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Never mind the rights of patients, what about our right not to be patients in the first place?

an open letter to the disease-mongering mental healthcare business

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 19, 2026



Medical ethicists are always talking about the rights of patients. But they never talk about the right not to be a patient in the first place. In a world in which we seek to benefit from psychoactive drug use, there would be no such things as patients, except in the old-fashioned sense of that word as referring to those with actual bodily injuries and illnesses. This is why the medical community gives so little pushback to drug prohibition, because they know upon which side their bread is buttered. They need patients. So they profit by selling us the defeatist line that all behavioral problems are biochemical diseases beyond our power to fight without medical intervention, without visiting a doctor, that is, as a humble patient. Hence the disease-mongering DSM. These doctors know that this immensely enriching paradigm would no longer exist in a world in which Americans were counseled to use any and all psychoactive substances wisely for the benefit of specific individuals with specific needs and backgrounds. This leaves doctors out of the loop. Employees in the medical field are thus natural enemies of that kind of human progress because they know that their bottom line is threatened precisely to the extent that human beings are empowered to take care of their own psychological health, hence the need for the gloom-and-doom narrative that we are all victims of biochemical determinism.

Perhaps the easiest way to see the absurdity of that position, however, is to consider what it tells us about the past. The biochemical determinist is basically telling us that the Bible and the Koran are farces, that they are really just stories of human beings manifesting a variety of inevitable pathologies in the benighted era before doctors had given those pathologies a name and claimed to have found ways to cure them, or at least to treat them in a highly profitable and ongoing way, with the help of dependence-causing drugs and talk therapy. This is why, when forced into a corner, the doctors will even deny the ability of substances like laughing gas itself to cheer up the depressed, resorting to the openly laughable idea that such treatments are not "real" treatments, which is really just a metaphysical statement assuming the ontological correctness of the philosophy of reductionism, the idea that drug efficacy is to be determined by observing the behavior of molecules. Doctors thus live in a world in which they are dogmatically blind to all obvious benefits of psychoactive drugs -- to the feelings of compassion and gratitude and aesthetic wholeness that they can generate -- and so gaslight us about such benefits and demonize such drug use as "self-medication," failing to realize that self-medication has been the right of humanity since cavemen and cavewomen first started treating their belly aches with peppermint and chamomile.

Powerful psychoactive drugs have been incorporated into societies in two basic ways thus far in the astonishingly brief period of human history: the indigenous shamanic way, in which drugs are used, especially by and through a shaman, for healing, religion and cultural adhesion; and the western way, in which any drugs with "unseemly" effects (which produced visions, for instance) were thought of in connection with witches and sorcerers. In the latter world, westerners posited a clear distinction between these drugs and medicines, much as we now assume a difference between drugs and "meds." We need a new third way of viewing drugs, a way compatible with human freedom, one that recognizes that a drug is a drug is a drug, and that its utility cannot be established outside of the context of use. There will be no gatekeepers to drugs in such a free world; there will, however, be the acknowledgement that the experts about wise use are actual human beings and not scientists. The Vedic people did not need a scientist to tell them whether the imbibing of Soma juice would result in the attitudes and feelings that would inspire an entire religion: the fact is that it did so and scientific opinions and clinical trials had nothing whatsoever to do with the matter. Yet, if we take modern drug attitudes seriously, then we should allow scientists to tell us if a drug can "really" inspire the creation of a new religion. This is, in fact, what we are doing from a philosophical point of view when we put scientists in charge of pronouncing on the efficacy of drugs that inspire and elate, insofar as such drugs are precisely the kind that have the potential for inspiring religions.



I was peaceably writing this essay when I made the mistake of checking my inbox, where I found an answer to a question that I had recently sent to the Musely.ai website on the subject of content censorship by algorithm. In first using the Musely services, it had seemed to me that they were blocking my attempts to create images that illustrate the downsides of drug prohibition, apparently because their algorithms figured that the truth about drugs might be "dangerous" for people to see. Actually, I had discovered after sending that particular email that the Musely algorithms were not entirely unreasonable on this subject and that I could indeed "work with them," at least for the time being, to create the images that I require, with the occasional help of some creative additional PhotoShopping on my part, after their software had constructed the politically correct parts of my desired image. As a result, I had almost forgotten the whole matter about algorithm blocking on Musely.ai. Then this button-pushing response appeared in my inbox about an hour ago. I really should have known better than to read it! For I found the tone and the content of the response to be off-putting, to put it mildly. I'm guessing that it was written by AI, given its tone-deaf construction. It was the kind of reply that is technically polite and yet reads like a piece of pompous condescension. The upshot is, I left off writing the above essay and concocted the following impassioned rejoinder instead -- whether for the benefit of a human being or a Musely bot, I'll probably never know:



Thanks. I can't see your algorithms blocking someone from talking about the psychiatric pill mill, upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life. The algorithms are only set up to flag problems if someone dares suggest that there are beneficial uses for the poppy, a flower which has been considered a panacea since the time of Galen. But who can blame you? Your algorithm writers grew up in a world where the media shielded them from seeing all positive reports of drug use, where the White House edited scripts for sitcoms to send an anti-drug message, and where you can lose your right to work in America if you use substances that have inspired entire religions in the past. The Drug War has fried the American brain. Musely is just one of the endless companies that actually brags about not using human judgment, of leaving all their basic decisions up to algorithms. If you're going to leave all the important decisions up to algorithms, you should at least name the staff that writes those algorithms so that your users can know whom to thank for being censored.



There! I guess I told THEM (or IT)!




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Materialist scientists cannot triumph over addiction because their reductive focus blinds them to the obvious: namely, that drugs which cheer us up ACTUALLY DO cheer us up. Hence they keep looking for REAL cures while folks kill themselves for want of laughing gas and MDMA.

It's always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract. That's anti-scientific. It begs so many questions and leaves suffering pain patients (and others) high and dry. No substance is bad in and of itself.

NOW is the time for entheogens -- not (as Strassman and Pollan seem to think) at some future date when materialists have finally wrapped their minds around the potential usefulness of drugs that experientially teach compassion.

There are no recreational drugs. Even laughing gas has rational uses because it gives us a break from morbid introspection. There are recreational USES of drugs, but the term "recreational" is often used to express our disdain for users who go outside the healthcare system.

An Englishman's home is his castle. An American's home is a bouncy castle for the DEA.

The WHO says that depression will be the number-one cause of disability by 2030. What they don't say is that this is only because drug prohibition has outlawed all obvious treatments for depression.

I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.

"Now, now, Sherlock, that coca preparation is not helping you a jot. Why can't you get 'high on sunshine,' like good old Watson here?" To which Sherlock replies: "But my good fellow, then I would no longer BE Sherlock Holmes."

Judging from research articles, they do not even teach the many obvious benefits of drugs in med school.

The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.


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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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