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You Have Been Ghosted

how the drug war frightens the world into silence

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 22, 2025



I don't mean to scare you, but you are reading an essay by a ghost. Yes, I have been ghosted so often when writing to others about drugs that I believe it is now time for me to embrace the identity that my reluctant interlocutors have tacitly chosen for me. We will all be ghosts soon enough, so I suppose that there is no harm in embracing that condition proactively, as it were. Not that my phantasmal status is going to shut me up, mind. On the contrary, I consider it my first official duty as a ghost to haunt those who have saddled me with this status in the first place, and what better way to do that than by publicizing their neglect of me online? This is not really about payback, however. My real goal in calling these people on the carpet is simply to demonstrate the extent to which drug prohibition has shut down free speech in America on a wide range of important topics.


CNN reporter Lisa Ling has been ghosting me ever since May 13, 2022, when I wrote her to suggest that she should have mentioned the Drug War in her documentary about Chicago gun violence 1 .
See Open Letter to Lisa Ling. BR>

Matthew K. Nock, chair of the Harvard Psychology Department, has been ghosting me since May 11, 2025, when I wrote to suggest that his university's bio about William James should reflect James's interest in altered states.
See How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James.


Mitch Horrowitz, author of "Uncertain Places, has been ghosting me since March 2, 2025, when I wrote to suggest that facts about beneficial drug use are the most "damned" facts in the world today, in the Fortean sense of that word.
See Charles Fort Didn't Know from Damnation.


Francis Fukuyama has been ghosting me since May 20, 2022, when I wrote him to suggest that the Drug War is the problem with inner-city neighborhoods, not drugs. Liquor and drug prohibition brought gunfire to American streets, not drugs.
See Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama.


San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins has been ghosting me since November 8, 2023, when I wrote her suggesting that drug prohibition is the problem 2 , not the drug dealers whom she makes such a fuss about catching. She should do us a favor and arrest all the Drug Warriors who set up all this violence in the first place, first with liquor prohibition and then with substance prohibition.
See Prohibitionists Never Learn.


Variety Critic Owen Glieberman has been ghosting me since May 23, 2021, when I wrote him suggesting that his review of the movie "Four Good Days" was warped by Drug War presumptions and biases.
See Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman.


Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has been ghosting me since September 1, 2024, when I wrote her complaining about her use of drug law to cover up societal problems, such as a lack of affordable housing and affordable medical care, etc.
See Regulate and Educate.


The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., has been ghosting me since September 9, 2020, when I first wrote to ask them to condemn the Nazification of America via drug law.
See Why the Holocaust Museum must denounce the Drug War.










Notes for essay entitled You Have Been Ghosted: how the drug war frightens the world into silence:

1: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
2: Drug Prohibition is the Problem, not Drugs: what the movers and shakers get wrong in the drug re-legalization debate DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.

"There has been so much delirious nonsense written about drugs that sane men may well despair of seeing the light." -- Aleister Crowley, from "Essays on Intoxication"

Check out the 2021 article in Forbes in which a materialist doctor professes to doubt whether laughing gas could help the depressed. Materialists are committed to seeing the world from the POV of Spock from Star Trek.

Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.

We should hold the DEA criminally responsible for withholding spirit-lifting drugs from the depressed. Responsible for what, you ask? For suicides and lobotomies, for starters.

In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.

Uruguay wants to re-legalize psilocybin mushrooms -- but only for use in a psychiatrist's office. So let me get this straight: psychiatrists are the new privileged shaman? It's a mushroom, for God's sake. Just re-legalize the damn thing and stop treating us like children.

Drug warriors are too selfish and short-sighted to fight real problems, so they blame everything on drugs.

Drug warriors do not want to end "addiction": it's their golden goose. They use the threat of addiction to scare us into giving up our democratic freedoms, like that once supplied by the 4th amendment.

I should have added to that last post: "I in no way want to glorify or condone drug demonization."


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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Book Cover

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Book Cover

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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.

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