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Cocaine is a Blessing, not a Curse

How Rolling Stone writer Wade Davis has been bamboozled by drug war propaganda

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





November 22, 2025



I get ready to cringe any time I start reading a modern article about drugs. Almost every single author of our time has been brainwashed in one way or another by the drug-war indoctrination that they have received since childhood, above all in the form of the ruthless censorship of all positive reports of drug use by our conglomerate media. As someone who has "skin in this game," I know that it's just a matter of time before I read something in their articles that will pluck my last and final nerve. Such irritating remarks usually come in the form of throwaway lines in which the writers doff their hats to modern drug prejudices which they take to be established facts, when for instance they say words to the effect that, "We know of course that cocaine and opium are evil," as if we knew any such thing except thanks to the Drug War propaganda that has shielded us from all views to the contrary. You might think that the writers for Rolling Stone magazine would be an exception to this rule, but you would be wrong.

Author's follow-up for November 27, 2025
Author's follow-up for November 28, 2025

Take the April 2025 article by Wade Davis entitled "The Secret History of Coca.1" While Wade is clearly aware of the racist and unscientific origins of the demonization of the coca leaf, he uncritically accepts the strategically promulgated notion that cocaine is evil, a conclusion which is wrong for so many reasons. Wade fails to see that the outlawing of cocaine has had a devastating effect on HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS around the globe, including those suffering from depression. Sigmund Freud knew that cocaine was a godsend for the depressed2 -- but Wade, like drug pundits everywhere -- has never considered the depressed to be stakeholders in the drug debate -- nor people who are trying to think more clearly (like our elderly parents with dementia), nor people seeking religious inspiration, etc. For Wade, as for most everybody else, the focus is always on the vast minority who might misuse a drug, not the hundreds of millions who might benefit from a drug.

By the way, what is wrong with the world today that no one can see the lopsided nature of our drug evaluations? Well, that's the reason for this entire website: to flesh that problem out.

Wade also uncritically uses the word "drug crisis," by which he means a problem caused by drugs. No, Wade, the real drug crisis is the fact that godsend medicines are being withheld from hundreds of millions of people who are in need.

This was meant to be a short introduction to my letter to the editors at the Rolling Stone regarding Wade Davis' article about coca3, but I find it impossible to write briefly on so fraught a subject. I find that a certain prolixity is required in order for me to make my positions comprehensible to a potentially brainwashed readership. I should add, moreover, that I am bothered not simply by the author's occasional brainwashed viewpoints, but also by the paleolithic viewpoints and actions that the author merely reports. I was horrified to learn from this article that the UN actually has committed to a policy of eradicating the coca plant from the face of the earth! This is insanity! I do not see how a Christian, for starters, could support such a plan, which basically gives a line-item veto to truth-challenged humanity on the bounty of Mother Nature herself, a bounty which God himself told us was good!

Moreover, it is anti-scientific and anti-progress to outlaw ANY medicine, much less to eradicate it -- especially a naturally occurring source of MULTIPLE medicines -- merely because we cannot, at the present moment, find a use for that medicine that we consider to be worthwhile. To actually get rid of the medicine, to literally wipe it off the face of the earth, is to outlaw human progress! The drug for which we can find no use today might have a wonderful use tomorrow -- either by itself or in combination with other drugs. Who gives us the right to decide on the fate of a plant medicine on behalf of endless generations to come? And why should Mother Nature be required to be useful to us in the first place? I have no need for the mud toad but it does not follow that we should launch an eradication campaign to remove those ungainly creatures from the bottom of the sea!

Most importantly, of course, coca is the exact OPPOSITE of a curse! We only demonize the drug because we ignore almost all stakeholders in the drugs debate except the vast minority who misuse a drug -- and even that misuse comes about because we refuse to learn about drugs and teach wise use based on real-world cases. In other words, our whole mindset about drugs is completely befuddled -- and that is why we need writers to see the depressed -- and pain patients and the cognitively challenged, and the spiritual seekers, etc. etc. -- as stakeholders in the drugs debate. Once they acknowledge the existence of these HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of so-far-ignored stakeholders, they will surely never support prohibition again.

