Is someone you love bamboozled by America's insane drug policies?
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 6, 2026
Does this sound like someone you know?
She organizes her day around pill time and is constantly dealing with prescription refills and doctor appointments. She talks about her meds constantly and how they are being tweaked. This is her small talk, as other people talk about the weather. She never refers to her pills as drugs, but only as meds. She mentions the many downsides of her "meds" frequently -- the weight gain, the high blood pressure, the headaches, you name it -- and yet she never blames those "meds" for these conditions -- instead, she will tell you that she simply has not yet found the right "med" or combination of "meds" that was meant for HER, but that she is sure to eventually do so (don't ask her when) with the help of her psychiatrist.
I ask you, reader: could anyone BE more bamboozled?
She is living in a real-life version of the Stepford Wives, where drug prohibition has given Big Pharma carte blanche to control her very mood -- using a drug that she can never quit -- except perhaps in order to switch to a similar dependence-causing med from the same companies that made her dependent in the first place.
Just imagine if coca and opium produced the kind of outcome that we consider to be a success in the psychiatric field. Drug warriors would pillory them to the ends of the earth. And yet for drugs like coca and opium, drug dependence is but a mere bug, a statistically rare phenomenon, while for Big Pharma "meds," drug dependence is an actual feature: the drugs are MEANT to cause dependence, they are meant to be used for a lifetime. And what do doctors say when one complains about this dependence and the impossibility of getting off their meds? They merely tell us that we should not have tried to get off them in the first place, that good patients don't do that, that good patients just shut up and "take their meds."
Jesus wept! Could the self-interested hypocrisy be any clearer or any more monstrous!
Imagine if we said the same thing about opiate use or cocaine use, as in: "Of COURSE you feel bad: you stopped taking your heroin" or "You stopped taking your cocaine!"
Chances are that the "she" you are thinking of also smokes cigarettes and is constantly interrupting road trips with a desperate need to pull off the road and light up. And this in a country where we insist that westerners foisted opium off on the Chinese, causing mass addiction.
WRONG.
The Chinese had smoked opium for hundreds of years. The only addictions that westerners passed on to the Chinese and the world in general were cigarette addiction and alcoholism -- a responsibility for which we Americans never take responsibility but instead change the subject by vilifying 19th-century British merchants based on the wholesale lies of self-interested missionaries.
Author's Follow-up:
February 07, 2026
Answer to some probable objections:
My point is not to villainize the sale of alcohol and tobacco -- but rather to villainize the drug attitudes and laws that make alcohol and tobacco the only game in town when it comes to psychoactive drugs. In an educated world in which all drugs were re-legalized and had been thoroughly studied for their psychologically obvious effects and contraindications, there need be no widespread use of substances that produce undesired outcomes. In such a world, getting off unwanted substances would be far easier for obvious psychological reasons, especially with the help of what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, actual drug users who know the effects of a wide variety of drugs first-hand and can advise as to usage protocols that would be conducive to various desired emotional, mental and even psycho-spiritual outcomes.
Of course, this will sound like nonsense to the vast majority of indoctrinated Americans who know nothing of the powers and potentials of the outlawed medicines that they have been taught to hate since childhood in their misnamed "drug education" classes, especially since they have been gaslighted by scientists into believing that drugs that merely work do not "really" work -- and that drug efficacy must be determined under a microscope. That is the kind of mindset that makes seemingly smart scientists doubt whether even laughing gas itself could help the depressed -- as if the depressed were an alien species from Planet Mars and so not amenable to common-sense motivations.
Nor am I suggesting that we further ostracize smokers -- whom we have already been taught to treat like pariah. Our goal should not be simply to stop them from smoking -- but rather to give them ALTERNATIVES to smoking. The comparison of cigarette smoking with opium smoking is particularly illuminating here. We have been taught that the Chinese were enslaved by the nightly smoking of opium, but by such logic, millions of Americans are also enslaved by the nightly drinking of alcohol. No, the real enslavement in America is to nicotine. I just went on a road trip yesterday with a cousin who had us stop at least every two hours for a cigarette break. Nightly opium smokers do not need to stop for regular "fixes" like that. And yet we have no more call to outlaw nicotine than any other drug. It has its uses at some dose for some people in some instances, as for instance its use among the shamanic tribes to obtain spiritual states. Our goal rather should be to end UNWANTED use of nicotine, and we should do that, not by eroding time-honored liberties but rather by expanding drug choice.
It is a matter of psychological common sense that drugs could help us fight drugs. Who knows? It may even be possible to get off of Venlafaxine (a Big Pharma antidepressant with a 95% recidivism rate 1 for long-term users) with the help of other drugs that would obviate the psychological downsides of withdrawal associated with that so-called "med."
This, of course, is why the so-called fight against addiction in America is so ineffective, because it begins by ignoring psychological common sense. If American scientists were consistent, they would tell us that coffee does not "really" motivate us and that we should replace it with Big Pharma meds that work "scientifically," that is to say by using chemical pathways that can be identified and named.
In some ways, indeed, the Drug War is all about causing Americans to ignore common sense when it comes to drugs. It is one big attempt to stand in front of the vast array of psychoactive drugs and shout to the world on megaphones provided by Big Money: "Nothing to see here!!!"
Notes:
1: I have been unable to confirm this stat. But the WHO notes clinical recidivism rates for depression ranging from 50% to 85%. Do we count that as a recidivism rate of Effexor? Not when Biopharma is paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget, as reported by John LaMattina in the Sep 22, 2022 edition of Forbes magazine. (up)
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"Like Christians burning mosques and temples to spread the word of Jesus, modem drugabuseologists burn crops to spread the use of alcohol." -- Ceremonial Chemistry, p. 48
Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???
Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity.
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.
Drug prohibition is the perfect racist crime. It brought gunfire to inner cities, yet those who seek to end the gunfire pretend that drug prohibition has nothing to do with it.
If I should die of some unusual concatenation of circumstances, I want my survivors to pass "Brian's Law," a law stating that we will no longer pass laws based on hard cases and so needlessly fill our prisons by taking common-sense discretion out of the hands of judges.
It's really an insurance concern, however, disguised as a concern for public health. Because of America's distrust of "drugs," a company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.
Psst! Drug use has benefits too. Pass it on!
Drug Warriors should be legally banned from watching or reading Sherlock Holmes stories, since in their world, it is a crime for such people as Sherlock Holmes to exist, i.e., people who use medicines to improve their mind and mood.
Answer to some probable objections:
(up)