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It’s Time for America to Admit that it has a Prohibition Problem
It’s Time for America to Admit that it has a Prohibition Problem
How the New York Times keeps getting it wrong about drugs
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 19, 2026
The New York Times keeps telling us that Americans have a problem with drugs. Most recently, it seems we have a problem with marijuana1. This is just another politically correct diagnosis on the part of a timid establishment media that cannot handle the truth. The fact is that America has a problem with drug prohibition. And until we face that fact, then Americans will just be wasting their time trying to patch a tire that should have been replaced well over 100 years ago now when America first outlawed the panaceas of opium and cocaine and thereby revoked the basic right for human beings to take care of their own health as they saw fit.
I broach this topic for the second time this week because I just received a bulk email from the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, Kassandra Frederique, trumpeting the fact that the Times is right!
With friends like these, right, folks?
Does anyone but myself see what's going on here? The New York Times is helping to normalize the demonstrably deadly policy of drug prohibition by blaming all of the problems that it causes on drugs itself. It is shielding drug prohibition from criticism by pretending that it does not exist. And this should sound familiar. This is the exact same strategy pursued by those organizations attempting to end gun violence in inner cities. They refuse to even mention drug prohibition, which brought guns to the streets in the first place. This is the same strategy pursued by enemies of the human condition that we call depression. They refuse to mention drug prohibition, which outlawed our right to end depression in a trice. This is the same strategy pursued by enemies of school violence. They refuse to mention drug prohibition, which outlaws the kinds of empathogenic drugs that could help hotheads love their fellow human beings -- at least to the point that they will no longer feel called upon to murder them wholesale!
Hurry, hurry! Step right up! See the deadly policy of Drug Prohibition disappear before your very eyes!
Hurry, hurry, step right up!
See the Magically Disappearing Drug Prohibition!
Here one minute and gone the next!
See for yourself, folks! Just try to hold drug prohibition responsible for any social problem whatsoever, and watch it magically disappear from the public discourse on the subject!
Whoop! There it goes again, folks. Did you catch that, kids? What a sneaky devil. Just try to hold it responsible for any downsides, and it's like, "Who, me? Hey, folks, I don't even EXIST, so how could I be causing problems!"
I will gladly respect the police once we remove them from Gestapo duty by ending the war on drugs. Police should also learn to live on a budget, without deriving income from confiscating houses and dormitories, etc.
Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."
By reading "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," I begin to understand why I encounter a wall of silence when I write to authors and professors on the subject of "drugs." The mere fact that the drug war inspires such self-censorship should be grounds for its immediate termination.
I've found that no one thinks I "have standing" when I comment about drugs. I'm just a guy who's been turned into a patient for life thanks to drug prohibition. People think that the real experts are the doctors and scientists who profit from the status quo.
We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.
I can't imagine Allen Ginsberg writing "Howl!" while under the influence of mood-damping drugs like Inderal and Prozac -- but then maybe that's the point: the powers-that-be do not want poets writing poems like "Howl!"
There is an absurd safety standard for "drugs." The cost/benefit analysis of the FDA & co. never takes into account the costs of NOT prescribing nor the benefits of a productive life well lived. The "users" are not considered stakeholders.
People say shrooms should not be used by those with a history of "mental illness." But that's one of the greatest potential benefits of shrooms! (They cured Stamets' teenage stuttering.) Some folks place safety first, but if I did that, I'd die long before using mother nature.
The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.
When is the Holocaust Museum going to recognize that the Drug War has Nazified American life? Probably, on the same day that the Jefferson Foundation finally admits to having sold out Jefferson by inviting the DEA onto his estate in 1987 to confiscate his poppy plants.
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.
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