on behalf of millions of unacknowledged victims of the War on Drugs
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 28, 2026
Dear Mr. Sullum,
I am a 67-year-old chronic depressive* who has been turned into a ward of the healthcare state by drug prohibition. Instead of being able to make common-sense, strategic and intermittent use of substances like laughing gas and cocaine, I was shunted off in my late teens onto Big Pharma drugs which turned out to be far harder to kick than heroin 1. This has turned me into a patient for life, with all of the humiliating, time-consuming and expensive baggage that comes with such a designation. I have to sail into Healthcare Harbor every three months of my life, like a modern Ancient Mariner, to tell my life story to complete strangers, all for the privilege of being allowed to purchase yet another supply of an expensive, under-performing, and highly dependence-causing "med." Before every such session, I am asked a litany of humiliating questions, including : "Have you considered suicide since our last visit?" – to which I always want to respond: "Only when I consider how drug prohibition has turned me into a ward of the healthcare state."
This backstory, combined with my passion for philosophy, caused me to resolve eight years ago now to spend the remainder of my life writing essays against drug prohibition from the point of view of a med-dependent American. I naively thought at first that all I had to do was to point out my seemingly blatant disempowerment in order to get the interested parties in the drug prohibition debate to sit up and take notice. I thought I could make it clear to them that the depressed are stakeholders in this debate, and that drug prohibition is nothing less than the outlawing of our right to heal. Instead, I have been ignored by literally everyone to whom I have written on this topic. Everyone. I feel like the child who has discovered that the emperor is wearing no clothes and who is now being shooed away by the adults who refuse to acknowledge that fact. I am writing to you today because I believe that you may be an exception to this rule, that you, at least, might understand what I am saying here, especially since you have no self-interested reason for refusing to do so, unlike members of the healthcare industry, for instance.
I draw that conclusion after reading statements like the following in your insightful book entitled Saying Yes:
One man's acid trip is another's spiritual awakening.
If an unhappy person takes heroin, he is committing a crime. If he takes Prozac, he is treating his depression."
Reformers will not make much progress as long as they agree with defenders of the status quo that drug use is always wrong."
You also conclude that "the stereotypes that drive the War on Drugs will be impossible to sustain" once people begin to speak out, which brings me to my main reason for writing to you today. I have a specific idea that I would like to "run by you," one that could give a voice to the millions of med-dependent Americans like myself, so that we can make it clear to the public that drug prohibition has not only outlawed our right to heal, but that, ironically, it has turned us into drug users for life. Julie Holland writes that 1 in 8 Americans (and 1 in 4 American women) are dependent on the daily use of Big Pharma drugs like SSRIs. By connecting the dots between drug prohibition and this wholesale disempowerment of the depressed with respect to their health care, we could deprive Drug Warriors of one of their biggest implicit arguments: namely, that the only stakeholders in the debate over drug prohibition are the white American young people whom we refuse "on principle" to educate about safe use. No longer would op-ed authors in the New York Times be able to state and/or imply, as they always seem to do, that drug prohibition is a victimless crime.
If you're interested in reading my specific idea for giving a voice to med-dependent Americans like myself, thereby hastening the end of drug prohibition, please let me know and I will follow up promptly with the details. I would love to get your thoughts on my plan. If not, so be it. It certainly would not be the first time that I have written to no avail on this subject. On the bright side, none of my would-be correspondents have as yet had the nerve to respond to my emails by telling me that I should just "shut up and take my meds."
Joking aside, you have my sincere thanks for reading thus far.
PS I feel that this idea of mine is more important than ever in light of the recent news stories about assisted suicide. Westerners are now so convinced that drugs have no benefits for them that depressed people like Canadian Claire Brosseau are demanding their right to die. They want the state to help to kill them: the same state that forbids them from using drugs that could cheer them up in a trice! Worse yet, the New York Times covered the story without any reference to drug prohibition. I have since written to Claire Brosseau, her psychiatrists, and to the healthcare reporter who covered her story in an attempt to convince them that assisted suicide (especially for the depressed) cannot be discussed meaningfully without also discussing drug prohibition, which outlaws substances whose informed and strategic use could make certain ailments quite livable for certain people. I say this not based on medical studies but based on psychological common sense, something that seems to be in short supply in the reductionist medical establishment of our times. So far, of course, I have received no responses to those emails.
*I use the term "chronic depressive" as a description of my general personality and not in the sense of a discrete illness as listed in the disease-mongering DSM.
Here's the first step in the FDA process for evaluating a psychoactive drug:
Ignore all glaringly obvious benefits.
Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.
Scientists hold holistically working drugs to reductionist standards, thereby practicing a sort of pharmacological colonialsm.
David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.
Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.
Musk and co. want to make us more robot-like with AI, when they should be trying to make us more human-like with sacred medicine. Only humans can gain creativity from plant medicine. All AI can do is harvest the knowledge that eventually results from that creativity.
The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.
Someday the world will realize that Freud's real achievement was his discovery of the depression-busting power of cocaine.
Racist drug warriors make cities dangerous with drug prohibition -- then they use that danger as an excuse to send in the National Guard.
For those who want to understand what's going on with the drug war from a philosophical point of view, I recommend chapter six of "Eugenics and Other Evils" by GK Chesterton.
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.
Dear Mr. Sullum,
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