Speak now or forever hold your peace about drug prohibition
An ultimatum for freedom-loving people in an age of nascent fascism
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 26, 2025
Author's Follow-up:
October 08, 2025
The reader should bear in mind that depression is only a problem in America because we have outlawed cocaine. The use of this one drug could end depression -- as Sigmund Freud well knew1 -- in all but extreme cases.
"My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine2
We would not have even heard of Freud today had he not used cocaine to transcend his own innate depression. (And believe it or not, he "got off" the drug without trouble after three years of generous use.) It was only by thus transcending his tendency to procrastinate that he managed to publish so prolifically in life and to thereby gain the attention of the world.
But the medical doctors of Freud's time responded in horror to his reports about the beneficial use of cocaine. They were horrified by the existence of a drug that could actually end depression for their patients. They realized, consciously or otherwise, that the free use of such a drug could put them out of business. And so they focused lopsidedly on the distinct minority of uneducated and uncounseled cocaine users who encountered difficulties with the drug thanks to their own irresponsible personalities. This, of course, was philosophically identical to judging alcohol by focusing only on town drunkards. And so they held cocaine use to a safety standard that we apply to no other dangerous activity on the planet.
Alcohol is linked to 178,000 deaths a year in America alone3. Aspirin itself is linked to 3,000 deaths a year in the UK alone4. Fortunately for us, no one has both the money and the motive to demonize such substances in a media-driven propaganda campaign. Only in the case of cocaine did self-interested doctors suddenly adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward drug downsides. (Keep in mind that some doctor-recommended Big Pharma drugs that are on the market today boast a list of side effects that include death itself!)
And so the self-interested doctors of the early 20th century hypocritically demonized cocaine, and what was the result?
They threw hundreds of millions -- nay, perhaps billions -- of depressed individuals "under the bus."
They thereby championed the prohibitionist mindset that was to bring about hundreds of thousands of deaths over the next 100-plus years and turn the world into a police state, meanwhile abnegating time-honored rights in America like the 4th Amendment, the freedom of religion 5, and the time-honored and once-inalienable right of the individual to take care of their own health as they saw fit.
As Thomas Szasz wrote:
"The laws that deny healthy people 'recreational' drugs also deny sick people 'therapeutic' drugs." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p. 676
Of course, it is not just the depressed who suffer needlessly because of the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. As Szasz also writes:
"More often than not, the effective treatment of pain requires neither clinics nor doctors, but only a free market in drugs. However, such pharmaceutical freedom would make our highly paid pain researchers and pain clinicians unnecessary and unemployed." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p. 1427
And yet most drug pundits today, on both sides of the re-legalization debate, completely ignore the disastrous effect of drug prohibition on pain patients and the depressed. This, in fact, is what makes my entire approach to drug prohibition different from everyone else's. I have experienced, first-hand, the profound psychological downsides of going without godsend psychoactive medicines, many of which grow at my very feet. For me, the drug debate is not merely an intellectual matter upon which I like to occasionally chime in in order to show off my rhetorical skills. Drug prohibition has effectively ruined my life by depriving me of the time-honored right to take care of my own health. It has thereby turned me into a ward of the healthcare state, dependent on a drug that is far harder to kick than heroin -- a drug which has a 95% recidivism rate and which scrambles the brains of the 5% who might manage to go without it for more than three years8!
I say this not to inspire pity in the reader but to underscore, as emphatically as possible, the fact that drug prohibition has real victims. It is NOT the victimless crime that most drug pundits on both sides of the issue seem to think that it is. It's just that the victims suffer silently behind closed doors and so are never considered stakeholders in the self-interested political game of substance demonization.
And the victim list of drug prohibition contains far more than pain patients and the depressed. It contains the artists whose imaginations have been unnecessarily limited9, the philosophers who are forbidden to follow up on the drug-inspired research of William James10, and the spiritually minded whose ideal entheogenic religions have been outlawed, even in advance of their official formulation as a creed11.
Drug prohibition fails even on its own terms. Instead of protecting white American young people, it has exiled them to the city streets where they are sacrificed on the altar of the American religion of substance demonization. There were no young people dying on our streets when opiates were legal in America. It took drug prohibition to accomplish that, by refusing to teach safe use, refusing to regulate product, and refusing to provide drug choice12.
Americans like to think that prohibition has ended, that America learned its lessons from that debacle that first brought machine-gun fire to our city streets and killed tens of thousands of Americans by deliberately shunting them off onto the aptly named "rotgut" liquor1314.
But prohibition never ended. To the contrary, we have outlawed almost every effective psychoactive substance in the world, while making an enormously hypocritical exception for liquor.
Prohibition is the killer, not drugs.
I would end here by saying that prohibition should be outlawed in the Bill of Rights -- were it not that Drug War hysteria has long since rendered that document useless in guaranteeing the rights of Americans. Americans have no rights when it comes to drugs. For those who think otherwise, I recommend the book Drug Warriors and Their Prey by Richard Lawrence Miller15. Here are a few citations from that rare classic. They indicate how America's drug hysteria has caused our republic to devolve into a police state.
"When seizing an automobile under civil forfeiture statutes, prosecutors need only demonstrate its use in transporting an illicit drug. The amount of drug is irrelevant, as is an innocent owner's lack of knowledge that the car was used in this way."
"Regarding a forfeiture against 80 Pennsylvania acres, "FBI and drug agents openly boasted that they 'couldn't wait to use the defendant's property for deer hunting and other social activities."
"Rev. Accelyne Williams, a slender 75-year-old man, spent his final moments doubled over, vomiting, his hands bound behind his back with a tight strip of plastic, totally confused about what was happening to him. ... He had literally been scared to death by shouting, storming anti-drug troops. No drugs were found."
NOTE: I would like to address an objection that is sure to arise in the medical field. It will be said that the misuse of cocaine can be ascribed to biochemical and/or genetic propensities rather than to personal irresponsibility. I admit that this may be true, to various extents, in specific cases. But I reject the notion that we have the knowledge as fallible and perceptually limited Homo sapiens to unpack the tangled hodgepodge of causative psychosocial and physical influences to which a human being is subjected in life and to conclude authoritatively that any given behavior was determined or free. We are not gods, that we can render such judgements authoritatively. Even if we find that physical condition X is always associated with psychological pathology Y, it does not follow that there is a necessary causative relationship between the two, for the question can always be asked: why then is pathology Y not ALWAYS present in those with condition X? And so I adopt here what I consider to be the healthy humility of Alfred North Whitehead, when he remarked as follows about the likelihood of nature repeating itself over the course of time.
"Our ignorance is so abysmal that our judgments of likeliness and unlikeliness of future events hardly count." --Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature16
In light of this implicit reproach to our rationalist pretensions, it would probably be best for me to avoid terms like "personal irresponsibility" altogether, but in so doing, I would have rendered my key points above less clear and would have had to backtrack to explain the niceties of my views about the complexity of causative arguments. Suffice it to say, that I leave all "final" and authoritative judgments about human behavior to a higher power, should such exist. I am strengthened in this resolve by the Kantian Critique, which reminds me that I never see the world "as it really is" but rather through the lens of my perceptions and experiences that are predetermined and limited by the a priori categories of understanding17.
Happily, the objection to which I have just responded has no effect on my main argument in any case. It matters not whether the cocaine "misuser" acts from free will or is compelled, will-he nil he, by genetic or biochemical factors: the point is that such users are only ONE of the stakeholders in the drug re-legalization debate -- and that the vast majority of stakeholders (like the depressed and the anxious) are completely ignored by most modern drug pundits. This is why we need more than just a change in laws in America, we need to drive a stake through the ideological heart of drug prohibition itself.
The first step is to recognize the absurdity of the anti-scientific algorithm on which the policy is based: namely, that a drug that can be misused, even in theory, by a white American young person when used at one dose for one reason, must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
Even a five-year-old child could see the problem with that "logic."
As Groucho Marx would say at this point: "Go out and find me a five-year-old child!"
Begin original essay
When I first started complaining about the plight of the chronically depressed in the age of the Drug War, I naively expected the world of drug pundits to sit up and take notice. I was writing from personal experience, after all, about a system that had turned me into a ward of the healthcare state and rendered me dependent for life on a drug that was far harder to kick than heroin1819. This was an outcome of drug prohibition that literally no one was highlighting, least of all from the point of view of a "patient." Surely, a word to the wise would be sufficient to get the sane world "up in arms" about this demoralizing status quo, one that has resulted in the utter disempowerment of Americans with respect to their own healthcare.
