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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!


Circus barker in full regalia, addressing audience with outspread hands
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!"









Notes for essay entitled It’s Time for America to Admit that it has a Prohibition Problem: How the New York Times keeps getting it wrong about drugs:

1: It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem The New York Times, 2026 (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




For most drugs, dependency is a bug. For Big Pharma antidepressants, it is a feature.

Rather than protesting prohibition as a crackdown on academic freedom, today's scientists are collaborating with the drug war by promoting shock therapy and SSRIs, thereby profiting from the monopoly that the drug war gives them in selling mind and mood medicine.

Drug Prohibition Downside #1,529: aviation accidents caused by pilots who failed to use mind-sharpening drugs to improve their situational awareness. (See, for instance, Comair flight 5191)

Richard Evans Schultes seems to have originated the harebrained idea (since used by the US Supreme Court to suppress new religions) that you have no right to use drugs in a religious ritual if you did not grow up in a society that had such practices. What tyrannical idiocy!

Was looking for natural sleeping aids online. Everyone ignores the fact that all the stuff that REALLY works has been outlawed! We live in a pretend world wherein the outlawed stuff no longer even exists in our minds! We are blind to our lost legacy regarding plant medicines!

The proof that psychedelics work has always been extant. We are hoodwinked by scientists who convince us that efficacy has not been "proven." This is materialist denial of the obvious.

Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.

The goal of rehab should not be to get people off of all drugs, it should be to teach them to be in control of their drug use and to use drugs wisely for beneficial purposes.

America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own depression by making opium and cocaine illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.

The best step we could take in harm reduction is re-legalizing everything and starting to teach safe use. Spend the DEA's billions on "go" teams that would descend on locations where drugs are being used stupidly -- not to arrest, but to educate.


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






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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..."

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Book Cover

Diary of a Drug Fiend

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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.

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

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