But then how optimistic can you be when most drug pundits ignore the evils of drug prohibition that are staring them in the face, in the form of the no-go zones in inner cities4, the destruction of the Bill of Rights5, and the election of a would-be fascist as President of the United States thanks to the fact that drug laws have thrown hundreds of thousands of minorities in jail6?

Finally, I must admit that I do not expect Rolling Stone to publish this letter that follows. That is just how brainwashed Americans are. Even the seemingly "forward thinkers" are in lockstep with a wide variety of crazed assumptions behind drug prohibition. Mind you, ten years ago, I would have thought otherwise. I would have said to myself, "Brian," I would have said, "they simply HAVE to publish your letter because it points out an angle of the problem that they have never even considered before!!!" Ah, the days of our youth! That was back when I still believed in Santa Claus. I have since found that Americans have a seemingly boundless ability to ignore common sense when it comes to drugs.

Compassion, logic, and consistency all fly out the window when that topic is raised. Americans received one too many teddy bears as kids for just saying no to godsend medicines. They can no longer view the subject rationally. They just cannot get it through their heads that prohibition is the problem, not drugs -- this despite the fact that it was liquor prohibition that first brought machine-gun fire to American streets -- this despite the fact that kids were not dying in the streets from opiates when opiates were legal in America: it took drug prohibition to bring that about.


MY LETTER TO THE EDITORS OF ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE


Like almost all drug pundits, Wade Davis assumes that cocaine is evil. He ignores the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DEPRESSED AND THOSE WITH MENTAL DECLINE who could benefit from the drug. Sigmund Freud knew cocaine was a CURE for depression7! A cure! Doctors judged it only by downsides. They knew that their careers were in jeopardy if people could fix depression on their own. (No one asked the depressed what THEY thought about cocaine.)

I have spent 40 years on an ineffective antidepressant that is MUCH HARDER TO KICK THAN HEROIN8! My doctor tells me that Effexor has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users after three years, a fact that I can verify from personal experience, while adding that I encountered cognitive impairment while I was off the drug. The drug had apparently mucked about with my brain chemistry in an irreversible way.

Compare this to heroin use, which Wade implies is beyond the pale. When American soldiers returned from Vietnam after using heroin overseas, only 5% had trouble getting off the drug (see the Lee Robins study9). Five percent!

And why was I shunted off onto Big Pharma's dependence-causing drugs? Why was I forced to become a patient for life, with all of the humiliating, time-consuming and expensive baggage that such a status entails? Answer: Because doctors and demagogues claimed to want to save me from evil drugs like cocaine, a drug that the vast majority of people can use wisely! Dependency is a mere bug for cocaine, it is an actual FEATURE for modern antidepressants.

Please, remind your authors that the depressed and those with mental challenges are stakeholders in the drug criminalization debate!

Wade writes about the plight of 400 victims of cocaine toxicity worldwide -- while alcohol kills 178,000 a year in the U.S. ALONE10!!

What about the rights of HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DEPRESSED?

The real problem of the WHO is that they think they should outlaw any drug that can theoretically cause addiction. That is absurd – especially in a world in which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma drugs for life11!

Americans care only about the rights of the potential addicts whom we refuse to educate about safe drug use. We care nothing about the rights of the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS who would use drugs wisely and benefit from their use. Cocaine is an obvious blessing for the depressed and those with mental challenges brought on by dementia.

It is nothing less than a crime against humanity that we have outlawed cocaine by judging it only by its downsides, as if we were to judge alcohol by looking only at alcoholics.

I write as one of the totally ignored stakeholders in the drug debate: one of the chronically depressed from whom a godsend medicine has been callously withheld for my entire lifetime now!

Also, Wade is WRONG to imply that regular opium use is necessarily deleterious to health. The answer is almost the opposite. See The Truth about Opium by William Brereton12. It would be a much better world if American males smoked an opium pipe nightly rather than downing a brew. Men who smoke opium nightly do not beat their wives.




