in response to the misguided billboard campaign of Cindy DeMaio and Rachel's Angels
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 14, 2025
I was bouncing along on poorly maintained I-295 through Philadelphia, yesterday, being force-fed enormous billboards hawking the benefits of alcohol, chiropractors, and lawyers. This was jarring enough from multiple perspectives and I resolved never to take that route again from Jersey to Virginia, even if it was toll-free.
Americans have been taught to superstitiously believe that drugs are bad. Drugs are not bad or good. They are inanimate objects. Their widespread misuse tells us something about society, not about drugs.
But just when I had made my peace with the existing irritations, another one arose which was more jarring than the rest, more jarring than any of the many linear asphalt cracks or poorly patched potholes on my penny-pinching route. For I began encountering a series of in-your-face billboards plastered with the portraits of smiling white young people and bearing the words "Fentanyl kills" and "Fentanyl steals loved ones."
"Oh, really?" I thought to myself. "An inanimate object does all that? By such logic, we could say that alcohol not only kills, but it massacres. Alcohol, after all, kills 178,000 a year according to the CDC, and yet liquor consumption is glorified with pride of place on many a nearby billboard.1"
These anti-Fentanyl signs were infuriating to me, because they promote the attitude that powers the War on Drugs, the belief that substances can be bad in and of themselves without regard to context of use. That is simply a superstition. Saying "Fentanyl kills" is just like saying "Fire bad!" It is a childish way of looking at the world. It is all about demonizing a thing by thinking only of its downsides and never of its upsides.
So as I bounced my way toward Maryland and the well-paved and commercial-free I-70 bypass near Washington, D.C., I resolved to write the organization responsible for those Fentanyl-bashing billboards when I arrived home and to kindly request that they change their tune. The organization in question turned out to be Rachel's Angels begun by Cindy DeMaio to honor her daughter and to ensure that her Fentanyl-related death was not in vain. While I condole Cindy for her loss, I am duty-bound to point out that her approach to fighting back is ill-advised and counterproductive in the extreme. Drug policy made Fentanyl a killer. Indeed, modern opiates exist thanks to the outlawing of opium , which was used peaceably at home until racist politicians decided to outlaw the drug that all ancient physicians had considered to be a panacea.
Open Letter to Rachel's Angels.
With all due respect, young people were not dying in the street from opiate use when opium 2 was legal, before it was outlawed by racist politicians. Fentanyl only kills in the sense that cars kill or alcohol kills. They kill when people are uneducated and lack alternatives and receive product of unknown quality and quantity -- all of which problems are brought about by drug prohibition!
prohibition is the problem 3 . It outlaws many inherently non-addictive alternatives to opiates. Even opiates can be used safely and without addiction, although the media refuses to publish any examples of that fact and the Drug Warrior refuses to teach safe and non-addictive use!!! In fact, the White House, since the Nixon years, has helped censor sitcoms and other TV shows 4 to conform to the drug-blaming ideology of the Drug Warrior, so that Americans will not even think that safe and non-addictive use is possible.
When we blame drugs rather than drug policy, we wage a Drug War that has revoked American liberties and destroyed the rule of law in Latin America. It has handed the presidency to Donald Trump by jailing over a million Blacks for gun violence 5 directly brought about by drug prohibition itself. Guns first entered the hood thanks to liquor and drug prohibition.
Drug prohibition has also given racist police officers carte blanche to be as evil as they want to be. The racist officers know this. That's why the police who killed George Floyd were shouting, "Just say no to drugs!" Meanwhile, minority kids die every day from drive-by shootings caused by drug prohibition.
There are positive uses even for cyanide, even for Fentanyl. When we outlaw substances based on misuse, we deny people godsend medicine, like the children in hospice in India where morphine 6 is difficult to find and use thanks to U.S.-inspired fears about opiate use.
The Hindu religion was inspired by drug use. Drugs are not the problem. Bad drug laws and a lack of education are the problems.
Every life is sacred, but that includes the lives of minorities like 15-year-old Niomi Russell, who was killed by a drive-by shooting in D.C. in 2024 thanks to drug prohibition, and that includes the 60,000 Mexicans who have been "disappeared" over the last two decades thanks to the War on Drugs.
America's attitudes and laws are the problem, not drugs. We have got to stop playing "whack-a-mole" with inanimate substances like Fentanyl, PCP 7, Ice, etc., and address the real problems: a lack of education, a lack of alternatives, and a lack of government regulation of drug supply.
Sincerely Yours
PS 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life on antidepressants 8. The antidepressant that I am on is harder to kick than heroin 9. The medical peddlers who sold me that "junk" never told me that it would make me a patient for life -- and yet no one is complaining on MY behalf. To the contrary, they are telling me to "just take your meds."
PPS Opiates cause less cravings than nicotine. See Andrew Weil's book, "From Chocolate to morphine 10 ."
The Drug War is all about fearmongering rather than solving problems. It causes suicides by outlawing all drugs that could inspire and elate without causing addiction. It causes unnecessary shock therapy for the depressed, by outlawing all alternatives. It denies godsend meds to the autistic, meds that could help them feel compassion for others!
For these reasons and many more, I urge you to start demanding education and a regulated drug supply instead of launching a war on an inanimate substance like Fentanyl.
Discussion Topics
May 23, 2025
Attention Teachers and Professors: Brian is not writing these essays for his health. (Well, in a way he is, actually, but that's not important now.) His goal is to get the world thinking about the anti-democratic and anti-scientific idiocy of the War on Drugs. You can stimulate your students' brainwashed grey matter on this topic by having them read the above essay and then discuss the following questions as a group!
Brian says that if Fentanyl kills, then alcohol massacres. Explain.
Why is saying "Fentanyl kills!" philosophically indistinguishable from saying "Fire bad!"
Name some of the (enormous) downsides of drug prohibition.
What is the obvious takeaway message from the fact that the police were shouting 'Just say no to drugs' as they killed George Floyd?
What are the 'real' problems, according to Brian?
How does drug prohibition bring about suicide 11 and the unnecessary use of brain-damaging shock therapy?
Until we legalize ALL psychoactive drugs, there will be no such thing as an addiction expert. In the meantime, it's insulting to be told by neuroscience that I'm an addictive type. It's pathologizing my just indignation at psychiatry's niggardly pharmacopoeia.
Almost every article about suicide is shallow because it takes drug prohibition as a natural baseline, even though drug prohibition outlaws substances that could so clearly elevate mood.
If opium and cocaine were re-legalized, hospital buildings would no longer be the secular cathedrals of our time. Some of that wealth would actually go to healthy people.
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.
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.
As great as it is, "Synthetic Panics" by Philip Jenkins was only tolerated by academia because it did not mention drugs in the title and it contains no explicit opinions about drugs. As a result, many drug law reformers still don't know the book exists.
If I want to use the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions, fight depression, or follow up on the research of William James into altered states, I should not have to live in fear of the DEA crashing down my door and shouting: "GO! GO! GO!"
Researchers say that the New York Times has been flooding the world with Drug War agitprop.
The New York Times gets it wrong again. Yes, kratom, like all drugs, has downsides. The problem is not kratom, it's drug prohibition which limits choice. Nor are young people the only stakeholders in the debate, as the Times always assumes.
Aleister Crowley actually TRIED to get addicted to drugs and found he could not. These things are not inevitable. The fact that there are town drunkards does not mean that we should outlaw alcohol.
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
Attention Teachers and Professors: Brian is not writing these essays for his health. (Well, in a way he is, actually, but that's not important now.) His goal is to get the world thinking about the anti-democratic and anti-scientific idiocy of the War on Drugs. You can stimulate your students' brainwashed grey matter on this topic by having them read the above essay and then discuss the following questions as a group! 
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