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!"
MDMA legalization has suffered a setback by the FDA. These are the people who think Electro Shock Therapy is not used often enough! What sick priorities.
Typical materialist protocol. Take all the "wonder" out of the drug and sell it as a one-size-fits all "reductionist" cure for anxiety. Notice that they refer to hallucinations and euphoria as "adverse effects." What next? Communion wine with the religion taken out of it?
The Drug War is the legally enforced triumph of human idiocy. We have rigged the deck so that our dunces can be right. The Drug War is a superstition. Indeed, it is THE modern superstition.
I know. I'm on SNRIs. But SSRIs and SNRIs are both made with materialist presumptions in mind: that the best way to change people is with a surgical strike at one-size-fits-all chemistry. That's the opposite of the shamanic holism that I favor.
The drug war controls the very way that we are allowed to see the world. The Drug War is thus a meta-injustice, not just a handful of bad legal statutes.
Big Pharma drugs have wrought disaster when used in psychotherapy, but it does not follow that the depressed should become Christian Scientists. The use of outlawed drugs can obviate the need for shock therapy.
Prohibition is wrong root and branch. It seeks to justify the colonial disdain for indigenous healing practices through fearmongering.
Trump supports the drug war and Big Pharma: the two forces that have turned me into a patient for life with dependence-causing antidepressants. Big Pharma makes the pills, and the drug war outlaws all viable alternatives.
Researchers insult our intelligence when they tell us that drugs like MDMA and opium and laughing gas have not been proven to work. Everyone knows they work. That's precisely why drug warriors hate them.
Getting off antidepressants can make things worse for only one reason: because we have outlawed all the drugs that could help with the transition. Right now, getting off any drug basically means becoming a drug-free Christian Scientist. No wonder withdrawal is hard.
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