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
Drug warriors are full of hate for "users." Many of them make it clear that they want users to die (like Gates and Bennett...). The drug war has weaponized humanity's worst instincts.
Why does no one talk about empathogens for preventing atrocities? Because they'd rather hate drugs than use them for the benefit of humanity. They don't want to solve problems, they prefer hatred.
When folks banned opium, they did not just ban a drug: they banned the philosophical and artistic insights that the drug has been known to inspire in writers like Poe, Lovecraft and De Quincey.
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.
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
Classic prohibitionist gaslighting, telling me that "drugs" is a neutral term. What planet are they living on?
The UN of today is in an odd position regarding drugs: they want to praise indigenous societies while yet outlawing the drugs that helped create them.
Musk vies with his fellow materialists in his attempt to diss humans as insignificant. But we are not insignificant. The very term "insignificant" is a human creation. Consciousness rules. Indeed, consciousness makes the rules. Without us, there would only be inchoate particles.
These are just simple psychological truths that drug war ideology is designed to hide from sight. Doctors tell us that "drugs" are only useful when created by Big Pharma, chosen by doctors, and authorized by folks who have spent thousands on medical school. (Lies, lies, lies.)
The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.
Drug warriors are full of hate for "users." Many of them make it clear that they want users to die (like Gates and Bennett...). The drug war has weaponized humanity's worst instincts.