The Verminization of Drug Users

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The Verminization of Drug Users

How drug warriors use medical terminology to justify hatred and intolerance

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher (Substack version)

August 12, 2026

Yesterday, I published my first essay that was inspired by events in a country other than the United States or the United Kingdom. The essay was entitled When America says 'Hate drugs!'... ¹ and it was inspired by a story entitled A disabled man was sent to prison. He self-medicated with marijuana. ² The story was posted online by a Bulgarian news service, Darik News, which is a subsidiary of Netinfo, which is a Bulgarian digital media company -- which is in turn owned by Nova Broadcasting, which is in turn part of United Group, "a leading telecommunications and media operator in Southeastern Europe." The link was provided by a reader who has been after me for some time to write about drug attitudes from a more global perspective. I was happy to oblige, the more so in that I cannot afford to ignore any reader who cares enough about the issues that I raise to actually get in touch with me. Such readers are rare, to put it mildly, although that is not surprising. Everyone knows that Drug Warriors are ruthless and that anything you say in favor of beneficial drug use can and will be held against you, perhaps even in a court of law. Even this reader of mine is obliged to use aliases whenever he shares his drug-related views with me.

To be honest, however, I found nothing new in the link provided. It was the kind of story that one might expect to see in the local news of at least half of the American states. (I say only half, because America is “all over the map” when it comes to drug laws -- although sadly, every state seems to agree that there are evil drugs out there that have no beneficial uses whatsoever.) It’s easy to find state prosecutors who are willing to second-guess a sick or injured person’s need for drugs like marijuana. I was far more rattled by the link that I received this morning, apparently from the same source, for a story entitled Drug use has reached epidemic proportions ³. This one came from Nova News, a Bulgarian news program that AI tells me provides “timely and objective information on important events in the country and around the world.” (Of course, the source for that supposed factoid was Nova News itself. ) And yet the story in question was anything but objective. The very headline is biased. By referring to drug use as an “epidemic,” the news agency is helping to justify any and all extreme measures to eradicate the supposed problem, including the curtailment of basic human rights. And yet, as historian Richard Miller writes in Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State ⁴

Drug use is a voluntary decision. It is no more an epidemic than is choosing a lunch of unhealthy fast foods instead of juice and sprouts. ⁵

Richard Lawrence Miller -- Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State

Thomas Szasz made a related point in Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers: ⁶

A physician who is a professor in a medical school here [in Syracuse, New York] asserts that heroin addiction is like malaria, that heroin is like a parasite, and that the person who sells heroin is like a mosquito. The verminization of the human being, begun by the Health Ministry of National Socialist Germany, is thus continued— without any public recognition that it is— through the American war on 'drug abuse.' ⁷

Thomas Szasz -- Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers

Ceremonial Chemistry was published in 1974, over a full half-century ago, and yet the Bulgarian news article shows that the verminization of drug users is alive and well today. We are told that use is an epidemic, with the implication being that we cannot let the mere principles of democracy and freedom stand in the way of our ending this perceived problem once and for all. And we all know where this mind set is going. As historian Richard Miller concludes in Drug Warriors and Their Prey:

Elsewhere I have argued that mass murder is probable once a society decides to eliminate a group of ordinary people, as was the case in Nazi Germany. The process allowing such an outcome in the war against drug users is underway. ⁸

Richard Lawrence Miller -- Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State

If anyone thinks that I'm worrying unnecessarily, they should start watching the evening news.

Over the last year, the Trump administration has bombed 67 boats and killed 221 people in the name of stopping drugs from entering the U.S. ⁹

Drug Policy Alliance

That is 221 people murdered by the U.S. government in the name of drug prohibition, based on the idea that psychoactive medicines present an existential threat to America and that the sellers of the same are so much vermin that need to be annihilated, without granting them any judicial rights whatsoever. This is the exact same attitude that Hutu radio taught its audience to adopt toward the Tutsi during the three-month-long genocide campaign launched against them in 1994. Years of anti-Tutsi radio had taught them to think of Tutsi as "cockroaches" just as decades of anti-drug propaganda and censorship have taught Americans to think of drug dealers as "scumbags." Yet one waits in vain for most Americans to speak out against drug prohibition. Most Americans remain frightened into silence, or else they apologetically suggest the adoption of a "Drug War lite," in which we send drug users to medically supervised re-education camps rather than killing them outright.

