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.
Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.
What attracts me about "drug dealers" is that they are NOT interested in prying into my private life. What a relief! With psychiatry, you are probed for pathological behavior on every office visit. You are a child. To the "drug dealer," I am an adult at least.
By reading "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," I begin to understand why I encounter a wall of silence when I write to authors and professors on the subject of "drugs." The mere fact that the drug war inspires such self-censorship should be grounds for its immediate termination.
Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks. People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took your prohibition to accomplish that! Stop arresting, start teaching safe use!
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.
Scientists are not the experts on psychoactive medicines. The experts are painters and artists and spiritualists -- and anyone else who simply wants to be all they can be in life. Scientists understand nothing of such goals and aspirations.
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.
Drug warriors have harnessed the perfect storm. Prohibition caters to the interests of law enforcement, psychotherapy, Big Pharma, demagogues, puritans, and materialist scientists, who believe that consciousness is no big "whoop" and that spiritual states are just flukes.
That's why I created the satirical Partnership for a Death Free America. It demonstrates clearly that drug warriors aren't worried about our health, otherwise they'd outlaw shopping carts, etc. The question then becomes: what are they REALLY afraid of? Answer: Free thinkers.
In the 2015 movie "No Escape," the only place that was safe from anti-American hysteria was an opium den. How ironic that the U.S. forced Iran to outlaw opium.
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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