It’s Time for America to Admit that it has a Prohibition Problem
How the New York Times keeps getting it wrong about drugs
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 19, 2026
The New York Times keeps telling us that Americans have a problem with drugs. Most recently, it seems we have a problem with marijuana1. This is just another politically correct diagnosis on the part of a timid establishment media that cannot handle the truth. The fact is that America has a problem with drug prohibition. And until we face that fact, then Americans will just be wasting their time trying to patch a tire that should have been replaced well over 100 years ago now when America first outlawed the panaceas of opium and cocaine and thereby revoked the basic right for human beings to take care of their own health as they saw fit.
I broach this topic for the second time this week because I just received a bulk email from the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, Kassandra Frederique, trumpeting the fact that the Times is right!
With friends like these, right, folks?
Does anyone but myself see what's going on here? The New York Times is helping to normalize the demonstrably deadly policy of drug prohibition by blaming all of the problems that it causes on drugs itself. It is shielding drug prohibition from criticism by pretending that it does not exist. And this should sound familiar. This is the exact same strategy pursued by those organizations attempting to end gun violence in inner cities. They refuse to even mention drug prohibition, which brought guns to the streets in the first place. This is the same strategy pursued by enemies of the human condition that we call depression. They refuse to mention drug prohibition, which outlawed our right to end depression in a trice. This is the same strategy pursued by enemies of school violence. They refuse to mention drug prohibition, which outlaws the kinds of empathogenic drugs that could help hotheads love their fellow human beings -- at least to the point that they will no longer feel called upon to murder them wholesale!
Hurry, hurry! Step right up! See the deadly policy of Drug Prohibition disappear before your very eyes!
Hurry, hurry, step right up!
See the Magically Disappearing Drug Prohibition!
Here one minute and gone the next!
See for yourself, folks! Just try to hold drug prohibition responsible for any social problem whatsoever, and watch it magically disappear from the public discourse on the subject!
Whoop! There it goes again, folks. Did you catch that, kids? What a sneaky devil. Just try to hold it responsible for any downsides, and it's like, "Who, me? Hey, folks, I don't even EXIST, so how could I be causing problems!"
Prohibition is wrong root and branch. It seeks to justify the colonial disdain for indigenous healing practices through fearmongering.
Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.
That's the problem with prohibition. It is not ultimately a health question but a question about priorities and sensibilities -- and those topics are open to lively debate and should not be the province of science, especially when natural law itself says mother nature is ours.
This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.
"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.
Prohibitionists have blood on their hands. People do not naturally die in the tens of thousands from opioid use, notwithstanding the lies of 19th-century missionaries in China. It takes bad drug policy to accomplish that.
Some outlawed drugs grow new neurons in the brain. To refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!
Someday the world will realize that Freud's real achievement was his discovery of the depression-busting power of cocaine.
All of our problems with opioids and opiates could have been avoided had the busybody Chicken Littles in America left well enough alone and let folks continue to smoke regulated opium peaceably in their own homes.
If I smoke opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag. If I use Big Pharma "meds" every day of my life, I am a good patient.
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