The Impact of Drug War Propaganda on Legalization Advocates
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
November 1, 2025
On Thursday last, the legalization advocates at Prohibition Blunder 1 sent me their October 2025 newsletter. Among its interesting contents was a list of Drug War quotes compiled by Barb and Charlie Asher. Today, I would like to comment on some of those quotes, not simply to highlight the idiocy of Drug Warriors, but also to demonstrate my oft-cited contention that most re-legalization advocates themselves do not recognize the full evil of drug prohibition. But first I would like to make a quick digression to point out how even the Prohibition Blunder website itself falls short in this regard.
Like most websites on this subject, they fail to recognize the role of drug prohibition in destroying our right to heal, our time-honored right, that is, to take care of our own health. This point can be made most clearly by considering the plight of the depressed under drug prohibition. There is a drug that could end almost all depression in America in a trice -- in an instant -- and yet it is unavailable to the depressed. Why? Because doctors saw the drug as a threat to their business model. They wanted to treat depression, not cure it. And so these self-interested physicians trashed the drug in op-ed pieces, thereby giving racist politicians the "scientific" pretext that they needed to outlaw cocaine, a medicine that Sigmund Freud himself knew could cure depression for most users 2 . Absolutely end it. And what was the doctor's MO? They simply ignored the hundreds of millions who could have benefited enormously from use and focused only on the statistically rare cases of people who somehow could not use the drug wisely, exactly as if they were to study alcohol by looking only at alcoholics. (Needless to say, the depressed themselves were never asked how THEY felt about cocaine.)
What happened to the depressed then? They were shunted off onto Big Pharma drugs that are harder to kick than heroin, and some of which (like Effexor/Venlafaxine) can never be kicked at all. My own psychiatrist told me that Effexor has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users like myself after three years. 95%! 3 Let's put this in context. Heroin had only a 5% recidivism rate when soldiers returned from Vietnam after using the drug heavily overseas. 5%! 4 I managed to stay off Effexor for three months this year after a year-long tapering campaign using the low-dose pills that I had to source myself from a compounding pharmacy. (The pharmacy could not even create extended-release pills for me because Viatris, the owners of Effexor, would not allow it.) I finally had to return to the drug, however, not just because the resulting depression was worse than ever, but because I was literally no longer able to think straight when I was off of Effexor. Clearly, this "scientifically" created wonder drug had mucked about with my brain chemistry in a way that seems to be irreversible.
In other words, drug prohibition denies me the right to heal -- as it does hundreds of millions of others around the world. It literally outlaws our ability to take care of our own health, and yet this particular wrong is off the radar of most legalization advocates. Why? Either because of their lifelong brainwashing, thanks to which they have been taught to think only of downsides when discussing outlawed drugs, or because they have a naive belief (like the otherwise clear-thinking Carl Hart 56) that modern science has somehow "sorted" depression and that so-called drugs are just for recreational purposes. As someone with 40 years of experience on the receiving end of such drugs, I beg to differ. The best we can say is that modern science has created HIGHLY dependence-causing pills that help the depressed to function in life, whereas outlawed drugs like cocaine (and opium and laughing gas and MDMA and phenethylamines, etc.) could actually help the depressed to THRIVE in life, to THRIVE! Sigmund Freud was well aware of this politically incorrect truth. Indeed, we would not have heard of Freud today had cocaine not prodded him to rise above his depression-inspired procrastination and to publish voluminously during the three years in which he used the drug. And no, he did not have a problem getting off of cocaine. Indeed, he found that his desire for the drug was self-limiting, that one of the effects of the drug for him was to render overuse distasteful.
We see then that drug prohibition outlaws one of our most basic rights as human beings: our right to take care of our own health as we see fit. As such, drug prohibition is nothing less than a crime against humanity, a fact that legalization advocates should be making loudly and clearly. But, of course, the Prohibition Blunder website is in good company in failing to connect these dots, as the following five quotations make clear.
Drug Quotes
“Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse—for both the addict and the rest of us.” — Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate in Economics 7
Friedman is arguing on the backfoot here. His quote implies that drugs are, indeed, a huge problem, but that our method of dealing with that problem is flawed. With friends like these...! Drugs in themselves are not a problem at all! They cause no problems insofar as they are inanimate objects! Human policies are the problem. Prohibition is the problem, and not just because it renders safe use impossible. Prohibitionists outlaw our time-honored right to take care of our own health as we see fit, that is the big headline here! How do they do this? By criminalizing Mother Nature in clear violation of Natural Law and common sense and so denying our right to medicines that would help us thrive in life. Moreover, drug prohibition is childish, anti-scientific and inherently xenophobic and racist, relying as it does on the following paleolithic algorithm: that a drug that can be misused, even in theory, by a white American young person, must not be used by anybody, for any reason, at any dose, ever. This is nothing less than the outlawing of human progress.
Even Botox, one of the most toxic substances in the world, has positive uses for human beings. Recently the drug has been found useful in treating migraine headaches 8. But this discovery would never have been made had we shut down research by criminalizing the drug merely because it was dangerous in the abstract.
But Friedman recognizes no beneficial uses for drugs and thinks that doctors should help us get off them. He wants to medicalize drugs just as prohibitionists want to moralize them. In other words, he wants the "experts" on drugs to be those same self-interested doctors mentioned above who ignored the needs of the depressed by trashing cocaine, thereby giving themselves a lucrative monopoly on treating depression, a monopoly that they did not fail to exploit by turning their custom-made clients into "patients" for life by prescribing highly dependence-causing "meds." Not only would legalized cocaine have cured the depression of these unearned clients -- and that in real-time -- it would have saved them from becoming wards of the healthcare state, with all of the disempowerment, humiliation and expense that such an identity entails.
Drug re-legalization should not be about medicalizing or moralizing: it should be about restoring our time-honored right to take care of our own health, without a by your leave from the self-interested medical establishment. In other words, Friedman is on the right side of the issue, but for the wrong reasons. As Thomas Szasz wrote:
"When even so staunch a defender of the free market as Milton Friedman regards treatment as the proper response to the drug problem, how can we expect ordinary people to resist this deadly illusion?" --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p. 147 9
As Szasz points out, Malcolm X did not get his followers to renounce heroin by directing them to the nearest doctor's office. He rather motivated them -- albeit with the help of racially paranoid doctrine -- to view their heroin use as a surrender to the enemy, namely the white man. He gave them a new priority in life, a new prime directive. He did not tell them that they were powerless before drugs (which is the self-serving conviction of the Russell Brands of the world who worship at the shrine of the medicalization movement 10), nor that they had some kind of "heroin use disorder" which required the use of Big Pharma antidepressants. He rather empowered his flock. Again quoting Szasz:
"The religious war that Malcolm declared and waged, without quite realizing it, was the war against the religion of Medicine. After all, not only the whites, but most of his own black people, and all of the black leaders, believed— and continue to believe— that drug abuse is an illness. " --Thomas Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers 11
“We’re fighting the crusade for a drug-free America.” — Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States 12
Where does one begin?! A drug-free America? What do you mean, Ronnie? A world in which the depressed may as well kill themselves? a world in which indigenous cultures should be encouraged to take up alcohol? a world in which we should fry the brains of the suicidal with shock therapy rather than giving them drugs which would make them want to live? a world in which no religions like the Vedic will ever be inspired again by the use of psychoactive substances? a world in which philosophers like William James are arrested for studying the philosophical implications of alternate states of consciousness? a world in which a multi-million-dollar estate can be confiscated by police if the slightest trace of a controlled substance is found on-site? a world-in which drug testing denies all jobs to Christian Science heretics?
And how did Ronald plan to go about creating this intolerant dystopia of his? That's right: by rolling back all the time-honored protections that were provided by the founding fathers in the U.S. Bill of Rights, starting with the fourth amendment and then working both up and down, insisting that America only really "meant it" when it came to the passage of the Second Amendment.
It is ironic that Reagan died of Alzheimer's Disease, by the way, after doing all he could to outlaw the kinds of drugs that grow new neurons in the brain!
“The entire American media apparatus bought into the Drug War and there wasn’t enough critical reporting about it.” — David Simon, author and journalist 13
It wasn't just a lack of critical reporting, David: the media has been actively promoting Drug War ideology over the years.
"Over the past two years [1998 to 2000] an agency of the Clinton White House, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), has secretly worked with all of the commercial television networks to broadcast anti-drug propaganda as part of the story lines of popular, prime time programs." --Barry Grey, How the White House and the media package government propaganda as entertainment 14
Some of this media bias was not even hidden.
I well remember that newscast in the seventies in which Tom Brokaw, co-host of the NBC Nightly news, turned to the audience and glibly told us that we all had to do our part in fighting the war against drugs. How's THAT for objective reporting? I wanted to provide his exact quote here, but it seems to have disappeared from the Internet. I have yet to find it on any "Brokaw quotes" page. I take it that Brokaw and his fans are now embarrassed by that soundbite, as well they should be.
I am also not sure why Simon employs the past tense when speaking of media bias about drugs. Almost all reports of drug-related deaths in the media today leave the viewer or reader with the impression that drugs are the real cause of problems in this life and that if they are implicated in any way in a tragic news story, that this represents a knock-down argument in favor of drug prohibition.
In January 2023, Channel 5 UK featured a debate about the potential criminalization of laughing gas between drug-law reform advocate Niamh Eastwood and Dr. David Nicholl of the NHS 15. At least the debate was SUPPOSED to be between those two. The polite and low-key guests could hardly get a word in edgewise, however, as one of the two co-hosts kept attempting to badger them into saying that laughing gas should be outlawed. It seems that one or two young Londoners had been rushed to hospital recently after misusing the gas, and now the young female anchor was on a maternalistic mission to outlaw nitrous oxide, even at the expense of normal journalism etiquette. I do not have a photographic memory, but she said something to the effect of: "What does it say about us as a people if we do NOT outlaw this gas on behalf of our children?"
Fortunately, neither guest took the bait. She did not persuade either to call then and there for the immediate outlawing of laughing gas 16. But she did succeed in demonstrating how thoroughly biased the news media can be on the subject of drugs, and how ignorant they can be as well, not just about drugs, but about history, philosophy, and psychological common sense as well. She apparently does not know that the use of laughing gas inspired the philosophy of William James and that he called on his fellow philosophers to study alternative states of consciousness in order to learn about Reality writ large. Nor does she consider how the wise use of laughing gas could save the lives of the depressed and suicidal -- a fact so obvious that only a brainwashed westerner could doubt it. Nor does she consider how the "logic" of her criminalization approach to laughing gas would necessarily bring about a police state were it to be applied consistently to all potentially dangerous substances. Nor has she noticed that the drug prohibition that she champions has already destroyed minority communities around the globe, repealed civil liberties in ostensibly democratic countries, and destroyed the rule of law in Latin America.
“If you want to fight a War on Drugs, sit down at your own kitchen table and talk with your own children.” — Gen. Barry McCaffrey 17
This might sound like enlightened advice, but one can just imagine how Barry supposes that such a discussion should go.
"Now, children, we love you to bits but we never want you to use those naughty drugs. You're so much better than that!"
In other words, Barry wants us to turn our kids into Christian Scientists when it comes to psychoactive drugs. But drugs are not the problem, Barry, they are inanimate objects! Saying "Drugs bad!" is philosophically identical to saying "Fire bad!" Both statements would have us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. Social policies are the problem, Barry, not drugs.
We should be teaching kids that drugs are neither good nor bad except in regard to specifics of use. I even have the medical community on my side on this one. Our doctors themselves believe that kids SHOULD be using drugs like Ritalin when they have trouble concentrating -- although somehow their parents are to be considered criminals if they use the exact same drug for the exact same reason!
I don't know about Barry, but I would much rather have my kid use cocaine than to commit suicide. But then that's just me.
I think one more "enlightened" drug-war quote is all that I can stomach for today.
“It’s the causes, not the dependent person, that must be corrected. The War on Drugs is focused on fighting drug dealers and the use of drugs, when the effort should be primarily aimed at treating and curing the causes that compel people to reach for drugs.” — Chris Prentiss 18
Again, where to begin? Does Chris not realize that the Vedic religion was inspired by the use of a drug? Does he not realize that the Inca culture considers coca to have divine status? Does he not know that all the great physicians of the past -- including Galen, Avicenna, and Paracelsus -- considered opium and/or opium admixtures to be panaceas?
And how dare we bemoan so-called "drug" dependence in a world in which the depressed are given Big Pharma meds that can NEVER BE KICKED!
And what is this fetish with dependence? Is that the only thing you see in drugs, the possibility of dependence? It is exactly as if I were to talk to you about the wonder of horses, and all you did was to carp and complain about all the tragic accidents that they cause and keep reminding me of the fate of Christopher Reeves 19. "Chris thought he could use horses wisely, and look what happened to HIM!" Horseback riding is the number one cause of traumatic brain injury in America, after all 20. And yet we would obviously think that someone were mad if they could see nothing in horses but death and destruction. Only when it comes to drugs do we feel justified in ignoring all benefits of use -- some of which are GLARINGLY OBVIOUS (like the fact that laughing gas could prevent suicides) -- and focus exclusively on downsides -- and with such outrageous hypocrisy, too. Cocaine, heroin, and opium are all FAR less dependence-causing than the Big Pharma "meds" that took their place, and yet we can see nothing in the use of those outlawed drugs except death and destruction.
It is madness.
We should be fighting the causes that compel people to reach for drugs, Chris? Really?
I don't suppose you would apply that advice to the use of Big Pharma drugs, would you? Or to coffee? Or to alcohol? And why do you think it is pathological of me to want to improve my mind, to think more clearly a la Sherlock Holmes, to use drugs that grow new neurons in my brain, to use drugs that inspire and elate, to use the kinds of drugs that indigenous people have always used, to use drugs that have inspired entire religions? What exactly are you intending to fight here? Are you waging a war against our very desire for taking care of our own psychological and spiritual health?
Are you channeling Francisco Pizarro? Do you think that sane people would only drink beer, drink coffee, and maybe smoke an occasional cigarette -- oh, and take their meds, of course?
I'm sorry, but I have skin in this game. It is incoherent attitudes like these that have made me go an entire lifetime now without godsend medicines. First we take away the right of human beings to heal themselves by tyrannously outlawing Mother Nature's medicines -- then we tell those who still want to use those medicines that their very desire to do so is pathological and that they must be "treated" for an illness. But then this is how the FDA regards these matters too, alas. Our FDA actually promotes shock therapy for the depressed, claims that it is an underused protocol, and yet they refuse to approve of drugs whose use could make shock therapy unnecessary!
But do you know what the worst thing is? I fear that the compilers of this list of quotations figured that folks like Friedman, McCaffrey and Prentiss are the enlightened ones when it comes to drugs. Oh, how far we westerners have to go before we can see through the dense mist of lies and misrepresentations with which we have been indoctrinated since our youth on the subject of drugs.
To paraphrase William Shirer in his classic book about Nazi Germany:
"No one who has not lived for years in a Drug War state can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda." --William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany21
Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.
The Drug Warriors say: "Don't tread on me! (That said, please continue to tell me what plants I can use, how much pain relief I can get, and whether my religion is true or not.)"
So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.
Now drug warriors have nitrous oxide in their sights, the substance that inspired the philosophy of William James. They're using the same tired MO: focusing exclusively on potential downsides and never mentioning the benefits of use, and/or denying that any exist.
I hated the show "The Apprentice," because it taught a cynical and hate-filled lesson about the proper way to "get ahead" in the world. I saw Trump as a menace back then, long before he started declaring that American elections were corrupt before the very first vote was cast!
Ketamine is like any other drug. It has good uses for certain people in certain situations. Nowadays, people insist that a drug be okay in every situation for everybody (especially American teens) before they will say that it's okay. That's crazy and anti-scientific.
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
If you're looking for an anti-Christ, just look for an American presidential politician who has taught us to hate our enemies. Gee, now, who could that be, huh? According to Trump, Jesus was just a chump. Winning comes before anything at all in his sick view of life.
This hysterical reaction to rare negative events actually creates more rare negative events. This is why the DEA publicizes "drug problems," because by making them well known, they make the problems more prevalent and can thereby justify their huge budget.
Addiction thrives BECAUSE of prohibition, which limits drug choice and discourages education about psychoactive substances and how to use them wisely.
Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.
