How drug prohibition turns Americans into children when it comes to healthcare
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 10, 2025
Drug policy has turned Americans into children. It deprives them of their time-honored right to take care of their own health. And this infantilization affects users of all controlled substances, not just illegal ones.
Take me, for instance. I am a 67-year-old who has been on the Big Pharma antidepressant called Effexor 1 for decades, and yet I am still required to visit the doctor every three months of my life in order to get refills. I am not even trusted to buy the drug without medical oversight. It is bad enough that drug prohibitionists gave Big Pharma 23 a monopoly on mind and mood medicine, thereby turning me into a patient for life with their dependence-causing "meds" -- but it adds insult to injury when they force me to visit a doctor every three months of my life to get a renewed prescription. They thereby constantly remind me that I am an eternal patient and a ward of the healthcare state. It is complete disempowerment, and yet like so many problems with modern drug policy, I seem to be the only person who is complaining about it.
This is a philosophical conundrum. How is it that Americans tolerate such enormous disempowerment when it comes to healthcare? Americans demand empowerment in all other areas of life: why not when it comes to their healthcare4?
The answer, I contend, is that they have a naive belief that they are receiving science-based healthcare and that their job is therefore simply to obey the doctors. They believe that science has developed proven cures for depression and that it is therefore Ludditism to complain about the status quo.
These contented masses seem to be unaware of the fact that there are plenty of medicines out there that could end depression in a trice -- and without causing a lifelong dependency. The wise intermittent use of a variety of drugs is all that an adult would need to take care of their own psychological health. But then that is the medical establishment's worst nightmare: a world in which human beings are allowed to take care of their own health. And so we are taught that we are children when it comes to psychoactive medicine. We are taught that we can never learn to use drugs wisely and that "doctor knows best" when it comes to mind and mood medicine. Thanks to this patronizing control of psychoactive substances, the medical establishment profits enormously from the disempowerment of Americans with respect to healthcare.
As Thomas Szasz writes:
Because these latter controls are ostensibly based on Science and aim to secure only Health, and because those who are so coerced and colonized often worship the idols of medical and therapeutic scientism as ardently as do the coercers and colonizers, the victims cannot even articulate their predicament and are therefore quite powerless to resist their victimizers.5
Smart people in America are like Don Quixote. They are sane on every subject on earth, but mention the subject of "drugs," and they start talking politically correct blather.
If politicians wanted to outlaw coffee, a bunch of Kevin Sabets would come forward and start writing books designed to scare us off the drink by cherry-picking negative facts from scientific studies.
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.
So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.
America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own depression by making opium and cocaine illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.
We should hold the DEA criminally responsible for withholding spirit-lifting drugs from the depressed. Responsible for what, you ask? For suicides and lobotomies, for starters.
In Mexico, the same substance can be considered a "drug" or a "med," depending on where you are in the country. It's just another absurd result of the absurd policy of drug prohibition.
The "acceptable risk" for psychoactive drugs can only be decided by the user, based on what they prioritize in life. Science just assumes that all users should want to live forever, self-fulfilled or not.
Saying "Fentanyl kills" is philosophically equivalent to saying "Fire bad!" Both statements are attempts to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as safely as possible for human benefit.
There would be little or no profiling of blacks if the Drug War did not exist.
(up)