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Doctor Feel Bad

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 17, 2022



It's no surprise that "Doctor Feel Good" should be the ultimate put-down in a Drug War society. The Drug War, after all, has at least two major philosophical motivations: 1) the protestant ethic, which questions our right to happiness in this world and views any "immoderate" happiness as suspicious; and 2) the ontology of reductionist science, which places its faith in the quantitative world, from which everything is supposed to "spring," and therefore has no patience with the mere subjective reports of the patient, except insofar as they can be confirmed and, as it were, 'proven' by quantitative measurements (especially of brain chemicals in the case of psychiatry). This is why pundits like Dr. Glatter can write an article for Forbes Magazine entitled "Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment-resistant Depression?" In a sane world, this would be a no-brainer: of course it could help. But Glatter wants to know if it could "really" help based on quantitative analyses that are presumably yet to be performed or even specifically envisioned.

In other words, billions of depressed around the world have to wait for the balm of laughing gas while materialists like Glatter try to wrap their heads around the psychologically obvious: that laughing helps. Even the Reader's Digest has known that for decades, judging from its time-honored motto, "Laughter is the best medicine."

Thus a drug-war society creates its own answer to Doctor Feel Good: namely, Doctor Feel Bad.

Glatter is a Doctor Feel Bad, for starters, in denying lifelong depressives like myself access to a no-brainer treatment like laughing gas 1 .

But Doctor Feel Bads are also present at our bedside for our dying day. Whenever anyone (like Anne Heche, for instance) is "peacefully" taken off life support, Doctor Feel Bad is there to make sure everything goes well -- which is to say horribly for the patient. For instead of giving the patient "an immoderate dose of morphine " and allowing them to drift off painlessly to death, the doctor makes sure that no such help is provided and that we simply "starve the patient out" when it comes to achieving our goal of "giving them peace."

Talk about dedication to the Drug War, we will even enforce its anti-patient ideology on the death beds of our beloved.

Doctor Feel Bad is also present in hospices for children around the world, where countries, under the spell of the Drug War ideology of substance demonization, deny morphine 2 to children, thus forcing them to live in unnecessary pain during the final days of their short lives. (For more about this latter infamy, see
Children of the Drug War.")


The Links Police



Do you know why I stopped you? No? Darn. I can't remember either. Hold on, maybe I've made a note of it in my memo pad. No, seriously, folks. There's more on this here subject of useless doctoring in the age of the Drug War:







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Notes for essay entitled Doctor Feel Bad:

1: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
2: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




When scientists discuss suicide without mentioning the fact that their government has outlawed drugs, it is like scientists discussing deaths from bacterial infection without mentioning the fact that their government has outlawed antibiotics.

Self-medicating has always been the most basic of human rights, until the medical industry demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.

America's "health" system was always screaming at me about the threat of drug dependency. Then what did it do? It put me on the most dependence-causing drugs of all time: SSRIs and SNRIs.

We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.

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.

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!"

How else will they scare us enough to convince us to give up all our freedoms for the purpose of fighting horrible awful evil DRUGS? DRUGS is the sledgehammer with which they are destroying American democracy.

That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.

If politicians wanted to outlaw coffee, a bunch of Kevin Sabets would come forward and start writing books designed to scare us off the drink by cherry-picking negative facts from scientific studies.

If I smoke opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag. If I use Big Pharma "meds" every day of my life, I am a good patient.


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Book Cover

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

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Book Cover

Diary of a Drug Fiend

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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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