Drug Re-Legalization is the best harm reduction strategy
an open letter to the Drug Policy Alliance
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 12, 2025
Author's Follow-up:
September 03, 2025
I do not mean to disparage harm reduction and the brave people who practice this good Samaritan behavior at the risk of being hassled and arrested by the police. (See Vancouver Police Seek to Eradicate Safe Use for more1.) This approach addresses a very real problem caused by drug prohibition: namely, the potentially uninformed use of potentially contaminated product. My point is merely that harm reduction is not enough. Unless we insist on the fact that drugs have benefits, then an exclusive focus on harm reduction tends to support the Drug Warrior's mythology that drug use is somehow nonsensical. In addition to practicing harm reduction, therefore, we need to unapologetically point out the ways that outlawed drugs can help the depressed. We have to normalize the practice of speaking honestly about substances like laughing gas, opium and coca: by pointing out the fact that all such drugs have obvious common-sense uses for the depressed, uses that are limited, indeed, only by our imaginations. We do not need to look at these drugs under a microscope to verify the obvious. The proof of efficacy is extant, as Benjamin Franklin knew, as Sigmund Freud knew, as the Peruvian Indians knew, etc. We should not let materialist scientist gaslight us about the existence of obvious drug benefits.
Consider the following reports of drug use provided in Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin2, and then try to tell me that these drug experiences could not be useful for the depressed:
I experienced the desire to laugh hysterically at what I could only describe as the completely ridiculous state of the entire world.
I learned a great deal about myself and my inner workings.
I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing.
The feeling was one of great camaraderie, and it was very easy to talk to people.
These states of mind are not mere disreputable "highs." These are obvious drug benefits. Just ask the anxious worrywart! It is common sense that such experiences have the potential to motivate the depressed and to keep them from committing suicide. We have to acknowledge this fact. Only by so doing, can we hold the prohibitionist responsible for one of their biggest crimes: the fact that they have destroyed healthcare freedom in America and denied us godsends. This is, in fact, nothing less than a crime against humanity, to outlaw medicine with such glaringly obvious benefits.
I am focused here on the rights of the depressed. There are many other stakeholders when it comes to drug policy, of course. However, when we view drug prohibition through the eyes of a disempowered depressed individual, we see clearly how that hateful policy has outlawed our rights to healthcare and to healing itself. And why? Because America contemplates drug policy based on the following inhumane, anti-scientific and xenophobic algorithm: namely, that if a drug can be misused by a white American young person when used at one dose for one reason, then it must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason. And so we throw every other stakeholder under the bus -- the potential suicides, the religious seekers, the philosophers, the residents of inner-cities, etc. -- and we outlaw time-honored godsends in an attempt to save our own young people from the drugs about which we refuse "on principle" to educate them!
And so we impose a safety standard on drug use that we apply to no other activity on the planet: not to mountain climbing, not to Parkour, not to car driving, and certainly not to spirit drinking.
It is one big campaign to disempower Americans with respect to their healthcare. Only by insisting on the benefits of drug use can we make this clear to the prohibitionist opposition.
Surely, there are societal influences that effect drug use, some of which may result in misuse -- but we should not lose track of the fact that drug use often makes perfect psychological sense from the user's point of view, even if we cannot perform the mind-meld with a user that would be necessary for us to verify that fact to our own satisfaction as an outsider. Drug use is, in effect, a kind of self-medication, a way to take care of one's own mental and emotional health. Such self-medication has always been our birthright by dint of being a citizen of planet Earth -- until racist and xenophobic American politicians began demonizing medicine in an effort to disempower minorities.
END FOLLOW-UP
If you want proof that Americans have been bamboozled on the topic of drugs, just look at the unnecessarily apologetic pushback of some of the enemies of the War on Drugs. Even most enemies of drug prohibition have been subconsciously bamboozled by certain aspects of the Drug War indoctrination that they have received since childhood, first and foremost by the conglomerate media's wholesale censorship of positive reports about drug use. Take the Drug Policy Alliance, for instance. They are obviously on the right side of the tracks on this overall issue. Unfortunately, they support their case by the constant discussion of harm reduction, as who should say: "Yes, drugs are indeed unnecessary and dangerous, as the prohibitionists maintain, but we must help people when they make unhealthy choices, not arrest them."
That is really just a "kinder, gentler" expression of the western world's materialist disdain for psychoactive medicine, what drug researcher Russell Newcombe described as the intoxiphobia of the west, which is the mindset that helped inspire the Drug War in the first place. To argue in this way is to argue "on the back foot." By so doing, we yield enormous ground to the Drug Warriors, who insist that all illicit drug use is pointless. The latter fearmongers have framed the whole discussion about drugs around the perceived downsides of use, and the DPA helps to legitimize this lopsided focus when they spend their time trying to answer each particular scruple that the Drug Warriors invoke along the way. As a boxing coach might point out, the Drug Warriors are luring us into "playing their own game."
We need to start talking about obvious drug benefits and not just potential downsides of use.
Take cocaine, for instance. This will come as a surprise to the mental healthcare industry (which, of course, has been a huge beneficiary of drug prohibition), but increased mental concentration can be a godsend in certain situations -- and not just for recreational purposes, either, but for obvious vocational ones as well. And yet even otherwise drug-sane authors like Charles Grob, Andrew Weil and Terence McKenna have this idea that cocaine can only be used frivolously, for dubious recreational purposes. This is not a scientific view on their part, it is a mere prejudice -- a prejudice that is the result of a surprising lack of imagination when it comes to the great variety of reasons for which such substances can be employed in the real world.
Should we outlaw the ability to become Sherlock Holmes or to become Robin Williams? Should we outlaw the time-honored coca use of the Peruvian Indians? Should we outlaw the use of a drug that could keep the depressed mind off of the contemplation of suicide and help it forego the brain-damaging expedient of shock therapy -- a treatment that the cocaine-scorning FDA actually advocates for the chronically depressed? These are not medical questions: they are deeply philosophical questions about what counts as "the good life," about how we balance and rank various eminently sensible desiderata. These are questions that medical science has no expertise whatsoever in answering!
This is the problem with advocating a health-based approach to drugs, at least insofar as such an approach implies the medicalization of drug use. Should I need a doctor's prescription to enjoy a sunset? No? Neither should I need a doctor's prescription to open my mind to seeing the world in new and improved ways, ways that will help me succeed in life by quieting the inner voices that might otherwise counsel despair. Of course, the medical doctor is going to insist that only he or she has the power to "really" treat my negative mindset -- but this is just metaphysical bluster based on wishful thinking and obvious financial motives.
In my unhappy 50-year relationship with psychiatry, I have never known anyone to accuse the field of cranking out self-actualization in real-time; indeed, the doctors themselves often make a point of telling us that the true benefits of analysis will take years if not decades to obtain -- which is hardly an inspiring answer for those whose default sober mindsets put them at risk of killing themselves right now, even as we speak. They need help now -- they need the real politik of drugs like cocaine, and/or laughing gas, and/or phenethylamines, and/or beta-carbolines, and/or huachuma cactus, and/or psilocybin mushrooms, and/or LSD, and/or Iboga, and/or opiates -- and not because these drugs necessarily show any benefits for fighting "depression" as the materialists have pretentiously reified and defined that "illness" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, but because such drug use can silence the inner voice that keeps that user from enjoying life and thriving in it according to his or her own definition of that term -- and these are benefits that will never show up under any microscope.
It is obvious that drugs like cocaine could help a subset of self-sabotaging neurotics to silence the nay-saying voice within and to thereby succeed in achieving their most heartfelt goals in life -- a result which in turn boosts confidence in a virtuous circle. But these kind of blatantly obvious psychological benefits are ignored by modern drug researchers. Why? Because psychology is behaviorism in the age of materialism and so scientists look for the meaning of drug use under a microscope rather than opening their eyes to the complex and interconnected psychosocial world in which the drug user actually lives and operates.
Of course, the successfully indoctrinated American will fret about the cocaine user's potential addiction or dependence -- and this in a world wherein 1 in 4 American women are considered to be "good patients" for taking one or more Big Pharma drugs every day of their life! Yet, let's use our common sense for a moment, that is, the psychological common sense that behaviorists ignore today "on principle." For if the cocaine user's self-image is improved by a drug-aided experience of success, this can inspire further self-improvement down the line, even when it comes to their future drug choices, at least in a world in which drugs were legal and we could use alternatives to the substances that we might eventually come to consider to be personally problematic. Even if cocaine were to cause dependence in a given case, it does not follow that the drug use is unhealthy. The real question is: are the drug-aided results for a particular person better than the self-destructive status quo generated by their masochistic SOBER mindset?
This is a question that can only be answered by the drug user -- and this is the reason why drug prohibition was such tyrannous folly in the first place. When the DPA talks about a concern for health, they seem to be talking about the materialist medical establishment's view of our health as drug users, not our health as we ourselves conceive it as drug users, a health which depends on a wide range of contextual factors, including our goals in life, our biochemistry, our genetics, our psychosocial history, etc., facts about which the materialist doctor is necessarily ignorant. Indeed, even if the materialists were demigods and somehow knew all these factors, they still would not know how such an incredibly diverse array of inputs came together and influenced each other in such a way as to produce an individuals outlook on life. In fact, if there is such a thing as free will in this life, then even God him or herself cannot perform such advanced moral calculus, even in theory.
This focus on "health" and "harm reduction" is no doubt popular with the healthcare lobby, which has profited enormously from our attempts to medicalize the problems caused by drug prohibition. But the whole problem with drug prohibition is that it places government in charge of the health of the individual in the first place. As GK Chesterton wrote:
"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."3
The DPA should finally draw the conclusion that so clearly follows from their own data: namely, that the best harm reduction strategy of all would be to re-legalize drugs. Only then would we put an end to the destruction of American cities, to the erosion of American freedoms, to the destruction of the rule of law in Latin America. Only then would we educate people based on the wise use of actual safe drug users, which, as Carl Hart reports4, are the majority of drug users, notwithstanding the fact that the government spends tens of billions of dollars a year in a ruthless effort to make drug use as dangerous as possible: by refusing to teach safe use, refusing to regulate product as to quality and quantity, and refusing to offer alternatives. If opium smoking was re-legalized, then determined opium users would have alternatives to the use of far more addictive substances which became popular precisely because of the outlawing of opium itself.
I write this today after having thoroughly read the DPA fact sheets on a variety of substances, including Cocaine5, Fentanyl6, Heroin7, LSD8, MDMA9, Methamphetamine10, and Psilocybin11. I decided to speak up after noticing that none of those fact sheets discussed drug-use benefits, only the downsides of use over which the Drug Warrior loves to obsess.
Take the fact sheet on MDMA use, for instance. That drug has enormous benefits -- ones that are apparently just too large for westerners to see. The use of Ecstasy in 1990s Britain resulted in UNPRECEDENTED peace, love and understanding at concert venues across the country12. It really says something about America's lousy social priorities when such enormous benefits are invisible to even the best of us -- and this in a world in which we are a living under a nuclear sword of Damocles thanks to the penchant of Homo sapiens to hate each other without reason.
Spoiler alert:
The Brits followed the American lead and cracked down on ecstasy use, and what was the result? The dance floors erupted into such liquor-fueled violence that concert organizers had to hire special forces troops to keep the peace13! Special forces! The pathology here is not to be found in the mindset of the drug users but rather in the mindset of the prohibitionists. It is no coincidence that the drug-fueled Summers of Love on both sides of the Atlantic were never valued by the mainstream for their most obvious benefit of all: the fact that they brought people of all backgrounds together in an atmosphere of peace, love and understanding. But this is no surprise, given that Drug Warriors are happy for their government to use drugs as weapons of war -- but are only offended when such drugs might be used to challenge the monopoly of alcohol in prohibitionist America... alcohol: a drug that is responsible for 178,000 deaths a year in America alone14.
Author's Follow-up:
August 12, 2025
In reading the DPA's data sheets on drugs15, I keep running up against the following boiler plate declamation:
"Ensuring people have access to housing, community, mental health services, and jobs can help address why people are using."16
"Why people are using?"
This phraseology seems to suggest that drug use is a bit of a poser, a bit of a mystery, as far as the DPA is concerned. "Why on earth would anyone use DRUGS?" the organization's editors seem to be asking here. "Surely, the sober mindset gives everybody the state of mind that they need to thrive in the world. There must be something odd going on in these lives that is causing people to 'turn to drugs,' something that has rendered the user unable to think clearly." And yet this implicit drug-scorning conclusion is completely unjustified! There is nothing odd at all about people choosing "to use," as the DPA editors somewhat pejoratively refer to the practice of benefiting from the substances of which racist politicians disapprove. As for the sober mindset, sobriety has never been a benefit in and of itself. Many of our worst mass murderers could have passed a drug test with flying colors. Sobriety actively counsels despair in the case of many a suicide.
If only some of our mass murderers HAD used drugs -- especially the many empathogenic drugs which help people actually care about their fellow human beings! Maybe then these hotheads would not have shot up the local grade school!
To repeat: There is nothing odd at all -- let alone pathological -- about using so-called drugs. (Is it odd for a human being to "throw back a cold one" after a busy day at work? Is it odd for them to have a morning cup of coffee -- or to "take their meds" every single morning, like the 1 in 4 American women who are dependent on Big Pharma drugs for life?17)
It is, in fact, common sense that people would wish to be all that they can be in life, with the help of any tools that are ready to hand, be they drugs, or automobiles, or a simple step ladder. It would be strange indeed -- and even pathological -- if people in a supposedly free and secular country were NOT trying to use the drugs with which they are surrounded for the purposes of improving their mind and mood -- just as we would wonder at people who refused on principle to improve their physical health with drugs. Indeed, the very fact that we make a big distinction between the treatment of mental versus so-called physical conditions betrays our ongoing inability to transcend the Cartesian dualism that has so bamboozled the west and on which so many of our anti-indigenous notions today are predicated, including our ongoing western disdain for the plant medicines of Central and South America. That disdain has survived intact now for almost 500 consecutive years, ever since the Spaniards under Francisco Pizarro slaughtered thousands of Incan natives in 1532 in response to Emperor Atahualpa's failure to "embrace" the Christian Bible, in both the physical and ideological sense of that verb18.
For a background on the Cartesian dualism mentioned above, I recommend that the reader consult "The Concept of Nature" by Alfred North Whitehead,19" or at least the first few chapters of that somewhat terse tome, in which the basic concepts are intelligible to any reasonably educated reader with an open mind. My point here, however, is simply to remind the reader of the following inconvenient truth: namely, that there is no philosophical reason why we should scorn drug use for the purpose of achieving psychological goals while yet praising drug use for achieving "strictly physical" outcomes. Our overall health as a human being is created by the balance of a wide variety of interacting psychological and physical factors and no one factor -- no, not even drug use -- can be considered wrong in and of itself. The proof (of health or the lack thereof) is in the holistic pudding -- in how the individual in question actually lives his or her life. And yet the phraseology noted above suggests that the DPA believes that drug use is necessarily pathological in and of itself. The DPA editors differ from the Drug Warrior, then, only in that they want to "help" the drug users, not punish them. To their credit, the DPA makes it clear, however, that they want to help only those who believe they actually NEED help with drugs. This refreshing humility on their part places them one important step ahead of the many cavalier drug-reform advocates who want to remove drug users from jail only to force them to visit therapists instead. And why? Because such reformers actually believe that it is pathological merely to wish to use the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions!
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.
I knew all along that Measure 110 in Oregon was going to be blamed for the problems that the drug war causes. Drug warriors never take responsibility, despite all the blood that they have on their hands.
Imagine if there were drugs for which dependency was a feature, not a bug. People would stop peddling that junk, right? Wrong. Just ask your psychiatrist.
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).
The Holy Trinity of the Drug War religion is Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and John Belushi. "They died so that you might fear psychoactive substances with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."
The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.
The confusion arises because materialists insist that every psychological problem is actually a physical problem, hence the disease-mongering of the DSM. This is antithetical to the shamanic approach, which sees people holistically, as people, not patients.
An Englishman's home is his castle.
An American's home is a bouncy castle for the DEA.
I hated the show "The Apprentice," because it taught a cynical and hate-filled lesson about the proper way to "get ahead" in the world. I saw Trump as a menace back then, long before he started declaring that American elections were corrupt before the very first vote was cast!
Psychiatrists prescribe drugs that muck about with a patient's biochemical baseline, making them chemically dependent and turning them into patients for life.
That disdain has survived intact now for almost 500 consecutive years, ever since the Spaniards under Francisco Pizarro slaughtered thousands of Incan natives in 1532 in response to Emperor Atahualpa's failure to "embrace" the Christian Bible, in both the physical and ideological sense of that verb18.
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.