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Electroshock Therapy and the Drug War

Why ECT is the last resort of drug warrior scoundrels

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

November 7, 2020



I hate to blow my own horn, but let's face it: I am the only anti-Drug War pundit who has ever pointed out that Drug Warriors are responsible for the use of the brain-damaging treatment known as electroshock therapy in America. Why? Because Drug Warriors have criminalized the many powerful psychoactive medicines that could help the severely depressed (like MDMA 1 , psilocybin, and even laughing gas ) thereby leaving the saddest of the sad with no options for relief other than ECT, a 'therapy' that can only win Pyrrhic victories over depression by partially destroying the mind in its attempts to save it. Yes, ECT may be great at making a patient more tractable from a caregiver point of view, but it has no power whatsoever to help the 'patient' achieve self-actualization in their life, a shortcoming which has been starkly demonstrated in the movie 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.' Nor is the movie's depiction of Randle McMurphy's fate a fictional exaggeration, as I have learned through my own personal experience thanks to the mental health challenges of my extended family.


Cartoon titled Euthanasia Meets the Drug War. Doctor talks to patient: The bad news is we can't give you drugs for your depression. The good news is, we can kill you if your depression gets too bad.
Americans have been taught to superstitiously believe that drugs are bad. Drugs are not bad or good. They are inanimate objects. Their widespread misuse tells us something about society, not about drugs.




Why then do professionals in the medical community still stubbornly support this brain-damaging treatment to this very day? For the same reason that 12-step groups still basically just tell their members to 'grin and bear it,' rather than advisedly using any of the godsend psychoactive medicines of Mother Nature to help them change without going through hell first: because American doctors and psychiatrists have fallen so far under the spell of the Christian Science Drug War that they accept the tyrannous status quo as a natural baseline, as if nature's psychoactive medicines did not exist from the point of view of American science. That's why they can still champion a procedure that purposefully damages the brain: because they console themselves with the mistaken belief that ECT is being used only as a last resort, that it is still an important treatment in cases where everything else has failed. But hold on a minute. Everything else has NOT failed. They can only cherish this illusion because they have accepted the DEA's time-honored claim that nature's psychoactive medicines have no therapeutic value whatsoever.

But, of course, that conscience sop is a lie. There is massive anecdotal evidence dating back thousands of years regarding the life-changing power of nature's psychoactive medicines. Indeed, the entire Vedic religion was founded in praise of the psychedelic concoction called Soma. The clinician can only throw the switch on his or her depressed patient with a clear conscience by ignoring all such evidence (from the Eleusinian Mysteries2 to the MesoAmerican mushroom cults) in dutiful obeisance to the know-nothing party line of the Drug Warrior.

This is why I say that the Drug War is responsible for the use of brain-damaging ECT in the modern world, because it has not only criminalized hundreds of natural alternatives to such therapy, but it has demonized them to the point that most modern psychiatrists feel free to ignore them altogether. (They want nothing to do with dirty evil drugs, after all!) And so modern doctors remain as clueless about the importance of psychoactive medicine for the depressed as 19th-century doctors were about the importance of washing their hands before performing surgery.

This is why, in a sane world, anti-drug-war protestors would show up outside a clinic or hospital in advance of a scheduled session of electroshock therapy, in the same way that protestors who are opposed to capital punishment currently show up outside prisons in advance of an execution. Such protests would finally alert the world to a so-far unrecognized cost of America's Drug War: namely, the way that it keeps godsend medicines out of the hands of the psychologically needy, all in the name of protecting us from medical godsends.

EPILOGUE: Drugs do not fry the brain3, but the Drug War certainly does, and not just thanks to the ECT treatments that it renders necessary. It fries the brain because it encourages our otherwise intelligent drug researchers to ask stupid questions like, 'Can laughing gas 4 help the depressed?' What? The answer is no, not if you are going to criminalize it and demonize it and withhold it from billions based on the potential irresponsible actions of a few. But because the Drug War is political, the FDA doesn't worry about the millions of Americans sitting alone in a room looking for a reason to get out of bed. The FDA worries about a few hooligans who may misuse the drug in some spectacular way and thereby get on the evening news, prompting willfully ignorant demagogues to blast the FDA for legalizing a 'dangerous drug' -- just before that cigarette-smoking opportunist rushes off to a bar to partake of alcohol, which kills 95,000 178,000 Americans a year5.

Author's Follow-up: July 31, 2022



Why are Americans (researchers included) so uninterested in the psychoactive power of drugs that have inspired entire religions? Because it is against government drug policy to even envision positive uses for the drugs that we have decided to demonize. The charter of the Office of National Drug Control Policy actually forbids that propaganda agency from considering positive uses of 'drugs.' And so American writers and researchers have drunk so heavily at the trough of these state lies (and the mendacious 'frying pan' ad) that they feel free to ignore the power of criminalized psychoactive medicines when it comes to helping the severely depressed. So, no, ECT is not a last resort -- it is the inhuman treatment that American Drug Policy makes necessary through its anti-scientific crack down on the formerly free domain of American 'science.'

Author's Follow-up: August 22, 2022



These narratives are not of use to the 1% who own the 9 or so media conglomerates that tell us what is 'common sense.' That's why they are never covered. Neither will you see coverage of the fact that young kids in hospice are refused effective painkillers like morphine because Drug War ideology tells us that such substances are so evil that it's better to let the kids suffer. Then there are the elderly who are 'taken off life support' -- RATHER than lulled to a peaceful death with an immoderate dose of morphine 6 . I sometimes want to pester the average American for not realizing this, but then the media conglomerates never 'run' with such stories. If you wonder why, then just ask cui bono when it comes to the status quo. The answer: pharmaceutical companies, the healthcare industry, psychiatry, the corrections industry, the liquor industry...

And the Bill Clintons of the world are guilty as well: those who think that the whole world has to suffer so that one's brother or sister can be protected from themselves. If you want to protect your family without causing civil wars overseas, without creating a psychiatric pill mill 7 , without turning inner cities into shooting galleries, without causing kids to suffer, without causing the dying to suffer exquisite torture, without frying the brains of the depressed... then the answer is to EDUCATE your brother and sister, not to insulate them from a world which, like it or not, has always been full of psychoactive substances. Then end the substance prohibition, which can easily be shown to cause all of the problems that it purports to solve -- and then some (including the outrages enumerated above, plus the stifling of science and the violation of the natural law upon which America was founded). One has to scream because the 1% turn off the microphones for those who speak up on this topic, just as psychiatrist DJ Nutt was relieved of his position in England because he dared to suggest that the meds that we criminalize might not represent the devil incarnate after all.











Notes for essay entitled Electroshock Therapy and the Drug War: Why ECT is the last resort of drug warrior scoundrels:

1: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
2: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
3: Meds fry the brain, not drugs DWP (up)
4: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
5: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (up)
6: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
7: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)




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It's amazing. Drug law is outlawing science -- and yet so few complain. Drug law tells us what mushrooms we can collect, for God's sake. Is that not straight-up insane? Or are Americans so used to being treated as children that they accept this corrupt status quo?

I'm looking for a United Healthcare doctor now that I'm 66 years old. When I searched my zip code and typed "alternative medicine," I got one single solitary return... for a chiropractor, no less. Some choice. Guess everyone else wants me to "keep taking my meds."

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."

The first step in harm reduction is to re-legalize mother nature's medicines. Then hundreds of millions of people will no longer suffer in silence for want of godsend medicines... for depression, for pain, for anxiety, for religious doubts... you name it.

I've always wondered why we don't just let heroin users be -- or better yet, re-legalize drugs and give them choices. Why are they punished for using heroin daily while we praise 1 in 4 women for taking an even more dependence-causing drug every day of their life?

Being a lifetime patient is not the issue: that could make perfect sense in certain cases. But if I am to be "using" for life, I demand the drug of MY CHOICE, not that of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry, who are dogmatically deaf to the benefits of hated substances.

It is actually illegal to be a Ben Franklin in 21st century America. To put this another way: we outlaw far more than drugs when we outlaw mind and mood medicine.

The "scheduling" system is completely anti-scientific and anti-patient. It tells us we can make a one-size-fits-all decision about psychoactive substances without regard for dosage, context of use, reason for use, etc. That's superstitious tyranny.

ME: "What are you gonna give me for my depression, doc? MDMA? Laughing gas? Occasional opium smoking? Chewing of the coca leaf?" DOC: "No, I thought we'd fry your brain with shock therapy instead."

We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.


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