Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass
blog icon orange rss icon with stylized radio waves bird icon for twitter bird icon for twitter substack icon


back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow


America's Blind Spot

Open Letter to Jospeh Koterski

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 30, 2020



2025 update



In his class entitled Natural Law and Human Nature, Professor Joseph Koterski reminds his students that early thinkers were blind to the injustice of slavery because they lived in a culture that held a variety of unfounded assumptions on that subject.


I recently e-mailed the professor, suggesting that modern Americans have the same kind of blind spot when it comes to the Drug War: we cannot see the injustice in IT because WE live in a culture that holds a variety of unfounded assumptions on THAT subject.

I have yet to hear back from Professor Koterski, but that's probably to be expected. After all, if my theory is right, then my ideas about the Drug War will seem as crazy to most people living today (professors included) as the abolitionist viewpoint would have seemed to an ancient Greek or Roman philosopher.

I'll give the professor a few more weeks to respond before publishing my e-mail to him as an "open letter." Meanwhile, here are a few of the harebrained American cultural assumptions that let the Drug Warrior get away with murder, literally speaking, fomenting completely unnecessary violence overseas in the name of protecting the American people from plants.

FALSE ASSUMPTIONS HELD BY MODERN AMERICANS

False Assumption One: It is legitimate to criminalize plants in the first place. COMMENT: Wrong. They are the birth right of human beings under natural law. As John Locke writes: we have the right to the use of the earth "and all that lies therein."

False Assumption Two: It makes sense to punish pre-crime: namely, the possession of substances that have become linked in the popular imagination with violence. COMMENT: Americans assume that pre-crime is an injustice limited to the plots of Philip K. Dick novels, but the punishment of pre-crime began in 1914 with the Harrison Narcotics Act. For the first time in American history (or in English history, for that matter), a person could be punished for something other than the way that they actually behaved. Now one merely had to possess a substance that had been linked in the modern imagination with evil.

False Assumption Three: Psychoactive substances have no function except as a "crutch" or to make a person "high." COMMENT: Entire books could be written to annihilate these assumptions on philosophical grounds. Suffice it here to say that early Vedic religion was inspired by psychedelics, the discovery of DNA was inspired by psychedelics, great literature was inspired by a wide variety of psychedelics and other psychoactive plants. Meanwhile, science has finally been granted just enough freedom from our aptly named Drug Czars to establish that psychedelics can be powerful therapeutic medicines for overcoming depression and PTSD. The notion that "drugs" - i.e. psychoactive plants - can only be used for sordid goals is, at best, a Christian Science superstition or at worst, a Drug Warrior lie, persisting for the sake of its propaganda value.

False Assumption Four: a country has the right to go overseas and burn plants that induce psychological states of which American politicians disapprove. COMMENT: If we have the right to travel overseas in order to burn plants that we hold responsible for American addictions, then surely other countries have the right to come stateside to burn tobacco and grape vines. This is why assumption number one must be overthrown. Once we criminalize plants in violation of natural law, we open up a Pandora's box full of ways for politicians to corrupt our democracy and destroy American values. American politicians inevitably use our crazed drug-war mentality as an excuse to give monopolies to Big Liquor and Big Pharma 1 2 when it comes to providing transcendence and psychological treatment. And if that means burning plants that have been used responsibly overseas for millennia, then so be it. And so colonialism thrives under the Drug War, where it can now fly below the radar of our usual moral distaste for that practice. Meanwhile, torture and murder become the new American values, as we so demonize plant users as to call for their execution. Behold, the anti-nature Drug War run amok.


Author's Follow-up: October 31, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


Father Koterski has the best excuse for ignoring me of all my reticent interlocutors. He passed away, bless him, on August 9, 2021!


Author's Follow-up: January 5, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


Speaking of drug czars, the very title should be anathema to a freedom-loving people. When we create a "czar" in America, we are basically saying the following:

"Constitutional protections are all well and good, and so is the rule of law, but this problem is so huge that we need to start playing dirty to achieve our ends!"


And it should be no surprise that drug czars would try to live up to that understanding. Drug czar William Bennett proposed the beheading of drug dealers -- BEHEADING, for a crime that never existed before -- beheading, for selling plant medicine. And Americans wonder how they lost their freedom3. They were cheering on the barbarians as they wrecked the place under cover of strategically created drug hysteria.












Notes for essay entitled America's Blind Spot: Open Letter to Jospeh Koterski:

1: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
2: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
3: Beheading of Convicted Drug Dealers Discussed by Bennett LA Times - Reuters, 1989 (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




AI is inherently plagiaristic technology. It tells us: "Hey, guys, look what I can do!" -- when it should really be saying, "Hey, guys, look how I stole all your data and repackaged it in such a way as to make it appear that I am the genius, not you!"

The DEA stomped onto Thomas Jefferson's estate in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. And the TJ Foundation helped them! They sold out Jefferson.

Someone tweeted that fears about a Christian Science theocracy are "baseless." Tell that to my uncle who was lobotomized because they outlawed meds that could cheer him up -- tell that to myself, a chronic depressive who could be cheered up in an instant with outlawed meds.

Self-medication is not a dirty word. It has always been a fundamental right to take care of one's own health -- until the medical establishment demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.

Drug warriors aren't just deciding for us about drugs. They're telling us that we no longer need Coleridge poems, Lovecraft stories, Robin Williams, Sherlock Holmes, or the soma-inspired Hindu religion.

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx

A generally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear. --James B. Stockade.

Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.

We have to deny the FDA the right to judge psychoactive medicines in the first place. Their materialist outlook obliges them to ignore all obvious benefits. When they nix drugs like MDMA, they nix compassion and love.

Drugs like opium and cocaine should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."


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






back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow
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..."

Purchase Your Copy
Book Cover

Diary of a Drug Fiend

This is the only full-cast recording of Aleister Crowley's 1922 classic paeon to common sense. It is the first book -- and so far almost the only book -- to stake out a philosophy of drug use that is compatible with human freedom, one in which we learn to use drugs as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. This recording was produced by the Drug War Philosopher and your purchases help support his effort to push back against the tragically counterproductive policy of drug prohibition, in the name of human freedom and of humanity's right to heal.

Purchase Your Copy



No cookies, no ads paid for by amoral and immoral billionaires (or trillionaires).


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.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is a proud sponsor of The Drug War Philosopher website @ abolishthedea.com.


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

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP (up)