from a 67-year-old who has been turned into a lifetime patient by American healthcare
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 11, 2026
When is Psychology Today going to publish psychiatry from the patient's point of view? I nominate myself for authorship of that groundbreaking expose.
I am a 67-year-old chronic depressive who has been turned into a ward of the healthcare state by psychiatry. Because of America's superstitious attitudes about drugs, I was "saved" from cocaine and phenethylamines and laughing gas 40 years ago and shunted off onto underperforming "meds" that are harder to kick than heroin. One of my many former psychiatrists told me that my current "med," Effexor, had a 95% recidivism rate 1 for long-term users. I can believe that given the hell I went through in my failed... year-long effort to get off the drug – which I had to finance myself by contracting with a compounding pharmacist to make small doses. They could not even give me extended-release meds because the formula was proprietary.
I repeat: I am 67 years old. And yet I have to see a psychiatrist less than half my age every three months of my life and share intimate details of my life in order to get a prescription for an underperforming drug that I can never kick, ever. This is expensive and humiliating and yet the experts ignore me. They are all on Google Scholar, after all, and so they are the authorities and I am just a totally unacknowledged victim.
You'll say, of course, that I am a ranter, but I believe I am writing pretty mildly for someone who has been completely ignored for a lifetime now and who is as depressed as ever, unable to use drugs that could cheer him up in a trice!
You know, the psychiatrists who are half my age ask me every three months: "Have you considered suicide lately?"
And I always want to answer as follows: "Only when I consider how America's healthcare system has turned me into a patient for life!"
For more on the total disempowerment of the depressed with respect to their own health, I invite you to read my website, starting with:
And now depressed people like Claire Brosseau are even demanding assisted suicide. They want the state to help kill them. And what state is that? The same state that denies them access to drugs that could make them want to live – including the kinds of drugs which, like Soma, have inspired entire religions!
And yet I am silenced by every platform in America. And I am the only one who says that Claire has a right to take care of her own health – i.e., that drug prohibition was wrong. But those who advocate for her right to die are featured prominently in the New York Times! This is not healthcare, it is Christian Science extremism.
See https://www.abolishthedea.com/no_one_would_need_assisted_suicide_if_we_ended_drug_prohibition
Will anyone ever take these ideas on board or is the anti-patient status quo really this entrenched!
PS Medical ethicists are always talking about the rights of patients. What about the rights of folks like myself not to BE patients in the first place? I am sick and tired of being a child for life thanks to the way that Big Pharma has parlayed drug prohibition into a financial windfall – not for the depressed but for the healthcare industry!
I don't know what I'm expecting from this, but I had to write someone "in a position of some sort of power." Today I was told that my psychiatrist who was at least treating me like an adult will have to be replaced - - and now I have to spend hours and money making my intimate life known to another complete stranger -- and pretend that I am a grade schooler. This is not healthcare, it is complete humiliation! And it is an insult added to this injury when letters like these are completely ignored by the establishment!
Notes:
1: I have been unable to confirm this stat. But the WHO notes clinical recidivism rates for depression ranging from 50% to 85%. Do we count that as a recidivism rate of Effexor? Not when Biopharma is paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget, as reported by John LaMattina in the Sep 22, 2022 edition of Forbes magazine. (up)
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
It's disgusting that folks like Paul Stamets need a DEA license to work with mushrooms.
There are definitely good scientists out there. Unfortunately, they are either limited by their materialist orthodoxy into showing only specific microscopic evidence or they abandon materialism for the nonce and talk the common psychological sense that we all understand.
Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.
First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws.
3:51 PM · Jul 15, 2024
Imagine educational documentaries showing how folks manage to safely incorporate today's hated substances into their life and lifestyle.
Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.
Timothy Leary's wife wrote: "We went to Puerto Rico and all we did was take cocaine and read Faust to one another." And there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with that!!! The drug war is all about scaring us and making illegal drug use as dangerous as possible.
The best step we could take in harm reduction is re-legalizing everything and starting to teach safe use. Spend the DEA's billions on "go" teams that would descend on locations where drugs are being used stupidly -- not to arrest, but to educate.
MDMA legalization has suffered a setback by the FDA. These are the people who think Electro Shock Therapy is not used often enough! What sick priorities.
The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.
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