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Don't Worry, Be Satisfied

the feeble ambitions of modern psychiatry

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 1, 2020



As a veteran addict of mind-fogging anti-depressants, I sometimes ask myself why so many of my fellow addicts seem to be happy (or at least satisfied) with the psychiatric status quo. Why would they be satisfied with a psychiatric pill mill that shunts them off onto a handful of highly addictive synthetic medicines when Mother Nature has already grown for them a large store of psychoactive medicines that can work psychotherapeutic wonders when administered thoughtfully?

Update: June 11, 2025

Of course, there's the obvious answer to this question, namely that said addicts are not permitted to access Mother Nature's medicines thanks to the Drug War and so the question is moot -- but that still doesn't explain why these depression sufferers don't view this situation as an intolerable obstacle to their mental health and do not protest the Drug War accordingly. For the vast majority of such sufferers never connect the dots between the Drug War and their own personal lack of treatment options. Instead, they make a virtue of necessity and turn the Big Pharma pill-choosing game into a lifelong quest to find the addictive golden grail that works best for them, a quest to be discussed at social get-togethers, where fellow depressives mingle and share their own idiosyncratic list of the Big Pharma pills (and pill combinations) that seem to be "working" for them.

I have recently concluded that this blase acceptance by patients of the anti-patient status quo has at least the following three causes:

1) Just as we can't know what we can't know, we can't feel what we can't feel. I unwittingly ingested a psychedelic at age 19. The result was so mind opening that I began crying: I began crying because I saw that the world was so full of possibilities that I had hitherto overlooked. Now, the point is this: Had you asked me if I was depressed before the "trip," I might well have said no -- but after that trip, my depression was so obvious to me that it made me cry for the lost hours and years that I had spent failing to take advantage of the opportunities right in front of me. In other words, one can be depressed as hell but not realize the fact until they clearly SEE what that depression has been hiding from them: namely hope and possibility.

2) Psychological health surveys ask the wrong questions. They rely on self-reporting about mood. But if a person has never experienced true happiness and understanding (see point one above), they cannot report their mood objectively. They are prone to report their mood as satisfactory merely because they do not have any idea what it's like to experience true psychological happiness. They're like a car buyer thinking that a beat-up car is in great shape, merely because he or she has never seen a car in perfect condition. A far better question to ask in a psychological examination would be: "How many of your important goals have you accomplished in the last year?" That's how I first realized through rational introspection that my own depression was bad: not by thinking "oh, I feel sad," but by reckoning up the myriad "brilliant ideas" that I had come up with over time but failed to follow through on despite having had plenty of time to do so. My depression, it turned out, was bad indeed, because it had stopped me from taking the actions that I needed to take in order to realize my most important goals in life. To paraphrase the book of Matthew: "You will know them by their LACK of works," at least when it comes to the depressed.

3) Psychiatric nostrums are designed to help us survive, not to thrive. Anyone who reads the horror story of psychiatry's early years in America will realize that the psychiatric goal, for well over a century, has been to render patients "docile," not to render them happy or fulfilled. This is why treatments like insulin shock therapy and frontal lobe lobotomy were both hailed as miracle cures in their time. The raves were not coming from patients: they were coming from the psychiatric establishment itself, whose staff were finding their jobs easier once their psychiatric patients were rendered peaceable. As author Richard Whitaker points out, there is an eerie continuity in this philosophy when it comes to the modern psychiatric go-to drugs of benzodiazepines and anti-depressants1. Benzodiazepines were never meant to help one solve a problem or find insight: they were meant to induce satisfaction with (or at least tolerance for) the status quo. The same can be said for modern anti-depressants. This brings to mind "The Stepford Wives" by Ira Levin. Westerners think of that story as a satire about women's place in society, but today it reads more like non-fiction. One in 4 American women are addicted to mind-fogging Big Pharma 2 3 antidepressants 4, medications that conduce to exactly the sort of emotional flat-lining and bland acceptance of life that Levin skewers in his book5.

Author's Follow-up: March 22, 2023



Of course, the whole point of antidepressants is to tranquilize. The best that modern antidepressants can boast is that they keep folks from killing themselves -- but then a blow on the head with a hammer would do the same thing, by so muddling the brain as to make suicide 6 unlikely. Meanwhile the meds we have outlawed can actually give folks a reason to live. The world knows this. A recent London Times Poll showed 83% of online respondents favored drug decriminalization, but as George Tyler notes in Billionaire Democracy7, no laws get past or repealed in America today without the help of the richest 3% and the many Congressional representatives that are on their payrolls.

Author's Follow-up: February 1, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

I have just recently discovered that Mariani Coca Wine is, for me, a wonderful antidepressant. It's irritating (bordering on unconscionable) that modern psychiatrists do not prescribe Coca Wine rather than dependency-causing pills. They literally pretend as if coca does not exist8.



Author's Follow-up:

June 11, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




I do not want to be satisfied, I want to thrive. I therefore want to be free to use the kinds of substances that inspired the following user reports in Pihkal:

"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place. " --Alexander Shulgin, from Pihkal9

"Later in the experience (the 8 hour point) easy childhood memory recall." --Alexander Shulgin, from Pihkal10

"A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like... In fact, the entire experience was exquisite. Next day, same sense of serene, quiet joy/beauty persisted for most of the day. A true healing potential." --Alexander Shulgin, from Pihkal11


I want to smoke opium wisely, as such use is described in a 19th-century short story by Fitz-James O'Brien:

"Those hours of opium 12 happiness which the Doctor and I spent together in secret were regulated with a scientific accuracy. We did not blindly smoke the drug of paradise, and leave our dreams to chance. While smoking, we carefully steered our conversation through the brightest and calmest channels of thought." --Fitz-James O'Brien, from the short story What Was It?13


I want to truly commune with Mother Nature with the help of morphine , as described in "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" by Edgar Allan Poe.

"In the meantime the morphine 14 had its customary effect- that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf- in the hue of a blade of grass- in the shape of a trefoil- in the humming of a bee- in the gleaming of a dew-drop- in the breathing of the wind- in the faint odors that came from the forest- there came a whole universe of suggestion- a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought." --Edgar Allan Poe, from A Tale of the Ragged Mountains15


I want to have "a great disposition to laugh,16" as did Humphry Davy, under the influence of laughing gas 17 .

In short, I want to improve my mentation and better appreciate the world with the help of the wise use of drugs. This is not pathology, this is a longing to transcend and improve in life. It is sanity itself. Politicians do not want us to eat of the fruit of such knowledge, however, and so they pathologize the desire to do so as an 'addictive tendency.' This is rich. First, the Drug War outlaws every substance whose use could improve our lives in real-time -- and then when we complain about the niggardly nature of this government-edited pharmacopoeia, we are told that we are ill, that we have an addictive personality. No, I have a desire to live large and not to accept the unprecedented limits foisted on me by an insane Drug War that puts racists and xenophobes in charge of prejudging medicines up or down, under the following inhumane and imperialist notion: that a substance that can be misused by a white young person when used at one dose for one reason, must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.

This is why the War on Drugs is so much more than a battle against hedonism. It is a war on mental improvement and creativity. It is a war designed to limit how and how much we can think and feel in this life. It is therefore the ultimate tyranny, for it is a meta-tyranny. It represents the government nosing its way into our digestive systems and thereby controlling the very way that we are allowed to experience this world.

Finally, drug Prohibition is a public policy that is guaranteed to result in unnecessary cases of depression. How? By outlawing all the substances that could have otherwise cheered us up. This is obvious -- or it would be if we had not been so brainwashed as to believe that our unprecedented drug prohibitions are some kind of natural baseline, with no knock-on effects in the real world, a stance, alas, which almost all non-fiction authors adopt these days. As just one example, consider Ronald Hutton's scholarly book on Witches18, in which the author only mentions drugs once, and then in a pejorative manner, failing to realize that the herbs that the witches used back then were drugs just as surely as "meds" are drugs today: it is only the constant use of biased drug-war terminology that makes us think otherwise.









Notes for essay entitled Don't Worry, Be Satisfied: the feeble ambitions of modern psychiatry:

1: Whitaker, Robert. 2011. “Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker: 9780307452429 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books.” PenguinRandomhouse.com. 2025. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/189611/anatomy-of-an-epidemic-by-robert-whitaker/. (up)
2: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
3: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
4: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
5: Richard Louis Miller. 2017. Psychedelic Medicine : The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca. Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press. (up)
6: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
7: Billionaire Democracy: The Hijacking of the American Political System Tyler, George R., Pegasus Books, Michigan, 2016 (up)
8: Coca Wine DWP (up)
9: PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (up)
10: PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (up)
11: PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (up)
12: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
13: Great Ghost Stories O'Brien, Fitz-James , Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., 1918 (up)
14: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
15: “Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (Text-02A).” 2026. Eapoe.Org. 2026. https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/raggeda.htm. (up)
16: “Emperors of Dreams : Drugs in the Nineteenth Century : Jay, Mike, 1959 December 14- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/emperorsofdreams0000jaym/page/n3/mode/2up. (up)
17: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
18: The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present Hutton, Ronald, Yale Press, 2017 (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition. We need a National Institute on Drug Use, not a National Institute on Drug Abuse.

"Dope Sick"? "Prohibition Sick" is more like it. The very term "dope" connotes imperialism, racism and xenophobia, given that all tribal cultures have used "drugs" for various purposes. "Dope? Junk?" It's hard to imagine a more intolerant, dismissive and judgmental terminology.

There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.

We won't know how hard it is to get off drugs until we legalize all drugs that could help with the change. With knowledge and safety, there will be less unwanted use. And unwanted use can be combatted creatively with a wide variety of drugs.

"When two men who have been in an aggressive mood toward each other take part in the ritual, one is able to say to the other, 'Come, let us drink, for there is something between us.' " re: the Mayan use of the balche drink in Encyc of Psych Plants, by Ratsch & Hofmann

There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.

I hope that scientists will eventually find the prohibition gene so that we can eradicate this superstitious way of thinking from humankind.

If religious liberty existed, we would be able to use the inspiring phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the same way and for the same reasons as the Vedic people of India used soma.

We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?

By reading "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," I begin to understand why I encounter a wall of silence when I write to authors and professors on the subject of "drugs." The mere fact that the drug war inspires such self-censorship should be grounds for its immediate termination.


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






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