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About that 17 billion...

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 27, 2026



About that 17 billion... I hate to open my mouth, lest I lose all ten of my followers in doing so, but this story does have a connection with drug attitudes in America and I feel called upon to make that clear -- or at least to die trying, statistically speaking. These prosecutors who claim to be acting on behalf of parents want to punish Meta for doing what any company tries to do under modern capitalism: attract as many customers as possible and make as much money from them as possible. Yes, I agree that there is a problem here for parents, the fact that their children cannot get away from "this stuff" -- but that problem is a result of Meta's enormous size, and there is an existing remedy for dealing with companies that have grown so large as to make them unresponsive to consumer interests. It's called the Sherman Antitrust Act. The prosecutors, by rights, should be fighting to end Meta's monopoly status. Instead, they are punishing Meta for following the capitalist algorithm, a precedent-setting approach that is sure to have unpredictable consequences in the future, and many of those are sure to be problematic, or at very least divisive in light of the philosophical viewpoints that they will presuppose.

Where's the connection with drug prohibition?

I get nervous when the activists use the term "addiction," since that term has been used to generate a hatred of drugs, especially by self-interested doctors who have a vested interest in teaching Americans that they are helpless dupes in the face of potentially addictive substances, and that once they step over the line, only the lifetime support of a board-certified doctor can help to keep them on the straight and narrow from that point forward. And there is another connection with the Drug War: in the stories I've read, the "extreme misuser" of social media, the one who gets thin and starts to waste away, the one in whose name the Meta company is sued, are real outliers. They do not represent the average user any more than a drunkard represents the average drinker. And yet the Drug Warriors have this fact in common with the prosecutors who are going after Meta: they believe that "one swallow makes a summer," that one only has to find one single case of drug abuse -- or of social media abuse -- and voila, one has a crisis that must be dealt with by any means necessary, even if it means changing the entire nature of one's country, by disowning the 4th amendment in the case of drugs or by disowning the capitalist way of doing business when it comes to so-called social media addiction.

And there's still one other connection.

I cannot help but be jealous. These metaphorically "addicted" young people are getting a big payout (or at least their lawyers are). Meanwhile, I have been addicted for a lifetime thanks to drug prohibition, addicted to Big Pharma drugs that are harder to kick than heroin, and in my case, no one’s launching any 17 billion dollar lawsuit. Indeed, no one even regards this situation as a problem. Robert Whitaker at Mad in America will not even publish my story, despite the fact that he has set himself up as the online champion of med-dependent patients. Instead, I am told by everybody in the healthcare business to "shut up and take my meds." If state prosecutors treated young people this way, they'd tell the kids who are claiming to be addicted to social media to "shut up and read your Facebook Feed."








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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The evidence has been in for well over a century now: people want to use psychoactive substances to transcend the rational mind. It's about time we stopped punishing them for that.

To say that taking SSRIs daily is better than using opium daily is a value judgement, not a scientific one.

When we outlaw drugs, we are outlawing far more than drugs. We are suppressing freedom of religion and academic research.

I'm told that most psychiatrists would like to receive shock therapy if they become severely depressed. That's proof of drug war insanity: they would prefer damaging their brains to using drugs that can elate and inspire.

The Shipiba have learned to heal human beings physically, psychologically and spiritually with what they call "onanyati," plant allies and guides, such as Bobinsana, which "envelops seekers in a cocoon of love." You know: what the DEA would call "junk."

The most addictive drugs have a bunch of great uses, like treating pain and inspiring great literature. Prohibition causes addiction by making their use as problematic as possible and denying knowledge and choices. It's always wrong to blame drugs.

Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.

If the depressed patient laughs, that means nothing. Materialists have to see results under a microscopic or they will never sign off on a therapy.

Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It forces us to use shock therapy on the severely depressed since we've outlawed all viable alternatives. It denies medicines that could combat Alzheimer's and/or render it psychologically bearable.

There are no recreational drugs. Even laughing gas has rational uses because it gives us a break from morbid introspection. There are recreational USES of drugs, but the term "recreational" is often used to express our disdain for users who go outside the healthcare system.


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Book Cover

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

This book features 150 annotated images, designed to force brainwashed Americans to confront the fact that drug prohibition is wrong. Here is what author Richard Parrish II says of the book's compiler: "The drug prohibition philosopher provides first-hand, principled, persuasive, and insightful arguments against the current drug prohibition regime..."

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Book Cover

Diary of a Drug Fiend

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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