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The Depressing Truth About SSRIs

why psychedelic therapy must REPLACE modern psychiatry rather than simply complement it

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher






April 17, 2020



Open letter to MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies:

2025 Update

I keep hearing MAPS researchers use the phrase "those who don't respond to regular anti-depressants" when talking about clinical trials. This gives the impression that anti-depressants usually work just fine, but that is just plain wrong - although psychiatrists have been paid millions by Big Pharma to go on shows like "Oprah" and say otherwise.

If such pills are really the silver bullets they are purported to be, why is America more depressed than ever, statistically speaking, decades after these silver bullets hit the market?

Many of these medications are highly addictive and harder to kick than heroin! Heroin can be beat in one grueling week. Anti-depressants can take months as the brain chemistry attempts to return to normal. Some of these meds can NEVER be stopped. I wanted to get off of Effexor, but my doctor told me not to bother because recidivism rates are over 95% after three years.

{^About one in eight men and one in four women are addicted to Big Pharma antidepressants, according to psychiatrist Julie Holland. And now the pharmaceutical companies are going after the toddler market. This is a huge but silent scandal, especially when you consider Robert Whitaker's finding that antidepressants actually CAUSE the chemical imbalances that they purport to fix.}{

And yet MAPS researchers are silent on these issues. I can only guess that Big Pharma's influence is keeping them from recognizing the obvious. MAPS researchers should be pushing for psychedelic therapy to REPLACE modern antidepressants, not simply to eke out therapy for those supposedly rare cases that can't be "helped" by these deliberately addictive drugs (these annuities for Big Pharma executives).

And what do we even mean when we say that an antidepressant "works"? In the book "Psychedelic Medicine," Dr. Richard Louis Miller tells the story of a reporter who wrote a first-person story about Prozac. The reporter was bullish on the drug at first, saying that the medicine was definitely making him happier. But then he went to a family funeral and found to his horror that he felt nothing at all. Was Prozac working? You might say yes, it was working all too well. (This is not a surprise, since American psychiatry has a long history of defining "cures" as "treatments that render the patient more docile," as opposed to "treatments that help the patient achieve self-fulfillment in life.")

Anti-depressants are working great for Big Pharma, of course, bringing in $40 billion a year. They are swimming in dough from monthly purchases by addicts. But those who take the drugs are turned into eternal patients and are guinea pigs for substances that were never properly trialed for lifetime use. Worse yet, such patients are ineligible for participation in most new psychedelic therapies for fear of Serotonin Toxicity Syndrome.

MAPS researchers should start speaking truth to power and tell Big Pharma that its whole pill-mill approach to psychiatry is wrong. As a victim of the status quo, I for one would appreciate to hear someone in the field actually recognizing that "eternal patients" like myself exist. I don't expect I'll ever get an apology from the psychiatry business for addicting me for a lifetime to a mind-numbing drug (one that offers no self-insight whatsoever), but it would be nice if someone in the field would at least acknowledge that there is a problem here.

That's why I won't be fully happy with MAPS until they start promoting psychedelic therapy as a REPLACEMENT for the status quo, rather than as a mere helpful adjunct for the Big Pharma pill mill.



July 12, 2022




Where are the conspiracy theorists when we need them? They could at least open our minds to some disturbing possibilities. Like, for instance, I sometimes wonder if Prozac wasn't designed to turn folks into neo-liberals. I know my own politics veered right after a few years of Prozac use. This was the same time that my musical skills decreased, at least when it came to playing in natural sync with my fellow musicians. There suddenly seemed to arise a new brief but destructive mental step of conscious reflection between the impulse and the act, rendering me nervous and uncertain in circumstances in which the thought of nervousness had never occurred before.

Of course, unlike the Drug Warrior, I know that one swallow does not make a summer, so perhaps the mental changes described above can be explained without reference to Prozac. My only point here is that no one seems to be considering the possibility that antidepressants are changing personalities in ways that are not necessarily consistent with the interests of the antidepressant user. Of course the silence is to be expected, since the moneyed interests support a media narrative that turns SSRIs into whole milk. And as with whole milk, all reported downsides are blamed on the user, not on the substance. Can't handle milk? Why, you freak! You must be lactose-intolerant! Can't handle a given SSRI? No problem, we just have to keep weaning you off and on different KINDS of SSRIs until we find the one that's "right" for you.

