Drug Re-Legalization is the best harm reduction strategy

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Drug Re-Legalization is the best harm reduction strategy

an open letter to the Drug Policy Alliance

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 12, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

October 07, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

A humorous cartoon juxtaposes a "Then and Now" comparison, showcasing two scenarios of societal warnings, one prehistoric and one contemporary, both humorously cautionary.

The best harm reduction strategy would be to re-legalize drugs like opium and cocaine. The reason no one agrees with this strategy is because they wrongly assume that potential drug abusers are the only stakeholders in such policies. The re-legalization of cocaine in particular would essentially end depression in America and free Americans from their abject and demoralizing reliance on the healthcare industry. In other words, the winners in such a policy would far outnumber the losers -- especially when we consider the reduction in the extreme violence that inevitably accompanies the prohibition of desired substances and the loss of liberties that inevitably accompanies the enforcement of such a ban. It is wrong in any case to deny good mental health to millions because of the actions of a minority whom we refuse to educate about drugs. Basically, the problem here is parents: they want easy answers (and excuses) when it comes to raising their kids -- and if that means throwing the depressed and anxious under the bus, that's fine with them.

The idea that cocaine could end depression in America is not the view of some wide-eyed fanatic. Sigmund Freud himself recognized that cocaine was a godsend for treating -- and ending -- depression ¹. It ended his own depression and empowered him to publish the prolific work for which he is known today. As Freud wrote:

"My impression has been that the use of cocaine ² over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine ³

He only gave up his promotion of cocaine when it became clear that the self-interested medical establishment was determined to judge the drug based solely on its worst possible use by a minority of obviously addiction-prone individuals.

Jeffrey Singer recently published a defense of drug re-legalization entitled "Your Body, Your Health Care." ⁴ ⁵ He makes some good points, such as:

"There are myriad press reports about people who died from Fentanyl overdoses when they purchased and consumed what they thought was cocaine or methamphetamine or a prescription pain pill." --Jeffrey A. Singer, Your Body, Your Health Care --p. 134 ⁶

"In many states, harm-reduction organizations-- or just compassionate individuals-- risk arrest for handing Fentanyl test strips to people they know who consume illicit drugs." --Jeffrey A. Singer, Your Body, Your Health Care --p. 121-122 ⁷

"[Harry Anslinger] claimed that 'marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others,' and that 'reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men.'" --Jeffrey A. Singer, Your Body, Your Health Care --p. 92 ⁸

Most importantly, Singer understands that drug re-legalization ⁹ IS harm reduction, as the following citation makes clear:

"Imagine how many people would have benefited during the past half-century had the government respected their autonomy and their right to self-medicate." --Jeffrey A. Singer, Your Body, Your Health Care --p. 97 ¹⁰

I do however politely disagree with Singer about his following claim, which, properly considered, seems to be at odds with his overall position on these issues:

"Much evidence confirms that long-term treatment with the opioid agonists methadone and buprenorphine is the most effective treatment for OUD." --Jeffrey A. Singer, Your Body, Your Health Care --p. 143 ¹¹

Surely, the best long-term treatment for Opioid Use Disorder is to normalize the peaceable smoking of opium at home -- not to promote the use of government-supplied drugs that render a human being impervious to the benefits of the poppy plant!

Author's Follow-up:

September 03, 2025

I do not mean to disparage harm reduction and the brave people who practice this good Samaritan behavior at the risk of being hassled and arrested by the police. (See Vancouver Police Seek to Eradicate Safe Use for more ¹².) This approach addresses a very real problem caused by drug prohibition: namely, the potentially uninformed use of potentially contaminated product. My point is merely that harm reduction is not enough. Unless we insist on the fact that drugs have benefits, then an exclusive focus on harm reduction tends to support the Drug Warrior's mythology that drug use is somehow nonsensical. In addition to practicing harm reduction, therefore, we need to unapologetically point out the ways that outlawed drugs can help the depressed. We have to normalize the practice of speaking honestly about substances like laughing gas , opium and coca: by pointing out the fact that all such drugs have obvious common-sense uses for the depressed, uses that are limited, indeed, only by our imaginations. We do not need to look at these drugs under a microscope to verify the obvious. The proof of efficacy is extant, as Benjamin Franklin knew, as Sigmund Freud knew, as the Peruvian Indians knew, etc. We should not let materialist scientist gaslight us about the existence of obvious drug benefits ¹³.

