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Night of the Addicted Americans

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 21, 2023



If 40 years' of experience means anything, DJ Nutt and the entire field of psychiatry are wrong. Antidepressants have been a HUGE mistake. They have rendered me personally less interesting and tired me out, making me absolutely unable to muster the enthusiasm of my youth. They have robbed me of my creativity. They have stolen my soul. If you came up behind me and shouted boo, there would be a delayed response. Spontaneity has become increasingly foreign to me over the decades of socially sanctioned pill popping.

Imagine what it says about America that 1 in 4 of its population needs some kind of tranquilizing medicine in order to be able to conform peaceably to the materialist status quo.

Antidepressants combined with prohibition is no way to treat depression: it is a way to manufacture depression, by denying us hundreds of godsends that could cheer us up and inspire us, under the harebrained and hypocritical theory that any drug which is potentially addictive must be avoided entirely - except, of course, when they're created by Big Pharma, in which case it becomes our moral duty to take them every day of our lives.

How has America arrived at this huge pharmacological dystopia, one so big that it is invisible to modern pundits?

The American religion is scientism, and so we fell for the argument that Big Pharma was going to treat all human sadness scientifically.

What a coup for conservatives: their natural enemies were no longer getting together to fight corporate power and income disparity: they were getting together instead to compare medicine lists and see "who's on what" and how their latest Big Pharma tranquilizers were working viz. their previous prescriptions.

If I had it to do again, I would rather die than be "started on antidepressants." I would go to the black market and take my chances.

This is why I hate the phrase "treatment resistant depression," because it implies that Big Pharma has conquered depression - it's just that some folks are resistant to the panacea just as some folks are allergic to milk.

Wrong.

If Big Pharma has conquered sadness, it is only because they have rendered Americans impervious to both happiness AND sadness. Big Pharma has merely made us able to tolerate the materialist status quo that we otherwise might have been so gauche as to deride and scorn.

Author's Follow-up: March 21, 2023


It's hard to write honestly about the Drug War -- almost nobody does because it requires calling out Big Pharma drugs that are used by at least 25% of Americans. So if one is interested in gaining "followers," they're tempted to avoid the topic entirely. The problem is that if everyone avoids the topic, things will never change.

We must not evaluate antidepressants in the abstract, asking merely "Do they make sense as therapy?" but rather "Do they make sense given the fact that the Drug War outlaws almost all psychoactive medicines?" I submit that no one in their right mind would take antidepressants (and certainly no one in their right mind SHOULD take antidepressants) if psychoactive medicines were legal. The former drugs will make you a patient for life and tranquilize you, while the latter drugs will inspire you and many of them are not even habit forming.

Moreover, even if they're habit-forming, so what? They still would not turn you into an eternal patient, with all the expense and stigma that represents. Moreover, psychiatry has no problem with making lifetime drug users with antidepressants: the fact that they disapprove of all other dependence-causing psychoactive medicine is a philosophical and business call, not a scientific one. They value a subdued patient -- but that is not my goal in life: my goal is to thrive in life.

Author's Follow-up: August 6, 2023


I recently got a Tweet from a psychiatrist who told me that SSRIs would still be desired and prescribed when all medicines were legal. If that turned out to be true, it would only be because prohibition was not accompanied by the promotion and unbiased understanding of all drugs. There are drugs out there so wonderful viz SSRIs that they make one laugh and cry and feel reborn. Under the right conditions, they can improve and sharpen your goals in life and make you want to live. The psych in question simply does not know about such drugs. Otherwise he would never have said that SSRIs should still have a role.

"Let's see: I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.

Addiction




"The irreducible core of the disease theory of addiction is still as strong as ever -- the significant distinction between good and bad opiate use is whether it's medically supervised." --Emperors of Dreams by Mike Jay


Addiction is a hugely fraught subject in the age of the drug war. This is because the Drug War does everything it can to make drug use dangerous. It encourages addiction by limiting our access to all but the handful of drugs that dealers find it practical and lucrative to supply. It fails to regulate product so that drug users cannot know the dose or even the quality of what they are ingesting. Meanwhile, the Drug War censors honest talk about drug use.

In short, until we end the Drug War, we will not know how much addiction is a true problem and how much it is an artifact of drug-war policy. And yet materialist researchers tell us that addiction is a "disease"? Why is it a disease to want to improve one's life with drugs? One could just as easily say that people are diseased, or at least masochistic, if they accept their limitations in life without doing everything they can to transcend them.

Indeed, the very idea that materialists are experts on psychoactive drug use is wrong. It is a category error. The proof is extant. Materialist researchers today are in total denial about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs. They maintain the lie that psychoactive drugs can only be proven effective by looking under a microscope, whereas the proof of such efficacy is right in front of them: in endless anecdotes, in human history, and even in psychological common sense, the kind of common sense that scientists ignore in the name of both Drug War ideology and the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism.

  • Addicted to Addiction
  • Addicted to Ignorance
  • Addiction
  • America's Great Anti-Depressant Scam
  • America's Invisible Addiction Crisis
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War
  • How Drug Prohibition Causes Relapses
  • How Prohibition Causes Addiction
  • How the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality Tale
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors
  • Libertarians as Closet Christian Scientists
  • Modern Addiction Treatment as Puritan Indoctrination
  • Night of the Addicted Americans
  • Notes about the Madness of Drug Prohibition
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
  • Prohibition Spectrum Disorder
  • Public Service Announcements for the Post-Drug War Era
  • Sherlock Holmes versus Gabor Maté
  • Tapering for Jesus
  • The aesthetic difference between addiction and chemical dependency
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    Over 45% of traumatic brain injuries are caused by horseback riding (ABC News). Tell your representatives to outlaw horseback riding and make it a federal offence to teach a child how to ride! Brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.

    Today's Washington Post reports that "opioid pills shipped" DROPPED 45% between 2011 and 2019..... while fatal overdoses ROSE TO RECORD LEVELS! Prohibition is PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE.

    Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.

    Even fans of sacred medicine have been brainwashed to believe that we do not know if such drugs "really" work: they want microscopic proof. But that's a western bias, used strategically by drug warriors to make the psychotropic drug approval process as glacial as possible.

    Americans heap hypocritical praise on Walt Whitman. What they don't realize is that many of us could be "Walt Whitman for a Day" with the wise use of psychoactive drugs. To the properly predisposed, morphine gives a DEEP appreciation of Mother Nature.

    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 the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."

    Today's drug laws tell us that we must respect the historical use of sacred medicines, while denying us our personal right to use them unless our ancestors did so. That's a meta-injustice! It negatively affects the way that we are allowed to experience our world!

    It's a category error to say that scientists can tell us if psychoactive drugs "really work." It's like asking Dr. Spock of Star Trek if hugging "really works." ("Hugging is highly illogical, Captain.")

    Oregon's drug policy is incoherent and cruel. The rich and healthy spend $4,000 a week on psilocybin. The poor and chemically dependent are thrown in jail, unless they're on SSRIs, in which case they're congratulated for "taking their meds."


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






    The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter
    Science Set Free... NOT!


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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