A Text That Needs Some Context
Escohotado’s Carta a la madre de un toxicómano (Letter to the Mother of a Drug Addict) appeared in the newspaper El País on May 23, 1988. The context matters: Spain was living through the hardest moment of the so-called “heroin epidemic,” with thousands of young people dying, neighborhoods marked by street-level dealing, and a public alarm that filled the streets with family associations demanding measures against “the drug.” Escohotado, a philosopher and historian of psychoactive substances, addresses one of those mothers directly.
The rhetorical gesture is deliberate: instead of joining the panic, he proposes stopping to think about where the problem comes from. The piece is neither a manual nor medical advice; it is a polemical plea, written with the intention of unsettling the consensus of its day. That is why it keeps circulating, and why it deserves a careful rereading.
The Central Idea: Uses, Not Substances
The whole letter hinges on one sentence: there are no good and bad drugs, only sensible or foolish uses of them. Escohotado compares substances to firearms or nuclear energy: neutral objects whose outcome depends on the conditions and on whoever handles them, not on some supposed intrinsic evil.
From there he derives his critique of the very category of “The Drug,” capitalized, as a demonic entity set against pharmacy medicines and against what is sold at the tobacconist’s or the grocery store. That boundary, he argues, is more cultural than pharmacological: it depends largely on what we choose to believe and on whom we choose to cast as the Satan of the moment.
Heroin Wasn’t Born Cursed
To defuse the “diabolical” character of the opiate, Escohotado turns to history. Opium was used as a remedy for millennia, and heroin was launched on the market by Bayer in the late nineteenth century, almost at the same time as aspirin, and was even recommended for soothing coughs. As long as these derivatives were legal, cheap, and of controlled purity, he argues, their users were mostly adults, and no accidental overdoses were recorded.
His conclusion is that the substance didn’t change; its legal status did. Pushed into the black market, it became impure, extremely expensive, and lethal. The harm, in his reading, is produced by the framework, not the molecule.
Prohibition, Adulteration, and Price
The most concrete stretch of the letter is economic. Escohotado points out that the “gram” a user bought at the time cost a fortune and contained, according to official figures he cites, barely 5–10% active ingredient; the rest was cutting agents. He then offers an analogy that has become his trademark: would we blame cognac if, because of price and adulteration, someone could only drink one poisoned thimbleful a day and died of it?
From that mechanism he draws his indictment: prohibition makes the product more expensive, adulterates it, feeds criminal networks, and creates an entire industry—police, therapeutic, media—that lives off managing an evil largely manufactured by the ban itself. Raising penalties, he adds, only pushes up the price, multiplies the business, and shifts sales toward minors, the only ones who can’t be prosecuted.
The “Alibi” of the Possessed
There is a more psychological and controversial part. Escohotado suggests that the mythology of the “irresistible hook” gives the addict, especially a young one, an alibi and a role: declaring oneself a victim possessed by a substance excuses one from taking responsibility, from growing up, from answering for one’s own acts. By believing ourselves in a demonic power capable of canceling out the will, he says, we hand that same narrative to our children.
Hence his skepticism toward measures that, in his opinion, would reward the “victim” role—subsidies or jobs simply for declaring oneself a heroin user—and his criticism of treatments such as methadone, which he compares, with his usual sarcasm, to curing an alcoholic of whiskey with gin.
A Critical Reading
The letter is a combat text, not a scientific paper, and it should be read as such. Several of its pharmacological claims—the exact timelines for developing dependence, the idea that withdrawal is equivalent to “a mild flu”—are framed for rhetorical effect and are debatable in light of current knowledge about opioids: dependence, tolerance, and the severity of withdrawal vary widely depending on the person, the route, the dose, and the history of use.
His economic thesis, by contrast, has aged better: the link between prohibition, adulteration, price, and harm is now a central argument of harm reduction policy. But the landscape has also changed. The arrival of extremely potent adulterants—fentanyl and its analogs—has made overdose even more unpredictable than in 1988, which reinforces, rather than weakens, the need for accurate information and health services.
Along those lines, a contemporary reading of Escohotado fits with tools he never saw consolidated: drug checking, the availability of naloxone, supervised consumption rooms, and an approach that treats problematic use as a health issue before a matter of punishment. None of this is a recommendation for use: when it comes to your own use or a relative’s, the sensible course is to seek out health resources and specialized services, not to manage the risk yourself on the basis of an opinion piece from decades ago. The letter serves, above all, as an invitation to think against the panic; concrete decisions belong to the clinical realm.
