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O Say Can You See

what the drug war's doing to you and me

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

November 3, 2024



Click the audio link above to listen to 'O Say Can You See.'
45 RPM record, O Say Can You See? by The Drug War Philosopher
Did you know that the Drug War Philosopher is actually the lead singer for Danny and the Drug Warriors? Here's their first Billboard Top 1000 hit!






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Tune into Drug War radio, spinning the platters that matter in the war against America's childish attitude about godsend substances!



Drug War Radio













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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Drug warriors abuse the English language.

Almost all of today's magazine articles about human psychology should come with the following disclaimer: "This article was written from the standpoint of Drug War ideology, which holds that outlawed substances can have no beneficial uses whatsoever."

Wade Davis wrote in Rolling Stone that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. SO WHAT?! 178,000 people die from alcohol every year in America alone.

Big pharma drugs are designed to be hard to get off. Doctors write glowingly of "beta blockers" for anxiety, for instance, but ignore that fact that such drugs are hard -- and even dangerous -- to get off. We have outlawed all sorts of less dependence-causing alternatives.

We've all been taught since grade school that human beings cannot use psychoactive medicines wisely. That is a defeatest lie. It's criminal to keep substances illegal that can awaken the mind and remind us of our full potential in life.

Thomas Szasz was not an extremist when it comes to drugs. The extremists are those who feel that psychiatrists know more about our mind and mood than we do.

The healthcare industry turns all the emotional downsides of drug prohibition into "illnesses."

David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.

I've found that no one thinks I "have standing" when I comment about drugs. I'm just a guy who's been turned into a patient for life thanks to drug prohibition. People think that the real experts are the doctors and scientists who profit from the status quo.

Self-medicating has always been the most basic of human rights, until the medical industry demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.


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..."

Purchase Your Copy
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.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is a proud sponsor of The Drug War Philosopher website @ abolishthedea.com.


Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP (up)