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Why the Drug War is far worse than a failure

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 5, 2021



Author's comment in response to article by Ramon T. Tulfo entitled 'Ping Lacson is right: Digong's Drug War is a failure,' published March 4, 2021 in the Manlia Times.

Author's follow-up for September 12, 2025

The Drug War is FAR WORSE than a failure. It is the politically inspired demonization of godsend plant medicines that have been used responsibly by other cultures for millennia. Benjamin Franklin loved opium , as did Marcus Aurelius and Marco Polo. Sigmund Freud thought cocaine was a godsend for his depression. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Plutarch were all influenced by the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries1. Tribes in MesoAmerica have used psychoactive plants in religious ceremonies for millennia, until they were decimated by the west. The entire Vedic religion was founded to worship a plant medicine called Soma.

With this politically incorrect backstory in mind, we can see that the Drug War is actually the enforcement of a religion: the religion of Christian Science, according to which a human being "should" have no need for drugs and should rely instead on the Christian religion for solace and peace of mind. That is, in fact, a religion, however, not a legitimate social policy for a supposedly democratic government.

It is also a violation of Natural Law for a government to tell its citizens that it can't reach down and use the plants that grow at their very feet. Jefferson founded America on Natural Law, after all, following in the footsteps of John Locke who wrote that human beings have a natural right to the use of the Earth "and all that lies therein." That's why Jefferson was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 2 in 1987 and confiscated the Founding Father's poppy plants. Unfortunately, Americans were so bamboozled by Drug Warrior censorship and lies at the time (especially the highly mendacious "frying pan" ad) that no one noticed that the invasion in question constituted a coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America.

Nor was the Drug War begun to combat a health crisis, but rather to disfranchise the political enemies of the Drug Warriors. The Drug War, in fact, merely took the place of the discredited poll tax in attempting to marginalize unpopular minorities. Harry Anslinger hounded black singer Billie Holiday to her death, not to prevent her from using heroin but to keep her from singing songs like "Strange Fruit," which was making white America uncomfortable in the 1930s. Richard Nixon created drug laws for the sole purpose of removing his enemies from the voting rolls. That's why his own "Drug War" treated "drug" possession as a felony, since a felony conviction would result in the disfranchisement of the guilty party.

If we must have a Drug War, let's crack down on alcohol and tobacco and punish and threaten anyone who has so much as a TRACE of these substances in their digestive systems. Bar them from work and hunt them down.

Then we'd lock up all the HYPOCRITICAL Drug Warriors and start to educate people to benefit from plant medicine and use it in the safest way possible, rather than to superstitiously demonize it and make it the scapegoat for all social problems. For if the Drug Warrior really wanted Americans to make good decisions, they would ensure that every American had a first-class education, rather than spending all their rhetoric and money on locking up the millions whom those same politicians have failed to properly educate in the first place.



Author's Follow-up:

September 12, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up






I am always bothered when pundits tell us that the Drug War has failed. This is because the statement seems to imply that drug prohibition would have been fine had it only succeeded in stopping us all from using the medicines of our choice. They do not see that the outlawing of psychoactive medicine is nothing less than the outlawing of basic liberties, including the right to practice the religion of our choice and the right to take care of our own health. The Vedic religion owes its very existence to the use of a medicine that inspired and elated. In the same way, ancient Greek religions were organized around the ritual use of opium 3. And the time-honored Eleusinian Mysteries clear centered around the use of a psychedelic of some kind. This is obvious from the awestruck accounts of that ritual. Such accounts read exactly like user reports of the psilocybin and LSD experience. Cicero wrote the following about this rite, a ritual that was observed annually with scarce a break for 2,000 consecutive years -- until it was tellingly outlawed by Emperor Theodosius in 392 A.D. as a threat to Christianity:

"For it seems to me that among the many admirable and divine things your Athenians have established to the advantage of human society, there is nothing better than the mysteries by which we are polished and softened into politeness, from the rude austerities of barbarism. Justly indeed are they called initiations, for by them we especially learn the grand principles of philosophic life, and gain, not only the art of living agreeably, but of dying with a better hope." --Marcus Tullius Cicero, Treatise on the Laws4


"Dying with a better hope." This is the kind of benefit that psychedelics are known to provide for the prepared mind.

But the Drug War also outlaws our right to take care of our own health. The outlawing of the panacea called opium had the result of saddling humanity with a wide variety of health issues that they could no longer treat on their own. The medical establishment saw dollar signs in this equation and were happy to help normalize the Drug War by promoting themselves as the new experts on literally everything that ailed us. When it came to depression, they ensured their maximum remuneration by offering us Big Pharma drugs for which dependency was a feature, not a bug! And so, to protect us from a time-honored panacea, the medical establishment created the biggest mass pharmaceutical dependency of all time. One in four American women take a Big Pharma 5 6 med every day of their life7.

Take me, for instance. I have been struggling to get off of Effexor 8 for a year now. This drug is FAR harder to kick than heroin. In fact, it is rare to find ANY long-term user who has successfully renounced the drug. My own psychiatrist told me that the drug has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users after three years. Compare this to heroin. 34% of Vietnam vets used that drug overseas and at least 20% were dependent on it. And what happened when these hundreds of thousands of soldiers returned to the States? Only 5% were unable to kick the drug on their own9. 5%! Meanwhile, it is not clear to me that it is even POSSIBLE to get off of Effexor -- with or without help from the medical industry that got me hooked on the drug in the first place.

