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Philosopher Triumphs over Totally Unnecessary Depression!

publishes five incisive rebuttals to five bamboozled Substack notes!

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 7, 2026



You know, it's a good thing that I don't use words like "crap"; otherwise I would tell you that today has been an absolute "crap" day. Fortunately, my mother raised me better than that. I don't care how unnecessarily depressed I've been today thanks to drug prohibition, I am NOT going to tell you that it's been a "crap day." That's just not me. I don't care how many people have ignored me and basically told me to shut up and take my meds over the past six months, that doesn't matter either. I don't care how many psychologists and psychiatrists may have ghosted me over the last seven years. In fact, do you know what? I don't even care that Robert Whitaker himself at Mad in America thinks that my life story should remain a secret to his Substack admirers, on account of journalists and credentialed doctors are the experts on what I need as a med-dependent patient, not myself, thank me very much. No, I don't care about any of that. None of that, as bad as it may seem to rational folk like you and I, can ever justify the use of such a vulgar asseveration as "I've had a crap day today."

In fact, do you know what? I don't even care that absolutely everyone has ignored my Cassandra-like warnings that it is madness to discuss state-assisted suicide for the depressed without also discussing the state's prohibition of drugs that could make one wish to live! A crap day, indeed. It's not gonna happen.

Still, I will say this: It's a good job that Richard P. messaged me this morning with some insights on drug prohibition or I might have had to write off the entire day as unproductive rather than writing the four responses to Substack notes that I subsequently posted below. For, just between you and I, I was feeling a bit down today... which, of course, always makes me mad when I reflect how unnecessary that feeling is given what I know about the existence of psychoactive medicines. It is at such times as this that drug prohibition for me becomes a very personal thing -- it is as if drug prohibitionists had crawled right up inside my skin to ensure that my physiology remains as unproductive as possible. And so it's like this: drug prohibition, from my point of view, is the most invasive kind of tyranny imaginable -- notwithstanding the childishly uninformed belief of the hoi polloi that drug prohibition is just a pain in the neck for hedonists.

Okay, it's not exactly War and Peace, but I was able to rise above my totally unnecessary depression today just long enough to publish the following four responses to Substack "notes." Reading such notes is always like listening to fingers scraping across a chalkboard for me, thanks to the fact that almost all pundits on drug-related matters are philosophically clueless. So just for fun today, I thought I'd include one of those old-school "irritation meters" above each particular note to show you just how close each one came to plucking my last and final nerve.



Things I never learned in four years of medical school: nutrition, resistance training science, sleep hygiene practice.


I can guarantee you that he also never learned about the glaringly obvious potential of outlawed medicines to benefit humanity.




We are at a point in history—not nearing it, but here—where everyone is going to have to decide if they are content to numb themselves and ruin their brains with an endless stream of Fentanyl-like digital slop or if they are going to fight for their humanity and touch grass and challenge themselves and create and contribute and love.


Fentanyl is only popular because Drug Warriors have outlawed Mother Nature and America refuses to educate about best practices in drug use. Instead, we’re waiting for human nature to change so that no one wants transcendence anymore, or literary inspiration, or philosophical insights a la William James. Please stop blaming human nature and the inanimate objects called drugs and start blaming our deadly drug policy that creates cartels and drug gangs out of whole cloth.




Would you support a federal ban on Sharia law in any U.S. state?


Sharia law already exists in the states. In Alabama, you can get 20 years in the penitentiary for possessing a mushroom. That is an example of Christian Science Sharia.




What did depression look like before antidepressants?


Depression is only a “thing” because we have outlawed literally all the substances that could end it in a trice. Self-interested doctors judged cocaine based only on worst-case scenarios, a way that they never judge anything else. No one asked what the depressed thought about cocaine. Sigmund Freud knew it was a godsend for many, but doctors fought tooth and nail to demonize the drug for their own financial interests, thereby turning one in four American women into wards of the healthcare state with dependence-causing “meds.”




How chronic THC use slowly drives you insane and what to do about it.


Anything can be shown to be deadly. That’s why it was such folly to outlaw Mother Nature in the first place. Suddenly, everybody can set themselves up as an expert on the habits of other people. How many are smoking and drinking while they read this indictment of a plant?

As GK Chesterton wrote:

“It is said that the Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things. And there is no escape for the hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all."

FURTHER COMMENT AFTER SNIDE REPLY:

Jazz owes its existence to marijuana. The outlawing of the drug has destroyed the Justice system. There is no longer such a thing as a trial by the jury of your peers because of racists who demonized marijuana. Demonizing and outlawing marijuana has thrown so many people in jail that trials are a thing of the past. It’s all done by plea deals. All drugs have bad uses and good. It’s a plant, damn it. Re-legalize Mother Nature and people would have choices. Once they do, let them use the plants that they want. Stop wrecking the Bill of Rights and jailing minorities wholesale.









read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Musk vies with his fellow materialists in his attempt to diss humans as insignificant. But we are not insignificant. The very term "insignificant" is a human creation. Consciousness rules. Indeed, consciousness makes the rules. Without us, there would only be inchoate particles.

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.

"All these anti-opium articles... are based upon the same model. They assume certain statements as existing and acknowledged facts which have never been proved to be such, and then proceed to draw deductions from those alleged facts." --William Brereton

My local community store here in the sticks sells Trump "dollar bills" at the checkout counter. I don't know what's worse: a president encouraging insurrection or an electorate that does not see that as a problem.

Americans believe scientists when they say that drugs like MDMA are not proven effective. That's false. They are super effective and obviously so. It's just that science holds entheogenic medicines to the standards of reductive materialism. That's unfair and inappropriate.

What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.

How would we even KNOW that outlawed drugs have no positive uses? We first have to incorporate them in a sane, empathic and creative way to find that out, and the drug war makes such a sensible approach absolutely impossible.

People talk about how dangerous Jamaica is -- but no one reminds us that it is all due to America's Drug War. Yes, cannabis and psilocybin are legal there, but plenty of drugs are not, and even if they were, their illegality elsewhere would lead to fierce dealer rivalry.

Laughing gas is the substance that gave William James his philosophy of reality. He concluded from its use that what we perceive is just a fraction of reality writ large. Yet his alma mater (Harvard) does not even MENTION laughing gas in their bio of the man.

All of our problems with opioids and opiates could have been avoided had the busybody Chicken Littles in America left well enough alone and let folks continue to smoke regulated opium peaceably in their own homes.


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






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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

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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