more obvious uses for the substances that Americans love to hate
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
July 29, 2025
Hercules had it easy. Cleaning the Augean stables may not have been a cakewalk, and it's no doubt difficult for even the strongest of men to kill a man-eating bird or a triple-headed dog. But if King Eurystheus had REALLY wanted to play hardball with the Greco-Roman hero in response to his god-inspired murder of Megara and her kids, he would have tasked the hero with transferring a database-driven website from one hosting platform to another. Now THAT is a challenge! I know this all too well, for that is the Herculean labor over which I myself have been slaving over the last week and which I have found to require the firing of every single available neuron in my brain, including many which I fear have grown dusty over the years with non-use.
This, of course, has everything to do with drug prohibition, insofar as anti-scientific and racist politicians have outlawed all the medicines that could have helped me to improve my brain power and so to handle this host-switching task with relative ease, that is, both calmly and in an organized manner. This is the evil of the Drug War: it allows these self-interested demagogues called "Drug Warriors" to dictate the limits of my mental power -- all in the name of protecting white American young people from so-called "drugs," the same young people whom America refuses on principle to educate about safe use. What kind of moronic principle is that?!
It is amazing to me that Americans do not see this for the anti-scientific evil that it is. Both common sense and a scientific mindset tell us that a drug that can increase mental focus has all manner of beneficial uses, especially when we actually teach how to use them wisely -- and yet the Drug Warrior tells us that we all must go without godsend benefits from drugs -- merely because the drugs could, in theory, be misused by a white American young person, whom we refuse to educate about safe use.
This is paleolithic nonsense, a mindset that is inherently racist and xenophobic. Americans have yet to understand that saying things like "Fentanyl 1 kills" is philosophically identical to shouting "Fire bad!" Those who utter such inane bromides are counseling us to fear dangerous substances rather than to learn to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of human beings. This is superstitious fearmongering.
We are surrounded by all sorts of possible godsend medicines for achieving mental focus -- not just cocaine 23 and Ritalin but drugs like Harmaline and the kinds of phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. And yet we are not allowed to use any of them! This is an outrageous state of affairs, especially given the astonishing fact that the vast majority of Americans have no problem with this hateful status quo whatsoever. How depressing is THAT?! They fail to realize that this status quo represents nothing less than the outlawing of human progress. Let me repeat: drug prohibition is the outlawing of human progress.
We will only leave this Prehistoric mindset behind when we start responding to the downsides of drug use in the way that we now respond to the downsides of liquor consumption: calmly, and with an eye toward educating people rather than arresting them!
Drugs that activate the mind's neural networks have prima facie potential in the fight against dementia and yet Drug Warriors show by their actions that they prefer dementia to the use of drugs -- that they prefer suicide 4 to the use of drugs, that they prefer brain-damaging shock therapy to the use of drugs. This is why we have make-believe healthcare in the United States. This is why we have entire make-believe libraries these days, full of books whose authors have dutifully ignored drug prohibition. These authors completely ignore what drug use could tell us about the topics which they pretend to cover so thoroughly -- for after a century of politically inspired propaganda, Americans now consider drug prohibition to be a natural baseline from which to research and study the world around us.
Switching web hosts would not have been a Herculean task if I had lived in a world wherein individuals like myself had sovereignty over their own mental and emotional states. In such a world, I would be able to wisely use substances for the purposes of focusing my mind in the times and circumstances where such focus was beneficial for me. In the absence of those time-honored freedoms, however -- that is, in the age of the unprecedented, superstitious and racist war on mind medicine -- I can only envy Hercules for having gotten off so easily when it comes to his appointed tasks. Capturing the Cretan Bull may have had its challenges and it no doubt takes a real diplomat to steal a girdle worn by the Queen of the Amazons -- but just you try focusing laser-like on creating successful PHP code when your government has outlawed every possible substance in the world that might help you to do so. Now, that is a challenge worthy of Hercules himself.
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.
SSRIs are created based on the materialist notion that cures should be found under a microscope. That's why science is so slow in acknowledging the benefit of plant medicines. Anyone who chooses SSRIs over drugs like San Pedro cactus is simply uninformed.
Most prohibitionists think that they merely have to use the word "drugs" to win an argument. Like: "Oh, so you're in favor of DRUGS then, are you?" You can just see them sneering as they type. That's because the word "drugs" is like the word "scab": it's a loaded political term.
Daily opium use is no more outrageous than daily antidepressant use. In fact, it's less outrageous. It's a time-honored practice and can be stopped with a little effort and ingenuity, whereas it is almost impossible to get off some antidepressants because they alter brain chemistry.
We're living in a sci-fi dystopia called "Fahrenheit 452", in which the police burn thought-expanding plants instead of thought-expanding books.
The drug war is a big scare campaign to teach us to distrust mother nature and to rely on pharmaceuticals instead.
Freud thought cocaine was a great antidepressant. His contemporaries demonized the drug by focusing only on the rare misusers. That's like judging alcohol by focusing on alcoholics.
By reading "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," I begin to understand why I encounter a wall of silence when I write to authors and professors on the subject of "drugs." The mere fact that the drug war inspires such self-censorship should be grounds for its immediate termination.
If I beat my depression by smoking opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag subject to immediate arrest. But if I do NOT "take my meds" every day of my life, I am a bad patient.
All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.
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.
