Madder in America

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Madder in America

Why Mad in America is not mad enough when it comes to the disempowerment of the depressed in Drug War America

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 26, 2026

If I had a little more guts and a lot more money, I would have named my Substack "Madder in America," to succinctly express my frustration with organizations like "Mad in America" ¹ which purport to speak for me as a depressed patient. The "Mad in America" website and organization, for those who may not know, was created by reporter Robert Whitaker, author of the eponymous 2010 bestseller, "to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care in the United States (and abroad)." Or so says the non-profit's mission statement. A close look at their website, however, reveals that Robert and his group of "experts" on my depression actually have definite limits to the kinds of rethinking that they are prepared to catalyze. A more honest mission statement would read: "to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care in the United States (and abroad) in ways that do not question the status quo according to which all uplifting drugs have been outlawed and self-interested academics and doctors have been dubbed the experts on the minds and moods of strangers."

The actual mission statement goes on to affirm that: "We believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society, and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change." Yes, but not TOO much change, apparently. A more honest mission statement would warn the reader that this "lived experience" counts for nothing if the pathologized individual fails to believe in two doctrines that Robert takes for granted: that outlawed substances have no obvious uses for the depressed and that doctors, academics and bestselling authors are the experts on what the depressed really need in order to live full and meaningful lives.

As a 67-year-old depressive who has been on antidepressants for over 45 years, you might think that I would be one of the grizzled old experts to whom Robert and his highly credentialed academics would defer if not positively genuflect, and yet MIA refuses to publish either my first-person life story or my essays on the all-too-timely topic of "assisted suicide for the depressed." ² ³ So much for my "lived experience." Their reason for banning me basically amounts to this: that they believe that talking honestly about drugs is the same thing as giving medical advice. And so, what is MY "lived experience"? My lived experience is that everyone -- from those who write Google algorithms ⁴ to Robert himself -- are basically telling me to shut up and take my meds, if not in a literal sense, then in the sense of listening to my betters when it comes to what I "really" need as a depressed human being.

And to whom should we be turning for medical advice? Why, the very doctors who got us started on dependence-causing meds in the first place. Of course MIA is trying to replace those doctors with new Christian Science doctors, but with all due respect to these highly credentialed do-gooders, the depressed do not need doctors of any kind, nor sermons about the joys of a hypocritically defined "sobriety." Their needs are far more simple: they simply require the re-legalization of Mother Nature's bounty, which, as Colleen Cowles reminds us in "War On Us," ⁵ was never justifiably taken from them in the first place, as nothing in the U.S. Constitution can be read to sanction such an enormous and unprecedented power grab by government.

Robert's entire organization would not exist if the depressed were simply allowed to use medicines that grow at their feet. 

Robert's entire organization would not exist if the depressed were simply allowed to use medicines that grow at their feet. Besides, the problem with the case of the chronically depressed Claire Brosseau is that no one is brave enough to GIVE her honest medical advice. Claire is on a campaign to qualify for state-assisted suicide in Canada, yet none of the principals and pundits in her case -- not Claire's psychiatrists, not Claire's Libertarian supporters, not even medical ethicists at our most prestigious thinktanks -- will point out that there are a vast array of outlawed substances whose wise and strategic use could make Claire wish to live! Anyone who denies that fact is simply not familiar with 21st-century pharmacology, ethnobotany -- or even with psychological common sense, for that matter. Even in the bizarre event that we could find nothing in a free world that "worked" for Claire according to her definition of that term, we could certainly boost her mood to the point that we would be justified in demanding that she "buck up" like the rest of us and cease championing a "right" whose legal establishment would set an insidious precedent for depressed human beings around the world.

Of course, I would be on shaky legal ground were I to name my Substack "Madder in America," but the risk of a lawsuit would be well worth it. In fact, a lawsuit would be to my benefit, were I only rich enough to afford it. It would give me a public forum in which to dispute Robert's seeming "ownership" of the one politically acceptable niche for pushing back against the complete medicalization of human behavior, a niche that purports to speak for the depressed who have been disempowered by the psychiatric pill mill and its expensive, underperforming and mendaciously promoted "meds." For I could prove that I am literally Madder in America than is Robert Whitaker, that the Mad in America community is not mad enough because they, like all groups that purport to help the depressed, ignore the way that drug prohibition has outlawed our right to heal. Otherwise they would be pointing out the inconvenient truth that drug prohibition has outlawed all naturally occurring medicines that could cheer me up in a trice and so render Robert's whole organization completely irrelevant. As Aleister Crowley wrote of his first use of cocaine:

The depression lifted from my mind like the sun coming out of the clouds. ⁶

Aleister Crowley -- The Diary of a Drug Fiend

In employing such quotes, I must remember that most Americans have a kind of PTSD when it comes to drug honesty. The minute one speaks common sense about drugs, most Americans will have flashbacks to their childhood when they were bribed with teddy bears and merit badges for "just saying no" to Mother Nature's psychoactive medicines; they will have flashbacks to all the throwaway drug-bashing lines that they have heard in their life in movies and sitcoms (some of them written by the White House itself ⁷); they will have flashbacks to the defeatist mantra of the Drug Warrior that has been instilled in them in countless ways since infancy, that we are all children when it comes to drugs and that we never will be able to use them wisely for the benefit of humanity. They may even have a sort of "negative flashback," when they recall, so to speak, all the documentaries and newspaper articles that they have NOT seen in their lifetime about the wise and beneficial use of poppies ⁸, the wise and beneficial use of coca ⁹, the wise and beneficial use of huachuma cactus ¹⁰, the wise and beneficial use of peyote ¹¹, the wise and beneficial use of phenethylamines ¹², the wise and beneficial use of tryptamines ¹³, and even the wise and beneficial use of nitrous oxide ¹⁴ ¹⁵ (the substance whose use changed William James' mind about the nature of human consciousness and of reality writ large).

WARNING: Teachers must learn to recognize the signs of PPSD, Post Propaganda Stress Disorder. After adducing politically incorrect quotes like the above in a classroom in the age of drug-bashing sensitivities, the prudent teacher will look around the room for signs of hyperventilation, rush deskside to the most flagrantly affected students, pat them on their no-doubt tense shoulders and remind them that the world will not come to an end merely because we are being honest about drugs.

I believe that the bias of Mad in America against Mother Nature's plant medicines (i.e., drugs) is clear given the fact that they will not even publish my "lived experience" as a med-dependent patient. Yet if the reader desire more proof of that bias, they have only to run their mouse cursor over the heading of "Drugs" at the top of the MIA homepage ¹⁶. They will find that the "drugs" to which that heading refers are all pharmaceutical drugs. When constructing this website, the organization's founders clearly took it as an article of faith that outlawed medicines have no potential uses for the depressed. Of course, it might be argued that they were just being practical: that they knew that all drugs that actually "work" in any way have been outlawed and so there was no need to even mention them. But by remaining silent about such drugs, Robert's organization is helping to normalize the disempowering policy of drug prohibition. The best we can say of the founders, then, is that they were creating their organization based on Christian Science presuppositions about what constitutes the good life, that they were not in fact simply protesting the problems with Big Pharma meds for the depressed, but that they were really protesting the use of drugs of all kinds whatsoever -- except, perhaps, for a rare subset of drugs that have been proven (after meticulous and expensive trials involving well-credentialed scientists) to work to the satisfaction of reductive materialism -- or in other words, drugs whose efficacy is determined, not by their actual effects in the real world, but by how their molecules are seen to behave when viewed under a microscope.

After Robert and his team elected not to publish my article about the case of Claire Brosseau and the fact that no one was noticing its obvious connection with the choice-limiting effects of drug prohibition, Robert and I got into a bit of a shouting match via email. Neither of us employed the argumentum ad hominem, I'm pleased to report, but I concluded my part of the harangue by telling Robert that I did not object to his disagreeing with me. Everybody does. What I objected to was the fact that he was basically declaring victory in our debate insofar as he was keeping it off-line. Rather than starting an online debate on these topics from which his depressed followers might have learned something, he was basically going to pretend that my ideas on the subject did not even exist, and that in my case, my 45-plus-years of "lived experience" as a med-dependent patient and the ideas derived therefrom counted for nothing.

This is why I believe that I could have won any suppositious lawsuit brought about by my use of the name "Madder in America" for my Substack. If the matter had gone to court, I could have convinced the judge that I was "Madder in America" than Robert was, and with good reason, when it comes to the unprecedented disempowerment of med-dependent depressed "patients" in the age of drug prohibition.

Notes:

1: “Mad in America - Science, Psychiatry and Social Justice.” 2016. Mad in America. October 2, 2016. https://www.madinamerica.com/. (up)
2: Nolen, Stephanie, and Chloë Ellingson. 2025. “Claire Brosseau Wants to Die. Will Canada Let Her?” The New York Times, December 29, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/health/assisted-death-mental-illness-canada.html. (up)
3: Half-Off on State Assisted Suicide DWP (up)
4: How Google censors pushback against drug prohibition DWP (up)
5: “War on Us – the War on Drugs Is a War on All of Us.” 2019. Waronus.com. 2019. http://waronus.com/. (up)
6: Arthur Crowley. “Full Text of ‘the Diary of a Drug Fiend.’” 1922. Archive.org. 2017. https://archive.org/stream/b29826433/b29826433_djvu.txt. (up)
7: “How the White House and the Media Package Government Propaganda as Entertainment.” 2000. World Socialist Web Site. January 24, 2000. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2000/01/drug-j24.html. (up)
8: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
9: “The Project Gutenberg EBook of Coca and Its Therapeutic Application, by Angelo Mariani.” 2026. Gutenberg.org. 2026. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48328/48328-h/48328-h.htm. (up)
10: Lite — EthnoCO, Scott. 2021. “The Sacred Cactus of the Andes — ‘San Pedro’ / ‘Huachuma.’” Medium. EthnoCO. January 25, 2021. https://medium.com/ethnoco/the-sacred-cactus-of-the-andes-san-pedro-huachuma-e0da13235445. (up)
11: Peyote Way Church of God, Inc., Plaintiff-appellant, v. William F. Smith, Attorney General of the United States JUSTIA US LAW (up)
12: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
13: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
14: “The Varieties of Religious Experience : William James : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2021. Internet Archive. 2021. https://archive.org/details/the-varieties-of-religious-experience_202109. (up)
15: How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James DWP (up)
16: “Mad in America - Science, Psychiatry and Social Justice.” 2016. Mad in America. October 2, 2016. https://www.madinamerica.com/. (up)

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We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.

America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own depression by making opium and cocaine illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.

Kids should be taught in grade school that prohibition is wrong.

I've always wondered why we don't just let heroin users be -- or better yet, re-legalize drugs and give them choices. Why are they punished for using heroin daily while we praise 1 in 4 women for taking an even more dependence-causing drug every day of their life?

If NIDA covered all drugs (not just politically ostracized drugs), they'd produce articles like this: "Aspirin continues to kill hundreds." "Penicillin misuse approaching crisis levels." "More bad news about Tylenol and liver damage." "Study revives cancer fears from caffeine."

The WHO says that depression will be the number-one cause of disability by 2030. What they don't say is that this is only because drug prohibition has outlawed all obvious treatments for depression.

Almost every mainstream article about psychology and consciousness is nonsense these days because it ignores the way that drug prohibition has stymied our investigation of such subjects.

Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?

The drug war controls the very way that we are allowed to see the world. The Drug War is thus a meta-injustice, not just a handful of bad legal statutes.

The line drawn between recreational and medical use is wishful thinking on the part of drug warriors. Recreation, according to Webster's, is "refreshment or diversion," and both have positive knock-on effects in the lives of real people.

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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Madder in America

Why Mad in America is not mad enough when it comes to the disempowerment of the depressed in Drug War America

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