How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs

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How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs

and leads to the preventable suicides of our loved ones

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 9, 2025

It is a commonplace to say that Americans believe in science, almost as a kind of replacement for the God that they have largely abandoned. But this is not exactly true.

Update

What Americans really believe in is a kind of folk science based on what flatters them personally, but which appears to be true science because scientists have no interest in undeceiving them on this subject: so much so, that many of the less profound thinkers among the scientists have adopted the folk beliefs themselves. This folk science consists of the notion that mind and mood problems are identical in kind to heart and liver problems, that such problems are literally illnesses, rather than just figuratively so. Despite Thomas Szasz's courageous virtual one-man crusade against this consequence-laden idea back in the 20th century, this belief has staying power, and the reason is obvious ¹. It persists because Americans see no alternative to this world view except to 'blame' the folks with 'mental health' problems for their own condition. Nevertheless, the myth of mental illness is clearly that -- a myth -- no matter how laudable the reason for its acceptance as fact among the hoi polloi.

Why is it wrong? Well, as Whitehead said, we judge a philosophy wrong because it leads to 'absurdum,' and the myth of mental illness has led to the mother of all absurdities: the fact that modern scientists claim to see no positive uses for the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions in the past. Why not? Merely because they can find no quantifiable evidence that such efficacy exists. Modern scientists are behaviorists when it comes to human psychology, and behaviorists believe that all that matters is quantifiable data. They do not care that the use of psychedelics inspired the Hindu religion, nor that Ecstasy brought together young people of all ethnicities in unprecedented harmony on the dance floors of Britain in the 1990s ². Materialists want to find out if such drugs 'really' work -- i.e., by ignoring all common sense and obvious facts whatsoever. That is a metaphysical quest if there ever was one, a task befitting a materialist Don Quixote and not a family member who is genuinely interested in the well-being of a depressed loved one.

This paradigm of 'mental illness' is hugely relevant to the Drug War because it implies that materialist doctors - the same materialist doctors who treat our heart and liver problems - are the same doctors who are qualified to treat our mental conditions. This in turn implies that we are all biochemical widgets when it comes to mental suffering; we are all amenable to one-size-fits-all cures from medical science. And this should sound familiar, because it is the assumption upon which today's psychiatric pill mill is based. This materialist ideology also helps scientists sign off on Drug War prohibitions by convincing them that 'cures' for mind and mood issues are to be found under a microscope, from which it follows that glaringly obvious benefits of drug use can be completely ignored. We don't ask heart patients how the doctor should treat their heart conditions, after all: why should we ask 'mental health' patients what works for them personally? By thus identifying mind and mood issues as pathological, we imply that the 'patient's' only job is to listen to their doctor. You say that laughing gas makes the chronic depressed laugh and gives them something to look forward to? 'So what?' cries the folk scientist who believes in the existence of literal mental illnesses. 'Doctors are the experts on mind and mood medicine,' they say, 'and the benefits of outlawed drugs have yet to be established with the quantitative data that we demand from the study of actual illnesses.'

This is a very convenient result for the powers-that-be because it permits doctors to 'sign off' on the outrageous lie of the DEA that psychoactive medicines have no known positive uses whatsoever, this despite the fact that both history and modern anecdote say otherwise, not to mention psychological common sense. There are, in fact, endless common-sense ways to leverage the power of psychoactive medicines to improve mind and mood, ways limited only by the power of our imaginations as living, breathing human beings. But we have been taught to ignore the very possibility of doing so thanks to drug-war fearmongering, which teaches us to apply a safety standard to drug use that we apply to no other risky activity on earth - not to mountain climbing, not to drag-racing, not to gun shooting, and certainly not to liquor consumption. We are told that one victim of 'drugs' is one victim too many - whereas 178,000 Americans die yearly from alcohol and the Drug Warrior never raises an eyelash ³.

And so we outlaw drugs in an effort to reduce the victim rate to zero, always failing to realize that we are thereby causing far more deaths than we are preventing. It's just that our laws outsource the deaths to minorities and foreigners: to minorities thanks to the inner-city drug gangs that our laws have incentivized and to foreigners thanks to the drug cartels that our policies have created out of whole cloth: gangs which have destroyed the rule of law in Latin America and caused 60,000 'disappearances' in Mexico alone over the last two decades ⁴. (I say nothing here of the stateside deaths caused by drug prohibition, which refuses to teach safe use, meanwhile failing to regulate product, thanks to which users can die of corrupted product or of unintentional overdoses - like the thousands of daily drug deaths in cities around the country, for which Drug Warriors have blood on their hands but about which they remain in an aggressive state of denial, blaming drugs as usual for the problems that they themselves are causing with their drug prohibitions.)

If Americans are concerned about blaming the victim, then they should stop using the term 'patient' at all, which is itself a stigmatizing and disempowering epithet. The word 'patient' would, indeed, be discarded if we followed my plan of replacing today's psychiatrist with what I call a 'pharmacologically savvy empath,'⁵ a sort of modern shaman whom literally anyone could visit for the purposes of improving their mental and emotional life, someone who has actually used the kinds of drugs about which he or she gives advice. The empath in question would be familiar with all psychoactive drugs available, and not just their pharmacological makeup either, but also their historic and anecdotal usage. They would have a raft of psychologically common-sense ideas regarding the wise leveraging of such substances on behalf of the goals of their client - their client, mind, and not their patient. There would be no stigma for anybody involved because everyone who visited these modern western shaman would be treated for the same thing: a desire to improve their mind and mood.

As Szasz himself noted, there are conditions that may justifiably be called 'mental illness,' ones in which specific neuronal damage results directly in maladaptive behavior, but to claim that sadness in general is a mental illness is to adopt a hyper materialist view of the world, one in which we are all predetermined widgets amenable to one-size-fits-all cures regardless of our own extraordinarily unique and complex personal psychology. We do not need a materialist doctor in most cases of mental and emotional suffering: we need a living, breathing human being who can empathize with our situation and whose pharmacopoeia has not been almost entirely censored by racist politicians who do not know psilocybin from ibogaine, nor coca from opium -- and who, in any case, are blind to all psychological common sense regarding motivation, anticipation and the desire for self-actualization in life.

This is not to say that everyone needs 'drugs,' but we do not limit a physical doctor's pharmacopoeia just because everybody does not need aspirin. Nor should we limit the shaman's pharmacopoeia because not everyone needs ayahuasca. Nor should anyone rule 'drugs' out of hand entirely, unless, perhaps, they believe in the tenets of Christian Science, the drug-hating religion founded by Mary Baker-Eddy. For some of the drugs we are talking about here can inspire a new-found love of nature and music - or new-found compassion for others, etc. - and such potential improvements should not be ruled out in advance by anyone, no matter how tempted they might have been in the past to hop on a moral high horse and cavil against drug use in general, as if it ever even made sense to talk about 'drug use' in the abstract, as if a single coca leaf were equivalent to a high-dose capsule containing Fentanyl or that the daily smoking of an opium pipe were the same as the hourly 'shooting up' of heroin ⁶ or that a spoonful of sugar, for that matter, is the same as five ounces of cacao.

Speaking of which, here's a question that no Drug Warrior has ever answered to my satisfaction: 'Why is it highly criminal for me to engage in the time-honored practice of smoking an opium pipe nightly, while it is my medical duty to take a series of Big Pharma antidepressants ⁷ every single day of my life?'

Nor am I implying here that these shaman should be the gatekeepers to beneficial drug use; I see them rather as a resource in a free world for informed decision making about using - or not using - any specific substance on the planet. For in the world that I envision, stigma would be attached only to unwise drug use, and never to drug use in general. Imagine, turning to folks who actually know the stuff that really MATTERS when it comes to drugs and not basing our views about drug use on the fearmongering of racist demagogue politicians.

The first step toward such sanity is jettisoning the belief in mental illness. That belief fosters the kind of inhumane behaviorism that deprives scientists of all common sense. This in turn is the proof that the mental illness myth is wrong: the very fact that it turns scientists into dogmatic idiots. It turns them into the emotionally purblind Dr. Spock of Star Trek when it comes to mood-related complaints, as in the case of materialist Dr. Robert Glatter, who wrote that infamous article in Forbes magazine in 2021 in which he questioned the ability of laughing gas to help the depressed ⁸. Laughing gas, for God's sake! Even Reader's Digest magazine knows that laughter is the best medicine. Not only would laughing gas help the depressed in many an imaginable protocol, but in a sane world, the suicidal would be given laughing gas kits in the same way as we give epi pens to those individuals who are subject to severe allergic reactions. For in a sane world we would all agree that it was better for them to use laughing gas than to commit suicide. Imagine that! But in our world, we actually outlaw laughing gas ⁹ for the depressed - and yet we are more than happy to fry their brains with electroshock therapy should they become TOO depressed!!! This is insanity, and until Americans recognize it as such, they will continue to support the myth of mental illness and the inhumane behaviorism for which it stands.

Incidentally, I was inspired to write this essay after visiting a relative yesterday and hearing some irritating background chatter about supposed 'mental illness' in our extended family. I hesitated, at first, to write about that experience lest this essay should 'get back' to the individuals concerned and cause hard feelings. But then I reflected that my essays are so thoroughly ignored by Google that I can reference such things without fear of my relatives finding out. Besides, maybe I should be honest with them, in any case.