But then what can we expect? Most Americans do not see any connection between the 49,000 yearly suicides in the States ¹⁰ and the fact that America has outlawed all medicines that can inspire and elate. This is why I write: I have first-hand experience with how drug prohibition outlaws our right to heal. I know that drugs have benefits and that we therefore outlaw far more than drugs when we outlaw psychoactive substances. Until mainstream Americans realize this fact, they will be easily tempted by a drug-bashing media into supporting our government's bloody new extermination campaign against suspected drug dealers -- a campaign that violates everything that America has ever stood for and whose mere existence confirms the suspicion that we've all had since the 2024 election: that Democracy is over in America, that it has been replaced by a right-wing dictatorship that has the treasonous support of the nation's billionaires and the mainstream media companies that they now control.

AFTERWORD

Last year, I received personal proof of the fact that this hatred of drug dealers had gone mainstream. During a family reunion at the Jersey shore, an elderly cousin of mine was talking about the writing art and of his experience in publishing ten-minute plays, several of which had actually been published and staged in various reasonably prestigious venues around the country. This cousin was both a progressive and a Presbyterian minister, so I had come to expect nothing but goodness and light from his every asseveration, and so far, he was living up to those high expectations that I had of him. I was listening somewhat half-heartedly to this dramaturgical shop talk, as one sometimes does when their interest in a subject is flagging despite their efforts to remain polite. But suddenly my cousin said something that aroused my full attention, for the simple reason that it irritated me extremely. He had been chatting inoffensively about ten-minute plays in that unassuming and quiet voice of his, when he suddenly brought up the subject of a new ten-minute play that he had just read. Its plot concerned a group of drug addicts who each take turns locating the drug dealer who had supposedly addicted them to drugs. Having found the villain, they then proceed to torture that individual "in order to get their own back." This saintly cousin of mine smiled as he explained this plot. He was apparently amused by what he took to be the poetic justice of the thing. He even began musing about how he himself might work such an angle into his next ten-minute play.

Now, I always try to remain silent when an extended family member unknowingly voices a viewpoint with which I disagree. I feel that our rare get-togethers should accent the positive whenever possible. But, bless his heart, this guy had just tossed a slow pitch right over the plate and I simply had to swing at it. I had to swing at it -- and keep swinging at it. I even had to drive the ball into the ground, even at the expense of destroying our relationship entirely. And so I began what turned out to be a ten-minute harangue, voiced as politely as I could, of course, under the circumstances. For his part, my interlocutor -- or rather my auditor -- smiled characteristically the whole time, as if to say that he was mildly amused at my unwonted passion on a topic that he had, after all, mentioned but in passing! I began by "gently" suggesting that if anyone should be tortured, it should be the Drug Warriors who had created laws that incentivized drug dealing in the first place. I then reminded him (ever so gently) that Nancy Reagan was right about one thing: that drug users are on the exact same moral plane as the drug dealer. If using psychoactive medicines really is evil, then drug users are just as evil as the drug dealers. I then went on to discuss how drug prohibition had ended the rule of law in Latin America, destroyed inner cities around the globe, and turned America into a penal colony, with so many drug-related arrests each year (over 1.4 million, in fact ¹¹) that trials are now a thing of the past in the American legal system. Instead, prosecutors threaten suspects with long jail terms if they refuse to give up their right to a trial by a jury of their peers.¹²

Did my cousin not realize, moreover, that the first anti-cocaine laws in the early 1900s USA were directed at Blacks, and that cocaine was a mere alkaloid of a plant whose use was (and is) a sacred practice of the Inca and of their present-day descendants in Peru? "Where is your multicultural tolerance?" I queried, good-naturedly. "Why are you suddenly 'signing off,' as it were, on the torture of poor minorities who have been lured into immensely lucrative drug dealing by laws that were designed to destroy the communities in which they live? Remember," I continued, lightly tapping my cousin's chest for emphasis, "that drug prohibition has continued long after America learned the hard way that prohibition policies bring gunfire to city streets. Politicians ignored that fact," I reminded him, "or rather they took advantage of it in order to use drug prohibition as a way to limit minority and black participation in politics." I'm afraid that I was now working myself up into something of a lather. "Hello?" I cried. "Bro, you're the one who's always talking about the systemic ways in which minorities are misused and held back in life in the USA! Why then does a political moderate like myself suddenly have to teach you the facts of life! Do I have to quote Nixon advisor G. Gordon Liddy for you? Ahem! Ahem!"

