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Regulate and Educate

an open letter to Oregon Governor Tina Kotek

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 1, 2024



With respect, Governor, you are just using drug law to steer attention away from the housing problem in America. The Drug War is always used like that: to steer attention away from social problems by arresting inconvenient populations. Drug warriors are murderers of our young people. MURDERERS! There were no young people dying by the thousands in American streets when opiates were legal. It was prohibition which brought that about. How? By discouraging education and incentivizing dealers to sell potentially contaminated product. When are we going to stop being hoodwinked by Drug Warriors?

Their MO is clear, Governor: They are in COMPLETE DENIAL. They blame all the problems caused by drug prohibition on drugs themselves. It is because of that self-serving misdiagnosis that I had to pay $4,000 to experience the benefits of a time-honored mushroom in Oregon. $4,000! So not only does the Drug War cause endless deaths of young people, it keeps millions of Americans from experiencing godsend medicines.

Please, please, please! Stop falling for the Drug War party line of complete denial. Drug warriors are murderers.

Drugs have never killed. Bad drug policies kill along with a lack of education. Drug warriors do not want education, and they refuse to teach safe use or to provide safe product.

So they are not only murderers, they are WILLFUL murderers. Please do not fall for their lies!

Re-legalize MOTHER NATURE TODAY! TEACH, DON'T ARREST. REGULATE AND EDUCATE!

And then address the homelessness problem honestly, head-on -- without diverting public attention to OTHER issues instead!










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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




It's just plain totalitarian nonsense to outlaw mother nature and to outlaw moods and mental states thru drug law. These truths can't be said enough by us "little people" because the people in power are simply not saying them.

When is the Holocaust Museum going to recognize that the Drug War has Nazified American life? Probably, on the same day that the Jefferson Foundation finally admits to having sold out Jefferson by inviting the DEA onto his estate in 1987 to confiscate his poppy plants.

The goal of rehab should not be to get people off of all drugs, it should be to teach them to be in control of their drug use and to use drugs wisely for beneficial purposes.

We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.

Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."

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.

Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.

We drastically limit drug choices, we refuse to teach safe use, and then we discover there's a gene to explain why some people have trouble with drugs. Science loves to find simple solutions to complex problems.

If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol slaughters. Drug prohibition is the real killer.

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.


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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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