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 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 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 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.
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
Scientists are censored as to what they can study thanks to drug law. Instead of protesting that outrage, they lend a false scientific veneer to those laws via their materialist obsession with reductionism, which blinds them to the obvious godsend effects of outlawed substances.
We drastically limit drug choices, we refuse to teach safe use, and then we discover there's a gene to explain why some people have trouble with drugs. Science loves to find simple solutions to complex problems.
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?
The "scheduling" system is completely anti-scientific and anti-patient. It tells us we can make a one-size-fits-all decision about psychoactive substances without regard for dosage, context of use, reason for use, etc. That's superstitious tyranny.
Drug warriors are too selfish and short-sighted to fight real problems, so they blame everything on drugs.
I'm interested in CBD myself, because I want to gain benefits at times without experiencing intoxication. So I think it's great. But I like it as part of an overall strategy toward mental health. I do not think of CBD, as some do, as a way to avoid using naughty drugs.
Drug testing labs should give high marks for those who manage to use drugs responsibly, notwithstanding the efforts of law enforcement to ruin their lives. The lab guy would be like: "Wow, you are using opium wisely, my friend! Congratulations! Your boss is lucky to have you!"
Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war:
"clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."
Freud found that cocaine CURED most people's depression and he "got off it" without trouble. I'm on a Big Pharma antidepressant that has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users. Drug prohibition is insane and a crime against humanity.
Drug War censorship is supported by our "science" magazines, which pretend that outlawed drugs do not exist, and so write what amount to lies about the supposed intransigence of things like depression and anxiety.
Scientists are censored as to what they can study thanks to drug law. Instead of protesting that outrage, they lend a false scientific veneer to those laws via their materialist obsession with reductionism, which blinds them to the obvious godsend effects of outlawed substances.