Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School

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Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 4, 2025

Similarly, we have Herbert Spencer taking morphia every day of his life, decade after decade. Without morphia, he would simply have been a querulous invalid, preoccupied with bodily pain. With it, he was the genius whose philosophy summarised the thought of the nineteenth century.

--Arthur Crowley, The Diary of a Drug Fiend ¹

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.²” 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.³" 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 ⁴ instead of morphine. He was "under the influence" of, let's say Effexor ⁵ , 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 heroin ⁶. 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 Mountains ⁷" 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 ⁸ ⁹ med every day of their life ¹⁰. 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 streets ¹¹, 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 ¹² to attempt to kick a morphine habit ¹³ ¹⁴. 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 Shulgin ¹⁵:

"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.¹⁶" 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 ¹⁷ 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.

Notes:

1: Arthur Crowley. “Full Text of ‘the Diary of a Drug Fiend.’” 1922. Archive.org. 2017. https://archive.org/stream/b29826433/b29826433_djvu.txt. (up)
2: “Ceremonial Chemistry – Syracuse University Press.” 2026. Syr.edu. 2026. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/1114/ceremonial-chemistry/. (up)
3: “Ceremonial Chemistry – Syracuse University Press.” 2026. Syr.edu. 2026. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/1114/ceremonial-chemistry/. (up)
4: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
5: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
6: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
7: A Tale of the Ragged Mountains Poe, Edgar Allan (up)
8: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
9: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
10: Richard Louis Miller. 2017. Psychedelic Medicine : The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca. Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press. (up)
11: Prohibition's Death Toll: Alcohol's Deadly Legacy (up)
12: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
13: “Artificial Paradises - Mike Jay.” 1999. Mike Jay. May 18, 2025. https://mikejay.net/books/artificial-paradises/. (up)
14: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
15: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
16: Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism DWP (up)
17: pharmacologically-savvy empath: this is an empathic individual with an ethnobotanical knowledge of safe and beneficial drug use worldwide, someone who recognizes psychological common sense and can advise on protocols that meet user needs while avoiding unwanted dependency. (up)

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Scientists are so used to ignoring "drugs" that they don't even realize they're doing it. Yet almost all books about consciousness and depression (etc.) are nonsense these days because they ignore what drugs could tell us about those topics.

The outlawing of coca and opium is a crime against humanity.

If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.

Now the folks who helped Matthew get Ketamine must be sacrificed on the altar of the Drug War, lest people start thinking that the Drug War itself was at fault.y

Despite the 50 year-long war on drugs, the global cocaine supply has grown by 400%. --Elma Mrkonjic

Imagine if there were drugs for which dependency was a feature, not a bug. People would stop peddling that junk, right? Wrong. Just ask your psychiatrist.

Countless millions suffer needlessly in silence because of America's fearmongering about drugs.

Pundits have been sniffing about the "smell" of Detroit lately. Sounds racist -- especially since such comments tend to come from drug warriors, the guys who ruined Detroit in the first place (you know, with drug laws that incentivized profit-seeking violence as a means of escaping poverty).

The proof that psychedelics work has always been extant. We are hoodwinked by scientists who convince us that efficacy has not been "proven." This is materialist denial of the obvious.

That's the problem with prohibition. It is not ultimately a health question but a question about priorities and sensibilities -- and those topics are open to lively debate and should not be the province of science, especially when natural law itself says mother nature is ours.

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Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School

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against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend