There are no killer drugs, only killer drug policies
an open letter to the Prohibition Blunder website
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 13, 2025
Dear Team:
I greatly enjoyed the video hosted by Charles Asher entitled "The Prohibition Blunder: Dismantling a Half-Century Blunder in Half an Hour.1" The video captured many of the glaringly obvious downsides of drug prohibition. I hope you will not take it amiss, however, if I make a few philosophically oriented comments on your compelling presentation.
1) The video approaches the topic from the point of view of economists -- and this is certainly one valid framework for a productive discussion -- but we need to also approach this topic from a wide variety of additional perspectives as well. Take the chronically depressed, for instance. I have gone a lifetime now without godsend medicine for my depression -- like laughing gas 2 , MDMA 3 , phenethylamines, coca, opium , beta-carbolines, etc. -- and been shunted off onto dependence-causing Big Pharma 45 'meds' into the bargain -- all because drug prohibition has denied me the right to the medicine that grows at my very feet. And yet folks in my circumstances are never considered stakeholders in the drugs debate, apparently because the materialist scientists behind the psychiatric pill mill 6 prefer that we "shut up and take our meds" instead. My ability to handle my own healthcare should be re-affirmed as an inalienable right. Moreover, that right should not depend on the utilitarian arguments of economists, it should be accepted as the first principle that it always used to be.
"The right to chew or smoke a plant that grows wild in nature, such as hemp (marijuana), is anterior to and more basic than the right to vote." --Our Right to Drugs by Thomas Szasz --p xvi7
Thomas Jefferson understood this fact. This is why he was rolling in his grave when Ronald Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello 8 in 1985 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for as a politician9.
2) In one sense, prohibition (or at least the prohibitionist mindset) is much more than a "half-century blunder"; the prohibition impulse seems to be deeply rooted in the western psyche. It goes back centuries. A reading of drug histories (like those published by Mike Jay10, Louis Lewin11, Jacob Sullum12, Jeffrey Singer13, Thomas Szasz14, Charles Grob15, Terence McKenna16 and Andrew Weil17) shows that westerners have had a kneejerk habit over the last 200 years of responding to "hard cases" of drug misuse (or at least of "perceived" drug misuse) by proposing and enacting prohibition laws -- with never a thought to using education and regulation and true drug choice to keep users safe instead. Never one thought.
Here is a case in point:
When W. Golden Mortimer was writing his book "Coca: Divine Plant of the Inca18" in the early 1900s, he solicited coca-related information from his fellow scientists, only to be told -- by the few who even bothered to respond -- that it was immoral of Mortimer to even write on the subject. And so we see that it was already the viewpoint of scientists -- even before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 -- that ignorance-inspired fear was the best policy when it came to protecting the world against drug misuse: ignorance-inspired fear! How hypocritical and unbecoming of a western world that likes to pride itself on its supposedly scientific approach to life!
3) With respect, your multiple scare quotes about Fentanyl are unhelpful. These citations suggest that Fentanyl is a killer drug, whereas the real killer is drug prohibition. You report, for instance, that:
"A single Fentanyl seizure in Citrus County, Florida, was enough to kill 100,000 people." --Prohibition Blunder19
Response: Maybe so. But then that same supply of Fentanyl is also enough to keep hundreds of thousands of children from suffering unnecessarily in hospice -- children whom, in India, for instance, go without morphine 20 simply because American fearmongers have demonized that drug in the abstract as a "killer" and so rendered it difficult and expensive to prescribe21.
Don't you see? This is the whole problem with the Drug War, that it encourages us to judge drugs up or down, without regard for context! This is the original sin of the prohibitionist mindset! In reality, there are no killer drugs! This is a superstition of logically challenged prohibitionists. We should not encourage this superstitious attitude by succumbing to this temptation to peg certain drugs as "killers," or as so-called "hard" drugs. Yes, we should criticize drug prohibition for turning Fentanyl into the go-to drug for so-called "recreational" opiate users -- but we should not join the Drug Warrior in damning Fentanyl itself as a villain just because insane drug policy has turned it into the opiate of choice for young white suburban Americans. People can be evil as can social policy, but drugs are inanimate substances. They are evil or good only insofar as context of use makes them so.
By demonizing specific drugs like this, you are playing into the hands of the Drug Warriors. You are basically agreeing with them that there are, indeed, substances that are beyond the pale, from which we must all be protected -- when in reality, all drugs have potential positive uses at some dose for some people in some circumstances, when used alone and/or in a wide variety of combinations. (Even highly toxic substances like botox and cyanide have positive and sensible uses in the healthcare industry.) There are no evil drugs, only evil drug policies -- only policies that make drugs dangerous. Yes, the outlawing of opium led to the use of more potent opiate alternatives, but that is a downside brought about by drug prohibition, not by those alternatives themselves. Those alternative drugs have potential common sense uses of their own, at some dose for some people in some circumstances. We should not demonize them, just because we lack the psychological imagination or historical knowledge to see how they could be of use for others in different circumstances than our own.
This is why I regret your portrayal of Fentanyl as a killer drug, inadvertent as that portrayal may have been on your part. Drug prohibition is all about demonizing certain substances as evil (as killers) outside of all context. This is no way to judge any substance -- based only on its potential misuse by one single demographic -- and a white American demographic at that, one which we have refused "on principle" to educate about safe drug use!
This effort to demonize Fentanyl (as opposed to demonizing the drug prohibition which made Fentanyl use problematic) suggests that the producers of the video do not so much want to end prohibition as they want to move a handful of drugs (like opium and coca) from the "bad" category to the "good" category in the public mind -- but are more than happy to keep highly stigmatized drugs (like crack, meth and Fentanyl) in the "bad" category. This is how the Drug Warrior gets away with preventing research on drugs: by condemning certain drugs as "bad" in advance of use -- when the supposed badness (i.e., the danger of use) is only brought about by drug policy itself.
This is an untenable mindset going forward.
We are surrounded by drugs that we did not even know existed a few hundred years ago: in tree bark, on animal skin, in mycelium, in mushrooms, in lichen, in flower seeds, etc. -- to say nothing of the lab-created drugs that have proliferated with the help of chemists like Alexander Shulgin22, some of which have truly extraordinary benefits of use -- albeit ones that are invisible to quantitatively oriented scientists. Until we stop trying to judge each new substance out of context, we will be forever playing whack-a-mole with the latest so-called "killer" drug.
The fact is that no drug causes addiction after one use, however. From this fact alone, it follows that even drugs like meth and crack and Fentanyl can be used wisely -- on an intermittent basis. Anyone who thinks otherwise simply has a lack of imagination. They fail to realize that any drug that inspires and elates can be a godsend for the depressed when used intermittently. The fact that I even have to point out this psychologically obvious truth shows how bamboozled Americans have become when it comes to drugs -- or when it comes to simple human psychology, for that matter. But then we live in a world in which materialism 23 rules, which means we ignore all obvious benefits of drug use in search for what science can tell us about that use by looking under a microscope.
Thoreau once noted that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.24" This is why drugs that inspire and elate have such amazing potential benefits. We all have access to blessed vacations from that despair thanks to Mother Nature's pharmacopoeia and the synthetic drugs inspired thereby! And yet even drug law reformers seem to agree with the Drug Warriors that a substance that CAN be used addictively MUST be used addictively. And so we call such drugs "killers" -- whereas the real killer here is our outlawing of education and drug choice such that it is almost impossible to use drugs wisely! The killer, in other words, is prohibition, not drugs!
AFTERWORD
1) Drugs that have been used for religious purposes have one thing in common: they inspire and elate. From this fact alone, it follows that the outlawing of inspirational medicines is the outlawing of religion -- nay, of the religious impulse itself. And yet when we look at the highly diverse substances that have been listed as Schedule 1 by the mendacious thugs in the DEA, we find that these drugs have nothing in common whatsoever except for the fact that they do, indeed, inspire and elate. This is the sin for which the racist, imperialist and xenophobic Drug Warriors can never forgive such substances. They want to outlaw such drugs for the same reason that Emperor Theodosius outlawed the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries 25 in C.E.26: because they consider them to be a threat to Christianity -- a threat to the bourgeois parochial life of the beer-swilling Drug Warrior.
2) I don't want to be unfair. It is possible to view the video referenced above without coming away with the idea that Fentanyl is evil. It is just that in order to do so, one has to distinguish between what the film producers say (in images, words and text) and what the viewer assumes that they actually meant. Personally, I'm not sure what they actually meant by their repeated allusions to mass deaths via Fentanyl 27 : it does seem to me, however, that they are suggesting that Fentanyl is beyond the pale for everybody merely because its use can prove problematic for young people whom we have refused to educate about drugs and for whom we have outlawed all safer opiates, like opium 28 itself.
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.
"Now, now, Sherlock, that coca preparation is not helping you a jot. Why can't you get 'high on sunshine,' like good old Watson here?" To which Sherlock replies: "But my good fellow, then I would no longer BE Sherlock Holmes."
I'm going to get on the grade-school circuit, telling kids to say no to horses.
"You think you can handle horses, kids? That's what Christopher Reeves thought. The fact is, NOBODY can handle horses!!!"
Michael Pollan is the Leona Helmsley of the Drug War. He uses outlawed drugs freely while failing to support the re-legalization of Mother Nature. Drug laws are apparently for the little people.
We know that anticipation and mental focus and relaxation have positive benefits -- but if these traits ae facilitated by "drugs," then we pretend that these same benefits somehow are no longer "real." This is a metaphysical bias, not a logical deduction.
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.
The drug war normalizes the disdainful and self-righteous attitude that Columbus and Pizarro had about drug use in the New World.
To understand why the western world is blind to the benefits of "drugs," read "The Concept of Nature" by Whitehead. He unveils the scientific schizophrenia of the west, according to which the "real" world is invisible to us while our perceptions are mere "secondary" qualities.
If we can go overseas to burn poppy plants, then Islamic countries should be free to come to the United States to burn our grape vines.
We live in a make-believe world in the US. We created it by outlawing all potentially helpful psychological meds, after which the number-one cause of arrest soon became "drugs." We then made movies to enjoy our crackdown on TV... after a tough day of being drug tested at work.
Response: Maybe so. But then that same supply of Fentanyl is also enough to keep hundreds of thousands of children from suffering unnecessarily in hospice -- children whom, in India, for instance, go without morphine 20 simply because American fearmongers have demonized that drug in the abstract as a "killer" and so rendered it difficult and expensive to prescribe21.
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.