Goodbye Patient, Hello Client

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Goodbye Patient, Hello Client

a new shamanic approach to drug use and mental healing

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 19, 2025

One of the strangest and most anti-scientific conceptions of the Drug Warrior is the idea that the word "drugs" constitutes a meaningful category of substances. The fact is that substances that fall under this politically defined rubric have an extraordinarily wide range of effects.

Author's follow-up for May 13, 2025
Author's follow-up for October 03, 2025
Author's follow-up for November 21, 2025

Tribal people use plant teachers and enjoy dancing to beat of drum as non-dancing native on left says: 'Personally, I think that we should just say not to Mother Nature's plant medicines.' — Westerners not only disapprove of drugs used by indigenous people for millennial, but westerners are trying to eradicate such drugs -- especially coca -- from the face of the Earth, which is a new low for colonialism.

Some increase blood pressure, some lower it. Some increase libido, some lower it. Some increase attention to detail, some lower it. Some increase volubility, some lower it. Some can vary widely in these effects based on other factors of usage: such as the personality of the user, the setting for use, the goal (if any) of use, etc. And so the question, "Do people need drugs?" is ambiguous in the age of the Drug War. The answer depends on whether one is responding with common sense or in light of the dogmatic and puritanical presuppositions of our times. The materialist will tell you that people only need meds - by which they mean psychoactive substances that have been proven to work via known chemical pathways. Drug warriors will tell you the same thing, although they will support their answer by alluding to the vast literature of misuse and abuse of drugs that the government has one-sidedly compiled in their puritanical effort to convince Americans that drug use - as opposed to the use of "meds" - is wrong and bound to end in tragedy (even if it takes a little help from law enforcement to vindicate that latter prophecy).

Such a wholesale denial of the beneficial nature of psychoactive drugs, however, can only be "justified" by metaphysical principles, since there is nothing logically obvious about it, neither when considered in the light of world history nor when subjected to our psychological common sense. Such conclusions therefore can only be thought of as a matter of faith. In the case of Mary Baker-Eddy, her faith taught her that only Jesus Christ could heal us, from which it followed (at least in her mind) that drug use was a sort of insult to the deity, a sign that the user lacked faith in the healing powers of the Lord. The Drug Warrior seldom mentions Jesus Christ, which makes their position less philosophically defensible than Mary's, or at least less intelligible. But we can imagine a secular metaphysic by which the wholesale negation of "drugs" might be suggested. We MUST imagine it, for the Drug Warriors are never honest enough to elucidate the "first principles ¹ " upon which they base their historically unprecedented view that psychoactive drugs have no positive uses whatsoever. Presumably the Drug Warrior means to say that human beings are so created (apparently by evolution) that we are "good to go" when it comes to psychological matters, though apparently this is not the case when it comes to "purely physical complaints," as if there really were such a beast as "purely physical complaints," except in the dogmatically passion-free mind of the materialist.

I can personally attest to the variability of psychoactive drug effects, by the way. After my first use of ayahuasca in a group organized by Pachamama Sanctuary, the 30 or so participants were asked to describe their experiences. To my surprise, almost everyone reported something quite different from that of their fellows. Many were greatly inspired. A few were "bummed out." One claimed to have spoken with her deceased grandmother. Another cried throughout the experience, though she claimed that her tears were tears of joy. Another shrieked and screamed throughout his entire journey (until I feared that the group session was going to be raided by the materialist police). For my part, my mental screen was full of what I can only describe as an inner-lit rainbow-colored circus, one that morphed and moved, as it seemed to me, in response to my consciously willed commands. In other words, the psychology of the user seemed to play a crucial role in defining the ayahuasca experience. This is really good news, in a way, because it suggests that the therapeutic use of the medicine could be guided by a pharmacologically savvy empath ² such that specific desired goals and outcomes are most likely to be brought about.

I have also personally noticed a wide range of reactions to psilocybin mushrooms. The outcome of use for myself seems to be determined by my own mood and circumstances at the time of consumption. I have had very poor results on very high doses and amazing results on modest doses. And surely every veteran marijuana user is aware of the role that one's pre-existing mood plays in determining the nature of one's experience on that drug. This, of course, is why such drugs are seldom of interest, in and of themselves, to pharmaceutical companies. They want to take them apart and repackage them in such a way that they can promise a one-size-fits-all result for the end user. In short, they want to take the unpredictable magic out of the drugs and present consumers with the predictable dross: something that intoxiphobic westerners can pop like aspirin without fear of inadvertently "letting their hair down" while "under the influence," without fear of unintentionally learning something unflattering about themselves from what indigenous people might call a "teacher medicine."

But there is an alternative approach to leveraging such drugs for human benefit, a way that maximizes their magic rather than minimizing it. I am alluding to the concept, already mentioned above, of the pharmacologically savvy empath, a new class of American professional who would combine the best human qualities of an empathic psychiatrist with a thorough knowledge of psychoactive drugs, with a special emphasis on discovering the best practices for beneficial use as suggested by anecdote, history and common sense - the three things which today's psychiatrists ignore, at least insofar as they are faithful to the materialist understanding of "mental illness ³ " in which they were instructed (or rather "proselytized") for a minimum of eight years in academia.

This new paradigm for treating mental health would get rid of the whole disempowering concept of the "patient," since such empaths could be visited by anyone seeking to improve their mind or mood for any reason - whether they suffer from what the materialist-oriented DSM describes as a discrete and unique "illness," such as clinical depression, or whether they merely want to "see a world in a grain of sand" with the help of drugs. In all cases, this pharmacologically savvy empath would be the go-to source when it comes to the wise use of drugs for beneficial purposes. He or she would not take the place of private drug use, they would not be the mandatory new gatekeepers for drug use, but they would rather always be there to help and advise. Imagine that: a world wherein we taught safe use rather than superstitiously demonizing drugs as bad in and of themselves: a world in which we frowned only upon uninformed drug use, rather than upon drug use in general.

It will be argued, of course, that psychiatrists are required by law to ignore such factors as anecdote, history and common sense when it comes to positive drug use, or at least that they cannot prescribe anything based merely upon such considerations. That is the result of drug prohibition, after all. And this is certainly true. But this neither explains nor justifies the silence of psychiatrists on this topic. If government policy is a roadblock to the interests of their patients, psychiatrists should be saying so loudly and clearly, at least in the official organs of their trade. Yet the American Psychiatric Association continues to support the pill-mill. Their website never once mentions phenethylamines nor the glaringly obvious ways in which they could be put to work on behalf of improving mental health. Their website never mentions Alexander Shulgin, whose usage reports on such substances suggest whole worlds of potential psychological protocols limited only by the creativity of the human mind.

Instead, the APA digs in its dogmatic heels and lives in the past. They feel no compulsion to denounce the Drug War since they are happy with the Big Pharma -oriented monopoly that drug prohibition has put in place. This is just another example of the oft-observed fact that Americans refuse to hold the Drug War responsible for the evils that it creates, often because they (or their employers) have some vested interest in the corrupt status quo. Psychiatrists ignore the effects of the War on Drugs in their field just as reporters ignore the effects of the War on Drugs in theirs. This is why modern news stories about inner-city gun violence ⁴ never mention the fact that it was the Drug War which loaded the 'hood with firearms in the first place. Indeed, Lisa Ling produced a CNN documentary about gun violence ⁵ in Chicago in which she never even mentioned the War on Drugs. Americans are so brainwashed by Drug War ideology that these negative effects of prohibition are simply invisible to them.

Nevertheless, I repeat that the beneficial usage reports of the phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin suggest a whole new approach to psychological healing, one in which we retire the disempowering epithet of "patient" altogether and replace it with positive words like "seeker" or "searcher" - or at least with the neutral term of "client."

Strangely enough, however, Shulgin himself seemed to be unaware of the potential that I am discussing here. I base this assessment on certain comments that I found in the sections of "Pikhal" entitled "extension and commentary," comments in which he made it clear that the stunning qualitative results of the drug use that he was reporting had no necessary connection with any actual treatments for the depressed. He seemed rather to think that depressed people are aliens from Mars and that they are not therapeutically susceptible to rapture and insight and other such benefits of using phenethylamines. Apparently those benefits were to be expected only by "normal" human beings, not the depressed.

