a response to Maia Szalavitz' op-ed piece in the New York Times
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 6, 2024
The following is a letter to the editor in response to an op-ed piece by Maia Szalavitz entitled How Oregon Became a Linchpin for the Country's Drug Policies, published February 5, 2024, in the New York Times. This response, of course, will never be printed by the Times because even those who challenge the Drug War must do so from a Christian Science point of view -- a rule that Maia, alas, follows all-too-religiously in the following editorial, hence my disagreement with the same.
It's a sign of the befuddled times when an opinion piece like this becomes a big favorite of the Drug Policy Alliance1. The DPA's Brian Pacheco raves that Maia Szalavitz "gets it right!"2 But Maia's essay concedes so many points to the Drug Warrior that one despairs of achieving the wholesale change in drug policy that America truly needs: namely the re-legalization 3 of Mother Nature and an emphasis on care and education instead of arrest and censorship.
What is Maia's conclusion about the current drug problems in Oregon?
Like any entry-level Drug Warrior, she blames the problem on drugs - but not just any drug, of course: she blames it on today's front-page killer drug called Fentanyl, just as her predecessors blamed the "drug crises" of yore on PCP 4, STP, ice and crack cocaine 567. She fails to note why Fentanyl took center stage in the first place.
She fails to notice the irony in the fact that America outlawed opium in 1914 and thereby incentivized the sale of drugs like heroin 8 and the modern opioids. To blame the Oregon situation on Fentanyl is to ignore the real problem and to play instead a political game of wack-a-mole with drugs - a game that was set up by prohibitionists in order to disguise all social problems (like homelessness) as drug problems, a game which will continue until America finally wakes up to the real problems: namely, our refusal to admit that people want self-transcendence in life, that the world is full of psychoactive substances -- indeed, DMT is an endogenous substance in our very brains9 -- and that the rational approach to dealing with these two realities in a purportedly free country is to teach safe use and to ensure safe supply. The alternative is unbecoming a democratic country for it involves the ruthless suppression of a human behavioral pattern which has been with us since prehistoric times, one that many western individuals and non-western societies alike have claimed to reveal spiritual truths and even hints about the nature of reality, as American psychologist William James believed10.
Moreover, Maia writes from a Christian Science point of view, from the notion that drug use is, indeed, bad, but that we must deal with it more humanely. This would have come as news to the tribal peoples that the west has suppressed, because as ethnobiologist Richard Schultes tells us, all tribal peoples have used drugs to achieve social harmony and obtain what they believed to be spiritual truths11. Seen in this light, the attempts to demonize all psychoactive drugs is merely an attempt to destroy the world view of the people's whom we in the west have already destroyed physically, often by plying them with our drug of choice, liquor, while denying them the use of their own sacramental drugs. And this targeting of tribal drug use continues to this day as the DEA continues to hassle the UDV church with government red tape, despite the fact that the church won its right to use ayahuasca from a unanimous decision of the US Supreme Court. The way the church is required to store and account for the ayahuasca in its possession makes one think that the church is using uranium in its ceremonies rather than plants provided by Mother Nature12.
Finally, Maia claims that the way forward needs to be based on facts. That's all well and good, but what facts, Maia?
