Drug WarRant

If winning the drug war means removing all access to illegal drugs then the odds of victory are close to zero. Supply‑side enforcement in the U.S. is unreliable. It fails to reduce drug availability or overall rates of addiction. Drugs are too profitable, too easy to smuggle, and too easy and cheap to replace in the event of captured shipments or arrests of smugglers. Smugglers are also easy to replace.

Under prohibition drug scheduling and enforcement priorities are driven by law enforcement, not health agencies, and not by scientific evidence that might otherwise eliminate punitive, culturalized, racialized, and ineffective efforts criminalizing addiction or use of a drug. Addiction is a human health problem, not a military target.

Enormous social costs are associated with prohibition strategies. There is no reliable estimate of the number of drug war related deaths that have occurred since President Richard M. Nixon declared his war on drugs in 1971 because no country retains the statistics for fatalities related to drug wars.

Despite lacking certain vital statistics drug wars promote increases in state corruption as well as producing drug crimes that lead to bloody extra‑judicial killings. Community disruptions originate with crime syndicates fighting over drug territories while inflicting their self-made justice onto their syndicate members or other people who betray their trust. Drug enforcement funding in the U.S. that began in 1981 with $1 billion increased to roughly $10 billion in the mid‑1990s while cocaine and heroin remained widely available and cheaper than before.

Recent U.S. military involvement in Ecuador’s drug enforcement has escalated to become joint operations targeting alleged “narco‑terrorist” groups with lethal force. Ecuador’s newly elected 35-year-old president, Daniel Noboa, equates organized crime with terrorism to justify military solutions over policing or social policy. He approved a military approach by the U.S. as a way to counter drug cartels in his country.

After a 2025 election that was too close for his own comfort, President Noboa concluded his political future will be secured by being tough on crime. The U.S. attack on Ecuadorian drug smugglers represents a unique political opportunity. Using drugs as an excuse he has suspended civil liberties in key regions of Ecuador and hired U.S. mercenary Erik Prince as his security consultant. Among the suspended civil liberties are citizens’ rights involving warrantless home searches, militarization of domestic policing, freedom of movement and assembly, protections against arbitrary detention, judicial oversight of security operations, and the arbitrary labeling of local gangs as terrorist organizations. Ecuador has begun construction of a high‑security El Salvador-style prison that will one day enable mass detention of prisoners minus any due process of law.

Problems occur with attempts to wipe out cartels. The most likely result of a war on cartels is the ongoing creation of new cartels. New cartels will adapt to new circumstances. Syndicates will continue to survive by using more sophisticated and less detectable smuggling strategies. Any progress made in taking on Ecuador’s cartels or those of any other country will be fleeting. Where there is a drug demand there will be a supply.

If winning a drug war means creating a huge enforcement bureaucracy that fails to eliminate most illegal drug use while providing a steady job and lifetime benefits to its federal and state employees then their jobs and pensions become the victory rather than that of limiting crime. There are no other reliable incentives for prohibitionists to win a drug war. Despite a decades long enforcement strategy an estimated 1.5 million Americans still have continuing access to cocaine no matter what the government does to stop it. Drug enforcement devolves into an ineffective and endless stalemate.

Drug enforcement propaganda depicting drug war successes can overstate the success. The contraband displayed by Attorney General Pam Bondi in a 2025 news release is exceptional in its size and potency, however the odds the drug enforcement agents seen in AG Bondi’s video will ever again be involved in a bust as large or larger are basically zilch. Large scale busts are rare.

Public health approaches to drugs consistently outperform punitive ones because there is a health focus on reducing a person’s physical and mental demand for the drug. If a medical cure for addiction emerges within the next few years it will make current drug treatment facilities medically obsolete. Thirty-five cents of every dollar the U.S. spends on drug enforcement goes to drug treatment that can fail to fully suppress physical or mental cravings for a drug. The most effective drug treatments offer a legal and medically prescribed drug substitute for the addictive substance. There is evidence that psychedelics can help reduce drug cravings, but access to psychedelics is difficult for many people because the drugs are currently being listed and prohibited on Schedule 1 of the controlled substances list. The scheduling list continues to grow as more chemical variations of listed drugs are created or discovered.

Winning the U.S. government’s war on certain drugs means that many people are foregoing effective medical remedies simply because a few bad actors can’t handle their drugs and a host of politicians fails to understand drugs. If the same set of rules were applied to owning automobiles no one would be allowed to drive — think of the children. What remains is a largely ineffective drug war industrial complex coupled with an unwillingness to move forward by implementing better health measures and fewer Kafkaesque bureaucracies.

Chemophobia is an irrational fear of chemicals and chemistry. Many examples exist. Some individuals believe certain synthetic chemicals are toxins whereas “natural” or derived substances are safe, even though the two substances are identical in every other respect. Similar reactions occur with cannabis. Recreational marijuana is condemned while medical marijuana is acceptable, even though the marijuana flowers used recreationally or medicinally can originate from the same plant.

Chemophobics believe toxicity is determined by the substance alone. In point of fact the harm comes from excessive exposures or dosages. Levels of toxicity are measured by laboratory testing to determine toxicity for animals of a given body weight. A problem for prohibitionists who want THC and psilocybin use to remain criminalized, and its users stigmatized, is that no toxic levels can be determined for either of the two chemical compounds. Prohibitionists are left with few other options than to declare the two substances to be taboo.