This really puzzled me. I could only think of one explanation for his obtuseness on this subject: namely, the fact that he knew that such common-sense results would be a non-starter with the pharmaceutical companies for which he worked. To gain contracts with those entities, Shulgin knew that he had to turn such drugs into one-size-fits-all medicine, at least in so far as "all" in this case means "all people that fit the DSM's specifications for a specific 'mental illness.'" The medicine, moreover, had to produce one specific result in a way that would please a behaviorist, namely by working via an identified chemical pathway and not merely by working per se. Any drug could "work," after all - hell, laughing gas could "work" (were it not made as unavailable as possible for therapeutic purposes by Drug Warrior legislators and the FDA). Drugs for depression had to "REALLY" work, according to materialist principles. The rapture and insight and compassion felt by users meant nothing to the behaviorist version of Shulgin's personality. Actual patients had to reap their benefits scientifically or not at all!

But Shulgin seems to have played both Jekyll and Hyde on this subject. He seemed to be a shaman by nature, one convinced of the power of phenethylamines to inspire via holistic processes, and yet whenever he considered drugs from a vocational viewpoint, he became a behaviorist, apparently because he understood what his Big Pharma ⁶ ⁷ clients were looking for. Their main goal was to sell predictable one-size-fits-all medicine, after all, not to facilitate breakthrough treatments. It was never enough that a drug merely worked - it had to work according to a biological pathway that could be identified on a flow chart. It did not matter that the depressed individual experienced rapture and insight if that rapture and insight could not be quantified in numbers that could be presented as "hard data" in a slick magazine for shareholders of the big pharmaceutical companies. Fortunately, however, the common sense that Shulgin sometimes ignores in his chemically oriented comments yet shines through in the qualitative reports that he published in "Pihkal" about the actual effects of various phenethylamines:

"It could be best described as an 'insight-enhancer'," wrote a user of one such drug, "and obviously of potential value in psychotherapy (if one would wish to spend 30 hours in a therapy session!). I suppose it would be best to simply stick with the insight-enhancing and skip the psychotherapy."

This user points out the obvious: that for some of us, at least, drugs of this sort could replace the need for psychotherapy altogether. The Drug Warrior has a coronary when reading such lines, but that is only because they never consider the actual circumstances of drug use and therefore they assume that everyone else ignores them as well. So when I say that SOME people might be able to replace psychotherapy with drugs, they hear me saying that ALL people could do so, which is nonsense. The whole point of my new approach to drug use is that we (i.e., my pharmacologically savvy empaths) would take patient-specific factors into account and devise drug-aided protocols based on those peculiarities. Say for instance that I entered their premises and told them that I wanted to learn to be more forgiving and less angry. They would work with me on creating a facilitated drug-use protocol which used drugs that were shown historically to conduce to such mental states as I desire. In so doing, they would take into account my risk tolerance and the extent to which I was familiar with the types of drugs that were indicated as being potentially beneficial in my case. I should add that my risk tolerance would be derived not simply from the consideration of the potential downsides of use but it would also take into account the potential downsides of NOT using the drugs, i.e., of continuing with the status quo, a course which at least in some individuals may entail the possibility of their committing suicide.

I should also point out here that suicide is, indeed, a "downside," by the way, since the FDA and our Drug Warriors pretend that it is not. This can be seen by the fact that they never consider the downsides of failing to approve godsend medicines, even though in so doing, they may be denying the suicide ⁸ of their last best hope for considering life to be worthwhile. The suicidal are not stakeholders when it comes to American drug policy, after all.

Of course, when the Drug Warrior says that people do not need "drugs," they are always using that term in the political sense of the word, namely, as a contrast to the word "meds," which apparently people DO need. To put this another way, Drug Warriors have no problem with drug use - as long as it is blessed and facilitated by materialists according to behaviorist principles. In still other words, the Drug Warrior and the modern psychiatrist are both "on the same page" when it comes to mental health protocols. They both agree that "healing" must only take place according to the materialist's understanding of that word, through some clearly identifiable biochemical process in the human being - and that merely cheering a patient up can never be considered a treatment for depression. This is why we outlaw all drugs with any obvious power to elate and inspire: including opium , the original panacea par excellence, and coca, and psilocybin - and, of course, the hundreds of phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. This is why materialist Dr. Robert Glatter expresses doubt in Forbes magazine about the ability of laughing gas ⁹ to help the depressed. Laughing gas, for God's sake! This is why the FDA continues to drag its feet when it comes to approving glaringly obvious godsends, like MDMA ¹⁰ and psychedelics.

