There is more hope in dope than there is in the psychiatric pill mill

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There is more hope in dope than there is in the psychiatric pill mill

How the healthcare industry profits from drug prohibition while denying the depressed the right to heal

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 23, 2026

The healthcare industry likes to talk about patient empowerment, but they never talk about the power not to be a patient in the first place. As one of the millions who have been turned into a ward of the healthcare state by the dependence-causing meds of Big Pharma, I stop to ask myself today, how did this happen?

Cartoon. Young girl anime cartoon on top says, 'I don't like capitalism and authoritarian structures. Doctor with syringe below responds, 'You have Oppositional Defiant Disorder. It's in the DSM. What you say is literally insane. — This uncredited image from 4Chan shows why the psychiatric pill mill is not science. It is rather the imposition of an interested party's viewpoint about what constitutes a disease and what constitutes a cure.

I see it so clearly now, although my insights will be seen as heresy in our age of blind faith in science to handle all subjects, even those of mind and mood.

I see how the medical industry demonized cocaine for self-interested reasons, by studying the drug only for its downsides, exactly as if they were to study alcohol by looking only at drunkards. No one asked the depressed how they felt about such drugs. The outlawing of drugs like cocaine ensured that no one would treat their depression on their own but would have to visit doctors. The doctors then teamed up with pharmaceutical companies to place these dragooned patients onto substances that could never be kicked. Voila: psychiatrists had well-paying jobs for life, and pharmaceutical profits shot through the roof.

The psychiatric field attempted to justify the mass pharmacological dystopia of dependent patients by claiming that depression was a literal disease -- and that, in fact, all sorts of behavioral problems were literal diseases. No one noticed their self-interest in doing this. First, by calling these conditions illnesses, parents of the depressed and the depressed themselves would no longer feel guilty or shameful for visiting a psychiatrist. That means more customers for psychiatrists. Meanwhile, the psychiatrists could claim to be "real" scientists, and not just counselors. And then they could charge accordingly. Not only could they henceforth turn their clientele into patients for life, but they could tell them that they had to take their meds if they wanted to be good patients.

And how well they succeeded. Americans were all-too-eager to let diseases take the blame for the problems of life.

But at what a cost! Not only were millions thus turned into patients for life, with all of the demoralizing baggage that such a transformation implies, but we were blinded to the larger lessons that we might have learned about society. For once you call human conditions like depression a disease, you cease to ask why depression is such a big thing in this country in the first place. Why bother when depression is a disease and therefore unavoidable? And yet the rates of depression in the U.S., being so much larger than those in other countries, surely tells us something about the downsides of modern capitalism.

And yet no one wants to criticize the lifestyle of modern capitalism, so psychiatrists are helping to divert the blame, not just from the individual but from society as well.

If we look at this story from the standpoint of self-interest, we see an obvious and enormous motivation for psychiatrists to look at all problematic behavior as illness, and indeed the DSM has been repeatedly expanded to reflect that self-interested viewpoint. And yet this is philosophically problematic, to put it mildly. It implies the existence of a kind of biochemical predestination that makes a mockery of the history of the world. From this point of view, the personalities of the Bible were all suffering from various diseases, for which the cure (to say nothing of the disease itself) had yet to be discovered. What we had naively supposed to be a religious drama was actually the inevitable expression of various brain diseases. For if modern behavioral problems are actual diseases, then surely the behavior of days gone by was spawned by disease as well.

Now let's do a little thought experiment: suppose we were able to go back in time and place all those Biblical characters on the "appropriate" Big Pharma drug. It's a cinch that Christianity as we know it would not exist today. And this is why the illness paradigm is dangerous nonsense: because you cannot "cure" human behaviors without knowing what the cures should be -- and that decision is based on value judgements, not on scientific data.

This is why I regret having ever visited a psychiatrist, because they placed me on drugs that I can never kick by giving me a "cure" that was chosen not scientifically, but rather based on the self-interested ideas of chemists as to what kind of mindset should constitute a "cure" for depression. Should the cured individual be empowered to live large or should they merely be tranquilized? Had I been allowed to choose, the mindset in question would have been very different indeed to that chosen by pharmaceutical company chemist, for I would have used a variety of previously outlawed drugs on a strategic basis to sharpen my mind and be more amiable and be more outgoing, etc.: in short, to help me live large. The last thing I would have done is to use a drug that I could never quit and which was designed to cure me in a way that was chosen by some unknown chemists based on their own value systems and/or that of their profit-driven employer.

Key Takeaways:

Medical ethicists talk about patient empowerment, never about our right not to be patients in the first place.
Doctors had enormous financial incentive for judging a near-panacea like cocaine only by its downsides.
There is an obvious financial incentive for psychiatrists to consider all behavior as pathology.
Anyone who claims to be curing depression is doing so according to their own definition of what constitutes a cure.

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Today's Washington Post reports that "opioid pills shipped" DROPPED 45% between 2011 and 2019..... while fatal overdoses ROSE TO RECORD LEVELS! Prohibition is PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE.

The drug war is a scare campaign to teach us to distrust mother nature and to rely on pharmaceuticals instead.

All drugs have potential positive uses for somebody, at some dose, in some circumstance, alone or in combination. To decide in advance that a drug is completely useless is an offense to reason and to human liberty.

Why does no one talk about empathogens for preventing atrocities? Because they'd rather hate drugs than use them for the benefit of humanity. They don't want to solve problems, they prefer hatred.

When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.

We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.

Rick Strassman isn't sure that DMT should be legal. Really?! Does he not realize how dangerous it is to chemically extract DMT from plants? In the name of safety, prohibitionists have encouraged dangerous ignorance and turned local police into busybody Nazis.

The drug war is being used as a wrecking ball to destroy democratic freedoms. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and freedom of religion and given the police the right to confiscate the property of peaceful and productive citizens.

Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.

If we cared about the elderly in 'homes', we would be bringing in shamanic empaths and curanderos from Latin America to help cheer them up and expand their mental abilities. We would also immediately decriminalize the many drugs that could help safely when used wisely.

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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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There is more hope in dope than there is in the psychiatric pill mill

How the healthcare industry profits from drug prohibition while denying the depressed the right to heal

Key Takeaways:

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against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend