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Why Drug Prohibition is a Meta Injustice
Why Drug Prohibition is a Meta Injustice
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 11, 2026
Normally, I would consider it bad form for essayists to tell you that they are "feeling down today." It would be a case of what we used to call TMI as kids: "too much information." But this admission by a drug-war philosopher is highly relevant to his essays given that the lack of motivation referred to has been brought about by drug policy, which outlaws all substances that could help one to transcend this feeling and so be productive in life. This is why I call drug prohibition a meta injustice, because it does far worse than censor you as to what you can talk about: it seeks to limit the amount of passion and zeal that you can devote to your cause as a naysayer against the status quo.
Take me, for instance. There are numerous "behind-the-scenes" steps that I could take to improve the potential indexability of each of my essays. These steps would not take long and I have custom forms that I can, in theory, easily fill out for this purpose. And yet I find it quite hard to follow through. It's kind of like that broken yellow water dish that sits out on my porch under the table on which I place peanuts for my blue jays and cardinals. The plate has been sitting there for months now, and I never think much about it; but when I analyze my failure to act (to pick up the two large ceramic pieces and throw them in a trash bag at long last), I realize that I'm always basically thinking to myself: "Why bother?" I actually like neatness and attention to detail, and yet I have difficulty cleaning up "in real time."
Fortunately, I have long since learned to compensate for this shortcoming by conducting condo clean-up operations on a semi-regular basis on my "good days" while listening to a variety of provocative philosophical screeds on my Bose headset, thereby keeping the morbid reflections at bay. And so, as I tote the garbage bag to the door, I'm no longer thinking, "What's the point of doing this, the bag's just going to fill up again after all!"; instead, I'm thinking to myself: "Where does this so-called philosopher 'get off' concluding that the sober mindset is the nonpareil of unbiased baselines, emotionally speaking!? I'll show him: I'll write an essay about this claptrap this very minute -- or at least after the one-hour timer has sounded, announcing the end of this particular battle in my ongoing war against entropy."
Thanks to these compensatory skills that I have acquired over the years, my place is quite attractive, if I do say so myself. And yet there are so many broken yellow water dishes sitting on the metaphorical porch of my life -- so many steps that could in theory be taken to advance my goals -- were I only allowed the same freedom that everyone had just over 100 years ago, the freedom to control how I take care of my own mind and mood.
Of course, if a psychiatrist were to read these thoughts, they would conclude that I have an addictive personality. From their point of view, I don't need any symptomatic incentives (except maybe for coffee and beer, of course): I need to have my brain chemistry changed once and for all with a one-size-fits-all pill that I will have to take for the rest of my life. Speaking of which, this is one of the most surprising realizations that I have come to over my last seven years of studying American drug attitudes, the fact that healthcare pundits never seem to see any downsides in turning their clientele into patients for life. This is odd, because so many of these pundits preach sermons about the horrors of dependency when it comes to illegal medicines, yet they tout dependency as a positive patient attribute when it comes to Big Pharma meds. They have become so blasé on the subject that the Mayo Clinic does not even mention "dependence" in their write-up of Effexor1, which is surely one of the most dependence-causing drugs in the world2 -- a fact that will never be "scientifically" established, however, in a world in which biopharma pays 75% of The FDA’s drug division budget3.
Key Takeaways:
Drug prohibition outlaws motivation and incentive.
We all have -- or had -- the freedom to take care of our own mind and mood.
Healthcare pundits see no downsides in dependency on Big Pharma meds.
In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.
It is a truism to say that we cannot change the world and that therefore we have to change ourselves -- but the drug war outlaws even this latter option.
If fearmongering drug warriors were right about the weakness of humankind, there would be no social drinkers, only drunkards.
Drug prohibition has resulted in hundreds of thousands of completely unnecessary deaths thanks to totally preventable drug overdoses!
The U.S. government created violence out of whole cloth in America's inner cities with drug prohibition -- and now it is using that violence as an excuse to kick the people that they themselves have knocked down.
The December Scientific American features a story called "The New Nuclear Age," about a trillion-dollar plan to add 100s of ICBM's to 5 states, which an SA editorial calls "kick me" signs. This Neanderthal plan comes from pols who think that compassion-boosting drugs are evil!
What bothers me about AI is that everyone's so excited to see what computers can do, while no one's excited to see what the human mind can do, since we refuse to improve it with mind-enhancing drugs.
People magazine should be fighting for justice on behalf of the thousands of American young people who are dying on the streets because of the drug war.
There are no recreational drugs. Even laughing gas has rational uses because it gives us a break from morbid introspection. There are recreational USES of drugs, but the term "recreational" is often used to express our disdain for users who go outside the healthcare system.
Outlawing substances like laughing gas and MDMA makes no more sense than outlawing fire.
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.
Normally, I would consider it bad form for essayists to tell you that they are "feeling down today." It would be a case of what we used to call TMI as kids: "too much information." But this admission by a drug-war philosopher is highly relevant to his essays given that the lack of motivation referred to has been brought about by drug policy, which outlaws all substances that could help one to transcend this feeling and so be productive in life. This is why I call drug prohibition a meta injustice, because it does far worse than censor you as to what you can talk about: it seeks to limit the amount of passion and zeal that you can devote to your cause as a naysayer against the status quo. 
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