In Praise of Thomas Szasz

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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 experiences ². We have been trained to distrust ourselves when it comes to drugs, to the point that the term "self-medicating ³" 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 afterlife ⁶. 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

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."

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Materialism

Notes:

1: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
2: How Drug Prohibition has turned academics into children DWP (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 DWP (up)
4: 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)
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 DWP (up)
8: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
9: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
10: 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)
11: Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism DWP (up)
12: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)
13: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

We need a few brave folk to "act up" by shouting "It's the drug war!" whenever folks are discussing Mexican violence or inner city shootings. The media treat both topics as if the violence is inexplicable! We can't learn from mistakes if we're in denial.

When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.

The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.

Q: Where can you find almost-verbatim copies of the descriptions of religious experiences described by William James? A: In descriptions of user reports of "trips" on drugs ranging from coca to opium, from MDMA to laughing gas.

My cousin says we should punish drug dealers. I say we should punish those politicians who created those drug dealers out of whole cloth by passing unprecedented laws against the use of Mother Nature's bounty.

We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.

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.

I'm going to get on the grade-school circuit, telling kids to say no to horses. "You think you can handle horses, kids? That's what Christopher Reeves thought. The fact is, NOBODY can handle horses!!!"

"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.

Drug warriors think only about young people misusing drugs. They never think about the millions of the depressed whom they're condemning to a lifetime of totally unnecessary misery by outlawing drugs.

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