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Quotes against America's hateful War on Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 7, 2025



Jeepers, would you look at these web stats! With a bounce rate like mine, I must have been a kangaroo in a former life. But then let's not forget what I am up against. The U.S. government is spending billions of dollars a year to ensure that my common sense message about drugs will be unintelligible to the hoi polloi.

"The federal drug control budget in 2020 was $35.60 billion dollars."1


They are accomplishing this, of course, through the full-court press of Drug War propaganda, and above all through the ruthless censorship of all positive reports of drug use in the conglomerate-owned media of our times.

That said, I am not going to give up.

I am going to keep trying to convince you guys that prohibition is the problem 2 , not drugs, no matter how dogmatically you turn away from my pages and seek out websites that flatter your brainwashed beliefs instead. And you know what? I don't care HOW justifiably tired I might be right now. So there! I just don't care!

Take today, for instance. Many webmasters in my position would call it a day right now, at 4 p.m. local time, having just spent the last eight hours of their life struggling with complex php code in an effort to move their site to a new hosting service -- and, of course, running into endless highly discouraging problems as they attempt to do so. But not myself. Oh, no, no, no. I make no excuses, friends. Tired as I may well be (and indeed almost certainly am), I have decided to go the extra mile. To be specific, I have decided to confront you guys with some choice quotations from my growing collection of bombshell bon mots regarding the hateful war on us -- also known as the anti-indigenous war on plant medicine, or the War on Drugs.

No need to thank me, as tired as I probably am right now. It's my pleasure. Though you might have the goodness to hang around long enough to actually read this page in its entirety, rather than to join your probably bamboozled fellows in giving me the marsupial treatment.

Enough said? (Oh, it's so gratifying to chat informally like this with apparently reasonable people like yourself. It's so apparently relaxing, so almost certainly great!)

May I have the first quotation please, preferably in an hermetically sealed envelope? Now, let's see here. And I quote...

"Over the past two years [1998 to 2000] an agency of the Clinton White House, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), has secretly worked with all of the commercial television networks to broadcast anti-drug propaganda as part of the story lines of popular, prime time programs." 3


This is disgusting. It is shameless unabashed indoctrination on the part of the U.S. government. It is bad enough that the media blocks all reports of positive drug use, but the situation is far worse than that. The media works with government to demonize precisely the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions! Just take a look at the wildly diverse substances on the DEA's mendacious Schedule 1: they have nothing in common whatsoever except that all of them have the potential to inspire and elate. This is what politicians really fear: non-White and non-western ways of "being in the world." That was why they did not like opium 4 : because they feared that Chinese and white would become friends and -- gasp! -- maybe even intermarry! Our original Drug Warriors loathed nothing so much as so-called "miscegenation."

"The DARE program began in 1983 to educate children on resisting drugs. By 2003 it cost $230 million dollars and employed 50,000 police officers, but never showed promising results in reducing illegal drug use."5


Of course, DARE should not be trying to get people to resist drugs any more than they should be trying to get people to resist penicillin and aspirin. DARE is indoctrinating our kids in the drug-hating tenets of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science religion. It is an outrage -- but like most of the outrages caused by drug prohibition, Americans are blinded to the evil that is afoot here. It makes you wonder how much more trouble the Drug War has to cause before Americans denounce it. It has already led to the election of Donald Trump by throwing over a million minorities in jail and hence removing them from the voting rolls, officially or for all practical purposes.

Next citation, please.

"There has been a significant increase in cancer patients and survivors being unable to access their opioid prescriptions since 2016, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finalized opioid prescribing guidelines."6


This brings to mind another citation, that of Thomas Szasz on page 126 of his classic 1992 book entitled Our Right to Drugs:

"One of the most tragic and publicly least understood side effects of the War on Drugs is that so many sick Americans suffering from painful illnesses are systematically deprived of adequate doses of painkilling drugs because of physicians' well-founded fears of prescribing so-called controlled substances."7


Or, as Szasz observes somewhat more succinctly on page 67 of the same book:

"The laws that deny healthy people 'recreational' drugs also deny sick people 'therapeutic' drugs."8


Yet Americans are so bamboozled by the Drug War, so fearful of their own government on this topic, that they fear even having such a book in their home library. And who can blame them? If America does not wake up and smell the fascism, our government will eventually get around to finding the people who have purchased such an insolently and defiantly titled book and arrest them in the name of our poor little white children; for the Drug War is all about protecting white American young people from themselves -- the young people whom we refuse to educate -- thereby throwing all other demographics under the bus, including the depressed, the anxious, the religious seekers, the philosophers. I say nothing here of the tens of thousands of inner-city residents whose hometowns have been turned into deadly no-go zones thanks to the absurd practices of outlawing drugs based on their supposed effect on one single demographic -- the demographic that we refuse on principle to educate.

On what principle, you ask?

Answer: The paleolithic principle that tells us the following:

namely, that if a drug can cause a problem, even in theory, when used by a white American young person at one dose for one reason and in one circumstance, then that substance must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason in any circumstance! What absolute kneejerk idiocy. This is pure caveman, folks. Saying things like "Fentanyl 9 kills" is philosophically equivalent to shouting "Fire bad!" Both statements represent an attempt to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.

