Lies, Damn Lies, and Drug War Statistics

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Lies, Damn Lies, and Drug War Statistics

what online drug data tells us about American society

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher (Substack version)

July 9, 2026

"He's got a 50/50 chance of living, though there's only a 10% chance of that." -- George Kennedy as Capt. Ed Hocken in "Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!

I recently published an essay in which I took Rolling Stone reporter Wade Davis to task for suggesting that 400 reports of cocaine toxicity in the late 19th century constituted a good reason for outlawing the drug. I was referring to Wade's article entitled "The Secret History of Coca" in the April 2025 edition of that magazine, wherein the Canadian anthropologist writes:

By 1890, however, with medical literature reporting more than 400 cases of acute toxicity brought on by the drug, cocaine had lost its luster. ¹

Wade Davis -- The Secret History of Coca

I pointed out that alcohol is associated with 178,000 deaths a year in the United States and that aspirin use is said to result in 3,000 deaths a year in the United Kingdom alone. I figured that in so doing, I was creating an unassailable argument against Wade's implicit position on the subject, the idea that 400 cases of downsides constituted a knock-down argument in favor of cocaine prohibition. Is not 178,000 greater than 400, after all? So you can imagine my surprise when a recently acquired friend of mine politely took me to task in turn, noting that my own use of statistics had opened me up to potential valid criticisms from my opponents.

I appreciate the feedback. It is crucial to know how one's critics might interpret, or misinterpret, one's arguments so that moving forward, one can close the windows that one has inadvertently opened to enemy fire. The complaint here seems to be that 400 reports in the worldwide medical literature about problems caused by substance A over a presumably multi-year period is not readily comparable with 178,000 reports of yearly deaths caused by substance B in a specific country over a one-year period. In other words, it might be said that I am comparing apples with oranges.

The take-home message for me from this criticism is that I should be more explicit when I use such stats, to argue why they do mean what they would seem to mean to the casual reader. Meanwhile, who knows? Maybe 400 reports of cocaine toxicity in the worldwide medical literature over a few years suggests (for reasons that Wade, however, has not attempted to elucidate for us) that there could be hundreds of thousands of deaths from cocaine in America alone if the drug remained legally available. But it's worth noting here that Wade himself threw the first stone in this argument: he hauled out a statistic out of context, implicitly claiming that it went a long way toward explaining why cocaine was justifiably outlawed, so he and his supporters would have but a feeble leg to stand on were they to complain about my own failure to wield stats with the appropriate clarifications and disclaimers.

This incident got me thinking about drug stats in modern America. Like almost every other social topic, the subject will be seen quite differently when we regard it in light of the effects of the drug prohibition mindset, which has worked to protect Americans from all positive reports of drug use. It is my position that all stories and statistics about drug abuse in America are propaganda, no matter how true they may be in and of themselves. There were certainly Jewish criminals in Germany in World War II, and yet any public service announcements that excoriated Jewish criminals back then were nonetheless propaganda given the mainstream assumption that was in place: namely, that there were no such things as good Jews.

I always hate to do online research on this subject because terms like addiction are thrown around like candy and substances are routinely blamed for deaths for which drug prohibition should have received the blame. I recoil from such research because almost every single site that covers drugs does so from the following point of view: that there are no benefits for drugs and that the only thing that we should consider about them is how they addict us and destroy our relationships and eventually kill us -- or at very least tempt us away from the straight and narrow path of a hypocritically defined "sobriety," where dependence-causing meds and alcohol and coffee are the order of the day -- and are never pilloried in the online world, though they may be targeted for one-off rebukes in a sort of man-bites-dog story in Science News.

In fact, this sudden focus on statistics has caused me to see something clearly that I had only seen through a glass darkly up until now: that is the fact that the web is full of propaganda about drugs, absolutely full of it. There is almost no site that will give drugs a fair break. The most you can ask of them is that they will put downsides in context, and mention how they were really the result of drug prohibition or a failure to educate. But even these sites will not discuss the benefits of drug use, for the simple reason that Americans have taken it as a matter of faith that benefits cannot exist. And no wonder. Because once you admit that there are benefits to drug use, you have to begin asking questions that no scientist can answer.

Questions like: Are the generic and abstract risks of using regulated MDMA worth it in order to help a hatemonger to experience compassion for his or her fellows? Is the abstract risk of empathogen use in general worth it given the fact that we live in a hate-filled world that is on the brink of nuclear destruction thanks to "fear of the other"? Is it okay to risk the use of psychedelics if the end goal is to appreciate a sunset for the first time in one's life? Is it okay for a senior in the early stages of dementia to use drugs like heroin and cocaine that have the potential to drastically improve mental cognition? Is it better for a suicidal person to use risky drugs than to die? Sadly, Americans are so biased against drugs that their implicit answer to that latter question appears to be "no." This is clear from the fact that no healthcare pundits involved in the assisted suicide debate see any connection between that topic and the fact that drug prohibition outlaws drugs that could improve the perceived quality of life and so make at least some people wish to live.

The best that the Drug Warrior can do in responding to these arguments is to deny that the kinds of drugs exist that could help bring about the beneficial results that I have indicated, and that denial on their part only serves to display their ignorance about drugs. But it is not my business here to bring them up to speed on pharmaceutical and ethnobotanical progress over the last 100 years (although I fear that one would have to have led a sheltered life indeed for my arguments not to recommend themselves on the grounds of common-sense psychology alone). My point is simply that the web is full of propaganda about drugs and will always be so until the mainstream stops living in a make-believe world in which drugs can have no benefits while they yet tell us that it is our duty as good patients to take a Big Pharma med every day of our lives.

Notes for essay entitled Lies, Damn Lies, and Drug War Statistics: what online drug data tells us about American society:

1: The Secret History of Coca Davis, Wade, Rolling Stone magazine, 2025 (up)

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The Partnership for a Drug Free America should be put on trial for having blatantly lied to Americans in the 1980s about drugs, while using our taxpayer money to do so!

Until prohibition ends, rehab is all about enforcing a Christian Science attitude toward psychoactive medicines (with the occasional hypocritical exception of Big Pharma meds).

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.

If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol slaughters. Drug prohibition is the real killer.

The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.

We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.

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.

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The most addictive drugs have a bunch of great uses, like treating pain and inspiring great literature. Prohibition causes addiction by making their use as problematic as possible and denying knowledge and choices. It's always wrong to blame drugs.

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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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Lies, Damn Lies, and Drug War Statistics

what online drug data tells us about American society

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend