Drug Warriors are the Problem, not Drug Dealers

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Drug Warriors are the Problem, not Drug Dealers

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 15, 2025

I have always tried not to impose my minority views on others when it comes to the Drug War and substance prohibition and to express my concerns instead in the form of impersonal online essays. My hope is that these essays may one day find an audience that will understand them and perhaps even profit from them. I am increasingly unsure, however, whether this reticence on my part represents cowardice or tact, especially since America's drug policy outlaws all sorts of psychoactive drugs which, alone or in combination, could prevent suicide, fight Alzheimer's, help autistic children, prevent school shootings, and fight weight gain. When such subjects come up in friendly discussion, I generally decide to hold my tongue. I do not want to rock the boat and create hard feelings. In any case, the law is the law, no matter how unjust it may be, and so my insights on such topics may not suggest any immediate applications for law-abiding citizens, but it does seem to me that someone should be recognizing the 6,000-pound gorilla in the room called "drug prohibition" rather than pretending that drug law places no limits on our choices in life. After all, the racist Drug War will never end if we never hold it responsible for the evils that it causes by outlawing godsend medicine.

Two cavemen in cave. Caveman on right, holding burning stick toward second caveman on left. Caveman on left says: 'Fire bad. Fire kill.' — Saying things like 'Fentanyl kills' is philosophically equivalent to saying 'Fire bad'. Both statements would have us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them wisely for the benefit of human beings.

Of course, the DEA will join with materialists in telling us that most psychoactive medicines have no positive uses whatsoever, but such conclusions can only be based on the western materialist prejudice that drug efficacy has to be established by looking under a microscope rather than by paying attention to how human beings actually think and feel in the world. This behaviorist approach to mind and mood medicine represents a kind of pharmacological colonialism. Moreover it leads to absurd results, like the inability of modern doctors in the FDA to "sign off" on the use of laughing gas for the severely depressed - laughing gas ! -- while, at the same time, this same FDA actually promotes the use of brain-damaging shock therapy! They promote it! As Whitehead says, we should discard a philosophy that leads to absurd results, and these results are absurd in the extreme: Drug War ideology leads us to a world in which we actually prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use! That is Christian Science on steroids. (Surely, even opiate use is better than suicide or brain damage. A co-founder of Johns Hopkins used morphine every day of his vocational life -- which is just one of the many inconvenient truths that today's conglomerate media will never apprise us of, let alone remind us about. The fact that morphine in particular has positive uses is clear from the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, especially his "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,¹" in which morphine use gave the protagonist an almost surreal appreciation of the ornate intricacies of Mother Nature's bounty.) By the way, the FDA also signs off on Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself ² ³. Clearly, the government's problem is not with drugs per se, but with substances that inspire and elate - like the Soma ⁴ of Vedic scripture that inspired the creation of the Hindu religion.

GLENN CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR

The idea that it is acceptable to demonize, or even kill, drug dealers is based on a wide variety of false beliefs that have been instilled in Americans since childhood. If we gain vindictive pleasure from such killing, it is only because Drug Warriors have taught us to blame "the other" for our problems and never government policy. Indeed, I consider that to be an overriding motive of many Drug Warriors: to turn us against each other and so create a world in which their beloved guns are relevant. I think in this connection of the housewife played by Glenn Close in the movie "Four Good Days.⁵" She looks across the suburban streets and sees a young drug dealer and mutters, "He should be shot!", just before rushing indoors to the fridge and taking a big gulp of wine. Where is her Christian belief in the power of redemption? Where is her belief in the power of people to change over the course of a long lifetime? Only in a Drug War would we dare to make such snap judgements about poor minority teenagers who have a whole life of potential moral improvement ahead of them and who we ourselves have enticed to deal in drugs with the lure of enormous profits thanks to our unprecedented outlawing of psychoactive medicines, many of which grow at our very feet.

CRACKING DOWN ON DRUG WARRIORS

Forgive the digression, but I feel compelled to pose the following question here:

QUESTION: What would happen if we treated alcohol with the same disdain that we reserve for opiates and cocaine ? In other words, what would happen if we treated alcohol as the number-one killer drug in America, which, of course, it actually is?

