how drug policy turns the depressed into patients for life
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 3, 2025
In Ceremonial Chemistry, 1974, Thomas Szasz introduced a crucial word for understanding our modern society in the age of drug prohibition.
"Inasmuch as we have words to describe medicine as a healing art, but have none to describe it as a method of social control or political rule, we must first give it a name. I propose that we call it pharmacracy, from the Greek roots pharmakon, for 'medicine' or 'drug,' and kratein, for 'to rule' or 'to control.'1"
This pharmacracy is all about disempowering human beings when it comes to their ability to take care of their own health, including, most critically, their most intimate mental and emotional states. This state of affairs could (and should) be challenged on all sorts of grounds by all sorts of stakeholders in the drugs debate -- including religious seekers, philosophical researchers, the anxious, pain patients, etc. -- but perhaps the best way to elucidate its tyrannous nature is to review the status quo from the point of view of the chronically depressed. In the age of pharmacracy, such individuals are forced to go without time-honored godsends like coca and opium while yet being shunted off onto modern Big Pharma meds which are harder to kick than heroin23. Freud considered cocaine to be a godsend for depression 4. Opium has been extolled by all the great ancient doctors -- including Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus -- as a panacea5. And yet drug law outlaws these empowering substances. And why? On the grounds that they can be misused by the young people whom we refuse to educate about drugs.
The impact of such inhumane and anti-scientific prohibition drug policy is most egregious for the depressed; they are literally denied the ability to heal in such a world. Instead, they are turned into wards of the healthcare state by being shunted off onto modern dependence-causing antidepressants 6.
Amazingly, no one seems to be raising this objection in the pushback against drug prohibition. This is due to the unfortunate fact that many Drug War critics are materialists and so they themselves believe in the category error whereby Westerners placed materialists in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place. Even Carl Hart declares in "Drug Use for GrownUps7" that "drugs" are not to be used for mental health issues -- even though Sigmund Freud himself was convinced that cocaine was a godsend antidepressant8.
In reality, we have two causes of pharmacracy: first, drug prohibition which gave scientists a monopoly on treating mind and mood disorders, and second, the hubris of the scientists, which made them gladly except the lucrative baton and to run with it -- like a pharmacological Midas, pathologizing everything they touch so that all the psychological issues that can no longer be treated easily with coca and opium must now be treated by board-certified doctors. How? With Big Pharma 910 drugs that cause lifelong dependency and are harder to kick than heroin11.
And so our materialist scientists are gaslighting us12. They tell us -- by their actions and their words -- that there are no benefits for drugs that have glaringly obvious benefits: like the time-honored panaceas of coca and opium 13 . Consider the following positive drug use reports from Pihkal14 and then try to tell me that such emotional states could not be of enormous benefit to the depressed, to the point of even convincing them to refrain from committing suicide.
I experienced the desire to laugh hysterically at what I could only describe as the completely ridiculous state of the entire world.
I learned a great deal about myself and my inner workings.
I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing.
The feeling was one of great camaraderie, and it was very easy to talk to people.
These are just a few of the reports of users on the phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. And yet our FDA sees no positive uses for the depressed. Surely they are gaslighting 15 us! This is the same FDA that promotes shock therapy for the severely depressed! This is the same FDA that approves of drugs whose side effects as advertised on prime-time television include death itself 16 .
This is what pharmacracy means for the so-called "mental health patient" in the age of the Drug War. It is very simply "the world turned upside down," a world wherein all obvious pharmacological aids are outlawed and all dubious and fiercely dependence-causing materialist remedies are foisted upon the depressed as the only game in town.
I'd like to become a guinea pig for researchers to test the ability of psychoactive drugs to make aging as psychologically healthy as possible. If such drugs cannot completely ward off decrepitude, they can surely make it more palatable. The catch? Researchers have to be free.
We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).
The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.
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.
I'm told that most psychiatrists would like to receive shock therapy if they become severely depressed. That's proof of drug war insanity: they would prefer damaging their brains to using drugs that can elate and inspire.
Until prohibition ends, rehab is all about enforcing a Christian Science attitude toward psychoactive medicines (with the occasional hypocritical exception of Big Pharma meds).
Drug warriors have harnessed the perfect storm. Prohibition caters to the interests of law enforcement, psychotherapy, Big Pharma, demagogues, puritans, and materialist scientists, who believe that consciousness is no big "whoop" and that spiritual states are just flukes.
That's the problem with prohibition. It is not ultimately a health question but a question about priorities and sensibilities -- and those topics are open to lively debate and should not be the province of science, especially when natural law itself says mother nature is ours.
The Holy Trinity of the Drug War religion is Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and John Belushi. "They died so that you might fear psychoactive substances with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."
The benefits of outlawed drugs read like the ultimate wish-list for psychiatrists. It's a shame that so many of them are still mounting a rear guard action to defend their psychiatric pill mill -- which demoralizes clients by turning them into lifetime patients.
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