"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 10 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist."11


Are you not livid yet? Consider this additional citation from the Loud Cloud Health website already referenced above:

"About 80% of those incarcerated on federal drug charges are people of color and Latino."12


Eighty percent!

What's the rationale behind this outrage? Why, precisely the same rationale that is driving Trump's ongoing attempt to gerrymander voting districts across the country: the goal is to ensure that minorities, the disenfranchised and the poor have as little say in American government as possible.

The answer? We need a complete separation of corporate money and politics. As Merleau-Ponty wrote:

"We know full well the means which the powerful have at their disposal - precisely under the aegis of freedom of the press - to stir up currents of opinion and manifestations which paralyze a parliamentary majority."13


It is not enough to have a theoretically "free" press. We need a press that is free to ignore the deceptive, racist and xenophobic narratives favored by conservatives and billionaires -- in other words, a press that is free to ignore the opinions of their advertisers. One searches in vain these days for news stories that connect inner-city violence with the drug prohibition that so obviously caused it, or that connects the 60,000 disappearances in Mexico in the 21st century with the War on Drugs down there that so obviously brought those disappearances about14. One likewise searches in vain for stories retailing positive uses for drugs. This is all Nazi propaganda at its worst. It has handed American elections to a would-be fascist and yet most Americans are still as bamboozled as ever.

I might have tried to be more diplomatic in concluding this essay of mine, bless me, but then the people whom I am confronting here have almost certainly paged away long ago from the inconvenient truths that I have been espousing above. Thank goodness that some of us are not dissuaded from writing such home truths merely because their views happen to be incomprehensible to the brainwashed hoi polloi. Take me, for instance. Did I tell you that I spent eight hours earlier today trying to re-code my web pages so that they function properly on a new hosting platform? (I did? Really? Are you sure about that?) I could have easily called it quits after that coding work and gone downstairs to dish up that pasta dinner that I have been looking forward to all day, but did I do so? Of course not. That's just not me.

In fact, I will not so much as rise from my swivel chair until I have completed this essay with a quotation from Allen Ginsberg that says it all.

"A materialist consciousness is attempting to preserve itself from dissolution by restriction and persecution of experience of the transcendental. One day perhaps the earth will be dominated by the illusion of separate consciousness, the bureaucrats having triumphed in seizing control of all roads of communication with the divine and restricting traffic. But sleep and death cannot evade the great dream of being and the victory of the bureaucrats of illusion is only an illusion of their separate world of consciousness."15


Ta-da! I told you so! Some of us actually follow through on things that are important to them in life, thank you very much, no matter how tough a day they may have had prior to the arrival of 4 o'clock in the afternoon, local time.

Now I can finally put on my checkered chef's apron with a good conscience and dish up that pasta meal that I have been looking forward to.

As for that high bounce rate, who cares? In fact, do you know what? Feel free to call me Captain Kangaroo. At least I am going on record here for a deprogrammed futurity, telling our descendants that at least one American in the 21st century saw through the madness: at least one person saw that the real evil in American society was drug prohibition and not drugs.









Notes for essay entitled Quotes against America's hateful War on Drugs:

1: War on Drugs Statistics Forbes (up)
2: Drug Prohibition is the Problem, not Drugs: what the movers and shakers get wrong in the drug re-legalization debate DWP (up)
3: “How the White House and the Media Package Government Propaganda as Entertainment.” 2000. World Socialist Web Site. January 24, 2000. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2000/01/drug-j24.html. (up)
4: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
5: The War on Drugs: History and Facts Criminal Justice Programs (up)
6: Drug Policy Facts Drug Policy Facts (up)
7: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)
8: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)
9: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
10: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
11: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
12: War on Drugs Statistics Forbes (up)
13: “The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty : Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2021. Internet Archive. 2021. https://archive.org/details/essentialwriting0000merl/mode/2up. (up)
14: Mexico's war on drugs: More than 60,000 people 'disappeared' 2020 (up)
15: The Yage Letters Redux, edited by Oliver Harris Burroughs, William S, 2005 (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.

In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.

Until prohibition ends, rehab is all about enforcing a Christian Science attitude toward psychoactive medicines (with the occasional hypocritical exception of Big Pharma meds).

"Users" can be kept out of the workforce by the extrajudicial process of drug testing; they can have their baby taken from them, their house, their property -- all because they do not share the intoxiphobic attitude of America.

Psychedelics and entheogens should be freely available to all dementia patients. These medicines can increase neuronal plasticity and even grow new neurons. Besides, they can inspire and elate -- or do we puritans feel that our loved ones have no right to peace of mind?

Some outlawed drugs grow new neurons in the brain. To refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!

If media were free in America, you'd see documentaries about people using drugs wisely for a wide variety of praiseworthy purposes.

The DEA is gaslighting Americans, telling them that drugs with obvious benefits have no benefits whatsoever. Scientists collude in this lie thanks to their adherence to the emotion-scorning principles of behaviorism.

New article in Scientific American: "New hope for pain relief," that ignores the fact that we have outlawed the time-honored panacea. Scientists want a drug that won't run the risk of inspiring us.

There are hundreds of things that we should outlaw before drugs (like horseback riding) if, as claimed, we are targeting dangerous activities. Besides, drugs are only dangerous BECAUSE of prohibition, which compromises product purity and refuses to teach safe use.


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






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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..."

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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.

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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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