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How the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient



by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher



August 18, 2020



f I had my life to live over again, I would never set foot in a psychiatrist's office, at least not while a Drug War was in effect. Why? Because the Drug War has outlawed every mood medicine except those that are the most addictive of all: namely, modern antidepressants and benzodiazepines. So if you go to a psychiatrist's office, chances are you're going to be started on a "regimen" of highly addictive medications that will turn you into a patient for life. Even as I write this, 1 in 8 American men and 1 in 4 American women are addicted to Big Pharma meds.

I once naively thought that the whole point of psychotherapy was to make the patient self-sufficient and to empower them to face life on their own. But I have learned the hard way, after 40 years of addiction to prescription meds, that modern psychiatry does not seek to empower patients at all. In fact, it does the exact opposite, by turning them into patients for life, who must visit a shrink every 3 to 6 months of their lives in order to qualify for yet another prescription of the addictive pills on which they were started. What could be more demoralizing than this constant expensive and time-consuming reminder that one is an eternal patient, living life as a ward of the healthcare state?

If the meds in question were simply addictive, that would be bad enough, but the DEA requires that I see my doctor every three to six months to have him or her officially determine that I have the right to continue taking these expensive and ineffective meds - and I say "ineffective" advisedly, because Big Pharma PR to the contrary, the Effexor I'm taking does not fight depression. At best it seems to dull the mind to make one slightly less worried about that depression. And yet the DEA thinks that I can't be trusted after 40 long years to use these medicines wisely without constant surveillance by the medical establishment? What a laugh, considering that I myself would be the first to renounce these drugs were any of the hundreds of natural alternative medicines actually legal.

Why is the DEA so pathologically worried about drug misuse, even when the drug in question is legal and does not provide the user with anything approaching a good time? It's because the Drug War is all about superstitiously turning psychoactive substances into giant bugaboos, all-purpose scapegoats, holding them responsible for everything good and bad in the world. In the past (that is before 1914), we knew that substances were amoral and that their proper use depended solely on context. Society's goal was to educate the citizen about making wise decisions. In the superstitious Drug War era, we label substances themselves as bad, making the tyrannous claim that citizens cannot be trusted with them, that the government must either outlaw psychoactive substances or watch like a hawk as its citizens use such substances under the closest bureaucratic scrutiny possible.

Of course, if the legal dope that I was taking actually worked - like the cocaine with which Sigmund Freud overcame his own depression or the opium that helped Benjamin Franklin get through the rainy days -- I might not mind the regular visits to the behavioral health clinic to jump through the required hoops. But it's a double insult to be subjected to this demoralizing indignity for the purpose of receiving a prescription that one does not even want, to be catechized about one's mental health by a constantly changing roster of interns who might be half my age at most.

Perhaps someday I'll have the nerve to truthfully answer the shrink's obligatory question about suicide:

Q: Have you ever thought about taking your own life?

A: Only when I think about the fact that the Drug War has turned me into an eternal patient.


Author's Follow-up: September 30, 2022



There are plenty of scientific reasons to think that SSRIs don't work (see the works of Robert Whitaker, Irving Kirsch and Julie Holland), but there is a philosophic reason that they do not work as well. Before you can claim that a drug cures an illness, you have to tell me how you define the word "cure." I want to live large like a friend of Jack Kerouac, "The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn burn like fabulous yellow roman candles." I will consider my depression "cured" when I am able to live life like that. But that is not Big Pharma's definition of "cure." Their definition of "cure" is to make me accept the status quo, by essentially tranquilizing me -- not increasing sensations but numbing them.

That is not curing my depression, that is making me a good consumer in a capitalist society, which was never my goal.

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
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Fighting Drugs with Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war
  • Getting off Effexor MY WAY
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • 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
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Mad at Mad in America
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Sending Out an SOS
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website
  • Taper Talk
  • Tapering for Jesus
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • 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
  • This is your brain on Effexor
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • What the psychiatrist said when I told him I wanted to get off Effexor
  • Why SSRIs are Crap





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    Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

    It's already risky to engage in free and honest speech about drugs online: Colorado politicians tried to make it absolutely illegal in February 2024. The DRUG WAR IS ALL ABOUT DESTROYING DEMOCRACY THRU IGNORANT AND INTOLERANT FEARMONGERING.
    Science keeps telling us that godsends have not been "proven" to work. What? To say that psilocybin has not been proven to work is like saying that a hammer has not yet been proven to smash glass. Why not? Because the process has not yet been studied under a microscope.
    There are hundreds of things that we should outlaw before drugs (like horseback riding) if, as claimed, we are targeting dangerous activities. Besides, drugs are only dangerous BECAUSE of prohibition, which compromises product purity and refuses to teach safe use.
    Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
    We've all been taught since grade school that human beings cannot use psychoactive medicines wisely. That is just a big fat lie. It's criminal to keep substances illegal that can awaken the mind and remind us of our full potential in life.
    To oppose the Drug War philosophically, one has to highlight its connections to both materialism and the psychiatric pill mill. And that's a problem, because almost everyone is either a Drug Warrior, a materialist, and/or has a vested interest in the psychiatric pill mill.
    Being less than a month away from an election that, in my view, could end American democracy, I don't like to credit Musk for much. But I absolutely love it every time he does or says something that pushes back against the drug-war narrative.
    Until we legalize ALL psychoactive drugs, there will be no such thing as an addiction expert. In the meantime, it's insulting to be told by neuroscience that I'm an addictive type. It's pathologizing my just indignation at psychiatry's niggardly pharmacopoeia.
    It's no wonder that folks blame drugs. Carl Hart is the first American scientist to openly say in a published book that even the so-called "hard" drugs can be used wisely. That's info that the drug warriors have always tried to keep from us.
    Anyone who has read Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin knows that the drug warriors have it exactly backwards. Drugs are our friends. We need to find safe ways to use them to improve ourselves psychologically, spiritually and mentally.
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    You have been reading an article entitled, How the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient published on August 18, 2020 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)