A laughable game show about a laughable drug policy
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 11, 2026
HOST: Welcome to What's My Line?! Today's guest is someone in the biomedical field. Someone in the biomedical field. Our contestants' duty is to identify the job that he holds. Okay, guys? Let's start with the star of Celebrity Lawn Darts, Talon West. Talon, your first question, please?
TALON: Do you work in a laboratory, my dear?
HOST: Oh, good question.
GUEST: Yes, I do.
HOST: Interesting. Let's go to Indigo Lane from CSI: Run-of-the-mill Victims Unit.
INDIGO: Do you test bodily fluids, by any chance?
GUEST: Yes, I do.
INDIGO: What can I say, I had a hunch.
HOST: A good hunch! Good for you. Let's move on to Cairo Reeves, host of Chutes & Ladders: Celebrity Edition.
CAIRO: Does your work affect people like me?
GUEST: It could.
HOST: Aha! It could affect you, Cairo! Watch out! Haha! Talon, next question, please?
TALON: You say it could affect Cairo. How so?
GUEST: It could cause him to lose his job.
HOST: Wow! How odd is THAT? This is a tough one, folks. Indigo?
Indigo: Does your job have anything to do with urine, by any chance?
HOST: Where does she GET these questions?
GUEST: Yes, actually it does.
HOST: Shut my mouth! Really?! How did you know that, Indigo? Cairo, you get to ask the final question.
CAIRO: Would you, by any chance, be one of those weasels who tests employee urine, not simply to check for impairment, but to "catch them out" for using any medicines that inspire and elate which are not produced by Big Pharma, thereby denying them their time-honored right to take care of their own health as they see fit and tossing them out of the work force for the crime of being a Christian Science heretic?
GUEST: You got it in one!
HOST: Well, he got it in two, actually, but he did get it! Congratulations.
CAIRO: You sneaky little weasel.
HOST: That's all for today, folks.
CAIRO: How does it feel, making money by running roughshod over my time-honored rights? Huh? Come back here!
"The Harrison [Narcotics] Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts.” --Robert A. Schless, 1925.
We have to deny the FDA the right to judge psychoactive medicines in the first place. Their materialist outlook obliges them to ignore all obvious benefits. When they nix drugs like MDMA, they nix compassion and love.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.
The Drug War brought guns to the "hoods," thereby incentivizing violence in the name of enormous profits. Any site featuring victims of gun violence should therefore be rebranded as a site featuring victims of the drug war.
In fact, 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???
Most psychoactive substance use can be judged as recreational OR medicinal OR both. The judgements are not just determined by the circumstances of use, either, but also by the biases of those doing the judging.
Drug-designing chemists have no expertise in deciding what constitutes a cure for depression. As Schopenhauer wrote:
"The mere study of chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher."
The best harm-reduction strategy is to re-legalize drugs.
"Those gentlemen who adopt the anti-opium doctrine... are only comparable to the monomaniac, who, sane upon every subject but one, is thoroughly daft upon that." --William Brereton
William James knew that there were substances that could elate. However, it never occurred to him that we should use such substances to prevent suicide. It seems James was blinded to this possibility by his puritanical assumptions.
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