Attention Teachers: Get your students talking honestly about drug prohibition

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Attention Teachers: Get your students talking honestly about drug prohibition

Start a lively discussion with these politically incorrect essays by one of the many victims of the War on Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

January 8, 2026

Welcome to abolishthedea.com, where students can read and discuss politically incorrect essays about drug prohibition from a guy with 'skin in the game,' a guy who has been turned into a ward of the healthcare state thanks to drug prohibition and shunted off onto a Big Pharma 'med' that is far harder to kick than heroin ¹ ² ³. This is not just another website about drug prohibition: this is a site where you're going to be introduced to ways of thinking about drug prohibition that you have never even thought of before, like the link between the psychiatric pill mill and drug prohibition, the link between the philosophy of materialism and drug prohibition, and the link between the rise of the healthcare state and drug prohibition -- even the link between the election of Donald Trump and drug prohibition. (Hint: the Drug War has succeeded as far as racists are concerned, because it has removed hundreds of thousands of minorities from the voting rolls, officially or otherwise, by charging them with the non-crime of selling the plants and fungi of Mother Nature after racists outlawed the same in violation of everything that America once stood for.)

In a hurry? Click here to see the lists of some useful essays for motivating a lively discussion!

A four-panel comic strip. PANEL 1: the cartoon title, That Nutty Drug War! PANEL 2: Son: 'I'm on my way to the Just Say No Rally' PANEL 3: Mom: 'Did you remember to take your meds?' PANEL 4: Son: 'Oh, yeah, thanks for reminding me!' — Americans claim to hate drugs, and yet 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma drugs for life, and we consider them to be good patients!

If you don't already see these links between drug prohibition and modern evils, you're not alone. Almost all Americans pretend that drug prohibition is a niche issue that only affects hippies and hedonists, when in reality it denies the depressed the right to heal and it causes kids in hospice to endure unnecessary pain ⁴. Why? Because bureaucrats in Washington DC are monitoring our doctors for potential arrest should they prescribe in a way that does not conform with the puritan sensibilities of the west. The Drug War also outlaws academic freedom by denying us the right to follow up the studies of William James on other forms of consciousness ⁵. Indeed, the Drug War Philosopher -- videlicet myself (one Brian Quass by name) -- is the only philosopher in the world who officially protested to the FDA about their plans to begin treating laughing gas as a drug ⁶, which is to say their plans to make it harder than ever to use laughing gas safely -- even though the gas was already shamefully unavailable as a practical matter for the severely depressed whom it could have saved from suicide. Indeed, the downsides of drug prohibition are everywhere you look -- or they would be if prohibitionists had not convinced us from childhood that there are no good things about drug use and no bad things about prohibition.

Did I mention that drug prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world by first introducing guns to the 'hood? This is really the perfect racist crime, because even the spokespeople for such communities refuse to draw the link between drug prohibition and gunfire. I know. I pester them on this topic frequently and they never so much as respond. But they're not alone in denial. Enemies of shock therapy refuse to notice the fact that shock therapy would not even be necessary if we were allowed to use psychoactive drugs for the benefit of humanity. Likewise, the many enemies of depression refuse to notice the fact that depression would not even be a "thing" in America had we followed Sigmund Freud's advice to have the depressed use cocaine ⁷ ⁸.

Heart-shaped Valentine's day candy featuring anti-Drug War messages like STOP DEA, COCAINE NOT EVIL, NO DRUG TESTS, DEA LIES, AND PSILOCYBIN GOOD — Here's hoping you have a Drug-War Free Valentine's Day!

It was not the depressed who hated the drug, it was their doctors, who had a vested interest in demonizing a panacea that could put them out of business. Doctors judged the drug based only on its statistically rare downsides, exactly as if they were to judge alcohol by studying alcoholics. Indeed, Wade Davis reported in Rolling Stone magazine last year that doctors were originally concerned because they had linked the drug with 400 cases of toxicity -- 400 ⁹. These doctors, of course, were statistically challenged when they demonized cocaine, for they failed to realize that it's a big world and people do die. Aspirin itself causes 3,000 deaths in the UK alone every year ¹⁰! Alcohol causes 178,000 in America ¹¹. And yet 400 cases are a reason to throw hundreds of millions of the depressed under the bus?! Please. Let's have some perspective here!

But no, these doctors demonized the drug until it was easily outlawed by fearmonger politicians, thereby throwing MILLIONS of the depressed under the bus, like yours truly, who, as mentioned above was shunted off onto drugs that are far far harder to kick than heroin! Eh, thanks for nothin', doc! Indeed, no one in America seems to notice that the healthcare industry owes at least half of its very existence to the outlawing of just two time-honored godsends, namely coca and opium. Opium was considered a panacea in the past: a panacea. That was something that all the ancient physicians could agree on, including Galen, Avicenna, and Paracelsus.

And yet our pharmacologically clueless politicians have decided that opium is evil in itself – and so they have promoted a prohibition policy that has shunted opium fans off onto far harder drugs, opiates that are not regulated as to dose or quality. And then, rather than taking responsibility for the murderous outcome of their policy, they have the callous gall to blame the downsides of prohibition on drugs themselves. If pushed to respond to the fiasco they have brought about, the typical unrepentant Drug Warrior will say something cruel and stupid such as the following: "Your rights end the moment you are dying in MY streets!" "Oh, fine," I reply. "You do realize, of course, that the young people are only dying in YOUR streets because you outlawed the peaceable smoking of opium at home!" Where does the Drug Warrior want these opiate fans to go: to Mars?

Founding Fathers meeting to discuss the contents of the proposed U.S. Constitution. One says: 'What about our right to Mother Nature's Bounty?' Another answers: 'Oh, surely that goes without saying!' — No wonder Drug Warriors trash plant medicine with the pejorative epithet of 'drugs' -- they don't want people realizing that they have lost the fundamental right to take care of their own health with the bounty of Mother Nature.

This prohibition is a lose-lose situation for the country. On the one hand, Americans have given up their right to take care of their own health as they see fit – which, as Thomas Szasz reminds us, is a fundamental freedom, more basic than the right to vote ¹² – and on the other hand, they have made drug use far more dangerous and incentivized the sale of far harder medicines than those that they were demonizing in the first place. (I say "medicines" rather than "drugs" on purpose, for even the hardest drug can be used wisely -- as Carl Hart reminds us in Drug Use for Grown-Ups ¹³ -- but Americans would rather scapegoat drugs than teach safe use and regulate product.)

Meanwhile, prohibitionists continue to run roughshod over the healthcare rights of the entire world in the greatest case of mass denial in human history.

They have known since liquor prohibition that the prohibition of desired substances leads to gunfire in the streets and the sale of contaminated product (like the aptly named rotgut of the twenties ¹⁴). They have known that! And yet here are the prohibitionists, a full century later, still holding drugs to be the root of all evil, to the point where they will actually travel overseas to physically eradicate the substances that they blame for all the social problems back here in the States.

Even a child could see through the embarrassing insanity of such a policy. When they fall off a bike, they don't expect their parents to outlaw bikes: they expect their parents to teach "safe use" of that bike! Imagine if their parent said instead: "Don't worry, honey. We are going to fight to outlaw bikes here in the States, and then we will travel overseas to take these deadly contraptions away from everybody ELSE in the world too -- for their own benefit, of course!" And why would we want to take a panacea away from anyone?

As Thomas Szasz wrote in Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers:

In Galenic practice the most useful medicine was a theriaca, or antidote, named Electuarium theriacale magnum, a compound composed of several ingredients, among them opium and wine. ¹⁵

And yet opium is a drug that our pharmacologically clueless politicians have convinced us provides no benefits whatsoever! None. No wonder that Szasz drew the following conclusion about this sad state of affairs:

"We are repelled by the opium habit not because it is harmful, but the other way around: we regard it as harmful in order to maintain our justification for prohibiting it."

If you are one of the rare few in America who is ready to tackle these issues head-on rather than simply ignore them, then welcome. I hope you will use this site and the unique insights that it contains to stimulate an open discussion of the laughable "philosophy" underlying the hateful policy of drug prohibition.

Kindly old professor, like Albert Einstein, pointing at text on chalkboard that says Read and Discuss! — Read and discuss these politically incorrect essays by a victim of drug prohibition.

Kindly cartoon professor, like Albert Einstein, pointing at chalkboard, with text reading 'Extra Credit' — Access more resources for learning about the problematic mindset behind drug prohibition

For hundreds of other essays about drug prohibition to read and discuss, click here. New essays weekly.

Notes:

1: Heroin versus Antidepressants DWP (up)
2: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
3: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
4: Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the Impact of Drug Policies on Young People Barrett, Damon, IDEBATE Press, 2011 (up)
5: William James rolls over in his grave as England bans Laughing Gas DWP (up)
6: Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine DWP (up)
7: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
8: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
9: Cocaine is a Blessing, not a Curse DWP (up)
10: Daily Aspirin Linked To More Than 3,000 Deaths Per Year, Scientists Warn Huffington Post (up)
11: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (up)
12: Ceremonial Chemistry by Thomas Szasz DWP (up)
13: Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear Hart, Dr. Carl L. Hart, 2020 (up)
14: “1920 : The Year That Made the Decade Roar : Burns, Eric, Author : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2020. Internet Archive. 2020. https://archive.org/details/1920yearthatmade0000burn/mode/2up. (up)
15: “Ceremonial Chemistry – Syracuse University Press.” 2026. Syr.edu. 2026. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/1114/ceremonial-chemistry/. (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Self-medicating has always been the most basic of human rights, until the medical industry demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.

Attention People's magazine editorial staff: Matthew Perry was a big boy who made his own decisions. He didn't die because of ketamine or because of evil rotten drug dealers, he died because of America's enforced ignorance about psychoactive drugs.

David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.

Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful.

The idea that "drugs" have no medical benefits is not science, it is philosophy, and bad philosophy at that. It is based on the idea that benefits must be molecularly demonstratable and not created from mere knock-on psychological effects of drug use, time-honored tho' they be.

The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?

Even prohibition haters have their own list of drugs that they feel should be outlawed. They're missing the point. We should not drugs "up or down" any more than we should judge penicillin or aspirin in that way.

Psychiatrists refuse to acknowledge that it is hugely disempowering to turn patients into wards of the healthcare state with dependence-causing "meds." End drug prohibition and end the psychiatric pill mill.

The DEA is a Schedule I agency. It has no known positive uses.

Google founders used to enthuse about the power of free speech, but Google is actively shutting down videos that tell us how to grow mushrooms -- MUSHROOMS, for God's sake. End the drug war and this hateful censorship of a free people.

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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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Attention Teachers: Get your students talking honestly about drug prohibition

Start a lively discussion with these politically incorrect essays by one of the many victims of the War on Drugs

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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

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