So then, these two family members were discussing the fact that a relative of ours had recently visited an emergency room for severe depression. Although I do not have anything close to a photographic memory, I can give you a faithful account of the essence of their discussion on this topic. First, they both believed that the family member had done the right thing. This, of course, was true, but only because going to the emergency room to see materialist doctors was about the only option she had in our society. It was further agreed that this severely depressed relative was on the road to recovery now that she had gone to the true church of materialist science. She would surely now be put on the right medications and should they not work, she would be put on still other medications until her mental illness had been cured. Praise God. Both relatives complained about the fact that such conditions were still considered to involve stigma and maintained that we should think of such a condition in the same way that we think about cancer or migraine headache: it was a biochemical condition that was purely physical in origin and for which materialist doctors were the experts. Such were the feel-good 'mental health' bromides being batted about by this duo of dueling materialists that I was overhearing against my will from an adjoining room.

Now, I have just as much concern for this troubled relative as the duo that I mention, but it is absurd to think that physical science has the answers to her sadness, to the sadness caused by the human condition. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, the scientific community has been all too willing to accept the myth of mental illness because they can then engage in disease-mongering and thereby set up emotionally purblind materialists as the highly remunerated experts when it comes to each and every one of these newly minted illnesses. You say a mother is depressed after childbirth? I say she can be cheered up in a trice by the common-sense use of medicines that elate and inspire. But the materialist says, 'No way! She must be treated for a specific illness called Postpartum Depression, one for which drugs that simply elate and inspire can do absolutely nothing at all.' That's just treating the symptoms, don't you see? The implication here is that a materialist reductive cure will fix the 'real' problem -- which is an ideological conclusion, however, not a scientific one. It is a logically fallacious conclusion insofar as it assumes the correctness of the materialist approach to mood medicine rather than proving it.

Besides, the illness approach explains too much. It implies that merely to exist is to be ill -- which renders illness so commonplace as to deny the term all meaning.

This is an outrageous abandonment of common sense. And it is proof that the mental illness myth is wrong. It forces us not only to be stupid when it comes to the depressed - but it forces us to be CRUEL to them as well, and that with malice aforethought. For we know perfectly well that we could cheer up our depressed relatives 'in a trice' with a wide variety of psychoactive medicines, but we would rather risk that they commit suicide than to let them use such drugs. But such medicine is outlawed, you say! True, but that does not prevent us from at least protesting that fact, loudly and clearly, on behalf of our suicidal relatives. Every new case of so-called postpartum depression or seasonal affective disorder should bring about new howls of protest against the prohibitionists: but by referring such conditions to physical illness, we give an enormous mulligan to the Drug War, which outlaws everything that really works for depression!

We are shirking our responsibility to the severely depressed when we pretend that this purblind physical science has the effective and immediate answers that our suicidal relatives so desperately require. They need real decisive answers now, not potential answers that might show up to some extent in eight to ten months if we're lucky. They require the wise and informed use of some portion of the vast psychoactive pharmacopoeia that we have been encouraged to outlaw by the fearmongering of racist politicians, and we should be pointing out this fact, loudly and clearly. Instead, those who believe in the myth of mental illness are living in a make-believe world: a world in which God is in his heaven and the doctor is in his emergency room and everything is fine with the world. It's a world in which depressed loved ones come in second to the substance demonizing ideology of the War on Drugs.

Author's Follow-up: March 12, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

The materialist will object that there are known biochemical and/or genetic correlates to given psychological conditions -- to which I say, of course there are! But the question is whether these correlations are both necessary and sufficient in causing the pathologies in question. The fact that these correlates can exist in the absence of pathology says otherwise. This is the whole problem with the drug-war mentality: it sees health and illness as something caused by a few specific things, rather than being the result of a balance of a vast variety of forces, which include an individual's upbringing, their genetics, their personality, ad infinitum. When we simplify the human being for the purposes of the materialist conception of life, we leave out so many things that matter -- not least of all that individual's attitude toward life. Only by thus blinding ourselves to common sense can we ignore the obvious power of drugs to cheer us up overall AND THEREFORE improve our ability to fight the many overlapping human conditions that the materialist dices up into discrete pathologies. Disease-mongering of this kind may be of benefit to insurance companies, but it is a disservice to the human beings whose emotional lives we thereby cheapen in the course of our self-congratulatory and hubristic prognoses.

The whole problem is caused by a category error: the crazy idea that materialists should have anything to do with mind and mood medicine in the first place. Who should? Someone whom I describe as a pharmacologically savvy empath ¹⁰.

Author's Follow-up: March 20, 2025

Alexander Shulgin synthesized hundreds of central nervous system stimulants called phenethylamines, many of which had obvious beneficial uses for improving both mood and mentation, as can be deduced from glowing user reports such as these that the pharmacist documented in his classic book called Pihkal: a Chemical Love Story ¹¹:

"The afterglow was benign and rich in empathy for everything."

"I experienced the desire to laugh hysterically at what I could only describe as the completely ridiculous state of the entire world."

"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."

"I felt that the experience continued for many days, and I feel that it is one of the most profound and deep learning experiences I have had."

Anyone with common sense can imagine how drug-savvy and empathic souls could use the phenethylamines discussed in "Pihkal" to bring about specific desired improvements in mood and mentation, for themselves and for others. Unfortunately, America's materialist mindset teaches us to ignore common sense and to claim that the sort of drug benefits implied above are not 'real' -- which, again, is purely a metaphysical conclusion. It relies on the conception of human beings as interchangeable biochemical widgets. The question might rather be asked, however: do we really WANT a "real" cure for mood problems? Do we really want a one-size-fits-all cure in which the chemist gets to decide how the depressed should ultimately feel, rather than the depressed themselves? We have seen where such protocols lead: to the largest pharmacological dystopia of all time: the fact that 1 in 4 American women are now dependent on Big Pharma drugs for a lifetime ¹². If modern psychiatrists were not behaviorists in outlook, they would see at a glance that this is a hugely disempowering protocol, to thus turn patients into wards of the healthcare state.

I highlight the absurdity of this modern dystopia in the following dialogue:

PSYCHIATRIST: Have you considered suicide ¹³ in the last three months?
PATIENT: Only when I consider the fact that antidepressants have turned me into a ward of the healthcare state.

Amazingly, Alexander Shulgin himself embraces behaviorism when it comes to creating antidepressant drugs for Big Pharma ¹⁴ ¹⁵ companies. This can be clearly deduced from the work-related musings that he jots down in the "extensions and commentary" section of Pihkal. He does not seem to be a behaviorist, ideologically speaking, however. He clearly sees and acknowledges the holistic benefits of the drugs with which he works, and yet he knows on which side his bread is buttered. He knows that drug companies want substances that work via identifiable biochemical "pathways" and which have predictable results for humanity in general, and not for individuals considered as such. He knows that the efficacy of any antidepressants that he proposes must be established by quantitative results and not merely by the fact that they cheer people up, not merely by the fact that they work. Anybody could cheer people up, after all, provided only that the government would allow them to do so. The pharmaceutical companies want something that will "really" cheer people up, which again is a metaphysical quest.

The real tyranny here is that such a quest for a "real" cure for depression puts chemists in charge of deciding how the depressed should feel, as if they had any expertise in that area whatsoever. If the depressed individual wants to live large a la the opium ¹⁶ -loving Avicenna or the coca-loving Robin Williams, tough luck. A "real" cure as determined by chemists is inevitably going to be one that results in a personality that our racist and xenophobic politicians can live with. The ideal personality will be a reliable consumer, one who is not prone to look at life in new and socially unsettling ways. The target personality will thus be one that ticks the boxes of politicians, not the boxes of the depressed individuals themselves. Their hopes and dreams do not matter.

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Notes for essay entitled How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs: and leads to the preventable suicides of our loved ones:

1: “Ceremonial Chemistry – Syracuse University Press.” 1974. Syr.edu. 2026. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/1114/ceremonial-chemistry/. (up)
2: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
3: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (up)
4: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (up)
5: Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism DWP (up)
6: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
7: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
8: Glatter, Robert. 2021. “Can Laughing Gas (Nitrous Oxide) Help People with Treatment-Resistant Depression?” Forbes, June 9, 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2021/06/09/can-laughing-gas-nitrous-oxide-help-people-with-treatmentresistant-depre (up)
9: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
10: Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism DWP (up)
11: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
12: Richard Louis Miller. 2017. Psychedelic Medicine : The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca. Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press. (up)
13: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
14: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
15: 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)
16: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)

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There are neither "drugs" nor "meds" as those terms are used today. All substances have potential good uses and bad uses. The terms as used today carry value judgements, as in meds good, drugs bad.

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.

"Those gentlemen who adopt the anti-opium doctrine... are only comparable to the monomaniac, who, sane upon every subject but one, is thoroughly daft upon that." --William Brereton

Outlawing opium was the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief.

It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.

71% of the depressed have relapses after getting off their meds. Doctors blame this on depression, but increasing evidence suggests that these people are having withdrawal problems.

We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).

Attention People's magazine editorial staff: Matthew Perry was a big boy who made his own decisions. He didn't die because of ketamine or because of evil rotten drug dealers, he died because of America's enforced ignorance about psychoactive drugs.

The Drug Warriors say: "Don't tread on me! (That said, please continue to tell me what plants I can use, how much pain relief I can get, and whether my religion is true or not.)"

William James claimed that his constitution prevented him from having mystical experiences. The fact is that no one is prevented from having mystical experiences provided that they are willing to use psychoactive substances wisely to attain that end.

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How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs

and leads to the preventable suicides of our loved ones

Author's Follow-up: March 12, 2025

Author's Follow-up: March 20, 2025

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

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Diary of a Drug Fiend