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Why Drug Prohibition is a Crime against Humanity

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 28, 2025



Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity1. It is staggeringly cruel. It forces untold millions to suffer in silence.

Take me, for instance. I am attempting to get off and stay off the Big Pharma 2 3 med called Effexor 4 . And it's not easy. The withdrawal downsides are hideous and can continue for years. And yet it is clear to me -- absolutely clear -- that I could use a variety of drugs like coca and opium 5 and phenethylamines in a strategic and safe way in order to transcend Effexor downsides and truly get off that dependence-causing drug -- starting today! Starting right now! I could get off Effexor! This is just psychological common sense. And yet our drug policy tells us that drugs must be outlawed for everybody if they could be misused by the white young people whom we refuse to educate about safe use.

This algorithm represents a veto on human progress. It represents the end of personal health care. It is illegal to take care of one's emotional and mental health in America. Illegal.

If Americans had a clue what was going on here, then all sites on the topic of Effexor withdrawal would contain protests against drug prohibition, the drug policy which makes that withdrawal impossible. And yet no one connects the dots. That shows how successful the Drug Warriors have been in blinding us to all benefits of demonized substances.

Drug warriors should be put on trial for denying me the godsends that grow at my very feet, for denying me the right to take care of my own health. That is a crime against humanity.

How do they get away with this?

Answer: They never consider any stakeholders in their drug policy debates except for white American young people -- the ones whom they refuse on principle to educate about safe use. They never take into account the depressed whom they are forcing to go without godsend medicines.

A few months ago I wrote about a progressive cousin who spoke favorably about the idea of killing drug dealers. That cousin has a deeply depressed wife. I should have said to him: "That drug prohibition that you champion is the reason why your wife is living in hell 24/7!!!"

Alas, the Drug War clearly demonstrates that you can fool all of the people all of the time. You can even convince progressives to abjure time-honored freedoms in an effort to keep Americans from using godsend medicines. Propaganda is all-powerful. As historian William Shirer wrote in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:

"No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda."


The Drug War proves that propaganda works, even in so-called democracies -- and this is a truth that the world has to come to terms with if freedom is to survive on planet Earth. Unless we take steps, like re-legalizing Mother Nature based on common-sense democratic principles, then racist politicians will continue to successfully promote inhumane agendas at the behest of self-interested billionaires.









Notes for essay entitled Why Drug Prohibition is a Crime against Humanity:

1: Drug Prohibition is a crime against humantiy DWP (up)
2: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
3: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
4: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
5: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The search for SSRIs has always been based on a flawed materialist premise that human consciousness is nothing but a mix of brain chemicals and so depression can be treated medically like any other physical condition.

By reading "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," I begin to understand why I encounter a wall of silence when I write to authors and professors on the subject of "drugs." The mere fact that the drug war inspires such self-censorship should be grounds for its immediate termination.

I'm grateful to the folks who are coming out of the woodwork at the last minute to deface their own properties with "Trump 2024" signs. Now I'll know who to thank should Trump get elected and sell us out to Putin.

I've found that almost no one in the medical establishment has a clue about the endless positive uses that there would be for drugs in a world in which we decided to use them as wisely as possible for human benefit.

Anyone who has read Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin knows that the drug warriors have it exactly backwards. Drugs are our friends. We need to find safe ways to use them to improve ourselves psychologically, spiritually and mentally.

I just can't believe... [image]

The main form of drug war propaganda is censorship. That's why most Americans cannot imagine any positive uses for psychoactive substances, because the media and the government won't allow that.

Addiction thrives BECAUSE of prohibition, which limits drug choice and discourages education about psychoactive substances and how to use them wisely.

Drug prohibition is the perfect racist crime. It brought gunfire to inner cities, yet those who seek to end the gunfire pretend that drug prohibition has nothing to do with it.

In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.


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






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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..."

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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.

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

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