And this, in turn, is why I write: because such politically-inspired cluelessness is so damnably productive of bad and inhumane laws - laws that keep me from being all that I can be in life by denying me a whole pharmacopoeia's worth of psychoactive medicine - medicine that has the glaringly obvious potential to elate and inspire, at least for those who have removed the dual blinders of behaviorism and Christian Science.

So, I ask again: do people need drugs? It's a leading question insofar as it falsely implies the existence of the Drug War apartheid of Julian Buchanan ¹¹, according to which some substances are "drugs" (bad) and some substances are "meds" (good). But the short and obvious answer to the question is an appropriately qualified yes, people do need drugs.

What people could do without is the gaslighting ¹² of politicians and psychiatrists (and chemists) who are forever trying to convince us that obvious drug benefits are not REALLY obvious drug benefits.

Author's Follow-up:

May 13, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

The Drug War is all about gaslighting ¹³ us when it comes to drug benefits. Amazingly, it has succeeded in making many of us close our eyes to the obvious. "What's that?" Americans ask. "You say that the time-honored panacea called opium ¹⁴ actually has no benefits whatsoever? Who knew? Well, okay, then. Whatever you say, boss!"

The success of the Drug War in making us believe nonsense demonstrates the terrible power of propaganda.

It forces one to ask a terrible question:

Does the Drug War prove that the type of government called democracy is bound to fail insofar as its most cherished freedoms (including freedom of thought itself) will eventually be sacrificed by a mob inspired by self-interested fearmongers?

Author's Follow-up:

October 03, 2025

The vast majority of people do not need psychiatry or psychoanalysis. Cocaine is a cure for depression. Freud knew this ¹⁵.

"My impression has been that the use of cocaine ¹⁶ over a long time can bring about lasting improvement." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine ¹⁷

He was gaslighted on this subject by his fellow physicians, however, who saw cocaine (quite rightly) as a drug that would deprive them of a living! And so they ignored ALL the stakeholders in discussing cocaine -- except for the rare individuals who proved unable to use the drug wisely -- you know, the ones whom we refuse to educate about safe drug use.

And so the depressed were never considered stakeholders when considering the pros and cons of cocaine use. By lopsidedly demonizing cocaine, the medical industry threw all the depressed in the world under the bus -- out of a pretended concern for the vast MINORITY of irresponsible users: those users whom we refuse to educate about drug use; those users whom we refuse to provide with the readily available legion of cocaine alternatives which would be easily found in a world wherein we actively sought to use drugs for human benefit rather than ignorantly demonizing them a la the "Fire bad!" mindset of the caveman.

Author's Follow-up:

November 21, 2025

It is impossible to overstate the extent to which drug policy turns Americans into children. The psychiatrist is legally obliged to treat us like children, bearing in mind that I am 67 years old and twice -- and sometimes thrice -- the age of my prescribing physicians. I have used an antidepressant daily for 40 years -- and yet I am still not trusted to take the medicine on my own! Instead, I have to see a psychiatrist every three months of my life to answer humiliating and invasive personal questions and to have my weight and blood pressure checked -- as if I could not be trusted to monitor my own health at home.

two colorful plastic baby rattles

This is why I cannot find it in my heart to hate drug dealers ¹⁸ ¹⁹. Say what you will about them, those dealers would treat me like an ADULT were I to buy my medicines from them. They would not ask me if I was contemplating suicide or if I had used alcohol excessively over the last three months. They would not roll out a scale and blood pressure kit like some kind of hypochondriacal control freak.

The amazing thing is that so few people are protesting this infantilization -- and almost no one except myself bothers to notice that this has all been brought about by drug prohibition and the childish attitudes upon which it is based. Our government treats drugs like they were uranium -- and spends billions of dollars on lopsided research, looking for any and all downsides of drug use wherewith to frighten children and to remind adults that they TOO are children when it comes to big terrible drugs.

This is why I look forward to a day when we get rid of the label of "patient" altogether and the condescending mindset that goes with it. For now, however, the label is all too accurate -- for the Drug War actually obliges psychiatrists to treat grownups not just like patients, but like irresponsible patients at that.

