what the movers and shakers get wrong in the drug re-legalization debate
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 10, 2025
PREFACE, October 25, 2025
DJ Nutt is a great guy.1 He lost a job thanks to standing up for truths regarding drugs. I appeal to him in this open letter because I wish to make all drug pundits of his ilk understand that they only see part of the problem. It is nothing personal whatsoever. However, I feel like I have to shout to waken people from their dogmatic slumbers on this issue. I have tried whispering -- sending hundreds of polite letters -- and even my own books! -- by snail mail, and I have been totally ignored. Totally. Meanwhile almost every single drug pundit today underestimates the evils of drug prohibition. Some actually -- horror of horrors -- still see benefits in drug prohibition, which, I maintain, is madness! Drug prohibition: a policy that results in drive-by shootings, the end of Constitutional freedoms, and ultimately the end of democracy in America by throwing millions of minorities in jail and so removing them from the voting rolls.
By some estimates half a million Americans have been killed by the effects of drug prohibition 2 and hundreds of millions of depressed have been turned into wards of the healthcare state, thereby shunting them off onto Big Pharma drugs that are far harder to kick than heroin3. Indeed, far far harder. In fact, Effexor/Venlafaxine is close to impossible to kick for long-term users -- and the 5% who do so are left with cognitive impairment -- and I say this both from personal experience and based on the facts vouchsafed me by my previous psychiatrist, whom, I suspect, was fired for his candor.
By the way, if you feel that I'm shouting below, I am. Because I have skin in this game, unlike most drug pundits. Drug prohibition has turned me into a patient for life! Some have it even worse. Pain patients go without adequate pain relief because doctors know they are being shadowed by Washington bureaucrats, who could actually have them arrested if their medical decisions run afoul of the drug-hating sensibilities of the superstitious, racist and imperialistic War on Drugs. What a state we have come to, wherein doctors can only make medical decisions that please their stealth Christian Science overseers in Washington, D.C.
Yes, DJ is great -- nor do I ascribe any moral faults to Rick Strassman 45 or Michael Pollan. 6 As human beings, I am sure that they are golden. But that will not stop me from shouting at the top of my keyboard that they are dead wrong about drug prohibition. They miss the point entirely. Why? Because they ignore all stakeholders in the debate except for young people -- and typically white anglophone young people at that -- the young people whom we REFUSE to teach about drugs -- except, of course, to teach them all the potential downsides of use in dogmatic ignoration of all the glaringly obvious benefits -- including the knock-on benefits that are associated with feeling good, benefits that are somehow just too obvious for our myopic behaviorists in the healthcare field to see.
Why are white young people considered the only stakeholders in this debate? 7 Why are hundreds of millions of pain patients and the depressed completely ignored?
This is because white parents raise a political stink if they are having trouble raising their kids. They need a scapegoat. It's so easy to say, "This substance did it!" Whereas that substance only "did it" with the help of drug prohibition, whereby we never educated young people about drugs, never regulated product, and never allowed for free drug choice thanks to which determined users could select drugs with discrimination -- rather than be limited to the product that profit-seeking dealers are currently stocking -- those dealers that were created out of whole cloth by drug prohibition itself. Young people were not dying in the streets from opiates when opiates were legal in America. It took drug prohibition to accomplish that.
We do not need a policy that relies on massive arrests -- not simply of drug users but of doctors themselves! Let's get the police out of the doctor's office! Let's let people take care of their own health once again. This is not some radical proposal on my part -- it is rather the status quo of the ages. The radical change was drug prohibition, wherein fearmongering doctors demonized panaceas by focusing only on downsides, exactly as if they were to study alcohol by focusing only on alcoholics.
But enough, for I am beginning to repeat some of the arguments made below. I write because it's such a shame: even our best and brightest have been bamboozled by the drug-related propaganda to which they have been exposed since childhood, chiefly in the form of the total censorship of all positive talk about drugs. They never take into account the fact that that propaganda has had real effects on their outlook. Propaganda works -- as every Coca-Cola fan knows. We have been convinced by propaganda that we can never use drugs wisely for positive purposes -- and we believe it because drug prohibition itself creates the kind of world in which wise and safe use is almost impossible!
And now the essay proper
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 Pollan8 and Rick Strassman9, are still fans of drug prohibition.
And even seemingly sensible people like DJ Nutt10 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 11
And yet, in "Psychedelic Healing for the 21st Century12," author Michael Watts tells us that drug-law reformer DJ Nutt "acknowledges the necessity of criminalizing extremely harmful drugs like heroin 13 and crack."
Extremely harmful, DJ? Not as most people use such things, for the inconvenient fact, as Carl Hart points out14, 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 15 . Again, the problem is drug prohibition, not drugs.16
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 empaths17.
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 18 and shunted beer drinkers off onto rotgut whiskey19. 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 21 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 2223 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 24 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 25 in America's inner cities over the last decade26, 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!
Author's Follow-up:
October 23, 2025
Aah! God help me! I just ran across this four-month-old essay of mine and was reminded that DJ Nutt actually supports drug prohibition! He wants to outlaw "extremely dangerous" drugs!
What?
Does he really want to continue the bloodshed in inner cities? Does he really want to continue the disappearances in Mexico? Does he really want to continue the psychiatric pill mill? Does he really want to continue the abridgment of democratic freedoms, based on the superstitious belief that drugs can cause problems as opposed to social policies that render them dangerous?
Cocaine could end depression in a trice! In a trice! Hundreds of millions are suffering unnecessarily -- including my own relatives -- because of the DJ Nutts of the world who want to protect us from such drugs. And what has your protection done for us, DJ? It has forced us to use Big Pharma pills that are literally IMPOSSIBLE to kick, that have turned us into patients for life. And so hundreds of millions sit in bleared-eyed silence behind closed doors -- they are not stakeholders in the drugs debate. The DJ Nutts of the world focus only on the poor little (white) children who might make bad decisions. Our right for adults to take care of their own health is completely ignored. But then doctors profit enormously when opium and coca are outlawed -- suddenly they are in charge of treating all the conditions that naturally arise when you outlaw time-honored panaceas!!!
Crack cocaine owes its popularity to the outlawing of the coca leaf just as heroin owes its popularity to the outlawing of opium! This is called the "iron law of prohibition," DJ. The police crackdowns that you support result in the creation of new and more powerful drugs, and so you create a world in which we have to play a militaristic game of whack-a-mole and to hell with human freedom. The prohibition mindset is the killer, DJ, not drugs! Moreover, it is inherently racist to hate on crack cocaine without evincing at the same time a similar hatred of plain-old cocaine. Crack is merely the form of cocaine that is historically associated with Blacks. If you're going to judge a substance based only upon its worst imaginable use, then at least be an Equal Opportunity alarmist.
As Jeffrey Singer wrote in Our Bodies, Our Health Care:
"[The Iron Law of Prohibition] is why cracking down on black-market prescription pain pills brought on heroin and why cracking down on heroin brought on Fentanyl." --Jeffrey A. Singer, Your Body, Your Health Care --p. 9727
Dangerous drugs, indeed! Does DJ Not realize that the Drug War is all about the self-interested branding of drugs as evil?
And what about heroin28, DJ, the drug that is supposed by brainwashed westerners to be the poster child for evil substances?
Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers used heroin in Vietnam, many on a daily basis, and yet only 5% of the soldiers required help getting off the drug when they returned to the states. 5%, DJ! Meanwhile, the popular antidepressant Venlafaxine/Effexor (i,e., popular with doctors) has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users --95% - and the 5% who manage to stay off the drug find that they have impaired cognition2930!
Dangerous drugs, indeed, DJ!
Prohibition is the problem, DJ, not DRUGS!
