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by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 5, 2026



Two and half decades ago, when posting comments was just becoming a "thing" online, my brother-in-law asked me the following question: "Why are you not soliciting comments on your web page?" The implication of his question was that I was being cowardly for failing to do so. I responded by pointing out that literally anyone in the world could use a comment form and that I had no interest in hearing the points of view of a serial killer in Kansas or a ten-year-old smart-aleck in Nova Scotia when it came to the philosophical questions that I was raising in my so-called 'blog' (a term, by the way, which always sounded pejorative to me as a struggling writer, despite its seemingly harmless etymology as a short form of 'web log'). I told him, moreover, that I could not picture my homeboy Arthur Schopenhauer pausing in the middle of his scathing critique of "Hegelians and similar ignoramuses" to ask his readers what they thought on the topic. As the so-called pessimist himself wrote in "The Four-fold Root of Sufficient Reason":

"I am not a professor of philosophy, forsooth, that I need bow to the folly of others."


In other words, the point of Schopenhauer's work was Schopenhauer's work, and so it is with myself. My goal is to publish my own philosophy of drug attitudes, not to create an ultra-democratic online community in which grade schoolers have the same publishing rights as professors emeriti -- although, to be sure, Schopenhauer did not have a high opinion of that latter class of pedants.

And yet I have changed my mind. Demonstrably clueless as I am about the fine art of search engine optimization and lacking an advertising budget, I have no choice but to solicit comments, in the hopes of reaching a wider audience. Besides, I just might learn something. Imagine that.

And my comment form is already helping. I have already garnered some useful advice. One reader has suggested that I compile my writings in book format -- while quite properly begging me not to create a silly title page for such a collection. Five years ago I published a book against drug prohibition containing 150 op-ed pics that demonstrated many downsides of drug prohibition which most westerners have never contemplated, let alone discussed. The point of the book was to throw these issues "in the face" of brainwashed westerners, perhaps as they gathered around a coffee table or library shelf, to more or less force them to discuss these issues. Unfortunately, I chose the poor title of Drug War Comic Book for my publication, causing my purchasers (or rather my non-purchasers) to conclude, naturally enough, that I had published a comic book, when in reality the point of my book was to get people talking about some very serious issues, indeed, like pharmacological colonialism, the destruction of inner-cities and the end of our time-honored right to take care of our own health as we see fit. So far, the number of sold copies can be counted on one maimed hand.

Of course not all the advice has panned out, as can be seen in my recent essay entitled What do you do when a like-minded activist so misunderstands you as to charge you with human rights abuses?.

And some of the feedback has puzzled me. One reader tells me that he is in agreement with my philosophical arguments, except when it comes to the "useless liberal reforms" that I advocate. This puzzled me because I was not aware that I was advocating any reforms at all in my essays, let alone those of a useless liberal variety. I consider myself to be following more in the footsteps of Immanuel Kant, whose self-appointed philosophical mission late in life was to inform the thinkers of his time that they were fundamentally wrong about the way that they thought about the world. That is my mission as well. In Kant's case, he attempted to persuade mainstream thinkers that they were wrong about epistemology, and that this ignorance had deleterious consequences in the real world. In my case, I am attempting to persuade mainstream thinkers that they are wrong about drugs and that this ignorance too has deleterious consequences in the real world -- many of them so large as to be invisible to brainwashed westerners -- like the outlawing of the individual's right to heal, the destruction of inner cities around the globe, and the end of the rule of law in Latin America.

Another useful comment: a suggestion that I say more about the effect of U.S.-inspired drug prohibition on other countries.

And what about you? Any useful comments for me?

Help me grow this site so that I can become the Van Helsing of the Drug War and drive a philosophical stake through the ideological heart of drug prohibition. For merely re-legalizing drugs is not enough: we have to vanquish the selfish and counterproductive mindset of the prohibitionists that got us in this mess in the first place. For prohibition did not end in 1933. In fact, it grew enormously after that year, as America decided to outlaw virtually everything BUT alcohol when it comes to psychoactive medicine!








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Rather than protesting prohibition as a crackdown on academic freedom, today's scientists are collaborating with the drug war by promoting shock therapy and SSRIs, thereby profiting from the monopoly that the drug war gives them in selling mind and mood medicine.

Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.

I've always wondered why we don't just let heroin users be -- or better yet, re-legalize drugs and give them choices. Why are they punished for using heroin daily while we praise 1 in 4 women for taking an even more dependence-causing drug every day of their life?

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.

Freud's real discovery was that drugs like cocaine could make psychiatry UNNECESSARY for the vast majority of people. The medical establishment hated the idea -- so they judged the drug based on its worst possible use!

Even if the FDA approved MDMA today, it would only be available for folks specifically pronounced to have PTSD by materialist doctors, as if all other emotional issues are different problems and have to be studied separately. That's just ideological foot-dragging.

Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.

Here is a sample drug-use report from the book "Pihkal": "More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place." Prohibition is a crime against humanity for withholding such drug experiences from the depressed (and from everybody else).

This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.

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!


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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