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How the Drug War Screws the Depressed

an open letter to Dr. Alan I. Leshner

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 16, 2022



Dear Dr. Leshner,

I was reading a book in which Thomas Szasz quoted you as saying (in 1998, I believe) that physicians should be jailed if they refused to prescribe SSRI antidepressants 1. With all due respect, I have a very different opinion as a 63-year-old depressed man who has been on Big Pharma 's dependence-causing meds for his entire adult life. I don't really want to throw anyone in jail, but if I had to choose, I would incarcerate those physicians who prescribed SSRIs for me without even mentioning the fact that they cause fierce chemical dependence, thereby turning me into an eternal patient. Of course, the dependence-causing nature of these drugs was not apparent to physicians at first, which would have been some excuse for them, were it not for the fact that they never subsequently apologized to me for having prescribed me drugs on false pretenses. Instead, when they learned of this problematic side effect, they made a virtue of necessity and began telling me that I had a duty to myself to "take my meds" every single day for the rest of my life. For it had suddenly developed that my "condition" was a chronic one, requiring daily medicine. (As Szasz would ask at this point: cui bono?)

I do not believe the myth of a chemical imbalance causing such a variegated and subjective condition as depression, but even if I did, the idea of what constitutes a "cure" for such a condition is not a medical matter but a philosophical one. I personally value living a wide awake life and investigating my physical and mental world for truths beyond those offered by prosaic materialism 2, but the creator of the SSRIs that I've been taking now for decades had a very different definition of "cure." For I have received no measure of self-actualization from these drugs but rather have felt an ever-growing feeling of tranquilization, anhedonia -- and even increased depression in these latter years -- all while taking the very miracle drugs that you wanted to jail physicians for withholding from the world.

If I had to jail someone for withholding drugs from me, I would immediately arrest those who are, even now, denying depressed folks like myself the use of godsend medicines like laughing gas , MDMA and psilocybin. But then the materialist healthcare field puts no stock in drugs like this which merely "work" according to the patient's subjective definition of that term. The patients' role is to sit back and be cured by modern science, which presumably will tell them when they are finally no longer depressed, objectively speaking.

If the medical community wanted to do something about depression, they would end the War on Drugs which keeps people like me from reaching down and using the botanical godsends that grow at their very feet. Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius enjoyed opium . HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their stories "on" coca wine. Plato got his views of the afterlife from the psychedelic Eleusinian Mysteries3. And the entire Vedic Religion was inspired by the psychoactive effect of botanical medicine. And yet America puts these off-limits and turns me into a ward of the healthcare state. Yes, America's got a drug problem, all right, and the problem is this: we are completely anti-scientific about substances and we demonize politically unpopular ones through demagoguery rather than teaching how to use them safely and wisely.

Instead of working to secure me this bounty of Mother Nature -- which should be mine by birth under natural law -- your profession has leveraged the Drug War for personal profit by gladly accepting the monopoly on mood medicine that was thrust into your laps thanks to substance prohibition. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that SSRIs were not INTENDED to cause chemical dependency when first developed, yet the fact is that SSRIs have led to the biggest drug dystopia in human history, with 1 in 4 American women dependent on Big Pharma meds for life -- and this in a country that says it's determined to keep people from using "drugs." That's a nation of Stepford Wives, completely off the radar of the modern Drug Warrior, no doubt thanks to spokespeople financed by Big Pharma on shows like Oprah who are reminding us to "keep taking our meds!"

The fact is that I could be happy almost overnight, were drugs like MDMA 4 , psilocybin and laughing gas suddenly available for the depressed -- but the moneyed stakeholders in the Drug War game (including health care, Big Pharma and police forces) are not about to kill the golden goose by acting in the interest of the depressed and anxious in the world, much less on behalf of those who merely want to "be all they can be" in life and do not feel any Christian Science duty to abstain from using medicine to achieve this goal. And so the drug approval process is politicized. The FDA doesn't care that millions could benefit immediately from such substances becoming legal. Instead, they're worried about a relative handful of young people whose well-publicized misuse of these substances could be leveraged by demagogue politicians into a huge scandal. That kind of anti-scientific reasoning, so massively skewed by political concerns, is why I have gone my whole life without the freedom to reach down and use the plant medicines that grow at my very feet.

The irony is that the Drug War did this to protect me, or so I'm told -- and yet what's the result? They addicted me to SSRIs for life (caused a chemical dependency, if you prefer) and turned me into a ward of the healthcare state and an eternal patient, with all of the demoralizing baggage that implies -- including the trimonthly trip to see a nurse half my age who has to decide if I'm still trustworthy enough to keep receiving the drugs that psychiatry has basically addicted me to. So it is that the current system conspires to turn Americans into children when it comes to drugs, even legal ones. In a Kafkaesque world like this in which the healthcare system collaborates with the Drug Warriors to addict me to Big Pharma 5 6 meds, I can perfectly understand why folks buy "drugs" on the black market, and would do so myself if I had the courage. But then the Drug Warriors -- eager to maintain the various monopolies -- would jail me, probably for a longer term than that meted out to most murderers, thereby showing how determined the powers-that-be are to maintain their monopoly on mind medicine.

This is why I regret the day that I ever allowed the psychiatric industry to turn me into an eternal patient, a situation which grows more intolerable every day as I read more books about the wonderful powers of the psychoactive medicines that anti-scientific America has demonized. And why? To save us all from dependency on medications? Not hardly. No, it turns out that the goal of the Drug War is not to get people off drugs, but to get them ON the RIGHT drugs, namely those that benefit the enormous healthcare state and Wall Street.

So if I had to toss anyone in jail, it would be those who deprived me of the plant medicine that grows at my very feet. I believe Thomas Jefferson would have felt the same. For the garden-loving Founding Father was surely rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 7 in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants, in violation of the natural law upon which Jefferson had founded America.

Author's Follow-up: July 16, 2022





There's a simple reason why I do not believe in the myth that SSRIs fix a chemical imbalance that causes depression (besides the obvious ones adduced by Thomas Szasz and Richard Whitaker). That's because the very term "depression" is subjective. What is depression, according to the drug makers? Is it simply an excessive level of sorrow? Or is it a state of mind that keeps one from realizing self-actualization in life? Personally, I define "depression" in the latter way, as a state of mind that keeps me from being all that I want to be in life and from accomplishing all that I want to accomplish. But if the drug maker considers their job done when they keep me from committing suicide, then our definitions of "depression" differ widely. This is a philosophical difference between us when it comes to what constitutes "the good life."

Drug war propaganda aside, the fact is that substances like opium 8 , coca, psychedelics, and even morphine 9 can be used in a strategic, non-addictive fashion to help one truly thrive as the person that they want to be in life (although materialists will arbitrarily slander such non-reductionist cures as "crutches"). Why then should I be content to become chemically addicted for life to medications whose only boast is that they can reduce my risk of killing myself? Plato said the unexamined life is not worth living -- but the Drug Warrior materialist tells us: "you will live just such an unfulfilled life -- and to make sure that you can endure such a drab existence, we'll give you our anti-suicide 10 pills-- Oh, sorry, I mean our anti-depressants!"


Related tweet: January 13, 2023

The use of laughing gas 11 changed William James' ideas about the very nature of reality. To outlaw such substances is to outlaw human advancement.



Notes:

1: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs (up)
2: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors (up)
3: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
4: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts (up)
5: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science (up)
6: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? (up)
7: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation (up)
8: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton (up)
9: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School (up)
10: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use (up)
11: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide (up)


Antidepressants




WARNING: Don't bother trying to get off antidepressants unless you are truly committed to the idea in the name of healthcare liberty. You have to be committed to such a goal heart and soul, merely to have a chance at success. For long-term users, it can be a real challenge. It is interesting how psychiatrists flip the script on this subject, by the way: they claim that the hideous withdrawal symptoms somehow prove that the user needed the drug all along. But this is obvious nonsense. This can be seen in the fact that these same psychiatrists would never say such a thing about heroin users: that their angst upon quitting the drug is a sign that the drug was actually working for them.

Note that I am not saying that antidepressants are drugs from hell -- but rather that they BECOME drugs from hell thanks to drug prohibition. Drug prohibition outlaws all drugs that could help you get off of antidepressants and so live a fulfilled life without becoming a ward of the healthcare state. We need merely to re-legalize mother nature's medicines. Why do we fail to do so? Because we judge drugs based on the following silly and inhumane algorithm: namely, that a substance that can be misused, even in theory, by a white American young person at one dose when used for one reason in one circumstance must not be used by anybody at any dose in any circumstances...

Suppose you lived in the Punjab in 1500 BCE and were told that Soma was illegal but that the mental health establishment had medicines which you could take every day of your life for your depression. Would it not be an enormous violation of your liberty to be told that you could not worship Soma and its attendant gods and incarnations? Would it not be an enormous violation of your liberty to be told that you cannot partake of the drink of the Gods themselves, the Soma juice?

Well, guess what? Your liberty is suppressed in that very fashion by modern drug prohibition: you are denied access to all medicines that inspire and elate. Seen in this light, antidepressants are a slap in the face to a freedom-loving people. They are a prohibitionist replacement for a host of obvious treatments, none of which need turn the user into a patient for life, and some of which could even inspire new religions.

The Hindu religion would not exist today had the DEA been active in the Punjab in 1500 BCE.

So do antidepressants make sense?

This question has two very different answers, depending on whether you recognize that prohibition exists or not. Of course, most Americans pretend that drug war prohibition does not exist, or at least that it has no effect on their lives -- and so they happily become Big Pharma patients for life. They flatter themselves that they are thereby treating their problems "scientifically." What they fail to realize, of course, is that it is a category error for materialist scientists to treat mind and mood conditions in the first place.

Why? Because scientists are behaviorists when it comes to drugs, which means that they ignore all obvious positive effects of drugs: all anecdote, all history and all psychological common sense -- and instead try to cure you biochemically. And what has been the result of this purblind approach to mind and moods, this search for the Holy Grail of materialist cures for depression? The result has been the greatest mass pharmacological dystopia of all time, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma pills for life.



  • And don't get me started on antidepressants!
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant
  • Depressed? Here's why!
  • Depression is real, says the APA, and they should know: they cause it!
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war
  • How the Drug War Screws the Depressed
  • How the Drug War Tramples on the Rights of the Depressed
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Philosophical Significance of the Use of Antidepressants in the Age of Drug Prohibition
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • What Malcolm X got right about drugs
  • Why SSRIs are Crap





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    "Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."

    What bothers me about AI is that everyone's so excited to see what computers can do, while no one's excited to see what the human mind can do, since we refuse to improve it with mind-enhancing drugs.

    Materialists are always trying to outdo each other in describing the insignificance of humankind. Crick at least said we were "a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Musk downsizes us further to one single microbe. He wins!

    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???

    Alcohol makes me sleepy. But NOT coca wine. The wine gives you an upbeat feeling of controlled energy, without the jitters of coffee and without the fury of steroids. It increases rather than dulls mental focus.

    America's "health" system was always screaming at me about the threat of addiction from drugs. Then what did it do? It put me on the most dependence-causing meds of all time: SSRIs and SNRIs.

    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.

    Harm Reduction is not enough. We need Benefit Production as well. The autistic should be able to use compassion-enhancing drugs; dementia patients should be able to use the many drugs that improve and speed up mental processes.

    This is why America is creeping toward authoritarianism -- because of the prohibitionists' ability to get away with everything by blaming "drugs." The fact that Americans still fall for this crap represents a kind of collective pathology.

    Most people think that drugs like cocaine, MDMA, LSD and amphetamines can only be used recreationally. WRONG ! This represents a very naive understanding of human psychology. We deny common sense in order to cater to the drug war orthodoxy that "drugs have no benefits."


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






    Science Fiction and the Drug War
    Depression is real, says the APA, and they should know: they cause it!


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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