How Mad in America pundits ignore the role of drug prohibition in destroying the lives of the depressed
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 15, 2026
In response to "Are We Overlooking Homicidal Ideation in Psychiatry?" by Jordyn Tovey1
COMMENT: Thank you for your article. I have just two thoughts regarding issues that were not raised.
1) I know that in America, confidentiality can no longer be assumed to be operative in conversations with a “professional,” whether we’re talking about a conversation with a priest or a psychiatrist. This creates an uncertain climate for the “patient.” They will be less likely to be honest about their anger precisely to the extent that they “plan to do something about it.”
2) There are a class of drugs called entheogens, which includes MDMA. America has been too busy hating drugs to notice that such drugs help inspire compassion. In a sane world, surely we would be using entheogens in counseling sessions to help angry patients “feel” for their perceived enemies.
The use of Ecstasy (the street version of MDMA) in the British rave scene of the 1990s resulted in unprecedented peace on the dance floor. Unprecedented! But MPs cracked down on the drug, and dancers switched to alcohol, a drug that kills 178,000 a year in the US alone. After the crackdown, the dance floors erupted into violence, all “justified” by the fact that a few young people had died after using Ecstasy. Why? Because drug prohibition had denied them regulated product and information about safe use.
These are drugs that help people feel compassion! Surely, this is hugely relevant to the topic of counseling angry patients. Consider the following quotations from DJs in Britain, as they describe the peaceful 1990s rave scene that existed with the help of Ecstasy. The following quotes are from the 2020 documentary by Terry Stone entitled “United Nation: Three Decades of Drum & Bass.”
“It was the first time that black-and-white people had integrated on a level… and everybody was one.” — DJ Ray Keith.
“It was black and white, Asian, Chinese, all up in one building.” — DJ MC GQ.
“Everyone’s loving each other, man, they’re not hating.” – DJ Mampi Swift.
And MDMA is just one of endless phenethylamines that could exist in a free world. Chemist Alexander Shulgin had the rare freedom to synthesize hundreds of phenethylamines in the 1990s, resulting in user reports such as the following:
“The feeling was one of great camaraderie, and it was very easy to talk to people.”
“I was able to go through and resolve some judgments with particular persons.”
“No more axes to grind. I can be free.”
The depressed need more than exercise
A case in point is Robert's April 9th post entitled "Prescribe Exercise, Not Pills." Now, I have nothing against exercise, but one must have the motivation to exercise. That is what drugs can provide. It seems to me that Mad In America is recommending a Christian Science answer to the psychiatric pill mill. Agreed, Big Pharma is profiting from turning America into patients with dependence-causing pills that underperform, but we are told that we need to fight back by abjuring all drugs whatsoever. (Robert seems not to see that "meds" are different from drugs in this: that for "meds," dependence is a feature, whereas for all other drugs, dependence is a bug.) As someone who has been afflicted in the past by negative inner voices that make it hard even to breathe, I find Robert's views on this topic to be naive, to put it mildly. Yes, let's have exercise, by all means, and let's take vitamins and sleep well, but it takes the common-sense incentive provided by medicines to inspire the severely depressed to follow through on those expedients in the first place. I submit that such a view as Robert's can only be held by those who have not personally been affected by negative inner voices, certainly not to the degree that they neither write books nor create organizations. It seems, moreover, that Robert is simply unaware of the common-sense benefits of drugs.
Of course, our society (our universities, our broadcasters, etc.) cranks out millions of such individuals through media censorship and the fact that the government study of drugs is devoted only to downsides, not to the godsend upsides that depressed people like myself would die for, some of us literally so insofar as we are all but forced to commit suicide by the wholesale outlawing of all substances that inspire and elate.
If Robert sees this, I'm sure he will sever all ties with yours truly, but I have to be honest on this subject. That's all I've got. Honesty. I won't make money off my efforts and it seems I might not even be heard for decades. All that's left for me is to speak the absolute truth, the truth of an adult who has been turned into a ward of the healthcare state by drug prohibition -- and who feelingly rejects the idea that the answer to the psychiatric pill mill is to take the medical advice of Mary Baker Eddy.
Letter to my Discord followers (yes, I think there are at least two!):
The good news: my essay on drugs and psychiatry is scheduled to appear on the Mad In America zine. Bad news: I expect to be kicked off the site or at least ignored eventually, probably sooner than later. Almost all the articles they post pretend that the answer to the psychiatric pill mill is to abstain from all drugs. Robert himself, organization founder, just published an essay entitled "Prescribe exercise, not pills." My response is, yes, but... By all means, let's dump dependence-causing meds upon which Big Pharma has been thriving at my expense, but let's not drop all substances because "meds" are being used as dependence-causing cash cows by amoral pharmaceutical execs. Crowley wrote the following about his first use of cocaine: "The depression lifted from my mind like the sun coming out of the clouds." That's the healing that I demand --- then maybe we can talk about exercising.
Final Word
Well, if Robert "drops me" immediately after picking me up, it will at least prove that some "movers and shakers" do occasionally read this page. The thing is, I just cannot deny the truth enough to sound diplomatic on these topics. I have lived this stuff my whole life: I've lived the downsides that our naive attitudes about drugs have brought about. But then maybe I am wrong. Maybe we should go down to Peru and tell the coca-chewing Inca that all they need is exercise. Maybe we should go back in time to the Indus Valley in 1500 BC and tell the Vedic people that they can pour out their goblets of Soma juice and exercise instead!
Of course, in Robert's defense, he never explicitly states that drugs could not be used effectively for the purposes that I have highlighted above. And yet absent an explicit declaration to this effect, it's tough to read his article title without recalling dozens of similar moralizing article titles in the past in the popular press, articles in which the depressed are conjured to "get high on sunshine" and to "do hugs, not drugs," and other such moralizing pablum from the drug-disparaging pens of the psychologically self-satisfied. It's as if the country had outlawed cars, and then when people complained, our most talented writers started cranking out articles about the benefits of walking and riding bikes. Yes, those two latter activities are fine, but let's not rewrite history so as to imply that we never needed cars or drugs in the first place.
Pundits tell us that there are medical reasons not to "snort" cocaine. So what? There are medical reasons not to drive a car: you may have an accident. The question is: does cocaine use or car driving make sense in a given case! Details matter!
NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition. We need a National Institute on Drug Use, not a National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?
When folks die in horse-related accidents, we need to be asking: who sold the victim the horse? We've got to crack down on folks who peddle this junk -- and ban books like Black Beauty that glamorize horse use.
"The Oprah Winfrey Fallacy": the idea that a statistically insignificant number of cases constitutes a crisis, provided ONLY that the villain of the piece is something that racist politicians have demonized as a "drug."
The drug war is being used as a wrecking ball to destroy democratic freedoms. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and freedom of religion and given the police the right to confiscate the property of peaceful and productive citizens.
When we place the FDA in charge of deciding whether a psychoactive drug should be re-legalized or not, we are asking them to decide on things like the relative importance of appreciating a sunset, a task for which the FDA has no expertise whatsoever.
Brits have a right to die, but they do not have the right to use drugs that might make them want to live. Bad policy is indicated by absurd outcomes, and this is but one of the many absurd outcomes that the policy of prohibition foists upon the world.
All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.
SWAT raids have increased by 15,000 percent from the late 1970s to today, resulting in 50,000 to 80,000 SWAT raids annually in the US alone. --War On Us
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