Author's Follow-up:

November 23, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




Wade implies that cocaine had to be outlawed because 400 people died of toxic doses worldwide. SO WHAT?!!! 49,000 Americans kill themselves every year -- all because we have outlawed and demonized the use of drugs like cocaine!!!

Drug pundits are horrible at assessing risks and benefits. Just like the FDA. They never take into account the downsides of NOT approving drugs. They never take into account the suicides, or the lifelong dependence on Big Pharma meds, or the violence caused by prohibition, etc. etc. etc.

Drug prohibition results in the inversion of all normal values. The FDA approves of brain-damaging shock therapy for the depressed -- but they will not approve of the use of drugs that could make brain-damaging shock therapy unnecessary!



Author's Follow-up:

November 27, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




After eight years of being completely ignored by mainstream media, you would think that I could finally take such sleights in stride. And yet it irritates me that a magazine like Rolling Stone, one that ostentatiously claims to "speak truth to power," will join with the rest of the corporate world in pretending that the depressed are not victims of drug prohibition.

They will happily print Wade Davis's philosophically challenged apologetics for drug prohibition, while refusing to print any principled rebuttal of the same, even when written by someone whose entire life has been negatively affected by the results of the brainwashed assumptions of the Wade Davises of the world. Americans are simply not supposed to connect the dots between drug prohibition and their silent suffering in life. The conglomerate media simply will not allow them to do so13. And so hundreds of millions of the depressed must suffer in silence -- a silence so complete that their voices are never even published by that media. But, of course, the problem is worse than that: the vast majority of the depressed themselves are so brainwashed by drug propaganda as to not recognize the reason for their own plight.

As Thomas Szasz writes in "Ceremonial Chemistry":

"We have thus managed to replace racial, religious, and military coercions and colonialisms, which now seem to us dishonorable, with medical and therapeutic coercions and colonialisms, which now seem to us honorable. Because these latter controls are ostensibly based on Science and aim to secure only Health, and because those who are so coerced and colonized often worship the idols of medical and therapeutic scientism as ardently as do the coercers and colonizers, the victims cannot even articulate their predicament and are therefore quite powerless to resist their victimizers14."


I am still not sure, however, exactly why the unnecessary suffering of hundreds of millions of people fails to resonate with the publishers of Rolling Stone magazine, whom, one might assume, have a modicum of education under their belts.

Perhaps they believe that "science" has "solved" the problem of depression -- albeit by turning 1 in 4 American women into patients for life15 -- and that therefore any attack on the healthcare status quo must come from the lunatic fringe. There must be some such assumption at play here: else how could the magazine's editors tacitly sign off on Wade's implicit claim that 400 cases of cocaine toxicity around the world justify the outlawing of that alkaloid -- especially in a world in which aspirin causes 3,000 deaths per year in the UK alone16?! Perhaps the editors fear that to acknowledge such home truths would be to challenge the entire medical industry and to thereby frighten their mainstream advertisers, especially in the beer and liquor industries. Whatever their excuse for ghosting me, it cannot be that I am simply one of many who has been connecting these dots, since any survey of depression-related websites will quickly serve to negative that supposition. The foes of antidepressants are just as anti-drug as the rest of us. We have all been subject to indoctrination in Drug War ideology since grade school, thanks especially to the media's almost total censorship of upbeat stories about the substances that we have been taught to hate -- and above all the panaceas of opium and cocaine.

Why these two drugs "above all"? It's simple. If opium and cocaine were legal again in America, the healthcare industry would suddenly have to undergo extensive downsizing, as Americans were once again put in charge of their own health.

It is a sign of the bamboozled times that a brainwashed writer like Wade Davis is considered to be at the cutting-edge of the drug-law reform movement.



