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America's Great Anti-Depressant Scam

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





April 27, 2020



I generally avoid watching network television (or any so-called "free" television, for that matter) because I've grown allergic in my old age to the condescending and manipulative power of product advertisements. However, I occasionally watch (or at least hear) one of these sales pitches in spite of myself as I attempt to remain updated on a breaking catastrophic news story such as the Coronavirus.

Update: May 18, 2025

Last night, for instance, I was messing about in the kitchen when I overheard a commercial for some new medicine that combatted some gnarly-sounding side effects of anti-depressants and bipolar "medicines." The commercial was hugely "telling" when it comes to the way that the media and Big Pharma literally dictate through words how society will think of any given psychoactive substance. Will we think of them as horrid "drugs" or will we think of them as blessed "medicines"? Answer: We'll think of them the way that Big Pharma and its advertising agencies want us to think about them, especially after said pharmaceutical companies have staffed the morning news shows with affable guns-for-hire from the medical industry who will reinforce in general terms the product-specific message of the multi-million-dollar advertisements in question.

I don't recall which notorious anti-depressant side effect last night's advertised medicine was intended to combat (sexual dysfunction, the risk of suicide, severe addiction, emotional flat-lining, weight gain), but what floored me was the fact that the dulcet-toned female narrator referred to the admittedly harmful anti-depressant as an "important medicine." In other words, the fact that anti-depressants caused devastating side effects was not the point of the commercial: the point was that some company was helping you stay on "your important medicine" despite these acknowledged side effects.

Conclusion: anti-depressants are "the drugs that can do no wrong."

If we were talking about any other psychoactive substance - especially one that was produced only by Mother Nature, such as psychedelics - its creation of the gnarly side effects mentioned above would turn it into a "drug" in the worst sense of that word, and it would quickly become a punching bag for outraged medical pundits across the country to trash in professional journals and public media. There would be front-page stories in the New York Times warning us how psychedelic X was the drug from hell. But when it comes to the horrible side effects of anti-depressants, the exact same kind of enormous shortcomings are seen merely as a whole new business opportunity for the marketing of anti-depressant "adjuncts." And so Big Pharma takes advantage of the psychological fact that folks don't like to be wrong in their choices: they have become persuaded of the long-debunked lie that anti-depressants are miracle drugs that fix chemical imbalances, and so the public will readily welcome any new medicines that help them hang onto that "faith," even in the face of increasingly obvious evidence to the contrary.

This is why a war on plants, once started, is so difficult to end in a capitalist society. Naturally occurring psychoactive substances are handicapped from the beginning. They merely have to be responsible for (or indeed associated with) one eye-catching horror story viz. side effects and we suddenly consider the "drug" in question to come from hell. Meanwhile, a synthesized drug from Big Pharma can blatantly addict 1 in 8 American males and 1 in 4 American females, and we will still consider it to be a miracle cure, in fact a "medicine" that it is our duty as health-conscious Americans to take daily, every day of our life!

What further proof do we need that the Drug War is about politics, not health, politics designed to keep Mother Nature's godsend plants from competing with Big Pharma ? The scam works something like this, by the way: first the DEA outlaws scientific research on natural products that might prove to be competitors to Big Pharma . Then Big Pharma runs prime-time ads that turn their own addictive synthesized substances into apple pie in the minds of the American public. Mother Nature is thus silenced from the beginning while Big Pharma runs advertisements on prime-time television: which one do YOU think is going to win the hearts and minds of the American people?

Of course, in hindsight, it was a telling moment when Congress began allowing pharmaceutical companies to start advertising on television: that was a tacit admission that the world of personal health in America had nothing to do with science and fact, but rather with salesmanship and hucksterism - a fact which any long-term psychiatric patient like myself can readily believe, having frequently shared their doctor's waiting room with an antsy suitcase-carrying sales rep from Big Pharma .



Author's Follow-up:

May 18, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




It's amazing: when demonized substances have side effects, those side effects are considered to be knock-down arguments for drug prohibition; when Big Pharma 1 2 "meds" have side effects, those side effects are considered to be a business opportunity to sell new medicines to conquer those downsides.

Take MDMA , for instance. Some users can experience lethargy on the day following use. If MDMA were considered a med, then there would be drugs being sold to overcome that side effect -- but since MDMA is a demonized substance, that report of lethargy is taken to be a knock-down argument against MDMA . Yet, as Charles Wininger reports in Listening to Ecstasy, this downside can be offset by the use of supplements. In fact, it is common sense that such a downside could be offset by a wide variety of wisely used drugs. And yet the Drug War ideology of substance demonization prevents us from thinking of MDMA 3 in that common-sense way. We are told to hate the substances that we are told are "drugs," not to learn how to use them wisely.

Sometimes one wonders "What's the use?" Americans are just far too brainwashed when it comes to psychoactive substances.

One wonders if Americans are ever going to wake up.

But then what is their motivation for doing so? America has always had the mindset of Pizarro and the Conquistadors when it comes to holistic medicine, and the Drug War is all about re-casting that viewpoint as meritorious and scientific -- when it actually represents nothing less than a sort of pharmacological colonialism on the part of the west.

*antidepressants 4*

*NYT*

Notes:

1: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science (up)
2: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? (up)
3: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts (up)
4: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs (up)


Addiction




"The irreducible core of the disease theory of addiction is still as strong as ever -- the significant distinction between good and bad opiate use is whether it's medically supervised." --Emperors of Dreams by Mike Jay


Addiction is a hugely fraught subject in the age of the drug war. This is because the Drug War does everything it can to make drug use dangerous. It encourages addiction by limiting our access to all but the handful of drugs that dealers find it practical and lucrative to supply. It fails to regulate product so that drug users cannot know the dose or even the quality of what they are ingesting. Meanwhile, the drug war censors honest talk about drug use.

In short, until we end the drug war, we will not know how much addiction is a true problem and how much it is an artifact of drug-war policy. And yet materialist researchers tell us that addiction is a "disease"? Why is it a disease to want to improve one's life with drugs? One could just as easily say that people are diseased, or at least masochistic, if they accept their limitations in life without doing everything they can to transcend them.

Indeed, the very idea that materialists are experts on psychoactive drug use is wrong. It is a category error. The proof is extant. Materialist researchers today are in total denial about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs. They maintain the lie that psychoactive drugs can only be proven effective by looking under a microscope, whereas the proof of such efficacy is right in front of them: in endless anecdotes, in human history, and even in psychological common sense, the kind of common sense that scientists ignore in the name of both drug war ideology and the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism.

  • Addicted to Addiction
  • Addicted to Ignorance
  • Addiction
  • America's Great Anti-Depressant Scam
  • America's Invisible Addiction Crisis
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War
  • How Drug Prohibition Causes Relapses
  • How Prohibition Causes Addiction
  • How the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality Tale
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors
  • Libertarians as Closet Christian Scientists
  • Modern Addiction Treatment as Puritan Indoctrination
  • Night of the Addicted Americans
  • Notes about the Madness of Drug Prohibition
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
  • Prohibition Spectrum Disorder
  • Public Service Announcements for the Post-Drug War Era
  • Sherlock Holmes versus Gabor Maté
  • Tapering for Jesus
  • The aesthetic difference between addiction and chemical dependency
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.

    Outlawing opium wOutlawing opium was the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief. as the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief.

    At best, antidepressants make depression bearable. We need not settle for such drugs, especially when they are notorious for causing dependence. There are many drugs that elate and inspire. It is both cruel and criminal to outlaw them.

    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.

    "Arrest made in Matthew Perry death." Oh, yeah? Did they arrest the drug warriors who prioritized propaganda over education?

    What are drug dealers doing, after all? They are merely selling substances that people want and have always had a right to, until racist politicians came along and decided government had the right to ration out pain relief and mystical experience.

    The goal of drug-law reform should be to outlaw prohibition. Anything short of that, and our basic rights will always be subject to veto by fearmongers. Outlawing prohibition would restore the Natural Law of Jefferson, which the DEA scorned in 1987 with its raid on Monticello.

    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.

    Our tolerance for freedom wanes in proportion as we consider "drugs" to be demonic. This is the dark side behind the new ostensibly comic genre about Cocaine Bears and such. It shows that Americans are superstitious about drugs in a way that Neanderthals would have understood.

    If there were no other problem with antidepressants, they would be wrong for the simple reason that they make a user dependent for life -- not as a bug (as in drugs like opium) but rather as a feature: that's how they "work," by being administered daily for a lifetime.


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






    America's Blind Spot
    How Fretting Drug Warriors Block Medical Progress


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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