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)!
Key Takeaways:
Medical ethicists never discuss our right not to be a patient.
The mental healthcare industry has a vested interest in proselytizing on behalf of biochemical determinism.
Doctors deny the obvious benefits of drugs by insisting that drug efficacy be determined by looking under a microscope.
There are ultimately no meds versus drugs: instead, any psychoactive substance is a drug.
Check out the 2021 article in Forbes in which a materialist doctor professes to doubt whether laughing gas could help the depressed. Materialists are committed to seeing the world from the POV of Spock from Star Trek.
We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.
I knew democracy was in trouble when most Americans in the '80s saw no problem with allowing drug testers to go on a fishing expedition in their bodily fluids for substances of which politicians disapprove.
Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but drugs have never been evil. The evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about drugs.
Outlawing opium was the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief.
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.
Alexander Shulgin is a typical westerner when he speaks about cocaine. He moralizes about the drug, telling us that it does not give him "real" power. But so what? Does coffee give him "real" power? Coke helps some, others not. Stop holding it to this weird metaphysical standard.
Q: Where can you find almost-verbatim copies of the descriptions of religious experiences described by William James? A: In descriptions of user reports of "trips" on drugs ranging from coca to opium, from MDMA to laughing gas.
Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.
If there is an epidemic of "self-harm," prohibitionists never think of outlawing razor blades. They ask: "Why the self-harm?" But if there is an epidemic of drug use which they CLAIM is self-harm, they never ask "Why the self-harm?" They say: "Let's prohibit and punish!"
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:
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