Drug Use as Self-Medication

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Drug Use as Self-Medication

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

December 4, 2022

The ultimate sin in the eyes of the psychiatrist is for a person to 'self-medicate.' But what exactly is wrong with self-medicating ¹? Everybody used to self-medicate while laudanum was still available in the 19th-century medical cabinets of England.

April 2025 Update

Babies crying? Give them a few drops of laudanum. Tooth ache? Crack out the laudanum. In exquisite pain? Reach for the laudanum.

Of course, this practice cuts out the role of the physician in so many cases that it is natural that the latter would consider the very concept of self-medicating to be heresy.

But let's consider some of the psychological reasons why people might wish to self-medicate.

Many of us want to live large in this world, to transcend the misgivings and fears that hold us back in life, keeping us from being all that we could be. This is the simplest of psychological facts but one that the Drug Warriors completely ignore in their efforts to demonize all "drug users" as irresponsible hedonists. And what are the legal options of such seekers? We encourage them to visit a psychiatrist. And what will the psychiatrist provide: not a substance that will help them to live large, but rather an expensive tranquilizing med upon which they will be dependent for life.

In light of these facts, it is perfectly natural that folks would seek medical help outside the system. In fact, except for the fear of arrest, it is perfectly logical to make such a choice. If I have to use a drug every day for the rest of my life, I'd rather that drug be provided by a dealer who is not going to pry into my emotional life than by a bearded man in a three-piece suit who is going to pompously catechize me every three months of my life about my innermost feelings and the probability of my committing suicide. Moreover, I'd far rather use an illegal medicine that inspired the writings of HG Wells than a legal one that inspires nobody to write anything at all.

But the Drug War is all about dividing Americans, turning formerly law-abiding citizens into "dealers" through extreme economic incentive and then urging us to look upon such dealers as "scumbags" and "wastes of space." We are encouraged to be as cold-hearted and unforgiving toward dealers as Glenn Close's self-righteous character in "Four Good Days" (see also ). When she sees a teenage "pusher" on the streets, she mumbles, "He should be shot," before she rushes indoors and throws back an unusually large glass of wine, that is.

The fact is that people want to live as fully as possible and have, from the beginning of time, sought pharmacological means toward that end. The answer to this "problem" is not massive arrests and a demonization campaign to make us hate our fellow human beings; the answer is re-legalization ² of psychoactive medicines and a full and honest and ongoing discussion about their benefits and drawbacks. The answer, in short, is a rational approach, not the superstitious approach of the Drug War which falsely tells us that demonized substances have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, at any time, ever.

"Society's prevailing view is that being medicated by a doctor is drug use, while self-medication is drug abuse. This justification rests on the principle of professionalism, not on pharmacology. [This] concept of drug abuse symbolizes scientific medicine's fundamental policy that laymen should place their care under the supervision of a physician. This is similar to the belief, prior to the Reformation, that laymen should not communicate directly with God but should place their spiritual care under the supervision of a duly accredited priest. The self-interest of the church and of medicine in such policies are obvious. These policies also relieve individuals of the burden of responsibility for themselves."-Thomas Szasz

Author's Follow-up:

April 04, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

The idea that we should not self-medicate only makes sense when we believe in the myth of mental illness ³. After all, if our depression is the same kind of thing as liver disease or a heart ailment, then we laypeople clearly know nothing about treating it. right? (We will answer yes for the purposes of this analysis, but please look below for some important caveats on this topic. )

However, it was clearly a category error to place materialist doctors in charge of mind and mood matters to begin with. This is obvious given that doing so has led to absurd results, and as Whitehead wrote in "The Concept of Nature"...

"The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us."

What absurd results?

Answer: the fact that our materialist drug researchers cannot find positive uses for the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions. And yet the Hindu religion only exists today because of the use of a drug that inspired and elated.

"The man with whom thou fillest thee with Soma deems himself a pious worshipper." --The Rig Veda ⁴

Modern materialist researchers cannot even figure out if laughing gas could help the depressed, when, in a sane world, we would issue laughing gas ⁵ kits to the suicidal just as we now provide Epi pens to those with severe allergies.

They are telling us to ignore common sense and to rely on a materialist cure for what ails us. That approach should sound familiar. It is the approach that has led to the biggest mass dependency of all time, namely, that of the psychiatric pill mill ⁶ thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma ⁷ ⁸ drugs for life.

The whole search for a psychiatric "cure" for depression took place in dogmatic ignorance of the vast psychoactive pharmacopoeia of Mother Nature and the synthesized medicines that have been inspired thereby. The chemists involved searched for a drug whose effects would constitute a one-size-fits-all "cure" that would pass muster with conservative politicians. In other words, there was no concern for the desired outcomes of drug use for individual patients, there was instead a plan to come up with a drug whose use would create a certain sort of individual when it comes to moods and emotions, one which is not too depressed to shop yet who is not so inspired as to make a scene or to advocate the creation of new religions, etc.

And yet the Hindu religion was inspired by a drug that elated and inspired. From this it follows that the outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of religious liberty.

Seen in this light, self-medication is a duty. To the extent that such a pursuit is dangerous, we have the Drug Warriors to blame, first, because they refuse to educate about safe use, and second, because they refuse to acknowledge the value of substances that have inspired entire religions.

But I need to backpedal a little here.

Even if the ailments we are talking about are what we would call physical in nature, it does not follow that we cannot medicate ourselves advisedly with regard to them. Whether or not such ministrations will cure the illness is a question whose answer depends on the specifics of any given case, but in many cases, our self-medication could render the negative effects dormant or irrelevant from the psychological point of view.

The problem here is that the materialist medical establishment ignores all holistic and indirect approaches to health. If a substance cheers you up and keeps your mind off of a physical malady, that benefit in itself may be more than sufficient to overcome or at least to palliate the negative effects of one's physical illness. And yet the medical establishment is only interested in the ability of intervention A to cure problem B. They have no interest in an intervention that causes seemingly unrelated upsides D,E, and F, and only thereby renders the original target malady either impotent or unimportant. Such an indirect treatment of ills cannot be quantified and placed in a PowerPoint presentation for the purpose of eliciting research funds from the government. Besides, such cures depend on the unique traits of individuals, and the medical establishment concerns itself only with unique diseases, not with unique human beings.

It is psychologically obvious also that certain drug use can nip hypochondria in the bud by keeping our minds off of ailments and so keeping us from aiding and abetting their manifestation via our mental obsessions about them.

The point that I am trying to make here is this:

We have never freely worked with the vast pharmacopoeia of psychoactive medicines to methodically leverage their power to amplify and enforce the desires of the human will, or of human consciousness, if you prefer. We do not know what the mind is capable of simply because we have outlawed the quest to find out. We have never attempted to combine persuasion and hypnosis and affirmation and/or spirituality with the strategic use of drugs in a coordinated effort to overcome illness via mental means. We have no idea of what the mind is capable in this regard or where its limits lie when it comes to prophylaxis. Of course, the results of such a study in a free world would surely be highly dependent upon the education level and intent and interests of the participants employed, which is an obvious caveat that I add here only because Drug Warriors absolutely hate details. They want to draw pathological conclusions about drugs per se, and not bother with the pesky fact that human beings are unique and have different susceptibilities to different protocols.

To be more specific, consider the elation and inspiration that users have derived from the phenethylamines synthesized by chemist Alexander Shulgin as reported in his 1991 book entitled "Pihkal: A Chemical Love Affair.⁹" Consider how the use of drugs like these could take place in a set and setting custom-designed to bring about an attitude that would decrease the likelihood of a physical illness, meanwhile helping us to live peaceably with the symptoms of that illness to the extent that it manifests in our lives despite our efforts.

Drug user reports from "Pihkal ¹⁰":

"Excellent feelings, tremendous opening of insight and understanding, a real awakening."

"I now know that the mind has a remarkable ability to control the particular place the psyche is in."

"The feeling was one of great camaraderie, and it was very easy to talk to people."

Opium, when used wisely, can change our whole outlook on physical illness ¹¹. see "The Crawling Chaos" by HP Lovecraft for an example of how opium use can inspire a user with a metaphorical outlook on their physical suffering. In the 1921 short story, the use of opium helps the protagonist to envision the throbbing pain in his head as the crashing of waves from a tormented sea, that is, as something apart from his self and no longer affecting him. in other words, it lets the user adopt for the nonce the mental powers that it takes the most devoted mystics of the world an entire lifetime to achieve.

The government is determined to keep us from knowing anything good about opium , but the truth has not yet been entirely eradicated from history. it is clear that opium use has the potential for leveraging the power of the human mind.

This is a hint from opium ¹² that we should follow up on as curious human beings interested in the psychological and physical well-being of humanity. Instead we run from the very mention of the task in superstitious fear inspired by our cradle-to-grave brainwashing in the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. We should nevertheless be searching for positive drug-using protocols without being hindered by legislation which outlaws almost every possible inspiring drug in the world. only then can we begin for the first time in history to learn both the true powers of every psychoactive drug in the world and the true powers of the human mind, for that matter!

We don't need another "Decade of the Brain" -- we need a "Decade of the Human Mind... with the human being included!"

This may seem like a degression from the topic of self-medication, but these things are all related. The modern hatred of self-medication is inspired by the medical mindset that is keeping us from making the kinds of discoveries about the human mind that i advocate here. It is a mindset that considers subjective reactions to drugs to be unimportant. It is a mindset that completely ignores the powers of drugs to elate and inspire. It is a mindset therefore that is antithetical to common sense and even to religious freedom, for the Hindu religion would not exist today except for the use of drugs that inspire and elate. Soma ¹³ helped the Vedic people to deal with life's problems successfully and even with a sense of triumph. The Vedic people used drugs to end human suffering, regardless of the prohibitionist spin that the theologian might want to place on that use in order to avoid scandal.

Conclusion:

There would be no Hindu religion today had the Vedic people not self-medicated in 1500 BCE.

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Notes for essay entitled Drug Use as Self-Medication:

1: Restoring our Right to Self-Medication: how drug warriors work together with the medical establishment to prevent us from taking care of our own health DWP (up)
2: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
3: How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs DWP (up)
4: Complete Rig Veda in English (Sakala Shakha). n.d. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/rigvedacomplete. (up)
5: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
6: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
7: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
8: 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)
9: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
10: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
11: Hogshire, Jim. 2009. Opium for the Masses. Feral House. (up)
12: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
13: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)

read more essays here

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Had the DEA been active in the Punjab and 1500 BCE, there would be no Hindu religion today.

Ann Lemke's case studies make the usual assumptions: getting free from addiction is a morality tale. No reference to how the drug war promotes addiction and how banned drugs could solve such problems. She does not say why daily SSRI use is acceptable while daily opium use is not. Etc.

You can get a Ph.D. in healthcare, and not learn a thing about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs, as demonstrated by history, anecdote and common sense.

America won't be grown up until we start blaming drug misuse on people and/or policies rather than on drugs.

Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.

Drugs that sharpen the mind should be thoroughly investigated for their potential to help dementia victims. Instead, we prefer to demonize these drugs as useless. That's anti-scientific and anti-patient.

Katie MacBride's one-sided attack on MAPS reminds me of why I got into an argument with Vincent Rado. Yes, psychedelic hype can go too far, but let's solve the huge problem first by ending the drug war!!!

The front page of every mycology club page should feature a protest of drug laws that make the study of mycology illegal in the case of certain shrooms. But no one protests. Their silence makes them drug war collaborators because it serves to normalize prohibition.

M. Pollan says "not so fast" when it comes to drug re-legalization. I say FAST? I've gone a whole lifetime w/o access to Mother Nature's plants. How can a botanist approve of that? Answer: By ignoring all legalization stakeholders except for the kids whom we refuse to educate.

Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses.

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

No cookies, no ads paid for by amoral and immoral billionaires (or trillionaires).

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.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is a proud sponsor of The Drug War Philosopher website @ abolishthedea.com.

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP

(up)

Drug Use as Self-Medication

Author's Follow-up:

April 04, 2025

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

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