I'm sure you drink, DJ31. If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol MASSACRES. Indeed, it kills 178,000 a year in America alone32! And yet DJ is not calling for the outlawing of liquor, are you, DJ?
The Drug War is all about branding drugs as dangerous -- above all the drugs whose legality would negatively impact doctors and scientists -- to say nothing of law enforcement and the corrections industry.
PROHIBITION IS THE KILLER, DJ! By some estimates, it has killed HALF A MILLION AMERICANS since 197133! HOW CAN YOU possibly support it? I'll tell you how: by completely ignoring all stakeholders in the drugs debate except uneducated young people.
William James told us that we must study the alternate forms of consciousness inspired by substances in order to learn about the nature of reality3536! Yet your drug prohibition makes it illegal to take up that baton! It outlaws progress! And so academics philosophize today in willful ignorance of James' insights -- all because we dare to outlaw Mother Nature, something that no government has the right to do, since the bounty of Mother Nature is our birthright as denizens of Planet Earth.
Aah! DJ has been thoroughly bamboozled by the indoctrination that he has received since childhood in the drug-hating religion of the west, thanks to which he has never been allowed to see any positive depiction of the use of those drugs that self-interested parties have demonized as "dangerous" and "hard."
What a tragedy that such pundits are considered to be the leaders in the drug law reform movement! But then the well-meaning DJ is not the only pundit who condemns drug relegalization with fain praise. Rick Strassman37 and Michael Pollan38 both like the idea of drug prohibition. They believe in the BIG LIE of the Drug Warrior: that drug prohibition has no downsides and that drug use has no upsides.
It just shows you how completely backwards the west is in its superstitious attitude toward drugs!
Okay, they may recognize some potential benefits of the drugs currently used by white people -- yet they support a prohibition policy (especially for "non-white" drugs) that has ended American democracy in America by throwing over a million minorities in jail, by treating health matters as police matters, god's sake! Absurd! Insane! Totally anti-democratic and totally dismissive of the power of education and freedom -- and our right to take care of our own damn health as we deem fit! Your drug prohibition turns us into babies with respect to drugs and forces us to rely on doctors! Total disempowerment!
DJ's attitude has a body count, too -- in inner cities and now in the suburbs, where young people die because we refuse to teach safe use, refuse to regulate product, and refuse to offer true drug choice and so allow for wise and discriminating use. No one was dying on the streets from opiates when opiates were legal in America. It took drug prohibition to accomplish that. But then no one was dying on the streets from machine-gun-fire when drugs were legal in America either. It took drug prohibition to accomplish that as well.
You know, I sent DJ a book of mine that I had written about six years ago39. I was puzzled by the fact that he never so much as acknowledged receipt, but after re-reading the above, I totally get it! He is in favor of the very drug prohibition that has rendered drug use dangerous!!!
You know, most white Americans think the Drug War started in 1971 with Richard Nixon40. This is really a racist point of view, since it ignores the fact that opium41 and cocaine were outlawed long before that, opium based on anti-Chinese prejudice and cocaine based on anti-Black prejudice. White people think of 1971 because that was the date in which the then-popular "white drugs" were first targeted by the government. And so we see that Nutt, in demonizing "hard drugs," is really referring to those drugs that were historically associated with and demonized in reference to racial groups other than his own. "Yes, let us use psychedelics and marijuana," says the white drug reformer, "but feel free to keep going after time-honored panaceas like opium and cocaine whose use is associated with other races! We white people are good with what we've got!"
Don't you see, DJ? Prohibition is evil, not drugs! It brings out the scapegoating racist in all of us.
There are no evil drugs, DJ! Moreover your prohibition is based on an anti-scientific algorithm: It tells us that a substance that can be misused by a white young person (whom we refuse to educate about drugs), must not be used by anyone, anywhere, for any reason, at any dose. This is nothing less than the outlawing of our right to healthcare and, indeed, the outlawing of human progress itself -- of even the potential for human progress.
Botox is an extremely dangerous drug -- but it has positive uses, more of which are becoming apparent every year. Botox is used now to treat migraines, but that would not be happening had we demonized the drug and outlawed it based on the fact that it was dangerous.
This is the caveman attitude of the Drug Warrior: they want to demonize dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. And so they say things like "Fentanyl kills!" which is the philosophical equivalent of saying "Fire bad!"
THE PROHIBITION THAT YOU SUPPORT HAS FORCED ME TO GO A LIFETIME NOW WITHOUT GODSEND MEDICINE!!!
Freud knew that cocaine was a godsend for the depressed4243. But no one ever asked the depressed what they thought about the drug. Instead, self-interested doctors considered only the rare misuse of the drug -- exactly as if they were to judge alcohol by looking only at drunkards. They did this because they knew that their jobs were in jeopardy if a near-panacea like cocaine were to become readily available for the depressed to use as they saw fit. Doctors themselves therefore needed to be in charge of our healthcare -- we could not be allowed to take care of it on our own. So they wrote op-ed pieces to trash cocaine, never even hinting at their vested interest in so doing.
Today's Washington Post reports that "opioid pills shipped" DROPPED 45% between 2011 and 2019..... while fatal overdoses ROSE TO RECORD LEVELS! Prohibition is PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE.
Talking about being in denial: drug warriors blame all of the problems that they cause on "drugs" and then insist that the entire WORLD accept their jaundiced view of the natural bounty that God himself told us was good.
Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.
My local community store here in the sticks sells Trump "dollar bills" at the checkout counter. I don't know what's worse: a president encouraging insurrection or an electorate that does not see that as a problem.
All drugs have potential positive uses for somebody, at some dose, in some circumstance, alone or in combination. To decide in advance that a drug is completely useless is an offense to reason and to human liberty.
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.
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!
The goal of drug-law reform should be to outlaw prohibition. Anything short of that, and our basic rights will always be subject to veto by fearmongers. Outlawing prohibition would restore the Natural Law of Jefferson, which the DEA scorned in 1987 with its raid on Monticello.
People talk about how dangerous Jamaica is -- but no one reminds us that it is all due to America's Drug War. Yes, cannabis and psilocybin are legal there, but plenty of drugs are not, and even if they were, their illegality elsewhere would lead to fierce dealer rivalry.
This pretend concern for the safety of young drug users is bizarre in a country that does not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.
This is because white parents raise a political stink if they are having trouble raising their kids. They need a scapegoat. It's so easy to say, "This substance did it!" Whereas that substance only "did it" with the help of drug prohibition, whereby we never educated young people about drugs, never regulated product, and never allowed for free drug choice thanks to which determined users could select drugs with discrimination -- rather than be limited to the product that profit-seeking dealers are currently stocking -- those dealers that were created out of whole cloth by drug prohibition itself. Young people were not dying in the streets from opiates when opiates were legal in America. It took drug prohibition to accomplish that. 
Aah! God help me! I just ran across this four-month-old essay of mine and was reminded that DJ Nutt actually supports drug prohibition! He wants to outlaw "extremely dangerous" drugs! 
Okay, they may recognize some potential benefits of the drugs currently used by white people -- yet they support a prohibition policy (especially for "non-white" drugs) that has ended American democracy in America by throwing over a million minorities in jail, by treating health matters as police matters, god's sake! Absurd! Insane! Totally anti-democratic and totally dismissive of the power of education and freedom -- and our right to take care of our own damn health as we deem fit! Your drug prohibition turns us into babies with respect to drugs and forces us to rely on doctors! Total disempowerment!
This is the caveman attitude of the Drug Warrior: they want to demonize dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. And so they say things like "Fentanyl kills!" which is the philosophical equivalent of saying "Fire bad!"
Today's Washington Post reports that "opioid pills shipped" DROPPED 45% between 2011 and 2019..... while fatal overdoses ROSE TO RECORD LEVELS! Prohibition is PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE.