Restoring our Right to Self-Medication

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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

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 24, 2025

Question: How did America ever arrive at the point where 1 in 4 American women are dependent on psychiatric medicine for life ¹... and that we consider this to be a good thing?

I contend that this dystopia followed naturally from our confused notion that it is wrong to "treat the symptoms" of a mental condition, that we need to treat the root causes of psychological problems instead. That proposition may have made sense when it came to physical illness, but it is fraught with problematic assumptions when applied to psychological conditions. Should we treat the "real" problem behind our drowsiness after rising from bed in the morning, or should we not rather just swallow a cup of coffee and get on with life? Should we treat the "real" problem behind our sense of agitation after a long day at work, or should we not rather just swallow a glass of beer and get on with life? And isn't the use of coffee and beer helping us treat such problems in any case, even if we are not doing so according to the dictates of materialist theory? Yet when it came to outlawed drugs, our apparently omniscient doctors told us that we were somehow using them in a vain and misguided attempt to solve problems like depression - problems that they assured us could be "scientifically" solved by modern medicine. How? By leapfrogging all external stimuli and directly adjusting the levels of the presumed "happiness chemicals" in our brain, such as serotonin and dopamine -- as a sort of one-size-fits-all cure for human sadness in general, a sort of meta-cure. This, we were told, was what it meant to "really" cure a problem as opposed to merely "treating the symptoms."

This was the big selling point for antidepressants ², of course: that they supposedly treated "the real problem" that caused human sadness: namely, by fixing a supposed chemical imbalance. It turned out, of course, that the drugs did nothing of the kind. To the contrary, it has been subsequently theorized that antidepressants actually cause the chemical imbalances that they purport to fix ³. Scientists still insist that the drugs "work," of course, but they no longer pretend to know why they should do so.

As Noam Shpancer wrote in Psychology Today in 2022: "We don't know how antidepressants work,⁴" to which I would add, we don't know that they work at all - not if the outcome of use is judged by the user as opposed to the drug researchers. Antidepressants certainly do not work for those of us who wish to live large. Meanwhile, they turn out to be incredibly difficult to "kick," apparently due to the very fact that they muck about with basic brain chemistry. My psychiatrist told me, in fact, that the SNRI called Effexor ⁵ that I am on has a 95% recidivism rate ⁶ for long-term users after three years of abstinence, suggesting that brain chemistry may indeed NEVER go back to normal after the pharmacological interventions of the materialists, compare this to the one week which is normally required to conquer the physical dependence on opiates ⁷. Were that factoid about antidepressants to be associated with an illegal drug, it would be trumpeted from the rooftops as a knockdown argument in favor of drug prohibition - but as it is associated instead with a Big Pharma antidepressant, the downside in question is completely ignored. Completely. In fact, it is not even considered a downside: in the perverse "logic" of self-interested psychiatry, our dependency on such drugs shows that those drugs work! According to this "logic," the only pathology is my desire to get off the drug. The philosophical mind boggles.

When I began my investigation of American drug attitudes back in 2019, I was incredibly naïve. I used to think that there was a limit to human ignorance and gullibility, at least in a "scientific" country like the United States, and yet I find that this just is not so. I find that money and self-interested materialist science can make even seemingly educated Americans believe that up is down and that night is day. If this were not so, then our hypocritical Drug Warriors would be wringing their hands over the fact that chronic depressives like myself have been turned into patients for life by the War on Drugs, which outlaws everything that obviously works according to my own definition of that term in favor of drugs that work according to materialist theory - or rather that were supposed to work according to materialist theory but which, as it turns out, work "God alone knows why" - and which do not work at all in the eyes of those who wish to live large rather than to just survive in life. Of course, antidepressants can be said to "work" from a conservative point of view, for they essentially tranquilize the user and keep them from threatening the status quo. What's more, Americans understand this. They know that antidepressants are used as tranquilizers: this is clear from the popularity of the modern question "Have you taken your meds?", which we only ask of people who are becoming too obstreperous and outspoken for our personal tastes. In this sense then, antidepressants "work," but then so would a sharp blow on the head with a two-by-four. Both interventions would shut us up and help us make our peace with a subpar status quo.

I write from a unique angle on this topic, not simply because I approach the matter philosophically (which is rare enough in itself), but because I myself have "skin in the game." As I write this essay, I am in the process of getting off of Effexor - or at least attempting to do so. It is not yet clear to me that this is even possible, at least not in the age of drug prohibition. If all drugs were re-legalized, then I would have no difficulties at all in this endeavor, since I could obfuscate the downsides of withdrawal with the strategic use of a wide variety of other drugs, from the intermittent smoking of opium ⁸ , the occasional ingesting of a phenethylamine, the monthly use of morphine ⁹ , the occasional inhalation of laughing gas ¹⁰ , and so forth. But the Drug Warrior tells me that all these interventions have to be renounced simply because they could be theoretically misused by those white American young people whom we refuse to educate about safe drug use. And so between the materialists and the Drug Warriors, I am denied the ability to care for my own health. What's more, my subsequent suffering is invisible. If an American is dependent upon heroin ¹¹, they are considered to be a wretch in need of expensive treatment. If they are dependent upon an antidepressant, they are considered to be a good patient - and ungrateful to the extent that they gripe about that dependency.

This is why I say that antidepressants are sinister - not in and of themselves, perhaps, but they are sinister in the context of drug prohibition, which not only makes them the only game in town for the depressed, but which makes them almost impossible to "kick" for long-term users. And yet the problem is completely invisible to the mainstream. (Even Jim Hogshire does not see the problem here, as is clear from his totally uncritical plug for Big Pharma ¹² ¹³ meds in "Pills-A-Go-Go.¹⁴") What does one do when they live in a mass pharmacological dystopia, and no one is even aware of the fact, not even the enemies of the War on Drugs? How do you get help for a problem that no one else can even see?

I have tried to show that drug prohibitionists and materialists are self-interested bedfellows in their attack on my ability to treat my own psychological conditions in the way that I myself see fit, but I sometimes despair of pushing back for the simple reason that Drug Warriors, at least, are clearly not arguing in good faith. They purport to believe that ill-advised drug use is such a threat to America that preventing it requires the erosion of our most basic American freedoms, like the 1st, 4th, and 5th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. (Of course, they never consider actually educating Americans about drugs, in fact they recoil from that idea. William Bennett reserved his most Nazified hatred for those Americans who used drugs wisely, under the bizarre belief that they were thereby setting a bad example.) And yet these same Drug Warriors believe that deaths from gunfire (67,000 over the last ten years in America's inner cities alone ¹⁵) do not represent a national crisis and require no such infringements on our liberty - to the contrary, most Drug Warriors routinely fight all efforts to limit the influx of guns into American inner cities, bearing in mind that it was liquor and drug prohibition which armed inner-cities to the teeth in the first place. As Ann Heather Thompson wrote in the Atlantic in 2014:

"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence ¹⁶ that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist.¹⁷"

It seems pointless to concoct logical arguments for people who are so committed to ignoring such inconvenient facts, especially when they have obvious racist reasons for playing dumb.

Meanwhile, the materialist opposition to my empowerment is similarly intransigent, albeit for different reasons. The materialist psychiatrists and drug researchers would lose their very livelihoods were I permitted to take care of my own health. How can we expect them to see problems with the premises upon which their very livelihoods depend?

And so we are forced to wonder with Jeffrey Singer in his 2025 book Your Body, Your Health Care:

"Imagine how many people would have benefited during the past half-century had the government respected their autonomy and their right to self-medicate.¹⁸"

Myself, for starters.

It is worth remembering that self-medication only became a four-letter word in the age of the Drug War, when that erstwhile human right was demonized as anti-scientific by psychiatrists who had a vested interest in disempowering Americans with respect to their mental states and so making them dependent on the healthcare establishment for life. In order to maintain this control, psychiatrists had to demonize all efforts at self-medication as "treating the symptoms," under the false idea that we can - or should - do anything but treat symptoms when it comes to psychological problems. It is precisely because of our attempt to "solve" mind-related problems once and for all in a biochemical manner that we have tranquilized the human mind with one-size-fits-all medicines that cause lifetime dependency and that only "work" according to the way that drug researchers define that term.

This antipathy to self-medication runs deep in the professional world today, as can be seen by a consideration of the attitude of drug researcher Alexander Shulgin. When evaluating the ecstatic user reports of phenethylamine users in "Pihkal,¹⁹" the American chemist recognized the common-sense power of such substances to inspire and elate. But when he considered those drugs from the point of view of the pharmaceutical companies for which he worked, he decided that such common-sense drug benefits were not good enough. A true antidepressant cannot simply inspire and elate, after all: it has to fix something according to materialist theory. Moreover, any excessive inspiration from drug use would actually be a downside in the censorious age of the Drug War. These vocational biases on Shulgin's part are not explicitly stated in "Pihkal," but can be clearly inferred from the chemist's "notes to self" in the technical section of his book, and this bothered me. As a chronic depressive, I found his two-faced attitude about drugs to be highly frustrating. Here I was reading a raft of user reports of mental states that were "to die for" from the point of view of a depressive mindset, and yet Shulgin was essentially telling me that these drugs were not for depressive people like myself, as if I had come from Mars and was not amenable to the ordinary psychological incentives of rapture and inspiration. I wanted to cry out: "Just let me use the kinds of exhilarating, refreshing and inspiring drugs that you have created for 'normal' people - and then you can continue on your materialist quest to count angels on the head of a pin for the benefit of your pharmaceutical paymasters!"

Notes for essay entitled 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:

1: Richard Louis Miller. 2017. Psychedelic Medicine : The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca. Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press. (up)
2: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
3: Whitaker, Robert. 2011. “Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker: 9780307452429 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books.” PenguinRandomhouse.com. 2025. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/189611/anatomy-of-an-epidemic-by-robert-whitaker/. (up)
4: Shpancer, Noam. 2022. “Depression Is Not Caused by Chemical Imbalance in the Brain | Psychology Today.” Www.psychologytoday.com. July 24, 2022. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/202207/depression-is-not-caused-chemical-imbalance-in-t (up)
5: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
6: 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)
7: Hogshire, Jim. 2009. Opium for the Masses. Feral House. (up)
8: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
9: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
10: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
11: 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)
12: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
13: 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)
14: Pills-a-go-go : a fiendish investigation into pill marketing, art, history and consumption Hogshire, Jim, 1999 (up)
15: Gun Deaths in Big Cities Big Cities Health (up)
16: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
17: Rudy Giuliani Doesn’t Understand Crime As Well As He Thinks Bouie, Jamelle, Slate, 2014 (up)
18: https://www.cato.org/people/jeffrey-singer. 2025. “Your Body, Your Health Care.” Cato Institute. April 8, 2025. https://www.cato.org/books/body-health-care. (up)
19: PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (up)

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against the hateful war on US

The fact that drugs have positive uses for human beings is a psychological corollary of Husserl's phenomenology and Whitehead's philosophy of organism.

In a compassionate world, we would give laughing gas kits to the suicidal just as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies.

Brits have a right to die, but they do not have the right to use drugs that might make them want to live. Bad policy is indicated by absurd outcomes, and this is but one of the many absurd outcomes that the policy of prohibition foists upon the world.

Scientists hold holistically working drugs to reductionist standards, thereby practicing a sort of pharmacological colonialsm.

The drug war is a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."

"All these anti-opium articles... are based upon the same model. They assume certain statements as existing and acknowledged facts which have never been proved to be such, and then proceed to draw deductions from those alleged facts." --William Brereton

Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.

We don't need people to get "clean." We need people to start living a fulfilling life. The two things are different.

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?

We've all been taught since grade school that human beings cannot use psychoactive medicines wisely. That is a defeatest lie. It's criminal to keep substances illegal that can awaken the mind and remind us of our full potential in life.

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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

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend