Connecting the dots between drug prohibition and disease mongering
an open letter to UVA Professor Joseph Davis, author of 'How Medicalization Lost Its Way'
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
May 23, 2026
Everywhere I look, I find that modern Americans reckon without drug prohibition. The enemies of inner-city gun violence ignore the fact that drug prohibition first brought guns to the 'hood.1 The enemies of Alzheimer's disease ignore the fact that drug prohibition outlaws drugs that drastically improve concentration, some of which can actually grow new neurons in the brain2. Our scientists who study depression ignore the fact that drug prohibition outlaws a wide variety of substances that could inspire and elate the depressed in real-time3. And our philosophers ignore the fact that drug prohibition outlaws the use of substances that could clarify or qualify the Categories of Immanuel Kant, insofar as those categories were created under the assumption of a one-size-fits-all consciousness, a premise which has since been called into question by the use of nitrous oxide by William James.4
"One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. " --William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature5
Today I found yet another subject on which American understanding is woefully enfeebled by our refusal to connect the dots between drug prohibition and modern problems. The topic du jour is the subject of medicalization, sometimes referred to as disease mongering, or the attempt to view every potentially problematic human behavior imaginable as pathological in the medical sense of that word and therefore as requiring the intervention of psychiatry and Big Pharma. I have been wading through academic papers on such topics today-- or at least through the freely available abstracts of such papers -- and have yet to find one that draws the obvious connection between drug prohibition and medicalization. Surely, the connection is obvious, however. When the government outlaws panaceas, they create unnecessary health problems, and it is common capitalistic sense that the medical industry and pharmaceutical companies will "step up to the plate" to address these problems in the most lucrative way possible. And how do you do that if you are in the healthcare business? You "discover" that the downsides of drug prohibition -- unnecessary depression, unnecessary anxiety, a feeling of disempowerment in life -- are actually medical problems! Who knew?!
The fact is that the topic of medicalization cannot be discussed advisedly without discussing the drug prohibition which empowers it.
Here's a letter I sent to UVA Professor Joseph Davis on the subject after reading his informative article entitled "How Medicalization Lost Its Way."6
Good afternoon, Professor Davis.
I enjoyed reading your article on medicalization.
At one point in that article, you ask the question, with what should we replace medicalization in cases where it is inappropriate?
I would answer that we should replace it with drug re-legalization, thereby allowing individuals to take care of their own health using time-honored medicines.
I am a 67-year-old male who has been turned into a ward of the healthcare state by the dependence-causing and underperforming meds of Big Pharma. And I was placed on those meds four decades ago only because drug prohibition had given a monopoly to the medical field when it came to dispensing psychoactive substances -- and, of course, drug prohibition gave Big Pharma a monopoly on creating such medicines. I would not have been depressed over the last four decades if I had had access merely to the plant medicines of Mother Nature, like opium and coca, to say nothing of laughing gas and the phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. Instead, my depression has been entirely medicalized as a result of drug prohibition, which, as I see it, has outlawed my right to heal. I am an unsung victim of drug prohibition because the depressed are never considered stakeholders in the debate over drug law.
You also refer to the elitist nature of criticizing only Big Pharma, but I don't see such criticism as elitist when it comes from a person in my situation. Big Pharma has a monopoly on mind and mood medicine, after all -- so it is not a free choice that I make when I purchase their meds. In fact, it's now against my choice. I have tried in vain to get off dependence-causing Effexor, which I have found is far harder to kick than heroin, at least in a world in which we have outlawed all drugs that could help a withdrawing person to "stay the course."
I hope that you find these comments interesting. Thanks again for the interesting read.
Brian
PS It is my belief that the subject of medicalization should be discussed in light of drug prohibition. In fact, I would argue that drug prohibition has created the environment in which medicalization can flourish. The way I see it, doctors first fought to outlaw time-honored panaceas like opium and cocaine, then they started creating "illnesses" out of all of the problems created by that drug prohibition. I am not saying that life would be idyllic without drug prohibition -- I would point out, however, that no one has ever sat down and methodically attempted to create safe use protocols for a wide variety of psychoactive drugs based on best practices and historical experience and psychological common sense. This is because we have placed biochemical determinists in charge of mind and mood medicine, which I maintain was always a category error.
AFTERWORD
Of course, I've been here before. I have spent the last four months trying to convince our supposed champions of the depressed that assisted suicide for the depressed cannot be discussed ethically without discussing the drug prohibition that outlaws drugs that could help make these people wish to live.7 Maddeningly, I can get nobody to agree with me, that's just how effectively drug propaganda and censorship have convinced Americans that drugs really do have no positive uses whatsoever -- or that if they do, that fact must be proven by Dr. Spock in a lab coat and not by common sense, anecdote or history.
From what I've seen, the organizations that set themselves up as the saviors of the med-dependent depressed are never interested in the true freedom of the depressed, otherwise they would be advocating an end to the drug prohibition that outlaws their right to heal. Instead, they are interested in selling vitamins, or workout routines, or meditation classes, or they will charge you $200 for hour-long virtual therapy sessions to help you through antidepressant withdrawal -- or else they are proselytizing on behalf of a Christian Science lifestyle (which seems to be the case with Mad in America) -- or some combination of the above.
The depressed are suffering because of drug prohibition, and until we connect those dots, we are really just using the pill-mill dystopia to further our own goals, however noble our intentions may be. These sites for the med-dependent attempt to dethrone psychiatrists as the experts in our cases, but they only do so so that they can enthrone the organization leaders as the experts for us instead. They just don't get it. We do not need experts to tell us what we should do: we need the restoration of our basic right to take care of our own health as we see fit: we need an end to drug prohibition.
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.
Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.
There are endless creative ways to ward off addiction if all psychoactive medicines were at our disposal. The use of the drugs synthesized by Alexander Shulgin could combat the psychological downsides of withdrawal by providing strategic "as-needed" relief.
Anytime you hear that a psychoactive drug has not been proven to be effective, it's a lie. People can make such claims only by dogmatically ignoring all the glaringly obvious signs of efficacy.
Freud found that cocaine CURED most people's depression and he "got off it" without trouble.
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.
If Americans want less government, they should get rid of the Drug War Industrial Complex, rather than abandoning democracies around the world and leaving a vacuum for Russia and China to fill.
When folks banned opium, they did not just ban a drug: they banned the philosophical and artistic insights that the drug has been known to inspire in writers like Poe, Lovecraft and De Quincey.
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