what the movers and shakers get wrong in the drug re-legalization debate
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 10, 2025
I am sure that I am making myself the most despised champion of drug re-legalization in the world, but I cannot conscientiously stop pointing out the problems with our movers and shakers in the drug re-legalization game. So many of them, like Michael Pollan1 and Rick Strassman2, are still fans of drug prohibition. And even seemingly sensible people like DJ Nutt3 have their own selection of drugs that they think should remain illegal. But then this is the inevitable result of putting the government in charge of deciding what is healthy for us as individuals: it opens a Pandora's box of individual opinions about what is dangerous to ingest and what can be used sensibly -- opinions based on our own cultural assumptions and lived experiences -- in other words, ideas that are sure to be plausibly gainsaid in other parts of the world about which we as parochial and cocksure judges are unfamiliar.
"It is said that the Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things. And there is no escape for the hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all. If he is to control the health of the community, he must necessarily control all the habits of all the citizens...." --GK Chesterton, from Eugenics and Other Evils 4
And yet, in "Psychedelic Healing for the 21st Century5," author Michael Watts tells us that drug-law reformer DJ Nutt "acknowledges the necessity of criminalizing extremely harmful drugs like heroin and crack."
Extremely harmful, DJ? Not as most people use such things, for the inconvenient fact, as Carl Hart points out6, is that most people use drugs wisely, this despite the fact that the government does everything it can to make drug use as dangerous as possible. Besides, what is crack but a racially inspired pejorative term for a form of cocaine? We call it "crack" for the same reason that we refer to hemp as "marijuana." Because we use the term that is most likely to bring up negative connotations of the ethnic groups that we assume are using such substances. As for heroin, its chief dangers are brought about by drug prohibition, which made it the only game in town after we outlawed opium. If we did not want people to use heroin on a daily basis, we should never have outlawed opium. Again, the problem is drug prohibition, not drugs.7
The answer to "drug problems" is not to crack down on heroin and crack -- as part of a never-ending "whack-a-mole" approach to "fighting drugs" -- but rather to teach safe use, regulate the drug market, and provide alternatives. In a free and educated world, few people would knowingly use a drug that would produce negative outcomes -- as they would have informed access to a vast pharmacopoeia which they could navigate to find ideal drug use with the help of what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths8.
It cannot be said enough: substance prohibition is the problem, not substances. Prohibition has been the problem since liquor prohibition first brought machine-gun fire to American streets and shunted beer drinkers off onto rotgut whiskey. Policy is the problem, not drugs! Meanwhile, saying things like "Fentanyl kills!" and "Crack kills!" is philosophically identical to saying "Fire bad!" All such statements are an attempt to make us superstitiously fear and demonize substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for human benefit.
We need to rid ourselves of the hateful prohibitionist notion that substances can be judged "up" or "down" outside of context. We should not rule out the use of any drug in advance -- for to do so is to rule out human progress. Our movers and shakers should stop offering their own idiosyncratic lists of "drugs that we should hate," and instead wake up to the fact that prohibition is the problem, not drugs!
It is interesting, moreover, that these "drug experts" who demonize heroin and crack are in no hurry to demonize the psychiatric pill mill thanks to which 1 in 4 American women take multiple big pharma drugs every day of their life. The determination of "extremely dangerous" is therefore a very subjective one. I would argue that it is extremely dangerous to turn a chronically depressed person like myself into a ward of the healthcare state -- whereas most materialists of our time would argue the opposite: that it is my moral duty to use Big Pharma drugs for a lifetime.
What I am pointing out here is that our views on drug dangers are dictated upon self-interest and prejudices, not facts. At best, our views are dictated by facts that have been cherry-picked to support our prejudices. This is why we need to resist the Drug Warrior's demand that we judge all psychoactive substance "up" or "down" without regard for context. It is simply superstitious nonsense to declare in advance that drugs that can be misused by white American young people at one dose in one circumstance can never have any positive uses for anyone at any dose in any circumstance.
This is why my site will never be popular with mainstream reformers: because even the mainstream legalization proponents are hoodwinked by the Big Lie of the Drug War, that drugs are the problem, when it is clearly the prohibitionist mindset that produces all the problems that we blame on "drugs." Besides, the very word "drugs" is a biased term. Using the term in drug-related articles is like using the term "scabs" in articles about labor relations. Both terms -- "drugs" and "scabs" -- do not just identify a thing but also judge that thing negatively in so doing.
Again, drug prohibition is the problem, not drugs.
Extremely dangerous, DJ? Drug prohibition is what has proven extremely dangerous. Just ask the surviving relatives of the 67,000 minorities killed by gun violence in America's inner cities over the last decade10, while keeping in mind that liquor and drug prohibition brought gunfire to the 'hood in the first place! When are these lukewarm drug reformers with their own private lists of "dangerous" drugs going to accept responsibility for their failure to recognize the dangers of OUTLAWING desired substances, the proof of which is extant and growing every day in the form of a literal body count!
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."
Mad in America publishes stories of folks who are disillusioned with antidepressants, but they won't publish mine, because I find mushrooms useful. They only want stories about cold turkey and jogging, or nutrition, or meditation.
"Abuse" is a funny term because it implies that there's a right way to use "drugs," which is something that the drug warriors deny. To the contrary, they make the anti-scientific claim that "drugs" are not good for anybody for any reason at any dose.
In fact, that's what we need when we finally return to legalization: educational documentaries showing how folks manage to safely incorporate today's hated substances into their life and lifestyle.
Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.
The Drug War brought guns to the "hoods," thereby incentivizing violence in the name of enormous profits. Any site featuring victims of gun violence should therefore be rebranded as a site featuring victims of the drug war.
Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."
Pundits have been sniffing about the "smell" of Detroit lately. Sounds racist -- especially since such comments tend to come from drug warriors, the guys who ruined Detroit in the first place (you know, with drug laws that incentivized profit-seeking violence as a means of escaping poverty).
This is the "Oprah fallacy," which has led to so much suffering. She told women they were fools if they accepted a drink from a man. That's crazy. If we are terrified by such a statistically improbable event, we should be absolutely horrified by horses and skateboards.
There are a potentially vast number of non-addictive drugs that could be used strategically in therapy. They elate and "free the tongue" to help talk therapy really work. Even "addictive" drugs can be used non-addictively, prohibitionist propaganda notwithstanding.
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."