Speaking of which, it's the new feminine small talk: what meds are you on? How many? How long have you been taking it? Do you think you'll switch to another SSRI any time soon?

And this in a country that is trying desperately to get Americans to say no to drugs? 1 in 4 American women are on multiple drugs every day of their life and the Drug Warrior pretends to not notice as they advocate 20-year jail terms for folks who reach down and use the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet.


Author's Follow-up: March 21, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up





It is amazing how easily one can be propagandized to believe that almost anything is normal. If super-intelligent aliens came to Earth and we told them that depression was "a tough nut to crack," they would be astonished. "What?" they would cry. "Haven't you people ever heard of laughing gas? Haven't you heard of opium? Haven't you heard of the thousands of phenethylamines that inspire and elate and which you could synthesize at will?"





Here is where the modern Drug Warrior would have to take the little green men aside and bring them up-to-speed on the warped mindset of our times.

"You see, Voltana, we Earthlings feel that it is highly inappropriate to use psychoactive medicine for the emotional and mental well-being of our species -- with the exception of commercial medicines that "work" according to the behaviorist's definition of that term. We feel that the government's role is to scare our people away from any common-sense uses for drugs."

To which Voltana would respond:

"Come, Krakor and Vestron: I told you earthlings were a crude people. Let us go back to our planet, where improving mind and mood is actually considered to be a GOOD thing!"

Antidepressants






"Depression Is Not Caused by Chemical Imbalance in the Brain" --Noam Shpancer Ph.D.


Suppose you lived in the Punjab in 1500 BCE and were told that Soma was illegal but that the mental health establishment had medicines which you could take every day of your life for your depression. Would it not be an enormous violation of your liberty to be told that you could not worship Soma and its attendant gods and incarnations? Would it not be an enormous violation of your liberty to be told that you cannot partake of the drink of the Gods themselves, the Soma juice?

Well, guess what? Your liberty is suppressed in that very fashion by modern drug prohibition: you are denied access to all medicines that inspire and elate. Seen in this light, antidepressants are a slap in the face to a freedom-loving people. They are a prohibitionist replacement for a host of obvious treatments, none of which need turn the user into a patient for life, and some of which could even inspire new religions.

The Hindu religion would not exist today had the DEA been active in the Punjab in 1500 BCE.

So do antidepressants make sense?

This question has two very different answers, depending on whether you recognize that prohibition exists or not. Of course, most Americans pretend that drug war prohibition does not exist, or at least that it has no effect on their lives -- and so they happily become Big Pharma patients for life. They flatter themselves that they are thereby treating their problems "scientifically." What they fail to realize, of course, is that it is a category error for materialist scientists to treat mind and mood conditions in the first place.

Why? Because scientists are behaviorists when it comes to drugs, which means that they ignore all obvious positive effects of drugs: all anecdote, all history and all psychological common sense -- and instead try to cure you biochemically. And what has been the result of this purblind approach to mind and moods, this search for the Holy Grail of materialist cures for depression? The result has been the greatest mass pharmacological dystopia of all time, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma pills for life.



  • America's Great Anti-Depressant Scam
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant: A critique of The Emperor’s New Drugs
  • Depressed? Here's why you can't get the medicines that you need: how the FDA's drug approval process is based on big-money politics and the drug war ideology of substance demonization
  • Depressed? Here's why.: Exposing the anti-patient drug-war lobby in Washington
  • Depression is real, says the APA, and they should know: they cause it!
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war: an open letter to Charley Wininger, author of 'Listening to Ecstasy'
  • How the Drug War Screws the Depressed: an open letter to Dr. Alan I. Leshner
  • How to end the war in Mexico, stop inner-city killings and cure depression in one easy step
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus: an open letter to Austin from the Huachuma Project
  • Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants: Here's why that's nonsense
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens: new hope for the millions who are dependent on SSRIs and SNRIs
  • Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants: an open letter to Frederick S. Barrett, Ph.D., cognitive neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University
  • The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs: notes on getting off of Effexor
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs: why psychedelic therapy must REPLACE modern psychiatry rather than simply complement it
  • The Philosophical Significance of the Use of Antidepressants in the Age of Drug Prohibition
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression: on replacing psychiatry with pharmacologically savvy shamanism
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants: an open letter to the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines
  • Why doctors should prescribe opium for depression: how materialists collude with drug warriors to keep us from using godsend medicine
  • Why SSRIs are Crap: testimony from an expert

  • Getting Off Drugs






    NOVEMBER 2024

    I have written dozens of essays about antidepressants and the Drug War, but it is important to read this one first, for it contains the most up-to-date info on my battle to get off such drugs. This reading order is important because I declared premature victory against the SNRI called Effexor in recent essays, only to discover that the drug is far more insidious than I gave it credit for. It turns out withdrawing, at least for me, eventually led to deep feelings of abject despair, far greater than the depression for which I started taking the "med" in the first place.

    The frustrating thing is, these feelings could be combatted by a host of drugs that we have outlawed in the name of our anti-scientific and anti-patient war on drugs. That much is just psychological common sense. But we have been taught to believe that there are no positive uses for opium, nor for cocaine, nor for coca, nor for MDMA, nor for laughing gas, nor for peyote, nor for the hundreds of inspiring phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, etc. etc. etc.

    The truth is, rather, that Drug Warriors (and the millions whom they have brainwashed) do not WANT there to be positive uses for such drugs. No, they want me to "keep taking my meds" instead and so to enrich their investment portfolios in the pharmaceutical sector. Meanwhile, those without a vested financial interest have been taught that antidepressants are "scientific" and so they cannot understand my desire to get off them. They cannot understand the hell of being turned into a patient for life and having to make regular expensive and humiliating pilgrimages to psychiatrists (who are half one's own age) to bare one's soul for the purpose of obtaining an expensive prescription for a drug that numbs one's brain rather than inspiring it - and a drug which seems to counteract, dampen and/or repress most of the positive effects that I might have otherwise obtained by the few semi-legal alternatives to antidepressants, such as psilocybin and ayahuasca.

    But it is just psychological common sense that I could withdraw successfully from Effexor with the advised use of a comprehensive pharmacy, including but not limited to the demonized substances listed above. But materialist science is not interested in common sense. And so they tell me that such drug use has not been proven to "work." But materialist doctors are not experts in what motivates me as a living, breathing, unique individual. The heart has its own reasons that reductionist science cannot understand. If I could look forward, at this moment, to relaxing with an opium pipe tonight, my mood would improve NOW, not just tonight. I would have something to look forward to. I would not feel the need to reach for that bottle full of Effexor pills that I was hoping to foreswear. Likewise, if I could use a drug to laugh and "touch the hand of God" (as with laughing gas and phenethylamines respectively), I could laugh at the pangs of despair that Effexor tries to throw my way.

    Science's eternal response to such ideas is: "There is no proof that such things work!"

    No, nor will there ever be in the age of the Drug War, in which such common sense use is punished by long jail terms and would never be favorably publicized, even if successful, since America's prime imperative in the age of the Drug War is to demonize psychoactive medicines, under the absurd assumption-laden idea that to talk honestly about drugs is to encourage their use.

    Well, we SHOULD be encouraging their use in cases where they actually work, in cases, for instance, when they prevent guys like myself from killing themselves thanks to the knowledge that they are a bounden slave to the combined forces of the Drug War and Big Pharma's pill mill.

    Besides, there is no proof that hugging works, but we do not need Dr. Spock of Star Trek to launch a study into that issue: we all know that hugging works by bringing two souls together both physically and spiritually. We do not need a map of brain chemistry to figure this out: the proof is extant, the proof is in the pudding.

    But I haven't given up yet despite the setback in my most recent plan. I'm going to search the world for a place where I can get off antidepressants in a way that makes some psychological common sense.

    Right now, all I see in terms of resources are a bunch of companies who, for large fees, will help me go cold turkey on antidepressants., or companies that claim to have found the right combination of legal herbal formulas that should make withdrawal easier. But to me, these are all what Percy Shelley would call "frail spells," concocted under the watchful eye of the Drug Warrior to make sure that nothing potent and obviously effective will get added to the mix. In fact, if a space alien came to earth and asked what sort of psychoactive drugs were outlawed, one could honestly answer: "Anything that obviously works."

    Meanwhile, drug laws make it impossible for me to visit psychiatrists remotely online, requiring me instead to physically visit my doctors, thereby limiting rural residents like myself to accessing hayseed psychiatrists whose one area of expertise seems to be the writing of prescriptions for antidepressants. Talk to them about anything else, and their eyes glaze over. "That's all unproven," they'll say, "Or, no, we have yet to fully study such things." As if we have to study in order to realize that feeling good helps and can have positive psychological effects.

