How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
and what we should do about that
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 24, 2021
omorrow morning, I have to meet yet again with a "doctor" who is half my age and explain to him or her for the thousandth time why I deserve to receive yet another expensive refill on an SNRI antidepressant that the NIH has found to be as hard to kick as heroin. As a 62-year-old, I find such appointments to be the most disempowering and humiliating form of healthcare imaginable. It has made me a ward of the healthcare state and an eternal patient. Even if the Effexor that I've been taking now for 25 years had cured my depression (which it did not), I would be depressed by the fact that I had to visit Healthcare Harbor every three months of my life as a sort of Ancient Mariner, to tell my life story over and over again to a series of complete strangers. How am I supposed to feel "normal" and "well" when the psychiatric profession keeps reminding me that I am a "patient" by forcing me to jump through all the time-consuming and expensive hoops that come with that label?
Despite my dissatisfaction with the psychiatric pill mill, however, it is the Drug War which I really blame for my eternal patient status, since Drug Warriors long ago outlawed all the far-less-addictive medicines that were facilitating fantastic psychological breakthroughs in the early '60s, including psychedelic meds which, when administered by a pharmacologically savvy empath, could have helped me re-imagine my life and lift my mind out of the mental ruts that it was carving for itself. But I guess I was destined to go without psychoactive godsends, having been born in the late '50s, at the very time when racist politicians were just beginning to demonize and outlaw the non-addictive medicines that were already racking up victories in treating the "mentally ill," including many hardcore alcoholics. Indeed Bill Wilson of AA was successfully treating alcoholics with psychedelic therapy when I was born, a treatment that would soon be shut down, however, by politicians who associated psychedelics with their political enemies of the time (you know, those dreadful hippies).
My goal now in life is to show the world how the psychiatric pill mill is the natural result of a Drug War in a capitalist society. For, from a strictly capitalist perspective, there is no money in curing "mental illness." The money lies in establishing a therapy that will go on for ever, till death do we patients part. And what better way to accomplish that goal than to outlaw Mother Nature's far less addictive meds and then hook patients on synthetic drugs that simply cannot be stopped (and which, according to Robert Whitaker, actually cause and reinforce the very chemical imbalances that they claim to "fix")?
The answer to this unjust set-up may not come in my lifetime, unfortunately, but I believe that I know what the answer would look like, at least in broad strokes: The answer is for America to end the Drug War and for the psychiatric profession to morph into a kind of "pharmacologically savvy shamanism," an holistic approach to mental health that combines the best of western, eastern and mesoAmerican therapies, using ANY PLANT IN THE WORLD that is found to help a person think and act productively in their life. Such a therapy would get rid of the idea of "mental patient" altogether, since anyone could visit such a shaman: from the severely depressed to a relatively happy soul who simply wants to get beyond the mental blocks that stand in the way of his or her self-actualization in life.
The answer, to repeat, is to exchange psychiatry for PSS: "pharmacologically savvy shamanism," a new non-addictive paradigm in which deeply caring medical professionals could guide their "clients" to self-knowledge through the historically informed use of natural entheogenic substances, plant medicines that conduce to self-insight and compassionate love of one fellows. Imagine that: America could stop demonizing plant medicine and actually learn how to use it safely and wisely for the benefit of humankind, just like all societies were prepared to do until corrupt stateside politicians began demonizing substances in order to remove the minorities who used them from the voting rolls. Then Ancient Mariners like myself could finally renounce Big Pharma and the demoralizing label of "patient," sailing into their home port at long last as just another human being seeking to achieve self-fulfillment in life.
Getting Off Drugs
NOVEMBER 2024
I have written dozens of essays about antidepressants and the Drug War, but it is important to read this one first, for it contains the most up-to-date info on my battle to get off such drugs. This reading order is important because I declared premature victory against the SNRI called Effexor in recent essays, only to discover that the drug is far more insidious than I gave it credit for. It turns out withdrawing, at least for me, eventually led to deep feelings of abject despair, far greater than the depression for which I started taking the "med" in the first place.
The frustrating thing is, these feelings could be combatted by a host of drugs that we have outlawed in the name of our anti-scientific and anti-patient war on drugs. That much is just psychological common sense. But we have been taught to believe that there are no positive uses for opium, nor for cocaine, nor for coca, nor for MDMA, nor for laughing gas, nor for peyote, nor for the hundreds of inspiring phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, etc. etc. etc.