This is strange. We hear so much talk about "empowerment" today in America -- and yet no one seems to care that psychiatric patients are treated like dirt -- forced to make endless trips and spend endless money and to answer humiliating questions -- just for the privilege of receiving drugs upon which they have been rendered chemically dependent for life! This is all because of drug prohibition -- and this is why I find it so hard to be tolerant and patient with those who argue on the backfoot against the Drug War. You see, I have skin in this game, and it permits me to see clearly -- to FEEL clearly -- that these lukewarm drug pundits just don't get it!

Let us never forget, of course, that the only reason I was made a patient in the first place was because the self-interested medical industry demonized cocaine -- which, as Sigmund Freud knew from personal experience, was a virtual cure for depression ²⁰. No one asked the depressed what they thought about it. Instead, self-interested doctors demonized the drug for obvious financial reasons. They focused exclusively on rare misuse while COMPLETELY INGORING THE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS WHO COULD HAVE ENDED THEIR DEPRESSION WITH WISE COCAINE USE.

Let me add that the "depressed" are not the only "patients" who suffer thanks to America's inhumane, childish and superstitious attitudes about drugs. Pain patients go without adequate pain relief because of drug prohibition as well. As Thomas Szasz notes in "Our Right to Drugs ²¹":

"One of the most tragic and publicly least understood side effects of the War on Drugs is that so many sick Americans suffering from painful illnesses are systematically deprived of adequate doses of painkilling drugs because of physicians' well-founded fears of prescribing so-called controlled substances."

It's not just that the medical industry has been frightened by the DEA into under-prescribing pain medicine -- it's that we Americans would not need their help in the first place if Americans still had their time-honored right to the godsend medicines of Mother Nature that grow at their very feet! To quote Szasz again:

"More often than not, the effective treatment of pain requires neither clinics nor doctors, but only a free market in drugs. However, such pharmaceutical freedom would make our highly paid pain researchers and pain clinicians unnecessary and unemployed."

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Christian Science

Notes for essay entitled Goodbye Patient, Hello Client: a new shamanic approach to drug use and mental healing:

1: A Principle-Driven Approach to Ending Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
2: 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)
3: How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs DWP (up)
4: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
5: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
6: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
7: 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)
8: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
9: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
10: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
11: Breaking Free From Prohibition: A Human Rights Approach to Successful Drug Reform Buchanan CPA, DSW, MA, PhD, Julian, Drugs, Human Rights & Harm Reduction, 2018 (up)
12: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
13: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)
14: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
15: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
16: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
17: “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)
18: In Praise of Drug Dealers DWP (up)
19: Drug Dealers as Modern Witches DWP (up)
20: “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)
21: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)

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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.

There is more hope in dope than there is in the psychiatric pill mill.

I've been told by many that I should have seen "my doctor" before withdrawing from Effexor. But, A) My doctor got me hooked on the junk in the first place, and, B) That doctor completely ignores the OBVIOUS benefits of indigenous meds and focuses only on theoretical downsides.

To say that taking SSRIs daily is better than using opium daily is a value judgement, not a scientific one.

If Americans want less government, they should get rid of the Drug War Industrial Complex, rather than abandoning democracies around the world and leaving a vacuum for Russia and China to fill.

And so, by ignoring all "up" sides to drugs, the DEA points to potential addiction as a knock-down argument for their prohibition. This is the logic of children (and uneducated children at that). It is a cost-benefit analysis that ignores all benefits.

Clearly a millennia's worth of positive use of coca by the Peruvian Indians means nothing to the FDA. Proof must show up under a microscope.

I have dissed MindMed's new LSD "breakthrough drug" for philosophical reasons. But we can at least hope that the approval of such a "de-fanged" LSD will prove to be a step in the slow, zigzag path toward re-legalization.

Thomas Szasz was not an extremist when it comes to drugs. The extremists are those who feel that psychiatrists know more about our mind and mood than we do.

Your drug war has caused the disappearance of over 60,000 Mexicans over the last 20 years. It has turned inner cities into shooting galleries. It has turned America into a penal colony. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and put bureaucrats in charge of deciding if our religions are "sincere."

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Goodbye Patient, Hello Client

a new shamanic approach to drug use and mental healing

Author's Follow-up:

May 13, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

October 03, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

November 21, 2025

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Christian Science

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