Author's Follow-up:

November 28, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up





Fisherman hauling in a HUGE catch. (abolishthedea.com)I should clarify my claim of having been ignored by the mainstream media. I have had at least two "bites" from established pundits over the last eight years of my philosophical inquiry into America's incoherent drug policies and attitudes. The big ones "got away," however, as explained below.

1) In May of this year, I received a request from the MAPS organization to feature one of my essays on Ketamine (How Ketamine Advocates Reckon without the Drug War) as their first letter-to-the-editor in their MAPS Bulletin. Of course, I was delighted to approve of such use. However, I was highly skeptical, even then, that any of my essays would ever actually appear in the Bulletin, and for two reasons: First, I had been critical of MAPS policies in my past essays, and second, I had previously sent a book of mine to MAPS founder Rick Doblin, for which I never received so much as an acknowledgement of receipt. I figured that the women with whom I was communicating had yet to run their ideas past Rick, who would surely give them the kibosh, especially as I have since gently upbraided Rick for his oversight in the odd essay. To be sure, I had only done so in the spirit of good-natured raillery, but then I suppose criticism is criticism. The Bulletin might indeed begin featuring letters to the editor, but surely my essays would never be featured therein, let alone in the first publication of that kind.

To be fair, there does seem to be a basic philosophical difference between myself and Rick, insofar as he seems to consider drugs like MDMA to be valuable as an adjunct to existing therapies whereas I (who have skin in the game) firmly believe that a vast array of re-legalized drugs should REPLACE the materialist-inspired antidepressants altogether, first and foremost because those drugs cause extreme dependence, far, far greater than that caused by heroin, the drug that Americans love to hate. Only 5% of America's many heroin-using soldiers in Vietnam required help getting off the drug when they returned to the States17. Compare that to the Effexor that I am on, which has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users18. 95%! I quit the drug entirely earlier this year, only to find that I had severe cognitive impairment that required me to get back on it pronto. This is why I dislike Rick's use of the term "treatment-resistant depression." It implies that "science" has a great treatment for depression, thank you very much, it's just that some finicky biochemistries don't know a good thing when they see it. But underperforming and highly dependence-causing drugs do NOT constitute a successful treatment for depression.

Most depression in America would end at once with the re-legalization of cocaine19. Unfortunately, no one cares about the hundreds of millions of depressed who would thereby have happy lives -- all that they care about are the minority of people who would not use cocaine wisely. If these cocaine critics were logically consistent, then they would judge alcohol use only by looking at alcoholics -- and never think about the vast majority of people who benefit from using alcohol wisely.

I should state for the record that my essay never did appear in the MAPS Bulletin.

2) Back in the spring of 2022, I wrote a lengthy letter to Michael Pollan's agent, asking permission to chat with the author about American drug policy. I pointed out some of my main "concerns" about Michael's implicit drug-related assumptions in "How to Change Your Mind20." Amazingly, the agent "put me through" to Michael, and we had a friendly email chat in which we agreed that I would forward my concerns in the form of a sort of thesis to be delivered in a month or two. I spent the next 30-plus days writing what ended up being a short book detailing all my concerns about modern drug policy, including the way that drug prohibition censored authors and academia, how it outlawed our ability to take care of our own health, and how it was based on materialist conceptions of mind and mood that obliged researchers to ignore common sense.

I read the treatise over and over to myself, amending and updating continually, before finally.... submitting it. As I had repeatedly made clear to Michael, I was not trying to "run a new book by him" or receive plugs of any kind: my only goal was to awaken him to a wide variety of drug-related concerns about which most authors (including himself) seemed completely unaware. My expectation was that I would thereby spark an online conversation with Michael about the seemingly endless points that I had raised. I looked forward to some give-and-take on these many issues, assuming that Michael simply HAD to agree with some of my conclusions -- or else surprise me with arguments that I had never heard before. Either way was a win-win. I merely hoped that some of the ideas that I had broached might start conversations that would eventually help inform Pollan's writing on related subjects.

Imagine my disappointment then when the celebrated author responded to my 100,000-plus-word thesis with a single short paragraph. He said, in effect, "I have read your comments in full and will take them onboard."

I was stunned. The wind that had been accumulating over the last month was instantly taken out of my sails. Had literally NOTHING I wrote inspired the least bit of feedback on his part?

In retrospect, of course, I see that my expectations of having a substantive discussion with Michael were naive in the extreme.

It was then that I began to realize what an uphill climb I had ahead of me in my attempts to convince Americans of their purblind bamboozlement about drugs.

But you know what they say: that which does not kill me turns me into a misanthropic curmudgeon.

I continue to write authors and pundits worldwide on these topics in the hopes of sparking informative discussions, but I no longer expect replies.

I only wish that the chronology of my lifespan had aligned more felicitously with that of Thomas Szasz
21. When I wrote him a letter on the topic of drugs in the 1980s, I received a lengthy and substantive handwritten reply.


Notes:

1: The Secret History of Coca Davis, Wade, Rolling Stone magazine, 2025 (up)
2: On Cocaine Freud, Sigmund (up)
3: The Secret History of Coca Davis, Wade, Rolling Stone magazine, 2025 (up)
4: Inner-City Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration Thompson, Heather Ann, The Atlantic, 2014 (up)
5: Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition DWP (up)
6: How the Drug War gave the 2016 election to Donald Trump DWP (up)
7: On Cocaine Freud, Sigmund (up)
8: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
9: Lee Robins' studies of heroin use among US Vietnam veterans Hall, Wayne, National Library of Medicine, 2016 (up)
10: Does alcohol cause more deaths in the U.S. than any other drug? Jaijongkit, Por, The Colorado Sun, 2025 (up)
11: Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle Miller, Richard Louis, Park Street Press, New York, 2017 (up)
12: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
13: Rolling Stone is owned by Penske Media Corporation, owners of Billboard and Variety. (up)
14: Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers Szasz, Thomas, Anchor Press/Doubleday, New York, 1974 (up)
15: Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle Miller, Richard Louis, Park Street Press, New York, 2017 (up)
16: Daily Aspirin Linked To More Than 3,000 Deaths Per Year, Scientists Warn Huffington Post (up)
17: Lee Robins' studies of heroin use among US Vietnam veterans Hall, Wayne, National Library of Medicine, 2016 (up)
18: How drug prohibition makes it nearly impossible to withdraw from antidepressants DWP (up)
19: On Cocaine Freud, Sigmund (up)
20: How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence Pollan, Michael, Penguin Books, New York, 2018 (up)
21: Ceremonial Chemistry by Thomas Szasz DWP (up)







Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




I agree that Big Pharma drugs have wrought disaster when used in psychotherapy -- but it is common sense that non-Big Pharma drugs that elate could be used to prevent suicide and obviate the need for ECT.

What I want to know is, who sold Christopher Reeves that horse that he fell off of? Who was peddling that junk?!

Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful. Wrong. Substance demonization is wrong, root and branch. It always causes more suffering than freedom.

SSRIs are created based on the materialist notion that cures should be found under a microscope. That's why science is so slow in acknowledging the benefit of plant medicines. Anyone who chooses SSRIs over drugs like San Pedro cactus is simply uninformed.

The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.

In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.

"The homicidal drug is booze. There's more violence on a Saturday night in a neighborhood tavern than there has been in the whole 20-year history of LSD." -- Timothy Leary

Attempts to improve one's mind and mood are not crimes. The attempt to stop people from doing so is the crime.

I could tell my psychiatrist EXACTLY what would "cure" my depression, even without getting addicted, but everything involved is illegal. It has to be. Otherwise I would have no need of the psychiatrist.

Pro-psychedelic websites tell me to check with my "doctor" before using Mother Nature. But WHY? I'm the expert on my own psychology, damn it. These "doctors" are the ones who got me hooked on synthetic drugs, because they honor microscopic evidence, not time-honored usage.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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Thanks for visiting The Drug War Philosopher at abolishthedea.com, featuring essays against America's disgraceful drug war. Updated daily.

Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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