It turned out, of course, that this was a naïve expectation on my part, to put it mildly. Not only did my essays on the subject fail to "break the Internet," but my Twitter following actually decreased to the extent that I drew connections between drug prohibition and the psychiatric pill mill, whether in essay form or in social media posts. I soon realized that this indifference to my "bombshell" revelations (nay, this positive AVERSION to them) was a big story in itself, one that was fraught with a potential treasure trove of philosophical insights about the American mindset in the age of the Drug War. And so I asked myself: How can it be that even the enemies of drug prohibition refuse to hold it responsible for the unprecedented pharmacological dystopia that it has brought about in America, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma drugs for life20? Why does no one hold the Drug War responsible for giving self-interested Big Pharma 2122 a monopoly on mind and mood medicine? Why am I the only one who notices that the pharmaceutical companies have thereby turned their depressed customers into patients for life? Why has no one but myself connected the dots between drug prohibition and this total disempowerment of Americans with respect to their personal health?
I have contemplated these questions for seven years now and have arrived at several conclusions, which I have summarized below. Bear in mind that the indifference to my writings on these topics cannot be attributed merely to the relative invisibility of my totally unfunded website in the pay-to-play world of the 21st-century Internet. I have sent physical treatises on these matters to over one hundred of America's "greatest" philosophers and have garnered no responses. I have sent my own 150-page book on this topic to drug pundits such as Rick Doblin and DJ Nutt and received not so much as an acknowledgement of receipt. Clearly, there is more at work here than a lack of publicity.
WHY THE INDIFFERENCE?
The failure of Americans to connect the dots between drug prohibition and the psychiatric pill mill is part of a larger pattern. There is a refusal on the part of political activists of all kinds to hold the Drug War responsible for the problems that it causes and/or exacerbates. Take the problem of gun violence in our inner cities, which has killed over 70,000 minorities in the last ten years in America alone. As Ann Heather Thompson wrote in the Atlantic in 2014,
"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist."23
Given this inconvenient fact -- a fact which should be obvious to any American given our disastrous "experiment" with liquor prohibition, which created the American Mafia out of whole cloth -- one might expect that the opponents of inner-city gun violence would be pushing for an end to drug prohibition, insofar as drug prohibition resulted in the proliferation of guns, and hence the gun violence , in the first place. But alas, one would search in vain for such pushback on the part of such activists. Take the group Philadelphia Citizen24. It claims to be devoted to ending gun violence in the City of Brotherly Love, and yet the group's website never even mentions drug prohibition! No, not once! As of September 2025, there was only one reference to drugs on the entire site, and that was in an article that was critical of marijuana.
But drug prohibition will never end if we refuse to hold it responsible for the horrors that it has brought about!
We see a similar refusal to "connect the dots" in groups that are opposed to brain-damaging shock therapy. If they really wanted to end this medieval therapy, they would demand the relegalization 25 of inspiring drugs that could make that barbaric treatment unnecessary – and yet, like the Philly activists, these activists acknowledge no connection between drug prohibition and shock therapy and, in fact, they will (as I well know) ghost anyone who attempts to point out such a connection. It is as if both of the above-mentioned groups have what biologist JB Haldane might call "a prior commitment," not to materialism 26 in this case but rather to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. They want to have their cake and eat it too: they want to rally against gun violence and shock therapy while yet refusing to name the culprit who brought about these two evils in the first place! They are, in fact, ideologically committed to being ineffective in their pushback against the evils against which they claim to be fighting!
Speaking of ghosting, I recently attempted to contact a reporter (one Mensah Dean) at the Philly publication called The Trace. Mensah had written an article about Philly gun violence 27 in which he never mentioned the drug prohibition which had armed the city to the teeth in the first place. I politely drew his attention to this oversight on his part, but of course I received no response. It seems that anyone who connects the dots between the Drug War and its consequences is ghosted these days.
Then there are those drug pundits who do, indeed, have a prior commitment to materialism. They fail to connect the dots between drug prohibition and the psychiatric pill mill because they believe in the philosophically absurd idea that science has "sorted" conditions like depression. These pundits are fond of using the term "treatment-resistant depression," by which they give the impression that science has solved the problem of depression; it's just that there are some people out there with finicky biochemistries who have not gotten the memo. They utterly fail to realize that science has only "solved" depression by letting chemists decide how the depressed should feel in life – using drugs that turn them into patients for life.