The fact that the Drug War has destroyed the rule of law in Latin America?13
The fact that the Drug War has turned inner cities into shooting galleries?14
The fact that the Drug War has censored science by outlawing the metaphysical researches of William James?15
The fact that the Drug War denies religious freedom to those of us who view Mother Nature as a goddess rather than as a drug kingpin?16
The fact that the Drug War removes Americans from the workforce, not for impairment but merely because they have certain demonized substances in their digestive system, some of which have inspired entire religions?17
The fact that the Drug War authorized the DEA to stomp onto Monticello 18 in 1987 to confiscate... wait for it, folks... a plant called the poppy, a raid that surely made the ghost of Thomas Jefferson roll over in its grave.19
No, when Maia speaks of facts, she means the facts turned up by organizations like the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which she fails to realize is a political group, not a scientific one. Otherwise they would be called the National Institute on Drug Use. But their actual title shows they have a dogmatic commitment to the uniquely western idea that psychoactive substances can have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, ever -- an anti-scientific postulate which keeps us from researching potential treatments for an endless array of mental maladies, from elderly angst to Alzheimer's 20 and autism. Moreover, we live in a country that demonizes daily opiate use while insisting that Americans have a medical duty to "take their meds" every day of their life -- as one in four American women are now dependent on antidepressants 21 for life, a "crisis" that we'll never hear about from NIDA, even though it represents the biggest mass pharmacological dystopia of all time, all based on the idea that science is God and nature is the devil22.
Maia quotes Dr. Alex Kral as saying "It's all about the Fentanyl"23. But Fentanyl is only what philosophers would call the efficient cause of drug problems. The real, final, cause is prohibition, since Fentanyl is just the current boogieman and is destined to be replaced by many other "killer drugs" to come, until we realize that the problem is prohibition, not drugs. Hopefully Maia's so-called 'guest essay' in the Times will have a positive political effect in Oregon's vote on ratcheting back Measure 110, a vote which is to take place today. But by ignoring the real causes at work in the Drug War, her essay comes close to damning decriminalization with faint praise. Still, as King Lear said to Regan after being given the boot by Goneril: "Not being the worst stands in some rank of praise."
Author's Follow-up: February 6, 2024
It's interesting to note that Maia's specialty is neuroscience. The very fact that this is thought to qualify her to write on such subjects is part of the problem. The neuroscientist is no expert on "drug use" but rather on the materialist dissection of such use. Drugs are used for a vast variety of reasons by a vast variety of societies and individuals, and a neuroscientist is not the go-to person for such considerations. It's as if prohibition creates addiction by legal fiat and then materialist neuroscience comes in to tell us how addiction is, surprise, a real disease! Miraculous how prohibition suddenly disappears from this story as if by magic. There were opium habitues before 1914 -- after 1914, there were opium 24 addicts who needed to be "treated" by modern science. Prohibition thus suborns science to treat drug use as necessarily pathological. There is a Christian Science agenda here that mainstream writers on this topic refuse to notice25.
What does Maia know about the individual's search for self-transcendence? What madness makes us think that materialist scientists have any expertise whatsoever in that field?! But then America's whole approach to drugs is based on a category error: the idea that passion-scorning materialists should be in charge of deciding what mental and emotional states are ideal for unique individuals. What an insult to human dignity. When are materialist scientists going to butt out and stop playing their highly remunerative game of pathologizing the search for ideal mental states?
Governor Kotek is "dealing" with the homelessness problem in Oregon by arresting her way out of it, in fealty to fearmongering drug warriors.
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.
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.
Drug Warriors should be legally banned from watching or reading Sherlock Holmes stories, since in their world, it is a crime for such people as Sherlock Holmes to exist, i.e., people who use medicines to improve their mind and mood.
Trump's lies about America's voting process are typical NAZI and DRUG WAR strategy: raise mendacious doubts about whatever you want to destroy and keep repeating them. It's what Joseph Goebbels called "The Big Lie."
Psychiatrists prescribe drugs that muck about with a patient's biochemical baseline, making them chemically dependent and turning them into patients for life.
Most psychoactive substance use can be judged as recreational OR medicinal OR both. The judgements are not just determined by the circumstances of use, either, but also by the biases of those doing the judging.
It's always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract. That's anti-scientific. It begs so many questions and leaves suffering pain patients (and others) high and dry. No substance is bad in and of itself.
Like when Laura Sanders tells us in Science News that depression is an intractable problem, she should rather tell us: "Depression is an intractable problem... that is, in a world wherein we refuse to consider the benefits of 'drugs,' let alone to fight for their beneficial use."
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.
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