The Devil is in the Dosage: The Symbiosis of the War on Drugs and Spiritual Warfare in the Reagan Era

This paper examines the convergence of two late-twentieth-century moral panics, the War on Drugs and the Satanic Panic, arguing that they functioned as a symbiotic project to police American consciousness. While the 1980s "Just Say No" campaign is often viewed as a secular public health initiative, this paper demonstrates how the Religious Right weaponized anti-drug rhetoric to validate theological fears of demonic infiltration. Drawing on the history of occult drug use (from Aleister Crowley to the psychedelic era), I analyze how the "drug-fueled occultist" became the central villain of 1980s folklore, exemplified by the Ricky Kasso case and D. Corydon Hammond’s conspiracy theories. I argue that for the Reagan-era Religious Right, the War on Drugs was a form of spiritual warfare: a crusade to sanctify sobriety and criminalize altered states as inherently demonic, reframing the drug war as a contest over the legitimacy of religious experience.