Do I have to do everything?

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Do I have to do everything?

Yes, Brian, you do!

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 8, 2026

This is an open letter to Richard (and to you, too, reader) on the subject of drug prohibition, as I attempt to flesh out some of the many important issues that he raised in our recent exchange of messages on his Substack ¹, particularly with regard to how the end of drug prohibition might work in the real world. This is a question that I have been avoiding over the years because, in a sense, I did not consider it to be my problem. When it came to the Drug Warriors, my attitude was basically, "You guys got us into this mess, now it's up to you to get us out of it." You were the ones who decided to unconstitutionally outlaw Mother Nature by rashly assuming that there were no other stakeholders in drug prohibition except for vulnerable young people. You were the ones who chose to demonize extraordinary substances a priori, without even deigning to consider their endless psychological, philosophical, spiritual and aesthetic implications and potential. You were the ones who said "Drugs kill!" in the exact same superstitious spirit as our prehistoric ancestors once said "Fire bad!" When the western world woke up to the fact that it was living on a planet full of powerful psychoactive medicines in the 19th century, you were the ones who decided that the best way to deal with this fact of life in a free world was to arrest rather than to educate, was to demonize rather than to understand.

But, of course, the Drug Warriors themselves could not get us out of the problems that they have caused even if they wanted to. This is made clear by the shallow grasp of the issues that they evinced when writing anti-drug legislation in the first place. And so, when I am asked the question, "How would we go about re-legalizing Mother Nature and the substances derived therefrom?", I am forced to sigh, and say, "Do I have to do EVERYTHING?", only to realize that the answer to that question is an obvious "yes." Given that almost no one else recognizes even a fraction of the problems that are caused by drug prohibition, I do indeed have to both point out the problems and supply the solution, not just in general but in detail. This will remain the case until enough people have escaped the cult of drug demonization that we freedom lovers can afford to specialize, with some of us arguing the philosophical case for re-legalization while others attend to the details of how re-legalization would actually be "rolled out" in the real world. The latter job will require a PR campaign, not philosophy. There is simply no doubt but that there will be less death and violence in a world in which drug education is the norm and violence is no longer incentivized by anti-drug legislation. But the re-legalization "roll-out" team must ensure that the demagogues and the press do not work together to turn individual heartbreaking cases of drug abuse into cause célèbres for the return of drug prohibition. Our PR team must convince the press that doing so is exactly like turning a grisly car crash into a cause célèbre for outlawing cars ².

This is the point in our analysis where it becomes clear that the Drug Warriors are not really concerned about health at all. In our current political climate, the conservative conglomerate media will be sure to combat drug re-legalization with a host of documentaries and in-depth reports about drug misuse. Most of the benefits of a free world do not make for exciting reading in any case. The media cannot write exciting stories about the hundreds of thousands of people who are NOT killed by gun violence, or of the hundreds of thousands of people who are NOT unnecessarily depressed, or of the hospice kids in India who do NOT have to go without adequate pain relief. But they can boost sales by publishing a gory and in-depth look at a case of drug misuse by a poor, seemingly defenseless white young person who, they will be sure to remind us, "had their whole life ahead of them." This brings up an astonishing fact that no one seems to notice, the fact that drug prohibitionists are statistically challenged.

In his April 2025 article about coca in Rolling Stone magazine ³, Wade Davis refers to 400 cases of cocaine toxicity that were discovered by researchers in the 19th century. Davis implies that this figure justified the outlawing of cocaine. What he fails to note is that aspirin is associated with 3,000 deaths a year in the United Kingdom alone ⁴, and that alcohol is associated with 178,000 deaths each year in the United States ⁵. It seems that drug prohibitionists have lousy math skills, and yet no one has yet bothered to flag them for this learning disability -- or maybe, like myself, they are writing to protest this display of mathematical ignorance, but the magazines are refusing to publish their criticism, just as Rolling Stone has ignored my efforts to double-check the math of their star reporter in this case. (I even sent a message directly to Wade himself, but, alas, he has not yet seen his way clear to vouchsafe me a response.) ⁶

And so conservatives and the press are able to veto drug re-legalization with ease: they have only to find one single instance of drug abuse -- or of something that could qualify as "drug abuse" in the gullible minds of a drug-fearing audience. They can then wring the hearts of mainstream American parents by making a morality tale out of that abuse on "48 Hours," with facts and footage provided by the DEA ⁷. Of course, the DEA is "the mother of all self-interested parties" when it comes to the subject of drug prohibition, but then all's fair in love and war, and there is indeed a war underway: a war to determine what a freedom-loving world should look like given the fact that the world is full of psychoactive substances.

The conservatives say, "Let's pretend that the world is not like that and let's punish anyone who tries to remind us of that fact." The liberals say, "Let's help people to understand that they have no need of those psychoactive substances -- with a few trendy exceptions that have been grudgingly approved by our scientists." But I say with William James, "Let's see what psychoactive substances have to tell us about the nature of the mind, of human perception, and reality. Let's accept the psychoactive world as it is, without presuming it to be one big morality trap, and let's try to use its bounty as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity." It's a sign of the bamboozled times when I am one of but a handful of online pundits who are in favor of this third option. Even Harvard University, the alma mater of William James, has decided to pretend that psychoactive substances do not exist. This is made clear by the fact that their online biography of "the father of American psychology" does not even mention James' use of nitrous oxide, which, as James himself reported, changed his entire view of the nature of reality.

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. ⁸

William James -- The Varieties of Religious Experience

Notes for essay entitled Do I have to do everything?: Yes, Brian, you do!:

1: Substack. 2026. “Richard Henry Parrish II.” Substack.com. 2026. https://substack.com/@richardhenryparrish2. (up)
2: Partnership for a Death Free America DWP (up)
3: The Secret History of Coca Davis, Wade, Rolling Stone magazine, 2025 (up)
4: “Daily Aspirin Linked To More Than 3,000 Deaths Per Year, Scientists Warn.” 2017. HuffPost UK. June 14, 2017. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/daily-aspirin-causes-more-than-3000-deaths-per-year-scientists-warn_uk_593fb481e4b0b13f2c6daa10. (up)
5: 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)
6: In response to some pushback on my use of statistics here: Here's the full quotation to which I was referring:

"By 1890, however, with medical literature reporting more than 400 cases of acute toxicity brought on by the drug, cocaine had lost its luster."

My point in citing 178,000 and 3,000 was to question the idea that 400 cases in the medical literature constituted, as Wade implied, a good argument in favor of banning cocaine. He himself was using statistics a little cavalierly in his article since he did not explain why that small number constituted a problem. We have to make assumptions of our own to draw the conclusion that 400 constitutes a problem, the same kind of assumption that parents make about the drug if it causes a problem for just a few young people whom the parents know personally. For them, 1 or 2 cases constitutes a problem, i.e., a social menace.

I still find the statistics instructive, so I think I am missing something. I guess you're saying that 400 cases in the medical literature might suggest that there are many thousands of actual problems out there? But even then, we have to ask, how many depressed people were "out there"? It seems to me that nobody figured them into the equation. Also, I find that nobody has considered the medical industry's vested interest in pathologizing cocaine use. They do not seem to have created a statistic about how many people had been miraculously helped by cocaine. In fact, they had no access to that information because people only showed up at the doctor's office if they were having trouble with the drug. Given that backstory and the ongoing Drug War, the use of the 400 stat by Wade is political in nature. He considers it ample evidence because he knows his audience will have a natural bias against the drug anyway, having grown up in a world in which it was almost illegal to discuss the benefits of drugs like cocaine: at best, that was to give medical advice without a license, and at worst, that was to promote vice.

My real concern is that doctors never talk about the benefits of drug use -- so anything they say about the downsides, however true, are really political statements., they are an effort to promote one side of a story, a side which they have a financial interest in supporting. (up)
7: Jenkins, Philip. 1999. Synthetic Panics. NYU Press. (up)
8: “The Varieties of Religious Experience : William James : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2021. Internet Archive. 2021. https://archive.org/details/the-varieties-of-religious-experience_202109. (up)

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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.

We've got to take the fight TO the drug warriors by starting to hold them legally responsible for having spread "Big Lies" about "drugs." Anyone involved in producing the "brain frying" PSA of the 1980s should be put on trial for willfully spreading a toxic lie.

There are hundreds of things that we should outlaw before drugs (like horseback riding) if, as claimed, we are targeting dangerous activities. Besides, drugs are only dangerous BECAUSE of prohibition, which compromises product purity and refuses to teach safe use.

It's just plain totalitarian nonsense to outlaw mother nature and to outlaw moods and mental states thru drug law. These truths can't be said enough by us "little people" because the people in power are simply not saying them.

I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.

"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."

And we should not insist it's a problem if someone decides to use opium, for instance, daily. We certainly don't blame "patients" for using antidepressants daily. And getting off opium is easier than getting off many antidepressants -- see Julia Holland.

Folks like Sabet accuse folks like myself of ignoring the "facts." No, it is Sabet who is ignoring the facts -- facts about dangerous horses and free climbing. He's also ignoring all the downsides of prohibition, whose laws lead to the election of tyrants.

We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.

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

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Do I have to do everything?

Yes, Brian, you do!

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