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Our Short-Sighted Fears about Long-Term Drug Use

exposing the Christian Science defeatism of the war on drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





May 14, 2024





Author's Follow-up:

October 24, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




So this guys says that the use of naturally occurring medicines could lead to problems in the longer term??? What hypocrisy! Open your eyes!! The problems are here -- and they are all because we have outlawed godsend medicines! Effexor is absolutely impossible to kick -- the few who do so have cognitive impairment! Stop fretting about possible downsides to using time-honored medicine beloved of Sigmund Freud and Benjamin Franklin, and wake up and smell the psychiatric pill mill -- which was created thanks to drug prohibition which gave Big Pharma a monopoly on mind mood mediccine!

And now the essay proper


I just had my buttons pushed by a guy who worries that using drugs in psychiatry could lead to problems "in the longer term," (by which he apparently means drugs other than antidepressants 1, of which he himself appears to be critical). I wanted to address this fear in essay form because it seems to reflect the assumptions held uncritically by many otherwise sane-thinking individuals. Their argument goes something like this: "Yes, some drugs might help (maybe, sort of...)... Oh, but what if someone gets addicted to them! Oh, no! We must stay the course and keep drugs illegal!"

My first response is: Why don't we worry about the problems that the Drug War is causing RIGHT NOW? Folks are receiving brain-damaging shock therapy because we refuse to treat them with substances that grow at their very feet. Folks are committing suicide 2 because they have no access to drugs that could cheer them up and give them a new view of life. Anyone who knows something about entheogens knows this is true3 4 5. To say that we could never learn to use such drugs wisely is Christian Science defeatism disguised as a concern for public health.

My second response is: Why do you think that antidepressants have caused a problem "in the longer term"? Answer: Because antidepressants are the only game in town. Because the Drug War has outlawed all competition when it comes to mood-enhancing drugs. It's not drugs that are a problem here, it is the lack of drugs and thus the lack of choice.

My third response is: It is not the role of scientists to do a cost/benefit analysis about psychoactive drug use. While they may report some of the potential costs of using a given drug - indeed, that's all they're allowed to study in today's ideologically driven labs: namely, the downsides of drug use -- they know nothing of the psychological costs of going without the drug nor of the psychological and/or spiritual benefits that the user hoped to find in such drug use, nor of the user's life goals nor of how the user would personally define the term "a fulfilled life." In short, they know nothing of the hopes and dreams of the would-be user6. How then can they decide that a benefit is not worth a cost when they know nothing of the benefit in question nor of the costs of going WITHOUT that proposed medicine (such as the many opportunities missed thanks to one's gloomy introspection and apathy).

But Americans have been taught from grade school that safe use of drugs like cocaine is simply not possible. (Someone forgot to send that memo to UK talk-show host Graham Norton, BTW, one of the few celebrities who speaks honestly - or, indeed, at all -- about such topics.) To the extent that this is true, however, it is only true because of the Drug War, which does everything it can to make cocaine use a problem: by refusing to teach safe use (as in, cocaine is contraindicated for those with a heart condition), while corrupting supply and shooting and arresting anyone who so much as mentions the word "cocaine 7 8 ." (Bringing coca leaves to the US to make tea? Expect to be treated like a druggie scumbag if the DEA finds out.)

Getting back to that guy who pushed my buttons: when he says that drugs may cause problems in the long-term, he no doubt means that use may become habitual, that a user may end up taking the drug every day of their life.

Here are two quick responses to that latter concern.

If the drug works for him or her based on their goals in life, what's wrong with daily use? One in four American women take a Big Pharma 9 10 med every day of their life11. Not only do doctors not consider this a problem, but they actually encourage their patients to "keep taking your meds."

If the user develops a habit that they wish to kick, they will have a host of drugs to swap for their pharmacological nemesis once substances are relegalized. It's called "fighting drugs with drugs.12" Unfortunately, such a protocol merely makes common psychological sense - and materialist science does not believe in common sense. That's why they can't even decide if laughing gas 13 could help the depressed14. They're still waiting for microscopic proof of that assertion, since the mere laughter of real human beings tells them nothing.

Could drug use cause a problem in the long term? What couldn't? But as adults, we can profit from their use while making that use as safe as possible. It is only the Drug War doctrine of Christian Science defeatism that tells us otherwise.

Finally, a few of my tweets in response to the button-pusher mentioned above:







Psychiatry had no concern for the long term when they started folks on SSRIs which turned out to be dependence causing. But they use the fear of long term consequences to deny us access to the plants that grow at our feet.








Anything can cause problems in the long term. When we legalize all drugs, including entheogens, we can treat that problem. The Drug Warrior tells us the lie that we can never learn to use these hundreds of substances wisely.






This is why science should butt out when it comes to psychoactive drugs. Use of such substances only makes sense based on a cost/benefit analysis, and when it comes to one's hopes and dreams in life, the potential user is the expert, not the scientist.






I would have been far better off had psychiatry risked causing me problems in the longer term rather than giving me SSRIs.






Psychiatry has caused more problems in the longer term than any street drugs. The only reason opiates are a problem is because we outlawed opium : we refused to have people using opium 15 peaceably at home. Now we complain that they're in the streets.




This is awkward because the button-pusher is replying but I'm still not sure to whom. Possibly to me? Anyway here's my response to his latest tweet about the difference between physiological and psychological addiction.


Moreover, any discussion on this topic has to take into account the societal effects of prohibition, not just look at a personal case. Detroit is in ruins because the Drug War brought guns and violence to the hood thru wild financial incentives16.




Moreover, any discussion on this topic has to take into account the societal effects of prohibition, not just look at a personal case. Detroit is in ruins because the Drug War brought guns and violence to the hood thru wild financial incentives.




Drug warriors have their way because they ignore all the stakeholders: the 100,000 disappeared in Mexico, the American cities in ruins, the patient who had shock therapy because we outlawed Mother Nature's entheogens.




So it's not enough to worry about the long-term for the patient. We have to worry about the long-term for democracy itself -- although I fear we may already be too late for that given the new trend toward fascism.




Notes:

1: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs (up)
2: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use (up)
3: The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys (up)
4: Listening to Ecstasy: The Transformative Power of MDMA (up)
5: The transpersonal vision: the healing potential of nonordinary states of consciousness (up)
6: Of course a psychiatrist may know something of their client's hopes and dreams, but I am talking about psychiatrists in general here, especially when they claim to know what is best for ALL their clients, which is precisely what they do when they rule out the use of psychoactive drugs on a priori grounds. (up)
7: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis (up)
8: On Cocaine (up)
9: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science (up)
10: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? (up)
11: Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle (up)
12: Fighting Drugs with Drugs (up)
13: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide (up)
14: Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment Resistant Depression? (up)
15: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton (up)
16: Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America (up)


Christian Science




On a superficial level, Christian Science may be seen as a drug-hating religion and so its very existence tends to support the effort of drug warriors to outlaw godsend psychoactive medicines. On a deeper level, however, the religion's founder Mary Baker-Eddy was fighting not so much against drugs as against the failure of modern science to acknowledge the power of the human mind. In Mary's case, of course, this was the mind as influenced by Jesus Christ, but yet she recognized a principle with which even a non-believer can agree and which, moreover, is clearly true in light of drug user reports from the Vedic days to the present: namely, that the human mind has a great as-yet untapped power to control one's outlook on life and to therefore positively affect overall human health to some as-yet undetermined degree. Mary does seem to have overestimated the mind's ability to cure the body, of course, but it is worth noting in her defense that the government has outlawed the very research that would be required to determine exactly where the line should be drawn between the mind-curable condition and that which is beyond the help of this sort of holistic healing.

We would need to be able to use psychoactive medicines freely in order to generate the sort of user reports that could help us answer such questions adequately. And this would be research of the greatest philosophical importance, because it would essentially be a search into the true nature of mind-body dualism.

Mind-body dualism is like the weather when it comes to the field of philosophy: everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. Well, here is a chance for philosophers to launch a first-hand investigation of the interaction between mind and body and to thereby determine the nature of each -- as well as the nature of the interactive whole which they in some sense comprise. Philosophers just have to decide: Do they want to perform the kind of hands-on philosophic research that William James advocated viz. altered states, or do they want to keep pretending that the drug war does not exist and that it has no downsides for philosophical research. For the opposite is so obviously true: namely, that drug prohibition forbids us from performing the kind of research that could blow the whole "mind-body" problem wide open from the western point of view and so inspire whole new fields of research.

For more on this subject, please see my essay entitled "Christian Science and Drugs: what Mary Baker-Eddy Got Right.



  • America's Imperialist Christian Science War on Drugs
  • American Sharia
  • Boycott Singapore
  • Christian Science and Drugs
  • Christian Science Rehab
  • Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition
  • Drug War Uber Alles
  • Even Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug War
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client
  • Our Short-Sighted Fears about Long-Term Drug Use
  • PROTEST DRUG TESTING NOW!
  • The Christian Science SWAT Teams of the Drug War
  • The Drug War = Christian Science
  • What You Can Do
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
  • Why the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.

    Katie MacBride's one-sided attack on MAPS reminds me of why I got into an argument with Vincent Rado. Yes, psychedelic hype can go too far, but let's solve the huge problem first by ending the drug war!!!

    In 1886, coca enthusiast JJ Tschudi referred to prohibitionists as 'kickers.' He wrote: "If we were to listen to these kickers, most of us would die of hunger, for the reason that nearly everything we eat or drink has fallen under their ban."

    We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!

    Drug prohibition represents the biggest power grab by government in human history. It is the state control of pain relief and mental states.

    Healthline posted an article in 2021 about the benefits of getting off of antidepressants. They did not even mention the biggest benefit: NO LONGER BEING AN ETERNAL PATIENT -- no longer being a child in the eyes of an all-knowing healthcare system.

    The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?

    The line drawn between recreational and medical use is wishful thinking on the part of drug warriors. Recreation, according to Webster's, is "refreshment or diversion," and both have positive knock-on effects in the lives of real people.

    Had the FDA been around in the Indus Valley 3,500 years ago, there would be no Hindu religion today, because they would have found some potential problem with the use of soma.

    That's the problem with prohibition. It is not ultimately a health question but a question about priorities and sensibilities -- and those topics are open to lively debate and should not be the province of science, especially when natural law itself says mother nature is ours.


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






    I hope to use cocaine in 2025
    Oregon's Incoherent Drug Policy


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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