From the psychiatric pill mill to assisted suicide for the depressed

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

From the psychiatric pill mill to assisted suicide for the depressed

How America's jaundiced view of drugs has deprived the mental health field of common sense

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 8, 2026

The following essay was green-lighted by author Robert Whitaker for publication on the Mad In America website. Finally, I had found a website that would publish my unique philosophical perspective on drug prohibition and its relation to social ills like the psychiatric pill mill and assisted suicide for the depressed.

Author's follow-up for April 18, 2026

Then I blew it. Just two days ago, I commented on a post by one Peter Simons about the use of "blinding" experiments in scientific drug trials (see The Lonely Voice in the Comments Section). I made the case that it was a category error to place scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place. In other words, I was basically saying that the entire molecule-focused approach of the article was based on a false premise. Only after posting that comment did I recall who this Peter Simons actually was. Peter was the person whom Robert Whitaker had instructed to edit my essay for publication in the email thread created by Robert's original email.

Today Robert told me that they weren't going to publish the essay after all, that it did not meet their editorial standards. I have posted my response to that all-too-predictable bombshell at the bottom of this page, immediately following the suddenly rejected essay. Of course, the editorial standard to which Robert was referring was Rule #1: Do not piss off the editor!!!

Of course, Peter would probably have resented my essay even had I not posted my comments on his own work, since he apparently believes in the idea that scientists are the experts on mind and mood medicine. He thinks, moreover, that some scientists are too accepting of drugs, whereas I see scientists as being just the opposite: I see most scientists as being epic foot-draggers when it comes to drugs, given the fact that I have gone a whole lifetime now (67 years and counting) without being able to use the kinds of drugs that other civilizations have considered godsends. I have thereby been denied the ability to heal -- and to add insult to injury, I have been turned into a ward of the healthcare state by underperforming Big Pharma drugs that are far harder to kick than heroin.

Here is my initially approved and then rejected essay, followed by my response to that last-minute rejection by Robert (God love 'im).

ESSAY

Seven years ago, I resolved to devote the remainder of my life to a philosophical study of American drug attitudes. I did so after undergoing a sort of epiphany on my 60th birthday, when it suddenly occurred to me that I had been turned into a patient for life by dependence-causing Big Pharma antidepressants. When I took my first Effexor capsule over 30 years ago now, I did not realize that I was signing up for a lifetime regimen of pill taking, and yet I have since found the drug to be impossible to "kick," at least in a world in which I am forbidden to use other drugs to obfuscate the hideous downsides of withdrawal, including the onset of a depression far worse than the original depression for which I had started treatment in the first place. I saw clearly that my disempowerment with respect to my health care was a direct result of drug prohibition, which had given a monopoly to psychiatry for the dispensing of mind and mood medicine. And this was a monopoly they definitely needed in order to thrive as a business. Who would intentionally seek out an antidepressant for which dependency is a feature rather than a bug, unless there were no other legal options available for the depressed?

[I was planning to add some figures here about reported recidivism rates for long-term users like myself who attempt to "kick" such drugs, but such stats are hard to come by in a world in which Biopharma pays 75% of the FDA's Drug Division budget ¹. I find, moreover, that the stats and studies that do exist are often given a problematic and self-interested "spin" by the healthcare sites that reference them. The ASK AI website tells me that "71% of individuals with recurrent depression experience a relapse within two years after treatment," but that factoid presupposes that the relapses in question are indeed a result of endogenous depression rather than the depressed person's biochemically induced need to "keep taking their meds." I found this very criticism invoked by researcher Mark A. Horowitz in 2021 in response to a report in the British Medical Journal entitled "Half of people who stopped long term antidepressants relapsed within a year, study finds." In what the BMJ bills as a "rapid response" to that report, Mark warned that: "Uncritical interpretation of this study may lead to the erroneous conclusion that antidepressants should be continued to prevent relapse, when in reality all they may be doing is preventing withdrawal symptoms." ²]

It was also seven years ago that the renewed public interest in psychedelics, and in psilocybin in particular, inspired me to read a variety of books on the seemingly taboo topic of beneficial drug use: books such as The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide by James Fadiman ³, The Truth about Opium by William Brereton ⁴, On Cocaine by Sigmund Freud ⁵, and even The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James ⁶. In that latter book, I learned how the use of nitrous oxide by America's premier psychologist changed his views about the nature of consciousness and of reality writ large. These were eye-opening books for an American like myself who, like most westerners, grew up in a world in which positive drug use was never depicted by the media, while cases of misuse were presented as morality tales and supposed "knock-down" arguments in favor of cracking down still further on drugs. I also re-read several of the works of Thomas Szasz ⁷ that had intrigued me in university in the 1980s, including Ceremonial Chemistry ⁸ and Our Right to Drugs. ⁹ One citation from that latter book especially resonated with me in light of my frustration over having been turned into a ward of the healthcare state by drug prohibition:

The laws that deny healthy people 'recreational' drugs also deny sick people 'therapeutic' drugs. ¹⁰

Of course, I had also read Anatomy of an Epidemic by Richard Whitaker ¹¹ in the twenty-teens, several years prior to my research into drug benefits. I learned how the "meds" that were said to work scientifically did nothing of the kind and that, far from fixing a chemical imbalance in the brain, they may actually be causing that imbalance instead.

Having thus familiarized myself with both the potential benefits of drugs and the actual downsides of meds, I soon came to consider drug prohibition as nothing less than the outlawing of my right to heal. I realized, moreover, that the public healthcare industry was playing a game of make-believe, pretending that psychoactive substances other than Big Pharma meds simply did not exist – or, if forced to acknowledge their existence, that they could have no positive uses whatsoever, that their use must always lead to dead-ends – never mind the fact that the government is spending 51 billion dollars a year in an effort to turn that latter dictum into a self-fulfilling prophecy. ¹² I realized that the healthcare industry is a self-interested party in the debate over drug prohibition ¹³ and that it is protecting its own economic interests by gaslighting Americans about the all-too-obvious benefits of drug use, its votaries going so far as to doubt whether laughing gas itself could help the depressed ¹⁴. Laughing gas! Unfortunately, Americans are playing along with this farce because they have a naive faith in science to solve all problems. And so our drug researchers slam the brakes on the approval of outlawed psychoactive substances by demanding proof of efficacy, not from user reports about drug use, which would supposedly be unscientific, but rather by insisting that the brain chemistry of users behave according to prevailing biochemical theories in order to conclude that a drug is "really" working, as if the mere laughter of users is not real.

This is the point where the reader may complain that I am off-topic, that this blog should be about Big Pharma "meds," not drugs. But this is precisely my point and contention, that the propriety of the psychiatric pill mill cannot be thoroughly debated without also debating the propriety of the drug prohibition that brought it about in the first place by handing a monopoly to psychiatrists in dispensing mind and mood medicine. There seems, unfortunately, to be a widespread belief among Americans that the topic of drug prohibition is a niche topic for Libertarians and anarchists to discuss on Reddit, a subject unrelated to the mainstream world. And so the non-profit organizations that are trying to end gun violence in our cities never mention the drug prohibition that brought guns to the streets in the first place ¹⁵; so the organizations that are trying to stop school shootings never mention the drug prohibition which outlaws the many empathogens that can help inspire compassion in hotheads ¹⁶; nor do the nonprofit foes of Alzheimer's Disease complain about the fact that drug prohibition outlaws substances that drastically improve mental performance, some of which can grow new neurons in the brain ¹⁷. Indeed, most Americans seem to hold two demonstrably false beliefs about drugs: 1) that there are no upsides to drug use, and 2) that there are no downsides to drug prohibition.

Anyone who doubts the omnipresence of those two latter beliefs should consider the case of Claire Brosseau, the chronically depressed Canadian activist who is fighting for her right to assisted suicide. It was with a sense of foreboding that I sat down to read Claire's story in the New York Times of December 29, 2025, entitled "Claire Brosseau Wants to Die. Will Canada Let Her?" by healthcare reporter Stephanie Nolen ¹⁸. Was this going to be yet another story in which all of the interested parties fail to connect the dots between drug prohibition and the topic at hand? I knew from my ongoing study of North American drug attitudes that most journalists and pundits never mention the benefits of outlawed drugs; I felt however that this story would have to be an exception to that rule, that it cries out so loudly for a discussion of the role of drug prohibition in so starkly limiting the options for people in Claire's situation. Even if drug propaganda has rendered us incapable as a people of imagining any beneficial uses for substances like opium and cocaine, surely the following user reports of the phenethylamines synthesized by chemist Alexander Shulgin and published in Pihkal ¹⁹ in 1991 must be seen as being obviously relevant to Claire's case:

I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing.

