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Sending out an SOS to the Talking Drugs website

an open letter to Andre @ release.org.uk

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 3, 2026



Dear Andre,

I am writing to offer my services in creating essays for the Talking Drugs website. Below please find a brief autobiographical sketch that highlights my perspective on drug prohibition. It is a perspective from which no one else seems to be writing these days and would therefore fit well with your organization's goal of publishing unheard voices. It is the voice of someone who has been a victim of drug prohibition for his entire lifetime, albeit in a way that most drug pundits have yet to even hear of.

Author's follow-up for April 22, 2026

My name is Brian Quass and I am a 67-year-old philosopher from Virginia, USA. I have published hundreds of essays against drug prohibition over the last eight years under the moniker of The Drug War Philosopher at abolishthedea.com. Interestingly enough, I am still "spoiled for choice" in 2026 when it comes to finding essay topics, because drug prohibition creates so many problems, although most North Americans seem completely unaware of this fact. Take the recent attempt of depressed Canadian Claire Brosseau to take advantage of the new assisted suicide laws in Canada. I am the only philosopher in the world to point out that the debate over assisted suicide for the depressed is completely unethical unless we also debate the drug prohibition which makes assisted suicide necessary in the first place, at least in the minds of the depressed. Anyone who is familiar with drug history and the state-of-the-art in the fields of pharmacology and ethnobotany knows that there are drugs that could improve Claire's mind and mood in a trice. And yet all the parties in the debate over Claire's case completely ignore this fact; they ignore the existence of all psychoactive substances except for Big Pharma "meds." They are thereby implying that death itself is preferable to drug use. Death itself.


This is just one of a number of cases in which I alone seem to be noticing the pernicious real-world effects of drug prohibition. I am also the only philosopher who seems to realize that the outlawing of laughing gas is the outlawing of academic freedom. The use of laughing gas completely changed the ideas of William James with respect to the nature of consciousness and of reality writ large, giving him insights that have obvious significance in evaluating the work of Immanuel Kant. James explicitly encouraged his fellow philosophers to follow up on his own studies by using the gas themselves for research purposes. Drug laws in Britain have already outlawed such research and now the FDA in America is seeking to treat laughing gas as a "drug" as well. I am the only philosopher who formally protested against the FDA's plans, despite my letters to philosophers at Yale and Harvard urging them to join me in standing up for academic freedom and the legacy of William James. That latter university is the alma mater of William James, the school where he founded the Psychology Department, and yet the online biography of James at Harvard University does not even mention his work with laughing gas. The government does not even need to censor academia; academia is censoring themselves on the subject of drugs.


I ask myself why I am the only one who seems to notice these downsides of drug prohibition. I think the answer is that I have "skin in the game" when it comes to the drug debate. This is because drug prohibition has turned me into a ward of the healthcare state. As a chronic depressive, I was "saved" from drugs like cocaine and laughing gas in my teens, only to be placed on expensive and under-performing Big Pharma meds that turned out to be far harder to kick than heroin. And so I experience the evil of drug prohibition "in my very bones," so to speak, thanks to my inadequately treated depression. And this status quo is humiliating. I have to see a doctor one-third my age every three months of my life to qualify for a refill of a drug that I have been taking now for 35 years.* It is in light of this complete disempowerment that I have come to agree with Thomas Szasz, that the outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of my right to heal and that the prohibition against self-medication, at least in the psychological realm, makes no sense, except from the financial point of view of the healthcare industry. Human beings have always had the right to take care of their own health. It was such a basic right that no one thought to include it in a Bill of Rights. And so doctors launched a successful campaign to make us disown that right, the same self-interested doctors who concluded that cocaine was too dangerous for the depressed, not by doing fair studies but by focusing only on the statistically rare cases of misuse, exactly as if they were to study alcohol by looking only at alcoholics. No one asked the depressed what they thought about the drug.



This is what sets me apart. I alone seem to realize that the chronically depressed are stakeholders in the drug debate. As Thomas Szasz reminded us, " The laws that deny healthy people 'recreational' drugs also deny sick people 'therapeutic' drugs." Szasz wrote that 34 years ago now, but westerners seem as clueless as ever about that fact. This ignorance was clearly demonstrated in the media coverage leading up to the outlawing of laughing gas in the UK. I remember one interview in particular on Channel 5 in 2023 between Niamh Eastwood, executive director of Release, and neurologist Dr. David Nicholl, in which the female presenter for the show was goading the speakers on to be more critical of laughing gas. She was essentially saying to them: "How could we NOT outlaw laughing gas given the threat that it poses to our CHILDREN?!" She had apparently forgotten that the role of the journalist is to report rather than to advocate. The answer to her question, however, is obvious: Children are not the only stakeholders in the drug debate. If one is really interested in the well-being of our children, they would be spending the billions that we are now spending on prisons and SWAT teams on educational campaigns instead. I believe, in fact, that we should have "educational SWAT teams" that descend on areas of problematic drug use by children, just as traditional SWAT teams now descend on suspected drug-trafficking sites, not to arrest the young people that they encounter there but to educate them as to the safe and appropriate use of drugs. That approach would respect my right to heal and to pursue philosophical studies, etc., while also dealing with the problem of underage substance use.



