how drug prohibition has turned 1 in 4 American women into patients for life
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 28, 2025
Imagine that you were given a drug that you cannot seem to kick -- thanks in part to the outlawing of all practical alternatives for the drug in question. Then, when you complained to your dealer, you were told that it was your medical duty to remain on that drug for a lifetime. Then, when you tried to complain about this injustice in a public forum, you were accused of encouraging risky medical behavior. After all, you are told, your complaints could cause other people to attempt the nearly impossible task of getting off the one single approved drug, which could, in turn, cause them to commit suicide.
This is precisely the situation that I find myself in when it comes to antidepressants 1. They have turned me into a ward of the healthcare state and I am told that it is morally wrong for me to even complain about this fact!
Thus we see how thoroughly the modern capitalist system has leveraged propaganda and product branding (not to mention self-interested choplogic) to create a world that is completely inimical to our freedom to take care of our own health. Completely. The psychiatric establishment first kicks you down by rendering you dependent upon them for life -- and then they kick you when you're down by telling you that you must not even complain about this disempowering status quo.
I do not say that this is conscious evil on anyone's part, but rather that this new world of pharmacological serfdom in which we live is a natural result of drug prohibition in a capitalist society. Such a drugs policy gives a monopoly to Big Pharma on creating mind and mood medicine, and such businesses will naturally seek to create drugs that will guarantee them patients for life. Meanwhile, the medical establishment profits enormously by claiming expertise on mind and mood conditions. Thus they set themselves up as experts on solving all the problems that they themselves have created by outlawing godsends like opium and coca.
But guess what is really amazing? What's really amazing is the fact that I am the only one complaining about this hateful status quo. Sure, you can find people bemoaning the psychiatric pill mill and you can find them bemoaning drug prohibition -- but no one connects the dots between these two injustices. No one shows how drug prohibition has created far, far more chemical dependency than ever existed before the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act. One in four American women take a Big Pharma 23 drug every day of their life4, which is more than twice the number of Americans who used opium regularly when it was still legal in America5.
Prior to drug prohibition, one could use a variety of drugs -- including various formulations of opium 6 and coca -- to treat problems symptomatically, from sleeplessness to anxiety to intolerable grief. After prohibition, the self-interested medical establishment told us that all such problems were discrete pathologies and that only medical professionals could "cure" them. We were fed the philosophically challenged lie that there is a "real" materialist cure for psychological problems and that any other approach was just "treating the symptoms."
And so we created the kinds of "meds" that have turned one in four American women into patients for life, a fact which, in a sane world, would be seen as nothing less than the greatest pharmacological dystopia of all time -- but which in this age of materialist triumphalism is actually considered a medical utopia. The pill mill is indeed a utopia, but not for "patients." It is a utopia for pharmaceutical companies and psychiatrists, who have been guaranteed patients for life thanks to drug prohibition.
We should never try to "cure" conditions like human sadness once and for all. We should treat them in such a way as to help create virtuous circles in life that can promote healthy behavior. Meanwhile, all drugs that inspire and elate have potential common-sense uses as antidepressants. But science is blind to common sense in the age of materialism 7 and behaviorism. When it comes to drug efficacy, we ignore all anecdote, all history and all common sense, insisting instead that drug use must be justified under a microscope with reference to chemical pathways.
But the fact that drugs have common-sense positive uses for human beings is actually just a psychological corollary of phenomenology, according to which experience matters.
Only a purblind materialist can think of sadness as an illness.
But we should never try to "cure" an illness that we cannot even define. What is human sadness, anxiety and angst? Human sadness should be "treated," not cured. Indeed, look what happened when we try to "cure" human sadness with miracle pills: we created the greatest mass pharmacological dystopia of all times, a real-world Stepford Wives.
How did we arrive at this pass? Because the reductive approach of modern materialism renders our doctors blind to all obvious benefits of drugs and causes them to look for drug efficacy under a microscope.
But there can never be a "cure" for the human condition that we call "depression" any more than there can be a "cure" for life itself (other than death, of course). This is because depression is more than what meets the eye of the behaviorist. Depression is felt and lived by people in ways that materialist doctors cannot understand. The precise nature of an appropriate "cure" for any given depression -- were such a cure conceivable -- would depend entirely on the individual: their goals in life, their risk tolerance, their biochemistry, their genetics, their psycho-social upbringing, and so forth.
But surely it is obvious to everyone who thinks that we should not try to "cure" human sadness. We should have left well enough alone and let people treat their own psychological issues as they saw fit, when they saw fit. In a hysteria-fueled effort to save them from themselves, we have created the greatest mass-dependency of all time. And we have so normalized this disempowering policy that we are told it we are not even supposed to complain about it.
In the future, when sociologists wish to demonstrate the power of propaganda and fearmongering and group-think and crowd delusion -- not to mention the mind-closing power of economic self-interest -- they will point to America's disastrous policy of drug prohibition.
Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.
We drastically limit drug choices, we refuse to teach safe use, and then we discover there's a gene to explain why some people have trouble with drugs. Science loves to find simple solutions to complex problems.
This pretend concern for the safety of young drug users is bizarre in a country that does not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.
Psychedelic retreats tell us how scientific they are. But science is the problem. Science today insists that we ignore all obvious benefits of drugs.
If we can go overseas to burn poppy plants, then Islamic countries should be free to come to the United States to burn our grape vines.
What bothers me about AI is that everyone's so excited to see what computers can do, while no one's excited to see what the human mind can do, since we refuse to improve it with mind-enhancing drugs.
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.
The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.
Almost all addiction services assume that the goal should be to get off all drugs. That is not science, it is Christian Science.
Drugs that sharpen the mind should be thoroughly investigated for their potential to help dementia victims. Instead, we prefer to demonize these drugs as useless. That's anti-scientific and anti-patient.
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