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Progressives and Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 23, 2025



Mark Twain had the good sense to delay the publication of his controversial autobiography, written with his "whole frank mind," until after his decease. But then he had a readership and therefore had something to lose by being fully honest during his lifetime. I, on the other hand, have no readership to speak of and so I may as well risk offending people upfront, the more so in that I hold with Schopenhauer's doctrine that philosophy should be about truth and not about diplomacy for diplomacy's sake.

Let me begin, however, by affirming that I believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. If the reader keeps that in mind while perusing the following, it may soften the blow of my politically incorrect outlook when it comes to specifics.

My problem is not with progressivism per se. My problem is specifically with progressivism in the age of the Drug War. For I see progressives as arguing for explicit rights that have never existed before in human history - the right for transgender adults to be accepted, not as people, but as transgender adults, and the rights of young children to decide in advance about their gender identity or lack thereof. Children. Meanwhile, these same progressives ignore the evils of drug prohibition, a policy which has denied us rights that have always been available to everybody in the past: namely, our right to Mother Nature's bounty and the medicines inspired thereby, or, to put it another way, our right to take care of our own health without a "by your leave" from government. It is as if the world is careening down whitewater rapids in a dangerously unbalanced raft and the progressive is decrying the fact that the seating arrangement in the boat reflects institutional sexism. There may be some truth to that claim, of course, but surely the big story now is that society is careening toward a waterfall, not that the seating arrangement during the descent could be theoretically traced to institutional biases. In other words, progressives seem to have lost the ability to prioritize societal concerns.

Keep in mind, however, that progressives are in good company. Academia is equally blind to the unprecedented denial of basic rights implicit in drug prohibition. Take the academic paper by Gabriel Ivbijaro published in 2024 entitled "A Global Agenda for Dignity and Health: a personal opinion.1" Gabriel never mentions the fact that drug prohibition has denied me the right to take care of my own mental and emotional states and yet he presumes to write on the subject of health and dignity? Surely, Gabriel has missed the gorilla in the room, the fact that I have been stripped of all dignity the moment that I am made a ward of the healthcare state thanks to the wholesale outlawing of everything that could help me, psychologically speaking.

My point here is that progressives and academics may be raising valid points - but their blindness to the super obvious outrage of drug prohibition renders everything they say suspect. One has to conclude either that they are cowards, afraid of running afoul of Drug War ideology, or that they fail to see the abnegation of basic American principles implicit in drug prohibition: our right to access Mother Nature, our right to treat our own mental and mood states without interference from government.

This is the problem with both the right and the left in America today: they fail to fight for the most basic time-honored principles. Both the right and the left ignore our right to Mother Nature and our right to take care of our own health. The right does this because they do not believe in principles but rather in outcomes. They have no belief in Jeffersonian freedoms. They believe in bully politics and end results, not principles. George Bush is the poster child for this attitude with his scornful defiance of international law in arresting Manuel Noriega in 1989. Such politicians never consider the long-term consequences of their indifference to principles, forgetting that if the US can ignore established norms today in dealing with Panama, so can other countries eventually ignore such principles in dealing with the United States. That is the problem with the right in general: they have no interest in the rights of future generations, they only want solutions that work NOW and to hell with all principles. This is why they do not champion the environment, because they want to make all the money they can NOW and to hell with the rights of future generations for breathable air and unpolluted landscapes.

The left, for its part, is blind to principle as well, but for different reasons; instead of restoring our most basic rights, our right to care for our own health, their interest is in creating exotic new rights. I am not opining here on the propriety of any of these new rights. My point is that basic rights should be afforded to all people AS PEOPLE -- rather than as transgender people or as homosexuals or bisexuals, etc. This latter way of looking at the world necessarily entails an endless creation of new rights in the future, as people imagine new ways of "being in the world." As much as I hate the divisive politics of the insurrectionists, this is surely one of the reasons for their recent triumphs in American politics: the fact that progressives have set America on a course of constantly expanding "rights," many of which can be disputed as inappropriate by people of good will. This constant proliferation of new rights would be unnecessary if we assigned rights to all people AS PEOPLE, which is what the Declaration of Independence was all about. The implication, moreover, of creating all these new rights is that no one has rights until their specific social or cultural group has been explicitly recognized as having rights in some legal document. This is clearly not what Jefferson had in mind for America. We are given rights because we are human beings: the question of our sexual orientation or our attitude toward gender politics has nothing to do with it. People with green eyes have these Jeffersonian rights as well, but we do not need to rewrite the Constitution to specifically acknowledge that fact.

Yes, we need to fight biases, but it is one thing to demand tolerance for various lifestyles, it is quite another to require that those lifestyles be accepted as normal, institutionally speaking.

The question of fighting discrimination is a real one, of course, and involves philosophically nuanced arguments that are not germane to this essay; my point here is that we should not have to reinvent the constitutional wheel for every new sexual "norm" that comes our way, constantly restating the fact that "yes, the Constitution applies to folks with THIS sexual predilection or belief as well!" Of course it does. Why? Because we have rights, not by virtue of our sexual inclinations, but by virtue of the fact that we are human beings!

There is a knock-on problem with this progressive focus on new rights. It empowers Drug Warriors to dismiss the call for drug re-legalization 2 itself as one of these exotic rights of progressives, thereby disguising the fact that the right to Mother Nature's bounty is not some newfangled right at all but rather a time-honored norm that has been abandoned in an unprecedented fashion by racist American politicians.

Again, my goal here is not to discuss the merits of any of the new rights proposed by progressives; my goal is to point out that progressives - like almost everyone else in America - are completely unable to sensibly prioritize their concerns: otherwise they would be fighting to restore our most basic right to control our own mind and mood - rather than ignoring the 6,400-pound gorilla of drug prohibition entirely and focusing instead on the creation of new and unprecedented rights based on sexual proclivities and metaphysical beliefs about the concept of gender.









Notes for essay entitled Progressives and Drugs:

1: Ivbijaro, Gabriel. 2024. “A Global Agenda for Dignity and Health: A Personal Opinion.” Academia Mental Health and Well-Being 1 (3). https://doi.org/10.20935/mhealthwellb7361. (up)
2: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)




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Laughing gas inspired the philosophy of William James. Outlawing N20 is outlawing academic freedom. Laughing gas should be available for the suicidal. Drug prohibition is not a victimless crime.

I looked up the company: it's all about the damn stock market and money. The FDA outlaws LSD until we remove all the euphoria and the visions. That's ideology, not science. Just relegalize drugs and stop telling me how much ecstasy and insight I can have in my life!!

Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.

When we place the FDA in charge of deciding whether a psychoactive drug should be re-legalized or not, we are asking them to decide on things like the relative importance of appreciating a sunset, a task for which the FDA has no expertise whatsoever.

Let's arrest drug warriors, confiscate their houses, and deny them jobs in America -- until such time as they renounce their belief in the demonstrably ruinous policy of substance prohibition.

I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.

A company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.

Q: Where can you find almost-verbatim copies of the descriptions of religious experiences described by William James? A: In descriptions of user reports of "trips" on drugs ranging from coca to opium, from MDMA to laughing gas.

If daily drug use and dependency are okay, then there's no logical or scientific reason why I can't smoke a nightly opium pipe.

Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?


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