Imagine
open letter to the 99.9% of Americans who have been completely bamboozled by anti-drug propaganda
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 11, 2026
Imagine if you lived in a world in which drug prohibition had given the psychiatric field a monopoly on prescribing mind and mood medicine. Imagine that the psychiatric field had used that monopoly to turn you into a ward of the healthcare state by putting you on medicines that could never be kicked, ever. Imagine that when you complained about this, you were ignored, not only by the healthcare industry but by every mainstream newspaper and magazine in the country. Imagine further that when you wrote to the movers and shakers on this subject, you were also completely ignored and that no one wanted your complaints to even be discussed. Imagine that after 40 years on these dependence-causing drugs, you are still not trusted to use them safely and that you have to see a psychiatrist half or even 1/3rd your age every three months for the privilege of getting another expensive prescription for your under-performing and dependence-causing "med."
Now imagine that you start reading stories about depressed people like Claire Brosseau1 who are demanding their right to assisted suicide from the same state that refuses to allow them the drugs that could make them want to live.
This is the mad world in which financial interests combine with philosophically challenged science and drug propaganda and drug prohibition to turn Americans into children with respect to their own health.
Notes:
1: No one would need assisted suicide if we ended drug prohibition: what Claire Brosseau's case tells us about the warped mindset of the west when it comes to drugs DWP (up)
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Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
Mad in America publishes stories of folks who are disillusioned with antidepressants, but they won't publish mine, because I find mushrooms useful. They only want stories about cold turkey and jogging, or nutrition, or meditation.
Getting off some drugs could actually be fun and instructive, by using a variety of other drugs to keep one's mind off the withdrawal process. But America believes that getting off a drug should be a big moral battle.
Wanna show drug warriors the error of their ways? Legalize all less dangerous drugs than alcohol and then deny work to those who test positive for liquor and confiscate their property if beer cans are found on-site.
I have yet to find one psychiatrist who acknowledges the demoralizing power of being turned into a patient for life. They never list that as a potential downside of antidepressant use.
Wade Davis wrote in Rolling Stone that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. SO WHAT?! 178,000 people die from alcohol every year in America alone.
If we can go overseas to burn poppy plants, then Islamic countries should be free to come to the United States to burn our grape vines.
"The Oprah Winfrey Fallacy": the idea that a statistically insignificant number of cases constitutes a crisis, provided ONLY that the villain of the piece is something that racist politicians have demonized as a "drug."
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
I'm told that most psychiatrists would like to receive shock therapy if they become severely depressed. That's proof of drug war insanity: they would prefer damaging their brains to using drugs that can elate and inspire.
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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.
Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass
Contact: quass@quass.com
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