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My review of Fentanyl Inc.

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 30, 2025



More Drug Bashing

Young Americans were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal in America. Drug prohibition is the problem 1 , not drugs. Ignorance is the problem, not drugs. Unregulated product is the problem, not drugs. Limited choice is the problem, not drugs. When we demonize drugs, we outlaw all positive uses (even for kids in hospice in India) and we bring about violence in inner cities and the end of the rule of law in Latin America. We militarize police forces around the world and outlaw religions. The Hindu religion owes its very existence to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. Drugs are not the problem: the problem is America's superstitious attitude about drugs. Dogmatic ignorance is evil, not the inanimate objects that we call drugs.

All drugs have potential positive uses. To outlaw them is idiotic. We outlaw human progress when we do so. Even cyanide has beneficial uses.

The Fentanyl Crisis is really a Prohibition crisis. Drug prohibition incentivized bad actors to seek to profit from public ignorance and the lack of choice that our own drug policies have brought about.

Besides, if Fentanyl kills, then Alcohol MASSACRES. I wonder how many people read this book while "throwing back a cold one."

The above review was uploaded to Downpour.com today. At least I think it was. After I clicked "submit," the form page cleared my data and reloaded with the words "Be the first to submit a review." I assume that this is just their ham-fisted way of implying that my review must be "vetted" before being posted, but who knows? I fear that Downpour is going to censor my philosophical criticism of the book. That would be all too typical.

This is the fate that my reviews suffer at the hands of the philosophically challenged techies at Archive.org, who refuse to allow me to criticize the raison d'etre for the National Institute on Drug Abuse -- which, in a sane country, would either not exist or else be called the National Institute on Drug Use, in which case they would teach safe and beneficial drug use and stop their politically motivated attempts to prove that psychoactive substances can lead to nothing but death and sorrow. NIDA 2 dogmatically ignores all positive effects of drug use and all negative effects of drug criminalization.




Author's Follow-up:

April 30, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




This is just the kind of review that philosophically challenged techies love to censor. They do not understand the concept of meta criticism. My arguments against such books as these have to do with the very way in which they approach their subject matter, in this case by treating Fentanyl as the incarnation of evil and thereby implying that drugs are the problem. We live in a make-believe world today, with bad guys custom-created by drug law. Instead of sating our anger on those who deal in Fentanyl , why are we not sating our anger on the guys who incentivized such activity in the first place? Why do we not confiscate the houses of Drug Warriors and lock them up and deny them work in America until such time as they renounce their ruinous prohibitionist mindset which has created all this suffering in the first place? Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal in America. That only happened thanks to drug prohibitionists: those who refuse to teach safe use, who refuse to regulate product. It was their refusal to leave well enough alone back in 1914 by outlawing the time-honored poppy plant which led to the creation of the readily marketable opiate alternatives that we demonize today.

The world will always be full of psychoactive substances -- with or without the help of chemists. This is a fact of life. Americans need to grow up and accept the fact. Instead, we have tried to "save white suburban young people" while throwing all wise and deserving drug users under the bus (like kids in hospice and the desperately depressed, whose brains we have to fry with ECT because we have hysterically outlawed everything that could cheer them up in a trice).

Like the Drug War itself, the book sets up a make-believe morality: users good, dealers bad; when actually Nancy Reagan got one thing right. If drug use is really bad, then it is absurd to consider drug users to be helpless shills without moral self-agency while yet considering dealers to be morally challenged monsters. This is not to say that we should blame drug users, merely to do them the credit of thinking of them as real human beings that make real choices. Rather than trying to whitewash their decisions by blaming everything on "dealers," we should be recognizing the "meta" problem, the overarching problem, which is that drug prohibition started this whole ball of counterproductive outcomes rolling in the first place. It was drug prohibition that put users in harm's way and incentivized dealers to meet a marketplace demand. It is the drug policy that we should be detesting, not those who have been purposefully set up to fail thanks to that policy.

America needs to grow up.

Some readers will say something like: "You would not say this if your loved one died of Fentanyl 3 ."

To which I say: "What about the young people who died of alcohol -- what about the 178,000 deaths per year in the USA alone? And yet no one is demonizing alcohol today. To the contrary, Jim Beam runs ads on prime-time television depicting happy young people conspicuously toting bottles of bourbon around in public with their friends."

It is America's politicized hatred of drugs that is the problem, not drugs. To be anti-drugs is to be anti-human progress and pro-censorship: it is to be in favor of the mass incarceration 4 of minorities. It is to ignore two blatantly obvious facts: that drug use has many amazing "upsides" and that drug prohibition has endless horrible "downsides."

No drug is bad in and of itself. All psychoactive substances have potential uses for some person, at some dose, at some time, in some circumstance. It is the height of anti-scientific madness to judge drugs in advance and to decide by legislative fiat that they shall be used by no one for any reason whatsoever -- merely because they can be misused by the white American young people whom we refuse to educate about safe use and for whom we refuse to regulate product. We need to wake up and realize that we have brought this miscalled opiate dystopia upon ourselves. We have known for a century now that liquor prohibition brought machine-gun fire to American streets and turned law-abiding Americans into criminals. And yet we knowingly pursue the same policy today with regard to all of liquor's less dangerous competitors. We need to stop whining about the problems and recognize that we ourselves are causing them with our childish and superstitious drug attitudes and the violence-causing laws that they have inspired.











Notes for essay entitled My review of Fentanyl Inc.:

1: Drug Prohibition is the Problem, not Drugs: what the movers and shakers get wrong in the drug re-legalization debate DWP (up)
2: Blocks, NIDA. 2016. “How the NIDA Blocks Marijuana Research over and Over.” Cannabis.net. 2016. https://cannabis.net/blog/opinion/how-the-nida-blocks-marijuana-research-over-and-over. (up)
3: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
4: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)




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Ten Tweets

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The book "Plants of the Gods" is full of plants and fungi that could help addicts and alcoholics, sometimes in the plant's existing form, sometimes in combinations, sometimes via extracting alkaloids, etc. But drug warriors need addiction to sell their prohibition ideology.

Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.

I hated the show "The Apprentice," because it taught a cynical and hate-filled lesson about the proper way to "get ahead" in the world. I saw Trump as a menace back then, long before he started declaring that American elections were corrupt before the very first vote was cast!

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!

Wade Davis writes that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. What about the 49,000 that commit suicide every year because we have outlawed drugs that could cheer them up!!!

If Americans cannot handle the truth about drugs, then there is something wrong with Americans, not with drugs.

AI is inherently plagiaristic technology. It tells us: "Hey, guys, look what I can do!" -- when it should really be saying, "Hey, guys, look how I stole all your data and repackaged it in such a way as to make it appear that I am the genius, not you!"

Drug prohibition is the perfect racist crime. It brought gunfire to inner cities, yet those who seek to end the gunfire pretend that drug prohibition has nothing to do with it.

Had the FDA been around in the Indus Valley 3,500 years ago, there would be no Hindu religion today, because they would have found some potential problem with the use of soma.

Was looking for natural sleeping aids online. Everyone ignores the fact that all the stuff that REALLY works has been outlawed! We live in a pretend world wherein the outlawed stuff no longer even exists in our minds! We are blind to our lost legacy regarding plant medicines!


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

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Diary of a Drug Fiend

This is the only full-cast recording of Aleister Crowley's 1922 classic paeon to common sense. It is the first book -- and so far almost the only book -- to stake out a philosophy of drug use that is compatible with human freedom, one in which we learn to use drugs as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. This recording was produced by the Drug War Philosopher and your purchases help support his effort to push back against the tragically counterproductive policy of drug prohibition, in the name of human freedom and of humanity's right to heal.

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