The Make-Believe World of Mental Health in the Age of the Drug War
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 19, 2025
I hate to use the term "fake science" in this age of politically inspired conspiracy theories, but the field of mental health in the western world is the fake science par excellence in the age of drug prohibition. The pundits in the field write endless papers about the patient's need for dignity and their right to healthcare, always completely ignoring the fact that we have outlawed everything that could work for these so-called "mental patients" and thereby turned them into patients for life, into wards of the healthcare state, with all of the expensive and time-consuming baggage that such a status implies. In other words, we are completely ignoring the patients' most glaringly obvious need -- the need for self-agency -- upon which all dignity is necessarily based.
First, the government denies me the right to heal, and then the professionals talk about my need for dignity without so much as acknowledging that injustice? And it is hard to push back. The heavily footnoted papers in the field are never open to criticism by individual "mental patients" with a lifetime of experience on the receiving end of mental health protocols; instead, they are reviewed and promoted by mental health "professionals" with a vested interest in the self-satisfied status quo, according to which more mental health services are desperately needed while the prohibitionist cancer consuming the field is completely ignored. The fact is that the field already has more patients than it deserves, because drug prohibition has given the mental health field an unearned monopoly on prescribing mind and mood medicine.
Take the article "Dignity in mental health care; human rights challenges and pathways" by Robert Anders, published on Academia.edu in 20251.
The paper's introduction begins with the lofty truism: "Dignity forms the bedrock of human well-being."
Fine words. And yet in what does dignity consist if not in our freedom to take care of our own mental health? And drug prohibition has prevented me from doing precisely that. This is the 6,400-pound gorilla in the room that almost all articles "in the field" completely ignore, so thoroughly have westerners been brainwashed to consider drug prohibition to be a natural baseline when it comes to mental health. True, Anders admits that "people seeking help encounter stigma, discrimination, inadequate services, and policies that neglect their needs," but it never occurs to the author that the wholesale outlawing of psychoactive therapeutic medicine might itself be one of these "policies that neglect their needs." Far less people would need to seek help in the first place if we had not outlawed almost everything that could help them and even rendered the mere study of such substances illegal, or at very least impractical. This drug prohibition has turned me into a ward of the healthcare state and an eternal patient for the last 50 years, and yet my disempowered status goes unnoticed by a field that sees no problem with it whatsoever. They pretend instead that the drug laws which have disempowered me do not even exist. They ignore the fact that drug law has given today's mental health "experts" their monopoly over mental health care in the first place.
This is why I consider almost every "paper" that is written in the field to be an exercise in make-believe. All such papers should come with a disclaimer stating that the author has taken drug prohibition as a natural baseline and so ignored the role that drug law plays in determining what treatments are available. I have tried for years to get magazines like Science News and Scientific American and Psychology Today to begin adding such disclaimers to their articles about drugs and yet they continue to publish articles based on the faulty idea that drug prohibition is a natural baseline from which to study mind-related topics like mental health, mentation, and human consciousness. But then where would the funding dollars go if we acknowledged that conditions like depression were actually easy for most people to "beat," were we to embrace the common-sense use of psychoactive medicine in strategic protocols: that is, if we studied all psychoactive medicines and used them for the benefit of humanity rather than childishly demonizing them as evil incarnate?
Pundits tell us that there are medical reasons not to "snort" cocaine. So what? There are medical reasons not to drive a car: you may have an accident. The question is: does cocaine use or car driving make sense in a given case! Details matter!
Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.
There will always be people who don't use drugs wisely, just as there are car drivers who don't drive wisely, and rock climbers who fall to their death. America needs to grow up and accept this, while ending prohibition and teaching safe use.
In "Four Good Days" the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.
Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.
Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."
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.
The best harm-reduction strategy is to re-legalize drugs.
Besides, why should I listen to the views of a microbe?
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