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Open Letter to Lisa Ling

whose documentary about Chicago violence does not even mention the Drug War!!!

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 13, 2022



Lisa Ling never once mentioned the Drug War during her documentary about violence in Chicago. Not once. Surely she knows that it is the Drug War that creates HUGE incentives for drug dealing, thereby facilitating the creation of armed gangs and the violence that comes with it in the form of turf wars. This violence (which killed almost 800 blacks in Chicago in 2021 alone) will never end if we fail to identify the obvious cause.

Update: May 18, 2025

By failing to identify the true cause of the violence -- namely, substance prohibition -- Lisa is empowering fascists like Trump to start executing black Chicagoans in the name of the hateful Drug War.


Please, Lisa: as liquor prohibition created the Mafia, so substance prohibition has created the modern inner-city gangs. Please say so in your future reportage! As Heather Ann Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014: "Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 1 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist.2"


Lisa missed a real opportunity to get to the truth about the hate-filled drug-war, which gives police carte blanche to treat suspects like scum. That's why the cop who killed George Floyd told the crowd to "just say no to drugs," because it was the Drug War which first gave racist cops like himself the green light to treat suspects like dirt.


Forgotten Stakeholders in the drug debate




  1. The depressed and anxious who are denied godsend medicines thanks to prohibition.

  2. The academic community, which is censored by drug law and told they can only research substances of which their government approves.

  3. Mexican children who lose their parents to the War on Drugs

  4. Patients (including children in hospice) experiencing pain who cannot get adequate relief, thanks to America's demonization of pain medicine.

  5. Residents of inner cities who live in violent "no-go" zones like Southeast Washington, D.C., where bullets fly thanks to the fact that substance prohibition armed these communities to the teeth.

  6. Formerly free Americans who now live in a semi-police state thanks to the militarization of local police forces in the name of "fighting drugs."





Author's Follow-up:

May 18, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




America is in complete denial about the downsides of drug prohibition, and Lisa Ling is the poster child for that denial. But she is not alone in ignoring the endless downsides to drug prohibition. Most of today's scientific articles on things like depression and human consciousness only make sense if you assume with the author that drugs do not exist. Take the claim that depression is hard to beat. That statement is true only if you assume that psychoactive substances do not exist, many of which could end depression in real-time, as for instance laughing gas 3 , phenethylamines, and even opium 4 , the drug that Americans love to hate.

But Americans have been brain-wiped when it comes to drug prohibition. They refuse to admit that drug prohibition exists. They refuse to even recognize the existence of the endless substances that we have outlawed in the name of fearmongering and racial and ethnic prejudices.

Even our history books ignore the Drug War. The progressive historian Howard Zinn never mentions the Drug War once in "A People's History of the United States of America"; neither does the conservative historian Paul Johnson in "Birth of the Modern."

How will the Drug War ever end when we refuse to recognize that it even exists? How will it end when we give it a giant "Mulligan" for all the harm that it causes, and instead cast about for other culprits, like global warming and job availability.

I try to be optimistic, but my comments on these topics are increasingly being blocked by algorithms, so confident are America's techies in their childish and disastrous view of "drugs." I am finding it very hard to believe that the truth will eventually be recognized as such, which is a belief that even the great pessimist Schopenhauer entertained, i.e., that the truth would eventually "out." I wonder rather if billionaires and their heavily censored media can ever be stopped from controlling the narrative and so deep-sixing any attempts at regaining religious and psychological liberty in America and hence in the world at large.













Notes for essay entitled Open Letter to Lisa Ling: whose documentary about Chicago violence does not even mention the Drug War!!!:

1: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
2: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
3: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
4: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Mad in America publishes stories of folks who are disillusioned with antidepressants, but they won't publish mine, because I find mushrooms useful. They only want stories about cold turkey and jogging, or nutrition, or meditation.

In a free future, newspapers will have philosophers on their staffs to ensure that said papers are not inciting consequence-riddled hysteria through a biased coverage of drug-related mishaps.

Your drug war has caused the disappearance of over 60,000 Mexicans over the last 20 years. It has turned inner cities into shooting galleries. It has turned America into a penal colony. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and put bureaucrats in charge of deciding if our religions are "sincere."

This is why America is creeping toward authoritarianism -- because of the prohibitionists' ability to get away with everything by blaming "drugs."

The government causes problems for those who are habituated to certain drugs. Then they claim that these problems are symptoms of an illness. Then folks like Gabriel Mate come forth to find the "hidden pain" in "addicts." It's one big morality play created by drug laws.

"In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us where to find it." --Antonin Arnaud

When people tell us there's nothing to be gained from using mind-improving drugs, they are embarrassing themselves. Users benefit from such drugs precisely to the extent that they are educated and open-minded. Loudmouth abstainers are telling us that they lack these traits.

Ketamine is like any other drug. It has good uses for certain people in certain situations. Nowadays, people insist that a drug be okay in every situation for everybody (especially American teens) before they will say that it's okay. That's crazy and anti-scientific.

Until we legalize ALL psychoactive drugs, there will be no such thing as an addiction expert. In the meantime, it's insulting to be told by neuroscience that I'm an addictive type. It's pathologizing my just indignation at psychiatry's niggardly pharmacopoeia.

Why does no one talk about empathogens for preventing atrocities? Because they'd rather hate drugs than use them for the benefit of humanity. They don't want to solve problems, they prefer hatred.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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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

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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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