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 Sullum1 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. 294
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. 1565
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 years6, 60,000 "disappearances" in Mexico over the last two decades7, 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 1011 , 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 today12. 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 2021 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 222324. 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 252627 or Richard Nixon?
The 1990s rave scene brought together folks of all ethnicity in unprecedented peace and harmony on the dance floor28 -- 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. 13730
New article in Scientific American: "New hope for pain relief," that ignores the fact that we have outlawed the time-honored panacea. Scientists want a drug that won't run the risk of inspiring us.
This is the "Oprah fallacy," which has led to so much suffering. She told women they were fools if they accepted a drink from a man. That's crazy. If we are terrified by such a statistically improbable event, we should be absolutely horrified by horses and skateboards.
There will always be people who don't use drugs wisely, just as there are car drivers who don't drive wisely, and rock climbers who fall to their death. America needs to grow up and accept this, while ending prohibition and teaching safe use.
I hope that scientists will eventually find the prohibition gene so that we can eradicate this superstitious way of thinking from humankind. "Ug! Drugs bad! Drugs not good for anyone, anywhere, at any dose, for any reason, ever! Ug!"
Scientists are not the experts on psychoactive medicines. The experts are painters and artists and spiritualists -- and anyone else who simply wants to be all they can be in life. Scientists understand nothing of such goals and aspirations.
Most substance withdrawal would be EASY if drugs were re-legalized and we could use any substance we wanted to mitigate negative psychological effects.
Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but drugs have never been evil. The evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about drugs.
Doc to Franklin: "I'm sorry, Ben, but I see no benefits of opium use under my microscope. The idea that you are living a fulfilled life is clearly a mistake on your part. If you want to be scientific, stop using opium and be scientifically depressed like the rest of us."
Today's war against drug users is like Elizabeth I's war against Catholics. Both are religious crackdowns. For today's oppressors, the true faith (i.e., the moral way to live) is according to the drug-hating religion of Christian Science.
This is why the foes of suicide are doing absolutely nothing to get laughing gas into the hands of those who could benefit from it. Laughing is subjective after all. In the western tradition, we need a "REAL" cure to depression.
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