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.
Key Takeaways:
The psychiatric pill mill would not exist but for drug prohibition.
Mad in America refuses to hold drug prohibition responsible for the problems that it causes.
Any organization that really had the interests of the depressed at heart would be fighting first and foremost for our right to use Mother Nature's medicines. Everything else is a side show.
In Mexico, the same substance can be considered a "drug" or a "med," depending on where you are in the country. It's just another absurd result of the absurd policy of drug prohibition.
In a free world, almost all depressed individuals could do WITHOUT doctors: these adult human beings could handle their own depression with the informed intermittent use of a wide variety of psychoactive substances.
People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.
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.
Imagine if there were drugs for which dependency was a feature, not a bug. People would stop peddling that junk, right? Wrong. Just ask your psychiatrist.
The drug war is the defeatist doctrine that we will never be able to use psychoactive drugs wisely. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the government does everything it can to make drug use dangerous.
This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.
The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.
The FDA is not qualified to tell us whether holistic medicines work. They hold such drugs to materialist standards and that's pharmacological colonialism.
Psychiatrists never acknowledge the biggest downside to modern antidepressants: the fact that they turn you into a patient for life. That's demoralizing, especially since the best drugs for depression are outlawed by the government.
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