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)
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
Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks. People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took your prohibition to accomplish that! Stop arresting, start teaching safe use!
The existence of a handful of bad outcomes of drug use does not justify substance prohibition... any more than the existence of drunkards justifies a call for liquor prohibition.
We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.
Americans were always free to take care of their own health -- until drug warriors handed doctors a monopoly on providing mind and mood medicine.
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
Prohibitionists have blood on their hands. People do not naturally die in the tens of thousands from opioid use, notwithstanding the lies of 19th-century missionaries in China. It takes bad drug policy to accomplish that.
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.
Materialist puritans do not want to create any drug that elates. So they go on a fool's errand to find reductionist cures for "depression itself," as if the vast array of human sadness could (or should) be treated with a one-size-fits-all readjustment of brain chemicals.
People magazine should be fighting for justice on behalf of the thousands of American young people who are dying on the streets because of the drug war.
Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.
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