The truth is, rather, that Drug Warriors (and the millions whom they have brainwashed) do not WANT there to be positive uses for such drugs. No, they want me to "keep taking my meds" instead and so to enrich their investment portfolios in the pharmaceutical sector. Meanwhile, those without a vested financial interest have been taught that antidepressants are "scientific" and so they cannot understand my desire to get off them. They cannot understand the hell of being turned into a patient for life and having to make regular expensive and humiliating pilgrimages to psychiatrists (who are half one's own age) to bare one's soul for the purpose of obtaining an expensive prescription for a drug that numbs one's brain rather than inspiring it - and a drug which seems to counteract, dampen and/or repress most of the positive effects that I might have otherwise obtained by the few semi-legal alternatives to antidepressants, such as psilocybin and ayahuasca.
But it is just psychological common sense that I could withdraw successfully from Effexor with the advised use of a comprehensive pharmacy, including but not limited to the demonized substances listed above. But materialist science is not interested in common sense. And so they tell me that such drug use has not been proven to "work." But materialist doctors are not experts in what motivates me as a living, breathing, unique individual. The heart has its own reasons that reductionist science cannot understand. If I could look forward, at this moment, to relaxing with an opium pipe tonight, my mood would improve NOW, not just tonight. I would have something to look forward to. I would not feel the need to reach for that bottle full of Effexor pills that I was hoping to foreswear. Likewise, if I could use a drug to laugh and "touch the hand of God" (as with laughing gas and phenethylamines respectively), I could laugh at the pangs of despair that Effexor tries to throw my way.
Science's eternal response to such ideas is: "There is no proof that such things work!"
No, nor will there ever be in the age of the Drug War, in which such common sense use is punished by long jail terms and would never be favorably publicized, even if successful, since America's prime imperative in the age of the Drug War is to demonize psychoactive medicines, under the absurd assumption-laden idea that to talk honestly about drugs is to encourage their use.
Well, we SHOULD be encouraging their use in cases where they actually work, in cases, for instance, when they prevent guys like myself from killing themselves thanks to the knowledge that they are a bounden slave to the combined forces of the Drug War and Big Pharma's pill mill.
Besides, there is no proof that hugging works, but we do not need Dr. Spock of Star Trek to launch a study into that issue: we all know that hugging works by bringing two souls together both physically and spiritually. We do not need a map of brain chemistry to figure this out: the proof is extant, the proof is in the pudding.
But I haven't given up yet despite the setback in my most recent plan. I'm going to search the world for a place where I can get off antidepressants in a way that makes some psychological common sense.
Right now, all I see in terms of resources are a bunch of companies who, for large fees, will help me go cold turkey on antidepressants., or companies that claim to have found the right combination of legal herbal formulas that should make withdrawal easier. But to me, these are all what Percy Shelley would call "frail spells," concocted under the watchful eye of the Drug Warrior to make sure that nothing potent and obviously effective will get added to the mix. In fact, if a space alien came to earth and asked what sort of psychoactive drugs were outlawed, one could honestly answer: "Anything that obviously works."
Meanwhile, drug laws make it impossible for me to visit psychiatrists remotely online, requiring me instead to physically visit my doctors, thereby limiting rural residents like myself to accessing hayseed psychiatrists whose one area of expertise seems to be the writing of prescriptions for antidepressants. Talk to them about anything else, and their eyes glaze over. "That's all unproven," they'll say, "Or, no, we have yet to fully study such things." As if we have to study in order to realize that feeling good helps and can have positive psychological effects.
I'm sure that part of the problem with my withdrawal scheme is that I tried to get off the drug too quickly. But I only tried that because I can find no doctor who will compound the drug for me in a way that makes psychological common sense, namely, with daily miniscule reductions in dosage. My current psychiatrist told me that such compounding was unheard of and that I should drop doses by 37.5 mg at a time, since that is the lowest dose that the pharmaceutical companies create. He said I could start "counting pill beads" once I am down to a 37.5 mg daily dose if I wanted to taper still further.
I did find a compounding company that said it could compound Effexor in the way that I desire. But there's a big catch: they have to receive a prescription for that purpose. And I can find no doctor in the world who is willing to write me one. Even those who sympathize with my plight want me to become their full-time patient before they will even consider writing such a prescription.
So those who warned me against trying to get off Effexor were right in a way: it is extraordinarily difficult. But they feel to realize WHY this is so. It is not just because Effexor is a toxic drug, but also because the drug war has outlawed everything that could help me get off it.
