How the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 18, 2020
If I had my life to live over again, I would never set foot in a psychiatrist's office, at least not while a Drug War was in effect. Why? Because the Drug War has outlawed every mood medicine except those that are the most addictive of all: namely, modern antidepressants 1 and benzodiazepines. So if you go to a psychiatrist's office, chances are you're going to be started on a "regimen" of highly addictive medications that will turn you into a patient for life. Even as I write this, 1 in 8 American men and 1 in 4 American women are addicted to Big Pharma meds.
I once naively thought that the whole point of psychotherapy was to make the patient self-sufficient and to empower them to face life on their own. But I have learned the hard way, after 40 years of addiction to prescription meds, that modern psychiatry does not seek to empower patients at all. In fact, it does the exact opposite, by turning them into patients for life, who must visit a shrink every 3 to 6 months of their lives in order to qualify for yet another prescription of the addictive pills on which they were started. What could be more demoralizing than this constant expensive and time-consuming reminder that one is an eternal patient, living life as a ward of the healthcare state?
If the meds in question were simply addictive, that would be bad enough, but the DEA requires that I see my doctor every three to six months to have him or her officially determine that I have the right to continue taking these expensive and ineffective meds - and I say "ineffective" advisedly, because Big Pharma PR to the contrary, the Effexor2 I'm taking does not fight depression. At best it seems to dull the mind to make one slightly less worried about that depression. And yet the DEA thinks that I can't be trusted after 40 long years to use these medicines wisely without constant surveillance by the medical establishment? What a laugh, considering that I myself would be the first to renounce these drugs were any of the hundreds of natural alternative medicines actually legal.
Why is the DEA so pathologically worried about drug misuse, even when the drug in question is legal and does not provide the user with anything approaching a good time? It's because the Drug War is all about superstitiously turning psychoactive substances into giant bugaboos, all-purpose scapegoats, holding them responsible for everything good and bad in the world. In the past (that is before 1914), we knew that substances were amoral and that their proper use depended solely on context. Society's goal was to educate the citizen about making wise decisions. In the superstitious Drug War era, we label substances themselves as bad, making the tyrannous claim that citizens cannot be trusted with them, that the government must either outlaw psychoactive substances or watch like a hawk as its citizens use such substances under the closest bureaucratic scrutiny possible.
Of course, if the legal dope that I was taking actually worked - like the cocaine 34 with which Sigmund Freud overcame his own depression or the opium 5 that helped Benjamin Franklin get through the rainy days -- I might not mind the regular visits to the behavioral health clinic to jump through the required hoops. But it's a double insult to be subjected to this demoralizing indignity for the purpose of receiving a prescription that one does not even want, to be catechized about one's mental health by a constantly changing roster of interns who might be half my age at most.
Perhaps someday I'll have the nerve to truthfully answer the shrink's obligatory question about suicide:
Q: Have you ever thought about taking your own life?
A: Only when I think about the fact that the Drug War has turned me into an eternal patient.
Author's Follow-up: September 30, 2022
There are plenty of scientific reasons to think that SSRIs don't work (see the works of Robert Whitaker, Irving Kirsch and Julie Holland), but there is a philosophic reason that they do not work as well. Before you can claim that a drug cures an illness, you have to tell me how you define the word "cure." I want to live large like a friend of Jack Kerouac, "The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn burn like fabulous yellow roman candles." I will consider my depression "cured" when I am able to live life like that. But that is not Big Pharma 67 's definition of "cure." Their definition of "cure" is to make me accept the status quo, by essentially tranquilizing me -- not increasing sensations but numbing them.
That is not curing my depression, that is making me a good consumer in a capitalist society, which was never my goal.
There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.
We throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.
Now the folks who helped Matthew get Ketamine must be sacrificed on the altar of the Drug War, lest people start thinking that the Drug War itself was at fault.y
Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.
If religious liberty existed, we would be able to use the inspiring phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the same way and for the same reasons as the Vedic people of India used soma.
The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.
I hated the show "The Apprentice," because it taught a cynical and hate-filled lesson about the proper way to "get ahead" in the world. I saw Trump as a menace back then, long before he started declaring that American elections were corrupt before the very first vote was cast!
Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.
That's why I created the satirical Partnership for a Death Free America. It demonstrates clearly that drug warriors aren't worried about our health, otherwise they'd outlaw shopping carts, etc. The question then becomes: what are they REALLY afraid of? Answer: Free thinkers.
In a compassionate world, we would give laughing gas kits to the suicidal just as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies.
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