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Driver's Ed and Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 16, 2025



In my driver's ed class back in high school in the 1970s, we students were forced to binge-watch short films from the Ohio Department of Transportation featuring gory, uncensored scenes of real-life traffic accidents. The apparent goal was to frighten us into driving safely -- although the first message that I took away from the celluloid blood-fest was that I should never drive a car in the Buckeye State. Virginia roads seemed so amazingly peaceful by comparison!

Looking back now, fifty years later, I see an enormous irony in those classes. When high schools started having classes to quote-unquote "educate" kids about drug use, they also showed films about the gory consequences of not being safe -- and yet they wanted the kids to come away with a very different conclusion after watching those films. They wanted them to conclude that safe drug use is impossible, that it is a contradiction in terms.

Imagine if driver's education classes were conducted like drug education classes. The teacher would show all those gory films and then address the students as follows:


"You know what, kids? All these bloody dead Ohioans that you have just seen sprawled out on the asphalt had one thing in common: they all thought that THEY could drive safely. Well, guess what, cupcake: NO ONE CAN DRIVE SAFELY!!!

All right, class dismissed. Tomorrow, we will be taking an in-depth look at the aftermaths of some high-speed head-on collisions on Interstate 71 between Columbus and Cleveland, involving buses, tractor-trailers, farm vehicles... and yes, folks, even motorcycles. [class sighs] I know, right? So schedule your lunch breaks accordingly!"









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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The evidence has been in for well over a century now: people want to use psychoactive substances to transcend the rational mind. It's about time we stopped punishing them for that.

The FDA is not qualified to tell us whether holistic medicines work. They hold such drugs to materialist standards and that's pharmacological colonialism.

Folks like Sabet accuse folks like myself of ignoring the "facts." No, it is Sabet who is ignoring the facts -- facts about dangerous horses and free climbing. He's also ignoring all the downsides of prohibition, whose laws lead to the election of tyrants.

The search for SSRIs has always been based on a flawed materialist premise that human consciousness is nothing but a mix of brain chemicals and so depression can be treated medically like any other physical condition.

SWAT raids have increased by 15,000 percent from the late 1970s to today, resulting in 50,000 to 80,000 SWAT raids annually in the US alone. --War On Us

The FDA should have no role in approving psychoactive medicine. They evaluate them based on materialist standards rather than holistic ones. In practice, this means the FDA ignores all glaringly obvious benefits.

Psychiatrists refuse to acknowledge that it is hugely disempowering to turn patients into wards of the healthcare state with dependence-causing "meds." End drug prohibition and end the psychiatric pill mill.

The best step we could take in harm reduction is re-legalizing everything and starting to teach safe use. Spend the DEA's billions on "go" teams that would descend on locations where drugs are being used stupidly -- not to arrest, but to educate.

If America cannot exist without outlawing drugs, then there is something wrong with America, not with drugs.

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.


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






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Book Cover

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

This book features 150 annotated images, designed to force brainwashed Americans to confront the fact that drug prohibition is wrong. Here is what author Richard Parrish II says of the book's compiler: "The drug prohibition philosopher provides first-hand, principled, persuasive, and insightful arguments against the current drug prohibition regime..."

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Book Cover

Diary of a Drug Fiend

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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.

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Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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