The Make-Believe World of Mental Health in the Age of the Drug War
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 19, 2025
I hate to use the term "fake science" in this age of politically inspired conspiracy theories, but the field of mental health in the western world is the fake science par excellence in the age of drug prohibition. The pundits in the field write endless papers about the patient's need for dignity and their right to healthcare, always completely ignoring the fact that we have outlawed everything that could work for these so-called "mental patients" and thereby turned them into patients for life, into wards of the healthcare state, with all of the expensive and time-consuming baggage that such a status implies. In other words, we are completely ignoring the patients' most glaringly obvious need -- the need for self-agency -- upon which all dignity is necessarily based.
First, the government denies me the right to heal, and then the professionals talk about my need for dignity without so much as acknowledging that injustice? And it is hard to push back. The heavily footnoted papers in the field are never open to criticism by individual "mental patients" with a lifetime of experience on the receiving end of mental health protocols; instead, they are reviewed and promoted by mental health "professionals" with a vested interest in the self-satisfied status quo, according to which more mental health services are desperately needed while the prohibitionist cancer consuming the field is completely ignored. The fact is that the field already has more patients than it deserves, because drug prohibition has given the mental health field an unearned monopoly on prescribing mind and mood medicine.
Take the article "Dignity in mental health care; human rights challenges and pathways" by Robert Anders, published on Academia.edu in 20251.
The paper's introduction begins with the lofty truism: "Dignity forms the bedrock of human well-being."
Fine words. And yet in what does dignity consist if not in our freedom to take care of our own mental health? And drug prohibition has prevented me from doing precisely that. This is the 6,400-pound gorilla in the room that almost all articles "in the field" completely ignore, so thoroughly have westerners been brainwashed to consider drug prohibition to be a natural baseline when it comes to mental health. True, Anders admits that "people seeking help encounter stigma, discrimination, inadequate services, and policies that neglect their needs," but it never occurs to the author that the wholesale outlawing of psychoactive therapeutic medicine might itself be one of these "policies that neglect their needs." Far less people would need to seek help in the first place if we had not outlawed almost everything that could help them and even rendered the mere study of such substances illegal, or at very least impractical. This drug prohibition has turned me into a ward of the healthcare state and an eternal patient for the last 50 years, and yet my disempowered status goes unnoticed by a field that sees no problem with it whatsoever. They pretend instead that the drug laws which have disempowered me do not even exist. They ignore the fact that drug law has given today's mental health "experts" their monopoly over mental health care in the first place.
This is why I consider almost every "paper" that is written in the field to be an exercise in make-believe. All such papers should come with a disclaimer stating that the author has taken drug prohibition as a natural baseline and so ignored the role that drug law plays in determining what treatments are available. I have tried for years to get magazines like Science News and Scientific American and Psychology Today to begin adding such disclaimers to their articles about drugs and yet they continue to publish articles based on the faulty idea that drug prohibition is a natural baseline from which to study mind-related topics like mental health, mentation, and human consciousness. But then where would the funding dollars go if we acknowledged that conditions like depression were actually easy for most people to "beat," were we to embrace the common-sense use of psychoactive medicine in strategic protocols: that is, if we studied all psychoactive medicines and used them for the benefit of humanity rather than childishly demonizing them as evil incarnate?
"Arrest made in Matthew Perry death." Oh, yeah? Did they arrest the drug warriors who prioritized propaganda over education?
The healthcare industry turns all the emotional downsides of drug prohibition into "illnesses."
Scientists cannot tell us if psychoactive drugs are worth the risk any more than they can tell us if free climbing is worth the risk, or horseback riding or target practice or parkour.
I've been told by many that I should have seen "my doctor" before withdrawing from Effexor. But, A) My doctor got me hooked on the junk in the first place, and, B) That doctor completely ignores the OBVIOUS benefits of indigenous meds and focuses only on theoretical downsides.
If we encourage folks to use antidepressants daily, there is nothing wrong with them using heroin daily. A founder of Johns Hopkins used morphine daily and he not only survived, but he thrived.
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!
Drugs are not the enemy, ignorance is -- the ignorance that the Drug War encourages by teaching us to fear drugs rather than to understand them.
Cop and detective shows are loaded with subtle drug war propaganda, including lines like, "She had a history of drug use, so..." The implication being that anyone who uses substances that politicians hate cannot be trusted.
Drug warriors do not want to end "addiction": it's their golden goose. They use the threat of addiction to scare us into giving up our democratic freedoms, like that once supplied by the 4th amendment.
"Arrest made in Matthew Perry death." Oh, yeah? Did they arrest the drug warriors who prioritized propaganda over education?
