Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 4, 2025
William Halsted was a renowned surgeon and co-founder of Johns Hopkins medical school. He was also a lifelong morphine addict, although his medical colleagues never realized that fact. He was recommended as a full surgeon at Hopkins by fellow-founder Sir William Osier, who later reported that: "I believed that he was no longer addicted to morphine. He had worked so well and so energetically that it did not seem possible that he could take the drug and do so much.1” Not until 1969, over forty years after his death in 1922, did his daily morphine use come to light.
And yet Halsted's history of drug use is fraught with significance for the debate about substance prohibition, and for at least three reasons.
1) First, as Thomas Szasz observes, "It was not despite his use of morphine but because of it that Halsted could do so much.2" This, of course, is a possibility that Drug Warriors are unwilling to even entertain given their morally tinged, simplistic and reductionist conception of human psychology. Surely, drugs can do no good, right? That is the modern mythology, or rather the modern superstition. (Imagine the Drug Warriors reading this article and shaking their heads in disapproval -- while yet enthusiastically drinking their morning cups of coffee!)
2) The story of Halsted's drug use illuminates the enormous hypocrisy of the War on Drugs. To see this second point, imagine that Halsted had lived in the latter half of the 20th century and was found upon his death to have been a lifetime user of Big Pharma antidepressants 3 instead of morphine. He was "under the influence" of, let's say Effexor 4 , my own bête noire, every single day of his vocational life and nobody knew it. Would this fact come as a surprise to anyone? To the contrary, this "bombshell" development would not even be considered newsworthy in our time, so thoroughly have the Big Pharma publicity departments normalized the idea of "taking your meds" on a daily basis.
And yet the cases are philosophically identical. "Meds" are drugs, after all, unless we are to take our own political mythologies as literal truth.
Neither morphine nor antidepressants can be given up easily and there is growing evidence that renouncing certain antidepressants is almost impossible. They change brain chemistry, which, as it turns out, does not necessarily go back to "normal" after cessation of drug use. Of course, the defenders of antidepressants will point triumphantly to the fact that SSRIs and SNRIs do not cause "cravings," but so what? Surely that fact is cold comfort for someone going through the psychological hell of antidepressant withdrawal, especially when it comes to drugs like Effexor. That latter drug can be harder to kick than heroin5. This is because the worst pangs of opiate withdrawal are over in a week and can be mitigated by drug therapy, whereas the downsides of Effexor withdrawal can continue for years and result in an ongoing depression that is far worse than that experienced before the drug was first employed.
Meanwhile, it can clearly be seen how the effects of morphine could amplify the talents of a trained professional -- (see "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains6" for Poe's description of the mind-focusing power of morphine) -- but no one would make that claim about antidepressants. Indeed, anecdotal testimony about the latter drug use indicates that long-term Effexor use may even degrade function. I say anecdotal testimony because it is in no one's financial interests to launch the relevant studies that would provide us with "hard data" on this subject, whereas we have entire agencies that exist for the express purpose of "proving" that illegal drug use causes problems. This is why we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse rather than a National Institute on Drug Use. The government is not devoted to science on such topics: they are devoted to the spread of propaganda based on a lopsided focus on only the potential downsides of unsanctioned drug use.
We cannot have it both ways, however: if William Halsted was a "junkie," then so are 1 in 4 American women who take a Big Pharma 78 med every day of their life9. Indeed, these latter users are the more obvious "junkies" if by "junk" we mean a medicine that fails to elate and inspire, meanwhile turning the user into a ward of the healthcare state. This description applies far more to antidepressants than it does to morphine.
So far I have cited two politically incorrect implications of the Halsted story: first, it suggests that drug use can be beneficial, and second, it shows how our uncritical embrace of the daily use of antidepressants is extremely hypocritical in the age of drug prohibition.
3) But there is a third lesson as well, and that is the fact that drug users are unique individuals. This is why it was folly to outlaw drugs in the first place: because health is not a thing but rather a balance of unique factors. This explains why some people can renounce given drugs without a problem and some cannot, why some people can thrive on given drugs while others cannot. America refuses to learn this lesson of human variability. Instead, we set ourselves the fool's errand of trying to decide whether a given drug is good or bad, addictive or not, in the abstract, outside of all context -- and so we end up outlawing godsends for many because they can be misused by a relative few.
In practice, this means the following as far as our legislators are concerned: that if a drug can be theoretically misused by a white American young person when used at one dose for one reason, then that drug must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
This is an anti-scientific, racist and imperialist algorithm. It throws millions of stakeholders under the bus, including not simply the depressed and anxious but also the residents of inner-cities whose very hometowns have been decimated thanks to the profit-driven violence that we have knowingly incentivized with our policy of drug prohibition. We knew perfectly well that liquor prohibition brought machine-gun-fire to America's erstwhile tranquil streets10, and yet rather than recoiling from that result, we passed drug laws that utterly destroyed America's cities.
We see then that the Halsted story, philosophically considered, shows us everything that is wrong with America's attitude toward so-called drugs.
