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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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"There has been so much delirious nonsense written about drugs that sane men may well despair of seeing the light." -- Aleister Crowley, from "Essays on Intoxication"

No drug causes addiction after one use. From this fact alone, it follows that even drugs like meth and crack and Fentanyl can be used wisely -- on an intermittent basis.

It's already risky to engage in free and honest speech about drugs online: Colorado politicians tried to make it absolutely illegal in February 2024. The DRUG WAR IS ALL ABOUT DESTROYING DEMOCRACY THRU IGNORANT AND INTOLERANT FEARMONGERING.

The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.

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.

People talk about how dangerous Jamaica is -- but no one reminds us that it is all due to America's Drug War. Yes, cannabis and psilocybin are legal there, but plenty of drugs are not, and even if they were, their illegality elsewhere would lead to fierce dealer rivalry.

Daily opium use is no more outrageous than daily antidepressant use. In fact, it's less outrageous. It's a time-honored practice and can be stopped with a little effort and ingenuity, whereas it is almost impossible to get off some antidepressants because they alter brain chemistry.

Immanuel Kant wrote that scientists are scornful about metaphysics yet they rely on it themselves without realizing it. This is a case in point, for the idea that euphoria and visions are unhelpful in life is a metaphysical viewpoint, not a scientific one.

Materialist scientists cannot triumph over addiction because their reductive focus blinds them to the obvious: namely, that drugs which cheer us up ACTUALLY DO cheer us up. Hence they keep looking for REAL cures while folks kill themselves for want of laughing gas and MDMA.

If religious liberty existed, we would be able to use the inspiring phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the same way and for the same reasons as the Vedic people of India used soma.


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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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