When America says 'Hate drugs!'...

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When America says 'Hate drugs!'...

the rest of the world says 'How much?'

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

August 11, 2026

In yesterday's essay, I reached out to overseas readers, asking them to update me on how drug prohibition is playing out in their home countries.¹ I did so in order to demonstrate that the prohibitionist mindset knows no boundaries. Everywhere we look, it has empowered logically challenged bureaucrats, judges, prosecutors and law enforcement personnel to behave inhumanely in the name of "fighting drugs." In doing so, such professionals demonstrate their embarrassing ignorance of world history. They do not realize that drug use has inspired entire religions, as in the case of the Vedic and hence the Hindu religion.² They have apparently never heard of William James, the Father Of American Psychology, who was convinced of the philosophical significance of so-called altered states.³ They have apparently never heard of ethnobotanist Richard Schultes ⁴ or chemist Alexander Shulgin ⁵ or drug researchers like Stanislav Grof ⁶ and James Fadiman.⁷ And so they set forth in ignorant bliss on a superstitious campaign to destroy basic freedoms under the supposition that "anything goes" in our efforts to push back against the inanimate scapegoat called "drugs." This is especially true in the legal realm. A modern society's legislative ability to punish a drug user seems to be limited only by the imagination of their prosecutors. The M.O. is always the same, however: come up with any punishment that you please for a drug user, and then retroactively give that punishment the fig leaf of propriety with the choplogic of your choice. The judge will be sure to see things your way provided only that your goal is to "send a message" to those "evil" users of psychoactive substances.

And today's first example of that M.O. comes from Bulgaria, in response to that 'call to action' that I sent out yesterday.⁸ It is the story of a disabled 44-year-old accident victim by the name of Vasil Tonchovski who was given a three-month jail sentence for "self-medicating" with marijuana. The state prosecutor has second-guessed the man's claim that marijuana provides him with pain relief and helps him to walk unaided. The state claims that the use of the drug for such purposes has never been proven to be effective. This statement demonstrates the philosophical absurdity of drug prohibition, however. We do not need scientists to tell us that a drug that relaxes us can have knock-on effects that lessen pain, at least from the viewpoint of the sufferer. This is psychological common sense, and yet this holistic common sense is ignored in Drug War societies. The prosecutor ignores it in order to get a conviction, and the scientists ignore it in order to keep their jobs in a laboratory environment in which the principles of reductive materialism must be accepted uncritically. If marijuana has not been proven effective for such purposes, it is only because the western world views the drug through the lens of reductive materialism, whereby they judge efficacy by looking under a microscope, totally ignoring the testimony of those who know best what is working and what is not: i.e., the users themselves.

This is why GK Chesterton was opposed to the idea of liquor prohibition.⁹ He realized that liquor prohibition was not just bad legislation, but that it involved an absurd principle: the idea that a bureaucrat could decide what is best for an individual human being when it comes to their health. Anyone can talk plausibly about health in the abstract, but to decide what makes sense for a given human being (given the endless array of variables involved, many of them unknown and scarcely suspected by the user him or herself) would require that the bureaucrat be a kind of God, a being that was privy to all the would-be user's hopes and dreams, their goals in life, etc. And yet in this case from Bulgaria, drug prohibition has basically placed the prosecutor in the role of a 'health expert', one who can decide what "should" constitute adequate pain relief for a complete stranger. Whence comes this expertise? Do they teach courses on psychological well-being in law school?

One wonders how that prosecutor would feel if he failed to get what he felt to be the proper amount of pain relief from his dentist after a tooth extraction. How would he feel if the dentist turned around and told him, "There is no proof that more pain relief would help you. Besides, how do I know that you're REALLY feeling so much pain? How do I know that you're not just putting on a show in order to get more drugs out of me?" I once got this very reaction from my own dentist when I asked for pain relief after the filling of a cavity. She did not speak those words, but I could read them in her worried eyes. She ended up giving me some over-the-counter medicine for my unbearable pain. I had to suffer because of Drug War ideology. No need to guess why, of course. My dentist knew that the DEA was watching dentists like a hawk; the bureaucrats' job was to second-guess the amount of pain relief that dentists doled out to their patients, and so my well-being had to come in second place to her job security and her ability to pay her bills.

Bulgaria does not have a DEA as such, but it does not need one. As the website "Ask AI" explains, Bulgaria "collaborates with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to combat drug trafficking and improve its capabilities in detecting and dismantling drug threats like Fentanyl." And "collaborates" is the word, all right. As historian Richard Louis Miller demonstrates in "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," drug prohibition has Nazified the world by destroying the rule of law whenever the word "drugs" is so much as mentioned in a case. That book is full of stateside drug-related cases that make Vasil Tonchovski's problems look like a walk in the park. Miller quotes one victim of drug-war zealotry as follows:

I'm an end-stage renal patient on kidney dialysis three days a week. I was growing and using marijuana as a medical herb. When the police entered my home they found one marijuana plant. I live in a trailer and they brought in so many police that some had to wait outside. Several weapons, flak jackets, ski masks, and an assortment of vehicles were present... I was taken to jail in handcuffs. ¹⁰

By the way, AI's answer was wrong. The DEA has no interest in dismantling drug threats of any kind. Their job is to keep the world scared of psychoactive substances in order to justify their $51 billion annual budget.¹¹ They need drug problems so badly that they create them out of whole cloth, as academician Philip Jenkins demonstrates in "Synthetic Panics."¹² What the DEA really does is search for ways to keep drugs a problem so that they will have something to crack down upon as intemperately as possible for ages to come. The last thing that the DEA wants to do is bring an end to drug problems. But then it's no surprise that AI got this wrong: the only source that they cited for their response was the DEA itself.

Speaking of Richard Miller, his book should be required reading in all high schools and universities, not just in the United States but in freedom loving countries everywhere. It clearly demonstrates how the scapegoating of drugs has led to an hysteria that has made a mockery of due process and subjected drug users to all sorts of extrajudicial punishment with disturbing parallels to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany.

A Missouri multiple sclerosis patient declared that marijuana 'lets me walk without the aid of a cane or walker' but was charged with felony cultivation. Soon thereafter, Highway Patrol spokesperson urged defeat of legislative efforts to make marijuana available to patients through their doctors. Rather than grant access to a drug that could improve the condition of people who are physically unfit, Drug Warriors demand that unfit people be rounded up and imprisoned. The Drug War has brought Nazi medical practice to America. ¹³

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

And so drug prohibition blends medicine with criminal justice, something that Miller warns us has happened before.

In 1938 a Nazi medical writer declared, 'National Socialism means something fundamentally new for medical life. It has overcome an idea that was central to medicine of the recent past: the right to one's own body.' ¹⁴

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

Of course, Miller's book was published in 1996, when the drug-hating hysteria fanned by Reagan and the Bushes was still close to fever heat. It was a time when the Stalinist practice of ratting out your parents for their use of demonized substances was still considered to be cool. The outward expression of our drug hatred may have become a little more subtle over the years, with the legalization of marijuana in over 20 states ¹⁵ and a renewed scientific interest in psilocybin.¹⁶ But Americans remain terrified about speaking up. They refuse to say anything good about drugs or anything bad about drug prohibition. At least that has been my finding after seven years of studying drug attitudes from a philosophical point of view. My letters on this subject almost always go unanswered; no one wants to say that the emperor is wearing no clothes (with a few rare exceptions, such as Carl Hart ¹⁷ and Colleen Cowles ¹⁸). This is no doubt why Robert Whitaker and MAD ¹⁹ ignore the fact that drug prohibition outlaws the right of the depressed to heal, because he knows that his organization would be pilloried and lose members were it to insist that drugs actually have positive uses, uses, moreover, that are obvious if we only could take off the blinders of social biases and consider the matter from the standpoint of psychological common sense. And so drug prohibition gets a big fat Mulligan for causing all sorts of problems, including inner-city shootings ²⁰, totally unnecessary electroshock therapy ²¹ and suicides ²² caused by the fact that we have outlawed all substances that can inspire and elate.

The Bulgarian story reminds me of the depressing fact that the DEA is a worldwide agency. It is a worldwide agency with the implicit goal of enforcing Christian Science Sharia around the globe, ruining the lives of anyone who dares to use drugs for human benefit. And make no mistake: the DEA will carry the "logic" of that job to its ultimate deadly conclusion unless Americans -- the people who gave them birth -- should pull the plug on this Frankenstein and start thinking sanely about drugs, for the first time, perhaps, in the history of the west. We need to find a new way to deal with what Aleister Crowley called "the moral problem posed by the discoveries of organic chemistry," a way that is consistent with democratic freedoms and human progress. In the words of his eccentric rehab coach King Lamus, America needs "to destroy the cowardly superstition that manhood and womanhood are incapable of the right and proper use of anything whatever in nature."

But time is running out.

