All it takes is one single death to make Americans call for drug prohibition. Meanwhile, there are 47,000 gun-related deaths per year and 178,000 alcohol-related deaths, and no one blames either guns or alcohol. It is drug prohibition that makes life dangerous because it discourages drug education and teaches intolerance and fear instead. Julian might as well have posted a picture of people having fun in a bar with the caption: “Serious harms and a death at a local bar.”

As a med-dependent patient who has to see a doctor one-third his age every three months of my life, I hate the term “treatment-resistant depression.” It suggests that science has “solved” depression but that there are a few weirdos out there whose body’s don’t recognize a good thing when they see it. We need to end drug prohibition before we can decide who — if anyone — REALLY has a treatment-resistant depression. We need to re-legalize Mother Nature and restore our individual right to take care of our own health.

It’s beyond a bad joke. Drug prohibition outlaws all substances that inspire and elate. We Americans would rather have suicide than drug use. The proof is extant. Our ethicists today debate the possibility of drug-aided suicide for the depressed — without mentioning the fact that we’ve outlawed all drugs that could make the depressed wish to live. Such drugs abound, and many are nonaddictive — but surely even dependence and addiction are better than death — especially in a country where 1 in 4 women take a psychiatric med every day of their life (source: Julie Holland).

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a debate about attempting to suppress quack cures-- a debate dominated by self-interested physicians. The problem is that by "quack cures," physicians back then meant any health treatment that did not treat the human being as a biochemical widget. William James tried to push back against this way of conceiving of health care, but he was outnumbered, outspent and outvoted by self-interested doctors. This goes a long way toward explaining where we are at today with drug prohibition and the psychiatric pill mill. We definitely need to disrupt this kind of "science." The best way would be to end drug prohibition, which outlaws the rights of the depressed to heal, meanwhile turning them into wards of the healthcare state by placing them on "meds" that are harder to kick than heroin. I write from personal hard-earned experience on this topic. I am a 68-year-old who has to see a doctor one-third my age every three months of his life for a refill on a dependence-causing med, meanwhile answering humiliating questions like, "Do you hear voices?" Drug prohibition has turned me into an eternal patient and an eternal child.

As Thomas Szasz points out, self-medicating has always been a basic right. It is simply the right to take care of one’s own health. It’s amazing that no one sees the self-interest that doctors have in depicting self-medication as a sin. Doctors also have a self-interest in claiming that there aren’t any benefits to “drugs,” that we need a “real” cure (preferably a dependence-causing cure that will turn us into a ward of the healthcare state). They don’t want humans treating themselves. When police arrest us for drug use, they are really arresting us for taking care of our own health without doctors. Police are enforcing a monopoly.