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Your feedback is welcome... I think

comments page for abolishthedea.com

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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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




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.

America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.

Prohibitionists will me that we're all children when it comes to drugs, and can never -- but never -- use them wisely. That's like saying that we could never ride horses wisely. Or mountain climb. Or skateboard.

The drug war tells us that certain drugs have no potential uses and then turns that into a self-fulfilling prophecy by outlawing these drugs. This is insanely anti-scientific and anti-progress. We should never give up on looking for positive uses for ANY substance.

They drive to their drug tests in pickup trucks with license plates that read "Don't tread on me." Yeah, right. "Don't tread on me: Just tell me how and how much I'm allowed to think and feel in this life. And please let me know what plants I can access."

The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.

In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort shows how science damns (i.e. excludes) facts that it cannot assimilate into a system of knowledge. Fort could never have guessed, however, how thoroughly science would eventually "damn" all positive facts about "drugs."

The press is having a field day with the Matthew Perry story. They love to have a nice occasion to demonize drugs. I wonder how many decades must pass before they realize that people are killed by ignorance and a corrupted drug supply, not by the drugs themselves.

I could tell my psychiatrist EXACTLY what would "cure" my depression, even without getting addicted, but everything involved is illegal. It has to be. Otherwise I would have no need of the psychiatrist.

I've found that no one thinks I "have standing" when I comment about drugs. I'm just a guy who's been turned into a patient for life thanks to drug prohibition. People think that the real experts are the doctors and scientists who profit from the status quo.


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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

Drama lovers: collect full-cast recordings of classic plays

In my spare time, when I am not shaming drug warriors for their heartless drug policies, I create full-cast recordings of classic plays using the latest in synthetic voices licensed by the Natural Reader company. Snag your copy of my production of Volpone, by Ben Jonson... and follow me on Payhip for more where that came from, including classics like The Post Office, The Double Dealer and The Inspector General. -- Yours in all-too-justified outrage, the Drug War Philosopher @ abolishthedea.com.

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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

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP (up)