A laughable game show about a laughable drug policy
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 11, 2026
HOST: Welcome to What's My Line?! Today's guest is someone in the biomedical field. Someone in the biomedical field. Our contestants' duty is to identify the job that he holds. Okay, guys? Let's start with the star of Celebrity Lawn Darts, Talon West. Talon, your first question, please?
TALON: Do you work in a laboratory, my dear?
HOST: Oh, good question.
GUEST: Yes, I do.
HOST: Interesting. Let's go to Indigo Lane from CSI: Run-of-the-mill Victims Unit.
INDIGO: Do you test bodily fluids, by any chance?
GUEST: Yes, I do.
INDIGO: What can I say, I had a hunch.
HOST: A good hunch! Good for you. Let's move on to Cairo Reeves, host of Chutes & Ladders: Celebrity Edition.
CAIRO: Does your work affect people like me?
GUEST: It could.
HOST: Aha! It could affect you, Cairo! Watch out! Haha! Talon, next question, please?
TALON: You say it could affect Cairo. How so?
GUEST: It could cause him to lose his job.
HOST: Wow! How odd is THAT? This is a tough one, folks. Indigo?
Indigo: Does your job have anything to do with urine, by any chance?
HOST: Where does she GET these questions?
GUEST: Yes, actually it does.
HOST: Shut my mouth! Really?! How did you know that, Indigo? Cairo, you get to ask the final question.
CAIRO: Would you, by any chance, be one of those weasels who tests employee urine, not simply to check for impairment, but to "catch them out" for using any medicines that inspire and elate which are not produced by Big Pharma, thereby denying them their time-honored right to take care of their own health as they see fit and tossing them out of the work force for the crime of being a Christian Science heretic?
GUEST: You got it in one!
HOST: Well, he got it in two, actually, but he did get it! Congratulations.
CAIRO: You sneaky little weasel.
HOST: That's all for today, folks.
CAIRO: How does it feel, making money by running roughshod over my time-honored rights? Huh? Come back here!
The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is a drug war collaborator. They helped the DEA confiscate Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in 1987.
A pharmacologically savvy drug dealer would have no problem getting someone off one drug because they would use the common sense practice of fighting drugs with drugs. But materialist doctors would rather that the patient suffer than to use such psychologically obvious methods.
The drug war is a slow-motion coup against democracy.
The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.
If there was free speech in America, we would see billboards demanding freedom to use psychoactive substances for religious purposes, or to heal, or to follow-up on the research of William James regarding the nature of human consciousness.
I can't imagine Allen Ginsberg writing "Howl!" while under the influence of mood-damping drugs like Inderal and Prozac -- but then maybe that's the point: the powers-that-be do not want poets writing poems like "Howl!"
Freud thought cocaine was a great antidepressant. His contemporaries demonized the drug by focusing only on the rare misusers. That's like judging alcohol by focusing on alcoholics.
MDMA legalization has suffered a setback by the FDA. These are the people who think Electro Shock Therapy is not used often enough! What sick priorities.
Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.
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.
HOST: Welcome to What's My Line?! Today's guest is someone in the biomedical field. Someone in the biomedical field. Our contestants' duty is to identify the job that he holds. Okay, guys? Let's start with the star of Celebrity Lawn Darts, Talon West. Talon, your first question, please? 
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