ANSWER: 1) We would remove people from the workforce were they found to have the slightest trace of alcohol in their digestive systems. 2) We would confiscate their houses if we discovered so much as one beer can on their property. 3) We would produce endless commercials and billboards designed to teach the public that "safe drinking" is impossible, that it is, in fact, a contradiction in terms. How would we do this? By always pointing to liquor-fueled car accidents and alcoholics. 4) The media would NEVER publish any movie or story that showed safe alcohol use - for that would be seen as "promoting drinking."

Such prohibition would have at least one upside, however: it would give white racist Drug Warriors a taste of their own medicine.

To say that we do not do this today is an understatement: we rather actively glorify drinking in prime-time television commercials ⁶ for Jim Beam targeted at... you guessed it... YOUNG PEOPLE ⁷ ⁸!

Apparently drugs are only evil when they are not enjoyed by racist white politicians.

THE DISAPPEARING BAD GUY TRICK

^1576^And there are plenty of other hate-mongering drug-war movies where that came from (or rather "where that oozed from"). In "Running with the Devil,⁹" the cigarette-smoking DEA agent hoists a "drug suspect" by a meat hook in his Speedo's and shoots another suspect at point-blank range, all in order to suppress the use of a plant that was considered sacred by the Inca. In "The Crisis," the DEA agents plant evidence to disguise the fact that a citizen killed an unarmed dealer who dealt in a substance that, truth be known, can and has been used safely and for beneficial reasons. In the movie "The Runner,¹⁰" a white detective refers to an amiable Black teenage drug dealer as a "waste of space." Spoiler alert: The teenager is later killed by a massively irresponsible SWAT raid on a high-school dance - for which the detective in question gets an award!!! An award!!! More recently, the movie "Smile 2" began with the vigilante killing of a drug dealer whose crew had been inadvertently responsible for the death of an innocent bystander in a drive-by shooting. These plot twists are like magic tricks designed to distract our gaze from the real culprit of the story: the racist politicians who enacted the drug laws that were designed to create such a gun-ruled dystopia in the first place, laws that would predictably do just that, given what we had learned - or at least what we should have learned - from the violence-spawning disaster called liquor prohibition. Such hate-filled agitprop is everyday fare in modern media, yet very few Americans seem to realize the extent to which they are thereby being indoctrinated in the drug-hating ideology of the Drug War, or indeed that they are being indoctrinated at all. And yet, to paraphrase William Shirer in his book about Nazi Germany:

"No one who has not lived for years in a drug-war society can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda.¹¹"

RICHARD NIXON THE SCREENWRITER

^1427^Richard Nixon did not simply outlaw a wide variety of naturally occurring medicine, he worked with Hollywood ¹² to craft drug-hating and drug-blaming messages for TV shows ¹³ like "Hawaii Five-O" and "Room 222." The Bush and Clinton administrations did the same thing. Meanwhile, the media censored all reports of people using drugs safely and for beneficial reasons. Can someone use cocaine ¹⁴ ¹⁵ occasionally to write good term papers? You will never be allowed to know about it if they do. Can someone have their fizzling religious faith reignited by the monthly smoking of opium ? You will never be allowed to know about it if they do. The goal of this censorship is to make the term "safe use" seem like an oxymoron to Americans. Above all, Americans must never know that the Hindu religion owes its very existence to the effects of a drug that inspired and elated. We must rather be taught to hate drugs in general and to hold them responsible for all the evils of the world (rather than demanding societal changes that might take a small investment in education from skinflint billionaires - skinflints who yet will spend lavishly on prisons, police forces and the military).

MAD MAXIMS

And so America lives by the following racist and xenophobic maxim:

if a drug can cause problems for white American young people when used at one dose in one place for one reason, then that drug must not be used at any dose by anybody in anyplace for any reason.

