Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass
blog icon orange rss icon with stylized radio waves bird icon for twitter bird icon for twitter substack icon


back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow


Harold and Kumar Support the Drug War

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

November 12, 2019



I've already found leisure to dilate on the anti-democratic impact of drug-war movies like 'Running with the Devil,1' in which the DEA agent is the (ahem) 'hero' who combats those bad guy plant sellers by torturing them and shooting them in cold blood.
A classified advertisement torn out of the newspaper.  It reads as follows: DEA AGENTS WANTED. Must have demonstrated ability to harass minorities in an urbans setting. Although this kind of movie deserves to be panned for its ideological toxicity, don't hold your breath waiting for critics to bash the movie on that score. And as far as parental watch dog groups are concerned, count on them to lambaste such pics for nudity, violence, and naughty words, but don't expect to hear a peep about the pro-fascist message of such DEA propaganda. Johnny must not swear, of course, but if he wants to torture and murder folks who traffic in Mother Nature's plants, more power to him.

Author's follow-up for November 24, 2025

But there is another genre of pictures that helps sell the pro-fascist Drug War sensibility to gullible Americans: namely, comedies such as 'Harold & Kumar go to White Castle,' in which illegal plant substances are uniquely associated with sexual abandon and blatant irresponsibility. Such films would be innocuous enough in a culture that spoke honestly about drugs -- that recognized both their benefits and ills -- but in our drug-war society, which dogmatically recognizes only the misuse of outlawed substances, such movies reinforce the Drug Warrior supposition that there is no sensible reason to use the plants that the government has chosen to criminalize. So as Neil Patrick Harris snorts cocaine off the tush of a pole dancer while driving Harold's car through off-road vegetation, one can just hear the 'lock-em-up' conservative in the audience saying to himself: 'You see? Aren't drugs just the worst thing in the world?!' And so we lie to ourselves to keep this Drug War myth going. We ignore responsible use of banished plants and erase such use from history.

Nowhere is this historical revisionism more striking than in the case of Freud's use of cocaine 2, because, properly considered, Freud's cocaine use calls into question most of modern psychiatry's pieties (such as 'no pain, no gain,' 'we must treat the REAL causes,' 'feel-good drugs are bad,' etc.) It begs the question: if Freud fought off fatigue and depression with cocaine , abjuring theoretical psychoanalysis for that purpose, and thereby amassing a prolific vocational output that led to an unprecedented degree of self-actualization in his life, why should the rest of us be forced by law to treat our similar problems with the latest popular theoretical therapy? Why can't we, too, avail ourselves of the real politik of plant-based therapy to attain self-fulfillment?

Of course, the modern psychiatrist will chide: 'But that's just treating the symptoms, that's not treating the REAL illness,' to which we say 'So what?' Despite materialist claims to the contrary, we do not know any one single cause for depression and fatigue, and indeed it is thanks to our determination to find this highly improbable El Dorado that we now have a nation of addicts, addicted to pills that claimed (falsely as it turns out) to correct a chemical imbalance peculiar to the depressed3.

Besides, isn't the goal of psychiatry to grant the patient a life of self-actualization? In that case, cocaine 4 5 worked a treat for Freud, not by giving him that self-fulfillment directly (not by targeting some supposititious self-fulfillment chemical!), but by arousing in him the psychophysical baseline condition that permitted him to succeed on his own. That was not a copout for Freud, but if we insist on calling it so, then God grant us all such a copout that leads to professional self-fulfillment in life.

Back to H&K:

A cop says: 'I just found enough dope in the car to put these skateboard punks in jail for the next couple of years.'

And the Drug Warrior in the audience cheers.

But think how costly this sense of satisfaction is : By putting away punks, we have denied godsend medicines to the elderly, the depressed, the victims of PTSD.

It's this focus on punishing (and/or protecting) punks through substance prohibition -- aided by Hollywood's selective depiction of drug use as exclusively hedonistic -- that denies the psychologically desperate the plant medicines that could make their lives livable, often enjoyable, again.

God grant Americans can someday be satisfied with punishing a punk's bad actions alone, not their mere possession of plants. That way, when we do punish them, we're not also punishing the psychologically needy as we do today, forcing them by law to eschew Mother Nature's therapies in favor of addictive Big Pharma 6 7 pills that need to be taken every single day for life.

The protection and/or punishment of the punks of the world must stop taking precedence over the psychological needs and, indeed, rights of the vast majority of humanity, for we're not talking about privileges here: we're talking about the resurrection of the earthling's natural birthright to the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet.




Author's Follow-up:

November 24, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




Whew! I just breathed a sigh of relief! I just re-read this essay of mine for the first time in six years and was delighted to find that I still agree with everything I said! I always fear that my early essays on these topics will be unnecessarily apologetic since my knowledge on the subject has grown considerably since I first started philosophically analyzing drug prohibition back in 2019. And yet I can safely say that I covered all the most important bases above. This is almost surprising to me, since I had not yet even read Sigmund Freud's "On Cocaine8" back in 2019. I knew, however, that Freud had found cocaine to be a godsend, and unlike most chronically depressed Americans, I took this fact to be a tacit indictment of the healthcare industry which was currently profiting from my lifetime dependence on underperforming antidepressants -- all because self-interested doctors were holding cocaine use to safety standards that they applied to no other activity on earth.

Unfortunately, it is not just my fellow depressives who are unable to connect the seemingly obvious dots between drug prohibition and their complete disempowerment in life. Even our most progressive thinkers are blind as a bat when it comes to the immensely fraught topic of "drugs" in drug-hating America.

