Why Drug Free Zones are Dangerous and Unconstitutional
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 1, 2022
The use of "Drug Free" signs around schools represents the establishment of a religion, since the idea that one should "say no to drugs" is merely the highly debatable premise upon which Mary Baker Eddy founded the religion that she called Christian Science. Worse yet, the concept that one should be "drug free" is unscientific.
Signs that read Drug Free Zone are proselytizing on behalf of the drug-hating religion of Christian Science. We should not want to be free of drugs in cases where they could be useful -- which are potentially legion in a sane world.
Should one be "free" of antibiotics or aspirin? Should one be free of coffee and chocolate? We certainly don't think Americans should be free of antidepressants 1 considering that one-in-four of our women are addicted to them and mainstream America does not even notice the fact. Why then should they be free of psychoactive medicines from Mother Nature, especially when such medicines have been used responsibly by other cultures since caveman days, sometimes inspiring the creation of entire new religions. Should we teach students to say no to medicines merely because they have been demonized by American politicians?
Moreover, placing "Drug Free Zone" signs around schools is like surrounding schools with "Prostitution Free Zone" signs. It is just as likely to give students ideas as it is to prevent them from misusing substances. In fact, studies show that drug use increases to the extent that schools remind students of "drugs" through anti-drug campaigns. To surround schools with "drug free zone" signs is like surrounding schools with signs that read: "Whatever you do, don't use your skateboard in the following dangerous locations that you've never heard of before until now..." and then listing the most exciting but dangerous locations in which to use a skateboard.
If we were really worried about our kids, we'd talk to them calmly and honestly about all substances (including coffee, alcohol and Big Pharma antidepressants), citing both their positive and negative uses and reminding students of the need to make their own decisions on political and religious topics. We wouldn't surround them with political messages determined to turn them into hypocritical Christian Scientists, who "just say no" to a politically defined roster of superstitiously hyped mega-enemies that unscientific America demonizes with the pejorative appellation of "drugs."
Drug Free Zones encourage kids to think they should fear medicine rather than understand it. It signals a jaundiced Christian Science view toward plant medicine. It is Christian Science indoctrination.
Author's Follow-up: September 29, 2022
Paul Stamets ate some psilocybin mushrooms in his youth and it allowed him to focus his mind in such a way that he stopped stuttering IN ONE DAY and, for the first time in his young life, could look girls straight in the eye. The psychedelic botanical(s) known as "Soma" inspired the Vedic-Hindu religion. Mushrooms were godlike for the Mayans and the Inca considered coca to be divine. Given this back story, "drug free" zones are Christian Science propaganda, designed to scare kids away from using anything but alcohol, tobacco, and, oh yes, those Big Pharma 23 drugs upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent.
Author's Follow-up: August 19, 2023
Also: America's foremost philosopher, William James, said we should study altered states, for they suggest that we see only a small part of reality with our limited senses. To say therefore that places of education are "drug free zones" is to say that their academic pursuits are censored by government. It is nothing to be proud of. Take the signs down and let's make America free again.
Author's Follow-up: January 3, 2024
Drug Awareness courses do just that: they make young kids aware of drugs. Why would you do that if you had no intentions of teaching safe use? Philip Jenkins has shown in "Synthetic Panics" that drug problems spread like wildfire precisely because of publicity given supposedly problematic use by the DEA and other drug agencies. The agencies know this and approve. They need an ongoing drug problem in order to justify their shamefully enormous budgets. It's a scam dedicated to the existence of an endless problem: first with PCP 4, then Ice, then crack cocaine 56 , then Oxy, then Fentanyl, you name it. Of course, for all this seeming concern about safety, the Drug Warrior has no problems with guns that kill 50,000-plus people every year. They are more worried about drugs that kill no one -- or else do so only thanks to the problems created by prohibition -- including contaminated supply and the dogmatic refusal to teach safe use -- and to even punish those who do so. See my letter to the Vancouver Police.
