Speak now or forever hold your peace about drug prohibition
An ultimatum for freedom-loving people in an age of nascent fascism
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 26, 2025
When I first started complaining about the plight of the chronically depressed in the age of the Drug War, I naively expected the world of drug pundits to sit up and take notice. I was writing from personal experience, after all, about a system that had turned me into a ward of the healthcare state and rendered me dependent for life on a drug that was far harder to kick than heroin12. This was an outcome of drug prohibition that literally no one was highlighting, least of all from the point of view of a "patient." Surely, a word to the wise would be sufficient to get the sane world "up in arms" about this demoralizing status quo, one that has resulted in the utter disempowerment of Americans with respect to their own healthcare.
It turned out, of course, that this was a naïve expectation on my part, to put it mildly. Not only did my essays on the subject fail to "break the Internet," but my Twitter following actually decreased to the extent that I drew connections between drug prohibition and the psychiatric pill mill, whether in essay form or in social media posts. I soon realized that this indifference to my "bombshell" revelations (nay, this positive AVERSION to them) was a big story in itself, one that was fraught with a potential treasure trove of philosophical insights about the American mindset in the age of the Drug War. And so I asked myself: How can it be that even the enemies of drug prohibition refuse to hold it responsible for the unprecedented pharmacological dystopia that it has brought about in America, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma drugs for life3? Why does no one hold the Drug War responsible for giving self-interested Big Pharma a monopoly on mind and mood medicine? Why am I the only one who notices that the pharmaceutical companies have thereby turned their depressed customers into patients for life? Why has no one but myself connected the dots between drug prohibition and this total disempowerment of Americans with respect to their personal health?
I have contemplated these questions for seven years now and have arrived at several conclusions, which I have summarized below. Bear in mind that the indifference to my writings on these topics cannot be attributed merely to the relative invisibility of my totally unfunded website in the pay-to-play world of the 21st-century Internet. I have sent physical treatises on these matters to over one hundred of America's "greatest" philosophers and have garnered no responses. I have sent my own 150-page book on this topic to drug pundits such as Rick Doblin and DJ Nutt and received not so much as an acknowledgement of receipt. Clearly, there is more at work here than a lack of publicity.
WHY THE INDIFFERENCE?
The failure of Americans to connect the dots between drug prohibition and the psychiatric pill mill is part of a larger pattern. There is a refusal on the part of political activists of all kinds to hold the Drug War responsible for the problems that it causes and/or exacerbates. Take the problem of gun violence in our inner cities, which has killed over 70,000 minorities in the last ten years in America alone. As Ann Heather Thompson wrote in the Atlantic in 2014,
"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist."4
Given this inconvenient fact -- a fact which should be obvious to any American given our disastrous "experiment" with liquor prohibition, which created the American Mafia out of whole cloth -- one might expect that the opponents of inner-city gun violence would be pushing for an end to drug prohibition, insofar as drug prohibition resulted in the proliferation of guns, and hence the gun violence, in the first place. But alas, one would search in vain for such pushback on the part of such activists. Take the group Philadelphia Citizen5. It claims to be devoted to ending gun violence in the City of Brotherly Love, and yet the group's website never even mentions drug prohibition! No, not once! As of September 2025, there was only one reference to drugs on the entire site, and that was in an article that was critical of marijuana.
But drug prohibition will never end if we refuse to hold it responsible for the horrors that it has brought about!
We see a similar refusal to "connect the dots" in groups that are opposed to brain-damaging shock therapy. If they really wanted to end this medieval therapy, they would demand the relegalization of inspiring drugs that could make that barbaric treatment unnecessary – and yet, like the Philly activists, these activists acknowledge no connection between drug prohibition and shock therapy and, in fact, they will (as I well know) ghost anyone who attempts to point out such a connection. It is as if both of the above-mentioned groups have what biologist JB Haldane might call "a prior commitment," not to materialism in this case but rather to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. They want to have their cake and eat it too: they want to rally against gun violence and shock therapy while yet refusing to name the culprit who brought about these two evils in the first place! They are, in fact, ideologically committed to being ineffective in their pushback against the evils against which they claim to be fighting!
Speaking of ghosting, I recently attempted to contact a reporter (one Mensah Dean) at the Philly publication called The Trace. Mensah had written an article about Philly gun violence in which he never mentioned the drug prohibition which had armed the city to the teeth in the first place. I politely drew his attention to this oversight on his part, but of course I received no response. It seems that anyone who connects the dots between the Drug War and its consequences is ghosted these days.
Then there are those drug pundits who do, indeed, have a prior commitment to materialism. They fail to connect the dots between drug prohibition and the psychiatric pill mill because they believe in the philosophically absurd idea that science has "sorted" conditions like depression. These pundits are fond of using the term "treatment-resistant depression," by which they give the impression that science has solved the problem of depression; it's just that there are some people out there with finicky biochemistries who have not gotten the memo. They utterly fail to realize that science has only "solved" depression by letting chemists decide how the depressed should feel in life – using drugs that turn them into patients for life.
There are drugs of all kinds that can inspire and elate, and yet a chemist at a pharmaceutical company will decide for us how we are all to feel in life, with their one-size-fits-all "cure," never mind the fact that even scientists today acknowledge that no one knows how these antidepressants "work" -- to which I would only add that no one even knows that they DO work, if by "working" we mean they produce a mindset with which the users themselves are satisfied -- as if the Jack Kerouacs of the world could ever be satisfied with a mass-marketed "med" that tranquilizes rather than inspires. Not only did drug prohibition bring about this pharmacological dystopia, this real-world reenactment of The Stepford Wives, but it has rendered such "meds" impossible to "kick" by outlawing all drugs that could be used intermittently to do precisely that. How? By helping the user to obfuscate and transcend the psychologically hideous withdrawal symptoms of these substances that muck about -- with such hubristic irresponsibility-- with our fundamental brain chemistry, a brain chemistry which we now see may take years -- if ever -- to return to normal, hence the 95% recidivism rate of Effexor for long-term users after three years. Compare this to the 5% recidivism rate of American soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam but then gave up the drug upon returning to the States6.
Nor is the problem here limited to activists. Almost all non-fiction authors fail to hold drug prohibition responsible for the evil it causes. To the contrary, they often go out of their way to demonize drugs. Academic Ronald Hutton wrote an entire book on witches and fearmongering ("The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present"7) in which he never mentioned drugs... except once, and then in a derogatory fashion. He frequently mentioned "herbs," however, failing to realize that those herbs WERE DRUGS, in the exact same way that "meds" are drugs! We have become so used to "branding" substances according to modern drug-war prejudices that Hutton takes this branding as objective! Moreover, the Drug War is the perfect example of the very strategic fearmongering about which the author is writing, and yet his anti-drug prejudices blind him to this obvious connection! See my essay on this topic: Drug Dealers as Modern Witches
Of course, the overarching moral to this story is that propaganda works, that billionaires can and do drive the narrative in America with an eye toward profit -- that plus the fact that I have been hopelessly naive about how the world works!
This conglomerate-driven control of the American mindset might not be so problematic in a democracy that operated according to principles, which is to say a world in which we took our Bill of Rights seriously. But now that we have, as a people, voted out democracy by scorning all the principles upon which that form of government depends, it is no surprise that we find ourselves incapable of mounting any principled pushback against drug-war tyranny. I can only hope that the ghosting of insights like my own will end before it finally becomes illegal to agree with me on these topics. That day may arrive sooner than later. This morning I received an email from Binaifer Nowrojee of the Open Society Foundations8. Nowrojee reports that the regime in Washington D.C. has just announced their plans to investigate the Society on charges of "supporting terrorism." It is now clear that any enemy of the right-wing status quo in America is fair game for far worse than ghosting.
William James claimed that his constitution prevented him from having mystical experiences. The fact is that no one is prevented from having mystical experiences provided that they are willing to use psychoactive substances wisely to attain that end.
I'm told that science is completely unbiased today. I guess I'll have to go back and reassess my doubts about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.
"Can I use poppies, coca, laughing gas, MDMA?" "NO," says the materialist, "We must be SCIENTIFIC! We must fry your brain and give you a lobotomy and make you a patient for life with the psychiatric pill mill! That's true SCIENCE!"
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda
(There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.)
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
Was looking for natural sleeping aids online. Everyone ignores the fact that all the stuff that REALLY works has been outlawed! We live in a pretend world wherein the outlawed stuff no longer even exists in our minds! We are blind to our lost legacy regarding plant medicines!
The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.
How would we even KNOW that outlawed drugs have no positive uses? We first have to incorporate them in a sane, empathic and creative way to find that out, and the drug war makes such a sensible approach absolutely impossible.
Attention People's magazine editorial staff:
Matthew Perry was a big boy who made his own decisions. He didn't die because of ketamine or because of evil rotten drug dealers, he died because of America's enforced ignorance about psychoactive drugs.
William James claimed that his constitution prevented him from having mystical experiences. The fact is that no one is prevented from having mystical experiences provided that they are willing to use psychoactive substances wisely to attain that end.