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 12 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-medication3 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 4 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 5 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 6 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 7 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 89 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.
Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war:
"clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."
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.
Here is a typical user report about a drug that the DEA tells us has no positive uses whatsoever:
"There is a profoundness of meaning inherent in anything that moves." (reported in "Pikhal" by Alexander Shulgin)
According to Donald Trump's view of life, Jesus Christ was a chump. We should hate our enemies, not love them.
People groan about "profiling," but why is profiling even a "thing"? There would be little or no profiling of blacks if the Drug War did not exist.
Of course, prohibitionists will immediately remind 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.
If Americans cannot handle the truth about drugs, then there is something wrong with Americans, not with drugs.
That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.
Science knows nothing of the human spirit and of the hopes and dreams of humankind. Science cannot tell us whether a given drug risk is worthwhile given the human need for creativity and passion in their life. Science has no expertise in making such philosophical judgements.
Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war:
"clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."