Bear in mind that drug prohibition has destroyed my right to healthcare in two ways: not only did drug prohibition force me to use these dependence-causing pills in the first place by outlawing everything else -- but drug prohibition also outlaws all the drugs that could help me get off of Effexor. It is just common sense that the wise intermittent use of coca and opium and laughing gas (etc.) could get me through the times of withdrawal -- but the Drug War completely outlaws all such medicines. Last I checked, the FDA is trying to turn laughing gas into a "drug" -- when the substance was already shamelessly unavailable to the depressed.

And laughing gas 10 is the substance that William James used to investigate the nature of Reality itself. So not only does drug prohibition outlaw religion and healthcare, but it outlaws academic freedom as well. Indeed, it outlaws human progress!

And I have yet to mention the way that drug prohibition has destroyed minority communities around the globe by incentivizing gun violence 11 among the poor and marginalized. This latter crime is unforgivable since America knew full well from liquor prohibition that prohibition causes death and violence.

For these reasons -- and endless others -- I think we to say not simply that the Drug War has failed but that it had no right to succeed in the first place!

Of course, as pundits like Jules Buchanan have justly pointed out, in one sense, the Drug War has not failed at all. It was clearly the goal of the original Drug Warriors to marginalize minorities and foreigners. All drug prohibition was originally justified by pointing to the danger of minorities affecting our poor innocent white young people. Opium demonization was all about anti-Chinese bigotry, just as marijuana was demonized based on a supposed threat from Hispanic immigrants, and cocaine 12 13 was demonized based on a supposed threat from Blacks. It is no coincidence that the War on Drugs has destroyed minority communities -- nor is it surprising that the Drug Warriors refuse to apologize for that fact, but rather pursue their death-dealing policies ever more fanatically.

The fact that the war on multi-ethnic Americans is supported by minority leaders themselves is a sad testament to the power of group think and fearmongering in a democracy -- and the power of relentless propaganda over the last 100 years, chiefly in the form of the ruthless censorship in the media of all talk of drug benefits of any kind. Today, the entire academic field reckons without drug prohibition. Depression, for instance, would not be a "thing" in America if we were to relegalize coca and opium 14 . That is a simple psychological fact. Of course, it is unthinkable in the west because we have been taught to judge drugs based on the worst possible imaginable use by a white young person -- a white young person whom we refuse to educate about safe use!

The overall take-home message is not even about drugs: it is rather that American democracy is fundamentally flawed. It turns out that even the U.S. Constitution itself combined with the Bill of Rights cannot protect us against the uninformed fearmongering of self-interested and racist politicians. Americans have shown that they are willing to renounce the most time-honored freedoms if we only scare them enough with racist and xenophobic fearmongering.

One is reminded of an historical anecdote related by the revivified Egyptian count in "Some Words with a Mummy," a short story by Edgar Allan Poe15. When his eager reanimators start bragging about the benefits of American democracy, the count recalls a similar political experiment in Egypt that took place thousands of years ago. The narrator summarizes as follows:

"For a while they managed remarkably well; only their habit of bragging was prodigious. The thing ended, however, in the consolidation of the thirteen states, with some fifteen or twenty others, in the most odious and insupportable despotism that was ever heard of upon the face of the Earth.

I asked what was the name of the usurping tyrant. As well as the Count could recollect, it was Mob.16"













Notes for essay entitled Why the Drug War is far worse than a failure:

1: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
2: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
3: Archaeological evidence on the use of opium in the Minoan world Askitopoulou , Helen, ScienceDirect, 2002 (up)
4: On the Laws Cicero, The Online Library of Liberty (up)
5: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
6: 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)
7: Richard Louis Miller. 2017. Psychedelic Medicine : The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca. Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press. (up)
8: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
9: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
10: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
11: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
12: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
13: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
14: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
15: Some Words with a Mummy Poe, Edgar Allan, PoeStories.com (up)
16: Some Words with a Mummy Poe, Edgar Allan, PoeStories.com (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Psychiatrists keep flipping the script. When it became clear that SSRIs caused dependence, instead of apologizing, they told us we need to keep taking our meds. Now they even claim that criticizing SSRIs is wrong. This is anti-intellectual madness.

It's a category error to say that scientists can tell us if psychoactive drugs "really work." It's like asking Dr. Spock of Star Trek if hugging "really works." ("Hugging is highly illogical, Captain.")

Drugs like opium and cocaine should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."

The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.

"When two men who have been in an aggressive mood toward each other take part in the ritual, one is able to say to the other, 'Come, let us drink, for there is something between us.' " re: the Mayan use of the balche drink in Encyc of Psych Plants, by Ratsch & Hofmann

My local community store here in the sticks sells Trump "dollar bills" at the checkout counter. I don't know what's worse: a president encouraging insurrection or an electorate that does not see that as a problem.

I never said that getting off SSRIs should be done without supervision. If you're on Twitter for medical advice, you're in the wrong place.

The best long-term treatment for OUD would be to normalize the nightly smoking of opium at home, not to addict the user to government-supplied drugs that render them impervious to the benefits of the poppy plant.

Here's the first step in the FDA process for evaluating a psychoactive drug: Ignore all glaringly obvious benefits.

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.


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






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