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Open Letter to Nathan at TheDEA.org

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 13, 2022



There is nothing more despicable to me than a website that takes the DEA seriously, as if it were a valid institution in a democratic and freedom-loving society. Nothing could be further from the truth. To the contrary, the DEA should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for lying about godsend medicines. The DEA promulgates the following lie: that a substance that can be misused, even in theory, by young white Americans when used at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason, and that any and all viciousness is legitimate to enforce that anti-scientific rule. They are part of a militarized Drug War establishment that trashes and confiscates houses in furtherance of this inhumane doctrine.

Here is just one sample of such perfidy, as quoted from "Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State" by Richard Lawrence Miller:


"Relying solely on the word of a paid informant who later explained he had been so drunk he could not remember the right address, a Boston drug squad raided the home of a retired Methodist preacher and chased him into his bedroom, where three police officers pushed him to the floor:

'Boston's coroner said it was a heart attack, brought on by sudden and extreme stress. Rev. Accelyne Williams, a slender 75-year-old man, spent his final moments doubled over, vomiting, his hands bound behind his back with a tight strip of plastic, totally confused about what was happening to him. ... He had literally been scared to death by shouting, storming anti-drug troops.'

No drugs were found.1"







Author's Follow-up:

April 24, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




Of course, even had "drugs" been found, the raid would have been unconscionable Gestapo tactics. This fact would have been blazingly clear to Americans over a hundred years ago, but I actually have to explain why this is so to modern Americans, so brainwashed have they become thanks to the full-court press of cradle-to-grave Drug War propaganda, chiefly in the form of the almost complete media censorship of all reports of positive uses for the drugs that we have been taught to hate. Suffice it to say here that the Hindu religion owes its very existence to the use of a drug that inspired and elated2, from which single fact alone it follows that it is a crime against humanity to outlaw drugs that inspire and elate. Then, too, the fact is that drug use is fundamentally a kind of self-medication3, an attempt to manage one's own psychological health, and it is bizarre and hateful to destroy people's lives merely because politicians have decided to second guess our health decisions.

One despairs of teaching brainwashed westerners to understand the enormous consequence-riddled folly of the whole drug-war undertaking. It is not just wrong in parts -- it represents a wrong way of looking at the world. Should any bamboozled reader wish to deprogram themselves, however, I would recommend my four-essay series entitled After the Drug War4 -- in which I attempt to describe a peaceful and free post-prohibition world in which personal and academic freedom rules and in which the enemy is ignorance, not drugs.

Prohibition is the killer, and always has been. We think that prohibition ended in 1933, but that is not true. America never ended prohibition. Instead, we safeguarded liquor consumption with a Constitutional amendment, while giving the prohibitionists in the temperance movement the consolation prize of all time: the right to outlaw every single one of liquor's less dangerous competitors.

The failure of westerners to see through this ruse calls into question the ability of the ironically named species Homo sapiens to "progress," as philosophers have always tacitly assumed that it could and would. Could it be that the propaganda age, the Internet and the power of advertising have combined with oligarchy in such a way that human beings are mere puppets in the hands of those who control the flow of information? It is so easy for the powerful to do this. They do not even have to lie to us: they merely have to give pride of place to news stories and features that seem to portray drug use in a bad light -- and simply fail to publish any inconvenient truths, like the fact that the Hindu religion was inspired by a drug5, or that Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius enjoyed opium , or that phenethylamines can give the suicidal a reason to live6, or that even coca and opium 7 can do so without necessarily addicting the user8, etc. etc. etc., and that dependence, when voluntary, is not the worst thing in the world in any case, as 1 in 4 American women tacitly admit by taking a Big Pharma 9 10 med every day of their life11. And what if somebody should happen to find God in nature through the advised and safe use of morphine 12 ?13 "No problem," says the oligarch: "we simply will not publish such stories. Problem solved."

Conclusion? I fear that Schopenhauer "did not know from pessimism." He makes it clear in many an "aside" that he believes that truth will ultimately triumph, but that seems hard to believe in light of a Drug War whose corrupt principles and censorship have so Nazified American society, to the point that even the outrageous death of the Methodist preacher mentioned above fails to motivate us to abolish the DEA and to reboot drug policy in favor of education and common sense. If anybody has a right to pessimism, it is the rare individual who has seen through the lies and misdirection that constitute America's criminal war on godsend medicines, aka the Drug War, aka the Scorched Earth triumph of the fearmongering ideology of the prohibitionist -- that Chicken Little vampire whose Pyrrhic ideology is alive and well long after we assumed it had been vanquished by the vox populi of white beer drinkers.

This is why I believe that the only way to de-Nazify the world once and for all and to return self-agency to the individual is to drive a stake through the heart of the prohibition ideology itself, to acknowledge it as the absurd doctrine that it is. For it is based on a racist and anti-scientific lie: namely, the idea that a substance that can be misused, even in theory, by a white American young person when used at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason -- no, not even for the purposes of religious insight and worship14, no, not even for the pain relief of kids in hospice in India who go without morphine 15 thanks to our American demonization of that drug16. This is a mad doctrine that is destined to produce a police state in direct proportion as we act according to its absurd precepts17.

In an enlightened world, we would replace the fearmongering billboards that read "Fentanyl 18 kills" and "Oxy kills" and "Crack kills" (etc. etc. etc.) with billboards that read "Prohibition kills" and "Ignorance kills19" and "Racist drug laws kill." In such a world, we would stop protecting the white suburban young people whom we refuse to educate about drugs by using minority children in inner cities as human shields: for that is precisely what we do when we incentivize gun violence 20 with drug prohibition in the name of protecting white kids (see also The Bill Clinton Fallacy21).









Notes for essay entitled Open Letter to Nathan at TheDEA.org:

1: Miller, Richard L. 1996. Drug Warriors and Their Prey. Praeger. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/594749.Drug_Warriors_and_Their_Prey. (up)
2: How the Drug War Outlaws Religion DWP (up)
3: Restoring our Right to Self-Medication: how drug warriors work together with the medical establishment to prevent us from taking care of our own health DWP (up)
4: After the Drug War DWP (up)
5: How the Drug War Outlaws Religion DWP (up)
6: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
7: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
8: Smart Uses for Opium and Coca DWP (up)
9: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
10: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
11: The War on Drugs and the Psychiatric Pill Mill DWP (up)
12: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
13: “Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (Text-02A).” 2026. Eapoe.Org. 2026. https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/raggeda.htm. (up)
14: How the Drug War Outlaws Religion DWP (up)
15: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
16: Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the Impact of Drug Policies on Young People Barrett, Damon, IDEBATE Press, 2011 (up)
17: Drug Warriors and their Prey DWP (up)
18: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
19: Fentanyl does not kill! Prohibition does! DWP (up)
20: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
21: The Bill Clinton Fallacy DWP (up)




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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.

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Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.

The media called out Trump for fearmongering about immigrants, but the media engages in fearmongering when it comes to drugs. The latest TV plot line: "white teenage girl forced to use fentanyl!" America loves to feel morally superior about "drugs."

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If we encourage folks to use antidepressants daily, there is nothing wrong with them using heroin daily. A founder of Johns Hopkins used morphine daily and he not only survived, but he thrived.

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