Doctors do NOT know best when it comes to psychoactive drugs
an open letter to Mad in America after they censored my life story in fealty to the drug-war ideology of substance demonization
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 19, 2025
received one of the biggest shocks of my life after I submitted my autobiography to Mad in America, the organization created by author Robert Whitaker to question the widespread use of antidepressants. The group solicits personal stories from pill-dependent Americans describing how they are personally dealing with the downsides of their "meds." As a pill jockey myself, I had written my own story for them a few months ago under the naïve belief that what I wrote could not be "wrong" since I was telling my own story. It would only be "wrong" if I were lying about my life, right? But I soon discovered that there were true life stories that simply cannot get published in the age of the Drug War. For the shock to which I refer consisted of the fact that the organization refused to publish my story. They claimed that my merely factual account of using mushrooms to fight depression might be interpreted by their readers as medical advice, and only doctors can give such advice. So my autobiography had to be excised from history to protect the apparently gullible readership of Mad in America.
The scary thing is that I myself might have agreed with this assessment 30 years ago, since I have been subject to drug-war brainwashing since grade school, just like the editors at Mad in America. I too had grown up in a world in which the media was determined to "protect" Americans from any positive depictions of drug use.
Fortunately, however, I had begun studying the Drug War from a philosophical angle back in 2019 and this enabled me to see that the censorship to which I was being subjected was based on unspoken assumptions that did not stand up to logical scrutiny.
These assumptions include 1) the idea that ignorance is the best policy when it comes to drugs, and 2) the idea that Americans will always be children when it comes to drugs.
But the real problem goes deeper. It is the demonstrably false idea that doctors know best when it comes to psychoactive medicine. To the contrary, depression is a problem today precisely BECAUSE doctors are considered the authorities on psychoactive medicine. Doctors today operate according to the inhumane principles of Behaviorism, which persuades them to ignore anecdote, history and common sense when it comes to mood medicine and to focus instead on brain chemistry and genetics. This is why materialists like Dr. Robert Glatter can write stories in national magazines questioning the power of laughing gas to help the depressed1. The doctor is unimpressed by the fact that users laugh - and that they look forward to that laughter, thus giving them the psycho-physical benefits of anticipation. As a behaviorist, he wants to know if laughing gas "really" works. In other words, he is on a metaphysical quest to find brain chemistry that will let him sign off on what even a grade-schooler already knows: that happiness is happiness and that occasional use of laughing gas is better than suicide. In a sane world, there would be laughing-gas kits for the suicidal, just as we have epi pens for those with severe allergies. But our behaviorist researchers are the slow kids in the class: they won't be convinced of efficacy until they can demonstrate it on an Excel chart.
The fact is that these doctors do NOT know best. In fact, today's doctors are over 50 years behind the curve when it comes to common sense, at least when it comes to the mental states and the desire for human self-actualization. Nor is it certain that they will ever catch up given the government's continued efforts to promote fear over education. Besides, let's be "real," as the kids say. I myself am the expert when it comes to what help I need, psychosocially speaking: me, myself and I, based on my own beliefs, my own goals in life and my own risk tolerance. Materialist doctors have no expertise in understanding my psychological world, let alone my spiritual world, they have no expertise in understanding my hopes and dreams: indeed, they have no interest in such things, at least to the extent that they approach the subject from a behaviorist viewpoint. I know that the use of laughing gas would cheer me up and that I could use it strategically to combat my depression. I know this. I do not need a medical doctor to sign off on that common-sense understanding, least of all one who is dogmatically obliged to ignore my feelings on the matter in favor of looking at my brain chemistry under a microscope.
This is not to say that advice is not important, only that such advice should be pertinent and not biased by scientific or political prejudices. I do want to know about safe use and potential downsides, but I do not want to consult a doctor who will pretend that the only factors in a cost/benefit analysis of such drug use should be the downsides alone. I want a doctor who understands the upsides of drug use and the imperative nature of a human being's desire for self-actualization in this life, a desire whose primacy for many of us renders certain risks not only acceptable but mandatory. In an ideal world, a doctor/shaman of this kind could help a user to achieve a desired state of mind and mood in the safest way possible and without creating undesired dependency. (To be honest, what I REALLY want is for all doctors to get the hell out of the way and let me use the medicines that will work for me, based on experience and the input of real users of such substances. Believe it or not, I am a grown adult, after all!)
