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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

against the hateful war on US




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

Someday the world will realize that Freud's real achievement was his discovery of the depression-busting power of cocaine.

Americans HATE big government -- and yet they have no problem with government using drug prohibition to control their pain relief and how and how much they can think and feel in this life.

There are no recreational drugs. Even laughing gas has rational uses because it gives us a break from morbid introspection. There are recreational USES of drugs, but the term "recreational" is often used to express our disdain for users who go outside the healthcare system.

Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.

I've always wondered why we don't just let heroin users be -- or better yet, re-legalize drugs and give them choices. Why are they punished for using heroin daily while we praise 1 in 4 women for taking an even more dependence-causing drug every day of their life?

Videos about science and psilocybin are funny. They show nerds trying to catch up with common sense.

Just think how much money bar owners in the Old West would have saved on restoration expenses if they had served MDMA instead of whiskey.

Irony of ironies, that the indignant 19th-century hatred of liquor should ultimately result in the outlawing of virtually every mind-affecting substance on the planet EXCEPT for liquor.

Oregon's drug policy is incoherent and cruel. The rich and healthy spend $4,000 a week on psilocybin. The poor and chemically dependent are thrown in jail, unless they're on SSRIs, in which case they're congratulated for "taking their meds."


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.

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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Diary of a Drug Fiend

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