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The Origins of Modern Psychiatry

How to create a billion-dollar industry in three easy steps

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

December 5, 2022



How to create a billion-dollar industry in three easy steps:



  1. Ban laudanum and all other drugs with which human beings have ever or could ever 'self-medicate'1

  2. List all of the psychological problems that result from this ban as discrete illnesses in a Diagnostic Statistical Manual

  3. Treat these illnesses with expensive and inadequate medicines, preferably those that cause chemical dependency




Congratulations. You have created a new industry. It's called psychiatry!



Follow-up steps:


  1. Tell the world that drugs not prescribed by psychiatrists are just "crutches."

  2. Teach the world that "self-medicating" is the worst possible medical sin.

  3. If someone uses non-psychiatric drugs, tell them that they are doing so to run away from hidden pain.

  4. Tell troublesome patients that they have a medical duty to keep taking their "meds"




Note that the preceding formulas can also help you keep the citizen's mind off of social problems by blaming all such problems on "drugs." No more need to invest in pesky programs like education and inner-city infrastructure. Just invoke the eternal problem of "drugs" and you can jail the adults whom you failed to properly educate as kids, thereby reaping the rewards of your racism without being held accountable for it.

Prohibition yanked laudanum from our medicine cabinets, ostensibly to prevent excess drug use. And where has that gotten us today? 80 million Americans (1 in every 4) now take psychiatric drugs every day of their life. (source: Citizens Commission on Human Rights International)




Editor's Comments:

May 23, 2025

female editor holding pencil


Brian is painting in broad strokes here in order to inspire discussion. He actually thinks psychiatrists are great -- to the extent that they are empathic. But he feels that they are caught up in a behaviorist field that downplays the importance of common-sense psychology. If this were not the case, then psychiatrists would be shouting from the rooftops on behalf of their clients' right to use the many godsend medicines that have been outlawed wholesale by drug prohibition. Instead, most psychiatrists speak of their arsenal of materialist medicines as if they were good in and of themselves. This is like a chef working in a world in which the government has outlawed all meals except for clam chowder. The chef insists on the endless health benefits of his clam chowder, never mentioning the fact that all alternative meals have been outlawed. The chef may even claim that his soup is the best meal in the world. And why not? All the other meals have been outlawed so there is no opportunity for anyone to prove that the chef is wrong.

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: Restoring our Right to Self-Medication: how drug warriors work together with the medical establishment to prevent us from taking care of our own health (up)







    Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."

    SSRIs are created based on the materialist notion that cures should be found under a microscope. That's why science is so slow in acknowledging the benefit of plant medicines. Anyone who chooses SSRIs over drugs like San Pedro cactus is simply uninformed.

    When folks die in horse-related accidents, we need to be asking: who sold the victim the horse? We've got to crack down on folks who peddle this junk -- and ban books like Black Beauty that glamorize horse use.

    The scheduling system is a huge lie designed to give an aura of "science" to America's colonialist disdain for indigenous medicines, from opium, to coca, to shrooms.

    We drastically limit drug choices, we refuse to teach safe use, and then we discover there's a gene to explain why some people have trouble with drugs. Science loves to find simple solutions to complex problems.

    The Hindu religion was created thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. It is therefore a crime against religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate.

    According to Donald Trump's view of life, Jesus Christ was a chump. We should hate our enemies, not love them.

    Drug War propaganda is all about convincing us that we will never be able to use drugs wisely. But the drug warriors are not taking any chances: they're doing all they can to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx

    Oregon has decided to go back to the braindead plan of treating substance use as a police matter. Might as well arrest people at home since America has already spread their drug-hating Christian Science religion all over the world.


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






    Blaming Drugs for Nazi Germany
    Drug Use as Self-Medication


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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