    I'm sure that part of the problem with my withdrawal scheme is that I tried to get off the drug too quickly. But I only tried that because I can find no doctor who will compound the drug for me in a way that makes psychological common sense, namely, with daily miniscule reductions in dosage. My current psychiatrist told me that such compounding was unheard of and that I should drop doses by 37.5 mg at a time, since that is the lowest dose that the pharmaceutical companies create. He said I could start "counting pill beads" once I am down to a 37.5 mg daily dose if I wanted to taper still further.

    Count pill beads? Surely that's why compounding pharmacists exist: to count pill beads. (UPDATE: I was wrong about this. See my article on "Tapering for Jesus.")

    I did find a compounding company that said it could compound Effexor in the way that I desire. But there's a big catch: they have to receive a prescription for that purpose. And I can find no doctor in the world who is willing to write me one. Even those who sympathize with my plight want me to become their full-time patient before they will even consider writing such a prescription.

    So those who warned me against trying to get off Effexor were right in a way: it is extraordinarily difficult. But they feel to realize WHY this is so. It is not just because Effexor is a toxic drug, but also because the drug war has outlawed everything that could help me get off it.

    This is why those pundits who sign off on the psychiatric pill mill are clueless about the huge problem with the war on drugs: the way it humiliates and disempowers millions. For it turns out that the phrase "No hope in dope" is true after all, but only when the dope in question is modern antidepressants.



    OCTOBER 2024

    Here are some of the many articles I have written about the philosophy of getting off drugs. Bear in mind that I am in the process of getting off Effexor myself and am exploring the power of "drugs to fight drugs" in so doing. And this is not a straightforward path given the sweeping limits that are imposed by drug law. So the question of exactly what might work (and how and when, etc.) is still wide open and I am advocating nothing, except the common sense notion that we can benefit from euphoria and mood boosts, yes, and that "drugs can be used to fight drugs," and in a safe way too -- a way that will prove far safer than prohibition, which continues to bring about daily deaths from drive-by shootings and unregulated product while causing civil wars overseas.

    I guess what I am saying here is, this site is not purporting to offer medical advice. I avoid using such wording, however, because so many authors refuse to talk honestly about drugs, especially about positive drug use, for fear of being seen as giving medical advice, and this, of course, is just how drug warriors want matters to remain. It lets them shut down free speech about drugs.

    Besides, I reject the idea that materialist doctors are the experts when it comes to how we think and feel about life. The best they can do as materialist is to tell us the potential physical risks of using holistically-operating drugs, but individuals are the experts on what motivates them in life, on their own particular hopes and dreams and on what risks they deem necessary to obtain them, to pursue happiness, that is, which objective our legislators outlawed when they outlawed all substances that can help facilitate happiness in the properly motivated and educated individual.

    The real answer is not for authors to give groveling apologies for being honest, however: the real answer is for kids to be educated about the basics of wise substance use -- and for America to come to grips with the fact that we will always be surrounded by "drugs" -- and that the goal should be to ensure safe use, not to keep endlessly arresting minorities and removing them from the voting rolls on behalf of the clinically insane idea that we should outlaw mother nature to protect our kids -- and this in a purportedly Christian country whose very deity told us that his creation was good.

  • America's biggest drug pusher: The American Psychiatric Association:
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Christian Science Rehab: aka the Twelve Step Group
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal: an open letter to Austin of the Huachuma Project
  • Fighting Drugs with Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war: an open letter to Charley Wininger, author of 'Listening to Ecstasy'
  • Getting off Effexor MY WAY: response to pushback from the Surviving Antidepressants website
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient: and what we should do about that
  • How the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality Tale
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus: an open letter to Austin from the Huachuma Project
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors: How the Drug War has blinded Gabor Maté to the great addiction crisis of our time
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Mad at Mad in America: how Robert Whitaker's organization shuts down free speech in the name of drug war ideology
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement: an open letter to Mad in America
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate: ending the torture-friendly 12-step programs
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand: or at least to her gatekeeper
  • Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants: Here's why that's nonsense
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens: new hope for the millions who are dependent on SSRIs and SNRIs
  • Sending Out an SOS: For Sentara to stop disempowering the victims of the psychiatric pill mill
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma: an open letter to the Heffter Research Institute
  • Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website
  • Taper Talk: a philosophical review of the antidepressant tapering guide from Psychedelic Passage
  • Tapering for Jesus: how drug warriors moralize the withdrawal process
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants: an open letter to Frederick S. Barrett, Ph.D., cognitive neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University
  • The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs: notes on getting off of Effexor
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs: why psychedelic therapy must REPLACE modern psychiatry rather than simply complement it
  • The Mental Health Survey that psychiatrists don't want you to take
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • The War on Drugs and the Psychiatric Pill Mill: Why you can’t understand one without understanding the other
  • This is your brain on Effexor
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants: an open letter to the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines
  • What the psychiatrist said when I told him I wanted to get off Effexor
  • Why SSRIs are Crap: testimony from an expert

  • Open Letters






    Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.

    I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.

    Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.



  • America's Blind Spot: Open Letter to Jospeh Koterski
  • Canadian Drug Warrior, I said Get Away: an open letter to Cory Morgan, columnist for the Western Standard
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal: an open letter to Austin of the Huachuma Project
  • Drug War Murderers: an open letter to People magazine
  • Drugs are not the problem: no, not even in nursing homes
  • End the Drug War Now: an open letter to American Senators in Washington, D.C.
  • Feedback on my first legal psilocybin session in Oregon: an open letter to the Psilocybin Advisory Board of the Oregon Health Authority
  • Finally, a drug war opponent who checks all my boxes: an open letter to Julian Buchanan
  • Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs: an open letter to Ligare, a Christian Psychedelic Society
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war: an open letter to Charley Wininger, author of 'Listening to Ecstasy'
  • God and Drugs: why I am not (entirely) a Christian
  • Hello? MDMA works, already!: An open letter to Dr. Jessica Maples-Keller, principal investigator for the 'MDMA Plus Exposure Therapy for PTSD' at Emory University
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War: an open letter to Professor Thad Polk
  • How National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of coca: an open letter to the National Geographic Society
  • How Scientific American reckons without the drug war: in response to 'A Talking Cure for Psychosis' by Matthew M. Kurtz
  • How the Drug War is Threatening Intellectual Freedom in England: an open letter to British Philosophers
  • How the Drug War Outlaws Criticism of Immanuel Kant: an open letter to Professor Daniel A. Bonevac of the University of Pittsburgh
  • How the Monticello Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987: open letter to the 'Sites of Conscience' website
  • How the US Preventive Services Task Force Drums Up Business for Big Pharma: an open letter to Task Force member David Chelmow MD
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus: an open letter to Austin from the Huachuma Project
  • Ignorance is the enemy, not Fentanyl: open letter to Lynn Walker of the Wichita Falls Times Record News
  • Illusions with Professor Arthur Shapiro: a philosophical discussion of the fascinating series on Curiosity Stream
  • In Defense of Religious Drug Use: an open letter to Samuel Bendeck Sotillos
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Keep Laughing Gas Legal: Open letter to Niamh Eastwood (Executive Director of Release) and Dr. David Nicholl (NHS neurologist), in response to their recent interview about laughing gas on Channel 5, UK
  • MDMA for Psychotherapy: open letter to researcher Michael Mithoefer, MD
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement: an open letter to Mad in America
  • No drugs are bad in and of themselves: an open letter to Steven Urquhart, founder of the Divine Assembly
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate: ending the torture-friendly 12-step programs
  • Open Letter to Anthony Gottlieb: author of The Dream of Enlightenment
  • Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA
  • Open Letter to Diane O'Leary: author of 'Medicine's Bad Philosophy Threatens Your Health'
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand: or at least to her gatekeeper
  • Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama: author of Liberalism and its Discontents
  • Open letter to Kenneth Sewell: author of Red Star Rogue
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling: whose documentary about Chicago violence does not even mention the Drug War!!!
  • Open letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo University: in response to his paper at Academia.edu entitled 'Regulating the Rave Scene'
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley: about addiction
  • Open Letter to Rick Doblin and Roland Griffiths: the downsides of 'working within the system'
  • Open Letter to Roy Benaroch MD
  • Open Letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
  • Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature: on behalf of my 92-year-old mother
  • Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman: regarding his Drug War-biased review of the movie 'Four Good Days'
  • Open Letter to Vincent Hurley, Lecturer: at Maquarie University, Department of Security Studies and Criminology
  • Open Letter to Vincent Rado: agreeing to disagree?
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith: author of 'The Quantum Enigma'
  • Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War: open letter to computer scientist George Mohler
  • Prohibitionists Never Learn: an open letter to San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins
  • Regulate and Educate: an open letter to Oregon Governor Tina Kotek
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens: new hope for the millions who are dependent on SSRIs and SNRIs
  • Review of When Plants Dream
  • Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War: open letter to Laura Sanders
  • Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no war on drugs: an open letter to freelance writer Cassandra Willyard, author of 'A next-gen pain drug shows promise, but chronic sufferers need more options'
  • Solquinox sounded great, until I found out I wasn't invited: an open letter to the Psychedelic Society of Vermont
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma: an open letter to the Heffter Research Institute
  • Teenagers and Cannabis: an open letter to Clinical Professor Bobby Smyth at the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants: an open letter to Frederick S. Barrett, Ph.D., cognitive neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University
  • The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter: an open letter to the Drug Policy Alliance
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs: why psychedelic therapy must REPLACE modern psychiatry rather than simply complement it
  • The Invisible Mass Shootings: open letter to Criminologist James Alan Fox
  • The Menace of the Drug War: open letter to Arab Naz, author of The Menace of Opiate
  • The problem with Modern Drug Reform Efforts: an open letter to Professors Peter Reuter and Alex Stevens
  • The Pseudoscience of Mental Health Treatment: an open letter to Dr. Jonathan Stea
  • The Right to LIVE FULLY is more important than the Right to DIE: open letter to Gino Kenny, People Before Profit
  • There is nothing to debate: the drug war is wrong, root and branch: an open letter to Nathan of TheDEA.org
  • Time for News Outlets to stop promoting drug war lies: an open letter to WTOP News
  • Top 10 Problems with the Drug War: and how we respond to it -- an open letter to Professor Nathan Nobis
  • Unscientific American: How the authors at Scientific American self-censor their articles in deference to America's Drug War
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants: an open letter to the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines
  • Vancouver Police Seek to Eradicate Safe Use: open letter to the Vancouver Police Department
  • Weed Bashing at WTOP.COM: an open letter to station manager Joel Oxley
  • Whitehead and Psychedelics: an open letter to Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes at the University of Exeter
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no: open letter to the Christian Science propaganda organization called DARE
  • Why Rick Doblin is Ghosting Me: An open letter to apologists for the psychiatric pill mill
  • Why the Drug War is Worse than you can Imagine: an open letter to Damon Barrett
  • Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine
  • Why the Holocaust Museum must denounce the Drug War: an open letter to the UHMM in Washington, DC