Intense euphoria that I call a feeling of grace.

No more axes to grind. I can be free. ²⁰

And yet I was wrong. I had underestimated how thoroughly uneducated North Americans were when it came to the potential benefits of drugs. But what can one expect when even the global healthcare reporter for the New York Times seems to be unaware of the relevant findings in the fields of ethnobotany and psychoactive pharmacology? Nolen does report that "there were a lot of drugs around" and that Claire "loved taking them," but neither the identity of those drugs nor the circumstances of their use were recorded. Whatever the circumstances, Claire obviously used only a fraction of the uplifting substances that would be available to her in a free world, one in which we actively sought out drugs for human benefit rather than launching a scorched-earth campaign to prevent the use of the relative handful of psychoactive substances with which we are already familiar today. To give "drugs" a fair test, however, she would need the help of a kind of professional for which the west does not even have a name yet but whom I would describe as a "pharmacologically savvy empath, ²¹" someone with a wide knowledge of best practices for using drugs wisely and for specific beneficial purposes, a knowledge based on anecdote, history and personal experience.

But the idea that drugs could not help Claire is simply not credible. As Mike Jay writes in Artificial Paradises:

Drugs that exert these effects have long been endowed with a halo of divinity by the people who used them. The peyotl was sacred to the Aztecs, the coca to the Incas. The gods in the Vedas drank Soma, 'potent destroyer of grief'...²²

This is why I was dumbfounded by the fact that drug prohibition was never mentioned in the New York Times article about Claire Brosseau: not by the reporter, not by Claire herself, and not by either of her two psychiatrists, one of whom is actually championing Claire's right to die. And so I wrote letters two months ago to all parties concerned, including to Claire herself, trying to convince them that they cannot debate the propriety of assisted suicide for the depressed without also debating the propriety of the drug prohibition that renders that suicide necessary in the first place, at least in the minds of the depressed themselves. I have not yet received any answers to those letters, but then that has been the norm during my seven years of philosophical investigations: everyone seems to clam up when you ask them to consider the positive uses of the drugs that we have been taught to hate. But if I was dumbfounded by this silence about drugs in Claire's case, how shall I describe my feelings when a subsequent Google search revealed that literally no one was connecting assisted suicide with the topic of drug prohibition, that all the top ethicists in the medical field were discussing assisted suicide in what philosopher Alfred North Whitehead might have called "the willful ignoration" of the benefits of outlawed drugs?

Nor is this just an issue for the depressed. Putting aside cases of advance directives for the incapacitated, a conscious person's desire for assisted death, even in "physical" cases, is affected by their mood. A condition that might be intolerable for them in their accustomed mental state of fruitless worry might yet be made tolerable for them with the help of one or more psychoactive medicines that could give them a calmer and more rational perspective on their condition. This is, in fact, how opium fights pain, according to Jim Hogshire in Opium for the Masses. "As a deadening agent," writes Hogshire, "opium has almost no effect. If measured purely for its ability to alleviate the sensation of pain, morphine, opium, or any of the others would score no better than aspirin. It is the perception of pain that opium alters, and that makes all the difference in the world. ²³" It follows that the propriety of assisted suicide, even in cases of bodily illness, must be considered with a full understanding of how specific psychoactive drug use may (or may not) be of help in allowing the death-seeking patient to live a meaningful life, as they themselves define that term, in spite of their injury or illness.

Unfortunately, this is an understanding that even legalization advocates have yet to attain. In her otherwise highly informative book about drug prohibition, War On Us, Colleen Cowles writes:

Would it be preferable for loved ones to never use an unprescribed drug? Yes. ²⁴

I disagree completely. I would much rather that a loved one of mine use an unprescribed drug than to have them suffer needlessly from depression or some other maladaptive and self-limiting mindset, especially when the prescribed drug is likely to turn them into a patient for life. Our medical ethicists are always talking about the rights of the patient, but what about our right not to BE a patient in the first place?

Nor am I giving medical advice here. It would surely be ironic and just a little too "convenient" for my viewpoint to be sidelined on THAT charge given the nature of the debate that I am calling for here. I am saying rather that the west's whole approach to psychoactive medicine is wrong root and branch and that it was a category error to place reductionist scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place. The proof is extant in the absurdum to which that approach has led us as a society, the fact that we now live in a world in which our medical ethicists can see no connection between suicide and the outlawing of almost every substance in the world whose ingestion has the potential to inspire and elate. Even if we draw the ahistorical and puritanical conclusion that such drugs can produce nothing but cheap thrills, thrills however that Claire herself admits that she loves, surely it is better to keep the depressed alive with a strategic regimen of cheap thrills than to permit them to die in the manner of a Christian Science martyr, intent on evincing their religious disdain for any drug-based salvation.

MY RESPONSE TO MIA'S LAST-MINUTE DECISION NOT TO PUBLISH MY ESSAY AFTER ALL

My essay was NOT a personal story. It was a philosophical argument. There is a difference. Philosophical arguments are made by adducing generally known facts and then drawing insightful conclusions therefrom. This is exactly what I did. In the essay, I was using what philosophers call the "argumentum ad absurdum" to reveal the evils of drug prohibition. Again, this was not a personal story. Publishing it as such is really just a way of putting my arguments to the side, giving the "experts" an excuse not to grapple with the issues that it raises.

Like everyone else, you are reckoning without the effects of drug prohibition when you assume that Claire had access to all she needed in the way of drugs. Drug prohibition has made sure that she could only access a fraction of the drugs that are theoretically available in the world, and those potentially contaminated -- while refusing to teach her a thing about psychologically obvious safe use. Moreover, we are not even allowed to see safe and wise use in the media -- how can we expect Claire to practice such use even if she had the right medicines? Anyone familiar with drug benefits from personal experience and reading knows that drugs could help Claire, in a world in which we actively sought to make this happen. Such benefits are clearly seen in drug history -- in the civilizations of the Inca, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Vedic people, etc. -- but have also been documented in 20th century studies by researchers such as Schultes, Shulgin, Fadiman, Grof and Grob.

But such voices are sidelined as "mere" common sense or dismissed as anecdote – we only hear from the titled researchers who have gone through eight years of university while never hearing a thing about the potential and actual positive uses of most psychoactive medicines, uses, however, which should be obvious to anyone whose imagination is not limited by the Drug War propaganda to which they have been subjected since childhood.

No one in the medical field even seems to be aware of the benefits of drugs and so they refuse to discuss them with Claire, essentially signing off on her uninformed idea that death itself is her only remaining option, as if she had already "tried drugs" and they did not work. The term "drugs" is not an objective category but a politically created dysphemism for all psychoactive substances that have the potential to inspire and elate. And so this silence on the part of our medical pundits and their supporters is highly unethical. In Claire's case, it is working to confirm her in her sense of hopelessness. Even if we naively claim that no drug could help Claire, drugs like laudanum could certainly allow her to kill herself peacefully, without a "by your leave" from the state or the medical establishment.

The whole point of my essay was to challenge the very idea that involuntary "patients" like myself are not experts on these matters, that we are not allowed to practice philosophy on these subjects without a license. But I see that the professionalization and the medicalization of mind and mood medicine has become de rigueur in America. I just thought that Mad in America might have proved an exception. I see, however, that your editorial standards are designed to sideline a free philosophical debate on the core issues with which your organization deals.

This is the problem I have faced ever since I began writing seven years ago as the first person to challenge drug prohibition from the point of view of a patient: everyone has denied me expert status by insisting that scientists are the experts. I am seen as just a guy with a grievance. Everyone is just saying to me in so many words: "Shut up and take your meds."

I now see that your Substack is basically the place where the "real" arguments are thought to reside -- the ones from board-certified scientists. No one is allowed to post if they believe that it was a category error to place the scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place, certainly not if they are a mere "patient." Surely, the proof of this category error is extant, however, in the absurdum to which it has led us: the fact that none of these scientists dares to mention to Claire that there are hundreds of drugs that, if used wisely, could make her wish to live! Again, this silence on their part is totally unethical. It helps to confirm Claire in her sense of hopelessness.

When my personal story was rejected by Emmeline several years ago, I originally took it to heart because she seemed to be basically telling me that healthcare employees were the experts when it came to antidepressants, that only they should give medical advice, never mind the fact that these so-called experts were the ones who turned me into a ward of the healthcare state in the first place by shunting me off onto medicines which are far harder to kick than heroin. (See the Lee Robins study on heroin use in the Vietnam war.) I then came to think that I had overreacted, as indicated in my previous letter, that she may not have had that thought in mind. I now see however that I was originally reacting to a true philosophical difference between myself and MIA. You really do think that scientists and healthcare employees are the experts when it comes to psychoactive drugs, failing to realize that they have a financial stake in prohibition insofar as many of their jobs would not even exist without it.

Of course, I'm sure I did not further my cause by posting my philosophical comments about Peter Simons' article on "unblinding" in the Substack two days ago. Only after doing so did I realize that the author of that article was the same Peter who had been tasked by Robert with the editing of my essay for publication! I suddenly realized that I had just shot myself in the foot. I can easily see how this diplomatic blunder on my part would have brought about a reconsideration of your decision to publish. What can I expect when my philosophical viewpoint questions the very premises upon which Peter's article was based? In my defense, however, the comment that I posted for his article was written in all sincerity, with zero malice aforethought, in an effort to promote a lively dialogue that has yet to occur anywhere else online. I thought that MIA might be one of the rare online venues that would welcome such a call to parley. I would certainly have chosen a different essay to comment upon, however, had I recognized the identity of the author to whom I was responding.

Upon taking a closer look at your website, I sense that MIA's preferred solution to the psychiatric pill mill is that we all become Christian Scientists and renounce drugs entirely. But that is a metaphysical or religious preference, one moreover that would be incomprehensible to indigenous societies where they actually seek to use psychoactive medicines for human benefit. Given my life history – a history which informs me rather than biases me – I see this as an attempt to get people to ride bikes in a country that has outlawed cars. Yes, bikes have good uses too, but we should respond to car prohibition with something more than sour grapes, by saying something more than, "Bikes are better than cars, anyway!"

I clearly view the Drug War through a different philosophical lens than Robert, given his (to me) naïve boosterism in favor of the power of exercise to conquer all. And that's fine. We do not have to agree. I do not mind parting ways based on our different philosophies of life and of drugs. But I do object to the implied idea that my philosophical take is just an "opinion" while my famous and/or titled opponents are presenting "real" arguments. Opposing viewpoints can be answered or ignored, but they should not be sidelined by dismissing the complainant as being someone who is unqualified to join in a philosophical debate for grownups.

I pointed out in my essay how a variety of national organizations refuse to connect the dots between drug prohibition and social problems: The organizations fighting gun violence in the inner cities refuse to protest the prohibitions which brought guns to the streets in the first place. The organizations fighting against school shootings refuse to protest the drug prohibition which outlaws entheogens, the kinds of drugs that give hotheads a sense of compassion for their fellows. The organizations fighting Alzheimer's Disease refuse to protest the drug prohibition that outlaws almost all substances that can drastically improve one's ability to concentrate, some of which have been shown to grow new neurons in the brain.

Now I can add a fourth organization to my list: groups like MIA that fight against the psychiatric pill mill while refusing to hold drug prohibition responsible for disempowering the patient in the first place.

This last-second withdrawal of the publication offer, however, and at MIA of all places, has taught me a lesson: that I truly am ahead of my time and that my essays will have to wait for a posterity in which Americans have been less brainwashed by the censorship of all positive reports of drug use, a world in which the victims of drug prohibition are able to claw back their right to heal from a reductionist scientific and medical establishment whose self-interested researchers have set themselves up as the only experts on all drug-related questions, with the help of a science-blinded public that would not know a "category error" from a hole in the ground.

As a practical matter, I cannot blame you. I know all too well that to challenge the medicalization model too directly is a recipe for marginalization. But I do ask that you refrain from publishing my philosophical essay as a personal story. If you want to ignore the issues that I raised therein, you are free to do so, but please do not dismiss me as just another guy with an opinion. Please do not tell me, like the rest of the mainstream media, to "Shut up and take my meds."

Brian

PS I just can't believe that you do not see the tragic irony in the status quo: the fact that the depressed are now asking the state to kill themselves using drugs, while this self-same state denies these depressed persons the use of drugs that could help make them wish to live! Anyone who believes that the latter kinds of drugs do not exist is simply not familiar with the literature on such topics, nor the history of drug use, nor with psychological common sense, for that matter.

You will wait a long time for a board-certified scientist to come to this conclusion and so meet your editorial standards, because this conclusion is not based on science. It is based rather on philosophy. I was simply adducing generally accepted facts in my now-rejected essay (facts for which I nevertheless provided supporting citations) and drawing the absurd conclusions that followed therefrom, thereby pointing out the absurdity of the scientific approach to psychoactive drug use and the tragic ramifications of that approach in the real world. Please do not ghettoize those philosophical insights by publishing them as a personal story.

With all due respect: This topic puts me in mind of a title for a book that cries out to be written: "Shut up and take your meds! How drug prohibition has turned me into a patient for life, and why scientists could care less."

Author's Follow-up:

April 18, 2026

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

I must give credit to Robert Whitaker for engaging (at least somewhat) with my arguments rather than ignoring me completely. In the course of my philosophical inquiry into American drug attitudes over the last seven years, no one else has dared to even try to defend the status quo mindset about drugs. The preferred technique has always been to pretend that I do not exist. But let me answer a couple of criticisms that Robert has brought up in this business: the business of my "almost published" essay.

He claims, "first off," that he never promised to publish my essay, which is true enough. He never explicitly wrote such a thing. However, it was Robert himself who invited me to write that essay on the grounds that he had found my proposal letter "interesting." Given his personal interest, I assumed that he would take the time to read my custom-written essay before "passing it on" to his editorial staff, the more so in that it was treating of a time-sensitive matter: nothing less than the life or death of depressed people like Claire Brosseau.

Let's grant that I was presumptuous, however. Indeed, I freely admit that shortcoming. The fact remains that I only learned of any objections to my essay after it had been "passed along" to the editor. And who was that editor? It was Peter Simons, the author of a post that I had just criticized from a philosophical point of view in the comments section of the MIA website, prior to realizing Peter's role in the Mad in America organization as Robert's right-hand man. Nor was this simply minor criticism on my part. I had diplomatically suggested in my comment that Peter's whole molecular approach to the subject of psychedelics and depression misses the point entirely and that the benefits of psychoactive drugs are extant in history and anecdote. Of course, such substances are not for everyone and results depend entirely upon context, crucially including the beliefs, expectations and goals of the user. But we send ourselves on a fool's errand, so I wrote, when we try to find out if such drugs are good or bad for treating depression in the abstract. This is merely to play the game of the Drug Warrior, who tells us to judge drugs up or down, in willful ignorance of the all-important details of use.

Surely, no one can expect Peter to sign off on an essay of mine after reading a critique of this nature.

But then this just goes to show how far apart I am from the presumptions upon which the MIA website is based. Even if my essay had been approved and I suddenly had my own blog on their platform, the honeymoon would soon be over as my philosophical critiques made it clear that Robert and I are on completely different pages. No wonder they would prefer to think of my criticism as subjective rant rather than as philosophical argument. As I reminded Robert, my essays are in the form of the argumentum ad absurdum, in which one adduces a variety of generally accepted propositions and then deduces the illogical consequences of those propositions, thereby displaying the inanity of our widely held beliefs.

For Robert to dismiss my arguments as personal opinion is to shield his organization's baseline assumptions from philosophical criticism. In so doing, he is preempting what could otherwise be a healthy debate on a topic that has yet to discussed in America: how drug prohibition outlaws the right of the depressed to heal, shunting us off onto dependence-causing "meds" and turning us into children for life and wards of the healthcare state.

I know that these statements are true from 45 years' of experience on the receiving end of the nostrums created by those scientists and academics whom Robert seems to think are experts on these matters. I have no say. I have to remain depressed and wait to see what drug may eventually come my way (should I live so long) through the glacial process of drug approval wherein scientists ignore all glaringly obvious benefits of drugs and instead look under microscopes for evidence for "efficacy," just as the sages of eld used to look for angels on a pinhead.

I am alone now (at least in speaking out). But the penny will eventually drop for an ever-increasing number of med-dependent senior citizens as they realize that they have been turned into a ward of the healthcare state by Big Pharma, psychiatrists, and the scientists who believe in the go-slow reductionist approach to drug approval. Eventually, this demographic of the unnecessarily depressed will realize that they are totally ignored stakeholders in the drug approval process and that drug prohibition has outlawed their most fundamental of rights: their right to heal.

