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Drug Use as Self-Medication

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





December 4, 2022



The ultimate sin in the eyes of the psychiatrist is for a person to 'self-medicate.' But what exactly is wrong with self-medicating1? Everybody used to self-medicate while laudanum was still available in the 19th-century medical cabinets of England.

April 2025 Update

Babies crying? Give them a few drops of laudanum. Tooth ache? Crack out the laudanum. In exquisite pain? Reach for the laudanum.

Of course, this practice cuts out the role of the physician in so many cases that it is natural that the latter would consider the very concept of self-medicating to be heresy.

But let's consider some of the psychological reasons why people might wish to self-medicate.

Many of us want to live large in this world, to transcend the misgivings and fears that hold us back in life, keeping us from being all that we could be. This is the simplest of psychological facts but one that the Drug Warriors completely ignore in their efforts to demonize all "drug users" as irresponsible hedonists. And what are the legal options of such seekers? We encourage them to visit a psychiatrist. And what will the psychiatrist provide: not a substance that will help them to live large, but rather an expensive tranquilizing med upon which they will be dependent for life.

In light of these facts, it is perfectly natural that folks would seek medical help outside the system. In fact, except for the fear of arrest, it is perfectly logical to make such a choice. If I have to use a drug every day for the rest of my life, I'd rather that drug be provided by a dealer who is not going to pry into my emotional life than by a bearded man in a three-piece suit who is going to pompously catechize me every three months of my life about my innermost feelings and the probability of my committing suicide. Moreover, I'd far rather use an illegal medicine that inspired the writings of HG Wells than a legal one that inspires nobody to write anything at all.

But the Drug War is all about dividing Americans, turning formerly law-abiding citizens into "dealers" through extreme economic incentive and then urging us to look upon such dealers as "scumbags" and "wastes of space." We are encouraged to be as cold-hearted and unforgiving toward dealers as Glenn Close's self-righteous character in "Four Good Days" (see also ). When she sees a teenage "pusher" on the streets, she mumbles, "He should be shot," before she rushes indoors and throws back an unusually large glass of wine, that is.

The fact is that people want to live as fully as possible and have, from the beginning of time, sought pharmacological means toward that end. The answer to this "problem" is not massive arrests and a demonization campaign to make us hate our fellow human beings; the answer is re-legalization 2 of psychoactive medicines and a full and honest and ongoing discussion about their benefits and drawbacks. The answer, in short, is a rational approach, not the superstitious approach of the Drug War which falsely tells us that demonized substances have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, at any time, ever.

"Society's prevailing view is that being medicated by a doctor is drug use, while self-medication is drug abuse. This justification rests on the principle of professionalism, not on pharmacology. [This] concept of drug abuse symbolizes scientific medicine's fundamental policy that laymen should place their care under the supervision of a physician. This is similar to the belief, prior to the Reformation, that laymen should not communicate directly with God but should place their spiritual care under the supervision of a duly accredited priest. The self-interest of the church and of medicine in such policies are obvious. These policies also relieve individuals of the burden of responsibility for themselves."-Thomas Szasz



Author's Follow-up:

April 04, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




The idea that we should not self-medicate only makes sense when we believe in the myth of mental illness3. After all, if our depression is the same kind of thing as liver disease or a heart ailment, then we laypeople clearly know nothing about treating it. right? (We will answer yes for the purposes of this analysis, but please look below for some important caveats on this topic. )

However, it was clearly a category error to place materialist doctors in charge of mind and mood matters to begin with. This is obvious given that doing so has led to absurd results, and as Whitehead wrote in "The Concept of Nature"...

"The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us."


What absurd results?

Answer: the fact that our materialist drug researchers cannot find positive uses for the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions. And yet the Hindu religion only exists today because of the use of a drug that inspired and elated.

"The man with whom thou fillest thee with Soma deems himself a pious worshipper." --The Rig Veda4


Modern materialist researchers cannot even figure out if laughing gas could help the depressed, when, in a sane world, we would issue laughing gas 5 kits to the suicidal just as we now provide Epi pens to those with severe allergies.

They are telling us to ignore common sense and to rely on a materialist cure for what ails us. That approach should sound familiar. It is the approach that has led to the biggest mass dependency of all time, namely, that of the psychiatric pill mill 6 thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma 7 8 drugs for life.

The whole search for a psychiatric "cure" for depression took place in dogmatic ignorance of the vast psychoactive pharmacopoeia of Mother Nature and the synthesized medicines that have been inspired thereby. The chemists involved searched for a drug whose effects would constitute a one-size-fits-all "cure" that would pass muster with conservative politicians. In other words, there was no concern for the desired outcomes of drug use for individual patients, there was instead a plan to come up with a drug whose use would create a certain sort of individual when it comes to moods and emotions, one which is not too depressed to shop yet who is not so inspired as to make a scene or to advocate the creation of new religions, etc.

And yet the Hindu religion was inspired by a drug that elated and inspired. From this it follows that the outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of religious liberty.

Seen in this light, self-medication is a duty. To the extent that such a pursuit is dangerous, we have the Drug Warriors to blame, first, because they refuse to educate about safe use, and second, because they refuse to acknowledge the value of substances that have inspired entire religions.

But I need to backpedal a little here.

Even if the ailments we are talking about are what we would call physical in nature, it does not follow that we cannot medicate ourselves advisedly with regard to them. Whether or not such ministrations will cure the illness is a question whose answer depends on the specifics of any given case, but in many cases, our self-medication could render the negative effects dormant or irrelevant from the psychological point of view.

The problem here is that the materialist medical establishment ignores all holistic and indirect approaches to health. If a substance cheers you up and keeps your mind off of a physical malady, that benefit in itself may be more than sufficient to overcome or at least to palliate the negative effects of one's physical illness. And yet the medical establishment is only interested in the ability of intervention A to cure problem B. They have no interest in an intervention that causes seemingly unrelated upsides D,E, and F, and only thereby renders the original target malady either impotent or unimportant. Such an indirect treatment of ills cannot be quantified and placed in a PowerPoint presentation for the purpose of eliciting research funds from the government. Besides, such cures depend on the unique traits of individuals, and the medical establishment concerns itself only with unique diseases, not with unique human beings.

It is psychologically obvious also that certain drug use can nip hypochondria in the bud by keeping our minds off of ailments and so keeping us from aiding and abetting their manifestation via our mental obsessions about them.

The point that I am trying to make here is this:

We have never freely worked with the vast pharmacopoeia of psychoactive medicines to methodically leverage their power to amplify and enforce the desires of the human will, or of human consciousness, if you prefer. We do not know what the mind is capable of simply because we have outlawed the quest to find out. We have never attempted to combine persuasion and hypnosis and affirmation and/or spirituality with the strategic use of drugs in a coordinated effort to overcome illness via mental means. We have no idea of what the mind is capable in this regard or where its limits lie when it comes to prophylaxis. Of course, the results of such a study in a free world would surely be highly dependent upon the education level and intent and interests of the participants employed, which is an obvious caveat that I add here only because Drug Warriors absolutely hate details. They want to draw pathological conclusions about drugs per se, and not bother with the pesky fact that human beings are unique and have different susceptibilities to different protocols.

To be more specific, consider the elation and inspiration that users have derived from the phenethylamines synthesized by chemist Alexander Shulgin as reported in his 1991 book entitled "Pihkal: A Chemical Love Affair.9" Consider how the use of drugs like these could take place in a set and setting custom-designed to bring about an attitude that would decrease the likelihood of a physical illness, meanwhile helping us to live peaceably with the symptoms of that illness to the extent that it manifests in our lives despite our efforts.

Drug user reports from "Pihkal10":

"Excellent feelings, tremendous opening of insight and understanding, a real awakening."

"I now know that the mind has a remarkable ability to control the particular place the psyche is in."

"The feeling was one of great camaraderie, and it was very easy to talk to people."


Opium, when used wisely, can change our whole outlook on physical illness11. see "The Crawling Chaos" by HP Lovecraft for an example of how opium use can inspire a user with a metaphorical outlook on their physical suffering. In the 1921 short story, the use of opium helps the protagonist to envision the throbbing pain in his head as the crashing of waves from a tormented sea, that is, as something apart from his self and no longer affecting him. in other words, it lets the user adopt for the nonce the mental powers that it takes the most devoted mystics of the world an entire lifetime to achieve.

The government is determined to keep us from knowing anything good about opium , but the truth has not yet been entirely eradicated from history. it is clear that opium use has the potential for leveraging the power of the human mind.

This is a hint from opium 12 that we should follow up on as curious human beings interested in the psychological and physical well-being of humanity. Instead we run from the very mention of the task in superstitious fear inspired by our cradle-to-grave brainwashing in the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. We should nevertheless be searching for positive drug-using protocols without being hindered by legislation which outlaws almost every possible inspiring drug in the world. only then can we begin for the first time in history to learn both the true powers of every psychoactive drug in the world and the true powers of the human mind, for that matter!

We don't need another "Decade of the Brain" -- we need a "Decade of the Human Mind... with the human being included!"

This may seem like a degression from the topic of self-medication, but these things are all related. The modern hatred of self-medication is inspired by the medical mindset that is keeping us from making the kinds of discoveries about the human mind that i advocate here. It is a mindset that considers subjective reactions to drugs to be unimportant. It is a mindset that completely ignores the powers of drugs to elate and inspire. It is a mindset therefore that is antithetical to common sense and even to religious freedom, for the Hindu religion would not exist today except for the use of drugs that inspire and elate. Soma 13 helped the Vedic people to deal with life's problems successfully and even with a sense of triumph. The Vedic people used drugs to end human suffering, regardless of the prohibitionist spin that the theologian might want to place on that use in order to avoid scandal.

Conclusion:

There would be no Hindu religion today had the Vedic people not self-medicated in 1500 BCE.



Notes:

1: Restoring our Right to Self-Medication: how drug warriors work together with the medical establishment to prevent us from taking care of our own health DWP (up)
2: National Coalition for Drug Legalization (up)
3: How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs DWP (up)
4: The Rig Veda Griffith (translator), Ralph T.H., Archive.org (up)
5: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
6: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
7: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science Seife, Charles, Scientific American, 2012 (up)
8: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? LaMartinna, John, Forbes, 2022 (up)
9: Scribd.com: PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story Shulgin, Alexander, Transform Press, New York, 1991 (up)
10: Scribd.com: PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story Shulgin, Alexander, Transform Press, New York, 1991 (up)
11: Opium for the Masses: Harvesting Nature's Best Pain Medication Hogshire, Jim (up)
12: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
13: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)


Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths




In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.

This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just their way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record than the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.

This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.

How do I know this?

Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.

More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?

This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."

  • Addicted to Addiction
  • Addiction
  • After the Drug War
  • After the Drug War part 2
  • Another Cry in the Wilderness
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant
  • Case Studies in Wise Drug Use
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Declaration of Independence from the War on Drugs
  • Drug Use as Self-Medication
  • Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy
  • Ego Transcendence Made Easy
  • Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client
  • Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War
  • Heroin versus Alcohol
  • How Cocaine could have helped me
  • How drug prohibition destroys the lives of the depressed
  • How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Blinds us to Godsend Medicine
  • How the Drug War is a War on Creativity
  • How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse
  • How The Drug War Killed Andy Gibb
  • How the Drug War Punishes the Elderly
  • How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs
  • How to Unite Drug War Opponents of all Ethnicities
  • Hypocritical America Embraces Drug War Fascism
  • In Praise of Doctor Feelgood
  • In Praise of Drug Dealers
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy
  • Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion
  • Notes about the Madness of Drug Prohibition
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart
  • Open Letter to Erowid
  • Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Pihkal 2.0
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism
  • Science is not free in the age of the drug war
  • Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms
  • Someone you love is suffering unnecessarily because of the war on drugs
  • Thank God for Erowid
  • Thank God for Soul Quest
  • THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG
  • The Drug War and Armageddon
  • The Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time
  • The Mother of all Western Biases
  • The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • The New Age of Pharmacological Serfdom
  • The Origins of Modern Psychiatry
  • The Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression
  • What Jim Hogshire Got Wrong about Drugs
  • Why America's Mental Healthcare System is Insane
  • Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    We should place prohibitionists on trial for destroying inner cities.

    Psychiatrists never acknowledge the biggest downside to modern antidepressants: the fact that they turn you into a patient for life. That's demoralizing, especially since the best drugs for depression are outlawed by the government.

    I looked up the company: it's all about the damn stock market and money. The FDA outlaws LSD until we remove all the euphoria and the visions. That's ideology, not science. Just relegalize drugs and stop telling me how much ecstasy and insight I can have in my life!!

    There are endless drugs that could help with depression. Any drug that inspires and elates is an antidepressant, partly by the effect itself and partly by the mood-elevation caused by anticipation of use (facts which are far too obvious for drug warriors to understand).

    If MAPS wants to make progress with MDMA they should start "calling out" the FDA for judging holistic medicines by materialist standards, which means ignoring all glaringly obvious benefits.

    Psychedelic retreats tell us how scientific they are. But science is the problem. Science today insists that we ignore all obvious benefits of drugs. It's even illegal to suggest that psilocybin has health benefits: that's "unproven" according to the Dr. Spocks of science.

    Trump's lies about America's voting process are typical NAZI and DRUG WAR strategy: raise mendacious doubts about whatever you want to destroy and keep repeating them. It's what Joseph Goebbels called "The Big Lie."

    Freud thought cocaine was a great antidepressant. His contemporaries demonized the drug by focusing only on the rare misusers. That's like judging alcohol by focusing on alcoholics.

    Ann Lemke's case studies make the usual assumptions: getting free from addiction is a morality tale. No reference to how the drug war promotes addiction and how banned drugs could solve such problems. She does not say why daily SSRI use is acceptable while daily opium use is not. Etc.

    If the depressed patient laughs, that means nothing. Materialists have to see results under a microscopic or they will never sign off on a therapy.


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






    The Origins of Modern Psychiatry
    Obama's Unscientific BRAIN Initiative


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    Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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