More politically incorrect quotes about the drugs that we have been taught to hate
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 6, 2025
Today some important quotes about the hateful policy of substance prohibition. I produce these quotes without commentary. I will, however, chime in on a few problematic quotations that I have appended to the end of this list.
"Almost half of the people in federal prisons are serving time for a drug offense." --National Coalition for Drug Legalization1
"The American Medical Association —the Vatican of the American Medical Church— had picked up the torch dropped by the Spanish Inquisition and has never relinquished its hostility toward non-alcoholic pharmacomythologies. " --Thomas Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers2
"The failure [of the War on Drugs] has a simple reason: Governments continue to treat the drug problem as a battle to be fought, not a market to be tamed." --The Prohibition Blunder: Dismantling a Half-Century Blunder in Half an Hour --Tom Wainwright, The Economist3
"My impression has been that the use of cocaine 4 over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine5
"Over the past two years [1998 to 2000] an agency of the Clinton White House, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), has secretly worked with all of the commercial television networks to broadcast anti-drug propaganda as part of the story lines of popular, prime time programs." --How the White House and the media package government propaganda as entertainment6
"On January 4, 2005, the GAO ruled that the Office of National drug Control Policy violated the publicity and propaganda prohibitions by distributing fake television news stories to broadcast stations from 2002 to 2004." --The Most Massive Propaganda Campaign in History: Drug Prohibition7
"There has been a significant increase in cancer patients and survivors being unable to access their opioid prescriptions since 2016, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finalized opioid prescribing guidelines." --Drug Policy Facts8
"Drug offenses are the leading cause of arrest in the United States." --War on Drugs Statistics9
"About 80% of those incarcerated on federal drug charges are people of color and Latino." --War on Drugs Statistics10
"545,602 Americans were arrested for crimes related to cannabis in 2019, which is more than the total number of arrests for violent crimes." --War on Drugs Statistics11
"All these anti-opium articles, speeches, and resolutions are based upon the same model. They assume certain statements as existing and acknowledged facts which have never been proved to be such, and then proceed to draw deductions from those alleged facts." --William H. Brereton, The Truth About Opium12
[regarding peyote ritual] "The White Man goes into his church house and talks about Jesus, but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus." --Quanah Parker: The Last Chief of the Comanche13
"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 14 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist." --Inner-City Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration15
"The contempt with which the jazzman is regarded can be seen in a story which famed trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie tells about being searched for drugs by police in Philadelphia. He refused to be searched and asked the police if they searched violinist Isaac Stern when he played in Philadelphia. Obviously, the police applied different standards to Stern than to Gillespie, although both men are great musicians." --Artificial Paradises : a drugs reader --p. 159-160, quoting Charles Winick16
"A materialist consciousness is attempting to preserve itself from dissolution by restriction and persecution of experience of the transcendental. One day perhaps the earth will be dominated by the illusion of separate consciousness, the bureaucrats having triumphed in seizing control of all roads of communication with the divine and restricting traffic. But sleep and death cannot evade the great dream of being and the victory of the bureaucrats of illusion is only an illusion of their separate world of consciousness." --The Yage Letters Redux, edited by Oliver Harris
"It is human variability -- the fact that one man's meat is another man's poison -- that imposes upon us the duty of preserving individual liberty and of encouraging tolerance, of preventing majorities from repressing minorities, of permitting people to have a certain measure of self-determination in their lives." --Aldous Huxley, The Human Situation --p. 7117
"The Indian vedas sang of Cannabis as one of the divine nectars, able to give man anything from good health and long life to visions of the gods." --Richard Schultes, Plants of the Gods: Origins of hallucinogenic use --p. 9518
"The Huichol worship and fear Solandra as a god-narcotic, Kieli, a powerful aid in sorcery." --Richard Schultes, Plants of the Gods: Origins of hallucinogenic use --p. 7319
"The difference between a poison, a medicine, and a narcotic is only one of dosage." --Richard Schultes, Plants of the Gods: Origins of hallucinogenic use --p. 1020
"In all things there is a poison, and there is nothing without a poison. It depends only upon the dose whether a poison is poison or not." --Plants of the Gods: Origins of hallucinogenic use --quote from Paracelsus, p. 1021
" If we were true to our political heritage, our aim would be not a 'drug-free America,' but an 'America free of drug laws.'" --Our Right to Drugs --p. 14922
"More often than not, the effective treatment of pain requires neither clinics nor doctors, but only a free market in drugs. However, such pharmaceutical freedom would make our highly paid pain researchers and pain clinicians unnecessary and unemployed." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p. 14223
"The therapeutic state... prevents sane adults from taking the drugs they want, and insane adults from rejecting the drugs they do not want." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p. 13224
"One of the most tragic and publicly least understood side effects of the War on Drugs is that so many sick Americans suffering from painful illnesses are systematically deprived of adequate doses of painkilling drugs because of physicians' well-founded fears of prescribing so-called controlled substances." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p. 12625
"Drug education... is the name we give to the state-sponsored effort to inflame people's hatred and intolerance of other people's drug habits, which is as indecent as it would be to inflame people's hatred and intolerance of other people's religious habits and call it 'religion education.'" --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p. 9026
"The laws that deny healthy people 'recreational' drugs also deny sick people 'therapeutic' drugs." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p. 6727
"Truly we are the redeemer nation, our centuries-old ambivalence toward alcohol seemingly entitling us to assume the role of moral savior not merely of our own people, but of people everywhere." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p. 4828
"We live in a society in which people have legal access to loaded guns but not to sterile syringes." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p. 4329
"Lacking the usual grounds on which people congregate as a nation, we [Americans] habitually fall back on the most primitive yet most enduring basis for group cohesion, namely, scapegoating." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p 3230
"How can a person lose the right to his body? By being deprived of the freedom to care for it and to control it as he sees fit." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p 631
"The right to chew or smoke a plant that grows wild in nature, such as hemp (marijuana), is anterior to and more basic than the right to vote." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p xvi32
"Whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a proper manner), introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. Wine robs a man of his self-possession: opium greatly invigorates it. -- De Quincey" --Artificial Paradises : a drugs reader --Page 1233
PROBLEMATIC QUOTES
"If only we could treat drug use and addiction like a public health crisis rather than crime, we'd be much better off." --Prohibition Blunder --Dr. Michael Hicks, economist34
RESPONSE: Why should we treat drug use as a public health crisis? Is Hicks a Christian Scientist? Why does he have a problem with "drugs" that he surely does not have with antidepressants 35 or liquor or coffee? Why does the use of the later substances pass muster with Hicks while the use of everything else constitutes a crisis? The fact is that we should not even treat addiction as a public health crisis. We do not need to medicalize the issue. We need to treat drug users as people in search of full lives -- and we need to treat and advise them individually, with empathy. We should not force them to become drug-free Christian Scientists based on a hypocritical morality disguised as objective healthcare!
"Ensuring people have access to housing, community, mental health services, and jobs can help address why people are using." --Drug Policy Alliance Fact Sheets36
RESPONSE: Let's remember, though, that most people are "using" because they simply want to lead full and happy lives. There is nothing pathological about that desire whatsoever.
"Everywhere we are promised something for nothing. Yet, the one clear lesson in the history of drug use is that in the giving and taking of drugs, one pays—in the short range or the long, visibly or invisibly—for what one gets." --Henry Lennard, Freud's Disaster With Cocaine37
RESPONSE: What a Tartuffe! The very title of his article is biased. Freud's encounter with cocaine was not a disaster38. It only seems that way to the author because he judges "drugs" anti-scientifically, based on the worst-case scenarios of usage. This is exactly like demonizing alcohol because there are such people as alcoholics in the world. Most people used cocaine wisely in Freud's time. His encounter with cocaine did not reveal anything about the coca alkaloid -- instead, it revealed something about western society: namely, that the medical establishment of Freud's time was determined to hold cocaine use to standards that we do not set for any other risky activity on the planet: not to mountain climbing, not to drag racing, and certainly not to liquor drinking. They completely ignored the huge benefits of the drug and focused only on its downsides. They did not stop to think of those who could be kept from suicide 39 if they only had the right to use a damn plant medicine!
Had the Wright Brothers worked according to such "logic," they would have thrown in the towel after their first biplane collided with a sand dune.
This biased judgment of drugs is alive and well today, of course. It explains why MDMA 40 is still demonized despite the fact that it brought unprecedented love and peace to the dance floors of Britain in the 1990s. Strictly speaking, it has killed nobody, and yet Drug Warriors hold it responsible for a handful of deaths that were brought about because Drug Warriors refuse to regulate product and to teach safe use. So British pols acted according to the mindset of Henry Lennard and cracked down on Ecstasy, after which the young ravers switched to alcohol. Of course, the dance floors then became so violent that concert organizers had to bring in special forces troops to keep the peace! Special forces!
This is the immense blindness of the Drug Warriors for which Henry Lennard is the poster child: They demonize a drug based on statistical trifles while Jim Beam Bourbon targets ads at young people on prime-time television and while 1 in 4 American women take a Big Pharma 4142 med every day of their life. It is amazing how few people notice this anti-statistical ignorance of the part of the Drug Warrior: we need merely to "feel" that a drug will have negative effects for young people and we are off to outlaw it -- in total ignoration of the endless unrecognized stakeholders in the drugs debate, those who will have to go without godsend medicines so that we can save white American young people from the fact that they live in a world full of drugs -- a world about which we refuse to educate them under the anti-democratic assumption that ignorance is the best policy.
But that's the whole problem with Robert Whitaker's otherwise wonderful critique of Big Pharma. Like almost all non-fiction authors today, he reckons without the drug war, which gave Big Pharma a monopoly in the first place.
If politicians wanted to outlaw coffee, a bunch of Kevin Sabets would come forward and start writing books designed to scare us off the drink by cherry-picking negative facts from scientific studies.
Mayo Clinic is peddling junk. They are still promoting Venlafaxine, a drug that is harder to kick than heroin. The drug is only a problem, though, because of prohibition. It would be easy to get off of with the help of other drugs!!! WAKE UP, MAYO!
Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.
The Shipiba have learned to heal human beings physically, psychologically and spiritually with what they call "onanyati," plant allies and guides, such as Bobinsana, which "envelops seekers in a cocoon of love." You know: what the DEA would call "junk."
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
Lying billboards in Philadelphia say that "Fentanyl Kills." NONSENSE! If Fentanyl kills, then so do cars, horses and alcohol. PROHIBITION IS THE REAL KILLLER.
Properly speaking, MDMA has killed no one at all. Prohibitionists were delighted when Leah Betts died because they were sure it was BECAUSE of MDMA/Ecstasy. Whereas it was because of the fact that prohibitionists refuse to teach safe use.
"In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us where to find it." --Antonin Arnaud
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda
(There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.)
But that's the whole problem with Robert Whitaker's otherwise wonderful critique of Big Pharma. Like almost all non-fiction authors today, he reckons without the drug war, which gave Big Pharma a monopoly in the first place.
