Drugging Our Kids on Behalf of Eli Lilly
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
May 29, 2019
Posted in response to When anxiety happens as early as preschool, treatments can help by Sujata Gupta in Science News magazine, April 21, 2019.
Isn't Big Pharma happy enough having 1 in 6 adult Americans on SSRIs? Now they have to go after the preschool market? This is irresponsible in the extreme (see Richard Whitaker's "Anatomy of an Epidemic" for many of the obvious reasons why this is immoral). What about the demoralizing effect of placing a child on a substance that could make them a pill popper for life? and the anhedonia that eventually results from such a regimen? Why should we trust psychiatry to treat our child when their "go to" pharmacopeia consists of a mere handful of chemically addicting drugs -- while hundreds of powerful non-addictive psychoactive medicines are growing at our very feet but are outlawed by our anti-patient Drug Wars? Let's not fog the kids' minds to make them manageable in the short run, only to make them chemically dependent in the long run.
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
The addiction gene should be called the prohibition gene: it renders one vulnerable to prohibition lies and limitations: like the lack of safe supply, the lack of choices, and the lack of information. We should pathologize the prohibitionists, not their victims.
Peyote advocates should be drug legalization advocates. Otherwise, they're involved in special pleading which is bound to result in absurd laws, such as "Plant A can be used in a religion but not plant B," or "Person A can belong to such a religion but person B cannot."
When is the Holocaust Museum going to recognize that the Drug War has Nazified American life? Probably, on the same day that the Jefferson Foundation finally admits to having sold out Jefferson by inviting the DEA onto his estate in 1987 to confiscate his poppy plants.
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.
Drugs are not the enemy, ignorance is -- the ignorance that the Drug War encourages by teaching us to fear drugs rather than to understand them.
After watching my mother suffer because of the drug war, I hate to hear people tell me that the problem is drugs. WRONG! That's a western colonialist viewpoint. God loved his creation (see Genesis). He did not make trash. We need to use entheogenic medicines wisely.
There will always be people who don't use drugs wisely, just as there are car drivers who don't drive wisely, and rock climbers who fall to their death. America needs to grow up and accept this, while ending prohibition and teaching safe use.
Imagine if there were drugs for which dependency was a feature, not a bug. People would stop peddling that junk, right? Wrong. Just ask your psychiatrist.
Classic prohibitionist gaslighting, telling me that "drugs" is a neutral term. What planet are they living on?
If opium were legal, then most of the nostrums peddled by drug stores today would be irrelevant. (No wonder the drug war has staying power!)
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Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass
Contact: quass@quass.com
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