Change Your Mind, Change Your Mind, Change Your Mind

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Change Your Mind, Change Your Mind, Change Your Mind

about the highly counterproductive policy of drug prohibition

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 17, 2025

The prohibitionist approach to drug use is based on the following hateful and anti-democratic algorithm: namely, that a drug that can be misused, even in theory, by a white American young person when taken at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason. This is Big Mother government at its worst. And yet, even if we made our peace with this childish and immensely disempowering algorithm, the Drug War would still be a case of massive tyrannical overreach. Consider our laws against coca. America does not just outlaw the godsend known as cocaine, but it outlaws the coca leaf itself since it could theoretically be used to manufacture cocaine. WHAT?! One may as well outlaw planes, trains, boats and automobiles because they could theoretically be used to carry coca leaves around the world.

Sounds crazy at first, right? Americans would never do that, right? But then prohibitionists have done something even more tyrannical than that: they have effectively repealed basic freedoms like the 1st and 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on the grounds that such democratic freedoms will impede the government's war against the use of drugs like cocaine. And so the Drug War is used as an excuse to end democracy itself! The fact that most Americans have gladly acquiesced in this anti-democratic outrage is depressing, to put it mildly.

I find it extremely depressing to write on this subject, by the way, because in researching the topic online, I encounter nothing but articles written by brainwashed drug haters, authors who have been thoroughly bamboozled since grade school by the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. Such authors make frequent and uncritical use of pejorative terms like "scourge" and "craze" when discussing cocaine -- in complete lockstep with our government's drug-demonizing imperative. The real "craze" over the last 150 years, however, was not our understandable fascination with the almost miraculous cocaine of the Inca -- a drug whose invigorating and hangover-free effects seem to violate the first law of thermodynamics -- it was the strategic attempt on the part of racist politicians and Chicken Little moralizers to demonize that substance by focusing on its misuse only. (Note: It was originally doctors who demonized cocaine ¹ . They completely ignored the benefits of the drug -- which was, of course, the whole point. Cocaine could have rendered psychiatry unnecessary for the vast majority of human beings. The medical establishment wanted nothing to do with such a drug. So they disguised their financial interests by evincing a lopsided concern for the vast minority who would misuse such a medicine. The medical establishment preferred that the depressed should suffer unnecessarily rather than to allow them to use a drug that could render the medical establishment unnecessary!)

That is how America approaches all drugs these days: by judging them on the basis of their worst-possible use. That is why we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse rather than a National Institute on Drug Use. The job of our government-sponsored science is to prove that drug use is bad; it is not to tell us the truth about drugs but rather to present cherry-picked data that would serve to justify our tyrannical laws against psychoactive medicine. If we judged aspirin by such lopsided standards, the drug would be outlawed for all times, since its use in the UK alone is associated with 3,000 deaths every year. Our politicians refuse to demonize aspirin use for the simple reason that they have no economic reason to do so. They themselves use aspirin, after all. The job of prohibition is to demonize the sorts of drugs that are used by one's enemy, not by oneself!

But back to cocaine, the drug that Americans love to hate -- the same Americans who refuse to start their day without a caffeine fix and who could not envision ending their day without "throwing back a cold one."

THE EYES HAVE IT (the mind, not so much)

The cocaine alkaloid has been highly prized as a local anesthetic in eye surgery ever since it was first employed for that purpose in 1884 by Austrian ophthalmologist Carl Koller. Such use is still legal today. This is all well and good for patients with eye problems, but it raises an immediate ethical question -- or at least it "would do" if we all had not been brainwashed since childhood to ignore such otherwise obvious considerations. That question is the following:

Why do we make exceptions to drug law for eye patients but not for so-called "mental" patients? Why is the eye patient allowed to get relief from ophthalmological distress while the mental patient is forced to go a lifetime without peace of mind?!

Of course, brainwashed westerners will reply with the kneejerk metaphysical bromide that drugs cannot bring about "real" peace of mind in any case (whatever THAT means) -- but then what else can they think, given the fact that they have been shielded since childhood from seeing, reading, or hearing any positive reports of drug use. It is for their benefit that I adduce the following upbeat assessment of coca use by Sigmund Freud himself, knowing as I do that most readers will be ignorant of this quotation thanks to Drug Warrior censorship -- a censorship in which 20th-century philosophers like Merleau-Ponty are happy to connive in cowardly silence. Why? Because their materialist and behaviorist views of the world naturally bias them against the sorts of "merely" holistic benefits to which the Austrian neurologist alludes:

"Coca is a much more powerful and less harmful stimulant than alcohol, and only its high price stands in the way at present of it being used on a large scale." --On Cocaine ²

