how worried white parents are destroying democracy around the globe in a counterproductive effort to protect their kids
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 9, 2026
Sky News reported last night that the UK is preparing to enact a new system to protect young people from supposedly addictive social media. Their plan is to require web surfers to submit their names and proof of age to the government so that bureaucrats (and the algorithms that they create) can henceforth monitor their web use and verify that they are only viewing pages containing age-appropriate content, and for the appropriate amounts of time (whatever that might be and however that might be calculated). I do not know the details of the plan yet -- indeed, the proponents have not yet hammered them out -- but I have no interest in learning them because the very idea of such a government power grab is an anathema to me, and I do not even consider myself to be a Libertarian.
It is a sign of the times that one is dismissed as a libertarian for expressing qualms about the government proposing to monitor the pastime activities of individual citizens in order to keep them "safe." And yet this, I think, is why democracy is starting to fail in the west: because we no longer wish to be free; we wish to be safe, instead, no matter what it takes: even if it means inviting Big Brother into the bedrooms of our children to monitor their web-surfing activity in real-time. Needless to say, the legislation that we create for that purpose is only aimed at "saving" one demographic (aka, "the troubled white teenager") by throwing all sorts of other demographics under the bus and setting a precedent that will give the government a future excuse to monitor web surfers for all new reasons that will never have occurred to the Chicken Little parents of our time.
In Ecclesiastes 10:16, King Solomon warns us that: "Woe to the land whose prince is a child." He might have added that: "Double woe to the democracy whose only valued citizen is a child."
In his histories of drug prohibition, Mike Jay explains how President Jimmy Carter was not particularly interested in "cracking down" on marijuana use but that he was pestered into doing so by indignant white parents in California who were upset about their inability to control their own kids. I need hardly add that the parents did not want education programs for their kids, they did not want drug choice for their kids, they did not want product regulation for their kids, they did not want counseling about safe use: No, they wanted a crackdown, they wanted the arrest and punishment of those who dared to use Mother Nature's plant medicine. And what was the result? The prison population increased by over 300% over the next half century, effectively ruining the lives of over 2.5 million young people!
If anyone doubts that claim, I suggest that they read "War On Us" by Colleen Cowles1 to get some idea of the indignities to which drug users are subjected in our misnamed "justice system," a system that has been deformed in the interest of prosecutors to accommodate the millions of perpetrators of the many drug-related crimes that prohibitionists have added to the books over the course of the last century. And how do prosecutors accommodate these millions of criminal cases that have been created out of whole cloth by our unprecedented draconian drug laws? Easy. They threaten the drug suspects with long sentences if they should insist on their right to a time-consuming trial. And these threats work. This is why 97% of drug cases end with plea deals -- and ankle bracelets, so that the government can monitor the paroled users like so much cattle.
This is how worried parents "save the world" -- by throwing everybody but their own white kids under the bus -- although, in practice, many of these "saved" white kids will themselves be eventually hoisted by their parent's own petard.
This latest Sky News story reminded me of the fuss in the UK several years ago about the use of laughing gas. A handful of young people found a way to misuse the substance (at least as the word "misuse" is defined by worried parents) and the media outlets -- particularly Channel 5 -- started essentially demanding that nitrous oxide be outlawed. Actually, I think that the UK had already outlawed the use of laughing gas (at least for the purposes of attaining transcendent mental states, or in other words they had already outlawed the kind of use of the gas that was essential to the philosophical work of William James), but the journalists were responding to perceived loopholes in existing law. If you wonder why I am not being specific here, it is because I get very irritated every time I read the routinely biased media stories on this subject, and so I frankly do not even wish to look this matter up at this moment. Feel free to look up the details for yourself: I am only interested in the philosophy of this question. In any case, I'll eventually learn the irritating details for myself, will I or nil I, as I poke about the mainstream Web to locate more evidence of the west's superstitious fear of psychoactive medicines.
The result of this media-inspired fearmongering was predictable enough: N20 was outlawed -- or at least it was outlawed more thoroughly than ever -- and the habitually worried parents, appeased only for the moment, soon began looking for other laws that they could pass to protect their kids. Isn't the legal system wonderful, by the way? If little Billy is eating too many Twinkies, you don't have to waste your time as a parent trying to change his eating habits by introducing him to passionate role models in the culinary community! All you have to do is launch a parent-driven campaign to outlaw Twinkies instead! A little self-righteous indignation on your part can go a long way with the help of a sympathetic media, one which agrees with you that the safety of our poor defenseless wee little white children comes before every other consideration on the planet, whatever Thomas Jefferson or John Locke might have had to say on the matter.
This obsession with safety would be funny, were it not for the fact that it has tragic real-world consequences. The "safer" that parents make the world for their kids with their ever proliferating drug laws, the more likely it is that the depressed will commit suicide or suffer in silence behind closed doors. In the words of Thomas Szasz: “The laws that deny healthy people 'recreational' drugs also deny sick people 'therapeutic' drugs.”
In "How to Change Your Mind," Michael Pollan says psychedelic legalization would endanger young people. What? Prohibition forces users to decide for themselves which mushrooms are toxic, or to risk buying contaminated product. And that's safe, Michael?
Did the Vedic People have a substance disorder because they wanted to drink enough soma to see religious realities?
Anytime you hear that a psychoactive drug has not been proven to be effective, it's a lie. People can make such claims only by dogmatically ignoring all the glaringly obvious signs of efficacy.
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.
Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.
Most psychoactive substance use can be judged as recreational OR medicinal OR both. The judgements are not just determined by the circumstances of use, either, but also by the biases of those doing the judging.
The drug war controls the very way that we are allowed to see the world. The Drug War is thus a meta-injustice, not just a handful of bad legal statutes.
We need a Controlled Prohibitionists Act, to get psychiatric help for those who think that prohibition makes sense despite its appalling record of causing civil wars overseas and devastating inner cities.
The best step we could take in harm reduction is re-legalizing everything and starting to teach safe use. Spend the DEA's billions on "go" teams that would descend on locations where drugs are being used stupidly -- not to arrest, but to educate.
Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks. People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took your prohibition to accomplish that! Stop arresting, start teaching safe use!
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