This is why those pundits who sign off on the psychiatric pill mill are clueless about the huge problem with the war on drugs: the way it humiliates and disempowers millions. For it turns out that the phrase "No hope in dope" is true after all, but only when the dope in question is modern antidepressants.
OCTOBER 2024
Here are some of the many articles I have written about the philosophy of getting off drugs. Bear in mind that I am in the process of getting off Effexor myself and am exploring the power of "drugs to fight drugs" in so doing. And this is not a straightforward path given the sweeping limits that are imposed by drug law. So the question of exactly what might work (and how and when, etc.) is still wide open and I am advocating nothing, except the common sense notion that we can benefit from euphoria and mood boosts, yes, and that "drugs can be used to fight drugs," and in a safe way too -- a way that will prove far safer than prohibition, which continues to bring about daily deaths from drive-by shootings and unregulated product while causing civil wars overseas.
I guess what I am saying here is, this site is not purporting to offer medical advice. I avoid using such wording, however, because so many authors refuse to talk honestly about drugs, especially about positive drug use, for fear of being seen as giving medical advice, and this, of course, is just how drug warriors want matters to remain. It lets them shut down free speech about drugs.
Besides, I reject the idea that materialist doctors are the experts when it comes to how we think and feel about life. The best they can do as materialist is to tell us the potential physical risks of using holistically-operating drugs, but individuals are the experts on what motivates them in life, on their own particular hopes and dreams and on what risks they deem necessary to obtain them, to pursue happiness, that is, which objective our legislators outlawed when they outlawed all substances that can help facilitate happiness in the properly motivated and educated individual.
The real answer is not for authors to give groveling apologies for being honest, however: the real answer is for kids to be educated about the basics of wise substance use -- and for America to come to grips with the fact that we will always be surrounded by "drugs" -- and that the goal should be to ensure safe use, not to keep endlessly arresting minorities and removing them from the voting rolls on behalf of the clinically insane idea that we should outlaw mother nature to protect our kids -- and this in a purportedly Christian country whose very deity told us that his creation was good.
That's my real problem with SSRIs: If daily drug use and dependency are okay, then there's no logical or truly scientific reason why I can't smoke a nightly opium pipe.
Mad in America publishes stories of folks who are disillusioned with antidepressants, but they won't publish mine, because I find mushrooms useful. They only want stories about cold turkey and jogging, or nutrition, or meditation.
Today's war against drug users is like Elizabeth I's war against Catholics. Both are religious crackdowns. For today's oppressors, the true faith (i.e., the moral way to live) is according to the drug-hating religion of Christian Science.
This massive concern for safety is downright bizarre in a country that will not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.
The American Philosophy Association should make itself useful and release a statement saying that the drug war is based on fallacious reasoning, namely, the idea that substances can be bad in themselves, without regard for why, when, where and/or how they are used.
Anytime you hear that a psychoactive drug has not been proven to be effective, it's a lie. People can make such claims only by dogmatically ignoring all the glaringly obvious signs of efficacy.
We have to deny the FDA the right to judge psychoactive medicines in the first place. Their materialist outlook obliges them to ignore all obvious benefits. When they nix drugs like MDMA, they nix compassion and love.
Clearly a millennia's worth of positive use of coca by the Peruvian Indians means nothing to the FDA. Proof must show up under a microscope.
I have dissed MindMed's new LSD "breakthrough drug" for philosophical reasons. But we can at least hope that the approval of such a "de-fanged" LSD will prove to be a step in the slow, zigzag path toward re-legalization.
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.
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, How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient: and what we should do about that, published on February 24, 2021 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)
omorrow morning, I have to meet yet again with a "doctor" who is half my age and explain to him or her for the thousandth time why I deserve to receive yet another expensive refill on an SNRI antidepressant that the NIH has found to be as hard to kick as heroin. As a 62-year-old, I find such appointments to be the most disempowering and humiliating form of healthcare imaginable. It has made me a ward of the healthcare state and an eternal patient. Even if the Effexor that I've been taking now for 25 years had cured my depression (which it did not), I would be depressed by the fact that I had to visit Healthcare Harbor every three months of my life as a sort of Ancient Mariner, to tell my life story over and over again to a series of complete strangers. How am I supposed to feel "normal" and "well" when the psychiatric profession keeps reminding me that I am a "patient" by forcing me to jump through all the time-consuming and expensive hoops that come with that label?
You have been reading an article entitled, How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient: and what we should do about that, published on February 24, 2021 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)