from a 67-year-old who has been turned into a lifetime patient by American healthcare
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 11, 2026
When is Psychology Today going to publish psychiatry from the patient's point of view? I nominate myself for authorship of that groundbreaking expose.
I am a 67-year-old chronic depressive who has been turned into a ward of the healthcare state by psychiatry. Because of America's superstitious attitudes about drugs, I was "saved" from cocaine and phenethylamines and laughing gas 40 years ago and shunted off onto underperforming "meds" that are harder to kick than heroin. One of my many former psychiatrists told me that my current "med," Effexor, had a 95% recidivism rate 1 for long-term users. I can believe that given the hell I went through in my failed... year-long effort to get off the drug – which I had to finance myself by contracting with a compounding pharmacist to make small doses. They could not even give me extended-release meds because the formula was proprietary.
I repeat: I am 67 years old. And yet I have to see a psychiatrist less than half my age every three months of my life and share intimate details of my life in order to get a prescription for an underperforming drug that I can never kick, ever. This is expensive and humiliating and yet the experts ignore me. They are all on Google Scholar, after all, and so they are the authorities and I am just a totally unacknowledged victim.
You'll say, of course, that I am a ranter, but I believe I am writing pretty mildly for someone who has been completely ignored for a lifetime now and who is as depressed as ever, unable to use drugs that could cheer him up in a trice!
You know, the psychiatrists who are half my age ask me every three months: "Have you considered suicide lately?"
And I always want to answer as follows: "Only when I consider how America's healthcare system has turned me into a patient for life!"
For more on the total disempowerment of the depressed with respect to their own health, I invite you to read my website, starting with:
And now depressed people like Claire Brosseau are even demanding assisted suicide. They want the state to help kill them. And what state is that? The same state that denies them access to drugs that could make them want to live – including the kinds of drugs which, like Soma, have inspired entire religions!
And yet I am silenced by every platform in America. And I am the only one who says that Claire has a right to take care of her own health – i.e., that drug prohibition was wrong. But those who advocate for her right to die are featured prominently in the New York Times! This is not healthcare, it is Christian Science extremism.
See https://www.abolishthedea.com/no_one_would_need_assisted_suicide_if_we_ended_drug_prohibition
Will anyone ever take these ideas on board or is the anti-patient status quo really this entrenched!
PS Medical ethicists are always talking about the rights of patients. What about the rights of folks like myself not to BE patients in the first place? I am sick and tired of being a child for life thanks to the way that Big Pharma has parlayed drug prohibition into a financial windfall – not for the depressed but for the healthcare industry!
I don't know what I'm expecting from this, but I had to write someone "in a position of some sort of power." Today I was told that my psychiatrist who was at least treating me like an adult will have to be replaced - - and now I have to spend hours and money making my intimate life known to another complete stranger -- and pretend that I am a grade schooler. This is not healthcare, it is complete humiliation! And it is an insult added to this injury when letters like these are completely ignored by the establishment!
Notes:
1: I have been unable to confirm this stat. But the WHO notes clinical recidivism rates for depression ranging from 50% to 85%. Do we count that as a recidivism rate of Effexor? Not when Biopharma is paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget, as reported by John LaMattina in the Sep 22, 2022 edition of Forbes magazine. (up)
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
We should start taking names. All politicians and government officials who work to keep godsends like psilocybin from the public should be held to account for crimes against humanity when the drug war finally ends.
If I have no right to mother nature's bounty, then I surely have no right to manmade guns. If hysterical fearmongering justifies the eradication of the Fourth Amendment, then the Second Amendment should go as well.
Here is a sample drug-use report from the book "Pihkal":
"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place."
Prohibition is a crime against humanity for withholding such drug experiences from the depressed (and from everybody else).
Anytime you hear that a psychoactive drug has not been proven to be effective, it's a lie. People can make such claims only by dogmatically ignoring all the glaringly obvious signs of efficacy.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort shows how science damns (i.e. excludes) facts that it cannot assimilate into a system of knowledge. Fort could never have guessed, however, how thoroughly science would eventually "damn" all positive facts about "drugs."
It's disgusting that folks like Paul Stamets need a DEA license to work with mushrooms.
All drugs have positive uses at some dose, for some reason, at some time -- but prohibitionists have the absurd idea that drugs can be voted up or down. This anti-scientific notion deprives the modern world of countless godsends.
Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could disbelieve it.
Americans were always free to take care of their own health -- until drug warriors handed doctors a monopoly on providing mind and mood medicine.
Imagine if we held sports to the same safety standard as drugs. There would be no sports at all. And yet even free climbing is legal. Why? Because with sports, we recognize the benefits and not just the downsides.
(up)