AFTERWORD
Halsted originally used morphine to attempt to kick a cocaine habit. Interestingly, Freud had a patient who used cocaine 11 to attempt to kick a morphine habit1213. Both attempts were failures, but both users were onto a truth: that we should be able to obfuscate and transcend the psychological downsides of one psychoactive drug with the help of other psychoactive drugs, used alone or in combination. The problem was, these users had only one drug in the entire world wherewith to try out such a protocol. One single drug out of the many thousands that were potentially available around the world -- to say nothing of the synthesized medicines inspired by Mother Nature. Drugs are not the problem here, but rather a lack of drug choice -- and our lack of knowledge about what is available out there: in fungi, in lichen, in plants, in tree bark, in animals, etc.
Just imagine treating an unhappy user on a strategic and non-addictive basis with drugs that produced the following results in the Pihkal studies by Alexander Shulgin14:
"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place."
"A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like..."
"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."
One can imagine endless potential withdrawal protocols when all drugs are re-legalized and we actually search the globe for wise uses of the same -- either by those cases which already exist in hitherto hushed-up anecdote and history, or those that are suggested to an empathic mind by psychological common sense -- as opposed to the passion-scorning psychology of the scientific behaviorist.
In Halsted's case, we could have just normalized his own wise use. He was a grown-up, after all. He himself found a safe way to use his drug sustainably on a regular basis.
This is why we need to take two important steps: first, we need to re-legalize all medicines and second, we need to replace psychiatrists with what I call "pharmacologically savvy empaths.15" These empaths would be familiar with a wide range of drug use around the world, both from anecdotal and historical accounts. They would perform research to find specific drugs that would help create specific outcomes for specific users in specific circumstances. Their drug advice would be based on actual success stories of real users, the kinds of reports that we thoroughly suppress today in modern media. In such a world, we would stop all our vain attempts to characterize drugs in the abstract and focus instead on the details of any given case. The question would no longer be asked: "Is drug X good?" Such a question would be dismissed as meaningless. The question is always: "Does the use of drug X make sense at a given dose in a given context for a given individual at a given time in their life, etc...?"
In other words, we would finally approach the topic of drugs from a logical rather than a political point of view.
I do not mean that these pharmacological savvy empaths would be gatekeepers; instead, all seekers of every kind -- folks whom we demean and disempower today with the appellation of "patient" -- will henceforth be encouraged to visit a pharmacologically savvy empath 16 to determine what drug use -- if any -- is right for them, given their specific situation in life -- given the details that Drug Warriors always ignore in favor of unscientifically demonizing drugs in the abstract.
PS I dislike describing Halsted's status as "addicted" because that word is so often misused by Drug Warriors as a mere pejorative epithet. Besides, "Addiction," according to Webster, implies that the addict finds his or her drug use to be problematic, and this does not seem to have been the case with Halsted. He was able to rationally determine a consistent dosing schedule that was sustainable and worked for him at home and at work. It will be said that addiction causes cravings while dependence-causing medicines do not, but this is a distinction without a real difference, at least from the users' point of view. If I feel like absolute hell during the withdrawal process, it is an academic point whether I am experiencing cravings or not. The fact is, I do have a craving during Effexor withdrawal: it's just that it's not a craving for a drug, so much as for blessed peace of mind. And yet I have heard a psychiatrist praise Effexor for its failure to cause cravings in those who seek to withdraw from the drug. For whom is this better? Is it better because the patient is not likely to bother the doctor at home for a refill, but instead they will stay at home silently contemplating suicide?
Morbid home truths aside, my point here is that a daily morphine user should be judged in the same way as we judge a daily antidepressant user: by the way that they actually behave in the world. Instead, we live in a world in which we are judged based on our mere use of a substance. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, we are judged today, not by the content of our character but by the contents of our digestive systems.
Trump is the prototypical drug warrior. He knows that he can destroy American freedoms by fearmongering. He has seen it work with the Drug War, which got rid of the 4th Amendment, religious freedom and is now going after free speech.
The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.
I should have added to that last post: "I in no way want to glorify or condone drug demonization."
The sad fact is that America regularly arrests people whose only crime is that they are keeping performance anxiety at bay... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
I'm interested in CBD myself, because I want to gain benefits at times without experiencing intoxication. So I think it's great. But I like it as part of an overall strategy toward mental health. I do not think of CBD, as some do, as a way to avoid using naughty drugs.
Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is a drug war collaborator. They helped the DEA confiscate Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in 1987.
Just saw a People's magazine article with the headline: "JUSTICE FOR MATTHEW PERRY."
If there was true justice, their editorial staff would be in jail for promoting user ignorance and a contaminated drug supply.
It's the prohibition, stupid!!!
People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.
ECT is like euthanasia. Neither make sense in the age of prohibition.
Trump is the prototypical drug warrior. He knows that he can destroy American freedoms by fearmongering. He has seen it work with the Drug War, which got rid of the 4th Amendment, religious freedom and is now going after free speech.
