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Join Philosophers Against the Drug War

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 12, 2021



This Blog is part of my ongoing attempt to wake the world from the violent man-made nightmare called the Drug War.

2025 Update

It is different from all other anti-Drug War blogs and websites in that it does not appeal to statistics to make its points. Rather, it appeals to first principles 1 , or, in other words, it approaches the matter philosophically. This is important, because inductive arguments and statistics can always be gainsaid by racist politicians seeking to maintain a corrupt status quo. In fact, that's why we've been saddled with this corrupt policy of childish substance demonization for over 100 years now. Even the best thinkers are merely using statistics to point out that the Drug War is a "failure," when the reality is that the Drug War had no right to succeed in the first place in a free country, being as it is a violation of Natural Law and the adoption of Christian Science as a state -- and indeed a world -- religion. But when we confront these same scheming politicians by revealing the false, bigoted and colonialist assumptions upon which the Drug War is based, they can't hide their malignant idiocy behind misleading statistics and lies. The only way they can save face is to ignore such arguments completely, and with your help, they won't be able to do that.

What are the philosophical truths with which we fight the Drug War? The truly philosophical thinker is spoiled for choice in compiling such a list. But some of the biggies include...

1) The Drug War is the enforcement of the metaphysical principles of Christian Science (the idea that humans have some moral obligation to go without "drugs") and it therefore represents the unconstitutional establishment of a religion.

2) The Drug War is a violation of the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America, since as John Locke himself wrote, human beings have a natural right to "the use of the land and all that lies therein." Indeed, God himself looked at the plants and fungi that he had created on Earth and said (in the book of Genesis, no less) that it was good.

3) The Drug War represents a warped way of viewing the world, one in which we ascribe substance misuse not to social forces (such as poverty, a lack of education and to prohibition itself) but rather to the substances themselves, ridiculously claiming, in fact, that some substances are so evil that they cannot even be studied by scientists in a supposedly free democratic country.

4) The Drug War is anti-scientific, therefore, since it forbids scientists from studying many of the psychoactive plant medicines of which politicians disapprove. This is the moral equivalent of the Church limiting the scientific freedom of Galileo. The only difference is that Galileo knew that his researches were being limited by an anti-scientific oppressor, whereas scholars today completely ignore the way that the Drug War limits their inquiries (into things like the tractability of depression and the best ways for treating addiction -- or even into studies of consciousness). This failure to acknowledge the Drug War's emasculating impact on scientific research helps keep the Drug War alive by rendering its pernicious influence invisible to all but the most perceptive minds.

5) The Drug War is anti-patient, since it criminalizes, a priori, a vast array of potentially godsend medicines which, when used responsibly and empathically, show great promise for fighting depression and giving the mentally challenged a brand-new way of looking at the world, something that one might have thought of as the holy grail of psychiatry. Moreover, this criminalization is undertaken by politicians who have no expertise in pharmacology and seemingly zero knowledge of our species' time-honored interest in expanding the mind with psychoactive medicine for both religious and practical purposes.

6) The Drug War is anti-minority, since it creates a violent black market that thrives in poor and poorly educated regions. Even the decriminalization of marijuana has racist overtones in a Drug Warrior society, since by failing to decriminalize cocaine as well (derived from a natural substance that Freud himself considered a godsend) we continue to cage Black Americans for dealing in substances of which politicians disapprove, while meanwhile ensuring that the increasingly "White person's drug," marijuana, is legalized. This double-standard is not surprising, however, since all the original Drug War laws were designed to marginalize minorities -- and not the supposedly good and upstanding White Americans who were in charge of creating these racially motivated drug laws in the first place.

If you can sign off on these basic truths -- if you realize that the term "drugs" is a modern invention by racists and Christian Scientists to unscientifically demonize substances -- then join us. If you realize that the Drug War thrives on dogmatically ignoring the cosmic and creative insights that psychoactive substances can provide the artist and the humanitarian, then join us. If you realize that a human being should be judged by the contents of their character, not by the contents of their digestive system, then join us.

What are the goals of this blog? To...

1) Rally philosophers (credentialed or otherwise) against the Drug War

2) Encourage ACTIONS such as...
a. Writing letters to Drug War-influenced authors and playwrights
b. Writing comments on IMDB etc. condemning implicit Drug War propaganda in movies 2 3
c. Writing letters to any congressperson who seems to have been bamboozled by Drug War lies, which, in practice (alas), means every single congressperson

3) Plan other peaceful on-site actions that will help speed the demise of America's unprecedented Christian Science war on plant medicine, aka the Drug War -- like how about a protest outside of DEA headquarters where we hand out books and pamphlets revealing the idiocy of America's Christian Science War on Plant Medicine -- a crucial protest, indeed, considering that America has now turned its jaundiced views of psychoactive medicine into the law of the entire world, to the extent that we even send armies abroad to burn plants, in an act of superstitious colonialist tyranny reminiscent of the book burners in Fahrenheit 451. (How about a protest outside of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime? Or at Monticello , to protest how the Monticello 4 Foundation betrayed Thomas Jefferson's Natural Law legacy in 1987 by allowing the DEA on his estate to confiscate the ex-president's poppy plants!)

