Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
an open letter to the Heffter Research Institute
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
December 25, 2019
In the book Psychedelic Medicine, Dr. Richard Louis Miller refers to a lack of support for psychedelic medicines, especially LSD, concluding that there are only a handful of specialists who are pursuing the work and that the public, especially in Britain, are largely indifferent to the whole topic.
In my opinion, this indifference exists only because no one has yet attempted to connect the dots between the outlawing of psychedelic therapy and the current sad state of depression therapy in America, namely that addictive and starkly inadequate solution of Big Pharma known as SSRIs and SNRIs. If this connection were understood by the depressed public, I imagine they would be plenty motivated to support change.
The dots may be connected as follows:
Psychedelic therapy showed great promise for the depressed and it's non-addictive.
The government banned that therapy half a century ago.
As a result, the depressed have been shunted off onto addictive medicines that simply do not work as claimed, drugs that actually create the chemical imbalance that they purport to fix. These ineffective medicines are expensive, must be taken daily and turn the pill-taker into an eternal patient, since they have to visit a psychiatrist every 3 months of their life in order to be catechized about their mental health. This is the exact opposite of an empowering therapy. Speaking personally, I consider it highly demoralizing (a fact that I've never heard psychiatrists recognize, let alone regret).
I personally have been a guinea pig for Big Pharma for the last 50 years, and their nostrums have not worked. Worse yet, they have conduced to anhedonia, a kind of emotional flat-lining - making life bearable, perhaps, but only by removing highs and lows. What's more, my particular "medicine," Effexor 1 , is so addictive (productive of chemical dependence, if you prefer) that my own shrink tells me not to bother trying to get off it! He says that an NIH study shows a 95% recidivism rate 2 for those who try.
I am plenty upset about this. That's why I'm dumbfounded and frustrated to read Miller's no-doubt-correct observation that there is little public interest in changing the status quo. Don't the depressed millions see what's going on? Apparently not. Not yet anyway. And this must change if organizations such as Heffter want to be in the mainstream and reap monetary donations accordingly.
The current tendency of psychedelic advocates (Like Lauren Slater in Blue Dreams) is to write as if psychedelics are just another way to approach the problem of depression and are in no way meant to take the place of Big Pharma 's addictive meds. (Slater is so "soft" on psychiatry's failings that she even supports shock therapy - a vicious therapy that only becomes a default option thanks to America's anti-scientific outlawing of psychoactive plants.)
This failure to "take on" Big Pharma also results in the psychedelic movement "reckoning without its host," at least when it comes to depression therapy. Thus we see that many otherwise exciting clinical trials are completely off-limits to those taking SSRIs and SNRIs. This means that the victims of the Drug War—the vast majority of the depressed—are not even eligible for the cures being brought forward by the psychedelic movement. And yet this same movement wrings its hands about a lack of funding?
How can one expect funding from a demographic for whom one's research is essentially useless? More than 1 in 8 Americans are addicted to SSRIs and SNRIs (1 in 4 women, according to psychiatrist Julie Holland). They are the folks you need to reach, not the lucky few who so far have had little or no contact with such disempowering poisons.
If the psychedelic movement really wants to excite the depressed layperson, they will work to develop a therapy that simultaneously eases depression while weaning a patient off of their SSRI. This would involve, in broad strokes, a ratcheting up of psychedelic doses for the patient as SSRI intake is decreased in proportion. Your researchers already have one guinea pig for use in trialing such a therapy: namely myself.
Creating a successful movement for psychedelic therapy requires creating a movement for the overthrow of the addictive Big Pharma status quo. Until professionals, authors and organizations realize this and change their rhetoric accordingly, a truly motivated fan club of psychedelic therapy will remain limited to the handful of forward-thinking individuals who were cited by Miller in "Psychedelic Medicine."
PS This is essentially the reason why I started my website, AbolishTheDEA.com, to connect the dots between the Drug War and the depression crisis in America. Part of that task is to point out the inconvenient truth that Big Pharma 3 4 's cures - made necessary only thanks to the existence of that Drug War -- are expensive, addictive - and bad for morale, since they turn the depressed into eternal patients.
Notes:
1: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
2: 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)
3: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
4: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.
For most drugs, dependency is a bug. For Big Pharma antidepressants, it is a feature.
If I want to use the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions, fight depression, or follow up on the research of William James into altered states, I should not have to live in fear of the DEA crashing down my door and shouting: "GO! GO! GO!"
Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.
Freud found that cocaine CURED most people's depression and he "got off it" without trouble.
Someone needs to create a group called Drug Warriors Anonymous, a place where Americans can go to discuss their right to mind and mood medicine and to discuss the many ways in which our society trashes godsend medicines.
Assisted suicide cannot be discussed meaningfully without discussing the drug prohibition that renders it necessary in the first place.
In the Atomic Age Declassified, they tell us that we needed hundreds of thermonuclear tests so that scientists could understand the effects. That's science gone mad. Just like today's scientists who need more tests before they can say that laughing gas will help the depressed. Science today is all about ignoring the obvious.
Brits have a right to die, but they do not have the right to use drugs that might make them want to live. Bad policy is indicated by absurd outcomes, and this is but one of the many absurd outcomes that the policy of prohibition foists upon the world.
Rick Strassman isn't sure that DMT should be legal. Really?! Does he not realize how dangerous it is to chemically extract DMT from plants? In the name of safety, prohibitionists have encouraged dangerous ignorance and turned local police into busybody Nazis.
Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us
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Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass
Contact: quass@quass.com
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