The so-called "leader of the free world" has already invoked the "final solution"²³ for dealing with suspected drug dealers at sea: one simply kills them. That is not some isolated policy decision on his part; he is following a definite trajectory. Unless the millions of Americans who know better start speaking up, despite the very real risks of doing so, America's unprecedented war on psychoactive substances is going to end very badly. As Richard Miller warns:

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. ²⁴

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

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Notes for essay entitled When America says 'Hate drugs!'...:

1: Outraged Fingertips DWP (up)
2: Flood, Gavin. 2009. “BBC - Religions - Hinduism: History of Hinduism.” Bbc.co.uk. August 24, 2009. https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/hinduism/history/history_1.shtml. (up)
3: “The Varieties of Religious Experience : William James : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2021. Internet Archive. 2021. https://archive.org/details/the-varieties-of-religious-experience_202109. (up)
4: Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers Schultes, Richard, 1979 (up)
5: “Erowid Online Books : ‘TIHKAL’ - The Continuation’ by Alexander and Ann Shulgin.” 2015. Erowid.Org. https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/tihkal/tihkal.shtml. (up)
6: “The Transpersonal Vision : The Healing Potential of Nonordinary States of Consciousness : Grof, Stanislav, 1931- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2022. Internet Archive. 2022. https://archive.org/details/transpersonalvis0000gro (up)
7: Fadiman, James. Psychedelicexplorersguide.com. 2011. https://www.psychedelicexplorersguide.com/. (up)
8: 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)
9: Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument against the Scientifically Organized State Chesterton, GK (up)
10: Miller, Richard L. 1996. Drug Warriors and Their Prey. Praeger. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/594749.Drug_Warriors_and_Their_Prey. (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: “Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic Politics of Designer Drugs | Office of Justice Programs.” 2024. Ojp.Gov. 2024. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/synthetic-panics-symbolic-politics-designer-drugs. (up)
13: Miller, Richard L. 1996. Drug Warriors and Their Prey. Praeger. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/594749.Drug_Warriors_and_Their_Prey. (up)
14: Miller, Richard L. 1996. Drug Warriors and Their Prey. Praeger. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/594749.Drug_Warriors_and_Their_Prey. (up)
15: DISA. 2025. “MARIJUANA LEGALITY BY STATE - Updated April 28, 2025.” DISA. https://disa.com/marijuana-legality-by-state/. (up)
16: Org, Drugpolicy. 2017. “Drug Policy Alliance WE NEED A HEALTH APPROACH TO PSILOCYBIN MUSHROOMS FACTS ABOUT PSILOCYBIN MUSHROOMS.” https://drugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/2023.04.05_psilocybin_factsheet.pdf. (up)
17: Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear Hart, Dr. Carl L. Hart, 2020 (up)
18: “War on Us – the War on Drugs Is a War on All of Us.” 2019. Waronus.com. 2019. http://waronus.com/. (up)
19: Madder in America DWP (up)
20: Gun Deaths in Big Cities Big Cities Health (up)
21: To this day, the FDA allows and even encourages electroshock therapy, a protocol that damages the brain. Brain damage is not a problem for the government. They just do not want brains to think differently. (up)
22: Depressed? Ask Your Doctor if Assisted Suicide is Right for You DWP (up)
23: The Final Solution DWP (up)
24: Miller, Richard L. 1996. Drug Warriors and Their Prey. Praeger. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/594749.Drug_Warriors_and_Their_Prey. (up)

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Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.

There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.

This is the mentality for today's materialist researcher when it comes to "laughing gas." He does not care that it merely cheers folks up. He wants to see what is REALLY going on with the substance, using electrodes and brain scans.

Suicidal people should be given drugs that cheer them up immediately and whose use they can look forward to. The truth is, we would rather such people die than to give them such drugs, that's just how bamboozled we are by the war against drugs.

I will gladly respect the police once we remove them from Gestapo duty by ending the war on drugs. Police should also learn to live on a budget, without deriving income from confiscating houses and dormitories, etc.

Americans HATE big government -- and yet they have no problem with government using drug prohibition to control their pain relief and how and how much they can think and feel in this life.

My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine, 1884

Assisted suicide cannot be discussed meaningfully without discussing the drug prohibition that renders it necessary in the first place.

Someone needs to create a group called Drug Warriors Anonymous, a place where Americans can go to discuss their right to mind and mood medicine and to discuss the many ways in which our society trashes godsend medicines.

Prohibitionists have blood on their hands. People do not naturally die in the tens of thousands from opioid use, notwithstanding the lies of 19th-century missionaries in China. It takes bad drug policy to accomplish that.

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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.

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When America says 'Hate drugs!'...

the rest of the world says 'How much?'

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend