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Does this sound like someone you know?

Is someone you love bamboozled by America's insane drug policies?

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 6, 2026



Does this sound like someone you know?

She organizes her day around pill time and is constantly dealing with prescription refills and doctor appointments. She talks about her meds constantly and how they are being tweaked. This is her small talk, as other people talk about the weather. She never refers to her pills as drugs, but only as meds. She mentions the many downsides of her "meds" frequently -- the weight gain, the high blood pressure, the headaches, you name it -- and yet she never blames those "meds" for these conditions -- instead, she will tell you that she simply has not yet found the right "med" or combination of "meds" that was meant for HER, but that she is sure to eventually do so (don't ask her when) with the help of her psychiatrist.

I ask you, reader: could anyone BE more bamboozled?

She is living in a real-life version of the Stepford Wives, where drug prohibition has given Big Pharma carte blanche to control her very mood -- using a drug that she can never quit -- except perhaps in order to switch to a similar dependence-causing med from the same companies that made her dependent in the first place.

Just imagine if coca and opium produced the kind of outcome that we consider to be a success in the psychiatric field. Drug warriors would pillory them to the ends of the earth. And yet for drugs like coca and opium, drug dependence is but a mere bug, a statistically rare phenomenon, while for Big Pharma "meds," drug dependence is an actual feature: the drugs are MEANT to cause dependence, they are meant to be used for a lifetime. And what do doctors say when one complains about this dependence and the impossibility of getting off their meds? They merely tell us that we should not have tried to get off them in the first place, that good patients don't do that, that good patients just shut up and "take their meds."

Jesus wept! Could the self-interested hypocrisy be any clearer or any more monstrous!

Imagine if we said the same thing about opiate use or cocaine use, as in: "Of COURSE you feel bad: you stopped taking your heroin" or "You stopped taking your cocaine!"

Chances are that the "she" you are thinking of also smokes cigarettes and is constantly interrupting road trips with a desperate need to pull off the road and light up. And this in a country where we insist that westerners foisted opium off on the Chinese, causing mass addiction.

WRONG.

The Chinese had smoked opium for hundreds of years. The only addictions that westerners passed on to the Chinese and the world in general were cigarette addiction and alcoholism -- a responsibility for which we Americans never take responsibility but instead change the subject by vilifying 19th-century British merchants based on the wholesale lies of self-interested missionaries.



Author's Follow-up:

February 07, 2026

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up





Judge's gavel beneath text reading 'I object!'Answer to some probable objections:

My point is not to villainize the sale of alcohol and tobacco -- but rather to villainize the drug attitudes and laws that make alcohol and tobacco the only game in town when it comes to psychoactive drugs. In an educated world in which all drugs were re-legalized and had been thoroughly studied for their psychologically obvious effects and contraindications, there need be no widespread use of substances that produce undesired outcomes. In such a world, getting off unwanted substances would be far easier for obvious psychological reasons, especially with the help of what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, actual drug users who know the effects of a wide variety of drugs first-hand and can advise as to usage protocols that would be conducive to various desired emotional, mental and even psycho-spiritual outcomes.

Of course, this will sound like nonsense to the vast majority of indoctrinated Americans who know nothing of the powers and potentials of the outlawed medicines that they have been taught to hate since childhood in their misnamed "drug education" classes, especially since they have been gaslighted by scientists into believing that drugs that merely work do not "really" work -- and that drug efficacy must be determined under a microscope. That is the kind of mindset that makes seemingly smart scientists doubt whether even laughing gas itself could help the depressed -- as if the depressed were an alien species from Planet Mars and so not amenable to common-sense motivations.

Nor am I suggesting that we further ostracize smokers -- whom we have already been taught to treat like pariah. Our goal should not be simply to stop them from smoking -- but rather to give them ALTERNATIVES to smoking. The comparison of cigarette smoking with opium smoking is particularly illuminating here. We have been taught that the Chinese were enslaved by the nightly smoking of opium, but by such logic, millions of Americans are also enslaved by the nightly drinking of alcohol. No, the real enslavement in America is to nicotine. I just went on a road trip yesterday with a cousin who had us stop at least every two hours for a cigarette break. Nightly opium smokers do not need to stop for regular "fixes" like that. And yet we have no more call to outlaw nicotine than any other drug. It has its uses at some dose for some people in some instances, as for instance its use among the shamanic tribes to obtain spiritual states. Our goal rather should be to end UNWANTED use of nicotine, and we should do that, not by eroding time-honored liberties but rather by expanding drug choice.

It is a matter of psychological common sense that drugs could help us fight drugs. Who knows? It may even be possible to get off of Venlafaxine (a Big Pharma antidepressant with a 95% recidivism rate 1 for long-term users) with the help of other drugs that would obviate the psychological downsides of withdrawal associated with that so-called "med."

This, of course, is why the so-called fight against addiction in America is so ineffective, because it begins by ignoring psychological common sense. If American scientists were consistent, they would tell us that coffee does not "really" motivate us and that we should replace it with Big Pharma meds that work "scientifically," that is to say by using chemical pathways that can be identified and named.

In some ways, indeed, the Drug War is all about causing Americans to ignore common sense when it comes to drugs. It is one big attempt to stand in front of the vast array of psychoactive drugs and shout to the world on megaphones provided by Big Money: "Nothing to see here!!!"









Notes for essay entitled Does this sound like someone you know?: Is someone you love bamboozled by America's insane drug policies?:

1: I have been unable to confirm this stat. But the WHO notes clinical recidivism rates for depression ranging from 50% to 85%. Do we count that as a recidivism rate of Effexor? Not when Biopharma is paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget, as reported by John LaMattina in the Sep 22, 2022 edition of Forbes magazine. (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




I personally hate beets and I could make a health argument against their legality. Beets can kill for those allergic to them. Sure, it's a rare condition, but since when has that stopped a prohibitionist from screaming bloody murder?

It's no wonder that folks blame drugs. Carl Hart is the first American scientist to openly say in a published book that even the so-called "hard" drugs can be used wisely. That's info that the drug warriors have always tried to keep from us.

No wonder the "Justice" Department relies on plea deals; otherwise juries could use nullification to free those charged with mere drug possession.

Prohibitionists will me that we're all children when it comes to drugs, and can never -- but never -- use them wisely. That's like saying that we could never ride horses wisely. Or mountain climb. Or skateboard.

Laughing gas inspired the philosophy of William James. Outlawing N20 is outlawing academic freedom. Laughing gas should be available for the suicidal. Drug prohibition is not a victimless crime.

Assisted suicide cannot be discussed meaningfully without discussing the drug prohibition that renders it necessary in the first place.

Psychiatrists prescribe drugs that muck about with a patient's biochemical baseline, making them chemically dependent and turning them into patients for life.

Addiction was not a big thing until the drug war. It's now the boogie-man with which drug warriors scare us into giving up our freedoms. But getting obsessed on one single drug is natural in the age of choice-limiting prohibition.

Jim Hogshire described sleep cures that make physical withdrawal from opium close to pain-free. As for "psychological addiction," there are hundreds of elating drugs that could be used to keep the ex-user's mind from morbidly focusing on a drug whose use has become problematic for them.

As great as it is, "Synthetic Panics" by Philip Jenkins was only tolerated by academia because it did not mention drugs in the title and it contains no explicit opinions about drugs. As a result, many drug law reformers still don't know the book exists.


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






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

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