The New York Times is at it again, bashing drugs out of context

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The New York Times is at it again, bashing drugs out of context

in response to Simar Bajaj's lopsided article about marijuana

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 27, 2025

The following is written in response to the New York Times' latest attempt to bash marijuana use by evaluating it from a medical materialist perspective in the article by Simar Bajaj entitled "Marijuana's Links to Heart Attack and Stroke Are Becoming Clearer ¹".

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Another attempt to demonize marijuana outside of all context -- a drug that we used to call "hemp" and which the white establishment used for pain relief without fanfare -- until Harry Anslinger rebranded the drug as "marijuana" to associate it with Mexicans in the xenophobic American mindset.

I wonder if the authors were consuming alcohol while writing this article, a drug that kills 178,000 a year in America alone. I wonder if the authors were "on" aspirin, a drug that kills 3,000 a year in Britain alone. I wonder if they were "on" Big Pharma ² ³ drugs, like 1 in 4 American women -- a mass pharmacological dependency that is off the radar of the NYT.

All substances are poisons at some dose and in some circumstances and so can be demonized. Where there's a will, there's a statistic. Everything can be "proven" dangerous in some context, from some angle -- especially when we ignore all obvious holistic benefits -- like the overall anxiety relief provided by marijuana use and its time-honored ability to facilitate religious states. Articles like this that lopsidedly focus on potential downsides are political in nature, not scientific.

This whack-a-mole policy called drug prohibition has already ended democracy in America by removing millions of minorities from the voting rolls -- and yet we continue to play the anti-indigenous game of selective substance demonization with a goal of locking up our "undesirables" and disguising all social problems as "drug" problems.

FOLLOW-UP

In the age of the Drug War, science is the handmaiden of the prohibitionist. It seeks to normalize prohibition by evaluating drugs based only on a reductive analysis of materialist science. Naturally, if you ignore all obvious drug benefits, it will be easy to "prove" that a drug is not worth the dangers that it poses. MDMA helped bring unprecedented peace, love and understanding to the dance floors of Britain in the 1990s ⁴, and yet even drug law reformers do not acknowledge this as a benefit -- this despite the fact that we are living under a nuclear sword of Damocles thanks to our species' penchant for hate and mistrust.

When we ignore all such upsides to drug use, we are practicing pharmacological colonialism, however. It is anti-indigenous in spirit because it ignores all obvious holistic benefits of drug use and looks at potential downsides outside of context. If a drug cheers one up and thus improves one's quality of life, this outcome itself has positive knock-on effects -- and materialist science is completely blind to all such knock-on effects. Science wants to tell us what marijuana does by itself, without regard to the endless other subtle inputs that determine in reality how marijuana affects any one person's health.

This is why it was such a disastrous mistake to place government in charge of our health. Ever since we did so, the moneyed powers-that-be have engaged in a massive and well-heeled branding operation to make us view specific drugs in a specific light ⁵. And so we are told that marijuana is too dangerous -- in a world in which Jim Beam bourbon targets prime-time television ads at young people.

OPEN LETTER TO SIMAR BAJAJ

Your article about marijuana is a political piece, not a scientific one. It completely ignores all the obvious holistic benefits of marijuana use, like overall stress relief - to say nothing of the knock-on effects of such benefits. Instead, you approach the drug from a materialist point of view, trying to see what the drug does outside of all context. That is pharmacological colonialism. Health, as HG Wells understood, is the outcome of a wide variety of factors, not just the use of a given drug. And so we must resist the prohibitionists' attempt to make us judge drugs up or down, as good or bad.

Like all drug researches, your pundits never consider the benefit of being able to live inside one's own skin. That is what marijuana provides and it is nonsense to discuss the drug without referencing these benefits or the fact that it has been used religiously for millennia - or the fact that it was used for pain relief without fanfare by the white establishment as "hemp" - until Harry Anslinger rebranded the drug as "marijuana" in order to associate it with Mexicans.

Don't you see, the prohibition mindset is the problem? As Paracelsus knew, all substances can be poisons - in some context, at some dose. When are materialist researchers going to discuss the downsides of prohibition! Prohibition first brought gunfire to inner cities, where there were 67,000 gun-related deaths ⁶ in the last 10 years. Prohibition has resulted in the disappearance of 60,000 in Mexico and the end of the rule of law in Latin America. And yet your scientists want to keep us safe? This does not pass the laugh test. Speaking of which, materialists are completely blind to the benefits of drug use. They actually tell us that laughing gas has no positive uses for the depressed ⁷. That insane belief can only be based on a dogmatic belief in materialism ⁸ - and a complete disregard for holistic healing.

Materialists work with Drug Warriors to keep us "off" drugs. They would rather that depressives like myself commit suicide ⁹ or have shock therapy than use MDMA or laughing gas ¹⁰ . Materialists and prohibitionists are the problem here. They are gaslighting ¹¹ Americans in the name of the medicalization and moralization of drug use.

When are newspapers going to cease to help Drug Warriors to build up a case against the drugs that they love to hate? When are they going to recognize the right of human beings to treat their own mental and emotional states as they see fit? It is thanks to the prohibitionist mindset that I have been turned into a patient for life - and the New York Times has been helping to normalize this status quo with its lopsided focus on the potential downsides of drug use.

You publish a wellness newsletter. If you really wanted depressives like myself to have "wellness," you would advocate my right to treat my mental and emotional states as I see fit rather than helping racist politicians build a case against the use of the few substances that have at least momentarily escaped the sieve of the prohibitionists. This prohibitionist mindset led to the election of Donald Trump, by throwing millions of minorities in jail, which, of course, was the real reason behind drug prohibition in the first place.

AFTERWORD

It will be objected that I am against all negative reports about "drugs." To the contrary, I want to live in a world in which the truth matters, but that is not what articles like Simar's are all about. They are in the business of dogmatically ignoring all positive benefits of drug use and looking for "gotcha" physical downsides of use instead, in total ignoration of the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition.

Consider this analogy. Suppose that America had outlawed all foods but gruel -- and then the government doctors began publishing articles telling us the dangers of eating foods like steaks and potatoes. There may indeed be much truth in what the doctors are telling us, but their whole viewpoint is untrustworthy and suspicious given their vested interest in keeping the world "food free" except for gruel. In such a world, we would know that politicians are working hand-in-glove with materialist science to make a case against the use of everything but gruel. We would be rightly suspicious of all such articles because they ignore so much of relevance in the debate about food prohibitions.

Notes for essay entitled The New York Times is at it again, bashing drugs out of context: in response to Simar Bajaj's lopsided article about marijuana:

1: Marijuana’s Links to Heart Attack and Stroke Are Becoming Clearer Bajaj, Simar, 2025 (up)
2: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
3: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
4: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
5: The Drug War is One Big Branding Operation to Demonize Mind and Mood Medicine: a review of essay number 8 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob DWP (up)
6: Gun Deaths in Big Cities Big Cities Health (up)
7: Glatter, Robert. 2021. “Can Laughing Gas (Nitrous Oxide) Help People with Treatment-Resistant Depression?” Forbes, June 9, 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2021/06/09/can-laughing-gas-nitrous-oxide-help-people-with-treatmentresistant-depre (up)
8: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
9: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
10: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
11: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)

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The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.

The book "Plants of the Gods" is full of plants and fungi that could help addicts and alcoholics, sometimes in the plant's existing form, sometimes in combinations, sometimes via extracting alkaloids, etc. But drug warriors need addiction to sell their prohibition ideology.

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.

The so-called "herbs" that witches used were drugs, in the same way that "meds" are drugs. If academics made that connection, the study of witchcraft would shed a lot of light on the fearmongering of modern prohibitionists.

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.

"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.

America legalizes alcohol and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.

Harm Reduction is not enough. We need Benefit Production as well. The autistic should be able to use compassion-enhancing drugs; dementia patients should be able to use drugs that speed up and sharpen mental processes.

It is consciousness which, via perception, shapes the universe into palpable forms. Otherwise it's just a chaos of particles. The very fact that you can refer to "the sun" shows that your senses have parsed the raw data into a specific meaning. "We" make this universe.

The drug war normalizes the disdainful and self-righteous attitude that Columbus and Pizarro had about drug use in the New World.

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The New York Times is at it again, bashing drugs out of context

in response to Simar Bajaj's lopsided article about marijuana

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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Diary of a Drug Fiend