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In Praise of Thomas Szasz

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





February 2, 2019



No one has lopped more heads off of the hydra-headed beast of drug-related misunderstanding than Hungarian-American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, and one of his greatest insights had to do with doctors. Ever since they were empowered with the privilege of writing (or withholding) prescriptions, Szasz tells us, the sick or troubled amongst us have been encouraged to think of themselves as babies when it comes to medications. We know nothing about medicine and our medical instincts, experiences, and pharmacological desires count for little. The big question is: "What does a board-certified doctor think that we need?" Even if we are visiting the eminent physician for a simple cold (something that our great grandparents might have laughed off with a little tincture of opium 1 ), we still must appeal to the brow-wrinkling doctor if we hope to access anything more powerful than acetaminophen and cough drops.

April 2025 Update
Update: May 05, 2025

I am not reminding the reader of this lost Eden in order to promote the dangerous solitary use of psychedelics and other substances, but rather to remind us that our caution on these topics is caused in part by our knee-jerk obedience to a healthcare paradigm that infantilizes us as patients and urges us to discount our medical instincts and experiences2. We have been trained to distrust ourselves when it comes to drugs, to the point that the term "self-medicating3" has become the taboo par excellence in the modern age. But let's remember that the disdain that modern doctors hold for "self-medicating" can be explained by more than just their concerns about patient health: after all, a doctor's bottom line is impacted precisely to the extent that their potential patients choose to "self-medicate." Little wonder then that doctors seek to characterize such patient initiative as medical heresy.

The inconvenient truth is that the non-medical world, with its many psychoactive substances, has far more effective cures for my depression than does the medical world with its beard-stroking doctors and outrageously limited pharmacopeia (especially if I have at least one botanically minded spiritual guide to aid me in my quest for self-improvement). I therefore would consider self-medication to be the rational choice for treating what ails me, were it not for the fact that the DEA is waiting to arrest me should I have the gall to improve my life outside the healthcare system with the mere help of Mother Nature. But let's remember that, in arresting me, the DEA is just following the medical profession's taboo to its logical conclusion: they are essentially arresting me for self-medicating. In this way the DEA is really just the enforcement arm of the American medical establishment. The two are in cahoots. They are both working to disempower the American people when it comes to healthcare.

One in four American women are hooked on Big Pharma anti-depressants, many of which are more addictive than heroin 4. That's a nice tidy annuity for pharmaceutical executives, especially when you add in the one in eight 5 males who are likewise addicted. No wonder there are so many lobbyists in DC asking Congress to "double down" on the Drug War. The Drug War is the goose that lays the golden egg, not just for Big Pharma but for psychiatrists, law enforcement and the corrections industry as well.




July 10, 2022



This was written three years ago, when Brian was still basically a kid (couldn't have been more than 62 years old). He's since realized that Szasz fell short in a few ways, which, however, does not in any way diminish his accomplishments when it comes to pushing back against the willfully ignorant Drug War.

What Szasz failed to notice



1) Szasz seems to have erred on the side of Libertarians in assuming that "drug use" was, indeed, by and large unnecessary, but that prohibition was still a flawed response to such use. He seems to pay short shrift to the fact that psychoactive drugs inspired the Vedic religion, the mushroom cults, and the Eleusinian Mysteries, from which Plato got his ideas about the afterlife6. When it comes to drugs, the Libertarian wants to let people "go to the devil in their own way." But this attitude yields far too much ground to the Drug Warrior, by agreeing with their false proposition that hypocritically defined "drug use" is stupid at some level, but must be tolerated. Wrong. Drug use is the fountainhead of the religious impulse and the source of most historic prophesying. To consider "drug use" as merely a dubious pastime of hippies is to make the Drug Warrior mistake of considering such use only in the context of 1960's America. Of course, the Drug War as Nixon defined it was a war against such youths and their pacifist and potentially communistic ideology, but in the larger picture, "drugs" have been used by Marco Polo, Marcus Aurelius, Benjamin Franklin, Richard Feynman, HG Wells, Jules Verne, Henrik Ibsen, etc. etc. etc. Drug use in general has nothing to do with American hippies, except "accidentally," as a philosopher would use that term.

2) In connection with the above remark, Szasz gives short shrift to the potential positive uses for drugs which the Drug War requires us to ignore entirely: teaching music appreciation, teaching compassion, providing concentration on tasks requiring "attention to detail," learning new approaches to life, seeing the world outside of the prison of one's default mode network, thanks to which one is blind to useful alternatives to non-constructive behavioral patterns instilled by nature and/or nurture.

3) He also fails to fully point out the link between materialism 7, reductionism and the Drug War -- though this is partly due to the fact that he lived during the "growth spurt" of the psychiatric pill mill 8 , which had yet to render 1 in 4 American women dependent on Big Pharma meds for life, thereby creating a world that is eerily like "The Stepford Wives," complete with a bell sounding at regular intervals (helpfully provided by Siri) to remind the female to "take her meds." Speaking of which, I keep waiting in vain for Margaret Atwood to denounce this real-life dystopia, but such drug use appears to be a new religion. For the field of psychiatry is taking full advantage of Drug War prohibition to hook Americans on Big Pharma 9 10 drugs under the pretense of "scientifically curing sadness." So I guess Margaret knows that to push back against the trend would make her stand out as a reactionary against American "progress," even though the status quo is the incarnation of the anti-female dystopias that she (and novelist Ira Levin) would otherwise revile as a matter of course.




Author's Follow-up:

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




I actually shared my views on the Drug War with Thomas Szasz himself in the 1980s in a lengthy letter -- to which he actually responded in a lengthy letter. Imagine that! Szasz remains the only person in the world so far to this day who took up my request to discuss drug-related matters in depth and from a philosophical point of view. I cannot find support anywhere else, even where you might expect it. I recently even got "unfollowed" by the Thomas Szasz quote page on Bluesky. I should point out that the quote page in question was following no one at all, last I checked, so maybe I should take that as consolation. It is still not clear to me why they began following me in the first place, however. One day I was liked, the next... not so much. If I were paranoid, I would think that they did this like-dislike business on purpose. "We LIKE ya Brian... NOT!!! Ha ha ha ha! Wait till he sees the unlike!"

Szasz was moving in the direction of identifying materialism as a sort of unindicted co-conspirator in the War on Drugs. His criticism of the "illness" paradigm with regard to mental health issues was at least pointing him in that direction. It is bad luck on my part that our timelines did not align such that we could have shot the breeze on such topics. I could not have followed through with him on this topic as a student in the 1980s in any case, because I was then still decades away from recognizing the category error implicit in putting materialist scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine. Modern materialists are behaviorists with regards to human psychology, after all, meaning that they are dogmatically obliged to ignore all common sense proof of drug efficacy. For them, it does not matter that a drug cheers me up and inspires me and makes me want to live. The behaviorist wants to find a drug that "really" works for me, i.e., according to the expectations of reductionist science. In other words, the primary goal of the materialist drug researcher is not to improve the life of the drug taker but rather to prove the omnipotence of the materialist conception of life in all areas of human endeavor.

What's the answer?

The true experts when it comes to mind and mood are real empathic people with a vast understanding of pharmacology and ethnography: a knowledge of all the best time-honored beneficial uses of drugs and how to emulate them -- including those practices employed in the hitherto hushed-up cases where folks have used drugs wisely for good reasons behind closed doors and in defiance of the tyrannous outlawing of godsend medicines. The true experts in the field are -- or someday will be -- what I call "pharmacologically savvy empaths.11"



Author's Follow-up:

May 05, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




Szasz is sometimes criticized for his campaign to end the indiscriminate institutionalization of homeless people by the police. But why do Drug Warriors criticize a change from the arrest-driven status quo?

ANSWER: Because the mere presence of homeless people on the streets is pointing to social problems that America's Drug Warriors do not want to deal with. By arresting the homeless, Drug Warriors can hide the problems created by modern capitalism as practiced today in the United States. It is "out of sight, out of mind" when it comes to social problems, as far as Drug Warriors are concerned.

This is the exact same reason why Drug Warrior agitators from around the country converged on Oregon last year to overturn that state's decriminalization of drugs. For conservatives and fascists and members of the Church of The Infallible Capitalist, drug criminalization is a way to hide the problems of society by arresting the canaries in the mine. It hides the problems that the presence of the homeless street people are broadcasting to the world: namely, that modern capitalism 12 is broke: that it has led to enormous income inequality and to complete indifference to the healthcare needs for the poor, especially when it comes to psychological well-being. Drug warriors do not want to spend a penny on solving those problems, of course, but they are willing to spend billions on hiding them. And drug criminalization gives police the power to do just that. Drug warriors know this and so they seek to arrest those whose very existence is an implicit criticism of modern social, economic and drug policy.

