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!
Cop and detective shows are loaded with subtle drug war propaganda, including lines like, "She had a history of drug use, so..." The implication being that anyone who uses substances that politicians hate cannot be trusted.
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.
@HKSExecEd The use of Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace and love to the British dance floors in the 1990s. When are political scientists going to acknowledge the potential for such substances to pull our species back from the brink of nuclear annihilation?
America won't be grown up until we start blaming drug misuse on people and/or policies rather than on drugs.
The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.
Someone should stand outside Jefferson's estate and hand out leaflets describing the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello to confiscate poppy plants. That raid was against everything Jefferson stood for. The TJ Foundation DISHONORED JEFFERSON and their visitors should know that!
Even prohibition haters have their own list of drugs that they feel should be outlawed. They're missing the point. We should not drugs "up or down" any more than we should judge penicillin or aspirin in that way.
The drug war is is a multi-billion-dollar campaign to enforce the attitude of the Francisco Pizarro's of the world when it comes to non-western medicine. It is the apotheosis of the colonialism that most Americans claim to hate.
No drug causes addiction after one use. From this fact alone, it follows that even drugs like meth and crack and Fentanyl can be used wisely -- on an intermittent basis.
The proof that psychedelics work has always been extant. We are hoodwinked by scientists who convince us that efficacy has not been "proven." This is materialist denial of the obvious.
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.
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? 
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