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, in his 1913 book Totem and Taboo, analyzed social phenomena and behavior which will likely be recognized by those caught up in the anguish and confusion emerging from the modern drug war:

The taboo restrictions are different from religious or moral prohibitions. They are not traced to a commandment of a god but really they themselves impose their own prohibitions; they are differentiated from moral prohibition by failing to be included in a system which declares abstinences in general to be necessary and gives reason for this necessity. The taboo prohibitions lack all justification and are of unknown origin. Though incomprehensible to us they are taken as a matter of course by those who are under their dominance. […]

Wherever the taboo was related to ideas of gods and demons, automatic punishment was expected from the poser of the godhead. In other cases, probably because of a further development of the idea, society took over the punishment of the offender whose action has endangered his companions. […]

The violation of a taboo makes the offender himself taboo … certain dangers resulting from the violation of a taboo may be exercised through acts of penance and ceremonies of purification. […]

We may say … we deal with a series of restrictions which these primitive people impose upon themselves; this and that is forbidden without any apparent reason; nor does it occur to them to question this matter, for they subject themselves to these restrictions as a matter of course and are convinced that any transgression will be punished automatically in the most severe manner. […]

The most peculiar part of it is that anyone who has violated such a prohibition assumes the nature of the forbidden object as if he had absorbed the whole dangerous charge. […]

Both this word and the system corresponding to it express a fragment of psychic life which really is not comprehensible to us. And indeed, it would seem that no understanding of it could be possible without entering into the study of the belief in spirits and demons which is so characteristic of these low grades of culture. […]

Taboos are a big business in the United States. Aside from drug enforcement, drug rehabilitation centers fulfill the role of providing acts of penance and ceremonies of purification for those caught using taboo substances. The drug rehab industry receives multi-billions of dollars in federal funding each year through Medicare, Medicaid, SAMSHA, and other HHS programs.

Until a cure for addictions can be found, drug rehabilitation programs offer fairly effective addiction treatments when combined with therapeutically prescribed drugs. Unfortunately, more than 95-percent of people needing drug rehabilitation in 2023 did not receive it.

Despite the promising results offered by psychedelic compounds for addiction treatment, lobbying costs for legalizing psychedelic use and therapies comes from psychedelic startups and not Big Pharma. Pharmaceutical companies are certain to lose revenue from drugs they currently market if any of their products are made obsolete by easy access to non-patentable psychedelics and THC.

Any individual who stands accused of assuming or absorbing the forbidden nature of a drug — according to taboos that equate the drug with a drug’s consumer — is a victim of an insane process leading to schemes that demonize and brand people. Prejudices and stereotypes make drug wars possible. Authoritarian governments promoting punishments of those whose drug use offends a particular culture’s god, guru, or religious beliefs, are virtually guaranteed to foment wars and inquisitions. The bloodiest European battle ever fought was the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Eight-million people were killed with what began as domestic clashes between established Catholics and dissident Protestants.

Despite all the warring parties, progress in combating drug taboos and drug wars is still achievable by employing education that reduces chemophobia through increasing public awareness of basic chemistry and other sciences. As with all social changes there are obstacles to overcome.

People avoid studying science or chemistry because it is abstract and therefore difficult. The topic requires studying physics and complicated math as well as chemicals and their molecular interactions. Science demands different ways of thinking from people who may have been continuously persuaded by ethnocentric cultures to never think for themselves. Science studies can take up much of a person’s time. Some students fear focusing on science because the workload could result in lowering their grade point average. Time spent on science studies can also force students to cut back on their social activities.

Another problem for American science education is that various religious groups deliberately steer their members away from science altogether. Books about dinosaurs are sometimes prohibited from appearing on the library bookshelves of publicly funded primary schools. Science instruction in some school districts is limited to middle and high school students. Even then it’s only offered in the form of elective courses. An ignorance of science is preferred to that of initiating quality science teaching early on in public primary schools where it can prove most interesting and mentally stimulating to younger audiences.

Among many other anti-medicine cults, sects and religions that reject modern medicine, the Christian Science religion doesn’t believe in the germ theory of disease or the use of drugs to treat disease. It demeans science knowledge among its members while promoting a theology of fatalism that says deaths from illnesses are predetermined and inevitable despite the existence of medicines that can treat or cure afflictions. The drug taboos pertain to Christian Science children as well as adults. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe blood transfusions are taboo. In their world view a blood transfer from one person to another is a form of cannibalism, so they reject common surgeries requiring transfusions that can save their own lives or the lives of their family members. Mormonism treats tea and coffee as taboo despite growing scientific evidence showing that moderate levels of caffeine in tea or coffee can help reduce the onset of dementia. Then there are the anti-vaxxers.

Reversing the annoying trend of America’s paranoid chemophobia would profoundly improve public health. People who seek to understand their own brain chemistry and that of others typically make better choices about drug use and vaccinations along with nearly everything else health related. Rather than saying no to drugs, they just say know to drugs, resulting in longer, happier, and better lives.

On February 25, 2025, the U.S. State Department under the direction of Marco Rubio accused several major drug cartels of being terrorist organizations. The accused include the Cártel de Sinaloa, Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), Cártel del Noreste, the Gulf Cartel, La Nueva Familia, Michoacana, and Cárteles Unidos. Each now bears the label of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) or Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs).

Designating groups as FTOs and SDGTs makes a convenient political weapon out of the word “terrorist.” Individual terrorists are rare, so there is a belief that such individuals represent something unique or abnormal. In practice this is not the case. People have propensities. Wars against drug users and alleged terrorists fail because normal people are predisposed to do what they do. They take drugs or they commit violent and irrational acts against political foes. Individual predilections are inalterable since they predate the behavior in question and because pre-existing temperaments are a big part of being human.