Author's Follow-up: January 30, 2024
"Drug Free Zones" are indoctrinating our kids in the anti-scientific ideology of the Drug War, which tells us (falsely) that drugs can be voted "up" or "down" -- it tells us that if a drug can be misused in one way, then it must not be used in any way, by anyone, anywhere, ever. This is the superstitious point of view that has censored science and kept endless godsend treatments from even being contemplated by our healthcare professionals. Thanks to this racist, xenophobic and politically motivated dogma, we are living in the Dark Ages of healthcare, one in which we prefer that young people commit suicide 7 rather than use the substances that tribal peoples have always used, many of which grow at our very feet.
Author's Follow-up:
May 17, 2025
The Hindu religion owes its existence to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. Opium inspired Marcus Aurelius. Coca inspired the Peruvian Inca. The fact is that drugs have a wide variety of positive uses -- not just the potential ones that humanity has already discovered but the many that would be available to us if we only performed common-sense research into the matter, in the same manner as Alexander and Ann Shulgin studied phenethylamines.
Speaking of whom, consider the following drug user reports from their 1991 book "Pihkal: Phenethylamines that I have Known and Loved.8"
"I feel that it is one of the most profound and deep learning experiences I have had."
"An energetic feeling began to take over me. It continued to grow. The feeling was one of great camaraderie, and it was very easy to talk to people."
"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."
"Drug Free Zones" are absurd when one considers such glaringly obvious benefits to drug use. By establishing such zones around grade schools, we teach our kids to fear the world that they live in rather than to understand it. We may as well have "Car Free Zones" and "Fire Free Zones" around our schools if our goal is to scare kids about the world rather than to educate them about it. The prohibitionists are doing their best to "disappear" or at least marginalize all reports of beneficial drug use -- and the conglomerate media is doing all it can to help them. Let's hope that the truth will triumph. This used to be my default assumption, but recent events make me fear that Homo sapiens are unable to rise above intense brainwashing that has been orchestrated by government to make them feel a certain way about the world. There has been an almost complete censorship of positive reports of drug use over the last 100 years in America, and that has perhaps irreparably warped the American mind on the topic of drugs.
Americans love to blame drugs for all their problems. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. The prohibition mindset is the problem, not drugs.
NOW is the time for entheogens -- not (as Strassman and Pollan seem to think) at some future date when materialists have finally wrapped their minds around the potential usefulness of drugs that experientially teach compassion.
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
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.
Your drug war has caused the disappearance of over 60,000 Mexicans over the last 20 years. It has turned inner cities into shooting galleries. It has turned America into a penal colony. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and put bureaucrats in charge of deciding if our religions are "sincere."
Philip Jenkins reports that Rophynol had positive uses for treating mental disorders until the media called it the "date rape drug." We thus punished those who were benefitting from the drug, tho' the biggest drug culprit in date rape is alcohol. Oprah spread the fear virally.
The U.S. government created violence out of whole cloth in America's inner cities with drug prohibition -- and now it is using that violence as an excuse to kick the people that they themselves have knocked down.
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?
At best, antidepressants make depression bearable. We need not settle for such drugs, especially when they are notorious for causing dependence. There are many drugs that elate and inspire. It is both cruel and criminal to outlaw them.
William James knew that there were substances that could elate. However, it never occurred to him that we should use such substances to prevent suicide. It seems James was blinded to this possibility by his puritanical assumptions.
Paul Stamets ate some psilocybin mushrooms in his youth and it allowed him to focus his mind in such a way that he stopped stuttering IN ONE DAY and, for the first time in his young life, could look girls straight in the eye. The psychedelic botanical(s) known as "Soma" inspired the Vedic-Hindu religion. Mushrooms were godlike for the Mayans and the Inca considered coca to be divine. Given this back story, "drug free" zones are Christian Science propaganda, designed to scare kids away from using anything but alcohol, tobacco, and, oh yes, those Big Pharma 2 3 drugs upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent.
(up)