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How Drug Prohibition turns Americans into patients for life
How Drug Prohibition turns Americans into patients for life
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 29, 2025
As I struggle to get off of Effexor 1 , I find my philosophical attacks on drug prohibition are beginning to read like a diary. But then how could this be otherwise? The difficulties that I am encountering with Effexor are both my life story and the proof of my ongoing thesis that the Drug War is an attack upon our most basic rights to take care of our own health as we see fit. I say this because I could end my dependence on Effexor in a trice if I had access to all godsend psychoactive medicines. In a trice. We need no lab studies to prove this. Indeed, various common-sense uses of just two natural substances -- coca and opium -- could do the job in preventing recidivism when used wisely by an educated grown-up. This is just psychological common sense, or at least it used to be before materialists embraced the passion-scorning ideology of the behaviorism of JB Watson 2 . And so the materialist medical establishment gaslights us3 into believing that glaringly obvious drug benefits are somehow not benefits at all.
Let me remind the reader here that Effexor can be viewed in two lights. If we assume that outlawed substances do not exist, then drugs like Effexor might be seen as the only game in town for the severely depressed. This is the ostrich-like view that psychiatry takes of the matter: they have their heads hidden in the sand, pretending that drug prohibition does not exist and therefore has no consequences in the real world. But prescribing Effexor is offensive in the age of drug prohibition. Why? Because Effexor turns the user into a ward of the healthcare state and the downsides of withdrawal are insidious and horrendous, at least in an age when we have outlawed all substances that could be used intermittently to palliate those downsides. The psychiatric defenders of Effexor ignore these excruciating downsides by insisting that Effexor must be used for a lifetime. (How convenient is that!) But if this is true, then it begs the question: why will I be arrested for the nightly smoking of opium 4 -- a natural substance created by Mother Nature -- and yet I will be considered a good patient if I swallow a Big Pharma 56 med every day of my life?
This situation reeks of self-interested hypocrisy. It tells us all we need to know about the deep evil of outlawing drug choice.
When the psychiatrist writes about heroin7, dependency is characterized as enslavement. When the psychiatrist writes about Effexor, suddenly dependency is characterized as a public duty. These are not medical judgements, they are rather subjective judgements about the nature of what philosophers call "the good life."
Something is horribly wrong with this picture. But we can see what is going on merely by asking the time-honored question 'Cui bono?' Who is benefitting from this illogical, anti-patient status quo?
ANSWER: Not the patients. The patients have been infantilized8, deprived of their rights to take care of their OWN health, not to mention their most basic of all rights: their rights to the bounty of Mother Nature. It is the healthcare establishment that profits. It is the pharmaceutical industry that profits.
This is why I say that we have to claw back our right to treat our own mental and emotional health from self-interested materialist doctors and chemists. They will fight us every step of the way, of course, typically in a pedantic attitude of professional disdain and fearmongering, because our disempowerment is their bread and butter, it is the presupposition upon which their very profession relies, thanks to which they can attend ritzy conferences in Reno and purchase homes in the Hamptons. They are sponging off of their patients. It might, of course, be asked, "What else can they do in the age of drug prohibition?" But the answer is obvious: they should protest drug prohibition loudly and clearly, on their own and as an industry, in the name of their patient's most fundamental rights to deal with their own health concerns as they see fit. Until they start doing so, the modern psychiatrist is in tacit cahoots with this enormously disempowering status quo. He or she is a Drug War collaborator.
The amazing thing is, almost no one argues against the Drug War from the patient's point of view. This is because we have been taught that we are children when it comes to the subject of mind and mood and that materialist doctors are the experts as to our thoughts and feelings. And it's no wonder that we are encouraged to be silent. The minute we look at drug prohibition from the point of view of healthcare rights, it reveals itself to be a hugely disempowering protocol. We see that the government does not want to keep us off drugs; rather, they wish to make sure that we become lifetime users of the "right" kinds of drugs, those that help the bottom line of conglomerate corporations: drugs like antidepressants 9, alcohol and caffeine.
And what is the rationale behind this disempowering protocol?
Drug prohibition is based on the following algorithm: namely, that if a drug can be misused, even in theory, by a white American young person whom we refuse to educate about drugs, then that drug must not be used by anybody for any reason ever. This is an anti-scientific viewpoint. It is anti-progress. If we applied that standard to aspirin, the drug would be removed from our pharmacy shelves. Aspirin kills over 3,000 people a year in the UK alone.
I can see, however, why there is so little pushback. It is painful for an antidepressant user to recognize the truth. It is so much easier to pretend that he or she is being a good patient -- than to realize that they are being deprived of an immense world of choices in favor of a few drugs that will turn them into wards of the healthcare state. That realization involves waking up to the world as it truly is -- and the world is not a pretty sight when it comes to American drug policy. It is a world in which we have used drug prohibition to destroy inner cities, destroy American freedoms, and hand elections to fascists by throwing minorities in jail in record numbers, using drug law that was ultimately written for that very purpose. And we do this while ignoring all stakeholders in the drug debate except for the white American young people whom we refuse to educate about safe, wise and beneficial drug use -- we do this by disempowering Americans -- and the world -- when it comes to caring for their own mental and emotional health.
The chronically depressed are just one of the many groups whose needs are completely ignored when fearmongering politicians meet in Washington to beat their chests and crack down on minorities in the name of fighting their own politically created scapegoat called "drugs."
The International Observer says the "core issues" causing Mexican drug violence are: "corruption, inequality, and the demand for narcotics in the U.S." Wrong, wrong, wrong. The core issue is DRUG PROHIBITION.
The Partnership for a Death Free America is launching a campaign to celebrate the 50th year of Richard Nixon's War on Drugs. We need to give credit where credit's due for the mass arrest of minorities, the inner city gun violence and the civil wars that it's generated overseas.
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
Racist drug warriors make cities dangerous with drug prohibition -- then they use that danger as an excuse to send in the National Guard.
Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.
Uruguay wants to re-legalize psilocybin mushrooms -- but only for use in a psychiatrist's office. So let me get this straight: psychiatrists are the new privileged shaman? It's a mushroom, for God's sake. Just re-legalize the damn thing and stop treating us like children.
Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.
It is actually illegal to be a Ben Franklin in 21st century America. To put this another way: we outlaw far more than drugs when we outlaw mind and mood medicine.
Drug prohibition is superstitious idiocy.
It is based on the following crazy idea:
that a substance that can be misused by a white young person at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.
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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