How drug prohibition turns Americans into children when it comes to healthcare
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 10, 2025
Drug policy has turned Americans into children. It deprives them of their time-honored right to take care of their own health. And this infantilization affects users of all controlled substances, not just illegal ones.
Take me, for instance. I am a 67-year-old who has been on the Big Pharma antidepressant called Effexor 1 for decades, and yet I am still required to visit the doctor every three months of my life in order to get refills. I am not even trusted to buy the drug without medical oversight. It is bad enough that drug prohibitionists gave Big Pharma 23 a monopoly on mind and mood medicine, thereby turning me into a patient for life with their dependence-causing "meds" -- but it adds insult to injury when they force me to visit a doctor every three months of my life to get a renewed prescription. They thereby constantly remind me that I am an eternal patient and a ward of the healthcare state. It is complete disempowerment, and yet like so many problems with modern drug policy, I seem to be the only person who is complaining about it.
This is a philosophical conundrum. How is it that Americans tolerate such enormous disempowerment when it comes to healthcare? Americans demand empowerment in all other areas of life: why not when it comes to their healthcare4?
The answer, I contend, is that they have a naive belief that they are receiving science-based healthcare and that their job is therefore simply to obey the doctors. They believe that science has developed proven cures for depression and that it is therefore Ludditism to complain about the status quo.
These contented masses seem to be unaware of the fact that there are plenty of medicines out there that could end depression in a trice -- and without causing a lifelong dependency. The wise intermittent use of a variety of drugs is all that an adult would need to take care of their own psychological health. But then that is the medical establishment's worst nightmare: a world in which human beings are allowed to take care of their own health. And so we are taught that we are children when it comes to psychoactive medicine. We are taught that we can never learn to use drugs wisely and that "doctor knows best" when it comes to mind and mood medicine. Thanks to this patronizing control of psychoactive substances, the medical establishment profits enormously from the disempowerment of Americans with respect to healthcare.
As Thomas Szasz writes:
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 victimizers.5
The search for SSRIs has always been based on a flawed materialist premise that human consciousness is nothing but a mix of brain chemicals and so depression can be treated medically like any other physical condition.
In fact, there are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???
What is the end game of the drug warrior? A world in which no one wants drugs? That's not science. It's the drug-hating religion of Christian Science. You know, the American religion that outsources its Inquisition to drug-testing labs.
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.
"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau
When people tell us there's nothing to be gained from using mind-improving drugs, they are embarrassing themselves. Users benefit from such drugs precisely to the extent that they are educated and open-minded. Loudmouth abstainers are telling us that they lack these traits.
It's disgusting that folks like Paul Stamets need a DEA license to work with mushrooms.
The Holy Trinity of the Drug War religion is Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and John Belushi. "They died so that you might fear psychoactive substances with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."
Your drug war has caused the disappearance of over 60,000 Mexicans over the last 20 years. It has turned inner cities into shooting galleries. It has turned America into a penal colony. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and put bureaucrats in charge of deciding if our religions are "sincere."
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.
The search for SSRIs has always been based on a flawed materialist premise that human consciousness is nothing but a mix of brain chemicals and so depression can be treated medically like any other physical condition.
