It's Time to Exterminate Hippopotami

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It's Time to Exterminate Hippopotami

a public service message from the Partnership for a Death Free America

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

October 18, 2025

Hippos kill thousands of children every year. Support the Tainey-Dipschitz Bill to exterminate the hippopotamus. For more information and to learn what you can do, visit the Partnership for a Death Free America ¹ at abolishthedea.com ².

Author's note:

This ad is funny with a purpose. It reveals the absurdity of the Chicken Little outlook of the drug prohibitionist. I employ here the argumentum absurdum to prove conclusively that drug prohibition is based on an illogical -- indeed, an hysterical -- view of the world -- a view that, if carried to its logical conclusion, results in nonsense so abject that even Drug Warriors cannot fail to notice it. And as philosopher Alfred North Whitehead reminds us:

"The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us." --Alfred North Whitehead, Concept of Nature ³

(from the Drug War Philosopher at abolishthedea.com)

My argument here can best be summed up by the following dictum: that saying things like "Fentanyl ⁴ kills" -- the superstitious claim with which Philadelphia billboards ⁵ are plastered even as we speak -- is philosophically equivalent to saying things like "Fire bad!" as did our paleolithic forebears. Both statements would have us fear dangerous substances rather than learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.

This is why I created the Partnership for a Death Free America ⁶, not simply as a satirical protest against the criminally mendacious Partnership for a Drug Free America -- which blatantly lied to us about so-called "drugs" in the 1980s (a fact for which they should have been charged with a criminal offense, indeed with a crime against humanity ⁷) -- but to lampoon the unprincipled ignorance of Drug Warriors. I say unprincipled because anyone who believes that American laws should be devised to protect young people from themselves would -- first and foremost -- outlaw alcohol and guns. Alcohol kills 178,000 Americans a year ⁸, after all, while guns kill well over 40,000 a year (46,728 in 2023)⁹. The fact that Drug Warriors do not call for such laws -- indeed, they vehemently oppose them -- makes it clear even to a child that the Drug War has nothing to do with the safety of our youth; it is rather an attempt to enforce what Heidegger called a certain "way of being in the world."¹⁰ They clearly want to privilege good-old-boy, beer-drinking Christianity while blatantly trampling on the rights of all others -- meanwhile denying the depressed godsend medicines like opium and cocaine , shunting them off onto Big Pharma ¹¹ "meds" instead: drugs like Effexor that literally can NEVER be kicked. ¹² NEVER! (The mere 5% of long-term users who manage to go without such drugs for more than three years are cursed with cognitive impairment.)

The only possible "justification" for this wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine is a religious one, namely, the Christian Science belief that drug use is wrong. Drug warriors clearly believe in that metaphysical assumption (the theological belief of Mary Baker Eddy) and therefore should come out of the closet as the Christian Scientists that they so obviously are. Instead, they try to gaslight us into believing that their death-dealing policy of prohibition -- which has destroyed minority communities around the globe -- has something to do with public safety! Public safety! A policy that some say has killed as many as half a million Americans since 1971!¹³ If these Drug Warriors believe their own claims about safety, it is only because they are selfishly thinking of the safety of their own white kids -- not the safety of minorities in inner cities and not the safety of pain patients and not the safety of the depressed who live lives of unnecessary suffering and despair thanks to the ignorant, childish and criminal outlawing of Mother Nature itself, as if government ever had a right to criminalize our birthright as denizens of planet earth.

"The right to chew or smoke a plant that grows wild in nature, such as hemp (marijuana), is anterior to and more basic than the right to vote." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p xvi ¹⁴

"Imagine how many people would have benefited during the past half-century had the government respected their autonomy and their right to self-medicate." --Jeffrey A. Singer, Your Body, Your Health Care --p. 97 ¹⁵

I should point out here that the Partnership for a Drug Free America has rebranded itself as the Partnership for Drug Free Kids. This is good news and bad news. The good news is that the Partnership finally realizes that Americans do not want a drug-free world -- not in a country wherein 1 and 8 Americans (and 1 in 4 American women)¹⁶ take a Big Pharma drug every single day of their life! The bad news is that the Partnership still doesn't get it. We should never decide in advance what drugs may be useful for an adult OR a child, whether for physical or psychological purposes. Drugs should never be considered bad in and of themselves but always be discussed in the context of a specific individual. If a child is forever contemplating suicide, it would be a crime to deny them drugs that inspire and elate ¹⁷. But Americans have been brainwashed since childhood by the censorship of all positive drug use, and so this argument is so hard to get across to them! Let's put it this way, then: Personally, I would prefer that my child use cocaine than to die. I would have preferred that my uncle had smoked opium nightly than to have had him damage his brain with electroshock therapy and so mope around for the rest of his life thanks to the perverse priorities of the Drug War.

And yet, irony of ironies, we DO allow kids to use drugs in America! In fact, we even encourage it! It's just that we do not let them use godsend drugs of Mother Nature. We increasingly encourage them to use Big Pharma drugs like Ritalin and -- tragically -- antidepressants as well. Those latter drugs muck about with brain chemistry and so turn kids into wards of the healthcare state, making them dependent for a lifetime on substances that are far harder to quit than heroin.

But then what can we expect? A hundred+ years of drug prohibition in America has resulted in the inversion of all sane priorities, turning our prime imperative into demonizing drugs rather than helping people to thrive in life. And why? Because our undereducated population loves easy answers to complex social problems and hence is always looking for scapegoats to provide those answers.

"Lacking the usual grounds on which people congregate as a nation, we [Americans] habitually fall back on the most primitive yet most enduring basis for group cohesion, namely, scapegoating." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p 32 ¹⁸

And yet, viewed critically, drug prohibition is based on a seemingly endless series of lies, mischaracterizations and hypocrisy.

>>>slum<<< This is why so many smart Americans are ignorant about the Drug War. They sense at some level that a critical investigation of that inherently racist project would reveal lie after lie, as in the peeling of an onion, and they do not want to go down that rabbit hole. They know that to do so would make them an outsider in brainwashed America -- a minority of one -- and probably piss them off into the bargain. Who needs that agony? Better to simply play along with the injustices of the Drug War -- like, for instance, mandatory urine testing for employment ¹⁹, which has nothing to do with impairment but is rather all about "outing" those workers who dare to use substances of which our beer-swilling and gun-toting politicians disapprove. Strategic ignorance about such things makes life easier for Americans. Were they to allow themselves to think critically, they would soon come to the infuriating conclusion that drug prohibition has thoroughly censored academia, to the point that most authors today pretend that outlawed drugs do not even exist, and therefore ignore all the inconvenient truths about which drug use could inform them -- like the fact that cocaine ²⁰ is a cure for depression (as Freud well knew ²¹) and that it causes infinitely less dependencies than those fostered by Big Pharma drugs -- or that only 5% of American soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam had trouble getting off the drug when they returned to the States ²². 5%. Consider that statistic in light of the fact that Big Pharma drugs like Effexor cannot be kicked AT ALL by the long-term user, not AT ALL!²³ Okay, maybe 5% can manage to stay off the drug for three years, but only at the price of their ability to think straight (thanks to the way the drug irreversibly scrambles brain chemistry).

There!

Now that I have gotten THAT out of my system, let me end on a lighter note by posting some more public service announcements from my Partnership for a Death Free America. Remember, we Chicken Littles here at the Partnership need your support if we are to meet our goal of creating a death-free America by 2030!

Public Service Announcements from the Partnership for a Death Free America

Title: "Take 2 Home Truths and Call Me in the Morning"

Topic: Aspirin

TRT: 00:48

Producer: Tanja Imhof

Title: "Death Plunge"

Topic: Rollercoasters

TRT: 00:43

Producer: Mir Kofron

Title: "Trail of Tears"

Topic: The Grand Canyon

TRT: 01:03

Producer: Kizzy Briskin

Title: "Too Hot to Trot"

Topic: Horses

TRT: 00:19

Producer: Sunny Tuel

Title: "Unsafe at Any Speed"

Topic: Cars

TRT: 00:47

Producer: Edwina Bubak

Title: "Monkey See, Monkey Chew"

Topic: Peanuts

TRT: 00:18

Producer: Austin Skeffington

To hear our latest public service announcements and to find out how you can help render America absolutely hysterical, visit The Partnership for a Death Free America ²⁴. With your help, we can infantilize the globe!

A final word to parents: People ask me how I can support outlawing all of these OBVIOUS threats. Well, I'll tell you something, folks: I just take one look at my poor little defenseless white children and I say to myself, "Brian," I say: "How can you NOT???"

Notes:

1: Time to Outlaw Shopping Carts: a message from the Partnership for a Death Free America DWP (up)
2: Partnership for a Death Free America DWP (up)
3: The Concept of Nature Whitehead, Alfred North (up)
4: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
5: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
6: Partnership for a Death Free America DWP (up)
7: Drug Prohibition is a crime against humantiy DWP (up)
8: Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use in the United States CDC, 2022 (up)
9: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
10: “Being-In-The-World.” n.d. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262540568/being-in-the-world/. (up)
11: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
12: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
13: Prohibition Blunder (up)
14: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)
15: https://www.cato.org/people/jeffrey-singer. 2025. “Your Body, Your Health Care.” Cato Institute. April 8, 2025. https://www.cato.org/books/body-health-care. (up)
16: Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle Miller, Richard Louis, Park Street Press, New York, 2017 (up)
17: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
18: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)
19: Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition DWP (up)
20: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
21: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
22: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
23: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
24: Partnership for a Death Free America DWP (up)

read more essays here

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Health is not a quality, it's a balance. To decide drug legality based on 'health' grounds thus opens a Pandora's box of different points of view.

Let's pass a constitutional amendment to remove Kansas from the Union, and any other state where the racist politicians leverage the drug war to crack down on minorities.

There would be little or no profiling of blacks if the Drug War did not exist.

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx

Katie MacBride's one-sided attack on MAPS reminds me of why I got into an argument with Vincent Rado. Yes, psychedelic hype can go too far, but let's solve the huge problem first by ending the drug war!!!

Hollywood presents cocaine as a drug of killers. In reality, strategic cocaine use by an educated person can lead to great mental power, especially as just one part of a pharmacologically balanced diet.

In a free world, almost all depressed individuals could do WITHOUT doctors: these adult human beings could handle their own depression with the informed intermittent use of a wide variety of psychoactive substances.

There are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???

The "scheduling" system is completely anti-scientific and anti-patient. It tells us we can make a one-size-fits-all decision about psychoactive substances without regard for dosage, context of use, reason for use, etc. That's superstitious tyranny.

Besides, why should I listen to the views of a microbe?

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Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP

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