by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

Thanks for the rare honesty!

Of course, in one sense, the Drug War IS working. It is working by empowering racist politicians and by disempowering minorities and the poor. It is working by bringing gunfire to inner cities and destroying the rule of law in Latin America. It is working by eroding American freedoms in the name of fighting a political scapegoat called drugs. It is working by handing otherwise close elections to Drug Warriors thanks to the imprisoning of over a million minorities.

As Thomas Szasz wrote in Our Right to Drugs:

"If we argue from principle, then it is moot whether drug prohibition works, because it is problematic what should count as its ‘working.’ The very existence of such a mass movement of scapegoating- uniting a diverse people in a common hatred– may be regarded as evidence that, simply put, it is working."

They do not see the patient alone at 2 a.m. in the morning, wishing that they were dead -- and knowing that all drugs that could have helped him or her have been ruthlessly outlawed by the chemical state.

With respect, you have been brainwashed your entire lifetime by Drug War censorship. You have never been allowed to see or read about the many positive uses for drugs.

The Hindu religion owes its existence to the use of a drug called Soma. Soma inspired and elated. This means that drug prohibition is the outlawing of religion -- of the religious impulse itself.

One in four American women take Big Pharma drugs every day of their life. Are you against THOSE drugs? Alcohol is a drug. Are you against THAT drug? Sugar is a drug. Caffeine is a drug. Jesus Christ himself had plenty of drugs in his earthly body, including DMT.

Drugs can stop people from committing suicide. Check out the drug-user reports in the book "Pihkal" by Alexander Shulgin. William James told us to use substances like laughing gas to understand reality. Yet drug prohibitionists have outlawed all such research. Drug prohibitionists are seeking to treat laughing gas like a "drug." In a sane world, we would give laughing gas kits to the suicidal, just as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies.

The FDA will not approve of laughing gas for the depressed, but they actually ENCOURAGE the use of brain-damaging SHOCK therapy for the depressed. Something is terribly wrong with this picture.

CONCLUSION: America is all screwed up because of the harebrained ideology of the prohibitionists. Prohibition never ended in 1933. We just appeased the prohibitionists by letting them outlaw all of liquor's less dangerous competitors.

The problem is that we are normalizing drug prohibition by ignoring all of its negative consequences, including:

the outlawing of religion, the end of academic freedom, the disappearance of 60,000 Mexicans over the last two decades, the death of 67,000 Blacks in inner-city America because liquor and drug prohibition armed the 'hood to the teeth.

The Drug War even led to the election of Donald Trump by removing over a million minorities from the voting rolls. (But then, of course, that was the real point of the Drug War in the first place, to disempower minorities and get rid of American democracy and democratic norms of all kinds.)

Drug prohibition has placed the government in charge of pain relief. It has placed the government in charge of what substances we can have in our digestive systems. It has placed the government in charge of deciding how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in life.

Drug prohibition is therefore the biggest power grab by government in world history. It seeks to control how citizens are allowed to think about the world. It is a meta injustice.

It's time that we stopped normalizing drug prohibition.

Meanwhile, Americans need to grow up. Saying things like "Fentanyl ³ kills!" makes as much sense as saying "Fire bad!" Both are attempts to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.

Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal in America. It took drug prohibition to accomplish that. How? By refusing to teach safe use, refusing to regulate product as to quantity and quality, and refusing to re-legalize the many opiate alternatives, like phenethylamines and laughing gas ⁴ , etc.

This shutting down of psychedelic research was based on the following crazy and anti-scientific idea:

"If a drug can pose a danger for white American young people when used at one dose for one reason, it must not be used by anyone at any dose for any reason."

This idea is especially crazy when one considers that Drug Warriors refuse "on principle" to educate these young people about safe use. The Drug Warrior actually believes that ignorance is the best policy when it comes to drugs.

Meanwhile, the FDA approves of Big Pharma ^{6 7} drugs whose published side effects include death itself ⁸ . Aspirin kills 3,000 a year in the UK alone⁹. Liquor kills 178,000 a year in the US¹⁰. Clearly the outlawing of psychedelics is completely irrational given this backstory. And yet folks like Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman support drug prohibition. They claim to be interested in safety — but whose safety? Not the safety of the 60,000 who have been disappeared in Mexico over the last two decades thanks to the War on Drugs¹¹. Not the safety of the 67,000 minorities who have been killed by gun violence ¹² over the last ten years in America's inner cities¹³. Not the safety of the folks who have to dangerously synthesize DMT with powerful chemicals because DMT has been outlawed. Not the safety of inner city kids like 15-year-old Niomi Russell who was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2024 in Washington, D.C., thanks to the fact that drug prohibition had armed inner city neighborhoods to the teeth¹⁴. Not the safety of the many young people who use alcohol only because we have outlawed almost all the obvious alternatives. Not the safety of the suicidal who kill themselves because we have outlawed all substances that inspire and elate.

The FDA also approves of shock therapy, by the way. They would rather that we knowingly damage the brains of the depressed¹⁵ than to let them use the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions, as Soma ¹⁶ inspired the rishi of the Punjab in 1500 BCE¹⁷. This results in part from the materialist approach to mood medicine, which scorns anecdote, history and common sense and looks instead for "cures" under a microscope. The goal is not really to help the patient but rather to prove the relevance of materialist science in the realm of mind and mood medicine. It was, however, a category error to place scientists in charge of such things. It is like placing Dr. Spock of Star Trek in charge of a study about the benefits of hugging. He just would not "get it." Neither do materialist scientists "get it" when it comes to holistic-acting drugs like psychedelics.*

I am talking here of scientists qua scientists, of course. There are many scientists who do indeed "get it." The point is that they "get it" in spite of their vocational indoctrination in materialist principles, not because of those principles.