It is impossible to imagine a more inhumane, selfish and antiscientific drug policy. If it saves white lives, it only does so by outsourcing prohibition-related deaths to minorities and foreigners, to say nothing of the kids in hospice in India who go without drugs like morphine because of the stigma that racist Americans have purposefully attached to such drugs. Moreover, even those white lives that we "save" by such prohibition are now less worth living thanks to the loss of democratic freedoms that was required to make drug prohibition "stick" in the States, like the effective annulment of the 4th amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the newly minted right of our government to confiscate entire estates after finding a mere trace of a proscribed substance on the property, no matter where that "trace" may have come from.

The fallacy of this fear-inspired prohibition mindset is clear, however. To see this, we simply need to ask ourselves what kinds of protest billboards we would see if we thought of horses or cars in the same way as we now think of drugs: that is, if we thought of them as being hopelessly dangerous and irredeemably evil. In such a case, our roadways would be surrounded by billboards reading

"Just one horse took my child!"

or...

"Just one car stole my loved ones!"

And yet we say "Fentanyl kills"?

FENTANYL KILLS, ALCOHOL MASSACRES

Surely, if Fentanyl kills, then alcohol massacres, taking 178,000 lives a year in America alone according to the CDC.

The fact is that Fentanyl does not kill, however; it is bad drug policy that kills, bad drug policy and a lack of truthful and impartial education about drugs. Indeed, the very statement "Fentanyl kills!" is just like the prehistoric statement "Fire bad!": both statements are idiotic and for the exact same reason. They both betray a superstitious way of looking at the world, one in which inanimate substances are considered to be all powerful and to call all the shots, while the otherwise storied creativity of the human mind is thought to be eternally unable to imagine a way to use such things wisely and for the benefit of humankind. (Police officers have claimed to be poisoned by merely being in the same room with Fentanyl , so thoroughly have they been taught to fear rather than to understand drugs. Thus the Drug War has created a whole new kind of hypochondriac, one whose imagined maladies are inspired by their own false ideas about the supposedly all-powerful nature of the bugaboos that we call "drugs." Such irrational fears have even inspired a new subgenre of monster movies about drug-stoked animals: movies ¹⁶ like "Cocaine Bear" and "Crack Coon," whose inane plots only seem plausible to a pharmacologically infantilized public ¹⁷.)

CUSTOM-MADE BAD GUYS

If drug dealers are bad guys, they are custom-made bad guys, created out of whole cloth by substance prohibition. Liquor prohibition created the Mafia as we know it today. It created Al Capone. There was no machine-gun-fire in American streets until liquor prohibition. There were no drive-by shootings in city streets. This was evident to everyone with eyes. And yet, in the irony of all ironies, Americans gave liquor special Constitutional protection while giving the prohibitionists the mother of all consolation prizes: the power to outlaw all the less dangerous psychoactive alternatives to alcohol. This wholesale outlawing of desired substances predictably incentivized drug dealing by the poor and uneducated who suddenly saw the chance to make phenomenal profits: we thereby incentivized drug dealing by minorities. Nancy Reagan was partially right, however. If drug use is really wrong, then users are as morally wrong as the drug dealers, perhaps even more so, since they create the demand without which the drug dealers could not operate. It is therefore racist and anti-poor to wish that drug dealers were dead while yet insisting that their white clients should be helped and pitied -- nay, that we should even seek violent redress on their behalf - not to be exacted from the Drug Warriors who created the violence in the first place, but rather from the minority pawns who were purposefully incentivized to do the actual drug dealing, and that with racist malice aforethought! Nancy Reagan's error was to think, even for a moment, that government ever had the right to outlaw substances whose use has inspired entire religions and which vastly expand how and how much we can think and feel in life. As GK Chesterton points out in his attacks on liquor prohibition, that was the ultimate usurpation of human agency itself and no one has a moral duty to obey such proscriptions. In fact, I would argue that we have a duty to ourselves to ignore such laws to the extent that this is possible for us, those laws that so vastly limit our right to use holistic and indigenous cures to take care of our psychological, physical and spiritual health.

