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How drug prohibition turns Americans into children when it comes to healthcare

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 10, 2025



Drug policy has turned Americans into children. It deprives them of their time-honored right to take care of their own health. And this infantilization affects users of all controlled substances, not just illegal ones.

Take me, for instance. I am a 67-year-old who has been on the Big Pharma antidepressant called Effexor 1 for decades, and yet I am still required to visit the doctor every three months of my life in order to get refills. I am not even trusted to buy the drug without medical oversight. It is bad enough that drug prohibitionists gave Big Pharma 2 3 a monopoly on mind and mood medicine, thereby turning me into a patient for life with their dependence-causing "meds" -- but it adds insult to injury when they force me to visit a doctor every three months of my life to get a renewed prescription. They thereby constantly remind me that I am an eternal patient and a ward of the healthcare state. It is complete disempowerment, and yet like so many problems with modern drug policy, I seem to be the only person who is complaining about it.

This is a philosophical conundrum. How is it that Americans tolerate such enormous disempowerment when it comes to healthcare? Americans demand empowerment in all other areas of life: why not when it comes to their healthcare4?

The answer, I contend, is that they have a naive belief that they are receiving science-based healthcare and that their job is therefore simply to obey the doctors. They believe that science has developed proven cures for depression and that it is therefore Ludditism to complain about the status quo.

These contented masses seem to be unaware of the fact that there are plenty of medicines out there that could end depression in a trice -- and without causing a lifelong dependency. The wise intermittent use of a variety of drugs is all that an adult would need to take care of their own psychological health. But then that is the medical establishment's worst nightmare: a world in which human beings are allowed to take care of their own health. And so we are taught that we are children when it comes to psychoactive medicine. We are taught that we can never learn to use drugs wisely and that "doctor knows best" when it comes to mind and mood medicine. Thanks to this patronizing control of psychoactive substances, the medical establishment profits enormously from the disempowerment of Americans with respect to healthcare.

As Thomas Szasz writes:

Because these latter controls are ostensibly based on Science and aim to secure only Health, and because those who are so coerced and colonized often worship the idols of medical and therapeutic scientism as ardently as do the coercers and colonizers, the victims cannot even articulate their predicament and are therefore quite powerless to resist their victimizers.5










Notes for essay entitled How drug prohibition turns Americans into children when it comes to healthcare:

1: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
2: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
3: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
4: How Drug Prohibition has turned academics into children DWP (up)
5: “Ceremonial Chemistry – Syracuse University Press.” 1974. Syr.edu. 2026. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/1114/ceremonial-chemistry/. (up)




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Judging from research articles, they do not even teach the many obvious benefits of drugs in med school.

A company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.

FDA drug approval is a farce when it comes to psychoactive medicine. The FDA ignores all the obvious benefits and pretends that to prove efficacy, they need "scientific" evidence. That's scientism, not science.

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.

There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.

It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.

SWAT raids have increased by 15,000 percent from the late 1970s to today, resulting in 50,000 to 80,000 SWAT raids annually in the US alone. --War On Us

Wade Davis wrote in Rolling Stone that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. SO WHAT?! 178,000 people die from alcohol every year in America alone.

The best harm reduction strategy would be to re-legalize opium and cocaine. We would thereby end depression in America and free Americans from their abject reliance on the healthcare industry, meanwhile ending gang violence and restoring the rule of law in Latin America.

The so-called opiate crisis is really a drug prohibition crisis.


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