Consider the following reports of drug use provided in Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin ¹⁴, and then try to tell me that these drug experiences could not be useful for the depressed:

I experienced the desire to laugh hysterically at what I could only describe as the completely ridiculous state of the entire world.

I learned a great deal about myself and my inner workings.

I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing.

The feeling was one of great camaraderie, and it was very easy to talk to people.

These states of mind are not mere disreputable "highs." These are obvious drug benefits. Just ask the anxious worrywart! It is common sense that such experiences have the potential to motivate the depressed and to keep them from committing suicide. We have to acknowledge this fact. Only by so doing, can we hold the prohibitionist responsible for one of their biggest crimes: the fact that they have destroyed healthcare freedom in America and denied us godsends. This is, in fact, nothing less than a crime against humanity, to outlaw medicine with such glaringly obvious benefits ¹⁵.

I am focused here on the rights of the depressed. There are many other stakeholders when it comes to drug policy, of course. However, when we view drug prohibition through the eyes of a disempowered depressed individual, we see clearly how that hateful policy has outlawed our rights to healthcare and to healing itself. And why? Because America contemplates drug policy based on the following inhumane, anti-scientific and xenophobic algorithm: namely, that if a drug can be misused by a white American young person when used at one dose for one reason, then it must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason. And so we throw every other stakeholder under the bus -- the potential suicides, the religious seekers, the philosophers, the residents of inner-cities, etc. -- and we outlaw time-honored godsends in an attempt to save our own young people from the drugs about which we refuse "on principle" to educate them!

And so we impose a safety standard on drug use that we apply to no other activity on the planet: not to mountain climbing, not to Parkour, not to car driving, and certainly not to spirit drinking.

It is one big campaign to disempower Americans with respect to their healthcare. Only by insisting on the benefits of drug use can we make this clear to the prohibitionist opposition.

Surely, there are societal influences that effect drug use, some of which may result in misuse -- but we should not lose track of the fact that drug use often makes perfect psychological sense from the user's point of view, even if we cannot perform the mind-meld with a user that would be necessary for us to verify that fact to our own satisfaction as an outsider. Drug use is, in effect, a kind of self-medication ¹⁶ , a way to take care of one's own mental and emotional health. Such self-medication ¹⁷ has always been our birthright by dint of being a citizen of planet Earth -- until racist and xenophobic American politicians began demonizing medicine in an effort to disempower minorities.

The Essay Proper

If you want proof that Americans have been bamboozled on the topic of drugs, just look at the unnecessarily apologetic pushback of some of the enemies of the War on Drugs. Even most enemies of drug prohibition have been subconsciously bamboozled by certain aspects of the Drug War indoctrination that they have received since childhood, first and foremost by the conglomerate media's wholesale censorship of positive reports about drug use. Take the Drug Policy Alliance, for instance. They are obviously on the right side of the tracks on this overall issue. Unfortunately, they support their case by the constant discussion of harm reduction, as who should say: "Yes, drugs are indeed unnecessary and dangerous, as the prohibitionists maintain, but we must help people when they make unhealthy choices, not arrest them."

Author's follow-up for August 12, 2025

That is really just a "kinder, gentler" expression of the western world's materialist disdain for psychoactive medicine, what drug researcher Russell Newcombe described as the intoxiphobia of the west, which is the mindset that helped inspire the Drug War in the first place. To argue in this way is to argue "on the back foot." By so doing, we yield enormous ground to the Drug Warriors, who insist that all illicit drug use is pointless. The latter fearmongers have framed the whole discussion about drugs around the perceived downsides of use, and the DPA helps to legitimize this lopsided focus when they spend their time trying to answer each particular scruple that the Drug Warriors invoke along the way. As a boxing coach might point out, the Drug Warriors are luring us into "playing their own game."

We need to start talking about obvious drug benefits and not just potential downsides of use.

Take cocaine, for instance. This will come as a surprise to the mental healthcare industry (which, of course, has been a huge beneficiary of drug prohibition), but increased mental concentration can be a godsend in certain situations -- and not just for recreational purposes, either, but for obvious vocational ones as well. And yet even otherwise drug-sane authors like Charles Grob, Andrew Weil and Terence McKenna ¹⁸ have this idea that cocaine can only be used frivolously, for dubious recreational purposes. This is not a scientific view on their part, it is a mere prejudice -- a prejudice that is the result of a surprising lack of imagination when it comes to the great variety of reasons for which such substances can be employed in the real world.