I hold these truths to be self-evident, that I have a right to Mother Nature's bounty and that the government cannot decide for me how (and how much) I am able to think and feel in this life, and that the government has no right to outlaw the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions, the effects of which even William James himself told us that we must study to learn more about Reality writ large. The government usurpation of such rights is particularly outrageous in a world like ours wherein drug prohibition gave Big Pharma a monopoly on mood medicine and so created the biggest (but most invisible) pharmacological dystopia of all time: the fact that 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma pills for life. Somehow it is evil for young people to use any "drug" daily but it is their medical duty to take a Big Pharma "med" every day of their life. (This is an example of the Drug War Apartheid of which Julian Buchanan writes, the use of this purely political distinction between "drugs" and "meds.") This is just a case of the government deciding how and how much you should be allowed to think and feel in life. It is an outlook that has turned the Big Pharma ¹⁸ ¹⁹ client into a ward of the healthcare state, a result which many of us consider to be the ultimate form of disempowerment. Say what we will about drug dealers, at least they do not pry into your personal life every three months to make sure you are eligible to continue taking overpriced and undereffective pills.

JEFFERSON LITE

^1577^By the way, I began the previous paragraph with Jeffersonian language on purpose, to remind the reader of the 1987 raid on Monticello ²⁰ in which the Reagan DEA confiscated the founding father's poppy plants in violation of everything that he stood for politically speaking. The Jefferson Foundation, which facilitated the raid, has refused ever since to tell its high-paying visitors about that outrage whereby they dishonored their benefactor and turned the estate into the home of "Jefferson Lite," the new "improved" Thomas Jefferson made acceptable to the Christian Science mindset of Drug War America. But then almost every American author and scientist does the same thing: they pretend that the Drug War does not exist and so has no effect on our daily lives. And so they implicitly promote the great twofold lie of the Drug War: 1) that drug use has no upsides, and 2) that prohibition has no downsides. Both claims are demonstrably false. Their frightened silence on the subject of drugs disproves the second claim, since the Drug War clearly has the downside of censoring free speech ²¹. The claim that drug use has no upsides is refuted by anecdote, history, and psychological common sense. Indeed, its falsity is clear in light of one inconvenient truth alone: the fact that the Hindu religion was inspired by the use of a drug that inspired and elated.

Before we hate drug dealers for selling a drug like heroin ²², we should first learn some of the many censored facts about such drugs. The party line of the Drug Warrior, of course, is that heroin is evil incarnate, but this is nonsense. Heroin can actually be used safely, even by the heroin-dependent; moreover it can actually be used without creating addiction, despite the efforts of drug-war censorship to convince us otherwise. As Michael Pollan pointed out in "How to Change Your Mind," the majority of Vietnam veterans who used heroin overseas did not return as heroin addicts, despite their regular use of the drug during combat operations - a totally understandable use, by the way: to make the hell of war bearable. As Andrew Weil pointed out in "From Chocolate to morphine ²³ ," opiate cravings are less severe than are cravings for nicotine. As Carl Hart pointed out in "Drug Use for Grown-Ups," Fentanyl itself can be used wisely. Fentanyl ²⁴ !

PROHIBITION KILLS ²⁵

Moreover, young people were not dying on the streets when opiates were legal: it took prohibition to accomplish that. How? By essentially outlawing education about drug use and refusing to regulate product as to quantity and quality. Perhaps the most suppressed truth of all is that certain antidepressants ²⁶ (like Effexor ²⁷ ) are actually HARDER to kick than heroin. Meanwhile, the drug overdoses that have been killing young people in Oregon are not the result of opiates being dangerous; they are the result of enforced ignorance combined with our failure to regulate product as to quality and quantity. Surely, a drug policy that relies on public ignorance and unregulated product is dead wrong: it is a formula for disaster. Yet despite all the roadblocks to safe use that the prohibitionist creates for drug users (including the outlawing of a theoretically endless list of inherently non-addictive drugs that inspire and elate - see the book "Pihkal" by chemist Alexander Shulgin), most people still manage to use outlawed drugs safely (see Carl Hart's book above). But even if this were not the case, it would be absurd to outlaw a drug in advance of finding good uses for it - at some dose, for some reason, in some circumstance. We can only fairly judge drugs in context, not in the abstract. Even deadly cyanide and Botox have beneficial uses in healthcare. We outlaw human progress itself when we let politicians decide "yea" or "nay" about drugs in advance of our actually studying them in search of beneficial uses.

