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The Drug War is a War on Patients

my letter to Republican senators of the 116th U.S. Congress

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

December 27, 2019



2025 update



Dear Senator:


Please end the Drug War. It is a war on patients.


I am a 61-year-old American who has been denied godsend medications for depression for the last 40 years, all because Washington legislators care more about punishing "drug users" than they care about helping those suffering from alcoholism, depression and PTSD.

When is Congress going to stop the war on drug research and the war on patients?

It is nothing less than a crime against humanity1 when the DEA knowingly withholds godsend medications from the American public - and lies while so doing.

Please end this war against patients today. Abolish the DEA and put its leadership on trial for causing immense and unnecessary suffering for America's patients through its anti-scientific lies about substances like MDMA and psilocybin.

And stop financially blackmailing other countries to make them follow suit with America's unscientific Drug War. Is it not bad enough that you've made it impossible for me to get help in America? Do you really have to make sure that I can't get help anywhere on the planet?

Substances are not evil, Senator. That is a drug-war superstition. They are good or bad, depending on how they are used.

Stop demonizing godsend medications just because they may be subject to occasional abuse.

Please stop denying godsend medication to millions merely because a few thousand may abuse them.

Get rid of the fascist DEA - the jackbooted thugs that stomped onto Monticello 2 and stole Thomas Jefferson's poppies -- and let scientists study any substance that they please without government interference - that is, if you really want to live in a free country.

Meanwhile, just remember that "getting tough" means getting tough on patients. We are the ones who suffer so that conservative Republicans can get their demagogue soundbites.

Psychiatric godsend medications include: MDMA , ayahuasca, psilocybin, and ibogaine. Please tell the DEA to back off and let science, not politics, determine these drugs' availability to patients.

Instead, the DEA does everything they can to hinder research and to keep these drugs unavailable to suffering Americans, including tens of thousands of soldiers who have fought for freedom overseas. MDMA was working wonders - but the DEA decided to criminalize it in 1985, AGAINST the advice of its own judge. Why? The DEA has a conflict of interest: their jobs depend on drugs being illegal. It's an outrage that such an agency protects its jobs by keeping godsend medication from the American people.

The DEA is anti-American and anti-soldier. Please tell it to cease ruining the lives of America's patients.

NOTES I sent the above e-mail to Republican Senators, under the assumption that much of the Drug War demagoguery comes from that quarter. It was written in anger and may thus be a trifled disjointed. My principal point, however, is clear: namely, that the Drug War is anti-patient, insofar as it criminalizes substances without regard for the millions of patients who are thereby denied godsend medication. This is because the Republicans like to appear "tough on drugs" by locking up minorities -- and if that means they have to totally ignore the valid interests of millions of alcoholics, depressives, and soldiers with PTSD, then so be it.

Unfortunately, Democrats have to share the blame, since they also pay almost no attention to the millions of patients who are forced to go without godsend medications thanks to our across-the-board drug criminalization. They only differ from Republicans in that they focus on protecting potential abusers instead of prosecuting them. Both sides, however, promote policies that keep godsend medicines unavailable for those who need them most: alcoholics, the depressed, and soldiers suffering from PTSD.

This in turn is because both sides share the superstitious Drug Warrior belief that chemical substances are either good or evil -- when in reality substances are neither good nor evil: only people are. The same substance which seems evil at one dose and in one setting can work miracles at another dose and in another setting. Somehow our Washington representatives are blissfully unaware of this fact. (I'm being kind to the pols here, by the way. A more cynical author would claim that Congress's Drug War-enablers are simply cowing to the demands of lobbyists for Big Pharma , psychiatry, prison guards, and sheriffs, all of whom stand to lose financially if the Drug War is rescinded or pared back in any way.)

