Why America cracked down on LSD

a review of essay number 1 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 25, 2025

The following remarks are part of a series of responses to the essays contained in the 2001 book "Hallucinogens: A Reader," edited by Charles Grob ¹. The comments below are in response to essay number 1: "A Conversation with Albert Hofmann."

We outlawed marijuana because its use was associated with Hispanics, we outlawed cocaine ² ³ because its use was associated with Blacks, we outlawed opium ⁴ because its use was associated with the Chinese - and just as surely we outlawed psychedelics because its use was associated with anti-establishment young people. Concern about health did not figure into the crackdown on LSD except as window dressing, as part of a media show trial, as part of a controlled political narrative, as a way to justify a preconceived crackdown on dissent. Yet Hofmann naively accepts the pretext that we outlawed psychedelics for health reasons. He fails to realize that, even if this were true, it is anti-scientific and inhumane to outlaw a drug for use by all peoples and in all contexts merely because we believe that it is being "misused" by one group of people in one context, especially when society has no interest in educating users about drugs. It is absurd to outlaw all research on a drug simply because the drug can be misused by white American young people. It is absurd for us to say that a drug has no positive uses and then to outlaw the research and experimentation that could identify positive uses.

Conclusion: Drug prohibition is the problem ⁵ , not the answer. Drug prohibition is inherently anti-scientific, imperialistic, and racist, for it tells us to judge drugs based on how we feel about the people that we currently see using them. We need to combat this anti-progress mindset. Unless we do so, then every drug will always be subject to criminalization and re-criminalization. As GK Chesterton noted about prohibition in general:

"It is said that the Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things. And there is no escape for the hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all. If he is to control the health of the community, he must necessarily control all the habits of all the citizens....⁶"

No matter how safe the use of any drug may become in general, any substance can be successfully criminalized by a demagogue with the help of a lurid news story reported by conglomerate media. This is why we have to expose the current biased standards for drug approval, rather than pretend that they are disinterested and objective and established for reasons of public health. Aspirin kills 3,000 people a year in the UK alone ⁷. If politicians and the media were so minded, they could work Americans up into a frenzy over this death toll and outlaw aspirin. But there is no political will to do so among the moneyed classes.

Again, the prohibitionist mindset is the problem, not drugs, the mindset that tells us that we are free at will to outlaw any drug, provided that we put time and effort into demonizing that drug outside of all context and focus on its cherry-picked links to "misuse" by undesirables.

No drug would ever be outlawed, however, even on the basis of a cost/benefit analysis, were we to actually consider all the costs of prohibition and all the benefits of drugs - and all the costs of NOT re-legalizing them. In that case, we would educate rather than demonize. But we never perform an unbiased analysis of a psychoactive drug. In failing to approve the sorts of drugs that inspire and elate (the kinds of drugs that inspired the Hindu religion), the FDA never considers the dangers of keeping the drugs illegal and thereby subjecting ignorant users to potentially contaminated product at unknown doses. The FDA never considers the suicides that will necessarily result when we outlaw every substance that can provide psychological relief. The FDA never considers that drug prohibition makes shock therapy necessary by outlawing everything that might have made life bearable for the severely depressed. The FDA never considers the thousands of deaths that occur yearly that can be directly linked to drug prohibition: the gun-related violence in inner cities, the sudden "disappearances" in Mexico -- nor do they consider the downsides of eroding time-honored democratic freedoms in the name of drug prohibition. The FDA never considers the downsides of outlawing the religious impulse. In short, we do not perform a risk/benefit analysis of drugs: we simply focus on the risks and legislate accordingly. Finally, the FDA ignores the obvious need for peace, love and understanding in the nuclear age - as if we can easily afford to do without the kinds of drugs that could help bring the world together. In a world with saner values, we would welcome MDMA ⁸ as the first in a line of phenethylamines that could help humanity survive... and yet this is clearly why the drug is being pilloried, to make sure that this whole movement toward godsend medicines is nipped in the bud.

Yet Hofmann seems to believe that we can reach a level of safety when it comes to LSD use that would justify the drug's relegalization ⁹ . That is naïve nonsense, of course. It's a big world after all. If conservative politicians do not want drugs like LSD legalized - and they clearly do not - then they will find a way to link the drug to perfidy on the part of undesirables. There is always some news story that they can torture into a morality play on behalf of drug prohibition. With the help of the conglomerate status-quo media, they will keep the public fearing LSD - the same public that watches with hypocritical complacency as Jim Beam bourbon targets prime-time television ads at young people - this despite the fact that liquor kills 178,000 a year in America alone ¹⁰.

No, no, Albert, the issue has never been about drug safety - it is all about politics, and until drug pundits recognize this fact, we will be dancing to the anti-scientific tune of the racist prohibitionists.

Notes:

1: Hallucinogens: a reader Grob, M.D., editor, Charles, Penguin Putnam, 2002 (up)
2: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
3: On Cocaine Freud, Sigmund (up)
4: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
5: Drug Prohibition is the Problem, not Drugs: what the movers and shakers get wrong in the drug re-legalization debate DWP (up)
6: Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument against the Scientifically Organized State Chesterton, GK (up)
7: Daily Aspirin Linked To More Than 3,000 Deaths Per Year, Scientists Warn Huffington Post (up)
8: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
9: National Coalition for Drug Legalization (up)
10: Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use in the United States CDC, 2022 (up)

Hallucinogens: a Reader, edited by Charles Grob

Essays about the opinions expressed in Hallucinogens by Charles Grob.

Cocaine and Ecstasy are not evil

Drug Prohibition and the Metaphysical Search for 'Real' Religious Inspiration

How Ralph Metzner was bamboozled by the Drug War ideology of substance demonization

Sartre and Speed

The Drug War is One Big Branding Operation to Demonize Mind and Mood Medicine

The metaphysics of drug use and how the drug war outlaws religious liberty

The thin line between honesty and fearmongering in the age of the War on Drugs

Want to end freedom in America? Just terrify philosophically clueless parents about the boogieman called drugs

Why America cracked down on LSD

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

America's "health" system was always screaming at me about the threat of addiction from drugs. Then what did it do? It put me on the most dependence-causing meds of all time: SSRIs and SNRIs.

Who would have thought back in 1776 that Americans would eventually have to petition their government for the right to even possess a damn mushroom. The Drug War has destroyed America.

Antidepressants might be fine in a world where drugs were legal. Then it would actually be possible to get off them by using drugs that have inspired entire religions. In the age of prohibition, however, an antidepressant prescription is usually a life sentence.

Many prohibition haters have their own list of drugs that they feel should be outlawed. They're missing the point. Drugs cannot be judged up or down. Prohibition is the problem. Say otherwise and you open the door to endless substance demonization by politicians.

Outlawing opium wOutlawing opium was the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief. as the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief.

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx

According to Donald Trump's view of life, Jesus Christ was a chump. We should hate our enemies, not love them.

Our tolerance for freedom wanes in proportion as we consider "drugs" to be demonic. This is the dark side behind the new ostensibly comic genre about Cocaine Bears and such. It shows that Americans are superstitious about drugs in a way that Neanderthals would have understood.

We're living in a sci-fi dystopia called "Fahrenheit 452", in which the police burn thought-expanding plants instead of thought-expanding books.

When we outlaw drugs, we are outlawing far more than drugs. We are suppressing freedom of religion and academic research.

Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us

Cocaine and Ecstasy are not evil
Restoring our Right to Self-Medication

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