Of course, Freud made this observation before he had run up against the REAL obstacle to large-scale use of cocaine ³ for human benefit: namely, the fearmongering of racist politicians. Such politicians realized in the late 19th century that they could win elections merely by frightening American mothers about the supposed vulnerability of their poor little white children in a world full of big evil drugs like cocaine and opium . It was only after he realized "in which direction the wind lay," politically speaking, that Freud renounced his work with cocaine in favor of promoting his hypotheses about the subconscious mind. As a sort of ontology of human behavior, such theories were of obvious philosophical interest -- but even Freud himself preferred the real politik of cocaine use to the glacially accruing benefits of his immensely expensive psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was all well and good for his patients, but Freud was determined to obtain real and obvious benefits for himself in real-time, thank you very much, and he had no patience with a time-consuming and merely theoretical approach to treating his own depression.

legalization THAT LASTS

Yes, I am calling for the immediate re-legalization ⁴ of all drugs in order to re-empower westerners to emulate Freud in his use of cocaine and so to take charge of their own health once again, a right of which government was never justified in depriving them in the first place, least of all in the wholesale manner undertaken by modern drug prohibition. And yet I am fully aware that such a policy will never "stick" in America until we have driven a stake through the heart of prohibitionist ideology. Take Oregon, for instance. Its short-lived experiment with drug decriminalization was vetoed last year by Drug Warriors who blamed drug decriminalization for the downsides that were caused by the prohibition mindset itself (the same Drug Warriors who never take responsibility for the fact that the prohibition which they champion has destroyed inner cities around the globe and destroyed the rule of law in Latin America). With this obstacle in mind, I will end this essay with a list of inconvenient truths with which America (and the west in general) must come to terms if democracy and freedom are to survive our inherently racist and xenophobic attempts to blame all the world's problems on drugs. I do so because Americans need to change their minds about drugs before they can sustainably change their laws about them.

WHAT AMERICANS MUST LEARN

1) There will always be victims of ANY risky activity (and some of those victims will be white young people). Drug use is no different in this regard than is mountain-climbing, horseback-riding, scuba-diving, parachuting, driving cars -- or drinking alcohol, for that matter!

2) Whenever we try to save EVERYBODY, we end up producing the very downsides that we claim to abhor. In this way, the prohibitionist is like the governess in "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James. Her young charges were placed in harm's way precisely because of their caretaker's illogical and hysteria-driven attempts to shield them from all harm.

3) Drug prohibition does NOT make the world safe! White American parents only believe this lie because drug prohibition outsources drug-related death and violence to poor neighborhoods by incentivizing the enormously lucrative sale of godsend substances!

4) If prohibition saves white little Suzie from misuse of a drug about which we refuse to educate her, it only does so by killing minorities, turning American inner cities into "no-go zones," and destroying the rule of law in Latin America -- meanwhile forcing the chronic depressed to go without the use of OBVIOUS godsend medicines!

5) Demonizing drugs in the abstract is always wrong. The propriety of any given drug use is always determined by a wide variety of contextual factors. We should punish people for their actions, not for the supposed "pre-crime" of substance use.

6) All drugs have potential positive uses for somebody, at some dose, in some circumstance, alone or in combination. To decide in advance that a drug is completely useless is an offense to reason and to human liberty. Such a tyrannical mindset outlaws human progress itself.

7) The fact that America cannot use drugs wisely tells us far more about America than it tells us about drugs. And yet we Americans are in such aggressive denial about the shortcomings of our own mindset on this topic that we impose our own jaundiced views of drugs on indigenous societies around the world. These societies have used drugs responsibly for millennia, and yet we have the imperialist hubris to tell them in effect: "If we cannot use drugs wisely here in the States, then no one can! Hence, you must allow us to burn your coca and poppy plants at will."

8) No government has the right to outlaw Mother Nature herself, least of all a country founded upon Natural Law, which, as John Locke tells us, gives the citizen the right to the use of the land "and all that lies therein."

THE GOLDEN GOOSE OF DRUG ADDICTION

Addiction is the golden goose of the Drug Warrior (indeed, it's a $35 billion business according to Colleen Cowles in "War On Us.") They know that they can ride a moral high horse into political office by declaiming against the addictive potential of drugs. And yet it is drug prohibition which creates addiction! It does this by creating a world in which our drug choices are limited to only a few substances -- sold by individuals who have a vested interest in turning us into customers for life. (Before we start demonizing these latter drug dealers, by the way, let us have the charity to remember that Big Pharma companies behave in the exact same way: they use their monopoly on mood medicine to turn 1 in 4 American women into patients for life. How? By selling "meds" for which lifetime dependency is a feature, not a bug! Indeed, the pharmaceutical companies are for more culpable in this respect since their business plan explicitly involves obtaining customers for life!)