In his April 2025 article for Rolling Stone magazine, "The Secret History of Coca,9 10" Wade Davis implies that cocaine was justifiably outlawed because it was found to have resulted in 400 cases of cocaine toxicity worldwide. 400 cases.

This shows how completely bamboozled Americans are when even the obvious enemies of the Drug War, our best and brightest, draw such statistically-challenged conclusions about drug use.

Davis worries about the 400 people who could not use cocaine wisely -- but he seems to have no concern for the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE who COULD use cocaine wisely and thereby end their chronic depression entirely -- END IT -- and this without becoming a ward of the healthcare state, with all the time, money and humiliation that such a status entails! For here is another thing that even drug-war enemies do not understand: the fact that modern antidepressants cause extreme dependency -- and that some of these drugs -- like the Effexor that I am on -- can not be kicked AT ALL. My own psychiatrist tells me that Effexor has been found to have a 95% recidivism rate 11 for long-term users -- and I have found from personal experience that going without the drug brings about cognitive impairment12!


Founding Fathers  meeting to discuss the contents of the proposed U.S. Constitution.  One says: 'What about our right to Mother Nature's Bounty?' Another answers: 'Oh, surely that goes without saying!' No one can claim to know the full evil of the Drug War without recognizing the fact that it has unnecessarily turned the depressed into patients for life -- and forced them to "treat" a condition that they could have effectively "cured" with drugs like cocaine had prohibition not denied them access to the plant medicine of Mother Nature -- which prohibition itself was a crime against humanity and a violation of the natural law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America13.

But somehow the 400 cases of cocaine toxicity are all that matters -- not only to Drug Warriors but also to their most vocal critics!

Have they forgotten that liquor results in 178,000 deaths a year in the United States alone14? Do they realize that 49,000 Americans commit suicide every year15 and that most of those deaths would have been AVOIDED had America refused to outlaw cocaine and had promoted its use instead for the severely depressed? Do they even realize that numbers like 178,000 and 49,000 are greater than 400?

America's Drug War propaganda has destroyed their ability to think straight.

I was never a good student in economics class in high-school, yet I no longer feel badly about that fact, not after discovering that our best and brightest routinely draw such statistically-challenged conclusions about drugs. It makes me wonder if our expert number crunchers are really such experts after all. If they really believe that 400 cases of cocaine-related downsides are all that matter in evaluating the drug, then I would hate to have them as financial advisors. I can hear them now:

"Brian, we have just sold off your entire portfolio of food stocks after learning that foodborne illness kills over 900 people a year in America alone!!!16"










Notes for essay entitled Harold and Kumar Support the Drug War:

1: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
2: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
3: Shpancer, Noam. 2022. “Depression Is Not Caused by Chemical Imbalance in the Brain | Psychology Today.” Www.psychologytoday.com. July 24, 2022. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/202207/depression-is-not-caused-chemical-imbalance-in-t (up)
4: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
5: “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)
6: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
7: 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)
8: “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)
9: The Secret History of Coca Davis, Wade, Rolling Stone magazine, 2025 (up)
10: Cocaine is a Blessing, not a Curse DWP (up)
11: 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)
12: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
13: John Locke was Jefferson's go-to man when it came to Natural Law. Locke insisted that we have a natural right to the use of nature 'and all that lies therein.' (up)
14: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (up)
15: National Institute of Mental Health. 2025. “Suicide.” National Institute of Mental Health. March 2025. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide. (up)
16: Estimates: Burden of Foodborne Illness in the United States CDC, 2025 (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




This is why we would rather have a depressed person commit suicide than to use "drugs" -- because drugs, after all, are not dealing with the "real" problem. The patient may SAY that drugs make them feel good, but we need microscopes to find out if they REALLY feel good.

My consciousness, my choice.

Drug warriors blame all of the problems that they cause on "drugs" and then insist that the entire WORLD accept their jaundiced view of the natural bounty that God himself told us was good.

First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws.

David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.

We throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.

We should hold the DEA criminally responsible for withholding spirit-lifting drugs from the depressed. Responsible for what, you ask? For suicides and lobotomies, for starters.

We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.

Prohibition turned habituation into addiction by creating a wide variety of problems for users, including potential arrest, tainted or absent drug supply, and extreme stigmatization.

Prohibition never ended. Busybody Americans just gave alcohol a big Mulligan for killing 178,000 a year in America alone and then began fighting to outlaw everything else.


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






back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow
Book Cover

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

This book features 150 annotated images, designed to force brainwashed Americans to confront the fact that drug prohibition is wrong. Here is what author Richard Parrish II says of the book's compiler: "The drug prohibition philosopher provides first-hand, principled, persuasive, and insightful arguments against the current drug prohibition regime..."

Purchase Your Copy
Book Cover

Diary of a Drug Fiend

This is the only full-cast recording of Aleister Crowley's 1922 classic paeon to common sense. It is the first book -- and so far almost the only book -- to stake out a philosophy of drug use that is compatible with human freedom, one in which we learn to use drugs as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. This recording was produced by the Drug War Philosopher and your purchases help support his effort to push back against the tragically counterproductive policy of drug prohibition, in the name of human freedom and of humanity's right to heal.

Purchase Your Copy



No cookies, no ads paid for by amoral and immoral billionaires (or trillionaires).


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.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is a proud sponsor of The Drug War Philosopher website @ abolishthedea.com.


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

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP (up)