The DEA truly believes that substances are evil in and of themselves. Whenever they are forced to allow a little research into MDMA , for instance, they insist on elaborate and expensive procedures to safeguard the MDMA 3 to be used in the study, as if the substance were some kind of highly enriched uranium or the Hope Diamond. This shows absurd priorities: the DEA is ready to stymy investigation into a drug that could help millions - even billions of people - and why do they run this interference? So that they can stop even a handful of Americans from being able to use the substance illicitly.

The DEA is so obsessed with "cracking down" that they would gladly scuttle a godsend cure for countless patients - just to get tough on a few minorities. But this is probably to be expected since the agency's raison d'etre is to punish Americans for using cures of which our politicians do not approve - our politicians, mind, not our scientists.



Author's Follow-up: January 10, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




This essay was written five years ago, when I had just started my philosophical campaign against drug prohibition. I can tell because I have given the false impression above that all would be well if we would only give scientists the freedom to figure out American drug policy. But nothing could be further from the truth. Scientists today approach the subject of drugs under the influence of positivism, behaviorism and reductive materialism 4, which means that they are impervious to psychological common sense. If a depressed person laughs under the influence of laughing gas 5 , that means nothing to them. If they are at peace with themselves through the weekly use of opium , that means nothing to them. As materialists, they are looking for "real" cures to conditions like depression, something that they can see under a microscope -- preferably something that would create lifetime patients for the drug researcher's financial benefactors, namely Big Pharma 6 7 .

In this way, modern scientists are aiding and abetting the mendacious DEA when they tell us that psychoactive medicines have no known positive uses. It does not matter to either scientists or the DEA that drugs like opium 8 , coca, and psychedelics have inspired entire religions. They ignore anecdote, history and psychological common sense. And so neither group will sign off on drug re-legalization 9 . Both will advance the preposterous idea that "drugs" have no known positive uses. True, the scientists are grudgingly acknowledging some potential benefits of psychedelics today, but they are only accomplishing this by laboriously relocating the word "psychedelics" from the "drugs" category to the "meds" category, when what they should be doing is denouncing the fictitious nature of both categories. Substances are substances, and to separate them a priori into morally fraught categories is superstitious and tyrannical.

Yet America has created entire institutions to enforce this neanderthal bias. That's why we have an institute on drug abuse and not an institute on drug use.

As for the perhaps somewhat harsh tenor of my epistle, you must remember that I was only 60 years old when I wrote it. I was little more than a kid at the time. I had yet to acquire the tact and diplomacy that are the hallmark of the mature mind. To paraphrase Verjuice in "School for Scandal," I wanted "that delicacy of tint and mellowness of sneer" that distinguishes the persuasive scrivener. Besides, I knew that the wretch to whom I was writing was fully aware of the injustice that he was perpetrating with his strategic fearmongering and so I felt no need to methodically enlighten him on the subject. My only goal was to remind him that some of us saw through the sham and wanted him to know it, both loudly and clearly.









Notes for essay entitled The Drug War is a War on Patients: my letter to Republican senators of the 116th U.S. Congress:

1: Drug Prohibition is a crime against humantiy DWP (up)
2: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
3: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
4: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
5: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
6: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
7: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
8: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
9: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.

For those who want to understand what's going on with the drug war from a philosophical point of view, I recommend chapter six of "Eugenics and Other Evils" by GK Chesterton.

We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).

In "Four Good Days" the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.

Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.

It's almost impossible not to have a problem with drugs in a world in which the government is spending over $50 billion a year to render drug use problematic.

Timothy Leary's wife wrote: "We went to Puerto Rico and all we did was take cocaine and read Faust to one another." And there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with that!!! The drug war is all about scaring us and making illegal drug use as dangerous as possible.

Psychiatrists refuse to acknowledge that it is hugely disempowering to turn patients into wards of the healthcare state with dependence-causing "meds." End drug prohibition and end the psychiatric pill mill.

The so-called "herbs" that witches used were drugs, in the same way that "meds" are drugs. If academics made that connection, the study of witchcraft would shed a lot of light on the fearmongering of modern prohibitionists.

We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.


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






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