The Drug War is FAR WORSE than a failure. It is the politically inspired demonization of godsend plant medicines that have been used responsibly by other cultures for millennia. Benjamin Franklin loved opium , as did Marcus Aurelius and Marco Polo. Sigmund Freud thought cocaine was a godsend for his depression. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Plutarch were all influenced by the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries1. Tribes in MesoAmerica have used psychoactive plants in religious ceremonies for millennia, until they were decimated by the west. The entire Vedic religion was founded to worship a plant medicine called Soma.
With this politically incorrect backstory in mind, we can see that the Drug War is actually the enforcement of a religion: the religion of Christian Science, according to which a human being "should" have no need for drugs and should rely instead on the Christian religion for solace and peace of mind. That is, in fact, a religion, however, not a legitimate social policy for a supposedly democratic government.
It is also a violation of Natural Law for a government to tell its citizens that it can't reach down and use the plants that grow at their very feet. Jefferson founded America on Natural Law, after all, following in the footsteps of John Locke who wrote that human beings have a natural right to the use of the Earth "and all that lies therein." That's why Jefferson was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 2 in 1987 and confiscated the Founding Father's poppy plants. Unfortunately, Americans were so bamboozled by Drug Warrior censorship and lies at the time (especially the highly mendacious "frying pan" ad) that no one noticed that the invasion in question constituted a coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America.
Nor was the Drug War begun to combat a health crisis, but rather to disfranchise the political enemies of the Drug Warriors. The Drug War, in fact, merely took the place of the discredited poll tax in attempting to marginalize unpopular minorities. Harry Anslinger hounded black singer Billie Holiday to her death, not to prevent her from using heroin but to keep her from singing songs like "Strange Fruit," which was making white America uncomfortable in the 1930s. Richard Nixon created drug laws for the sole purpose of removing his enemies from the voting rolls. That's why his own "Drug War" treated "drug" possession as a felony, since a felony conviction would result in the disfranchisement of the guilty party.
If we must have a Drug War, let's crack down on alcohol and tobacco and punish and threaten anyone who has so much as a TRACE of these substances in their digestive systems. Bar them from work and hunt them down.
Then we'd lock up all the HYPOCRITICAL Drug Warriors and start to educate people to benefit from plant medicine and use it in the safest way possible, rather than to superstitiously demonize it and make it the scapegoat for all social problems. For if the Drug Warrior really wanted Americans to make good decisions, they would ensure that every American had a first-class education, rather than spending all their rhetoric and money on locking up the millions whom those same politicians have failed to properly educate in the first place.
Author's Follow-up:
September 12, 2025
I am always bothered when pundits tell us that the Drug War has failed. This is because the statement seems to imply that drug prohibition would have been fine had it only succeeded in stopping us all from using the medicines of our choice. They do not see that the outlawing of psychoactive medicine is nothing less than the outlawing of basic liberties, including the right to practice the religion of our choice and the right to take care of our own health. The Vedic religion owes its very existence to the use of a medicine that inspired and elated. In the same way, ancient Greek religions were organized around the ritual use of opium 3. And the time-honored Eleusinian Mysteries clear centered around the use of a psychedelic of some kind. This is obvious from the awestruck accounts of that ritual. Such accounts read exactly like user reports of the psilocybin and LSD experience. Cicero wrote the following about this rite, a ritual that was observed annually with scarce a break for 2,000 consecutive years -- until it was tellingly outlawed by Emperor Theodosius in 392 A.D. as a threat to Christianity:
"For it seems to me that among the many admirable and divine things your Athenians have established to the advantage of human society, there is nothing better than the mysteries by which we are polished and softened into politeness, from the rude austerities of barbarism. Justly indeed are they called initiations, for by them we especially learn the grand principles of philosophic life, and gain, not only the art of living agreeably, but of dying with a better hope." --Marcus Tullius Cicero, Treatise on the Laws4
"Dying with a better hope." This is the kind of benefit that psychedelics are known to provide for the prepared mind.
But the Drug War also outlaws our right to take care of our own health. The outlawing of the panacea called opium had the result of saddling humanity with a wide variety of health issues that they could no longer treat on their own. The medical establishment saw dollar signs in this equation and were happy to help normalize the Drug War by promoting themselves as the new experts on literally everything that ailed us. When it came to depression, they ensured their maximum remuneration by offering us Big Pharma drugs for which dependency was a feature, not a bug! And so, to protect us from a time-honored panacea, the medical establishment created the biggest mass pharmaceutical dependency of all time. One in four American women take a Big Pharma 56 med every day of their life7.
Take me, for instance. I have been struggling to get off of Effexor 8 for a year now. This drug is FAR harder to kick than heroin. In fact, it is rare to find ANY long-term user who has successfully renounced the drug. My own psychiatrist told me that the drug has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users after three years. Compare this to heroin. 34% of Vietnam vets used that drug overseas and at least 20% were dependent on it. And what happened when these hundreds of thousands of soldiers returned to the States? Only 5% were unable to kick the drug on their own9. 5%! Meanwhile, it is not clear to me that it is even POSSIBLE to get off of Effexor -- with or without help from the medical industry that got me hooked on the drug in the first place.
Bear in mind that drug prohibition has destroyed my right to healthcare in two ways: not only did drug prohibition force me to use these dependence-causing pills in the first place by outlawing everything else -- but drug prohibition also outlaws all the drugs that could help me get off of Effexor. It is just common sense that the wise intermittent use of coca and opium and laughing gas (etc.) could get me through the times of withdrawal -- but the Drug War completely outlaws all such medicines. Last I checked, the FDA is trying to turn laughing gas into a "drug" -- when the substance was already shamelessly unavailable to the depressed.
And laughing gas 10 is the substance that William James used to investigate the nature of Reality itself. So not only does drug prohibition outlaw religion and healthcare, but it outlaws academic freedom as well. Indeed, it outlaws human progress!
And I have yet to mention the way that drug prohibition has destroyed minority communities around the globe by incentivizing gun violence 11 among the poor and marginalized. This latter crime is unforgivable since America knew full well from liquor prohibition that prohibition causes death and violence.
For these reasons -- and endless others -- I think we to say not simply that the Drug War has failed but that it had no right to succeed in the first place!
Of course, as pundits like Jules Buchanan have justly pointed out, in one sense, the Drug War has not failed at all. It was clearly the goal of the original Drug Warriors to marginalize minorities and foreigners. All drug prohibition was originally justified by pointing to the danger of minorities affecting our poor innocent white young people. Opium demonization was all about anti-Chinese bigotry, just as marijuana was demonized based on a supposed threat from Hispanic immigrants, and cocaine 1213 was demonized based on a supposed threat from Blacks. It is no coincidence that the War on Drugs has destroyed minority communities -- nor is it surprising that the Drug Warriors refuse to apologize for that fact, but rather pursue their death-dealing policies ever more fanatically.
The fact that the war on multi-ethnic Americans is supported by minority leaders themselves is a sad testament to the power of group think and fearmongering in a democracy -- and the power of relentless propaganda over the last 100 years, chiefly in the form of the ruthless censorship in the media of all talk of drug benefits of any kind. Today, the entire academic field reckons without drug prohibition. Depression, for instance, would not be a "thing" in America if we were to relegalize coca and opium 14 . That is a simple psychological fact. Of course, it is unthinkable in the west because we have been taught to judge drugs based on the worst possible imaginable use by a white young person -- a white young person whom we refuse to educate about safe use!
The overall take-home message is not even about drugs: it is rather that American democracy is fundamentally flawed. It turns out that even the U.S. Constitution itself combined with the Bill of Rights cannot protect us against the uninformed fearmongering of self-interested and racist politicians. Americans have shown that they are willing to renounce the most time-honored freedoms if we only scare them enough with racist and xenophobic fearmongering.
One is reminded of an historical anecdote related by the revivified Egyptian count in "Some Words with a Mummy," a short story by Edgar Allan Poe15. When his eager reanimators start bragging about the benefits of American democracy, the count recalls a similar political experiment in Egypt that took place thousands of years ago. The narrator summarizes as follows:
"For a while they managed remarkably well; only their habit of bragging was prodigious. The thing ended, however, in the consolidation of the thirteen states, with some fifteen or twenty others, in the most odious and insupportable despotism that was ever heard of upon the face of the Earth.
I asked what was the name of the usurping tyrant. As well as the Count could recollect, it was Mob.16"
All uplifting drugs are potential antidepressants. Science denies that fact by claiming that drug efficacy must be proven quantitatively. And so they ignore anecdote, history and psychological common sense.
The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.
NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition. We need a National Institute on Drug Use, not a National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Almost all talk about the supposed intractability of things like addiction are exercises in make-believe. The pundits pretend that godsend medicines do not exist, thus normalizing prohibition by implying that it does not limit progress. It's a tacit form of collaboration.
Addiction thrives BECAUSE of prohibition, which limits drug choice and discourages education about psychoactive substances and how to use them wisely.
The Partnership for a Death Free America is launching a campaign to celebrate the 50th year of Richard Nixon's War on Drugs. We need to give credit where credit's due for the mass arrest of minorities, the inner city gun violence and the civil wars that it's generated overseas.
Drug prohibition is superstitious idiocy.
It is based on the following crazy idea:
that a substance that can be misused by a white young person at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
Classic prohibitionist gaslighting, telling me that "drugs" is a neutral term. What planet are they living on?
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.
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.
(up)