There are drugs of all kinds that can inspire and elate, and yet a chemist at a pharmaceutical company will decide for us how we are all to feel in life, with their one-size-fits-all "cure," never mind the fact that even scientists today acknowledge that no one knows how these antidepressants 28 "work" -- to which I would only add that no one even knows that they DO work, if by "working" we mean they produce a mindset with which the users themselves are satisfied -- as if the Jack Kerouacs of the world could ever be satisfied with a mass-marketed "med" that tranquilizes rather than inspires. Not only did drug prohibition bring about this pharmacological dystopia, this real-world reenactment of The Stepford Wives, but it has rendered such "meds" impossible to "kick" by outlawing all drugs that could be used intermittently to do precisely that. How? By helping the user to obfuscate and transcend the psychologically hideous withdrawal symptoms of these substances that muck about -- with such hubristic irresponsibility-- with our fundamental brain chemistry, a brain chemistry which we now see may take years -- if ever -- to return to normal, hence the 95% recidivism rate of Effexor for long-term users after three years. Compare this to the 5% recidivism rate of American soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam but then gave up the drug upon returning to the States29.
Nor is the problem here limited to activists. Almost all non-fiction authors fail to hold drug prohibition responsible for the evil it causes. To the contrary, they often go out of their way to demonize drugs. Academic Ronald Hutton wrote an entire book on witches and fearmongering ("The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present"30) in which he never mentioned drugs... except once, and then in a derogatory fashion. He frequently mentioned "herbs," however, failing to realize that those herbs WERE DRUGS, in the exact same way that "meds" are drugs! We have become so used to "branding" substances according to modern drug-war prejudices that Hutton takes this branding as objective! Moreover, the Drug War is the perfect example of the very strategic fearmongering about which the author is writing, and yet his anti-drug prejudices blind him to this obvious connection! See my essay on this topic:
Of course, the overarching moral to this story is that propaganda works, that billionaires can and do drive the narrative in America with an eye toward profit -- that plus the fact that I have been hopelessly naive about how the world works!
This conglomerate-driven control of the American mindset might not be so problematic in a democracy that operated according to principles, which is to say a world in which we took our Bill of Rights seriously. But now that we have, as a people, voted out democracy by scorning all the principles upon which that form of government depends, it is no surprise that we find ourselves incapable of mounting any principled pushback against drug-war tyranny. I can only hope that the ghosting of insights like my own will end before it finally becomes illegal to agree with me on these topics. That day may arrive sooner than later. This morning I received an email from Binaifer Nowrojee of the Open Society Foundations31. Nowrojee reports that the regime in Washington D.C. has just announced their plans to investigate the Society on charges of "supporting terrorism." It is now clear that any enemy of the right-wing status quo in America is fair game for far worse than ghosting.
But that's the whole problem with Robert Whitaker's otherwise wonderful critique of Big Pharma. Like almost all non-fiction authors today, he reckons without the drug war, which gave Big Pharma a monopoly in the first place.
Google founders used to enthuse about the power of free speech, but Google is actively shutting down videos that tell us how to grow mushrooms -- MUSHROOMS, for God's sake. End the drug war and this hateful censorship of a free people.
ECT is like euthanasia. Neither make sense in the age of prohibition.
Cocaine is not evil. Opium is not evil. Drug prohibition is evil.
Philip Jenkins reports that Rophynol had positive uses for treating mental disorders until the media called it the "date rape drug." We thus punished those who were benefitting from the drug, tho' the biggest drug culprit in date rape is alcohol. Oprah spread the fear virally.
People say shrooms should not be used by those with a history of "mental illness." But that's one of the greatest potential benefits of shrooms! (They cured Stamets' teenage stuttering.) Some folks place safety first, but if I did that, I'd die long before using mother nature.
Drug prohibition represents the biggest power grab by government in human history. It is the state control of pain relief and mental states.
In Mexico, the same substance can be considered a "drug" or a "med," depending on where you are in the country. It's just another absurd result of the absurd policy of drug prohibition.
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.
It's a category error to say that scientists can tell us if psychoactive drugs "really work." It's like asking Dr. Spock of Star Trek if hugging "really works." ("Hugging is highly illogical, Captain.")
But that's the whole problem with Robert Whitaker's otherwise wonderful critique of Big Pharma. Like almost all non-fiction authors today, he reckons without the drug war, which gave Big Pharma a monopoly in the first place.