Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass
blog icon orange rss icon with stylized radio waves bird icon for twitter bird icon for twitter substack icon


back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow


Virus Update

Keeping track of the dreaded Drug War Virus

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 20, 2020



Just a quick message to let our readership know that we are doing everything we can to fight the Drug War virus. The first and most important step is to recognize the symptoms of an infected person:

1) Pathological obstinacy. Those infected with the Drug War Virus stubbornly fail to recognize that criminalizing medicinal plants is the unconstitutional enforcement of Christian Science with respect to psychological healing.

2) Selective amnesia. Infected persons conveniently "forget" that Mother Nature's plants and fungi are the birth right of every human being under the natural law to which the American Declaration appealed in arguing against British injustice.

3) Logical confusion. The infected person also fails to realize that all the problems of drug abuse are either directly brought about or greatly exacerbated by the Drug War itself.

What can you do?

The key is to practice social distancing. Keep at least 6 feet away from every known or suspected Drug Warrior and their specious arguments. In so doing, you will underscore your contempt for the shoddy reasoning and fascist tendencies apparent in every carrier of the Drug War virus.





June 15, 2022

Not to nitpick, but there's another symptom of the Drug War virus, namely the tendency to forget that HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their best stories while drinking coca wine, that Plato's views of the afterlife were inspired by the psychedelic kykeon at Eleusis, that Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius were big fans of the opium 1 poppy, and that the entire Vedic religion was inspired by psychoactive plant medicine. Then there's the fact that the psychoactive medicine that we demonize today could be used to fight Alzheimer's 2 disease, fight depression, increase worker productivity, increase one's love of music, increase one's appreciation of the natural world, etc.

If folks forget all this, it is a sure sign that they have contracted the Drug War virus.

In other words the Drug War virus is far more insidious than anyone has yet to fully appreciate. So remember to social distance yourself -- and to buy a mask so that you can place it over the infected person's mouth the next time these anti-nature blasphemers start demonizing psychoactive botanicals without regard for the context of use.

Author's Follow-up: August 14, 2022



A new more virulent strain of the virus has been reported in Children of the Drug War, a chilling collection of drug-war essays compiled by Damon Barrett 3 . It appears that once-civilized countries are now denying morphine 4 to children in hospice, in servile and dogmatic fealty to the drug-war ideology which says that such demonized substances can have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, for any reason whatsoever. In other words, the virus is causing severe neurological problems in those it attacks -- otherwise so-called civilized human beings would never be so heartless as to knowingly allow dying children to suffer severe ongoing pain for no good reason whatsoever.









Notes for essay entitled Virus Update: Keeping track of the dreaded Drug War Virus:

1: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
2: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
3: Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the Impact of Drug Policies on Young People Barrett, Damon, IDEBATE Press, 2011 (up)
4: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Thomas Szasz was not an extremist when it comes to drugs. The extremists are those who feel that psychiatrists know more about our mind and mood than we do.

When Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan call for continued prohibition to protect young people, they ignore the ENORMOUS fact that prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world. Wake up, guys! Prohibition is evil, not drugs! Ignorance is evil, not education!

Just think how much money bar owners in the Old West would have saved on restoration expenses if they had served MDMA instead of whiskey.

Materialists are always trying to outdo each other in describing the insignificance of humankind. Crick at least said we were "a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Musk downsizes us further to one single microbe. He wins!

America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.

It's already risky to engage in free and honest speech about drugs online: Colorado politicians tried to make it absolutely illegal in February 2024. The DRUG WAR IS ALL ABOUT DESTROYING DEMOCRACY THRU IGNORANT AND INTOLERANT FEARMONGERING.

A law proposed in Colorado in February 2024 would have criminalized positive talk about drugs online. What? The world is on the brink of nuclear war because of hate-driven politics, and I can be arrested for singing the praises of empathogens?

John Halpern wrote a book about opium, subtitled "the ancient flower that poisoned our world." What nonsense! Bad laws and ignorance poison our world, NOT FLOWERS!

Drug warriors have taught us that honesty about drugs encourages drug use. Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.

Folks like Sabet accuse folks like myself of ignoring the "facts." No, it is Sabet who is ignoring the facts -- facts about dangerous horses and free climbing. He's also ignoring all the downsides of prohibition, whose laws lead to the election of tyrants.


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






back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow
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..."

Purchase Your Copy
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.

Purchase Your Copy



No cookies, no ads paid for by amoral and immoral billionaires (or trillionaires).


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.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is a proud sponsor of The Drug War Philosopher website @ abolishthedea.com.


Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP (up)