Wanted: Martian Psychiatrists

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Wanted: Martian Psychiatrists

Must be willing and able to prescribe pills to make Martian life bearable.

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 28, 2026

One never knows where the next drug-related insight will come from. Last night was a case in point. I was watching a Spanish-dubbed version of a 2024 documentary called "Alien Humans on Mars," narrated by Gary Dean Orona and Tabitha Stevens. I figured this would give me a break from the often irritating subject of American drug attitudes while helping to improve my Spanish language skills at the same time. And indeed, the first half-hour of the program was ideal for this purpose. The co-hosts greeted us from what looked like a campground in Death Valley, seated on what appeared to be logs, but which were possibly some sort of prefabricated stand-in for logs, bearing in mind that I was not wearing my glasses at the time. From this forbidding (if perhaps somewhat blurry) outpost, they began speculating freely -- and in intelligible and straightforward Spanish -- about the many challenges that would face the first human beings who traveled to the Red Planet, placing particular emphasis on the psychological challenges that would be encountered there, including claustrophobic living quarters and the absence of all but a handful of human beings with whom one could share one's thoughts and feelings. They also pointed to some underappreciated physical drawbacks to Martian life, like the excruciatingly cold temperatures and the fact that the Martian soil contains toxins called perchlorates.

"Perchlorates, check," I thought to myself. "I did not know that." I was soon starting to relax, convinced that I was in a "drug-war free" zone while watching this documentary, that there was no opportunity for the hosts to suddenly make some biased statement about drugs that would pluck my last and final nerve. Alas, I was wrong. After a half-hour of unobjectionable speculation about the challenges of living on Mars, mostly on the part of Gary, who was apparently the main narrator for the piece, Tabitha started getting talkative. She started riffing, in particular, on specific ways that future astronauts could conquer claustrophobia and loneliness on Mars without going stir crazy. "Okay," I thought to myself, "be careful here, Tabitha. Where exactly are you going with this?" Come to find out, Tabitha believed that some medications could be created to help us endure life on Mars and that such medications could be administered by... wait for it, folks... a sort of astronaut psychiatrist, who would be "along for the ride" to Mars to make sure that everybody "took their meds."

"As if meds were not drugs in the first place."

"Isn't that just like Americans?" I thought to myself. "They think that meds can solve everything, while drugs -- you know, the junk cranked out by Mother Nature -- can only be misused, abused, and drive us crazy!? As if meds were not drugs in the first place; as if we should judge psychoactive substances by the spin that they are given by racist and xenophobic politicians, to say nothing of financially interested pharmaceutical companies and their front organizations that parade before the gullible public as health-conscious nonprofits." I asked myself, "Why is Tabitha qualified to give medical advice, while my Reddit posts get blocked if I so much as suggest that naturally occurring substances have any beneficial uses whatsoever? Who is this Tabitha Stevens, anyway? Who died and gave her a medical degree?" So thinking, I betook myself to my smartphone to perform a cursory search on the co-host's name. It turned out that Tabitha was a former American porn star and a winner of the AVN award, whatever that is. I'm not sure that does much to improve her street cred on the subject of psychoactive medicine; I should add, however, in the interests of full disclosure, that the documentary as a whole was credited to an organization called Psychoactive Circus, a nomenclature which may be a nod to experiential knowledge on the part of the co-host, the specifics of which might be inconvenient to relate. Just maybe.

So I'm thinking to myself: "Thanks for nothing, Tabitha. You couldn't leave well enough alone, could you? You had to get specific in a way that reinforces America's deeply ingrained drug-war biases." I then went on to remind Tabitha, in an imaginary but heartfelt colloquy, that a free people would learn about best uses for drugs for achieving specific psychological and socio-spiritual purposes based on actual best practices. We would not need financially-interested psychiatrists to decide for us what sorts of mental attitudes we should have at any given moment in our life: whether we're living in a SpaceX Starship on Mars or a one-bedroom apartment in Jamaica Queens. We can decide such matters for ourselves with the help of a re-legalized pharmacopoeia (yes, Mother Nature would actually be legal in the world of which I speak, Tabitha!)" Besides, with Tabitha's plan, you'd have to have a DEA astronaut along for the ride, to make sure that the "meds" being doled out by the psychiatrist do not inspire any unnecessary joy or bliss. "We can't have them going stir crazy," thinks the narc, "but that doesn't mean they have the right to enjoy a world full of multi-colored phantasmagoria either!"

I think it was Hamlet who said:

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell
and count myself a king of infinite space,
were it not that the Drug War has outlawed
all substances that could facilitate
precisely such a beneficial mindset on my part.

Or something like that.

I managed to keep watching the documentary to the end, probably because my imperfect grasp of the Spanish language helped to cushion the blow of some of the more biased statements that otherwise could have sent me diving for the "off" button on the remote. It's hard to be furious at someone over something that they may not have even said, after all. But there was no mistaking Stevens's advocacy of a psychiatric pill mill on Planet Mars, and preferably one overseen by a board-certified psychiatrist. She communicated those warped ideas in the vocabulary of Spanish 101. It was all too clear what she was driving at: she was telling us that self-interested doctors are the ones who should call the shots about how we're allowed to think and feel in this life, whether we're living on Planet Mars or in Kingdom of Prussia, Pennsylvania. She failed to mention the fact, however, that DEA bureaucrats would have to look over the shoulders of those Martian psychiatrists, to ensure that patient empowerment does not go too far and that the meds in question do not produce any unnecessary insight or mental flexibility in the partaker. We'll even need a jail on Mars in case the psychiatrists really overdo it and start REALLY helping the crew.

REVIEW

There's a curious line at the end of chapter one of "The Trial" by Franz Kafka, in which the protagonist-narrator is reflecting on his behavior around his attractive boarding house neighbor named Ms. Burstner. "K" tells us that he was satisfied with his behavior around the woman, but that he was also surprised that he was not MORE satisfied with his behavior. This is kind of how I felt about the documentary called "Alien Humans on Mars." I found it interesting, but I was surprised that I did not find it MORE interesting. It was, after all, about a subject in which I should be deeply interested, given that my father worked for NASA and that I am engrossed by the philosophical study of human psychology (not to be confused with the study of the naive behaviorist psychology of today's biochemical determinists). Why then was I lukewarm about this documentary? I could see why some viewers might be put off by the heavy reliance on fabricated still shots in an age when the producers must have had access to plenty of real-life footage from the planet itself as taken by at least four different Martian rovers. But that didn't bother me much; such visuals might have even distracted me from engaging in the philosophical contemplation that the narrators were apparently trying to generate in their audience.

I finally figured out what was sticking in my craw, though. I realized that any human exploration of Planet Mars was going to be undertaken by oligarchs and their toadies, not by the U.S. government on behalf of all the citizens of the world. This was not going to be one small step for man, it was going to be one giant financially leveraged leap for Elon Musk. With this in mind, I found it hard to care about the psychological health of the SpaceX voyagers. They would only be going to Mars to assuage their vanity and to show the world that they (as opposed to "us") are a real "somebody," thank you very much, and that they matter in this world! How am I supposed to be riveted by their fate? It would serve them right if they discovered that they couldn't live with themselves once they got up there. Besides, I'm sure that the well-heeled crew will have their own psychiatrists that they'll want to bring along for the ride. Anyway, the actual trip is still ages away: SpaceX has not yet so much as designed a separate spacecraft for the DEA, its SWAT teams, and the bureaucrats who will be needed to ruin the lives of those who seek to profit from the use of psychoactive medicine on Mars.

Of course, I wish Godspeed to Musk and company, as they boldly go where no multi-billionaires have gone before. But I will not be glued to the TV set, staring at the Starship when it departs the launch gantry for Mars. I might just as well gawk at the next-door neighbors' Honda Civic when it departs their driveway for Disneyworld. That trip is THEIR business, not mine.

Key Takeaways:

'Alien Humans on Mars' is a documentary about the psychological challenges that will be faced by human beings living on the Red Planet.
Tabitha Stevens suggests that psychiatrists could help Red Planet astronauts with pharmaceuticals.
Stevens reinforces drug-war biases by pretending that 'meds' are valuable while completely ignoring the use of drugs, forgetting, of course, that meds ARE drugs.
Stevens advocates a psychiatric pill mill on Planet Mars.

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

"All these anti-opium articles... are based upon the same model. They assume certain statements as existing and acknowledged facts which have never been proved to be such, and then proceed to draw deductions from those alleged facts." --William Brereton

I passed a sign that says "Trust Trump." What does that mean? Trust him to crack down on his opposition using the U.S. Army? Or trust him not to do all the anti-American things that he's saying he's going to do.

I have nothing against science, BTW (altho' I might feel differently after a nuclear war!) I just want scientists to "stay in their lane" and stop pretending to be experts on my own personal mood and consciousness.

There is an absurd safety standard for "drugs." The cost/benefit analysis of the FDA & co. never takes into account the costs of NOT prescribing nor the benefits of a productive life well lived. The "users" are not considered stakeholders.

What is the end game of the drug warrior? A world in which no one wants drugs? That's not science. It's the drug-hating religion of Christian Science. You know, the American religion that outsources its Inquisition to drug-testing labs.

The best step we could take in harm reduction is re-legalizing everything and starting to teach safe use. Spend the DEA's billions on "go" teams that would descend on locations where drugs are being used stupidly -- not to arrest, but to educate.

Suicidal people should be given drugs that cheer them up immediately and whose use they can look forward to. The truth is, we would rather such people die than to give them such drugs, that's just how bamboozled we are by the war against drugs.

If politicians wanted to outlaw coffee, a bunch of Kevin Sabets would come forward and start writing books designed to scare us off the drink by cherry-picking negative facts from scientific studies.

Like when Laura Sanders tells us in Science News that depression is an intractable problem, she should rather tell us: "Depression is an intractable problem... that is, in a world wherein we refuse to consider the benefits of 'drugs,' let alone to fight for their beneficial use."

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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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Wanted: Martian Psychiatrists

Must be willing and able to prescribe pills to make Martian life bearable.

Key Takeaways:

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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

Diary of a Drug Fiend