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?
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.
Many articles in science mags need this disclaimer: "Author has declined to consider the insights gained from drug-induced states on this topic out of fealty to Christian Science orthodoxy." They don't do this because they know readers already assume that drugs will be ignored.
The fact that drugs have positive uses for human beings is a psychological corollary of Husserl's phenomenology and Whitehead's philosophy of organism.
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.
If they're going to throw doctors in jail for prescribing too much pain medication, they should also throw them in jail for prescribing too LITTLE.
After a long life, I have come to the conclusion that when all the establishment is united, it is always wrong. (Harold MacMillan)
Someday the world will realize that Freud's real achievement was his discovery of the depression-busting power of cocaine.
"Those gentlemen who adopt the anti-opium doctrine... are only comparable to the monomaniac, who, sane upon every subject but one, is thoroughly daft upon that." --William Brereton
Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.
Even if the FDA approved MDMA today, it would only be available for folks specifically pronounced to have PTSD by materialist doctors, as if all other emotional issues are different problems and have to be studied separately. That's just ideological foot-dragging.
Trump's lies about America's voting process are typical NAZI and DRUG WAR strategy: raise mendacious doubts about whatever you want to destroy and keep repeating them. It's what Joseph Goebbels called "The Big Lie."
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