Discussion Questions for Studying Drug Prohibition in Schools and Universities
for teachers and professors who dare to use them
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 9, 2025
Welcome, teachers and professors!
Here's an idea: let's actually teach about the social, political, psychological and scientific issues raised by drug prohibition, AKA the unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicines worldwide.
To help get you started, here are a variety of discussion topics for your class to investigate -- openly and freely, as if freedom of thought actually mattered!
1) The Drug War has given Big Pharma a monopoly on mind and mood medicine. Cui bono? (Who stands to profit?)
2) Critics of so-called Big Government tool around in automobiles with license plates reading "Don't Tread on Me." And yet these same "rebels" usually have no problem with the government using drug prohibition to determine how and how much a citizen can think and feel in life. Discuss the blind hypocrisy at work here.
3) The very existence of the drug-using deity Xochipilli, the Aztec "Prince of the Flowers," demonstrates the imperialist nature of drug prohibition and suggests why outlawing drugs is an act of religious intolerance. Discuss.
4) God said that his creation was "good" and yet our Christian Drug Warriors believe that Mother Nature is a Drug King Pin. Discuss the telling irony of this glaring contradiction.
5) Discuss how books and movies avoid all depictions of beneficial drug use. Explain how this massive and thorough censorship (most of it self-censorship) has given America a warped view of the kinds of substances that indigenous peoples have always used for human benefit.
6) William James said the following about what we today would call "altered states": "No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." But disregard them we must thanks to drug prohibition. Discuss.
7) Consider the following outrage reported in "Drug Warriors and Their Prey" by Richard Louis Miller. Why have stories like the following failed to become cause célèbres for opponents of drug prohibition? ""Rev. Accelyne Williams, a slender 75-year-old man, spent his final moments doubled over, vomiting, his hands bound behind his back with a tight strip of plastic, totally confused about what was happening to him. ... He had literally been scared to death by shouting, storming anti-drug troops." No drugs were found."
8) Discuss the following quotation from "Our Right to Drugs" by Thomas Szasz: "The principal role of medical, and especially psychiatric, professionals in the administration and enforcement of this system of chemical statism is to act as double agents-- helping politicians to impose their will on the people by defining self-medication1 as a disease, and helping the people to bear their privations by supplying them with drugs."
9) Explain how drug prohibition may be seen as the enforcement of a sort of Christian Science Sharia.
10) Explain how media censorship shapes our views about drug use.
11) Discuss the philosophical similarity between saying "Fentanyl bad!" and "Fire kills!" (Hint: both statements superstitiously demonize dangerous substances rather than encouraging us to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of actual human beings.
12) Discuss the cruelty of detox in a world in which all drugs that could make the withdrawal process both "bearable" and successful have been outlawed. Discuss the following telling irony: that one is considered an "addictive type" merely because they bridle at the niggardliness of the modern legal pharmacopoeia.
13) Discuss the fact that the Drug War has turned 1 in 4 American women into patients for life by giving Big Pharma a monopoly on providing dependence-causing mind and mood medicine. Cui bono? Who benefits from this unprecedented -- and yet seemingly invisible -- pharmacological dystopia?
14) Discuss the ghoulish implications of legalizing doctor-assisted suicide in a country that denies us all medicines that might make us want to live.
15) America holds drug use to a safety standard that we hold for no other activity on planet Earth -- and it is a hypocritical standard at that. We ignore the 178,000 alcohol-related deaths a year, but ban MDMA if it can theoretically pose a problem for a single white young person (a single white young person whom we have refused to educate about safe drug use). Discuss this mother of all hypocrisies.
16) Discuss the following quotation from "Our Right to Drugs" by Thomas Szasz: "One of the most tragic and publicly least understood side effects of the War on Drugs is that so many sick Americans suffering from painful illnesses are systematically deprived of adequate doses of painkilling drugs because of physicians' well-founded fears of prescribing so-called controlled substances."
17) The American healthcare establishment would rather that chronically depressed individuals have their brains damaged with shock therapy than to allow them to use any of the many medicines that could make shock therapy unnecessary. Discuss this bizarre state of affairs and how it makes the medical establishment's former reliance on leeches seem like genius by comparison.
18) American young people were not dying on the streets when opiates were legal in America. It took drug prohibition to accomplish that. Discuss some of the many other downsides to outlawing godsend substances.
19) Ronald Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in violation of everything that he stood for, politically speaking. Discuss this pusillanimous betrayal, bearing in mind that the Thomas Jefferson Foundation actually facilitated the raid, thereby betraying the very man whom they are supposed to be celebrating. (Of course, they have refused to talk about the raid ever since, proving that even they, in their heart of hearts, know that they were wretches for thus betraying their benefactor.)
20) One in four American women are dependent on Big Pharma meds for life. And yet Americans are completely blind to the existence of this mass pharmacological dystopia. Explain.
21) Resolved: that we need to TREAT human sadness, not cure it. We need to treat it with running, jogging, meditating, traveling, socializing, praying, attending churches, joining clubs... and yes, taking beneficial drugs when helpful for us as a unique individual -- drugs that work based on the best-use practices of actual successful drug users. Discuss.
22) The use of ecstasy brought about UNPRECEDENTED peace, love and understanding on the British dance floor in the 1990s, and yet Drug Warriors never saw this as a drug benefit -- even though we live in a world that is on the brink of nuclear annihilation thanks to hatred of "the other." Explain what this blindness to enormous drug benefits tells us about the perverse mindset of the Drug Warrior.
Kids should be taught beginning in grade school that prohibition is wrong.
A law proposed in Colorado in February 2024 would have criminalized positive talk about drugs online. What? The world is on the brink of nuclear war because of hate-driven politics, and I can be arrested for singing the praises of empathogens?
The Drug War treats doctors like potential criminals and it treats the rest of us like children. Prohibition does not end drug risks: it just outsources them to minorities and other vulnerable populations.
The line drawn between recreational and medical use is wishful thinking on the part of drug warriors. Recreation, according to Webster's, is "refreshment or diversion," and both have positive knock-on effects in the lives of real people.
It's no wonder that folks blame drugs. Carl Hart is the first American scientist to openly say in a published book that even the so-called "hard" drugs can be used wisely. That's info that the drug warriors have always tried to keep from us.
Trump's lies about America's voting process are typical NAZI and DRUG WAR strategy: raise mendacious doubts about whatever you want to destroy and keep repeating them. It's what Joseph Goebbels called "The Big Lie."
Cop and detective shows are loaded with subtle drug war propaganda, including lines like, "She had a history of drug use, so..." The implication being that anyone who uses substances that politicians hate cannot be trusted.
Ketamine is like any other drug. It has good uses for certain people in certain situations. Nowadays, people insist that a drug be okay in every situation for everybody (especially American teens) before they will say that it's okay. That's crazy and anti-scientific.
"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.
Health is not a quality, it's a balance. To decide drug legality based on 'health' grounds thus opens a Pandora's box of different points of view.
Kids should be taught beginning in grade school that prohibition is wrong.