Meanwhile, Drug Warriors do not want to end addiction. Addiction is their "golden goose." They want to use the fear of addiction to scare Americans into thinking that they will always be children with respect to psychoactive drugs. They want to scare us into giving up democratic freedoms. They want to scare us into hating our neighbor. Addiction is the "boogieman" that they use to scare us into protecting ourselves with unprecedented drug laws that throw all responsible drug users - actual or potential - under the bus. The depressed patient who sits at home contemplating suicide ²⁸ is never a stakeholder in their white-centric evaluation of drugs nor are those who seek to use drugs wisely for personal improvement or to garner religious insights. But then if politicians really considered addiction to be the ne plus ultra of evil, then they would be putting their money where their hyperbolic mouths are and calling for a Manhattan Project to overcome addiction, something that they would never think of doing. Of course, the irony is that such a anti-addiction project is ONLY NECESSARY because of prohibition itself. Addiction and unwanted dependency would not be a "thing" for most people were we all free to use any and all drugs and were taught how to do so wisely based on the many real-life examples of safe use that we have been shielded from even hearing about for our entire brainwashed lives. In such a world, dependency would occur for the most part only when people consciously chose dependency - as do one in four American women right now with their use of antidepressants. And even dependency could be easily overcome with the use of drugs to fight drugs, something that materialist Drug Warriors cannot even imagine given their western behaviorist prejudices against holistic healing.

NO MORE "MENTAL PATIENTS"

What is recidivism after all but the result of a few hours of a seemingly unconquerable urge to gain relief, a few hours of torment that could be easily survived with the use of OTHER drugs that inspire and elate and thus take one's mind off the downsides of withdrawal? My previous backsliding on Effexor withdrawal would have been EASILY prevented had I been able to use laughing gas ²⁹ on an as-needed basis... EASILY... this despite the fact Effexor use is harder to kick than heroin for long-term users (see Julie Holland's interview in "Psychedelic Medicine" by Richard Louis Miller). This is all just psychological common sense, the idea that feeling good actually helps, even though materialists will refuse to agree with me until they can look under a microscope and somehow prove such supposedly "unscientific" claims in a quantifiable manner. But Drug Warriors do not want to solve drug problems, in any case: they want to inspire us to hate each other and to give the government a reason to invade Latin American countries at will. Indeed, the DEA's job is to make sure that there is always a drug problem. They have billions of dollars in funding riding on that status quo. See "Synthetic Panics" by Philip Jenkins for more on the DEA's fearmongering M.O. for staying eternally relevant. This is a tragedy since we could spend a fraction of their budget to make drug use as safe as possible and in a way consistent with democratic freedoms, were we to employ what I call "pharmacologically savvy empaths" for that purpose rather than materialist doctors. We would save additional billions by ending the outrageous expenditures on prisons, police forces and the military. In fact, we would get rid of the very concept of "mental patient" by treating all people as seekers for psychological improvement - whether their goal be to fight a problematic aspect of the human condition that materialists have reified into a discrete "illness" in the DSM manual, such as chronic depression or ADHD, or to teach a seeker to better appreciate music, nature, or even to engage in a drug-aided search for their very place in the great scheme of things.

CONCLUSION

Trump won the presidency because of prohibition. First liquor and then drug prohibition flooded poor and undereducated city neighborhoods with guns and incentivized violence. This, in turn, had the effect of removing hundreds of thousands of Blacks from the voting rolls by throwing them in jail. The sinister significance of these facts is clear when we consider how close modern presidential elections have been in terms of winning margins. Having won (or rather stolen) office thanks to drug prohibition, now Trump claims that he is the savior of the gun-filled cities that his own policies have created. He plans to solve the violence problem that Drug Warriors like himself have created. How? By getting tough on the very people that our drug policy has set up for failure. Indeed, he HIMSELF wants to execute drug dealers. Surely a play that seeks to lambaste Donald Trump for his authoritarian tendencies should not be premised on a backstory that tends to legitimize his own racist stance on drug law.

Speaking of heroin in particular, Black singer Billie Holiday was a regular user of the drug - having grown up just after America had outlawed the safe and regulated use of opium ³⁰ . Our government did all that it could to make her use of heroin as problematic as possible. She was hounded to her death in the first half of the 20th century by Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Harry was not interested in the well-being of Billie. He did not want to save her from opiates. He was outraged by her political songs, especially "Strange Fruit," which cast Caucasian racists in a bad light. His goal was to destroy Billie, to stop her from singing, and not to reform her.

In light of this racist backstory, I have no desire to blame drug dealers for fulfilling a role that drug prohibition purposefully created for them with racism aforethought. I refuse to hate drug dealers, except insofar as they are guilty of crimes other than that of "dealing" in substances that the government never had the moral authority to outlaw in the first place - least of all in a country based on natural law, which, according to John Locke himself, gives citizens the right to the use of the land "and all that lies therein." Drug dealers as such can even be seen as heroes in light of the government's attempt to keep me from being all I can be in life by suppressing godsend medicine. And so, although I probably should not yield to the modern politicians' attempt to make me hate anyone at all -- if I must choose one demographic to hate, it would be the racist Drug Warriors themselves, those pharmacologically and ethnobotanically clueless politicians who continue to create and pass drugs the laws that deprive the entire world of godsend medicines while giving police carte blanche to crack down on minorities and the poor. They have turned inner-cities into shooting galleries, destroyed the rule of law in Latin America, and now they have even ended democracy itself in the United States of America. These Drug Warriors are the problem, not drug dealers.

See also Drug Dealers as Modern Witches.

Fentanyl

Notes for essay entitled Drug Warriors are the Problem, not Drug Dealers:

1: “Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (Text-02A).” 2026. Eapoe.Org. 2026. https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/raggeda.htm. (up)
2: RINVOQ RX List (up)
3: Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine DWP (up)
4: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)
5: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
6: Television Commercials and Drugs DWP (up)
7: Jim Beam and Drugs DWP (up)
8: Glorifying Beneficial Drug Use DWP (up)
9: Running with the Devil (up)
10: The Runner: Racist Drug War Agitprop DWP (up)
11: The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler Shirer, William, RosettaBooks, New York, 2011 (up)
12: Blast-off for Planet Hypocrisy! DWP (up)
13: The Dead Man DWP (up)
14: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
15: “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)
16: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
17: How Drug Prohibition has turned academics into children DWP (up)
18: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
19: 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)
20: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
21: Speak now or forever hold your peace about drug prohibition DWP (up)
22: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
23: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
24: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
25: Prohibition's Death Toll: Alcohol's Deadly Legacy (up)
26: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
27: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
28: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
29: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
30: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)

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If drug war logic made sense, we would outlaw endless things in addition to drugs. Because the drug war says that it's all worth it if we can save just one life -- which is generally the life of a white suburban young person, btw.

There are neither "drugs" nor "meds" as those terms are used today. All substances have potential good uses and bad uses. The terms as used today carry value judgements, as in meds good, drugs bad.

In his treatise on laws, Cicero reported that the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries gave the participants "not only the art of living agreeably, but of dying with a better hope."

The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.

Americans HATE big government -- and yet they have no problem with government using drug prohibition to control their pain relief and how and how much they can think and feel in this life.

Americans outlaw drugs and then insist that those drugs did not have much to offer in any case. It's like I took away your car and then told you that car ownership was overrated.

The UN of today is in an odd position regarding drugs: they want to praise indigenous societies while yet outlawing the drugs that helped create them.

The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.

The best harm-reduction strategy is to re-legalize drugs.

Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice.

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Drug Warriors are the Problem, not Drug Dealers

Fentanyl

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Diary of a Drug Fiend