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Notes from Underground, Drug War Edition

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 1, 2026



I was planning to write an essay on “The Politics of Ecstasy” by Timothy Leary today, citing numerous passages to show that the man was far more than a grandstander. I was also going to copy the contents of my satirical site called Partnership for a Death Free America to my Substack. God love me, I was even going to create an original newspaper-style crossword puzzle for you lot on the subject of America’s hateful drug attitudes. It would have done your heart good just to see it. But then I made the mistake of looking at my stats and the wind just went right out of my sails. Six subscribers. Six. They say that I should be posting notes, and before I know it, I’ll have subscribers up the wazoo on Substack. “Okay, fine,” I think to myself, “I’ll try to remain patient.” And yet post as I might, I can find almost no one online who seems to resonate with my position, namely, that we should use drugs as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.

I can find Libertarians who think that we have the right to drugs based on utilitarian grounds, and plenty of healthcare professionals and bestselling journalists who think that we need to get away from dependence-causing meds — yet no one but myself seems to be putting the two thoughts together, concluding that we need to get away from meds, not while becoming drug-scorning Christian Scientists, but while re-establishing the rights of human beings to access the natural medicines that grow at their very feet.

So I got distracted this morning. I began looking for ways to open a whole bunch of apparently very heavy eyelids. In addition to adding audio files to my essays, I was canvassing the possibility of turning those audio files into videos with the help of AI, under the theory that people who demur at reading philosophical treatises might yet deign to listen to them while being entertained with the bauble of a little whimsical eye candy from the Getty’s Images film archive. So I started experimenting with the audio-to-video app at the Pictory AI website — an activity which began hopefully enough, but I soon discovered that I lacked the motivation to really roll up my sleeves insofar as I was still obsessing about the non-result in the stats department.

Speaking of which, while researching Substack, I saw a teaser graphic for a YouTube tutorial with a big arrow pointing to the number 23, apparently as a subscriber total on the platform, and then featuring the words “What to do about this!” And I’m thinking to myself, “What do you mean, ‘What to do about this?’ I’m jealous of anyone who has as many as 23 Substack subscribers! The real question is, how does an apparent one-off like myself reach such a milestone in the first place? Let’s deal with first things first before we start talking about the 1,000-plus subscribers that the Substack influencers assure me anyone can garner in three months with the least bit of effort.

It’s not like I don’t have a niche. I know of literally no one else who is writing about my subjects of choice from my perspective, that of a med-dependent patient for life who is not willing to go gently into that good night without giving the medical establishment a good tongue-lashing for disempowering me in this way — for colluding with the inhumane policy of drug prohibition in order to deny me the right to heal. Someone connected with the medical field might have at least stood up in 1914 in Congress and said, “Whoa, fellas! It seems to me that, by outlawing erstwhile panaceas like opium and cocaine, we’re basically outlawing the right of people to heal! Am I right, gentlemen, or am I right?”

My first two weeks on this platform have been an eye-opener however. While searching for thematically similar Substacks, I realized for the first time how completely the “experts” today on mind and mood matters live in a world of make-believe, one in which drug prohibition and the substances that it outlaws simply do not exist. Almost everything that they say about the needs of the depressed might be correct enough in a world wherein there was literally no other biochemical option for those patients but Big Pharma meds, but when considered in the light of drug prohibition, the question is just begging to be asked: “Why are all of these endless well-paid professionals who claim to care so much about the depressed not protesting against drug prohibition on the grounds of their patients’ right to heal; indeed, on the grounds of their patients’ right not to BE patients in the first place?”

I would rather have people just peaceably show up here of their own accord, so to speak, after saying to themselves: “Oh, yes, you’re darn tootin’. I want the freedom to take care of my own health as well, and come to think of it, I am getting quite tired of seeing this ridiculously young doctor every three months of my life. In fact, do you know what? You GO, Brian. You go.” But if people aren’t going to show up willingly, I might have to start making some noise. I need to keep posting inconvenient questions in the many self-satisfied feeds about mental health on Substack, in which literally all of the credentialed pundits are reckoning without drug prohibition. I need to become a Socratic gadfly on the topic.

I’ve only been on the platform for two weeks and I’ve already got a list of mainstream psychologists whom I suspect are ghosting me on Substack, including Mark Horowitz, Neil Harper and Awais Aftab himself, a certified subscription superstar on Substack (which is highly annoying, by the way, that someone who reckons without drug prohibition can hold the healthcare community of our time in thrall like that). One pays a high price for committing the faux pas of bringing up drug prohibition in a discussion thread about mental health these days: one is kicked out of polite society. We patients are supposed to shut up and take our meds, after all — or at least to shut up. If anything can end our depression, trust them, the experts will be sure to tell us about it! We need to just return to our seats and pipe down, remembering that doctors know best when it comes to our mental and emotional needs.

One is reminded of the scene in “High Anxiety” when a mere patient (i.e., Mel Brooks) questions his psychiatrist’s call for a series of therapy sessions:

DR. THORNDYKE: But, Professor, is it really nece--

PROFESSOR LILLOMAN: It IS “nece”! I know what is “nece”! Don’t tell ME what’s “nece,” I tell YOU what’s “nece.”









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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




FDA drug approval is a farce when it comes to psychoactive medicine. The FDA ignores all the obvious benefits and pretends that to prove efficacy, they need "scientific" evidence. That's scientism, not science.

SSRIs are created based on the materialist notion that cures should be found under a microscope. That's why science is so slow in acknowledging the benefit of plant medicines. Anyone who chooses SSRIs over drugs like San Pedro cactus is simply uninformed.

They drive to their drug tests in pickup trucks with license plates that read "Don't tread on me." Yeah, right. "Don't tread on me: Just tell me how and how much I'm allowed to think and feel in this life. And please let me know what plants I can access."

The DEA is a Schedule I agency. It has no known positive uses.

Ann Lemke's case studies make the usual assumptions: getting free from addiction is a morality tale. No reference to how the drug war promotes addiction and how banned drugs could solve such problems. She does not say why daily SSRI use is acceptable while daily opium use is not. Etc.

Outlawing opium was the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief.

I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.

Trump's lies about America's voting process are typical NAZI and DRUG WAR strategy: raise mendacious doubts about whatever you want to destroy and keep repeating them. It's what Joseph Goebbels called "The Big Lie."

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

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.


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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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Book Cover

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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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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