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Legalize Cocaine Now

an open letter to prohibitionists like you

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 10, 2026



Do you know that the aptly named National Institute on Drug Abuse has a ground rule that forbids it from ever advocating the legalization of any outlawed substance? The Institute is not allowed to do that. And no wonder. As its very name suggests, the institute is dedicated to drug bashing, to only pointing out the downsides of drug use1. Combine this with the fact that the media refuses to publish positive reports of drug use and the result is that the American population is completely indoctrinated to hate drugs. And perhaps the most hated drug of all is cocaine, which could have cured my depression in a trice2. Instead, I have been shunted off onto a Big Pharma drug that is far harder to kick than heroin 3: one, in fact, which has a 95% recidivism rate 4 for long-term users (a fact of which my ex-psychiatrist informed me shortly before he was terminated by his employer for his honesty on that topic).

So let's look at what your outlawing of cocaine has done. (I say "your" because odds are that you are a prohibitionist when it comes to cocaine like almost everybody else in the west.)

By outlawing cocaine, you have destroyed inner cities around the world and turned folks like myself into patients for life. Far from keeping folks off drugs, you have forced me to use a drug every single day of my life!

Say, here's an idea: instead of playing a trillion-dollar game of whack-a-mole5 with every new dangerous substance that comes on the public radar, let's treat drug use like every other dangerous activity in the world: let's teach safe use and best practices for achieving various desired results!

I know, it sounds crazy, right? Using education to solve problems?

You guys want to save everybody, and what's the result? Your prohibition has killed millions since 1914 totally unnecessarily6, not only through contaminated product but through lack of education and the eruption of gunfire at country borders and on city streets. And yet you have the nerve to shudder at the election of Donald Trump? You (you prohibitionist) brought him to power by sitting by while prohibition put hundreds of thousands of minority voters in jail for using substances of which politicians disapprove.

I'm picking on independents and democrats here, because the insurrectionists of our time apparently know what they're doing and don't give a damn.

IMAGINE

Imagine if there were a drug that killed 3,000 citizens a year in the United Kingdom alone! Wouldn't we want to ban it at once?!

Er, not exactly. Because the drug in question is called aspirin -- and we all agree that aspirin has positive uses7.

Now, who is telling us that cocaine has no positive uses. Answer: Doctors. No one asked the depressed what they thought about cocaine before doctors started their op-ed demonization campaign.

The premise of the doctors seems to have been this: If we can save 400 people from cocaine issues, then hundreds of millions of the depressed can go to hell8!

This is a calculation that nobody questions.

No other risky activity on earth is evaluated in this puerile way.

Horseback riding could easily be outlawed if we held it to such standards, since horseback-riding is the main cause of sports-related traumatic brain injury in the United States9.

But everyone agrees that freedom is more important when it comes to horse lovers. Somehow, freedom is not important when it comes to the rights of the depressed. We have to remain depressed for life because drug prohibitionists are determined to hold cocaine to unheard-of safety standards.

Sure, cocaine is not for everyone. Neither is penicillin. But it does not follow that it should be for NO ONE. And that is the depressed-damning conclusion that our doctors have reached on behalf of folks like myself. And, of course, my ideas on the subject can be ignored because I am just a patient. What counts are the opinions of those with endless titles beside their names who write papers full of nepotistic footnotes and place them behind expensive academic firewalls. They don't have to take into account anything but their own theories and footnote-supported prejudices -- and to hell with the depressed.

By placing scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine, the whole discussion on such topics has moved to the ivory tower -- giving Google and everyone else an excuse to ignore the people who suffer based on the prejudices of academia -- based on their absolute refusal to hear from those who pay the price for their assumption-laden ideas about mind and mood.

Cocaine is one obvious treatment for depression. Obvious! And yet when I search the web for "cocaine and depression," what do I see? There is nothing about using cocaine for depression -- but rather I find wild speculation about how cocaine might actually CAUSE epression.

But then drug law does everything it can to make cocaine a problem drug -- by refusing to educate, refusing to regulate, and refusing to offer other drug choices for those who don't really need cocaine or who (for whatever reason) cannot "handle" cocaine.






Key Takeaways:






Notes:

1: “War on Us – the War on Drugs Is a War on All of Us.” 2019. Waronus.com. 2019. http://waronus.com/. (up)
2: “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)
3: Heroin versus Antidepressants DWP (up)
4: I have been unable to confirm this stat. But the WHO notes clinical recidivism rates for depression ranging from 50% to 85%. Do we count that as a recidivism rate of Effexor? Not when Biopharma is paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget, as reported by John LaMattina in the Sep 22, 2022 edition of Forbes magazine. (up)
5: “War on Us – the War on Drugs Is a War on All of Us.” 2019. Waronus.com. 2019. http://waronus.com/. (up)
6: “Prohibition Blunder.” 2026. Prohibition Blunder. 2026. https://www.prohibitionblunder.org/. (up)
7: Daily Aspirin Linked To More Than 3,000 Deaths Per Year, Scientists Warn Huffington Post (up)
8: In his April 2025 article in Rolling Stone magazine, 'The Secret History of Coca,' Wade Davis draws the statistically-challenged conclusion that 400 deaths worldwide from cocaine use justify the outlawing of the drug, or at least its thorough demonization. (up)
9: Equestrian Sports Are The Leading Cause of Sports-Related TBI Neurologic Rehabilitation Institute at Brookhaven Hospital, 2016 (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Drug testing should flag impairment only. Any other use is a flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment.

The "acceptable risk" for psychoactive drugs can only be decided by the user, based on what they prioritize in life. Science just assumes that all users should want to live forever, self-fulfilled or not.

Timothy Leary's wife wrote: "We went to Puerto Rico and all we did was take cocaine and read Faust to one another." And there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with that!!! The drug war is all about scaring us and making illegal drug use as dangerous as possible.

Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.

The Hindu religion was inspired by drug use.

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.

After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.

If media were free in America, you'd see documentaries about people using drugs wisely for a wide variety of praiseworthy purposes.

Here is a sample drug-use report from the book "Pihkal": "More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place." Prohibition is a crime against humanity for withholding such drug experiences from the depressed (and from everybody else).

It is folly to put bureaucrats in charge of second-guessing drug prescriptions: what such bureaucrats are really doing is second-guessing the various philosophies of life which are presupposed by the way we use psychoactive drugs.


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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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Drama lovers: collect full-cast recordings of classic plays

In my spare time, when I am not shaming drug warriors for their heartless drug policies, I create full-cast recordings of classic plays using the latest in synthetic voices licensed by the Natural Reader company. Snag your copy of my production of Volpone, by Ben Jonson... and follow me on Payhip for more where that came from, including classics like The Post Office, The Double Dealer and The Inspector General. -- Yours in all-too-justified outrage, the Drug War Philosopher @ abolishthedea.com.

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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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