Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, by Jacob Sullum

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Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, by Jacob Sullum

a philosophical review

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 13, 2025

originally titled: Our Minds, Ourselves

The takeaway message from books like "Saying Yes" by Jacob Sullum ¹ is that it was always a mistake to put government in charge of ensuring the public health of the community. The moment we do so, as GK Chesterton reminds us, "there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea.²" Suddenly, literally any substance can be plausibly depicted as unhealthy from one perspective or another and drug policy becomes a political effort to "brand" drugs as dangerous in the public mind: as, for instance, when Harry Anslinger branded hemp as marijuana to underscore the drug's supposed connection with Mexican immigrants or when subsequent Drug Warriors branded cocaine ³. as the evil-sounding 'crack' when used in a format favored by minorities. This is why I sigh with frustration whenever I see pundits chiming in on the presumed healthiness or lack thereof of this drug or that. Who cares about your own opinion of a drug in general, especially one which you yourself have never even used? Drug use is all about the specifics of use by a specific person, how it affects a particular person in a particular situation in life, or in other words, all those specifics that Drug Warriors ignore in their anti-scientific effort to demonize drugs a priori and in the abstract.

Sullum understands this, as is clear when he writes:

"Reformers will not make much progress as long as they agree with defenders of the status quo that drug use is always wrong." --Jacob Sullum, from Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, p. 29 ⁴

Of psychedelics in particular, Sullum writes:

"As with other forms of recreation, the relevant standard has to be the value that psychedelics offer to a given individual, weighed against the risks they pose." --Jacob Sullum, from Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, p. 156 ⁵

Of course, when it comes to setting drug policy, one has to keep something else in mind as well: the dangers that one will create by outlawing desired substances. These downsides are obvious and enormous and yet are never noticed by Drug Warriors. The enforcement of substance prohibition has resulted in 67,000 deaths in inner cities over the last 10 years ⁶, 60,000 "disappearances" in Mexico over the last two decades ⁷, and thousands of unnecessary deaths of American young people in the streets from opiate use thanks to our failure to educate and provide users with real choice. But the Drug Warriors never take responsibility for the blood bath that they are causing, nor for the fact that their hysteria has repealed a raft of basic freedoms, to the point that free speech about drug benefits is almost impossible these days because media venues simply will not publish such inconvenient truths and thus violate the caveman prejudice that "Fentanyl ⁸ kills!" and "Crack kills!" and "PCP ⁹ kills! and "Oxy kills!" In reality, of course, to say such things is philosophically identical to shouting "Fire bad!" All such statements would have us demonize a dangerous substance rather than to learn how to use it as wisely as possible for human benefit.

Sullum describes this paleolithic view of drugs as a kind of "voodoo pharmacology," the idea that drug use abolishes free will. This voodoo status has been attributed to all drugs at some point, from alcohol, to marijuana, to cocaine ¹⁰ ¹¹ , to opium -- and continues to "inform" drug policy to this day.

In reading "Saying Yes," I am particularly revolted by the pretended 'omniscience' of the Schumers and the Bennetts of the world as to my own particular emotional needs. They sit back and tell me that the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions can have no beneficial uses for me in my life -- as if they have been inside my mind and understood how I see the world and know how I feel within my own skin. What enormous cavalier presumption on their part, especially as they say nothing about the monopoly that their drug policies have given to Big Pharma to make me a ward of the healthcare state. Had such strategic worrywarts been around in the Indus Valley in 1500 BCE, there would be no Hindu religion today ¹². Drug warriors would have told us that nobody needs to drink the Soma ¹³ juice and that such drugs take over our minds and give us super-human powers to disobey authorities. If only I could respond to the fearmongering of Drug Warriors by arresting them for using alcohol and tobacco and caffeine -- and then confiscating their houses for harboring such substances -- and then removing them from the voting rolls for their unnecessary use of drugs. Let us deny them the ability to work in America should they be discovered to have used alcohol or tobacco or caffeine. Then maybe they would start to see that it was a mistake to judge substances in advance, without regard for how or why they are used.

I do not wish to criticize a book that ticks off so many points that are ignored by most authors on these topics. But I could wish that Sullum had placed more emphasis on the downsides of drug prohibition, which has destroyed minority communities around the globe, censored academia, outlawed freedom of religion, and incarcerated so many minorities in America as to facilitate the election of a would-be fascist as President of the United States of America. But even this litany of outcomes pales in comparison to the fact that drug prohibition has outlawed our right to take care of our own body and mind, which is an aspect of drug prohibition that is rarely mentioned by anybody who writes on these topics: the fact that drug prohibition has outlawed our ability to take care of our own health. The outlawing of just two drugs -- opium and coca -- have given the medical industry a firm control on life in America -- leaving both our physical and psychological condition in the hands of materialist doctors. Life is now completely medicalized ¹⁴. Yet we could do without most of the medicines on drugstore aisles were laudanum still to be found in our medicine cabinets.

