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!"
No substance is bad in and of itself. Fentanyl has positive uses, at specific doses, for specific people, in specific situations. But the drug war votes substance up or down. That is hugely anti-scientific and it blocks human progress.
In America, they save the depressed from cocaine and opium by turning them into patients for life with dependence-causing "meds." Now 30-year-old doctors get to treat 67-year-olds like children, with new visits every damn three months.
The fact that drugs have positive uses for human beings is a psychological corollary of Husserl's phenomenology and Whitehead's philosophy of organism.
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)
There are a potentially vast number of non-addictive drugs that could be used strategically in therapy. They elate and "free the tongue" to help talk therapy really work. Even "addictive" drugs can be used non-addictively, prohibitionist propaganda notwithstanding.
It is actually illegal to be a Ben Franklin in 21st century America. To put this another way: we outlaw far more than drugs when we outlaw mind and mood medicine.
Jim Hogshire described sleep cures that make physical withdrawal from opium close to pain-free. As for "psychological addiction," there are hundreds of elating drugs that could be used to keep the ex-user's mind from morbidly focusing on a drug whose use has become problematic for them.
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!
Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.
"The Legislature deliberately determines to distrust the very people who are legally responsible for the physical well-being of the nation, and puts them under the thumb of the police, as if they were potential criminals."
-- Aleister Crowley on drug laws
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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