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Listening to the Drug War

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 28, 2021



If the global capitalist system cannot allow plants to be legal, then there is something wrong with the global capitalist system, not with plants.

What's wrong with the system?

Update: June 01, 2025

Cynicism -- that refuses to see any good in spiritual states -- indeed that refuses to see any spiritual states at all, referring all good feelings to "getting high."

Scientism -- that associates plant-induced mystical states with unscientific tribal life, insisting instead that folks take scientifically approved medications developed on reductive criteria, ignoring all such obvious benefits of substance use as ecstasy and the psychologically beneficial anticipation of the same.

Racism -- that, consciously and/or subconsciously, seeks to fashion laws that impact minorities, the racism being evident in the fact that white Anglo Saxon drugs of tobacco and alcohol receive zero state punishment, while far less dangerous substances which are associated with non-whites and foreigners are demonized and criminalized to the point that Anglos even travel overseas in an attempt to eradicate such plant medicine from the face of the earth.



Author's Follow-up:

June 01, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




Another problem with the status quo is the Drug Warrior's inability to wait for delayed gratification. The Drug Warriors never look ahead at the long-term totalitarian consequences of their drug laws. Like a blissful canine, the Drug Warrior lives forever in the present, wielding drug laws to achieve immediate social goals, totally oblivious of the consequences of their principle-free policymaking. What? You say that drug panic has destroyed the first and fourth amendments to the Constitution? "Who cares?," quoth the Drug Warrior, "our drug laws have helped us to cut down on minority voting in the here and now, and that is all that matters to us." And if the Drug Warriors were honest, they would add: "Besides, who needs democracy, anyway, when rich white people should be running the show?"

For more on this topic, see The Drug War Mindset.

If we "listen to the Drug War," we will realize that it is based on the following absurd idea:

If a psychoactive substance can cause problems for white American young people when used at one dose for one reason, then it must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.


This is nothing less than a bar on human progress. It is a racist and xenophobic attempt to withhold medicines from everybody in the world merely because immature Americans might find a way to misuse them. This outcome is especially galling considering that American Drug Warriors refuse "on principle" to educate their citizens about the safest and wisest methods for using the psychoactive medicines with which we are surrounded as human beings. It is as if a bunch of ignorant juvenile delinquents had injured themselves while playing with knives and then blamed their injuries on the knives themselves rather than on their own ignorance about knives. And so these delinquents become politicians and craft laws to outlaw knives, not simply in America, but around the world, as if to say, "If our uneducated white American young people cannot use these things safely, then clearly nobody in the world can." A more cavalier attitude could not be imagined. America wants to "save" its own undereducated citizens from the dangers of drugs by depriving the entire world of all the benefits of using them.

For more on this selfish and massively counterproductive idiocy, see my essay entitled The Bill Clinton Fallacy.








read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




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.

The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.

Someone should stand outside Jefferson's estate and hand out leaflets describing the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello to confiscate poppy plants. That raid was against everything Jefferson stood for. The TJ Foundation DISHONORED JEFFERSON and their visitors should know that!

To say that taking SSRIs daily is better than using opium daily is a value judgement, not a scientific one.

The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.

All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.

"Chemical means of peering into the contents of the inner mind have been universally prized as divine exordia in man’s quest for the beyond... before the coarseness of utilitarian minds reduced them to the status of 'dope'." -- Eric Hendrickson

The reasons that people use drugs are psychologically obvious. Academics gaslight us on this topic and invent new diseases to explain away our desire to live large.

If opium were legal, then most of the nostrums peddled by drug stores today would be irrelevant. (No wonder the drug war has staying power!)

Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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Book Cover

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

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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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