Drugging Our Kids on Behalf of Eli Lilly
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
May 29, 2019
Posted in response to When anxiety happens as early as preschool, treatments can help by Sujata Gupta in Science News magazine, April 21, 2019.
Isn't Big Pharma happy enough having 1 in 6 adult Americans on SSRIs? Now they have to go after the preschool market? This is irresponsible in the extreme (see Richard Whitaker's "Anatomy of an Epidemic" for many of the obvious reasons why this is immoral). What about the demoralizing effect of placing a child on a substance that could make them a pill popper for life? and the anhedonia that eventually results from such a regimen? Why should we trust psychiatry to treat our child when their "go to" pharmacopeia consists of a mere handful of chemically addicting drugs -- while hundreds of powerful non-addictive psychoactive medicines are growing at our very feet but are outlawed by our anti-patient Drug Wars? Let's not fog the kids' minds to make them manageable in the short run, only to make them chemically dependent in the long run.
read more essays here
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
I can't imagine Allen Ginsberg writing "Howl!" while under the influence of mood-damping drugs like Inderal and Prozac -- but then maybe that's the point: the powers-that-be do not want poets writing poems like "Howl!"
"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
When it comes to "drugs," the government plays Polonius to our Ophelia:
OPHELIA: I do not know, my lord, what I should think.
POLONIUS: Marry, I'll teach you; think yourself a baby!
People talk about how dangerous Jamaica is -- but no one reminds us that it is all due to America's Drug War. Yes, cannabis and psilocybin are legal there, but plenty of drugs are not, and even if they were, their illegality elsewhere would lead to fierce dealer rivalry.
Psychiatrists prescribe drugs that muck about with a patient's biochemical baseline, making them chemically dependent and turning them into patients for life.
Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx
Getting off antidepressants can make things worse for only one reason: because we have outlawed all the drugs that could help with the transition. Right now, getting off any drug basically means becoming a drug-free Christian Scientist. No wonder withdrawal is hard.
Drug prohibition represents the biggest power grab by government in human history. It is the state control of pain relief and mental states.
There will always be people who don't use drugs wisely, just as there are car drivers who don't drive wisely, and rock climbers who fall to their death. America needs to grow up and accept this, while ending prohibition and teaching safe use.
Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us
No cookies, no ads.
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.
Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass
Contact: quass@quass.com
(up)