But today's doctors are biased against common sense thanks to their belief in the philosophy of behaviorism, according to which the patient's biochemistry is more important than their feelings. Even if the doctors are able to transcend their political and scientific biases, they know that they risk legal and vocational repercussions by talking honestly about drugs. In other words, today's doctors could not be the authorities on psychoactive medicines even if they WANTED to be, so the advice that you should "see your doctor" on such topics is a joke. Or rather, it's like an invitation to a potluck dinner: you'll just have to wait and see if the doctor in question can rise above his or her legal and scientistic scruples on the subject of drug use to give you relevant advice. If the medicine concerned is illegal, however, chances are that you yourself know more about it than your doctor, who, as noted above, is over 50 years behind the times when it comes to understanding what really works for real people, psychoactively speaking.
And so we see that this deference for the advice of medical doctors is just an excuse on the part of publishers to censor free speech about drugs. Their assumption-riddled antipathy to such free speech is the hidden reason why we never read positive accounts of coca use, or opium use, or MDMA use in America, except in niche magazines. Thus publishers are a big part of the problem when it comes to promulgating the anti-democratic tendencies of the War on Drugs. Our publishers seem to have been charged with the task of ending free speech in America in the interest of health, just as businesses use drug testing to destroy the 4th amendment under the same pretext. This is all based on the demonstrably false idea that drug use is riskier than every other activity on the globe. The truth, however, is far otherwise, especially considering the fact that alcohol is responsible for 178,000 deaths per year in America alone2. The fact is that MOST people use psychoactive substances wisely, as Carl Hart makes clear in his ground-breaking book "Drug Use for Grown-Ups3." As for the downsides of drug use, which our media cannot seem to publicize enough, most of them can be traced to the policy of prohibition itself, which fails to regulate product and teach safe use. Young people were not dying on the streets when opiates were legal in America; it took prohibition to accomplish that.
Yes, users should try to become informed about psychoactive substances: but this is the whole point: the Drug War is based on the idea that Americans should NOT be educated about drugs, that they should fear them instead. This renders all government sites about drugs suspicious in the eyes of real-life users since such resources exude a Christian Science focus on the downsides of drugs, meanwhile completely ignoring the glaringly obvious reasons for drug use based on their commitment to the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism. This emphasis is purposeful. It exists for the same reason that we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse and not a National Institute on Drug Use. The party line is that there are no positive uses for drugs, a claim that denies anecdote, history and common sense. There should be a reliable one-stop source for unbiased information about the pros and cons of the use of specific drugs in the real world, but no such source exists. The Erowid website4 is a step in the right direction of providing such real-world information, but it is filled with too much highly specific information to be of much practical use, at least for beginners; what's lacking is a readily available source that summarizes the understanding of drugs from multiple angles, a source without any ideological hatchet to grind, neither for the drug-hating principles of Christian Science nor for the psychologically purblind philosophy of Behaviorism.
Meanwhile, it cannot be said enough, especially since it never has been said before: American publishers are censoring speech in the age of the Drug War on the demonstrably false grounds that materialist doctors are the authorities when it comes to psychoactive medicines, that "doctors know best." This is laughably false when it comes to psychoactive medicine. But even if this were true, it would still be anti-democratic for publishers to censor an autobiography based on the merely factual information that it contains. Would Mad in America censor a biography of Ben Franklin that mentioned his opium use? They would if they were consistent with their Drug War-inspired principles. Indeed, almost all school kids receive only censored biographical information about that American hero, for fear that they might think inconvenient thoughts about the erstwhile panacea known as opium. This is because the fearmongering of the Drug Warriors has convinced publishers that fighting drugs is more important than mere democratic values like freedom of academia and freedom of speech.
I offered to write an essay on this topic, by the way, in place of my personal story which was declined by MIA, an essay about the links between the Drug War and censorship and the psychiatric pill mill: you know, things of great relevance to the supposedly truth-seeking quest of Richard Whitaker. But Mad in America ignored the offer. Like almost every other publisher in America, they would prefer to go on pretending that the Drug War does not exist and so has no effect on the real world, this despite the fact that the antidepressant dystopia about which their founder writes would not exist had the Drug War not handed Big Pharma a monopoly on mind and mood medicine. And what about the dependence-causing nature of such drugs of which the author rightly makes so much? It is a problem that could be easily overcome by the psychologically obvious strategy of "fighting drugs with drugs," were such a strategy not rendered illegal (indeed unthinkable) by the War on Drugs, which prioritizes fear over common sense. In other words, "Halloo, Richard! The Drug War is incredibly relevant to your subject of choice!"
Amazingly, this argument goes nowhere. MIA is clearly determined not to "go there."
This is why I say that, in writing about antidepressants, Robert Whitaker is like a detective who marks his job "case closed" just as he is zeroing in on the real villain of the piece: namely, the Drug War and its enormously counterproductive policy of drug criminalization and enforced ignorance, a social policy that leads to the end of free speech and to dogmatic blindness to all things obvious.
Drug War censorship is supported by our "science" magazines, which pretend that outlawed drugs do not exist, and so write what amount to lies about the supposed intransigence of things like depression and anxiety.
The Drug War is a religion. The "addict" is a sinner who has to come home to the true faith of Christian Science. In reality, neither physical nor psychological addiction need be a problem if all drugs were legal and we used them creatively to counter problematic use.
The Drug War is the ultimate example of strategic fearmongering by self-interested politicians.
But that's the whole problem with Robert Whitaker's otherwise wonderful critique of Big Pharma. Like almost all non-fiction authors today, he reckons without the drug war, which gave Big Pharma a monopoly in the first place.
We need to push back against the very idea that the FDA is qualified to tell us what works when it comes to psychoactive medicines. Users know these things work. That's what counts. The rest is academic foot dragging.
Drug warriors do not want to end "addiction": it's their golden goose. They use the threat of addiction to scare us into giving up our democratic freedoms, like that once supplied by the 4th amendment.
Science knows nothing of the human spirit and of the hopes and dreams of humankind. Science cannot tell us whether a given drug risk is worthwhile given the human need for creativity and passion in their life. Science has no expertise in making such philosophical judgements.
The Drug War is the legally enforced triumph of human idiocy. We have rigged the deck so that our dunces can be right. The Drug War is a superstition. Indeed, it is THE modern superstition.
The drug war controls the very way that we are allowed to see the world. The Drug War is thus a meta-injustice, not just a handful of bad legal statutes.
I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Doctors do NOT know best when it comes to psychoactive drugs: an open letter to Mad in America after they censored my life story in fealty to the drug-war ideology of substance demonization, published on February 19, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
received one of the biggest shocks of my life after I submitted my autobiography to Mad in America, the organization created by author Robert Whitaker to question the widespread use of antidepressants. The group solicits personal stories from pill-dependent Americans describing how they are personally dealing with the downsides of their "meds." As a pill jockey myself, I had written my own story for them a few months ago under the naïve belief that what I wrote could not be "wrong" since I was telling my own story. It would only be "wrong" if I were lying about my life, right? But I soon discovered that there were true life stories that simply cannot get published in the age of the Drug War. For the shock to which I refer consisted of the fact that the organization refused to publish my story. They claimed that my merely factual account of using mushrooms to fight depression might be interpreted by their readers as medical advice, and only doctors can give such advice. So my autobiography had to be excised from history to protect the apparently gullible readership of Mad in America.
You have been reading an article entitled, Doctors do NOT know best when it comes to psychoactive drugs: an open letter to Mad in America after they censored my life story in fealty to the drug-war ideology of substance demonization, published on February 19, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
