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How materialists turned me into a patient for life



by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher



November 27, 2024



aterialists have conspired with the Drug Warrior to turn me into an eternal patient. They have done this by dogmatically ignoring a glaringly obvious fact: namely, the fact that drugs that elate and inspire a person have obvious uses in fighting depression. Materialists ignore common-sense psychology and prefer instead to find their answers to problems under a microscope. They are deaf to drug-inspired laughter. They want to "really" cure the depressed person, whatever that might mean, metaphysically speaking. In other words, they have a dogmatic materialist agenda in mind, they could care less if I merely laugh and smile.

Here is just one case in point that hits home hard with me:

I had been trying to get off Effexor (an SNRI antidepressant) and I had temporarily succeeded. I felt triumphant and empowered because I was no longer reliant on the medical industry and the psychiatrists who have always treated me like a child. (My vinyl chairs at the sessions were always closer to the ground than the mahogany chairs of my doctors.) I no longer had to suffer the humiliation of traveling to a mental health clinic every three months of the year and receiving an unwanted prescription from a doctor who was one-half my age.

After doing without the drug successfully for several months, I had a particularly bad day in which depression came back with a vengeance. I went through several hours of tears and groaning. Finally, seeing no options, I went back to the prescription, and my feelings of self-agency disappeared. I was once again a ward of the healthcare state.

Here is where the story stops for almost all so-called "experts" in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. They say: "See? Depression is very hard to beat. Getting off antidepressants requires the help of doctors!"

"Yes," I reply, "the same doctors who got me hooked on Effexor in the first place." These doctors never told me that Effexor would make me a patient for life. To the contrary, when it became clear that this was the case, they "flipped the script" and told me that it was my medical duty to take Effexor every day for the rest of my life.

What is amazing, however, is that literally no one recognizes the obvious: the fact that I could have avoided going back to Effexor by using other drugs. The strategic use of drugs like laughing gas, coca, opium, and a wide variety of phenethylamines would have obfuscated the downsides of withdrawal and allowed me to get through a bad day without returning to the unwanted substance. That much is just psychological common sense. But as mentioned above, doctors today do not "do" common sense. They are instead obsessed with "really" curing me - an obsession that has turned 1 in 4 American women into patients for life.

The critic will say: "Yes, but all the drugs that you are talking about are illegal."

To which I respond: Exactly! And it is therefore the duty of any doctor with common sense to protest this anti-patient status quo. They should remind the government that all drugs that elate and inspire have potential positive uses: that this is just plain common sense and requires no additional proof. Instead, doctors normalize prohibition by pretending that the outlawed substances really have failed to show proof of efficacy. If that is so, it is only because the proof that doctors require ignores common sense: they have no interest in helping the patient to thrive according to the patient's own definition of that term, they want the patient to be "really" cured via neurochemical intervention.

And so I am back on Effexor. Why? Because materialists have ignored the obvious power of laughter and happiness in their disastrous search for the holy grail of psychiatric pharmacology, one that will not run afoul of the Christian Science metaphysic of the War on Drugs.

Why don't psychiatrists protest the War on Drugs? That's easy. I would never have needed their antidepressants in the first place had drugs remained legal. We would then live in a world where common sense and empathy guided drug use, not a blind hatred of psychoactive substances. In such a world, the enemy would be unwanted dependency, not drugs. And that enemy would be combatted using psychological common sense.

Getting Off Drugs






NOVEMBER 2024

I have written dozens of essays about antidepressants and the Drug War, but it is important to read this one first, for it contains the most up-to-date info on my battle to get off such drugs. This reading order is important because I declared premature victory against the SNRI called Effexor in recent essays, only to discover that the drug is far more insidious than I gave it credit for. It turns out withdrawing, at least for me, eventually led to deep feelings of abject despair, far greater than the depression for which I started taking the "med" in the first place.

The frustrating thing is, these feelings could be combatted by a host of drugs that we have outlawed in the name of our anti-scientific and anti-patient war on drugs. That much is just psychological common sense. But we have been taught to believe that there are no positive uses for opium, nor for cocaine, nor for coca, nor for MDMA, nor for laughing gas, nor for peyote, nor for the hundreds of inspiring phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, etc. etc. etc.

The truth is, rather, that Drug Warriors (and the millions whom they have brainwashed) do not WANT there to be positive uses for such drugs. No, they want me to "keep taking my meds" instead and so to enrich their investment portfolios in the pharmaceutical sector. Meanwhile, those without a vested financial interest have been taught that antidepressants are "scientific" and so they cannot understand my desire to get off them. They cannot understand the hell of being turned into a patient for life and having to make regular expensive and humiliating pilgrimages to psychiatrists (who are half one's own age) to bare one's soul for the purpose of obtaining an expensive prescription for a drug that numbs one's brain rather than inspiring it - and a drug which seems to counteract, dampen and/or repress most of the positive effects that I might have otherwise obtained by the few semi-legal alternatives to antidepressants, such as psilocybin and ayahuasca.

But it is just psychological common sense that I could withdraw successfully from Effexor with the advised use of a comprehensive pharmacy, including but not limited to the demonized substances listed above. But materialist science is not interested in common sense. And so they tell me that such drug use has not been proven to "work." But materialist doctors are not experts in what motivates me as a living, breathing, unique individual. The heart has its own reasons that reductionist science cannot understand. If I could look forward, at this moment, to relaxing with an opium pipe tonight, my mood would improve NOW, not just tonight. I would have something to look forward to. I would not feel the need to reach for that bottle full of Effexor pills that I was hoping to foreswear. Likewise, if I could use a drug to laugh and "touch the hand of God" (as with laughing gas and phenethylamines respectively), I could laugh at the pangs of despair that Effexor tries to throw my way.

Science's eternal response to such ideas is: "There is no proof that such things work!"

No, nor will there ever be in the age of the Drug War, in which such common sense use is punished by long jail terms and would never be favorably publicized, even if successful, since America's prime imperative in the age of the Drug War is to demonize psychoactive medicines, under the absurd assumption-laden idea that to talk honestly about drugs is to encourage their use.

Well, we SHOULD be encouraging their use in cases where they actually work, in cases, for instance, when they prevent guys like myself from killing themselves thanks to the knowledge that they are a bounden slave to the combined forces of the Drug War and Big Pharma's pill mill.

Besides, there is no proof that hugging works, but we do not need Dr. Spock of Star Trek to launch a study into that issue: we all know that hugging works by bringing two souls together both physically and spiritually. We do not need a map of brain chemistry to figure this out: the proof is extant, the proof is in the pudding.

But I haven't given up yet despite the setback in my most recent plan. I'm going to search the world for a place where I can get off antidepressants in a way that makes some psychological common sense.

Right now, all I see in terms of resources are a bunch of companies who, for large fees, will help me go cold turkey on antidepressants., or companies that claim to have found the right combination of legal herbal formulas that should make withdrawal easier. But to me, these are all what Percy Shelley would call "frail spells," concocted under the watchful eye of the Drug Warrior to make sure that nothing potent and obviously effective will get added to the mix. In fact, if a space alien came to earth and asked what sort of psychoactive drugs were outlawed, one could honestly answer: "Anything that obviously works."

Meanwhile, drug laws make it impossible for me to visit psychiatrists remotely online, requiring me instead to physically visit my doctors, thereby limiting rural residents like myself to accessing hayseed psychiatrists whose one area of expertise seems to be the writing of prescriptions for antidepressants. Talk to them about anything else, and their eyes glaze over. "That's all unproven," they'll say, "Or, no, we have yet to fully study such things." As if we have to study in order to realize that feeling good helps and can have positive psychological effects.

I'm sure that part of the problem with my withdrawal scheme is that I tried to get off the drug too quickly. But I only tried that because I can find no doctor who will compound the drug for me in a way that makes psychological common sense, namely, with daily miniscule reductions in dosage. My current psychiatrist told me that such compounding was unheard of and that I should drop doses by 37.5 mg at a time, since that is the lowest dose that the pharmaceutical companies create. He said I could start "counting pill beads" once I am down to a 37.5 mg daily dose if I wanted to taper still further.

Count pill beads? Surely that's why compounding pharmacists exist: to count pill beads. (UPDATE: I was wrong about this. See my article on "Tapering for Jesus.")

I did find a compounding company that said it could compound Effexor in the way that I desire. But there's a big catch: they have to receive a prescription for that purpose. And I can find no doctor in the world who is willing to write me one. Even those who sympathize with my plight want me to become their full-time patient before they will even consider writing such a prescription.

So those who warned me against trying to get off Effexor were right in a way: it is extraordinarily difficult. But they feel to realize WHY this is so. It is not just because Effexor is a toxic drug, but also because the drug war has outlawed everything that could help me get off it.

This is why those pundits who sign off on the psychiatric pill mill are clueless about the huge problem with the war on drugs: the way it humiliates and disempowers millions. For it turns out that the phrase "No hope in dope" is true after all, but only when the dope in question is modern antidepressants.



OCTOBER 2024

Here are some of the many articles I have written about the philosophy of getting off drugs. Bear in mind that I am in the process of getting off Effexor myself and am exploring the power of "drugs to fight drugs" in so doing. And this is not a straightforward path given the sweeping limits that are imposed by drug law. So the question of exactly what might work (and how and when, etc.) is still wide open and I am advocating nothing, except the common sense notion that we can benefit from euphoria and mood boosts, yes, and that "drugs can be used to fight drugs," and in a safe way too -- a way that will prove far safer than prohibition, which continues to bring about daily deaths from drive-by shootings and unregulated product while causing civil wars overseas.

I guess what I am saying here is, this site is not purporting to offer medical advice. I avoid using such wording, however, because so many authors refuse to talk honestly about drugs, especially about positive drug use, for fear of being seen as giving medical advice, and this, of course, is just how drug warriors want matters to remain. It lets them shut down free speech about drugs.

Besides, I reject the idea that materialist doctors are the experts when it comes to how we think and feel about life. The best they can do as materialist is to tell us the potential physical risks of using holistically-operating drugs, but individuals are the experts on what motivates them in life, on their own particular hopes and dreams and on what risks they deem necessary to obtain them, to pursue happiness, that is, which objective our legislators outlawed when they outlawed all substances that can help facilitate happiness in the properly motivated and educated individual.

The real answer is not for authors to give groveling apologies for being honest, however: the real answer is for kids to be educated about the basics of wise substance use -- and for America to come to grips with the fact that we will always be surrounded by "drugs" -- and that the goal should be to ensure safe use, not to keep endlessly arresting minorities and removing them from the voting rolls on behalf of the clinically insane idea that we should outlaw mother nature to protect our kids -- and this in a purportedly Christian country whose very deity told us that his creation was good.

  • America's biggest drug pusher: The American Psychiatric Association:
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Christian Science Rehab: aka the Twelve Step Group
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal: an open letter to Austin of the Huachuma Project
  • Fighting Drugs with Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war: an open letter to Charley Wininger, author of 'Listening to Ecstasy'
  • Getting off Effexor MY WAY: response to pushback from the Surviving Antidepressants website
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient: and what we should do about that
  • How the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality Tale
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus: an open letter to Austin from the Huachuma Project
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors: How the Drug War has blinded Gabor Maté to the great addiction crisis of our time
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Mad at Mad in America: how Robert Whitaker's organization shuts down free speech in the name of drug war ideology
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement: an open letter to Mad in America
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate: ending the torture-friendly 12-step programs
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand: or at least to her gatekeeper
  • Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants: Here's why that's nonsense
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens: new hope for the millions who are dependent on SSRIs and SNRIs
  • Sending Out an SOS: For Sentara to stop disempowering the victims of the psychiatric pill mill
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma: an open letter to the Heffter Research Institute
  • Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website
  • Taper Talk: a philosophical review of the antidepressant tapering guide from Psychedelic Passage
  • Tapering for Jesus: how drug warriors moralize the withdrawal process
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants: an open letter to Frederick S. Barrett, Ph.D., cognitive neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University
  • The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs: notes on getting off of Effexor
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs: why psychedelic therapy must REPLACE modern psychiatry rather than simply complement it
  • The Mental Health Survey that psychiatrists don't want you to take
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • The War on Drugs and the Psychiatric Pill Mill: Why you can’t understand one without understanding the other
  • This is your brain on Effexor
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants: an open letter to the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines
  • What the psychiatrist said when I told him I wanted to get off Effexor
  • Why SSRIs are Crap: testimony from an expert

    • Materialism






    In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James demonstrated how materialists are blind to the depth and meaning of psychological states of ecstasy and transcendence -- or in other words the states that are peculiar to mystics like St. Teresa... and to those who use psychoactive substances like laughing gas. The medical materialist is dogmatically dismissive of such states, which explains why they can pretend that godsend medicines that elate and inspire have no positive uses whatsoever:

    "To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce."


    And so materialist scientists collaborate with the drug war by refusing to see glaringly obvious drug benefits. They acknowledge only those benefits that they believe are visible under a microscope. The Hindu religion would not exist today had materialist scientists held soma to such a standard. But that's the absurd pass to which prohibition eventually brings us in a society wherein materialist science is the new god: scientists are put in charge of deciding whether we are allowed to imagine new religions or not.

    This materialist bias is inspired in turn by behaviorism, the anti-indigenous doctrine of JB Watson that makes the following inhumane claim:

    "Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic."

    According to this view, the hopes and the dreams of a "patient" are to be ignored. Instead, we are to chart their physiology and brain chemistry.

    JB Watson's Behaviorism is a sort of Dr. Spock with a vengeance. It is the perfect ideology for a curmudgeon, because it would seem to justify all their inability to deal with human emotions. Unfortunately, the attitude has knock-on effects because it teaches drug researchers to ignore common sense and to downplay or ignore all positive usage reports or historic lessons about positive drug use. The "patient" needs to just shut up and let the doctors decide how they are doing. It is a doctrine that dovetails nicely with drug war ideology, because it empowers the researcher to ignore the obvious: that all drugs that elate have potential uses as antidepressants.

    That statement can only be denied when one assumes that "real" proof of efficacy of a psychoactive medicine must be determined by a doctor, and that the patient's only job is to shut up because their hopes and dreams and feelings cannot be accurately displayed and quantified on a graph or a bar chart.





  • A Quantum of Hubris: how know-it-all materialists block scientific progress
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Behaviorism and the War on Drugs: or why doctors and researchers are blind to common sense
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Common Sense and the Drug War: How prohibition and materialistic science work together to turn Americans into babies when it comes to psychoactive medicine
  • Constructive criticism of the MAPS strategy for re-legalizing MDMA
  • David Chalmers and the Drug War: how reductive materialism ruins American healthcare
  • Dogmatic Dullards: why scientists are the slow kids in the class when it comes to drugs
  • Every Day and in every way, you are getting more and more bamboozled by drug war propaganda
  • Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman
  • How AI turned William James into a Drug Warrior: letter to the editors of New Scientist
  • How Bernardo Kastrup reckons without the drug war: a philosophical review of 'Why Materialism is Baloney'
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Scientific Materialism Keeps Godsend Medicines from the Depressed
  • I've got a bone to pick with Jim Hogshire: a philosophical review of 'Opium for the Masses'
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Materialism and the Drug War
  • Materialism and the Drug War Part II: open letter to the Discovery Institute
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart: author of 'Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear'
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith: author of 'The Quantum Enigma'
  • Science News Unveils Shock Therapy II: just when you thought it was safe to go back into the insane asylum...
  • The Inhumanity of Drug Prohibition: and its roots in materialist morality
  • The Poorly Hidden Materialist Agenda at Scientific American: in response to the September 2024 issue
  • Unscientific American: the hypocritical materialism of Elon Musk: how sci-fi nerds ignore the healing power of Mother Nature
  • What Can the Chemical Hold?: a review of the paper by Katherine Hendy on Academia.edu
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs: an open letter to a reader
  • William James rolls over in his grave as England bans Laughing Gas: an open letter to Steve Taylor, author of 'The Genius of William James'
  • Without Philosophy, Science becomes Scientism





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    Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

    America has outlawed drugs for everybody in the world on the grounds that their use may prove problematic for the white American youngsters whom we have refused to educate about safe use.
    Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.
    I have yet to find one psychiatrist who acknowledges the demoralizing power of being turned into a patient for life. They never list that as a potential downside of antidepressant use.
    I just asked New York Attorney General Letitia James how much she was getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out that the drug war created the gangs just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.
    Wanna show drug warriors the error of their ways? Legalize all less dangerous drugs than alcohol and then deny work to those who test positive for liquor and confiscate their property if beer cans are found on-site.
    Materialist puritans do not want to create any drug that elates. So they go on a fool's errand to find reductionist cures for "depression itself," as if the vast array of human sadness could (or should) be treated with a one-size-fits-all readjustment of brain chemicals.
    The drug war is a slow-motion coup against democracy.
    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.
    "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.
    Classic prohibitionist gaslighting, telling me that "drugs" is a neutral term. What planet are they living on?
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    You have been reading an article entitled, How materialists turned me into a patient for life published on November 27, 2024 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)