Cultural Appropriation with a Body Count

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Cultural Appropriation with a Body Count

How online entrepreneurs set themselves up as the experts on what the depressed need in the age of drug prohibition

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 27, 2026

I fear that the charge of "cultural appropriation" gets invoked too easily when it comes to artistic creation. There is nothing wrong with writing about a group to which one does not belong. There are both upsides and downsides to being an outsider, just as there are upsides and downsides to being an insider. Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" was written by a white American Jew. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was written by a white female northerner. And the most popular and informative book about Americans as a people was written by a Frenchman. True cultural appropriation, for me, is just a subset, or instance, of a larger literary sin known as "writing about something that one knows nothing about," especially when one's goal in doing so is to promote their own reputation as a writer and/or to make money. I don't say, then, that cultural appropriation does not exist, merely that the term should be used carefully lest we discourage well-meaning people in their attempt to make valid and useful points merely because they do not belong to the group about which they are writing.

With this qualification in mind, I would like to complain this morning about a kind of cultural appropriation that I am the very first to notice. (I find that I'm racking up a lot of "firsts" as a drug-war philosopher simply because I'm willing to speak up on those subjects about which my tenured colleagues do not dare say a word.) I am referring to the as-yet unacknowledged culture of the millions of med-dependent patients in America, who, like myself, have been turned into wards of the healthcare state by drug prohibition. Our story and our plight has been co-opted by non-profit agencies and entrepreneurs who claim to be the experts on what we are going through in life while yet ignoring the gorilla in the room: the fact that we would not be suffering at all were it not for the drug prohibition which these very agencies and entrepreneurs are completely ignoring! Groups like Right to Heal, Surviving Antidepressants, and Mad in America will provide us online sandboxes in which we can complain about our depressed status quo, but these sites will never allow us to make the connection between drug prohibition and our disempowerment, certainly not in any forceful way. These sites have to appeal to a mainstream audience, after all, in order to raise operating funds and/or push product, like herbal aids and meditation courses and virtual therapy sessions: in other words, all sorts of Christian Science "cures" for depression.

These sites want to teach the depressed but they do not want to learn from them.

This is real cultural appropriation. Robert Whitaker's depression-free staff at Mad in America sets themself up as the experts in their privileged intellectual substacks while the depressed themselves get to chat about their woes in a free-for-all sandbox, and will even be censored there if they so much as give the impression that outlawed drugs could be of use to them. To say such things is to give medical advice, after all, don't you see? And so we are told they we must visit doctors for our problems, the very doctors who are treating us with the dependence-causing meds that we came to the site to complain about! These sites want to teach the depressed, but they do not want to learn from them. If they did, they would have a person like myself in their intellectual substack who represented the interests of the depressed as a depressed person. For you see, here is a case where the biography of the writer really matters enormously: the case where their point of view is not even being represented, but rather distorted by those who do not feel the downsides of policy, as we do, in their daily lives. Here is a case of real cultural appropriation.

Whitaker's site is all about antidepressant downsides, and yet he tells me that I have no standing after taking such "meds" for over 45 years, after living on the receiving end of drug policy for an entire lifetime now. If he were to ask me, I would say that he is the one who has no standing on the subject of depression. Granted, he wrote some excellent books about the bogus scientific claims of pharmaceutical companies viz. antidepressants, but that does not make him an expert on depression. Nor does it make him a philosopher. In my view, Robert is an excellent reporter but a very poor philosopher. He seems to see no connection between assisted suicide for the depressed and drug prohibition, a connection that would be clear to any philosopher, assuming that they were familiar with the state of the art in ethnobotany and pharmacology. They would know that there exist drugs that can inspire and elate, and that it is therefore wrong to discuss suicide for the depressed without discussing the outlawing of such substances. Apparently that common-sense fact has to be established by a biochemical determinist before it will register for the mainstream with its mania for medicalization and the professionalization of the subject of human feelings.

And so depressed westerners like Claire Brosseau must die because I have no standing. We must wait for an academic to protest drug prohibition on behalf of the depressed -- which is kind of like waiting for a Maga supporter to write a position paper welcoming the LGBTQ community into the fold. It's certainly not going to happen in time to keep Claire from unnecessarily exercising her right to die as a Canadian, in spite of the fact that there are drugs that could cheer her up in a trice. This is hardcore cultural appropriation for the depressed community in North America. This is cultural appropriation with a body count. A community of self-styled "experts" has set themselves up online to "teach" us what we need; it is our job to sit back and learn from our betters, as they gaslight us about the common-sense fix to our whole problem: the eradication of the drug prohibition which so clearly outlaws our right to heal. We may give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are not writing for personal gain, but they are still guilty of cultural appropriation when they write as outsiders about what the depressed community needs, while ignoring the input from one of that community's most senior members, namely myself. Like society as a whole, such groups are just telling myself and the rest of the depressed to "shut up and take your meds."

Key Takeaways:

Cultural appropriation occurs when one writes about something that they know nothing about.
The story of the depressed has been co-opted by entrepreneurs claiming to be the experts on what's best for us.
Online sites want to teach the depressed, not learn from them.
It is wrong to discuss assisted suicide for the depressed without discussing drug prohibition.
The experts gaslight the depressed, ignoring the role of drug prohibition in outlawing mood-elevating medicines.

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own depression by making opium and cocaine illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.

Harm Reduction is not enough. We need Benefit Production as well. The autistic should be able to use compassion-enhancing drugs; dementia patients should be able to use drugs that speed up and sharpen mental processes.

The FDA uses reductive materialism to justify and normalize the views of Cortes and Pizarro with respect to entheogenic medicine.

It is consciousness which, via perception, shapes the universe into palpable forms. Otherwise it's just a chaos of particles. The very fact that you can refer to "the sun" shows that your senses have parsed the raw data into a specific meaning. "We" make this universe.

Despite the 50 year-long war on drugs, the global cocaine supply has grown by 400%. --Elma Mrkonjic

Drug warriors have taught us that honesty about drugs encourages drug use. Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.

Heroin versus Antidepressants https://abolishthedea.com/heroin_versus_antidepressants.php

DEA Stormtroopers should be held responsible for destroying American Democracy. Abolish the American Gestapo.

Being a lifetime patient is not the issue: that could make perfect sense in certain cases. But if I am to be "using" for life, I demand the drug of MY CHOICE, not that of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry, who are dogmatically deaf to the benefits of hated substances.

No substance is bad in and of itself. Fentanyl has positive uses, at specific doses, for specific people, in specific situations. But the drug war votes substance up or down. That is hugely anti-scientific and it blocks human progress.

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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Cultural Appropriation with a Body Count

How online entrepreneurs set themselves up as the experts on what the depressed need in the age of drug prohibition

Key Takeaways:

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend