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Quotes from Thomas Szasz

about modern drug attitudes

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 13, 2026



Thomas Szasz1 was an American-Hungarian doctor who saw through the unprecedented madness of America's drug-related attitudes like no one else. He revealed the philosophical inanity of those attitudes in clear language. He has a special place in my heart since he is the only drug pundit who not only answered a letter of mine on the subject of drugs, but responded to it in detail, and in a handwritten letter no less. This was in the 1980s, unfortunately, when I had yet to appreciate the full evil of drug prohibition. I wish our years on earth had aligned more felicitously so that I could bounce my ideas off the man today, rather than to continue tossing them in vain at the brick walls erected by the bamboozled pundits of our time.

The following are just a few of the insightful citations found in Szasz's philosophical analyses of the origin, nature, and consequences of America's drug-related madness. (See also After Szasz)


Black-and-white portrait photograph of Thomas Szasz

It is a grievous mistake to conceptualize certain drugs as a "dangerous enemy" we must attack and eliminate, instead of accepting them as potentially helpful as well as harmful substances, and learning to cope with them competently2.
Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs


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


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


In the psychiatric drug market, we as a society are saying, "The patient is always wrong": The psychiatrist decides what drug the mental patient "needs" and compels him to consume it, by force if necessary.3
Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs


The principal role of medical, and especially psychiatric, professionals in the administration and enforcement of this system of chemical statism is to act as double agents-- helping politicians to impose their will on the people by defining self-medication as a disease4, and helping the people to bear their privations by supplying them with drugs.
Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs


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


Although there is no evidence that the American consumer ever complained about the free market in drugs, there is plenty of evidence that his self-appointed protectors complained bitterly and loudly.
Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs


Although initially the drug laws were intended to protect people from being "abused" by drugs others wanted to sell them, this aim was soon replaced by that of protecting them from "abusing" drugs they wanted to buy. The government thus succeeded in depriving us not only of our basic right to ingest whatever we choose, but also of our right to grow, manufacture, sell, and buy agricultural products used by man since antiquity.
Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs


We live in a society in which people have legal access to loaded guns but not to sterile syringes5.
Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs


Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty or property...
Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs


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


The various drug-regulatory measures enacted during the prewar years of Roosevelt's presidency... led inexorably to the present situation of virtually complete state control of the drug economy, which I call 'chemical statism' (drug socialism).
Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs


It is this longing for a holy utopia that leads to the fateful obliteration of the distinction between vice and crime, and the tragic transformation of the virtue of temperance into the vice of prohibition.
Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs


If our love of the Constitution and gratitude for our heritage cannot keep us united as a nation, then hatred of 'dangerous drugs' must do the job.
Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs


The laws that deny healthy people 'recreational' drugs also deny sick people 'therapeutic' drugs.
Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs


Actually, as a slogan, 'Just say no to drugs' is simply witless, in both senses of that word: It is at once humorless and stupid, leaving unsaid to what drugs, in what doses and under what circumstances one ought to say no.
Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs


It was the Reagans who, through the repetition of a moronic anti-drug slogan, taught American children to spy on their parents and denounce them to the police.
Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs


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










Notes for essay entitled Quotes from Thomas Szasz: about modern drug attitudes:

1: “The Thomas S. Szasz Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility.” 2025. Szasz.com. 2025. https://www.szasz.com/. (up)
2: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
3: How materialists turned me into a patient for life DWP (up)
4: Restoring our Right to Self-Medication: how drug warriors work together with the medical establishment to prevent us from taking care of our own health DWP (up)
5: Oregon's Incoherent Drug Policy DWP (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they denote.

Democratic societies need to outlaw prohibition for many reasons, the first being the fact that prohibition removes millions of minorities from the voting rolls, thereby handing elections to fascists and insurrectionists.

Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.

Freud thought cocaine was a great antidepressant. His contemporaries demonized the drug by focusing only on the rare misusers. That's like judging alcohol by focusing on alcoholics.

Besides, why should I listen to the views of a microbe?

A generally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear. --James B. Stockade.

I just can't believe... [image]

Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!

So much harm could be reduced by shunting people off onto safer alternative drugs -- but they're all outlawed! Reducing harm should ultimately mean ending this prohibition that denies us endless godsends, like the phenethylamines of Alexander Shulgin.

Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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