4) Encourage the use of comment forms to push back against the endless instances of muddled reasoning that the Drug Warrior displays online in zine articles, academic papers, movie and TV show reviews, and everyday musings.

5) Remind the world that there is no problem with substances, nor has there ever been -- but rather there's a huge problem with how modern societies think about and deal with substances. If plant medicine causes problems in a capitalist society, then there is a problem with capitalism 5 , not "drugs."

My goal, in short, is to hasten not simply the end of the Drug War, but the end of the childish and tyrannical way of thinking about the world that the Drug War represents. For there are no such things as "drugs" in the way that Drug Warriors use the term. There are no substances that are somehow bad in and of themselves and that must be banned from even the science lab. Instead, every substance in the world can be used for good or ill, and a smart and free country studies those substances to enlighten their people about best practices for use, rather than ahistorically declaring -- through censorship and blatant lies about "brain-frying drugs" -- that substances can only be used for evil purposes once they have been demonized by pharmacologically clueless politicians.

Incidentally, if any substances fry the brain, they are the SSRIs to which 1 in four American women are addicted even as I type6. Such drugs tamp down the emotions and have been shown to conduce to anhedonia in long-term users. I know this from 60 years of hard-earned, expensive, and demoralizing experience as just one cog in the psychiatric pill mill . Of course, to the Drug Warrior mind, this is somehow not a problem -- indeed it is actually a good thing according to the Drug Warrior, who patronizingly reminds folks like myself to keep taking our nice-sounding "meds" (which is the Drug Warrior antonym for "drugs," of course)... a fact that reveals the fathomless politically and financially motivated hypocrisy of the war on plant medicine, aka the War on Drugs. None of this is about public safety, of course: otherwise the Drug Warrior would not tolerate the pill mill 7 -- nor would they support politically motivated prohibition policies that are causing a civil war in Mexico even as we speak while empowering a self-proclaimed Drug War Hitler in the Philippines.

Join today: contact quass@quass.com to join this site and add to the discussion -- and action!


Related tweet: November 10, 2022



I wonder if the editors address the fact that our government has outlawed precisely those psychoactive medicines whose use suggests that consciousness is all around us, like in the Mayan symbols I saw on a peyote "trip." So many academics reckon without the Drug War.

Author's Follow-up: November 10, 2022



I wrote the above in response to a tweet from Wiley Philosophy (@philosophersEye) that publicized a collection of essays on 'Consciousness.' This is just my first salvo in a new campaign I'm launching to call out the many academics who reckon without the Drug War, who pretend that they are living in a free country and therefore fail to properly note the way that their researches have been hamstrung by government propaganda.



Author's Follow-up: March 23, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




The above was written four years ago, when I was still somewhat naive. I had actually thought that this well-hidden post was going to bring forward at least a handful of philosophers to share thoughts on this topic. But the response count currently stands at... let me see, 48 divided by 7, carry the one... ZERO responses, give or take. But then I had overlooked the common-sense mantra that one has to do everything oneself.

I also had to laugh when I read that advice of mine for you guys to post comments on relevant websites! Ha! Post comments, indeed! For I have found since writing the above that algorithms and moderators are on the lookout for comments that merely mention drugs and that they are sure to delete them should they contain anything but derogatory thoughts on the subject. But then what do you expect in a world in which publishers routinely ignore all but negative reports of drug use?

Here is a case in point from this very morning. The UK publication called the Telegraph never publishes articles about the positive use of the coca plant or of any other "drug," for that matter. But this morning they posted an article entitled "Son menaced mother unless £100 forthcoming to buy cocaine 8 9 ." How typical. Now, that's a headline that would warm the cockles of any board-certified Drug Warrior, for it is one that supports the drug-war narrative that outlawed drugs are productive of only evil and sorrow. Like so much drug-war propaganda, it is not propaganda in and of itself, insofar as the story may well be true. But all such negative stories about drug use are propaganda all the same in the context of the Drug War, since they are the only sort of drug-related stories that we are allowed to see, hear or read thanks to the dogmatic censorship of the modern media.









Notes for essay entitled Join Philosophers Against the Drug War:

1: A Principle-Driven Approach to Ending Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
2: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
3: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
4: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
5: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)
6: Meds fry the brain, not drugs DWP (up)
7: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
8: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
9: “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)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Materialist scientists are drug war collaborators. They are more than happy to have their fight against idealism rigged by drug law, which outlaws precisely those substances whose use serves to cast their materialism into question.

It is a crime against humanity to withhold cocaine from the depressed and those with impaired cognition.

There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.

People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.

I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.

We give kids drugs to improve their concentration -- but if adults use drugs to concentrate, we call them names and throw them in jail.

When we place the FDA in charge of deciding whether a psychoactive drug should be re-legalized or not, we are asking them to decide on things like the relative importance of appreciating a sunset, a task for which the FDA has no expertise whatsoever.

This is why I call the drug war 'fanatical Christian Science.' People would rather have grandpa die than to let him use laughing gas or coca or opium or MDMA, etc. etc.

Americans love to blame drugs for all their problems. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. The prohibition mindset is the problem, not drugs.

There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."


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Book Cover

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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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