American politicians speak of a war on terror when they really mean a war on certain non-conformists or anti-authoritarians who commit violent acts. In contrast to wars on terror, drug wars target not only drug cartels and their members but also drug consumers who may or may not make informed personal choices about their drug use, and who are typically non-violent toward politicians and common citizens. Despite what Marco Rubio or anyone else believes, drug smugglers and consumers are not in any way terrorists or terrorist collaborators.

Terrorism is defined as politically related violence. The first recorded instance of terrorism was in 6 CE when Rome imposed direct taxation on Judea. In retaliation a Jewish sect known as the Zealots infiltrated Roman cities and assassinated Roman soldiers along with the military’s Jewish collaborators. The Zealots believed that submitting to foreign taxation and rule implied accepting human rulers instead of a god, and that it threatened Jewish identity and culture. The Sicarii, or dagger men, a Zealot subgroup, specialized in assassinations and carried out attacks during crowded festivals for extra effect. Since the first century terrorism has been frequent. The world’s largest terrorism data set, the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) has catalogued over 190,000 terrorist incidents since 1970. Hundreds of distinct perpetrator groups are spread throughout 163 countries comprising 97.7-percent of the world’s population.

The distinction between groups and individuals is critical for understanding terrorism. Individuals tend to get along together when they first encounter one another in a peaceful setting, while differing groups of people typically do not. Group behavior can turn tribal. One result is the emergence of terrorism which poses an opportunistic disregard and reckless contempt for the lives of innocent people it imperils, while the primary aim of the terrorists themselves is merely to gain the attention of an already fearful public. Recent acts of terrorism conducted by the U.S. Department of Defense involved the planned and deliberate bombing of suspected drug smuggling boats off the coast of Venezuela. The government gained worldwide attention from aerial photography depicting precision strikes on fast-moving waterborne targets, exactly as needed for its drug war propaganda. The attacks pose a terrorizing prospect for non-commercial fishermen operating in the Caribbean.

In addition to murdering operators of fishing boats, kidnapping a foreign leader is considered a criminal and terrorist act under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. Kidnapping foreign leaders violates the established legal order. Anti-drug zealots within the U.S. government are culpable for numerous war-like crimes which lately include aiding and abetting the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores by staging drug busts on alleged narco-boats in which exonerating evidence and potentially innocent victims are sent to the bottom of the ocean never to be seen again.

The labeling of drug cartels as FTOs and SDGTs by Rubio’s State Department is absurd. Drug cartels do not bomb fishing boats. Drug smugglers do not terrorize American citizens by attacking them during holiday festivals. Drug kingpins do not assassinate or kidnap political figures, they buy them off instead. Any act of violent terrorism by the cartels against American citizens or citizens anywhere would be bad for business and the cartels know it. The principal aim of smugglers is to deliver products to people who want them. If cartels didn’t smuggle drugs then someone else would.

What emerged from the boat strikes is that practically no one believes the political or military actions taken in Venezuela were initiated because of illegal drugs smuggling by Venezuelan officials. What remains in the end is the sad picture of a broken government that believes its dirty tricks using faked drug accusations still work in the information age. The original master dirty trickster of them all, Richard M. Nixon of Watergate fame, the president who originally declared war on drugs on June 17, 1971, by calling illegal drugs a national security crisis, would have tears in his eyes were he alive today to witness the ineptitude of the current government’s drug war propaganda. The United States is reduced in its greatness by these events to a nation whose terrorist influenced public officials commit human rights crimes while filming it all in glorious detail for the convenience of the federal prosecutors who will one day put them on trial.

Regional political changes are a window of opportunity to fully legalize marijuana in Venezuela and other countries south of the U.S. border. Done properly it could lead to ending marijuana smuggling in the Western Hemisphere.

Marijuana in Venezuela is currently illegal in all its forms, medical and recreational. In 2010 penalties were softened so that up to 20 grams of marijuana and up to 5 grams of “genetically modified marijuana” for personal use did not land a person in jail. Revocation of a person’s driver’s license is still possible. Trafficking cannabis is punished with one-to-two years in prison. Venezuela’s marijuana penalties exceed many of those currently found in most parts of the United States. Venezuelans convicted of possessing small amounts are sentenced to a stint in rehab, or sent to therapy, forced to do community service, or directed to a social reintegration program, as if anyone really wants to reintegrate into extreme poverty and the insanity of marijuana prohibition. Eighty-seven percent of Venezuelans lived below the poverty line as of 2017. A domestic marijuana industry would boost the local economy by creating new jobs and boosting tourism.

Latin American countries more lenient on marijuana than Venezuela include Uruguay, the first country in the world to legalize marijuana. It has state licensed cannabis pharmacies, home cultivation, and marijuana social clubs. Argentina allows personal possession and medical use. Home cultivation is legal. Brazil has national legal decriminalization for users, plus a medical regime. In Colombia personal use is acceptable. Ecuador does not see drug consumption as a crime, only a health issue. In Mexico small amounts of cannabis for personal use are legal. Mexico’s Supreme Court rulings have declared marijuana prohibition unconstitutional. Medical cannabis is legal and regulated. In Chili cannabis is illegal, but small amounts for personal use are tolerated, and medical use is legal and regulated. Bolivia prohibits medical and recreational use of cannabis. The Bolivian state’s focus is more on coca leaf regulation than cannabis liberalization.

Moving the clock forward by liberating cannabis in Venezuela would be the least the U.S. could do to compensate Venezuelans now that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has employed deadly and unwarranted force on Venezuelan boats to create blurry photo-op propaganda as a way to justify siphoning off the country’s huge oil reserves so it only ships oil to those the President chooses. If Donald Trump is really in charge of Venezuela as he claims, it should be a straight-forward task for him to persuade the country to change its marijuana laws. Liberating cannabis in Venezuela would provide a template for doing the same in Latin American countries where marijuana use is still restricted in ways that deprive citizens of the plant’s health and anxiety-reducing benefits.

President Trump says he wants to end all wars. If so he should take a closer look at ending drug wars. A Western Hemisphere that frees the weed will also free itself of marijuana smuggling and its related problems. Domestic production and local consumption of marijuana will assure a lasting drug peace. Ending cannabis smuggling could ease international tensions by giving the President one less excuse to invade the next hapless foreign country. If nothing else he does succeeds, fully legalizing marijuana in the West would finally give Donald Trump some undying appreciation.

Neither President Trump nor anyone else seemed concerned when the Ukraine legalized cannabis for medical, industrial, and scientific use in a bill it passed on August 6, 2024. The Ukraine is presently the only Eastern European country to have legalized medical marijuana. Ukrainian President Zelensky signed a bill during the war with Russia after debate and major public opinion shifts when it became clear that marijuana was useful in the treatment of PTSD suffered by soldiers at the front lines. Recreational use in the Ukraine is still prohibited.

Vladimir Putin and Russian laws prohibit citizens and Russian soldiers from using cannabis (THC) in any form, even if it comes as CBD slightly tainted with THC. This is a mistake. Russian military forces risk being demoralized and disadvantaged in combat with Ukrainians. Russia’s fate could end up being exemplified by a 17th-century English parable popularized by Benjamin Franklin:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost;

For want of a shoe the horse was lost;

For want of a horse the rider was lost;

For want of a rider the battle was lost;

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost;

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

In totalitarian societies, marijuana use is a crime of the mind. Its consumption is distinguished from crimes of violence and other types of offenses in that its use symbolizes a flagrant dissent that challenges the authoritarian ideologies prohibiting it.

Marijuana is criminalized not for how users might conduct themselves after smoking it but for what they might contemplate while in a transcendent mental state that could lead to reading banned books or engaging in critical thinking about the drug war and other types of social harms. Thinking is discouraged in totalitarian states just as it is in cults. Those who think effectively and who produce unequivocal answers to social or medical problems are the same people who are capable of exposing the lies imposed upon society by completely monistic applications of toxic ideologies seeking to affect all aspects of human existence. Freethinkers are the natural enemies of totalitarian states.

Governments and legal institutions based largely on dominionistic ideologies like religion or abstract political concepts are known as ideocracies. Uniformity of thought is their ultimate goal. Enforcement typically involves enlisting the help of secret police in addition to creating severe penalties for petty crimes. The goal is to terrorize citizens into absolute silence and obedience. Ideocracies include political factions such as Fascism and Stalinist and Maoist Communism. Religious ideocracies include Islam, Mormonism, Evangelicalism, and Catholicism. Notably, the juridical machinery for enforcing Catholic dogma was achieved through the legalistic methods of the Inquisitions beginning in the 12th century. The Church didn’t apologize for its inquisitorial laws and penalties until Pope John Paul II did so on March 12, 2000, a bit too late in the game to be effective. The Church still hasn’t apologized for its role in the prohibition of marijuana that began in the late 15th century.

The prosecution of thought crimes or heresies is part of the detestation of pluralism, or the condition in which two or more political states or ideologies peacefully coexist together. Heresy is derived from the Greek word hairetikós which means able to choose or form a school of thought, thereby making free choice a forerunner of pluralism. Pluralism is distinctively anti-fascist. As Benito Mussolini noted:

The Fascist conception of the state is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual value may exist, much less have any value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian and the Fascist State, as a synthesis and a unit which includes all values, interprets, develops, and lends additional power to the whole life of a people. — Benito Mussolini, “Dottrina,” in Political Quarterly 4 (July 1933):341–356.

Dictators can behave in ways that fly in the face of traditional ideological, religious and social values. In doing so they make it clear they use popular ideologies as a mere front, a justification for their own existence, a distraction camouflaging a corrupt state or criminal enterprise, as well as an effective way to stay in power.

Leaders contemplating totalitarian rule have not forgotten Mussolini’s fate at the hands of angry mobs. Faith, loyalty and repression of criticism of the regime are believed by dictators to be absolutely essential for retaining power or even staying alive. Endless strings of lies about cannabis and its consumers have been incessantly useful in this way by keeping certain types of people in their designated places while keeping others in places of power.

Social tolerance for drug use can be viewed as a kind of barometer depicting the overall degree of freedom a citizen enjoys. The most severe penalties for cannabis consumption are found in repressive societies like those found in modern Russia and China where long prison terms and even death sentences for its use, transportation or sale are common. Other countries that engage in severe persecution or death penalties for marijuana smugglers include Iran, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates. Exceptionally long prison sentences for marijuana trafficking are common in countries having traditionally rigid social or political structures such as France, Indonesia, Japan, Venezuela, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia. Censorship is also strongly correlated with totalitarian regimes. Dissenters by their very existence reveal the totalistic construct imposed upon society to be a lie.

With the exception of methamphetamine or Pervitin Nazi Germany was vehemently against recreational marijuana and similar drug use while favoring a fanatical vision of racial and moral purity. Opioid addicts were severely treated and were often sent to concentration camps.

The Germans knew about psychedelic drugs. They knew of Albert Hofmann who synthesized LSD-25 and were familiar with his famous bicycle day on April 19, 1943, when he experimented upon himself by intentionally ingesting 250-micrograms of the psychedelic. The Nazis considered fantasy and absurdity along with harmless hallucinations to be dangerous distractions that could undermine their dreams of a rational and militant society. Nazi anti-drug propaganda would emerge to condemn the Alice in Wonderland story first published in England in 1865 in which Alice eats a magic mushroom and becomes tall or small. They portrayed the classic children’s story as being Jewish drug propaganda designed to corrupt German youth through its embodiment of foreign decadence and subversion of authority.

The forces of old and evil can never defeat marijuana. As citizens become more enlightened about cannabis there is no way they can be made unenlightened. It is truly ironic that dictators would be far less terrified of little Alice and her Wonderland if cannabis and psychedelics were fully legalized at the federal level for adults. Despots would not lose control of their despotic empires as a result. Instead, they will be happy to know that alternative forms of government fraud, waste, corruption and scapegoating will continue as usual and will fill in any of the gaps that result from discontinuing the war on THC. Those who dedicated their lives and careers to amplifying human misery and suffering through the use of censorship and disinformation aiding cannabis prohibition and its drug arrests are likely to be the ones who need to worry. Cause and effect will dictate their political fate and place in history.

CIA mind control experiments that exposed willing and more often unwilling people to mind-altering chemicals are the focus of an HBO series now in early production by David Chase. Chase is best known as the creator of the Emmy-winning mob drama The Sopranos. His latest drama series is based on John Lisle’s new book Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra.

John Lisle’s book goes into greater detail than previous MKUltra exposés. The reader gets to know the arch-chemist Sidney Gottlieb (aka The Black Sorcerer), who headed MKUltra while working at Langley, Virginia. On January 30, 1973, Gottlieb burned all his own files related to the secret drug dosing program. He was driven out of the CIA during the Nixon Watergate scandal. Gottlieb’s testimony before the Church and Pike Committees survived, and it is this testimony, along with seven displaced boxes of rediscovered MKUltra files, that is vividly revealed by Lisle.

One of the major mysteries surrounding MKUltra involves the circumstances of the death of CIA operative Frank Olson. Many have speculated that Olson was tossed out of a 13th-story hotel window by fellow CIA colleagues who feared he would panic and reveal details of the LSD experiments and MKUltra to the public. The fall was recounted by the Statler Hotel’s doorman, who yelled:

“We got a jumper, we got a jumper!” He later described Olson’s fall as “like the guy was diving, his hands out in front of him, but then his body twisted and he was coming down feet first, his arms grabbing at the air above him.” (p. 49)

Olson wasn’t the only fatality involving MKUltra. Gottlieb was a real-life super spy who could outshine any James Bond villain with scores of super-deadly brainwashing tricks all commissioned in the name of national security. He attempted to use psychedelic drugs to create an American-controlled Manchurian Candidate before the Communists could create one of their own. One witness to the Gottlieb family’s very private lifestyle was a young family friend of Peter Gottlieb named Elizabeth:

One day that summer, we were out at the house swimming. The parents had gone to the store to buy food for dinner, and Peter goes, kind of conspiratorially, “Come here. I want to show you something.” He takes me into his father’s den, his library, and says, “Turn around.” He did something—he didn’t want me to see what he did—and the wall of books opened up. Behind it was all this stuff. Weapons—I couldn’t tell which kind, but guns. There was other stuff back there. It was like a secret compartment. I couldn’t tell which kind, but guns. There was other stuff back there. It was like a secret compartment. I asked him, “What is that for?” He closed it back up quickly and said, “You know, my father has a price on his head.” I said, “Why, is he a criminal?” He said, “No, he works for the CIA.” Then he said, “You know, my dad has killed people. He made toothpaste to kill someone.” Later on he told me, “Don’t tell anyone that you were in there, and don’t ever tell anyone you know that my father kills people.” (p. 154).

If the Sopranos episodes are any indication of what to expect with the MKUltra production, David Chase’s new series should be just as outstanding and win just as many awards while providing a fascinating glimpse inside the CIA’s covert drug wars.

Dogma is an ancient Greek word that originally meant opinion until it was repurposed in 1534 to be an authoritarian mandate with legal consequences for anyone questioning it. It was the same year the Church of England split from the Roman Catholic Church. In the Reformation, criticizing dogma became heresy. Rejecting it altogether could lead to lethal penalties.

Fear mongering and foreboding over dogmas involving marijuana use began for Western culture in 1484 when Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal mandate rejecting cannabis consumption. The Catholic Church reigned over the medical profession at the time. Besides rejecting cannabis as a medicine, the pope also believed that by drinking children’s blood he could alleviate or prevent some of his health problems. Among his other faults Innocent VIII is remembered for initiating the Catholic witch hunts and for bankrupting the papacy through nepotism, simony and extravagant spending. He used Church funds to support his illegitimate children with titles and estates.

Good Catholics were subsequently expected to believe cannabis was a witch’s tool used to hereticate the soul. Alleged witches in the late Middle Ages could be male or female. In most cases they were female medical practitioners at odds with the male Catholic clergy who ruled the Western healing traditions. The clergy were not allowed to take money for their medical services for fear it could lead to corruption in the Church. More medical practitioners were needed so in due course the job of medical doctor emerged to become a profitable secular career in which the clergy might participate. Nuns could still work as nurses for example.

Apart from opium and alcohol, medicines in the medieval Christian era were viewed with moral suspicion. The clergy believed a demonic force was the enabling agent if a drug got people high. The ability to alter consciousness resulted in the humble marijuana plant being elevated to the lofty position of the supernatural to become one among many demons thought to exist everywhere. By contrast, wine is sacred for the Catholic Church. Wine is central to the Eucharist, where bread and wine undergo a ceremonial metamorphosis to become the body and blood of Christ that is symbolically cannibalized by parishioners. The first communion age is about 7 years-old, or when a child is considered mature enough to sip wine.

Wine has always played a substantial role in Christian history. According to scripture Noah had a vineyard. Benedictines and Cistercians are regarded as the early pioneers of excellent winemaking. A Benedictine monk, Dom Pierre Pérignon, invented champagne. St. Junípero Serra brought viticulture to California by planting grapes at Catholic missions. His miraculous efforts grew to become the state’s $84.5 billion per year wine industry. Other religious groups in which wine is fundamental to their ancient religious ceremonies include Judaism and Shinto.

Fear of cannabis and psychedelic drugs by modern cults, sects, and mainstream religions originates with a belief that psychoactive drugs can stimulate the mind and imagination in ways that might weaken dogmatic authority. If the critical-thinking accusation is correct, it would follow that marijuana and psilocybin could be employed as medical treatments for religious hysteria and extremism. Unfortunately, neither marijuana nor psilocybin show signs of reducing dogmatic hostilities, while there exists evidence that psilocybin can enhance or stimulate religious experiences. More research is needed. Either way, the wine industry is safe.

The evidence connecting religious dogma to marijuana prohibition is best illustrated by those who favor cannabis and those who don’t. Recent polls suggest that religious people are more likely to practice moral absolutism regarding marijuana use, whereas marijuana users are more likely to accept moral relativism. In a 2021 Pew poll only 44-percent of white Protestants and 58-percent of white Catholics favored full marijuana legalization compared to 88-percent of atheists who favored all uses of cannabis. The large opinion gaps indicate that religion, emotion and social norms play a more important role in cannabis prohibition than suspected health concerns. Marijuana prohibition is what many always suspected it to be, a religious dogma backed by falsehoods.

As a legal instrument, marijuana prohibition is required to fall under a specific set of rules that sidestep religious decision making. The U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause insists that Congress not create a national church or endorse purely religious practices. Despite this restriction the government and courts often side with religions, sects and cults regarding their uniquely unscientific rejection of illicit drugs. Other legal safeguards add weight to the establishment clause. Article VI of the Constitution states that no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust. Because marijuana criminalization is for all intents and purposes a religiously biased prohibition, a religious test occurs by default when a government agency rejects employment applications because an applicant used marijuana in the recent past, either for religious, medical or recreational purposes.

Marijuana prohibition ignores a person’s right to medical privacy. Privacy in America is protected by the First Amendment’s freedom of association and expression, the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Fifth Amendment’s protections against self-incrimination, the Ninth Amendment’s recognition of rights not specifically enumerated, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause used to protect individual autonomy. Medical record privacy is assured by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).

A big problem for law enforcement is that no victim acting as a plaintiff exists in marijuana arrests. Unusual and often extreme measures are therefore required in apprehending violators. Sometimes the measures are illegal, such as entrapment. For instance, entrapment occurs when a person in ill health is forced to use marijuana medicinally but is trapped into committing a violation of the law by not being allowed to possess it legally.

Other enforcement problems exist. Drugs can be planted on a person during a police encounter. Drug laws can be used to target otherwise law-abiding people for political purposes. Drug accusations can be used for personal leverage, e.g., threatening to expose private information or take away children. Marijuana violations have been used as an excuse to deny government monetary assistance to Americans who suffered property damage in wildfires. One marijuana violation can cause a person to lose their government security clearance or be kicked out of the military. Drug prohibition can be an aid in upholding a totalitarian government that persecutes its opponents and private citizens to remain in power.

It’s often argued that legislating morality is impossible. Marijuana and alcohol prohibition are good examples of why it is impossible. Science research consistently points to the health benefits for cannabinoids such that little remains to justify cannabis prohibition but an archaic moral system. Federal drug enforcement agencies are aware of the problems and contradictions of the drug war. The continuing desire to disrupt or eliminate suspected moral enemies appears to dominate all other concerns.

The anti-marijuana movement is a major obstacle to ending the drug wars that have raged across continents for over fifteen centuries. Beginning in 5th century North Africa, religious factions targeted users of illicit substances in much the way prohibitionists do today. Drug users were scapegoated for social problems unrelated to their drug use while cannabis consumption itself was made a shibboleth—a means of exposing hidden identities, ethnicities, heresies, and political agendas.

Ritualized persecutions of ostracized individuals and groups that consume marijuana have ensured that drug laws remain repressive and dangerous. It’s a simple process. Scapegoating a material substance such as marijuana for society’s problems is only one short step away from condemning the people who consume it:

The Sufis were not the only group blamed for the destruction caused by hashish. The fabled Haydar was an older contemporary of Genghis Khan, and about the time of Haydar’s death, the Mongols were poised to invade the lands of Islam [13th century CE]. Blaming moral and material ills of any kind upon the machinations of foreigners and enemies is a common human trait. Thus the Mongols were a natural target for those searching for an explanation of what brought about a social evil assumed to have reached dangerous proportions in their times. – Franz Rosenthal, The Herb: Hashish Versus Medieval Muslim Society – (c. 1971), p. 54.

The religious theme runs deep in drug prohibition. President Richard Nixon’s henchman, John Ehrlichman—who admitted to counseling Nixon to use marijuana criminalization to crack down on alleged pot smoking political opponents—was a member of the Christian Science religion as was Nixon advisor H. R. Haldeman. Christian Science rejects any reliance on the medical or recreational use of drugs. It claims drugs interfere with spiritual healing, so it practices faith healing instead. Its members would literally rather die than consume a drug, and they do. Haldeman died of abdominal cancer in 1993 while refusing any medicinal treatments or painkillers, including marijuana.

Kevin Sabet, a founder (along with co-founders Patrick J. Kennedy and David Frum) of the anti-marijuana organization Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), is a member of the Baha’i faith, a Muslim sect founded in 1863 that currently comprises about 8-million members scattered throughout the world. In contrast to the tolerance shown by Sufism toward marijuana, Baha’i strongly forbids cannabis as well as alcohol consumption, except for medicinal purposes. Baha’i was founded by Bahá’u’lláh, who warned against any substance that induces “sluggishness and torpor” and harms the body. Abdu’l-Bahá, his son and successor, called hashish “the worst of all intoxicants” and described its effects as causing “disintegration of thought and the complete torpor of the soul.” Baha’i’s hostility toward marijuana consumers has been surpassed by persecution of the Baha’i themselves, particularly in Iran where the 1979 Islamic Revolution caused the deaths of about 200 Baha’i.

As Baha’i’s most celebrated disciple, Kevin (Abraham) Sabet, President and CEO of SAM, has a political science degree from Berkeley (2001) and a social policy degree from Oxford (2007). His medical opinions regarding marijuana are often exposed as demonstrably false when subjected to the rigors and conclusions of modern science. Sabet himself is not formally trained in any specific physical, biological, pharmaceutical or medical science. He is not a professional psychiatrist with an actual medical degree in psychiatry, even though he somehow managed to attain a position as Assistant Professor Adjunct of Psychiatry at Yale University, as well as an Adjunct Assistant Professorship at the University of Florida School of Medicine—Drug Policy Institute.

The narrow lens through which Kevin Sabet views marijuana is inherently Islamic, moralizing, self-aggrandizing, and self-enriching, not medical or scientific. He opposes policies that would expand scientific research on marijuana’s potential as a medical treatment. Both Sabet and Patrick Kennedy want each ingredient of medical cannabis to be pharmaceutically sourced, packaged individually, and distributed separately in pill or skin patch form, making the natural source, the marijuana flower in all its THC, CBD and aromatic terpene glory unavailable. Doing this would preclude any potential entourage effect that might occur among marijuana’s various constituents.

Sabet’s Big Pharma style prescription drug preferences are distinctly American. Europeans and many people of other nations don’t object to combining or taking their medications in the form of herbal supplements or natural ingredients. They are more likely to visit a local drug compounder to obtain their drugs in some more preferable or convenient form. They’re willing to swallow a dry magic mushroom they grew at home in preference to taking a boring and expensive pill at a psychiatric clinic.

Smoking or vaporizing marijuana is the quickest, most efficient, and most convenient means of consuming marijuana’s active ingredients. Sabet’s lifelong crusade to penalize herbal marijuana consumers for how and why they consume marijuana has helped initiate thousands of needless criminal arrests. It has resulted in premature and unnecessarily agonizing deaths for those who were subsequently denied marijuana for use as a palliative. Like many religious extremists throughout history, Kevin Sabet doesn’t appear to concern himself with the harm that he, his organizations, and his ideologies produce.

In contrast to Baha’i, religions that use intoxicants in their religious practices for spiritual healing and to enhance the soul include Catholicism that uses wine, the Native American Church that uses peyote, Rastafarianism that uses cannabis, Hinduism that uses cannabis and soma, Bwiti that uses iboga (Gabon, West Africa), ancient Greek religions that used opium and other psychoactives, Amazonian indigenous religions that use ayahuasca, and Mazatec (Mexico) that uses psilocybin mushrooms. Under some U.S. federal laws each of the named religions in theory has a federal legal right to practice their religions using their chosen sacramental herbs, even though infidels, atheists, secularists, Mongols (Tibetan Buddhists), Israelites, and heathens who might want to claim cannabis or another drug as their own personal sacrament currently do not enjoy a federal legal right to possess either cannabis, psilocybin, peyote, ibogaine, LSD, or MDMA (Ecstasy).

The marijuana legalization movement shows no sign of weakening as more people throughout the world add cannabis to their shopping lists. Cannabis consumers encourage drug peace, not drug wars. A workable drug peace will necessitate an absolute separation of church and state on issues regarding drugs and their use. Dominionistic sects and religions such as Catholicism, Baha’i, Mormonism and Evangelicalism that reject recreational use of marijuana so they can dominate other religious groups or citizens must not be given a legal, social, or moral standing in either determining or undermining the alternative lives and successful social adaptations of others regarding their drug use. Ending the drug war means drug use by adults who are fully and truthfully educated about drugs must be treated as a fundamental human right in the fight to preserve domestic tranquility and the rights of citizens everywhere to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

American drug treatment programs specializing in cannabis use disorder (CUD) achieve long term marijuana abstinence rates of only 14-to-22 percent. Opioid addictions treated using buprenorphine have a 90 percent abstinence rate over two-to-five years. The differences in treatment success highlight the fact that alleged marijuana addictions are radically different from opioid addictions.

One source of confusion is that CUD is defined by psychologists and psychiatrists rather than medical doctors or neuroscientists. For example, neuroscientists have identified addiction pathways in the brain for cocaine and opioids as well as nicotine, but no neural addiction pathways have been identified for cannabis. Medical science has moved on. Opioid addictions are now viewed as an illness comparable to a disease like diabetes.

Despite a lack of biological evidence for marijuana dependency, mental health professionals cite data hinged on adolescent users and a vague social definition of a CUD:

An estimated 9 to 30% of cannabis users become dependent on cannabis and an estimated one in six adolescent cannabis users has cannabis use disorder. People who start using cannabis before age 18 are four to seven times more likely to develop a cannabis use disorder than people who begin as adults, according to NIDA. Withdrawal symptoms can include irritability, changes in appetite, depression, and twitches and shakes.

To explain all the twitching and shaking, most psychologists and psychiatrists rely upon a self-serving definition of CUD found in the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, also known as DSM-5-TR. According to the manual, CUD is a “problematic pattern of cannabis use” leading to “clinically significant” impairment or distress, as characterized by at least two or more criteria occurring within a 12-month period: cannabis is often taken in larger amounts or over a longer period than intended; there exist persistent desires or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control use; a great deal of time is spent obtaining, using, or recovering from cannabis; a strong urge persists to use cannabis; a failure to fulfill major obligations at work, school, or home due to use; continued use despite social or interpersonal problems caused by cannabis; giving up or reducing important activities because of use; use in physically hazardous situations; continued use despite physical or psychological problems caused or worsened by cannabis; tolerance or needing more cannabis to achieve the same effect; and withdrawal symptoms, or using cannabis to relieve withdrawal.

A heroin addict’s abrupt withdrawal or detox from heroin can involve many hours of vomiting up nearly everything the individual has eaten for the past three days. Ceasing heavy marijuana use does not typically create withdrawal symptoms. If someone’s cannabis supply is cut off after it’s been used medicinally for treating conditions such as anxiety disorders or major depression, then these disease symptoms are likely to reoccur, but this does not make chronic medicinal use an addiction. This idea has led some marijuana consumers to suggest that much of the wonder weed’s recreational use is actually medical use.

Marijuana-focused drug treatment programs have traditionally employed therapies such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that helps users identify triggers to cannabis use. Motivational Enhancement Therapy (MET) focuses on building motivation, and Contingency Management (CT) uses rewards for meeting goals. Holistic and Supportive Approaches include mindfulness, exercise and nutritional counseling to create a sense of wellbeing. Marijuana Anonymous is the cannabis equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous and focuses on accountability and community, said to be critical for a sustained recovery.

Pharmaceutical drug treatments for marijuana addictions involve non-FDA-approved experimental options. These include Dronabinol and Nabiximols for withdrawal symptoms, and N-acetylcysteine and gabapentin that give mixed results. None of these drugs or supplements are recommended. Dronabinol is the international non-proprietary name in a pharmaceutical context for THC.

Clinical significance widens the field since the most clinically significant social impairments that can occur with marijuana include being arrested for possession and sentenced to jail, or getting fired from one’s job because of a positive urine test. The legal connection was once a big cash cow for the marijuana rehab industry. In some parts of the US, in a legal process called diversion, a court would sentence a person convicted of marijuana possession to a rehab program with the stipulation that upon completion of the official brainwashing curriculum their criminal charges would be dropped. The anti-marijuana brainwashing effort has had little effect. As more state residents continue to opt for legalization the marijuana rehab business is falling on hard times. Aside from psychologists, psychiatrists, and politicians, it’s difficult to find a cannabis consumer or anyone else who believes marijuana is addictive.

Many elected public officials and employees of the federal government still describe marijuana as addictive. A failure by a president or a member of Congress to support marijuana prohibition along with its mythologies would mean drug rehabs and other businesses profiting from marijuana drug enforcement would lose their ability to donate money to helpful politicians to aid their re-election campaigns.

On the business side, transformations of the pharmaceutical industry are inevitable. If a specific cannabinoid or its chemical analog succeeds in replacing opioids as a non-toxic addiction-free pain reliever then certain pharmaceutical companies will suffer big losses in the global opioid market, estimated for 2025 to be $24.8 billion in total revenue. Pushback from businesses with a financial interest in promoting cannabis prohibition can be expected.

Despite a few new adjustments for the pharmaceutical industries, a freed marijuana marketplace will be good news for the economy and for democracies in general. Employment opportunities will improve, and not just for the marijuana industry. The government and its contractors will finally be allowed to hire marijuana consumers of all types who seek government jobs, including jobs that require a security clearance. The result will be the displacement of large numbers of professionally unqualified religious conservatives and true believers who owe their social and discriminatory employment status to puritanical rejections of marijuana and democracy. The current quest by organizations such as the New Apostolic Reformation to construct a new theocracy at the federal level and all other levels could be derailed. With so much to gain from cannabis legalization and so much to lose the stakes remain high.