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


How Logic-Challenged Journalists Support the Drug War

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 11, 2020



When Leah Betts died after ingesting a single Ecstasy tablet in 1995, the media trumpeted the triumphant news (from a Drug Warrior perspective at least) that an actual death had finally been attributed to E.

Update 2025

At last! You could almost hear a sigh of relief from Drug Warriors around the world: now they could finally plausibly call for a crack down on a drug that so far had caused nothing but peace, love and understanding on the rave dance floor. The fact that aspirin causes 3,000 deaths a year in the UK was never mentioned, of course. Nor the fact that safe guidelines for Ecstasy use were discouraged because of prohibition which limited researchers' ability to even develop such guidelines. But that's no problem for the modern Drug Warrior. During a Drug War, it only takes one death to torpedo a drug's reputation thanks to the childish logic employed by the Drug Warrior and Drug Warriors were never going to let the world forget this one glaring exception to the rule when it came to Ecstasy use.

But to say that E killed Leah was like saying that a bicycle killed the victim of a bike accident. It misses the point entirely. It turns the drug ecstasy into a scapegoat and boogieman, thereby allowing logic-challenged Drug Warriors to ignore the real cause of Leah's death: namely, the above-mentioned fact that proper safe use guidelines could not be developed for the drug thanks to the Drug War itself.

How does the media get away with this biased drug-related coverage, with this failure to put deaths like Leah's into some kind of sane perspective, pharmacologically speaking? They get away with it because their drug-related articles are informed by the drug-warrior belief that illegal psychoactive substances can only be used for getting "high" in the most frivolous and irresponsible sense of that word, that there is no sensible reason for using such substances. "Drugs like E have no sane use," they believe, "therefore even one death from using them is one too many."

But their premise is false, both psychologically and historically speaking. Historically speaking, entheogenic drugs like E have been the inspiration for founding entire religions (as the Vedic religion was inspired by Soma). From a psychological viewpoint, such substances, at a bare minimum, give the user a break from reality, which is precisely the therapeutic benefit that the punter seeks in hitting up the local pub. Meanwhile, the use of Ecstasy by a group conduces to harmonious crowds full of dancers who actually care for each other in spite of racial and ethnic differences, whereas the collective guzzling of beer often leads to violent brawls and the surfacing of vestigial racism in the inebriates.

No sane use for E? Um, hello? It brings about peace, love and understanding. Isn't that good enough for you?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. Drug warriors are not interested in peace, love and understanding any more than they are interested in allowing the kind of research that could have resulted in guidelines that would have prevented Leah's death in the first place. The Drug Warrior is all about demonizing substances in a way that no cultures have ever done before (before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 first effectively outlawed a plant in violation of the natural law upon which Jefferson founded America), and if they have to ignore reality to do that, so be it.

It is my hope that essays like this will encourage logic-savvy journalists to fight back against this ideological demonization of amoral substances by putting "drug-related deaths" in perspective in their media coverage, by refusing to adopt the Drug Warrior prejudices mentioned above, especially the absurd notion that psychoactive substances can cause only evil once they have been criminalized by scheming politicians.

_27_ Perhaps the greatest change in this regard is needed in the obit section, for the Drug Warrior has a ghoulish love for autopsies of famous people, especially of those who die an early death. Drug warriors are always rooting for the coroner to discover some outlawed drug in the system of such celebrities. Why? Because if an outlawed drug is found, they know that the mere reporting of that fact in the media will read (in a Drug War society like our own) as an implicit argument in favor of the Drug War and the need for a still greater crackdown on illicit substances. No need to definitively link the drug to the death. The autopsy need only associate a proscribed substance with a death and the public (already well primed by Drug Warrior lies and propaganda) will draw the "right" (albeit illogical) conclusion: namely, that drugs are horrible in and of themselves, once they've been outlawed by politicians.

Drug Warriors therefore want to parlay each premature celebrity death into first-class Drug War propaganda, and the media typically abets them in doing this by implicitly accepting the chop logic mentioned above, failing to mention in their outraged articles (with Drug War-friendly headlines such as "E Kills Leah Betts!") that the two main dangers of illegal drug use are both results of the Drug War itself: first, the lack of available safety information about the drugs in question (caused by a drug-war crackdown on research of those substances), and second, the inability to access a safe and unadulterated product (caused by the drug-war prohibition which puts drug sales in the hands of profit-driven criminals, whose financial interest lies in diluting their product with god-knows-what look-alike replacements for the desired product).

Before journalists write one more logically challenged article about the evil of drugs, they may wish to reflect on the following inconvenient historical truths viz today's Drug War ideology:

There was no Drug War in Ancient Egypt. There was no Drug War in Ancient Mesopotamia. There was no Drug War in Ancient Greece. There was no Drug War in Ancient Persia. There was no Drug War in Ancient Rome. There was no Drug War in the Mongol Empire. There was no Drug War in the Viking Age.

Why not? Because until the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, people were judged by the way that they actually behaved and not by what substances they had in their digestive systems. Likewise, before 1914, there was no such thing as a bad substance - only substances that could be bad or good depending on the precise circumstances of their use, for the intelligent of all literate ages have understood that even salt could be deadly at high doses. In other words, substances never kill anyone: all substance-related deaths are caused by people, whether by dealers providing tainted product or by Drug Warriors failing to provide users with objective education about the pros and cons of all psychoactive substances - all substances, including Big Pharma 1 2 meds, tobacco and alcohol -- whether those substances have been previously demonized by racist politicians or not.

The Links Police

Pull over to the side of the web page: topic-related links coming through viz. the media and the way they misunderstand the Drug War:








Author's Follow-up: April 2, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




The Drug War is based on two enormous lies: first that there are no upsides to drug use, and second that there are no downsides to prohibition. Both are demonstrably false.

America needs a reboot as a country whose policies and laws are no longer influenced by uninformed hysteria. The first step is to promote responsible and educated journalism. The status quo is extremely biased against drug use. To see how this is so, do a little thought experiment. Consider how today's reporters might write headlines about automobile-related deaths were they to do so from the same point of view that they use when writing stories about drug-related deaths.



"Cars Continue to Kill Young People"

"Her son thought he could handle cars. He was wrong."

"Car implicated in death of teenager"

"Yet another county young person killed by a car"


The implication being, of course, that anybody with a heart would be hollering for the immediate abolition of cars!

That makes no sense, right? Right. But it makes no sense for the exact same reason that drug demonization makes no sense.

Cars and drugs have good and bad uses -- it makes zero sense to hold either one of them responsible for problems outside of all context. They are inanimate objects, after all. Ignorance is the enemy, not cars, and not drugs.

In a free future, newspapers will have philosophers on their staffs to ensure that said papers are not inciting consequence-riddled hysteria through a biased coverage of drug-related mishaps.

Journalists should be pushing back against the attempts of demagogues to drive us apart and make us hate "the other."

Sadly, the conglomerate paymasters in the field are on the side of the Drug War -- as can be seen by the media's ongoing failure to connect the dots between the Drug War and the vast dystopia that it has created.











Notes:

1: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
2: 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)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Here's the first step in the FDA process for evaluating a psychoactive drug: Ignore all glaringly obvious benefits.

Another problem with MindMed's LSD: every time I look it up on Google, I get a mess of links about the stock market. The drug is apparently a godsend for investors. They want to profit from LSD by neutering it and making it politically correct: no inspiration, no euphoria.

Drug testing should flag impairment only. Any other use is a flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment.

In the 2015 movie "No Escape," the only place that was safe from anti-American hysteria was an opium den. How ironic that the U.S. forced Iran to outlaw opium.

Before anyone receives shock therapy -- or the right to assisted suicide -- they should have the option to start using opium or cocaine daily -- in fact, any drug that makes them feel that life is worth living again.

Almost all talk about the supposed intractability of things like addiction are exercises in make-believe. The pundits pretend that godsend medicines do not exist, thus normalizing prohibition by implying that it does not limit progress. It's a tacit form of collaboration.

Katie MacBride's one-sided attack on MAPS reminds me of why I got into an argument with Vincent Rado. Yes, psychedelic hype can go too far, but let's solve the huge problem first by ending the drug war!!!

Imagine if there were drugs for which dependency was a feature, not a bug. People would stop peddling that junk, right? Wrong. Just ask your psychiatrist.

A generally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear. --James B. Stockade.

In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.


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

Drama lovers: collect full-cast recordings of classic plays

In my spare time, when I am not shaming drug warriors for their heartless drug policies, I create full-cast recordings of classic plays using the latest in synthetic voices licensed by the Natural Reader company. Snag your copy of my production of Volpone, by Ben Jonson... and follow me on Payhip for more where that came from, including classics like The Post Office, The Double Dealer and The Inspector General. -- Yours in all-too-justified outrage, the Drug War Philosopher @ abolishthedea.com.

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)