We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did. ¹³

Colleen Cowles, JD -- War on Us: How the War on Drugs and Myths about Addiction Have Created a War on All of Us

This cousin never said anything in response to these expostulations of mine, but kept smiling throughout my philippic, which I was delivering, as it were, in spite of myself, as if my tongue had gone rogue and was determined to utter the home truths that my brain wanted to conceal for diplomatic reasons. I figure that my cousin was either mildly amused by my outburst or he was boiling with inner rage. Either way, a well-timed interruption brought an end to these irrepressible admonitions of mine. We were suddenly joined by my cousin's equally progressive wife, who is herself a progressive Presbyterian minister, with whom we now drove out to a nearby Olive Garden. There we dined in peace while engaging in the most inoffensive and apolitical small talk that a body could desire, especially if that body were slightly embarrassed by its erstwhile display of a passion that was so out of keeping with its usual tranquil demeanor. I was tempted to chide my cousin once again, however, this time with respect to his selection of beverages. No sooner had he seen our server than he called out for a large serving of beer, with the self-entitled air of a modern King Cole. I was tempted to chastise him on that account as follows: "Do you know that alcohol is responsible for 178,00 deaths in America every single year? Wouldn't it be nice to locate the server who has peddled you that junk and then torture him for doing so? It would serve him right, wouldn't it? You might even use that idea in a play of yours. And what about this wife of yours? She takes drugs every day of her life. Why, she just now ordered a glass of water so that she could take her - ahem -'meds.' Suppose we were to track down the guy who's peddling her that junk. What, cuz? I'm just sayin'."

Notes for essay entitled The Verminization of Drug Users: How drug warriors use medical terminology to justify hatred and intolerance:

1: When America says 'Hate drugs!'... DWP (up)
2: марихуана, Пратиха в затвора мъж със сто процента инвалидност Самолекувал се с. 2019. “Пратиха в затвора мъж със сто процента инвалидност. Самолекувал се с марихуана.” Dariknews.Bg. Dariknews.bg. June 6, 2019. https://dariknews.bg/regioni/burgas/pratiha-v (up)
3: NOVA. 2026. “Nova.” Nova.Bg. Nova TV. May 26, 2026. https://nova.bg/news/view/2026/05/26/538510/. (up)
4: Miller, Richard L. 1996. Drug Warriors and Their Prey. Praeger. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/594749.Drug_Warriors_and_Their_Prey. (up)
5: Miller, Richard L. 1996. Drug Warriors and Their Prey. Praeger. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/594749.Drug_Warriors_and_Their_Prey. (up)
6: “Ceremonial Chemistry – Syracuse University Press.” 1974. Syr.edu. 2026. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/1114/ceremonial-chemistry/. (up)
7: “Ceremonial Chemistry – Syracuse University Press.” 1974. Syr.edu. 2026. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/1114/ceremonial-chemistry/. (up)
8: Miller, Richard L. 1996. Drug Warriors and Their Prey. Praeger. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/594749.Drug_Warriors_and_Their_Prey. (up)
9: “Drug Policy Alliance.” 2000. Drug Policy Alliance. https://drugpolicy.org/. (up)
10: STOBBE, MIKE. 2024. “US Suicides Held Steady in 2023 — at a Very High Level.” AP News. https://apnews.com/article/us-suicide-rate-cdc-c57bb0852adfb4d85b3670d465a8b890. (up)
11: “War on Us – the War on Drugs Is a War on All of Us.” 2019. Waronus.com. 2019. http://waronus.com/. (up)
12: “War on Us – the War on Drugs Is a War on All of Us.” 2019. Waronus.com. 2019. http://waronus.com/. (up)
13: “War on Us – the War on Drugs Is a War on All of Us.” 2019. Waronus.com. 2019. http://waronus.com/. (up)

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The Verminization of Drug Users

How drug warriors use medical terminology to justify hatred and intolerance

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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