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)
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
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.
Oregon's drug policy is incoherent and cruel. The rich and healthy spend $4,000 a week on psilocybin. The poor and chemically dependent are thrown in jail, unless they're on SSRIs, in which case they're congratulated for "taking their meds."
We have to deny the FDA the right to judge psychoactive medicines in the first place. Their materialist outlook obliges them to ignore all obvious benefits. When they nix drugs like MDMA, they nix compassion and love.
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?
There are definitely good scientists out there. Unfortunately, they are either limited by their materialist orthodoxy into showing only specific microscopic evidence or they abandon materialism for the nonce and talk the common psychological sense that we all understand.
If we encourage folks to use antidepressants daily, there is nothing wrong with them using heroin daily. A founder of Johns Hopkins used morphine daily and he not only survived, but he thrived.
Americans heap hypocritical praise on Walt Whitman. What they don't realize is that many of us could be "Walt Whitman for a Day" with the wise use of psychoactive drugs. To the properly predisposed, morphine gives a DEEP appreciation of Mother Nature.
The Drug War brought guns to the "hoods," thereby incentivizing violence in the name of enormous profits. Any site featuring victims of gun violence should therefore be rebranded as a site featuring victims of the drug war.
In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.
The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.
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Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass
Contact: quass@quass.com
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