Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass
blog icon orange rss icon with stylized radio waves bird icon for twitter bird icon for twitter substack icon


back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow


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)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Drug warriors blame all of the problems that they cause on "drugs" and then insist that the entire WORLD accept their jaundiced view of the natural bounty that God himself told us was good.

The government causes problems for those who are habituated to certain drugs. Then they claim that these problems are symptoms of an illness. Then folks like Gabriel Mate come forth to find the "hidden pain" in "addicts." It's one big morality play created by drug laws.

Americans outlaw drugs and then insist that those drugs did not have much to offer in any case. It's like I took away your car and then told you that car ownership was overrated.

The drug war is a whole wrong way of looking at the world. It tells us that substances can be judged "up" or "down," which is anti-scientific and blinds us to endless beneficial uses.

Richard Evans Schultes seems to have originated the harebrained idea (since used by the US Supreme Court to suppress new religions) that you have no right to use drugs in a religious ritual if you did not grow up in a society that had such practices. What tyrannical idiocy!

The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.

The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?

Med-dependent patients of the world, unite -- to end drug prohibition, that is. You have nothing to lose but your prescription bottles and your status as a ward of the healthcare state.

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."

When we outlaw drugs, we are outlawing far more than drugs. We are suppressing freedom of religion and academic research.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow
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.

Purchase Your Copy



No cookies, no ads paid for by amoral and immoral billionaires (or trillionaires).


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)