In a free world, one in which we learn from the documented experiences of wise drug users, we would find endless common-sense protocols for avoiding addiction in the first place, or at least for weaning a user off of an undesired substance. Take me, for instance. I was having a tough time last year attempting to get off of the Big Pharma antidepressant called Effexor ⁵. There was one particular night in which I felt like hell and so, after two hours of existential angst, I went over to my medicine cabinet and swallowed a relatively large dose of the drug. I felt horrible after so doing, of course, like I had ignominiously raised the surrender flag in my battle against my Big Pharma enemies. And yet it was blazingly clear to me, even at that very moment, that my backsliding would not have occurred had I been allowed to use drugs wisely on an as-needed basis -- substances that inspire and elate -- like laughing gas ⁶ , or coca, or opium ⁷ , or phenethylamines.

Consider the following reports from users of that latter category of psychoactive substances as reported in the book Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin ⁸:

"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place."

"For me there was a deep feeling of peace and contentment. The euphoria grows in intensity for several hours and remains for the rest of the day making this one of the most enjoyable experiences I have ever had."

"A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like... The entire experience was exquisite. Next day, same sense of serene, quiet joy/beauty persisted for most of the day. A true healing potential." -

Clearly, the timely use of drugs like these could have kept me from backsliding on Effexor! This is glaringly obvious to anyone with common sense! The political and scientific establishments are clearly gaslighting ⁹ me when they claim otherwise ¹⁰.

Which brings us to point 9 in our list of inconvenient truths that Americans need to take onboard before they can renounce the prehistoric ideology of drug demonization:

9) Drug prohibition causes addiction and unwanted dependency, while outlawing all the common sense ways of treating such problems.

10) You are "saving" your kids from drugs like cocaine by killing hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, well over 200,000 in the 21st century alone.

CONCLUSION

Unfortunately, the jaundiced attitude of fretful American parents with respect to drugs has itself been strategically choreographed by our conglomerate-owned media, which has no interest in changing -- or even challenging -- the hateful status quo when it comes to American biases against drugs. This is why we look in vain for news stories that connect Mexican violence with drug prohibition, despite the fact that prohibition first created drug cartels out of whole cloth. This is why we look in vain for news stories that connect drug prohibition with the destruction of America's inner cities, despite the fact that it was substance prohibition which first brought gunfire to those city streets. This is why we look in vain for news stories showing how Americans have used drugs wisely and for good reasons -- as, for instance, when strategically use drugs for the purpose of avoiding relapse on a dependence-causing Big Pharma 'med' such as Effexor.

And the media is not the only American institution that has a vested interest in promoting drug prohibition. Other interested parties include law enforcement, the corrections industry, medical science, and Big Pharma ¹¹ ¹² .

Talk about an uphill climb for drug-law reformers!

When a David like myself confronts a Goliath of this size, he can only do so as an act of faith, trusting that truth will eventually triumph in life.

Fortunately, one can find this latter conviction in the works of many great thinkers. It was the great pessimist himself, Arthur Schopenhauer, who admonished his readers as follows in the 1818 edition of "The World as Will and Idea":

"Life is short, and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth."

Cocaine

Notes for essay entitled Change Your Mind, Change Your Mind, Change Your Mind: about the highly counterproductive policy of drug prohibition:

1: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
2: “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)
3: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
4: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
5: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
6: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
7: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
8: PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (up)
9: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)
10: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
11: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
12: 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)

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Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.

Doc to Franklin: "I'm sorry, Ben, but I see no benefits of opium use under my microscope. The idea that you are living a fulfilled life is clearly a mistake on your part. If you want to be scientific, stop using opium and be scientifically depressed like the rest of us."

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 Partnership for a Death Free America is launching a campaign to celebrate the 50th year of Richard Nixon's War on Drugs. We need to give credit where credit's due for the mass arrest of minorities, the inner city gun violence and the civil wars that it's generated overseas.

Any self-respecting mycologist should denounce the criminalization of mushrooms.

Alcohol is a drug in liquid form. If drug warriors want to punish people who use drugs, they should start punishing themselves.

America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.

This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.

Attempts to improve one's mind and mood are not crimes. The attempt to stop people from doing so is the crime.

If there is an epidemic of "self-harm," prohibitionists never think of outlawing razor blades. They ask: "Why the self-harm?" But if there is an epidemic of drug use which they CLAIM is self-harm, they never ask "Why the self-harm?" They say: "Let's prohibit and punish!"

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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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Change Your Mind, Change Your Mind, Change Your Mind

about the highly counterproductive policy of drug prohibition

Cocaine

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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

Diary of a Drug Fiend