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    Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

    Capitalism requires disease-mongering -- and disease-mongering requires the suppression of medicines that work holistically, that work by improving mood and elating the individual AND THEREFORE improving their health overall.
    Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."
    Getting off some drugs could actually be fun and instructive, by using a variety of other drugs to keep one's mind off the withdrawal process. But America believes that getting off a drug should be a big moral battle.
    If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
    Drug warriors are full of hate for "users." Many of them make it clear that they want users to die (like Gates and Bennett...). The drug war has weaponized humanity's worst instincts.
    The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.
    If drug war logic made sense, we would outlaw endless things in addition to drugs. Because the drug war says that it's all worth it if we can save just one life -- which is generally the life of a white suburban young person, btw.
    Drugs like opium and psychedelics should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
    The DEA is gaslighting Americans, telling them that drugs with obvious benefits have no benefits whatsoever. Scientists collude in this lie thanks to their adherence to the emotion-scorning principles of behaviorism.
    I never said that getting off SSRIs should be done without supervision. If you're on Twitter for medical advice, you're in the wrong place.
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    The latest hits from Drug War Records, featuring Freddie and the Fearmongers!


    1. Requiem for the Fourth Amendment



    2. There's No Place Like Home (until the DEA gets through with it)



    3. O Say Can You See (what the Drug War's done to you and me)






    front cover of Drug War Comic Book

    Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans



    You have been reading an article entitled, The Depressing Truth About SSRIs: why psychedelic therapy must REPLACE modern psychiatry rather than simply complement it, published on April 17, 2020 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)