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The New Age of Pharmacological Serfdom

how drug prohibition has turned 1 in 4 American women into patients for life

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





August 28, 2025



Imagine that you were given a drug that you cannot seem to kick -- thanks in part to the outlawing of all practical alternatives for the drug in question. Then, when you complained to your dealer, you were told that it was your medical duty to remain on that drug for a lifetime. Then, when you tried to complain about this injustice in a public forum, you were accused of encouraging risky medical behavior. After all, you are told, your complaints could cause other people to attempt the nearly impossible task of getting off the one single approved drug, which could, in turn, cause them to commit suicide.

This is precisely the situation that I find myself in when it comes to antidepressants. They have turned me into a ward of the healthcare state and I am told that it is morally wrong for me to even complain about this fact!

Thus we see how thoroughly the modern capitalist system has leveraged propaganda and product branding (not to mention self-interested choplogic) to create a world that is completely inimical to our freedom to take care of our own health. Completely. The psychiatric establishment first kicks you down by rendering you dependent upon them for life -- and then they kick you when you're down by telling you that you must not even complain about this disempowering status quo.

I do not say that this is conscious evil on anyone's part, but rather that this new world of pharmacological serfdom in which we live is a natural result of drug prohibition in a capitalist society. Such a drugs policy gives a monopoly to Big Pharma on creating mind and mood medicine, and such businesses will naturally seek to create drugs that will guarantee them patients for life. Meanwhile, the medical establishment profits enormously by claiming expertise on mind and mood conditions. Thus they set themselves up as experts on solving all the problems that they themselves have created by outlawing godsends like opium and coca.

But guess what is really amazing? What's really amazing is the fact that I am the only one complaining about this hateful status quo. Sure, you can find people bemoaning the psychiatric pill mill and you can find them bemoaning drug prohibition -- but no one connects the dots between these two injustices. No one shows how drug prohibition has created far, far more chemical dependency than ever existed before the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act. One in four American women take a Big Pharma drug every day of their life1, which is more than twice the number of Americans who used opium regularly when it was still legal in America2.

Prior to drug prohibition, one could use a variety of drugs -- including various formulations of opium and coca -- to treat problems symptomatically, from sleeplessness to anxiety to intolerable grief. After prohibition, the self-interested medical establishment told us that all such problems were discrete pathologies and that only medical professionals could "cure" them. We were fed the philosophically challenged lie that there is a "real" materialist cure for psychological problems and that any other approach was just "treating the symptoms."

And so we created the kinds of "meds" that have turned one in four American women into patients for life, a fact which, in a sane world, would be seen as nothing less than the greatest pharmacological dystopia of all time -- but which in this age of materialist triumphalism is actually considered a medical utopia. The pill mill is indeed a utopia, but not for "patients." It is a utopia for pharmaceutical companies and psychiatrists, who have been guaranteed patients for life thanks to drug prohibition.

We should never try to "cure" conditions like human sadness once and for all. We should treat them in such a way as to help create virtuous circles in life that can promote healthy behavior. Meanwhile, all drugs that inspire and elate have potential common-sense uses as antidepressants. But science is blind to common sense in the age of materialism and behaviorism. When it comes to drug efficacy, we ignore all anecdote, all history and all common sense, insisting instead that drug use must be justified under a microscope with reference to chemical pathways.

But the fact that drugs have common-sense positive uses for human beings is actually just a psychological corollary of phenomenology, according to which experience matters.

Only a purblind materialist can think of sadness as an illness.

But we should never try to "cure" an illness that we cannot even define. What is human sadness, anxiety and angst? Human sadness should be "treated," not cured. Indeed, look what happened when we try to "cure" human sadness with miracle pills: we created the greatest mass pharmacological dystopia of all times, a real-world Stepford Wives.

How did we arrive at this pass? Because the reductive approach of modern materialism renders our doctors blind to all obvious benefits of drugs and causes them to look for drug efficacy under a microscope.

But there can never be a "cure" for the human condition that we call "depression" any more than there can be a "cure" for life itself (other than death, of course). This is because depression is more than what meets the eye of the behaviorist. Depression is felt and lived by people in ways that materialist doctors cannot understand. The precise nature of an appropriate "cure" for any given depression -- were such a cure conceivable -- would depend entirely on the individual: their goals in life, their risk tolerance, their biochemistry, their genetics, their psycho-social upbringing, and so forth.

But surely it is obvious to everyone who thinks that we should not try to "cure" human sadness. We should have left well enough alone and let people treat their own psychological issues as they saw fit, when they saw fit. In a hysteria-fueled effort to save them from themselves, we have created the greatest mass-dependency of all time. And we have so normalized this disempowering policy that we are told it we are not even supposed to complain about it.

In the future, when sociologists wish to demonstrate the power of propaganda and fearmongering and group-think and crowd delusion -- not to mention the mind-closing power of economic self-interest -- they will point to America's disastrous policy of drug prohibition.

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths




In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.

This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just their way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.

This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.

How do I know this?

Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.

More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of Drug War propaganda to the true evil that it causes?

This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."

  • Addicted to Addiction
  • Addicted to Ignorance
  • Addiction
  • After the Drug War
  • After the Drug War part 2
  • Another Cry in the Wilderness
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant
  • Case Studies in Wise Drug Use
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Declaration of Independence from the War on Drugs
  • Drug Use as Self-Medication
  • Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy
  • Ego Transcendence Made Easy
  • Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client
  • Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War
  • Heroin versus Alcohol
  • How Cocaine could have helped me
  • How drug prohibition destroys the lives of the depressed
  • How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Blinds us to Godsend Medicine
  • How the Drug War is a War on Creativity
  • How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse
  • How The Drug War Killed Andy Gibb
  • How the Drug War Punishes the Elderly
  • How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the War on Drugs
  • How to Unite Drug War Opponents of all Ethnicities
  • Hypocritical America Embraces Drug War Fascism
  • In Praise of Doctor Feelgood
  • In Praise of Drug Dealers
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy
  • Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion
  • Notes about the Madness of Drug Prohibition
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart
  • Open Letter to Erowid
  • Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Pihkal 2.0
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism
  • Science is not free in the age of the Drug War
  • Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms
  • Someone you love is suffering unnecessarily because of the War on Drugs
  • Thank God for Erowid
  • Thank God for Soul Quest
  • THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG
  • The Drug War and Armageddon
  • The Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time
  • The Mother of all Western Biases
  • The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • The New Age of Pharmacological Serfdom
  • The Origins of Modern Psychiatry
  • The Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression
  • What Jim Hogshire Got Wrong about Drugs
  • Why America's Mental Healthcare System is Insane
  • Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs


    • Notes:

    1: Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle (up)
    2: Opium for the Masses: Harvesting Nature's Best Pain Medication (up)







    Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.

    The drug war is being used as a wrecking ball to destroy democratic freedoms. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and freedom of religion and given the police the right to confiscate the property of peaceful and productive citizens.

    Michael Pollan is the Leona Helmsley of the Drug War. He uses outlawed drugs freely while failing to support the re-legalization of Mother Nature. Drug laws are apparently for the little people.

    We're living in a sci-fi dystopia called "Fahrenheit 452", in which the police burn thought-expanding plants instead of thought-expanding books.

    The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.

    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.

    Until prohibition ends, rehab is all about enforcing a Christian Science attitude toward psychoactive medicines (with the occasional hypocritical exception of Big Pharma meds).

    "There has been so much delirious nonsense written about drugs that sane men may well despair of seeing the light." -- Aleister Crowley, from "Essays on Intoxication"

    That's why I created the satirical Partnership for a Death Free America. It demonstrates clearly that drug warriors aren't worried about our health, otherwise they'd outlaw shopping carts, etc. The question then becomes: what are they REALLY afraid of? Answer: Free thinkers.

    Trump's lies about America's voting process are typical NAZI and DRUG WAR strategy: raise mendacious doubts about whatever you want to destroy and keep repeating them. It's what Joseph Goebbels called "The Big Lie."


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






    Why Drug Prohibition is a Crime against Humanity
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    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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