Should we outlaw the ability to become Sherlock Holmes or to become Robin Williams? Should we outlaw the time-honored coca use of the Peruvian Indians? Should we outlaw the use of a drug that could keep the depressed mind off of the contemplation of suicide ¹⁹ and help it forego the brain-damaging expedient of shock therapy -- a treatment that the cocaine-scorning FDA actually advocates for the chronically depressed? These are not medical questions: they are deeply philosophical questions about what counts as "the good life," about how we balance and rank various eminently sensible desiderata. These are questions that medical science has no expertise whatsoever in answering!

This is the problem with advocating a health-based approach to drugs, at least insofar as such an approach implies the medicalization of drug use. Should I need a doctor's prescription to enjoy a sunset? No? Neither should I need a doctor's prescription to open my mind to seeing the world in new and improved ways, ways that will help me succeed in life by quieting the inner voices that might otherwise counsel despair. Of course, the medical doctor is going to insist that only he or she has the power to "really" treat my negative mindset -- but this is just metaphysical bluster based on wishful thinking and obvious financial motives.

In my unhappy 50-year relationship with psychiatry, I have never known anyone to accuse the field of cranking out self-actualization in real-time; indeed, the doctors themselves often make a point of telling us that the true benefits of analysis will take years if not decades to obtain -- which is hardly an inspiring answer for those whose default sober mindsets put them at risk of killing themselves right now, even as we speak. They need help now -- they need the real politik of drugs like cocaine, and/or laughing gas ²⁰ , and/or phenethylamines, and/or beta-carbolines, and/or huachuma cactus, and/or psilocybin mushrooms, and/or LSD, and/or Iboga, and/or opiates -- and not because these drugs necessarily show any benefits for fighting "depression" as the materialists have pretentiously reified and defined that "illness" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, but because such drug use can silence the inner voice that keeps that user from enjoying life and thriving in it according to his or her own definition of that term -- and these are benefits that will never show up under any microscope.

It is obvious that drugs like cocaine could help a subset of self-sabotaging neurotics to silence the nay-saying voice within and to thereby succeed in achieving their most heartfelt goals in life -- a result which in turn boosts confidence in a virtuous circle. But these kind of blatantly obvious psychological benefits are ignored by modern drug researchers. Why? Because psychology is behaviorism in the age of materialism ²¹ and so scientists look for the meaning of drug use under a microscope rather than opening their eyes to the complex and interconnected psychosocial world in which the drug user actually lives and operates.

Of course, the successfully indoctrinated American will fret about the cocaine user's potential addiction or dependence -- and this in a world wherein 1 in 4 American women are considered to be "good patients" for taking one or more Big Pharma drugs every day of their life! Yet, let's use our common sense for a moment, that is, the psychological common sense that behaviorists ignore today "on principle." For if the cocaine user's self-image is improved by a drug-aided experience of success, this can inspire further self-improvement down the line, even when it comes to their future drug choices, at least in a world in which drugs were legal and we could use alternatives to the substances that we might eventually come to consider to be personally problematic. Even if cocaine were to cause dependence in a given case, it does not follow that the drug use is unhealthy. The real question is: are the drug-aided results for a particular person better than the self-destructive status quo generated by their masochistic SOBER mindset?

This is a question that can only be answered by the drug user -- and this is the reason why drug prohibition was such tyrannous folly in the first place. When the DPA talks about a concern for health, they seem to be talking about the materialist medical establishment's view of our health as drug users, not our health as we ourselves conceive it as drug users, a health which depends on a wide range of contextual factors, including our goals in life, our biochemistry, our genetics, our psychosocial history, etc., facts about which the materialist doctor is necessarily ignorant. Indeed, even if the materialists were demigods and somehow knew all these factors, they still would not know how such an incredibly diverse array of inputs came together and influenced each other in such a way as to produce an individuals outlook on life. In fact, if there is such a thing as free will in this life, then even God him or herself cannot perform such advanced moral calculus, even in theory.

