How organizations like Mad in America normalize drug prohibition
An open Letter to Robert Whitaker
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 27, 2026
Any regular reader of this site -- all two of them, in fact -- will know that I am constantly complaining about the failure of movers-and-shakers in the mainstream world to engage with the endless philosophical issues that I raise in my essays. But I have recently discovered that there are at least two things worse than being ghosted on this subject, and that is being told, 1, that one has no standing on these issues, that board-certified healthcare professionals and academics are the real experts, and 2, that one is not raising particularly compelling arguments in the first place.
This is the reception that my article1 about assisted suicide for the depressed met with at Mad In America2, a website and organization devoted to helping the depressed to push back against the psychiatric pill mill. They (i.e., Robert Whitaker and staff) claim that I am not an objective source. Apparently Claire Brosseau3 must die because I do not sound objective when I point out that there are drugs that could make her want to live. It's like I have just run into the fire brigade and warned them of a fire down the street and been ignored because I was shouting and therefore not viewing the world rationally. Sometimes there are reasons to shout; sometimes there is no time to wait for a disinterested party to view the situation godlike from some ivory tower or other.
Besides, I wasn't shouting in said article, though I was certainly writing passionately, partly because I care about the Claire Brosseaus of the world, and partly because, if state-assisted suicide is right for Claire, then it's right for myself as well, since we are both chronic depressives for which the "miracle" drugs of Big Pharma did not work. When psychiatrists and pundits sign off on Claire's right to assisted suicide, they are essentially inviting me to "end it all" as well. But unlike Claire, I am not so willing to normalize drug prohibition that I will go to my grave rather than hold it accountable for its role in depressing me in the first place. I will hold drug prohibition responsible for the evils that it causes, even if no one else will.
But I should not be surprised that Robert Whitaker would not immediately grasp the relevance of drug prohibition to the debate over assisted suicide for the depressed. He does not even recognize the relevance of drug prohibition to his own organization. Mad in America is all about the shortcomings of the psychiatric pill mill, and yet the pill mill owes its very existence to drug prohibition, which gave a monopoly to Big Pharma on the creation and sale of mind and mood medicine. If Robert's goal is to get people off of Big Pharma meds, his organization should be all about ending drug prohibition in the name of healthcare freedom. Instead, he seems to consider drug prohibition as a niche issue, meriting, perhaps, an occasional post by a cautious and well-respected academic suggesting that we should maybe no longer arrest people for sourcing drugs from a non-doctor but rather send them to re-education camps where they can learn the error of their ways. And so, like the organizer of almost every other social justice organization in the country, Robert refuses to hold drug prohibition publicly responsible for the evil that it causes.
This is how Robert -- like almost everybody else in the social justice movement -- helps to normalize drug prohibition. Their silence on the topic leaves the impression that there are no downsides to drug prohibition, from which it follows in the public mind that there need not be any particular hurry to end it.
David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.
Morphine can provide a vivid appreciation of mother nature in properly disposed minds. That should be seen as a benefit. Instead, dogma tells us that we must hate morphine for any use.
There would be almost no recidivism for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.
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.
Mad in America solicits personal stories about people trying to get off of antidepressants, but they will not publish your story if you want to use entheogenic medicines to help you. They're afraid their readers can't handle the truth.
America legalizes alcohol and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.
Americans believe scientists when they say that drugs like MDMA are not proven effective. That's false. They are super effective and obviously so. It's just that science holds entheogenic medicines to the standards of reductive materialism. That's unfair and inappropriate.
All drugs have potential positive uses for somebody, at some dose, in some circumstance, alone or in combination. To decide in advance that a drug is completely useless is an offense to reason and to human liberty.
The prohibitionist motto: "Billions for arrest, not one cent for education."
Anyone who has read Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin knows that the drug warriors have it exactly backwards. Drugs are our friends. We need to find safe ways to use them to improve ourselves psychologically, spiritually and mentally.
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