Why the Outlawing of Cocaine is a Crime Against Humanity
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
November 15, 2025
When brainwashed Americans think about cocaine 1, they think about the poor American young people whom we refuse to educate about safe drug use. They actually believe that American young people are the only stakeholders in the drug debate in America. They demand therefore that the government protect their kids by all means necessary. Bill Clinton 2 is the poster child for this selfish point of view, having opposed cocaine legalization on the grounds that it would have meant the death of his brother, as if his brother was not placed in even greater danger by the ready availability of illegal cocaine which was never regulated as to quality and dosage.
Bill must have really loved his brother, however, since he was willing to "save him" by paying the high price tag of drug prohibition. If saving Roger meant the destruction of inner cities around the globe, fine 3. If it meant the disappearance of tens of thousands of Mexican young people, fine 4. If it meant the end of the rule of law in Latin America, fine 5. If it meant the destruction of the American Bill of Rights, fine 6. Anything to save Roger Clinton. Indeed, Bill Clinton's drug policies have now led to the election of a would-be fascist as President of the United States by throwing hundreds of thousands of minority voters in jail, and Bill is still unrepentant about his support for drug prohibition 7. Now, that's love!
Or is it?
It strikes me rather as monstrous nepotism: attempting to safeguard the health of one's undereducated loved one by saying, in effect: "To hell with the rest of the world! To hell with time-honored freedoms and fair elections! To hell with education and personal responsibility! To hell with our time-honored right to take care of our own health as we see fit!"
And above all: "to hell with those who could profit from improved mind and mood -- including the severely depressed and those with mental impairment due to Alzheimer's 8 Disease, etc."
That's Bill's rationale: Let the world itself end, provided only that his brother can be saved from his own irresponsibility.
CASE OF THE INVISIBLE STAKEHOLDERS
Now, when I think about cocaine, I do not think about the white American young people whom we refuse to educate about drugs. I think instead of the hundreds of millions of depressed in the world who suffer in silence, totally unnecessarily, because of the outlawing of a naturally occurring godsend. I think in particular of close family members who are stuck at home, on a daily basis, for years at a time, unable to face the world, all because self-interested doctors and racist American politicians have libeled and slandered "the Divine Plant of the Incas.910" I think of the fact that many of these depressed millions have received a double blow from drug prohibition: not only has it denied them the use of veritable panaceas, but it has shunted them off onto underachieving Big Pharma "meds" that cause life-long dependency: drugs like Effexor that can NEVER be kicked, ever 1112. I think as well of the victims of dementia whom we are sacrificing on the altar of our superstitious religion of drug demonization 13. They desperately need a drug that could sharpen and motivate the mind, results for which cocaine is perfectly well known, and yet we refuse to let even Alzheimer's patients use the drug!
I think finally of the enormous hypocrisy of this cruel prohibition in a world in which the Jim Beam company targets bourbon advertisements at young people on prime-time television 14!
For these and many more reasons, I consider the outlawing of cocaine to be nothing less than a crime against humanity.
I'LL TRY 'SNOOKERED PUNDITS' FOR 200, ALEX
This is what makes me so different from most drug-war pundits, by the way. The majority of big names in the field (like Rick Strassman 15, Michael Pollan 16, DJ Nutt 17, and Andrew Weil 18) actually believe that panaceas like opium and cocaine are "hard" drugs that should never be used except perhaps for physical complaints. They are completely blind to the full list of stakeholders in the drug debate. They do not realize that our media censors have shielded them, not only from stories about beneficial drug use, but also from stories about the immense but hidden suffering caused by the prohibition of drugs, about which we never hear, read, or see anything at all! The millions who suffer in silence from drug prohibition are never considered stakeholders by our Chicken Little prohibitionists.
Carl Hart might seem an exception to this rule. In his brave book, "Drug Use for Grown-Ups, 19" the American neuroscientist reminds us that most people can and do use drugs wisely, that even opiates can be used wisely. There is a problem here, however. You see, Carl is a materialist by profession and so he believes -- or at least he must claim to believe -- that holistic-working drugs like opium and cocaine cannot be used for psychotherapeutic purposes 20. Why not? Because science has come up with wonder drugs for such things, don't you see? What wonder drugs, you ask? Why, those pills that turn the depressed into patients for life, that's what wonder drugs -- and we are Luddites if we renounce those drugs in favor of using the plant medicine that grows at our very feet. This is why Carl warns his readers at the beginning of his otherwise informative book that the drugs that he will be discussing are to be used for recreational purposes only. If we want to improve our mind or mood, we should see a materialist doctor so that he can fix our "real" problems.
I am guessing that this is how Carl "got away" with publishing such a controversially titled book in the first place without being hounded out of the mainstream. He made it clear from the beginning that he was not going to question the propriety of the medical industry's monopoly on providing mind and mood medicine. He posed no threat to this multi-billion-dollar industry that had been created out of whole cloth by drug prohibition and its outlawing of time-honored panaceas. Of course, the drug re-legalization that Carl championed would be a devastating blow to such a monopoly, but few people in the industry -- or outside it, for that matter -- could imagine re-legalization coming about anytime soon, at least not before they reached their respective retirement ages. And so Carl was tolerated as an eccentric, especially since he never questioned the supposed all-powerful nature of the reductive-materialist approach to mind and mood medicine 21. Carl was a scamp, perhaps, but he was not a real revolutionary. The Mental Health Industry could continue as normal, raking in money hand over fist thanks to its guaranteed customer base -- a customer base provided by the Big Pharma companies that took advantage of drug prohibition to turn the depressed into patients for life.
THEY CAN'T BE THIS BLIND, CAN THEY?
Just two days ago, I wrote an essay 22 about how cocaine could help people suffering from dementia and how Drug War propaganda had rendered this obvious fact completely invisible to Americans, doctors included (see What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition). As I was writing, I became a little worried, however. The potential benefits of cocaine use for fighting mental fog seemed so obvious to me that I suddenly felt there MUST be all sorts of attempts going on to leverage that power, or at least to change drug law for that purpose. Was I perhaps berating the medical industry for a crime of which it was innocent -- or at least less guilty than I had supposed? So thinking, I started searching the Web for "cocaine and Alzheimer's," half expecting that I would encounter results that would force me to rewrite my essay and to admit that scientists were indeed pursuing this angle as best they could in the age of drug prohibition. And yet I need not have worried. Scientists were, indeed, just as brainwashed as I had supposed on this subject.
Instead of finding articles about fighting dementia with the brain-focusing power of cocaine, I found articles stressing only the potential dangers of cocaine use. Many of the authors actually seemed to be disappointed that they could not draw any direct connection between Alzheimer's and cocaine use, but they tsk-tsked the reader that long-term cocaine use could potentially be problematic, concluding by essentially saying, "Lord knows what might happen if dementia patients were to use cocaine, especially for any length of time!!!"
You see what we're up against as drug-law reformers? Even when there are no drug-incriminating facts whatsoever to go on, our scientists encourage us to keep wringing our hands over the threat posed by the politically created category of substances called "drugs" -- meanwhile completely ignoring the obvious fact that a drug that fights mental fog might actually be of use to people who suffer from mental fog!
This is why I keep saying that drug prohibition outlaws far more things than just drugs: it outlaws common sense and hence simple humanity. Wherefore I repeat that the outlawing of drugs is a crime against humanity.
Other pundits might agree with me here, but they would claim that cocaine and opium are exceptions to that rule, that these latter drugs are obviously too dangerous for anyone to use wisely. They are "hard" drugs and must not be used by anybody at all -- at least not for mental, emotional or spiritual purposes.
But these pundits have things exactly backwards. The outlawing of such time-honored panaceas as cocaine and opium is the greatest crime of all! Our pundits think otherwise only because they completely fail to recognize all the stakeholders in the drug prohibition debate. They fail to realize that drug prohibition withholds drugs from far more stakeholders than just the white American young people whom we refuse "on principle" to educate about safe drug use. It withholds godsend medicines from hundreds of millions of chronic depressives and hundreds of millions of dementia patients. As such, this prohibition of theirs brings about immense unnecessary suffering.
As Thomas Szasz wrote in "Our Right to Drugs":
"The laws that deny healthy people 'recreational' drugs also deny sick people 'therapeutic' drugs." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p. 6723
GODSEND TERMINOLOGY
I realize that I use the word "godsend" in my essays quite a lot, but I do so for a reason. The word "drugs" is a pejorative term as used today; it is both subjective and prejudicial. I therefore use the word "godsend" on purpose, as an implicit rebuke to the use of the biased term "drug" and as a reminder that there are other ways to regard psychoactive medicines than through the jaundiced lens of the demagogue politicians of the west.
The fact that some drugs can be addictive is no reason to outlaw drugs. It is a reason to teach safe use and to publicize all the ways that smart people have found to avoid unwanted pharmacological dependency -- and a reason to use drugs to fight drugs.
Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but drugs have never been evil. The evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about drugs.
We should start taking names. All politicians and government officials who work to keep godsends like psilocybin from the public should be held to account for crimes against humanity when the drug war finally ends.
Daily opium use is no more outrageous than daily antidepressant use. In fact, it's less outrageous. It's a time-honored practice and can be stopped with a little effort and ingenuity, whereas it is almost impossible to get off some antidepressants because they alter brain chemistry.
Someone tweeted that fears about a Christian Science theocracy are "baseless." Tell that to my uncle who was lobotomized because they outlawed meds that could cheer him up -- tell that to myself, a chronic depressive who could be cheered up in an instant with outlawed meds.
Americans were always free to take care of their own health -- until drug warriors handed doctors a monopoly on providing mind and mood medicine. Instead of denouncing this attack on our healthcare autonomy, doctors began demonizing self-care as a mortal sin.
Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
How else will they scare us enough to convince us to give up all our freedoms for the purpose of fighting horrible awful evil DRUGS? DRUGS is the sledgehammer with which they are destroying American democracy.
Rick Strassman isn't sure that DMT should be legal. Really?! Does he not realize how dangerous it is to chemically extract DMT from plants? In the name of safety, prohibitionists have encouraged dangerous ignorance and turned local police into busybody Nazis.
The fact that some drugs can be addictive is no reason to outlaw drugs. It is a reason to teach safe use and to publicize all the ways that smart people have found to avoid unwanted pharmacological dependency -- and a reason to use drugs to fight drugs.
