What the series 'Deadline: Crime' tells us about drug prohibition
or at least what it SHOULD tell us
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
May 17, 2026
If you want to see how thoroughly the law enforcement approach to drug use has compromised the health of young people, try binge-watching "Deadline: Crime" with Tamron Hall1, a series about homicide in the suburbs. You will find that every other episode has at least one character who is said to have had a "problem" with drugs. Every other episode. There are almost no episodes in which drugs have any direct role in the featured homicide, but there always seems to be at least one cousin of the victim of the day or one red herring of a suspect whom we're told had drug-related issues or struggles, etc. This drug-related factoid is always presented as a dramatic revelation, as if the viewers were supposed to think: "My God, if the principals in the case are involved with drugs, God knows WHAT'S going on here!" This is how America derives entertainment value out of the ruined lives that its own drug policies have brought about.
It makes you wonder when the penny is going to drop. When are our psychologists and scientists going to learn a lesson from this prevalence of drug users in our communities? When are they finally going to realize that the desire to modify consciousness is not a pathology at all, nor is it a crime, but it is rather a normal human propensity? One look at history should have told them this, even if they can draw no conclusions from the evidence that is right before their eyes. Whether it is the beer swilling of the Sumerians, the coca chewing of the Inca, the therapeutic use of mushrooms by the Mazatec, the religious use of peyote by North American tribes, or the drinking of the Soma juice which inspired the Vedic and hence the Hindu religion: the species Homo sapiens likes to modify consciousness. To think otherwise, is to engage in the wishful thinking of a Christian Scientist.
Edgar Allan Poe could have been addressing the naive American Drug Warriors when he wrote the following in "The Imp of the Perverse";
It would have been wiser, it would have been safer to classify, (if classify we must), upon the basis of what man usually or occasionally did, and was always occasionally doing, rather than upon the basis of what we took it for granted the Deity intended him to do.
The lesson of both modern and ancient history is that people want to alter consciousness. Nor is this desire always the expression of hedonism as the puritan prohibitionists seem to think. There are endless potential positive reasons to use drugs as well, as, for instance, to overcome depression or to follow up on the studies of consciousness undertaken by William James. Prohibitionists pretend that the only stakeholders in drug legalization are worried parents, but this is just not true. It's just that no other stakeholders have yet dared to speak up and demand their rights.
The depressed are stakeholders in the drug debate when we outlaw almost every naturally occurring substance that could cheer them up. Philosophers are stakeholders when we outlaw all substances whose use could help us evaluate the arguments of William James and Immanuel Kant with respect to the nature of consciousness. Senior citizens with dementia are stakeholders when we outlaw all substances that drastically increase concentration, some of which even grow new neurons in the brain. Even kindergartners are stakeholders when we outlaw all the entheogenic drugs whose strategic use could help end school shootings.
And why do we think that American young people are having problems with drugs in the first place?
It's almost impossible not to have a problem with drugs in a world in which your government is spending over $50 billion a year to render drug use problematic. How? By refusing to regulate supply as to quality and dosage, refusing to teach safe use, and by creating a playing field in which would-be drug users are forced to deal with bloodthirsty gangs and cartels -- and, of course, by threatening to arrest you, and even refusing to allow you to work in America should your urine be found to contain substances of which politicians disapprove. In such a world, any use of an outlawed substance qualify as a problem by definition; it can even qualify as an addiction, at least in the minds of Drug Warriors, who are not especially known for their powers of logical discrimination.
In the series "Deadline: Crime," the suspect with a "dark history" of drug use is almost always a red herring, leading the viewer down blind alleys with respect to the homicide of the day, but the near omnipresence of such characters in the show's roster of suspects has a relevance of its own. It shows us that the world is full of drug users; they are our friends, family members and neighbors. They are to be found on every single suburban street, this despite the fact that the U.S. government has spent over a trillion dollars now in an effort to end so-called drug use in America2. This tells us in turn that the War on Drugs is truly a war on us, a fact that author Colleen Cowles has recently helped to document in her book of that name345.
Key Takeaways:
Drug users are omnipresent in shows like Deadline: Crime, showing that the War on Drugs is a War on Us
All cultures have used psychoactive substances to transcend rational consciousness.
The lesson of history is that people want to alter consciousness.
Psychoactive substances can be used for many more reasons than mere hedonism.
Outlawed drugs can help end school shootings and treat Alzheimer's and dementia.
Drug Warriors have spent a trillion dollars to stop drug use, and yet drug users are found on every suburban street.
Our government treats drugs like uranium and spends hundreds of billions of dollars trying to scare us about them.
LA Police Chief Daryl Gates said drug users should be summarily executed. William Bennett said drug dealers should be beheaded. These are the Nazi attitudes that the drug war inculcates. This racist and brutal ideology must be wiped out.
We need a few brave folk to "act up" by shouting "It's the drug war!" whenever folks are discussing Mexican violence or inner city shootings. The media treat both topics as if the violence is inexplicable! We can't learn from mistakes if we're in denial.
Even fans of sacred medicine have been brainwashed to believe that we do not know if such drugs "really" work: they want microscopic proof. But that's a western bias, used strategically by drug warriors to make the psychotropic drug approval process as glacial as possible.
I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.
Materialists are always trying to outdo each other in describing the insignificance of humankind. Crick at least said we were "a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Musk downsizes us further to one single microbe. He wins!
It's amazing. Drug law is outlawing science -- and yet so few complain. Drug law tells us what mushrooms we can collect, for God's sake. Is that not straight-up insane? Or are Americans so used to being treated as children that they accept this corrupt status quo?
Drugs that sharpen the mind should be thoroughly investigated for their potential to help dementia victims. Instead, we prefer to demonize these drugs as useless. That's anti-scientific and anti-patient.
There's a run of addiction movies out there, like "Craving!" wherein they actually personify addiction as a screaming skeleton. Funny, drug warriors never call for a Manhattan Project to end addiction. Addiction is their golden goose.
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???
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