As for cocaine, Freud knew that it was a veritable cure for depression in most cases ¹⁵ -- and yet hundreds and hundreds of millions of depressed have had to suffer from this condition unnecessarily over the last 100 years, and why? Because self-interested doctors demonized the drug based on worst-possible use, exactly as if they were to have judged alcohol by looking only at alcoholics. I take this very personally, because I have been a patient for life thanks to this injustice, and thereby totally infantilized. To this very day, I have to visit psychiatrists one-third my age to talk about my personal life -- in order to qualify for the privilege of purchasing a drug which my biochemistry can no longer do without. Effexor is very possibly the hardest drug to kick in the world, far harder to kick than any opiate. My own psychiatrist tells me that it has a 95% recidivism rate ¹⁶ for long-term users -- and as a long-term user myself, I have found that going without the drug results in cognitive impairment ¹⁷.

Finally, here are a few other thoughts about drugs that are shortchanged -- or more often ignored entirely -- by authors on these subjects.

When we do a cost/benefit analysis about psychoactive drug use, we must talk about the potential downsides to the would-be user of NOT using a drug: such as failing to succeed at one's job, failing to ensure that life is sufficiently worth living, the downsides of making suicide ¹⁸ and shock therapy more likely, and so forth. Only the naive and the behaviorist could deny the relevancy of such considerations.

The most important point, unfortunately, is one which writers on this topic never sufficiently stress (assuming they notice it at all) -- and that is the fact it is wrong to judge drugs "up" or "down" in a popular plebiscite and that misuse as we call it is never caused by a drug itself but by social conditions surrounding the use of a drug. When we ignore this fact, America ends up creating drug policies not just for itself, but for the entire world. This is why I have no patience with those who say that drug re-legalization ¹⁹ cannot work given the way that things are set up now in America. They are thereby saying that the entire world has to go without time-honored medicine and obvious psychoactive godsends simply because Americans are too immature to use them wisely. This is surely the greatest case of mass denial in history -- it is an aggressive denial in which the sick person (the Drug Warrior) insists that the entire world adopts the sick person's viewpoint and passes laws accordingly.

Also, I do not think that we can ever overemphasize the role that censorship plays in biasing our views on drugs. To understand this claim, I ask readers to perform a little experiment, to ask themselves, "When was the last time that I read an article about the beneficial use of outlawed substances like opium and coca?" Such positive news is ruthlessly suppressed by the conglomerate media, often under the absurd pretext that merely implying that drugs are not evil amounts to medical advice and medical advice about what drugs to use can only be given by doctors. And who are these doctors? They are the materialists who made America dependent on Big Pharma drugs in the first place, by helping to outlaw all of Big Pharma's ²⁰ ²¹ competition. So before we think that we have a free and unbiased view of the terrain on these topics, we must consider that the government is spending literally billions of dollars to ensure that we maintain a jaundiced view of all but a handful of hypocritically shielded psychoactive medicines.

Here is another aspect of the drug story that no author explicitly highlights. In discussing the supposed 'flower children' and holding them up to scrutiny for their supposed utopian and unrealistic mindset, we should be fair and also scrutinize the nature of the mindset against which these peace lovers were rebelling. What were the enemies of the hippies 'up to' as the flower children were using drugs and talking about world peace? Answer: Their opposition was waging a war and amassing a nuclear arsenal that could destroy the world ²² ²³ ²⁴. In fact, both anglophone Summers of Love (in America in the '60s and in Britain in the 1990s) were shut down by cracking down on substances that helped to bring people together. And yet many writers on this topic simply speak of the peace-lovers being unrealistic, as if this were the end of the story. The fact is these peace-lovers were promoting drug use that could theoretically stave off nuclear annihilation -- and so we can ask, who was really crazy when it comes to drugs like psychedelics and Ecstasy: those who wanted to bring the world together or those who saw no benefits in peace, love and understanding, Timothy Leary ²⁵ ²⁶ ²⁷ or Richard Nixon?

The 1990s rave scene brought together folks of all ethnicity in unprecedented peace and harmony on the dance floor ²⁸ -- and yet no one classes this as a drug benefit! Why not? For the simple reason that Drug War ideology insists as a matter of faith that there can be no benefits to drug use. It is, in fact, one of the two superstitious credos of the Cult of the Drug War, the other one being that there can be no downsides to drug prohibition.

Finally, let us explicitly identify the M.O. of the prohibitionists that is made clear from the citations contained in this book. Their approach to drugs is identical with that of the members of the Anti-Opium Society in the early 19th century, about whom William H. Brereton, author of 'The Truth About Opium,' wrote the following:

"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.²⁹"

JOURNALIST FEARMONGERS

Finally, a long ignored point of which Sullum's book reminded me:

If the world is to regain its freedom of mind and mood, it must, first and foremost, educate its journalists on how to cover drug-related deaths and injuries without bias. Until then, any statistically irrelevant incident can be parleyed by journalists into a cause célèbre for drug prohibitionists, as, for instance, when Ann Landers slammed LSD use based on her own total ignorance of the drug and its effects.

"The exchange [between Ann Landers and her readers on the subject of LSD use] nicely illustrated how the conventional wisdom about LSD (and other illegal drugs) is propagated: People who don't know what they're talking about pass on hearsay and misinformation, blithely reinforcing each other's ignorance." --Jacob Sullum, from Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, p. 137 ³⁰

Notes for essay entitled Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, by Jacob Sullum: a philosophical review:

1: Sullum, Jacob. 2025. “Saying Yes by Jacob Sullum: 9781585423187 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books.” PenguinRandomhouse.com. 2025. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/288705/saying-yes-by-jacob-sullum/. (up)
2: “The Project Gutenberg eBook of Eugenics and Other Evils, by G.K. Chesterton..” 2019. Gutenberg.Org. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25308/25308-h/25308-h.htm. (up)
3: “Harry Anslinger: 11 Fucked up Quotes from the Father of Cannabis Prohibition.” n.d. TheBluntness. https://www.thebluntness.com/posts/harry-anslinger-quotes. (up)
4: Sullum, Jacob. 2025. “Saying Yes by Jacob Sullum: 9781585423187 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books.” PenguinRandomhouse.com. 2025. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/288705/saying-yes-by-jacob-sullum/. (up)
5: Sullum, Jacob. 2025. “Saying Yes by Jacob Sullum: 9781585423187 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books.” PenguinRandomhouse.com. 2025. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/288705/saying-yes-by-jacob-sullum/. (up)
6: Gun Deaths in Big Cities Big Cities Health (up)
7: Mexico's war on drugs: More than 60,000 people 'disappeared' 2020 (up)
8: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
9: Kirkpatrick, Jonathan. 2023. “Filter.” Filter. October 10, 2023. https://filtermag.org/pcp-meth-news-media/. (up)
10: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
11: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
12: How the Drug War Outlaws Religion DWP (up)
13: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)
14: “Medicalization of Everyday Life, the – Syracuse University Press.” 2026. Syr.edu. 2026. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/953/medicalization-of-everyday-life/. (up)
15: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
16: I have been unable to confirm this stat. But the WHO notes clinical recidivism rates for depression ranging from 50% to 85%. Do we count that as a recidivism rate of Effexor? Not when Biopharma is paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget, as reported by John LaMattina in the Sep 22, 2022 edition of Forbes magazine. (up)
17: According to a study by Lee Robins, 34% of American soldiers made generous use of heroin in Vietnam, yet only 5% required help getting off the drug when they returned to the States. (up)
18: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
19: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
20: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
21: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
22: A Darkening Horizon: Nuclear Dangers Around the World with Matthew Bunn Bunn, Matthew, Harvard Kennedy School, 2023 (up)
23: 8 Nuclear Close Calls that Nearly Spelled Disaster Davidson, Lucy, History Hit, 2022 (up)
24: Nuclear Near-Misses: The Close Calls That Almost Changed the World Atomic Toasters, 2024 (up)
25: “Full Text of ‘the Politics of Ecstasy.’” 2026. Archive.org. 2026. https://archive.org/stream/ecstaspoliticsof00learrich/ecstaspoliticsof00learrich_djvu.txt. (up)
26: The One Thing that Timothy Leary Got Wrong: a philosophical review of The Politics of Ecstasy DWP (up)
27: Timothy Leary was Right DWP (up)
28: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
29: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
30: Sullum, Jacob. 2025. “Saying Yes by Jacob Sullum: 9781585423187 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books.” PenguinRandomhouse.com. 2025. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/288705/saying-yes-by-jacob-sullum/. (up)

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Well, today's Oregon vote scuttles any ideas I might have entertained about retiring in Oregon.

My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine, 1884

In an article about Mazatec mushroom use, the author says: "Mushrooms should not be considered a drug." True. But then NOTHING should be considered a drug: every substance has potential good uses.

Drug use is judged by different standards than any other risky activity in the western world. One death can lead to outrage, even though that death might be statistically insignificant.

I have nothing against science, BTW (altho' I might feel differently after a nuclear war!) I just want scientists to "stay in their lane" and stop pretending to be experts on my own personal mood and consciousness.

"The Harrison [Narcotics] Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts.” --Robert A. Schless, 1925.

This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.

Before anyone receives shock therapy -- or the right to assisted suicide -- they should have the option to start using opium or cocaine daily -- in fact, any drug that makes them feel that life is worth living again.

The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.

It is consciousness which, via perception, shapes the universe into palpable forms. Otherwise it's just a chaos of particles. The very fact that you can refer to "the sun" shows that your senses have parsed the raw data into a specific meaning. "We" make this universe.

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Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, by Jacob Sullum

a philosophical review

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend