from a 67-year-old who has been turned into a lifetime patient by American healthcare
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 11, 2026
When is Psychology Today going to publish psychiatry from the patient's point of view? I nominate myself for authorship of that groundbreaking expose.
I am a 67-year-old chronic depressive who has been turned into a ward of the healthcare state by psychiatry. Because of America's superstitious attitudes about drugs, I was "saved" from cocaine and phenethylamines and laughing gas 40 years ago and shunted off onto underperforming "meds" that are harder to kick than heroin. One of my many former psychiatrists told me that my current "med," Effexor, had a 95% recidivism rate 1 for long-term users. I can believe that given the hell I went through in my failed... year-long effort to get off the drug – which I had to finance myself by contracting with a compounding pharmacist to make small doses. They could not even give me extended-release meds because the formula was proprietary.
I repeat: I am 67 years old. And yet I have to see a psychiatrist less than half my age every three months of my life and share intimate details of my life in order to get a prescription for an underperforming drug that I can never kick, ever. This is expensive and humiliating and yet the experts ignore me. They are all on Google Scholar, after all, and so they are the authorities and I am just a totally unacknowledged victim.
You'll say, of course, that I am a ranter, but I believe I am writing pretty mildly for someone who has been completely ignored for a lifetime now and who is as depressed as ever, unable to use drugs that could cheer him up in a trice!
You know, the psychiatrists who are half my age ask me every three months: "Have you considered suicide lately?"
And I always want to answer as follows: "Only when I consider how America's healthcare system has turned me into a patient for life!"
For more on the total disempowerment of the depressed with respect to their own health, I invite you to read my website, starting with:
And now depressed people like Claire Brosseau are even demanding assisted suicide. They want the state to help kill them. And what state is that? The same state that denies them access to drugs that could make them want to live – including the kinds of drugs which, like Soma, have inspired entire religions!
And yet I am silenced by every platform in America. And I am the only one who says that Claire has a right to take care of her own health – i.e., that drug prohibition was wrong. But those who advocate for her right to die are featured prominently in the New York Times! This is not healthcare, it is Christian Science extremism.
See https://www.abolishthedea.com/no_one_would_need_assisted_suicide_if_we_ended_drug_prohibition
Will anyone ever take these ideas on board or is the anti-patient status quo really this entrenched!
PS Medical ethicists are always talking about the rights of patients. What about the rights of folks like myself not to BE patients in the first place? I am sick and tired of being a child for life thanks to the way that Big Pharma has parlayed drug prohibition into a financial windfall – not for the depressed but for the healthcare industry!
I don't know what I'm expecting from this, but I had to write someone "in a position of some sort of power." Today I was told that my psychiatrist who was at least treating me like an adult will have to be replaced - - and now I have to spend hours and money making my intimate life known to another complete stranger -- and pretend that I am a grade schooler. This is not healthcare, it is complete humiliation! And it is an insult added to this injury when letters like these are completely ignored by the establishment!
Notes:
1: I have been unable to confirm this stat. But the WHO notes clinical recidivism rates for depression ranging from 50% to 85%. Do we count that as a recidivism rate of Effexor? Not when Biopharma is paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget, as reported by John LaMattina in the Sep 22, 2022 edition of Forbes magazine. (up)
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against the hateful war on US
In "Psychedelic Refugee," Rosemary Leary writes:
"Fueled by small doses of LSD, almost everything was amusing or weird." -- Rosemary Leary
In a non-brainwashed world, such testimony would suggest obvious ways to help the depressed.
If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.
Meanwhile, no imaginable downside could persuade westerners that guns and alcohol were too dangerous. Yet the DEA lies about almost all psychoactive drugs, saying there are no good uses. That's a lie! Then they pass laws that keep us from disproving their puritanical conclusion.
If America cannot exist without outlawing drugs, then there is something wrong with America, not with drugs.
Americans love to blame drugs for all their problems. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. The prohibition mindset is the problem, not drugs.
Alexander Shulgin is a typical westerner when he speaks about cocaine. He moralizes about the drug, telling us that it does not give him "real" power. But so what? Does coffee give him "real" power? Coke helps some, others not. Stop holding it to this weird metaphysical standard.
They drive to their drug tests in pickup trucks with license plates that read "Don't tread on me." Yeah, right. "Don't tread on me: Just tell me how and how much I'm allowed to think and feel in this life. And please let me know what plants I can access."
"Just ONE HORSE took the life of my daughter." This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It forces us to use shock therapy on the severely depressed since we've outlawed all viable alternatives. It denies medicines that could combat Alzheimer's and/or render it psychologically bearable.
To oppose the Drug War philosophically, one has to highlight its connections to both materialism and the psychiatric pill mill. And that's a problem, because almost everyone is either a Drug Warrior or a materialist these days and has a vested interest in the continuation of the psychiatric pill mill.
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