This focus on "health" and "harm reduction" is no doubt popular with the healthcare lobby, which has profited enormously from our attempts to medicalize the problems caused by drug prohibition. But the whole problem with drug prohibition is that it places government in charge of the health of the individual in the first place. As GK Chesterton wrote:

"It is said that the Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things. And there is no escape for the hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all. If he is to control the health of the community, he must necessarily control all the habits of all the citizens."²²

The DPA should finally draw the conclusion that so clearly follows from their own data: namely, that the best harm reduction strategy of all would be to re-legalize drugs. Only then would we put an end to the destruction of American cities, to the erosion of American freedoms, to the destruction of the rule of law in Latin America. Only then would we educate people based on the wise use of actual safe drug users, which, as Carl Hart reports ²³, are the majority of drug users, notwithstanding the fact that the government spends tens of billions of dollars a year in a ruthless effort to make drug use as dangerous as possible: by refusing to teach safe use, refusing to regulate product as to quality and quantity, and refusing to offer alternatives. If opium smoking was re-legalized, then determined opium users would have alternatives to the use of far more addictive substances which became popular precisely because of the outlawing of opium itself.

I write this today after having thoroughly read the DPA fact sheets on a variety of substances, including Cocaine ²⁴, Fentanyl ²⁵ ²⁶, heroin ²⁷ ²⁸, LSD ²⁹, MDMA ³⁰, Methamphetamine ³¹, and Psilocybin ³². I decided to speak up after noticing that none of those fact sheets discussed drug-use benefits, only the downsides of use over which the Drug Warrior loves to obsess.

Take the fact sheet on MDMA use, for instance. That drug has enormous benefits -- ones that are apparently just too large for westerners to see. The use of Ecstasy in 1990s Britain resulted in UNPRECEDENTED peace, love and understanding at concert venues across the country. It really says something about America's lousy social priorities when such enormous benefits are invisible to even the best of us -- and this in a world in which we are a living under a nuclear sword of Damocles thanks to the penchant of Homo sapiens to hate each other without reason.

Spoiler alert:

The Brits followed the American lead and cracked down on ecstasy use, and what was the result? The dance floors erupted into such liquor-fueled violence that concert organizers had to hire special forces troops to keep the peace ³³! Special forces! The pathology here is not to be found in the mindset of the drug users but rather in the mindset of the prohibitionists. It is no coincidence that the drug-fueled Summers of Love on both sides of the Atlantic were never valued by the mainstream for their most obvious benefit of all: the fact that they brought people of all backgrounds together in an atmosphere of peace, love and understanding. But this is no surprise, given that Drug Warriors are happy for their government to use drugs as weapons of war -- but are only offended when such drugs might be used to challenge the monopoly of alcohol in prohibitionist America... alcohol: a drug that is responsible for 178,000 deaths a year in America alone ³⁴.

Author's Follow-up:

August 12, 2025

In reading the DPA's data sheets on drugs ³⁵, I keep running up against the following boiler plate declamation:

"Ensuring people have access to housing, community, mental health services, and jobs can help address why people are using."³⁶

"Why people are using?"

This phraseology seems to suggest that drug use is a bit of a poser, a bit of a mystery, as far as the DPA is concerned. "Why on earth would anyone use DRUGS?" the organization's editors seem to be asking here. "Surely, the sober mindset gives everybody the state of mind that they need to thrive in the world. There must be something odd going on in these lives that is causing people to 'turn to drugs,' something that has rendered the user unable to think clearly." And yet this implicit drug-scorning conclusion is completely unjustified! There is nothing odd at all about people choosing "to use," as the DPA editors somewhat pejoratively refer to the practice of benefiting from the substances of which racist politicians disapprove. As for the sober mindset, sobriety has never been a benefit in and of itself. Many of our worst mass murderers could have passed a drug test with flying colors. Sobriety actively counsels despair in the case of many a suicide.

If only some of our mass murderers HAD used drugs -- especially the many empathogenic drugs which help people actually care about their fellow human beings! Maybe then these hotheads would not have shot up the local grade school!

To repeat: There is nothing odd at all -- let alone pathological -- about using so-called drugs. (Is it odd for a human being to "throw back a cold one" after a busy day at work? Is it odd for them to have a morning cup of coffee -- or to "take their meds" every single morning, like the 1 in 4 American women who are dependent on Big Pharma ³⁷ ³⁸ drugs for life?³⁹)

It is, in fact, common sense that people would wish to be all that they can be in life, with the help of any tools that are ready to hand, be they drugs, or automobiles, or a simple step ladder. It would be strange indeed -- and even pathological -- if people in a supposedly free and secular country were NOT trying to use the drugs with which they are surrounded for the purposes of improving their mind and mood -- just as we would wonder at people who refused on principle to improve their physical health with drugs. Indeed, the very fact that we make a big distinction between the treatment of mental versus so-called physical conditions betrays our ongoing inability to transcend the Cartesian dualism that has so bamboozled the west and on which so many of our anti-indigenous notions today are predicated, including our ongoing western disdain for the plant medicines of Central and South America.
Historic cartoon featuring Conquistadors landing in the New World and being greeted by peaceful natives. The herald dries: 'Presenting your new Drug Czar, Francisco Pizarro!'

Historic cartoon featuring Conquistadors landing in the New World and being greeted by peaceful natives. The herald dries: 'Presenting your new Drug Czar, Francisco Pizarro!'

That disdain has survived intact now for almost 500 consecutive years, ever since the Spaniards under Francisco Pizarro slaughtered thousands of Incan natives in 1532 in response to Emperor Atahualpa's failure to "embrace" the Christian Bible, in both the physical and ideological sense of that verb ⁴⁰.

For a background on the Cartesian dualism mentioned above, I recommend that the reader consult "The Concept of Nature" by Alfred North Whitehead,⁴¹" or at least the first few chapters of that somewhat terse tome, in which the basic concepts are intelligible to any reasonably educated reader with an open mind. My point here, however, is simply to remind the reader of the following inconvenient truth: namely, that there is no philosophical reason why we should scorn drug use for the purpose of achieving psychological goals while yet praising drug use for achieving "strictly physical" outcomes. Our overall health as a human being is created by the balance of a wide variety of interacting psychological and physical factors and no one factor -- no, not even drug use -- can be considered wrong in and of itself. The proof (of health or the lack thereof) is in the holistic pudding -- in how the individual in question actually lives his or her life. And yet the phraseology noted above suggests that the DPA believes that drug use is necessarily pathological in and of itself. The DPA editors differ from the Drug Warrior, then, only in that they want to "help" the drug users, not punish them. To their credit, the DPA makes it clear, however, that they want to help only those who believe they actually NEED help with drugs. This refreshing humility on their part places them one important step ahead of the many cavalier drug-reform advocates who want to remove drug users from jail only to force them to visit therapists instead. And why? Because such reformers actually believe that it is pathological merely to wish to use the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions!

Author's Follow-up:

October 09, 2025

Opiate Use Disorder is actually Prohibition Disorder Syndrome. The answer to the problem is to normalize the peaceable smoking of opium ⁴² at home as an alternative to drinking alcohol.

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Clearly a millennia's worth of positive use of coca by the Peruvian Indians means nothing to the FDA. Proof must show up under a microscope.

When it comes to "drugs," the government plays Polonius to our Ophelia: OPHELIA: I do not know, my lord, what I should think. POLONIUS: Marry, I'll teach you; think yourself a baby!

No wonder conservatives are terrified of drugs. It is not safety that worries them, else they would demand education. They are terrified of new ways of seeing life. The outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of whole mindsets. It is a meta injustice.

"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.

Mad in America publishes stories of folks who are disillusioned with antidepressants, but they won't publish mine, because I find mushrooms useful. They only want stories about cold turkey and jogging, or nutrition, or meditation.

Our tolerance for freedom wanes in proportion as we consider "drugs" to be demonic. This is the dark side behind the new ostensibly comic genre about Cocaine Bears and such. It shows that Americans are superstitious about drugs in a way that Neanderthals would have understood.

Most people think that drugs like cocaine, MDMA, LSD and amphetamines can only be used recreationally. WRONG ! This represents a very naive understanding of human psychology. We deny common sense in order to cater to the drug war orthodoxy that "drugs have no benefits."

Let's arrest drug warriors, confiscate their houses, and deny them jobs in America -- until such time as they renounce their belief in the demonstrably ruinous policy of substance prohibition.

The drug war controls the very way that we are allowed to see the world. The Drug War is thus a meta-injustice, not just a handful of bad legal statutes.

Politicians protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment and encourage drug testing to ensure that drug war heretics starve.

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Drug Re-Legalization is the best harm reduction strategy

an open letter to the Drug Policy Alliance

Author's Follow-up:

October 07, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

September 03, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

August 12, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

October 09, 2025

Ten Tweets

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

Diary of a Drug Fiend