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The Origins of Modern Psychiatry

How to create a billion-dollar industry in three easy steps

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

December 5, 2022



How to create a billion-dollar industry in three easy steps:



  1. Ban laudanum and all other drugs with which human beings have ever or could ever 'self-medicate'1

  2. List all of the psychological problems that result from this ban as discrete illnesses in a Diagnostic Statistical Manual

  3. Treat these illnesses with expensive and inadequate medicines, preferably those that cause chemical dependency




Congratulations. You have created a new industry. It's called psychiatry!



Follow-up steps:


  1. Tell the world that drugs not prescribed by psychiatrists are just "crutches."

  2. Teach the world that "self-medicating" is the worst possible medical sin.

  3. If someone uses non-psychiatric drugs, tell them that they are doing so to run away from hidden pain.

  4. Tell troublesome patients that they have a medical duty to keep taking their "meds"




Note that the preceding formulas can also help you keep the citizen's mind off of social problems by blaming all such problems on "drugs." No more need to invest in pesky programs like education and inner-city infrastructure. Just invoke the eternal problem of "drugs" and you can jail the adults whom you failed to properly educate as kids, thereby reaping the rewards of your racism without being held accountable for it.

Prohibition yanked laudanum from our medicine cabinets, ostensibly to prevent excess drug use. And where has that gotten us today? 80 million Americans (1 in every 4) now take psychiatric drugs every day of their life. (source: Citizens Commission on Human Rights International)




Editor's Comments:

May 23, 2025

female editor holding pencil


Brian is painting in broad strokes here in order to inspire discussion. He actually thinks psychiatrists are great -- to the extent that they are empathic. But he feels that they are caught up in a behaviorist field that downplays the importance of common-sense psychology. If this were not the case, then psychiatrists would be shouting from the rooftops on behalf of their clients' right to use the many godsend medicines that have been outlawed wholesale by drug prohibition. Instead, most psychiatrists speak of their arsenal of materialist medicines as if they were good in and of themselves. This is like a chef working in a world in which the government has outlawed all meals except for clam chowder. The chef insists on the endless health benefits of his clam chowder, never mentioning the fact that all alternative meals have been outlawed. The chef may even claim that his soup is the best meal in the world. And why not? All the other meals have been outlawed so there is no opportunity for anyone to prove that the chef is wrong.











Notes for essay entitled The Origins of Modern Psychiatry: How to create a billion-dollar industry in three easy steps:

1: Restoring our Right to Self-Medication: how drug warriors work together with the medical establishment to prevent us from taking care of our own health DWP (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Most people think that drugs like cocaine, MDMA, LSD and amphetamines can only be used recreationally. WRONG ! This represents a very naive understanding of human psychology. We deny common sense in order to cater to the drug war orthodoxy that "drugs have no benefits."

Freud found that cocaine CURED most people's depression and he "got off it" without trouble.

Drug warriors abuse the English language.

The press is having a field day with the Matthew Perry story. They love to have a nice occasion to demonize drugs. I wonder how many decades must pass before they realize that people are killed by ignorance and a corrupted drug supply, not by the drugs themselves.

Prohibitionists will me that we're all children when it comes to drugs, and can never -- but never -- use them wisely. That's like saying that we could never ride horses wisely. Or mountain climb. Or skateboard.

America legalizes alcohol and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.

The outlawing of opium eventually resulted in an "opioid crisis"? The message is clear: people want self-transcendence. If we don't let them find it safely, they will find it dangerously.

We have to deny the FDA the right to judge psychoactive medicines in the first place. Their materialist outlook obliges them to ignore all obvious benefits. When they nix drugs like MDMA, they nix compassion and love.

What are drug dealers doing, after all? They are merely selling substances that people want and have always had a right to, until racist politicians came along and decided government had the right to ration out pain relief and mystical experience.

The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that signs off on Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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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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