The good news is that I write from a completely unique point of view, as someone who has been turned into a ward of the healthcare state by drug prohibition. The bad news is that almost no one wants to hear from me, especially in the healthcare establishment. Meanwhile, sites like The Conversation refuse to publish my story. They only publish works from academia and the medical establishment, meaning that they only publish the doctors' side of this story. Researchers with Ph.D.s are free to demonize drugs at will on that platform, but I am not free to rebut those articles from the point of view of a "patient." Such sites are essentially telling me to "Shut up and take your meds." This is why I am writing to you today, because your website's "call to parlay" persuades me that the Talking Drugs website might actually welcome my insights, particularly as I know of no one else in the world who is protesting drug prohibition from my point of view. And this issue is not going away. My site feedback shows that I am not alone. As new generations of "med-dependent" westerners grow into senior citizens, they too will feel the humiliation of having been turned into a patient for life by the healthcare industry, a status that they will maintain should they live to be 100 years old or older, unless and until they end drug prohibition and so relegalize their right to heal.



Thank you for your time. Given my almost unprecedented approach to the topic of drug prohibition, I find that my essays are buried online in search results under hundreds of drug-demonizing articles from academia. Nor do I have the resources to boost my site visibility with expensive advertisements. So my main goal in contacting you is to make my voice heard in some online forum that is actually interested in unique perspectives on ending drug prohibition. Having only become aware of your site today, however, I cannot provide any informed suggestions as to how I might best accomplish that goal while also contributing to the Talking Drugs website/movement as a whole. So I will be happy to hear your suggestions on that topic.



Thanks again, Andre!



* The Effexor that I am "on" has a 95% recidivism rate 1 over a three-year period for long-term users who attempt to kick the drug: 95%. Of the tens of thousands of American soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam, only 5% sought help for getting off the drug after their return to the States. 5%! (See the Lee Robins study.) By the way, the stats about Effexor were provided to me three years ago by one of my former psychiatrists. I have good reason to believe that he was fired for his candor on this subject. At any rate, he was no longer working for the clinic when I made my obligatory follow-up visit three months later.




Author's Follow-up:

April 22, 2026

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




Andre has not yet seen his way clear to acknowledge receipt of the above missive. But then I've always said that my man Andre had a procrastination problem, God love 'im. I used to tease him about it when he'd arrive late at class. We took a summer course together at Utrecht University on Applied Data Science in 2024. Something about text mining and processing natural language or whatever. I'd always be trying to cover for Andre in class. I'd be asking needless questions about assignments and such, trying to distract Professor Bagheri so that by the time he called the roll, Andre would finally have arrived at long last.

If you're in Andre's neighborhood, you might want to check in on him, make sure he's okay. Surely, if he were able to respond to his old crony from school days, videlicet myself, he would do so. In fact, do you know what? I'm almost beginning to suspect foul play. I may not be a detective, but I've been binge-watching the Spanish series called Crímenes Casi Perfectos over the last month on Canel+ in an effort to improve my language skills, and some of the things that I've learned have sent shivers up my proverbial. So if you've seen any strange person hanging around Andre's place recently or if Andre has changed his normal habits -- failing to walk a supposititious dog, perhaps, or lavishing unwonted disdain upon your most well-meaning of asseverations -- then say something! I mean, this is not the Andre I know. No, no, the Andre I know would never ruthlessly cut me like this. Depend upon it, something is going on.




Key Takeaways:






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)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Drug prohibition fails even on its own terms. Instead of protecting white American young people, it has exiled them to the city streets where they are sacrificed on the altar of the American religion of substance demonization.

Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.

The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.

We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?

We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).

My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.

Prohibition turned habituation into addiction by creating a wide variety of problems for users, including potential arrest, tainted or absent drug supply, and extreme stigmatization.

If opium were legal, then most of the nostrums peddled by drug stores today would be irrelevant. (No wonder the drug war has staying power!)

Some fat cat should treat the entire Supreme Court to a vacation at San Jose del Pacifico in Mexico, where they can partake of the magic mushroom in a ceremony led by a Zapotec guide.

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


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






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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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