How drug prohibition makes it nearly impossible to withdraw from antidepressants
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 2, 2025
Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once wrote that the history of Western Philosophy can be characterized as a series of footnotes on Plato1. In the same way, this website can be characterized as a series of footnotes on Thomas Szasz. In books like "Our Right to Drugs,2" "The Medicalization of Everyday Life,3" and especially "Ceremonial Chemistry,4" Szasz has elucidated most of the pertinent philosophical issues raised by substance prohibition. He has shown how the medicalization of morality has mistakenly anointed healthcare professionals as the experts in our personal lives and so denied human beings of personal agency and the time-honored right to take care of their own health. In so doing, however, he has tossed down a gauntlet that few modern philosophers are willing to pick up. He has been ignored rather than refuted. Why? Because Americans worship science. And the reigning philosophy of science is materialism 5, which views human beings as interchangeable widgets amenable to one-size-fits-all cures from Big Pharma . As Szasz himself explains:
"We have thus managed to replace racial, religious, and military coercions and colonialisms, which now seem to us dishonorable, with medical and therapeutic coercions and colonialisms, which now seem to us honorable. Because these latter controls are ostensibly based on Science and aim to secure only Health, and because those who are so coerced and colonized often worship the idols of medical and therapeutic scientism as ardently as do the coercers and colonizers, the victims cannot even articulate their predicament and are therefore quite powerless to resist their victimizers6."
In other words, Westerners have no clue that they are victimized. Once they accept science as king in the realm of mind and mood medicine, then it becomes a sort of Luddite heresy to suggest that the emperor is wearing no clothes. It is heresy against the god of Science.
No one denies that the materialist approach can work wonders in the inorganic world -- but it was always a category error to place materialist scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine. The proof is extant. This approach has led to the biggest mass chemical dependency of all times as Big Pharma attempted to "cure" depression with one-size-fits-all pills. These cures were said to be "scientific" -- they were said to fix chemical imbalances in the brain. And yet, after all the decades' worth of publicity on this topic provided by pharma-backed talking heads on prime-time talk shows, Dr. Noam Shpancer admitted in Psychology Today in 2022 that "We don't know how antidepressants 7 work.8"
He might have added that we don't know that antidepressants work at all -- unless we suppose that the Big Pharma chemist's idea of "working" dovetails with that of the drug user. I wish to live large in life and believe me, antidepressants have never helped me to do such a thing, in sharp contrast to the potentialities of the many medicines that we have outlawed in order to give Big Pharma a monopoly on psychoactive substances.
Take cocaine, for instance.
Sigmund Freud discovered that cocaine could be used as an antidepressant and he used it as such without fanfare910. And yet his contemporaries decided that the drug could only be judged based on its worst possible and most problematic use. This is like setting liquor policy based on the study of drunkards. The majority of cocaine users -- then and now -- used the drug wisely, and yet the only recognized stakeholders in drug policy decisions have been those irresponsible users whom we refuse to educate about safe use. This wholesale dismissal of cocaine's benefits makes no sense, statistically or logically speaking. One can only assume that the early medical critics of cocaine sensed that such a truly efficacious drug would put an end to much highly remunerative talk therapy, rendering it superfluous.
It's amazing -- and depressing at the same time -- that no western scientists are conducting trials with coca leaf chewing in Peru -- where such a thing is still legal -- in order to help people foreswear antidepressants. I do not mean the mere ingestion of coca candies or the simple chewing of a leaf. I mean the constant chewing of bunches of leaves as performed by the Inca in such a way that they truly benefit from the uplifting alkaloids of the coca medicine. But then who is going to pay for a study that helps people get off of antidepressants? Certainly, not the pharmaceutical companies.11 Besides, if we really wanted to help the depressed, we would re-legalize cocaine -- and, as I have said time and again, the depressed are never considered stakeholders in the drugs debate. The only stakeholders of which politicians speak are the young white people whom America has refused to educate about drug use.
If you search "antidepressant withdrawal" online, you will encounter endless lists of potential downsides to withdrawal -- and yet no website will ever bother to point out that these withdrawal symptoms could be easily obfuscated and transcended with the help of many other medicines. No one mentions the fact, that is, that drug prohibition itself makes antidepressant withdrawal almost impossible for long-term users. This demonstrates how entirely brainwashed Westerners are when it comes to the subject of drugs. We take America's unprecedented drug prohibitions as a natural baseline, as if godsends like opium and coca do not exist. And so we completely ignore the role that such drugs could play in solving problems, rather than simply causing them.
As Jeffrey Singer observes in "Your Body, Your Health Care":
"Imagine how many people would have benefited during the past half-century had the government respected their autonomy and their right to self-medicate.12"
Myself, for starters.
But Americans are completely blind to the suffering that occurs behind closed doors. There are no lurid newspaper articles about those downsides of drug prohibition. The motto is, "out of sight, out of mind" when it comes to the enormous downsides of drug prohibition. Instead, today's conglomerate-owned media focuses on specific incidents of misuse by those whom we refuse to educate about drugs. Each such news story is considered to be a knockdown argument against drug re-legalization 13 . The truth, however, is that modern drug policy is based on two demonstrable lies: 1) that drug prohibition has no downsides and 2) that drug use has no upsides.
In casting about for reasons for the staying power of this prohibitionist mindset, Szasz writes:
"No doubt one of the reasons why such policies might be attractive to modern people everywhere, and perhaps especially in the United States, is because they allow them to be childish and dependent on authorities, while continuing to regard themselves as remaining "politically independent.'14"
Whatever its initial cause, however, this prohibitionist penchant is powerfully reinforced by the wholesale censorship in media of all positive reports of drug use. It is easy to come to believe one's own biases against drugs when one is never confronted with any inconvenient truths on the topic, like the fact that cocaine use can end depression in a trice and so prevent suicides.
I have devoted my twilight years to speaking common sense like this, for the simple reason that nobody else is doing so. Sure, there are many pundits who will attack drug prohibition and many who will attack the psychiatric pill mill -- but I am the only pundit who sees how those two policies work together to destroy the lives of the depressed.
To grasp the extent of the brainwashing at work here, just do a search on antidepressant withdrawal online. Almost every site you encounter will urge you to visit a materialist doctor. That's right, they want you to visit the very doctors who make a living from prescribing the medicines that have turned you into a ward of the healthcare state in the first place. These doctors are the only game in town. Sure, you can find holistic counselors, but they are not allowed to offer reasonable alternatives to Big Pharma drugs -- and so will focus on their own "frail spells" of vitamins and exercise -- never the real politik of drugs that actually make a difference in life.
Imagine the enormous irony here: Freud found that cocaine cured depression -- but that cure was outlawed almost immediately because it could theoretically be misused by a minority of morphine 15 habitues. Fast forward 100 years, and we now "treat" depression with drugs for which dependence is a feature, not a bug! One in four American women take a Big Pharma 1617 med every day of their life. And so we see what we have done with our attempt to save the world from dependency: we have caused the greatest mass drug dependency in human history -- meanwhile denying godsend cocaine to the depressed and turning them into wards of the healthcare state instead!
This is why this site is unique: only I seem to be making these connections between drug prohibition and the complete disempowerment of the so-called "mental health patient." Indeed, most so-called "mental health patients" only exist today as patients because of prohibition, chiefly because we have outlawed two time-honored medicines: first opium , which was considered a godsend and a panacea by such ancient doctors as Galen, Paracelsus and Avicenna, and then coca, which was considered divine by the Inca and which Freud himself considered to be a cure for depression.
"In Galenic practice the most useful medicine was a theriaca, or antidote, named Electuarium theriacale magnum, a compound composed of several ingredients, among them opium 18 and wine." -- Thomas Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry19
It tells you all you need to know about the brainwashing of America that no one even talks about Freud's cocaine use. Americans prefer theoretical cures to problems instead, like psychoanalysis. That's where the money is, in stringing "patients" along with promises of eventual benefits using the second-best protocols approved of by racist and imperialist politicians. There is no money in curing problems in a capitalist society.
And where did politicians get the idea that irresponsible white American young people are the only stakeholders when it comes to the question of re-legalizing drugs??? There are hundreds of millions of other stakeholders: philosophers, pain patients, the depressed.
Drug testing labs should give high marks for those who manage to use drugs responsibly, notwithstanding the efforts of law enforcement to ruin their lives. The lab guy would be like: "Wow, you are using opium wisely, my friend! Congratulations! Your boss is lucky to have you!"
If daily drug use and dependency are okay, then there's no logical or scientific reason why I can't smoke a nightly opium pipe.
Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.
Drug War propaganda is all about convincing us that we will never be able to use drugs wisely. But the drug warriors are not taking any chances: they're doing all they can to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
The Drug War is a crime against humanity.
If Americans want less government, they should get rid of the Drug War Industrial Complex, rather than abandoning democracies around the world and leaving a vacuum for Russia and China to fill.
The American Philosophy Association should make itself useful and release a statement saying that the drug war is based on fallacious reasoning, namely, the idea that substances can be bad in themselves, without regard for why, when, where and/or how they are used.
Imagine if we held sports to the same safety standard as drugs. There would be no sports at all. And yet even free climbing is legal. Why? Because with sports, we recognize the benefits and not just the downsides.
Take cocaine, for instance.
To grasp the extent of the brainwashing at work here, just do a search on antidepressant withdrawal online. Almost every site you encounter will urge you to visit a materialist doctor. That's right, they want you to visit the very doctors who make a living from prescribing the medicines that have turned you into a ward of the healthcare state in the first place. These doctors are the only game in town. Sure, you can find holistic counselors, but they are not allowed to offer reasonable alternatives to Big Pharma drugs -- and so will focus on their own "frail spells" of vitamins and exercise -- never the real politik of drugs that actually make a difference in life.
And where did politicians get the idea that irresponsible white American young people are the only stakeholders when it comes to the question of re-legalizing drugs??? There are hundreds of millions of other stakeholders: philosophers, pain patients, the depressed.