Brian

Notes for essay entitled From the psychiatric pill mill to assisted suicide for the depressed: How America's jaundiced view of drugs has deprived the mental health field of common sense:

1: 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)
2: “Antidepressant Discontinuation Trial Misleading as It Likely Mis-Interprets Withdrawal Effects as Relapse.” 2022. Www.bmj.com, November. https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2403/rr-4. (up)
3: Fadiman, James. Psychedelicexplorersguide.com. 2011. https://www.psychedelicexplorersguide.com/. (up)
4: “The Truth about Opium, by William H. Brereton—a Project Gutenberg EBook.” 2024. Gutenberg.org. 2024. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44043/44043-h/44043-h.htm. (up)
5: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
6: “The Varieties of Religious Experience : William James : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2021. Internet Archive. 2021. https://archive.org/details/the-varieties-of-religious-experience_202109. (up)
7: “The Thomas S. Szasz Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility.” 2025. Szasz.com. 2025. https://www.szasz.com/. (up)
8: “Ceremonial Chemistry – Syracuse University Press.” 1974. Syr.edu. 2026. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/1114/ceremonial-chemistry/. (up)
9: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)
10: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)
11: 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)
12: “War on Us – the War on Drugs Is a War on All of Us.” 2019. Waronus.com. 2019. http://waronus.com/. (up)
13: Illich, Ivan. 1977. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/544958. (up)
14: Glatter, Robert. 2021. “Can Laughing Gas (Nitrous Oxide) Help People with Treatment-Resistant Depression?” Forbes, June 9, 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2021/06/09/can-laughing-gas-nitrous-oxide-help-people-with-treatmentresistant-depre (up)
15: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
16: Quass, Brian Ballard. 2021. “How Ecstasy Could End Mass Shootings.” Abolishthedea.com. 2021. https://www.abolishthedea.com/how_ecstasy_could_end_mass_shootings. (up)
17: Quass, Brian Ballard. 2020. “The DEA’s War on Alzheimer’s Research.” Abolishthedea.com. 2020. https://www.abolishthedea.com/the_deas_war_on_alzheimers_research. (up)
18: Nolen, Stephanie, and Chloë Ellingson. 2025. “Claire Brosseau Wants to Die. Will Canada Let Her?” The New York Times, December 29, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/health/assisted-death-mental-illness-canada.html. (up)
19: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
20: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
21: pharmacologically-savvy empath: this is an empathic individual with an ethnobotanical knowledge of safe and beneficial drug use worldwide, someone who recognizes psychological common sense and can advise on protocols that meet user needs while avoiding unwanted dependency. (up)
22: “Artificial Paradises - Mike Jay.” 1999. Mike Jay. May 18, 2025. https://mikejay.net/books/artificial-paradises/. (up)
23: Hogshire, Jim. 2009. Opium for the Masses. Feral House. (up)
24: “War on Us – the War on Drugs Is a War on All of Us.” 2019. Waronus.com. 2019. http://waronus.com/. (up)

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Alexander Shulgin is a typical westerner when he speaks about cocaine. He moralizes about the drug, telling us that it does not give him "real" power. But so what? Does coffee give him "real" power? Coke helps some, others not. Stop holding it to this weird metaphysical standard.

"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.

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

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?

Even if the FDA approved MDMA today, it would only be available for folks specifically pronounced to have PTSD by materialist doctors, as if all other emotional issues are different problems and have to be studied separately. That's just ideological foot-dragging.

Uruguay wants to re-legalize psilocybin mushrooms -- but only for use in a psychiatrist's office. So let me get this straight: psychiatrists are the new privileged shaman? It's a mushroom, for God's sake. Just re-legalize the damn thing and stop treating us like children.

The prohibitionist motto: "Billions for arrest, not one cent for education."

The best harm-reduction strategy is to re-legalize drugs.

Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."

Drug prohibition is superstitious idiocy. It is based on the following crazy idea: that a substance that can be misused by a white young person at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.

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From the psychiatric pill mill to assisted suicide for the depressed

How America's jaundiced view of drugs has deprived the mental health field of common sense

ESSAY

MY RESPONSE TO MIA'S LAST-MINUTE DECISION NOT TO PUBLISH MY ESSAY AFTER ALL

Author's Follow-up:

April 18, 2026

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Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend