How drug prohibition has destroyed the American justice system
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 17, 2026
I'm still wrapping my head around the Kafkaesque world faced by so-called drug offenders in America as detailed by Colleen Cowles in "War On Us."1 For merely possessing a few pills, Americans are being charged with felonies. Felonies! An estimated eight percent of Americans have felonies, according to a study cited by Cowles, and thirty-three percent of African Americans. 33%. This means far more than that they can be sent to prison for years. Once out, they can be denied educational loans, evicted from public housing, rendered ineligible for food stamps, and forced to submit to drug testing on demand. Even after they've completed years of harassing parole, the law seeks to prevent felons from getting on with their lives. As felons, they are barred from working in a host of jobs, which Colleen tells us include, but is by no means limited to: childcare worker, electrician, engineer, judge, nurse, manicurist, midwife, optometrist, psychologist, school-bus driver, social worker, teacher... even watchman. It makes you wonder what jobs they ARE allowed to hold: circus clown, perhaps? Ayurveda healer? Video game tester? (full-time pundit against the War on Drugs?)
"Most felony drug arrests," as Colleen reports, "are from minimal drug quantities," and yet we punish these folk with the fanaticism of a Torquemada. American Drug Warriors are truly sating their bloodlust. Legislators haven't been so busy trying to ruin the lives of nonviolent citizens since the passage of the anti-Catholic Penal Laws in 16th-century England.
Well, there is at least one hope for these self-medicators, however: if nothing else, they can always run for President of the United States, a job for which a prior felony conviction does not seem to be a problem.
For more specifics on the inhumane consequences of modern drug law in our so-called justice system, I refer the reader to the modern expert on that topic: Colleen Cowles and her eye-opening book: "War on Us: How the War on Drugs and Myths about Addiction Have Created a War on All of Us."2
I conclude with my own takeaways from that book viz. the American justice system.
Drug Prohibition and American Justice
Drug prohibition has destroyed the American justice system by replacing trials with plea deals and placing drug users on an onerous kind of parole in which their life is subject to micromanagement by court-appointed monitors with effectively arbitrary powers. Meanwhile, humiliating high-tech tools like "ankle bracelets," originally designed for violent offenders only, are now given to non-violent drug offenders as well.
We can see what's going on here. Instead of facing the fact that drug prohibition has overloaded the justice system to the point that trials are almost a thing of the past, the powers-that-be have instituted anti-democratic workarounds to deform the system to the point that it can accommodate the hundreds of thousands that we are determined to imprison for the mere possession of psychoactive substances of which politicians disapprove.
Instead of demanding an immediate end to the drug prohibition that has thus destroyed our justice system, respected organizations across America are determined to make as much money off of this hateful status quo as possible. The Corrections industry is just one of the many beneficiaries of the status quo which are determined to hold onto the golden goose of drug prohibition for as long as possible, and they are spending their PR dollars accordingly.
As Colleen Cowles reports in War On Us:
"In 2018, the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association mounted an ad campaign against criminal justice reform in that state. The New York City Patrolmen's Benevolent Association campaigned against parole reform. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association spends approximately $8 million annually on lobbying to defeat criminal justice reform, ranging from opposition to reform of three strikes laws to prison expansion."
Meanwhile, companies like J Pay and Securus earn billions by selling communication services to prisoners at monopoly prices.
Our current system," the author concludes, "is trading profit for public safety and human rights."
But then the profit motive appears everywhere you look in the drug prohibition story. The medical industry had a huge financial interest in demonizing the use of psychoactive godsends like cocaine and opium and thereby supporting drug prohibition. And now that they've had their enormously lucrative way and all would-be drug competitors are rotting in jail, the entrepreneurial vultures are descending on the carnage of strategically ruined lives to see what relative scraps they can pick up in this massive war against Americans who dare to take care of their own psychological health as they see fit. Addiction treatment alone is a $35 billion industry in a world in which "use equals abuse" in the minds of drug-hating judges. And arrestees always need lawyers -- not for a trial, of course, but rather to haggle on their behalf for a plea deal in the prosecutor's office.
Police profit handsomely from drug prohibition as well, especially when they prioritize drug arrests over fighting violent crime. Why would they do that, you ask? Colleen Cowles gives the following two reasons for what she calls these "strange priorities" on the part of law enforcement:
"First, police departments compete for federal anti drug grants with number of arrests and drug seizures strengthening their application for those grants. The grants also incentivize departments to pay for SWAT team armor and weapons, further militarizing our police forces. Secondly, the ability of police departments to pad their own budgets using civil forfeiture statutes makes drug arrests more lucrative than pursuing other types of arrests."
Why, then, is the justice system broken today in America? Answer: Because self-interested parties wouldn't have it any other way.
Author's Follow-up:
March 19, 2026
No wonder the "Justice" Department relies on plea deals; otherwise juries could use nullification to free those charged with mere drug possession.
All of our problems with opioids and opiates could have been avoided had the busybody Chicken Littles in America left well enough alone and let folks continue to smoke regulated opium peaceably in their own homes.
There would be little or no profiling of blacks if the Drug War did not exist.
Self-medicating has always been the most basic of human rights, until the medical industry demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.
I'm going to get on the grade-school circuit, telling kids to say no to horses.
"You think you can handle horses, kids? That's what Christopher Reeves thought. The fact is, NOBODY can handle horses!!!"
When Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan call for continued prohibition to protect young people, they ignore the ENORMOUS fact that prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world. Wake up, guys! Prohibition is evil, not drugs! Ignorance is evil, not education!
Whether we judge people only by the words that they say or only by the substances of which they partake, we are ignoring the most important things: what they really mean and how they really behave.
Properly speaking, MDMA has killed no one at all. Prohibitionists were delighted when Leah Betts died because they were sure it was BECAUSE of MDMA/Ecstasy. Whereas it was because of the fact that prohibitionists refuse to teach safe use.
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.
I might as well say that no one can ever be taught to ride a horse safely. I would argue as follows: "Look at Christopher Reeves. He was a responsible and knowledgeable equestrian. But he couldn't handle horses. The fact is, NO ONE can handle horses!"
Drug prohibition has resulted in hundreds of thousands of completely unnecessary deaths thanks to totally preventable drug overdoses!
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.
I'm still wrapping my head around the Kafkaesque world faced by so-called drug offenders in America as detailed by Colleen Cowles in "War On Us."1 For merely possessing a few pills, Americans are being charged with felonies. Felonies! An estimated eight percent of Americans have felonies, according to a study cited by Cowles, and thirty-three percent of African Americans. 33%. This means far more than that they can be sent to prison for years. Once out, they can be denied educational loans, evicted from public housing, rendered ineligible for food stamps, and forced to submit to drug testing on demand. Even after they've completed years of harassing parole, the law seeks to prevent felons from getting on with their lives. As felons, they are barred from working in a host of jobs, which Colleen tells us include, but is by no means limited to: childcare worker, electrician, engineer, judge, nurse, manicurist, midwife, optometrist, psychologist, school-bus driver, social worker, teacher... even watchman. It makes you wonder what jobs they ARE allowed to hold: circus clown, perhaps? Ayurveda healer? Video game tester? (full-time pundit against the War on Drugs?)
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