Szasz's critics do not care about the homeless people on the street; they just do not want to be reminded of the fact that their political policies are not working. They want to be able to travel between their multiple McMansions without being offended by the sight of homeless people whose presence clearly demonstrates the inadequacy of the status quo. They do not want to be reminded that their selfish, hate-filled and prohibitionist social system is not working for the average person. Drug warriors hate the idea of drug-relegalization 13 because when it finally occurs, they will no longer be able to direct our attention away from the 6,000-pound gorillas in the room. They will be forced to admit the existence of real social problems in America, starting with the inhumane and violence-causing Drug War itself, and so be obliged to spend time and money on solving them. In a post-prohibition world, their penny-pinching selfishness will no longer be hidden under the veneer of their hypocritical hatred of the inanimate substances that we choose to demonize today as "drugs."




Notes:

1: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton (up)
2: How Drug Prohibition has turned academics into children (up)
3: Restoring our Right to Self-Medication: how drug warriors work together with the medical establishment to prevent us from taking care of our own health (up)
4: Lee Robins' studies of heroin use among US Vietnam veterans (up)
5: Common antidepressants could help the immune system fight cancer, UCLA study finds (up)
6: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
7: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors (up)
8: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs (up)
9: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science (up)
10: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? (up)
11: Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism (up)
12: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism (up)
13: National Coalition for Drug Legalization (up)


Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths




In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.

This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just their way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.

This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.

How do I know this?

Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.

More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?

This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."

  • A Quantum of Hubris
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Behaviorism and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • David Chalmers and the Drug War
  • 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 Bernardo Kastrup reckons without the drug war
  • I've got a bone to pick with Jim Hogshire
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Materialism and the Drug War Part II
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Unscientific American: the hypocritical materialism of Elon Musk
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs
  • William James rolls over in his grave as England bans Laughing Gas
  • Without Philosophy, Science becomes Scientism
  • Addicted to Addiction
  • Addicted to Ignorance
  • Addiction
  • After the Drug War
  • After the Drug War part 2
  • Another Cry in the Wilderness
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant
  • Case Studies in Wise Drug Use
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Declaration of Independence from the War on Drugs
  • Drug Use as Self-Medication
  • Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy
  • Ego Transcendence Made Easy
  • Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client
  • Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War
  • Heroin versus Alcohol
  • How Cocaine could have helped me
  • How drug prohibition destroys the lives of the depressed
  • How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Blinds us to Godsend Medicine
  • How the Drug War is a War on Creativity
  • How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse
  • How The Drug War Killed Andy Gibb
  • How the Drug War Punishes the Elderly
  • How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs
  • How to Unite Drug War Opponents of all Ethnicities
  • Hypocritical America Embraces Drug War Fascism
  • In Praise of Doctor Feelgood
  • In Praise of Drug Dealers
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy
  • Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion
  • Notes about the Madness of Drug Prohibition
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart
  • Open Letter to Erowid
  • Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Pihkal 2.0
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism
  • Science is not free in the age of the drug war
  • Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms
  • Someone you love is suffering unnecessarily because of the war on drugs
  • Thank God for Erowid
  • Thank God for Soul Quest
  • THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG
  • The Drug War and Armageddon
  • The Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time
  • The Mother of all Western Biases
  • The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • The New Age of Pharmacological Serfdom
  • The Origins of Modern Psychiatry
  • The Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression
  • What Jim Hogshire Got Wrong about Drugs
  • Why America's Mental Healthcare System is Insane
  • Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    We westerners have "just said no" to pain relief, mood elevation and religious insight.

    Americans were always free to take care of their own health -- until drug warriors handed doctors a monopoly on providing mind and mood medicine. Instead of denouncing this attack on our healthcare autonomy, doctors began demonizing self-care as a mortal sin.

    I'll never understand Americans. Most of them HATE big government -- and yet they have no problem with government using drug prohibition to control how and how much they can think and feel in this life. Talk about warped priorities.

    I'm told that most psychiatrists would like to receive shock therapy if they become severely depressed. That's proof of drug war insanity: they would prefer damaging their brains to using drugs that can elate and inspire.

    The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.

    Americans think that fighting drugs is more important than freedom. We have already given up on the fourth amendment. Nor is the right to religion honored for those who believe in indigenous medicines. Pols are now trying to end free speech about drugs as well.

    There would be almost no recidivism for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.

    That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.

    Someday the world will realize that Freud's real achievement was his discovery of the depression-busting power of cocaine.

    Trump is the prototypical drug warrior. He knows that he can destroy American freedoms by fearmongering. He has seen it work with the Drug War, which got rid of the 4th Amendment, religious freedom and is now going after free speech.


    Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






    Why American Drug Policy is Insane
    The real reason for depression in America


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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