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The Origins of Modern Psychiatry

How to create a billion-dollar industry in three easy steps

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

December 5, 2022



How to create a billion-dollar industry in three easy steps:



  1. Ban laudanum and all other drugs with which human beings have ever or could ever 'self-medicate'1

  2. List all of the psychological problems that result from this ban as discrete illnesses in a Diagnostic Statistical Manual

  3. Treat these illnesses with expensive and inadequate medicines, preferably those that cause chemical dependency




Congratulations. You have created a new industry. It's called psychiatry!



Follow-up steps:


  1. Tell the world that drugs not prescribed by psychiatrists are just "crutches."

  2. Teach the world that "self-medicating" is the worst possible medical sin.

  3. If someone uses non-psychiatric drugs, tell them that they are doing so to run away from hidden pain.

  4. Tell troublesome patients that they have a medical duty to keep taking their "meds"




Note that the preceding formulas can also help you keep the citizen's mind off of social problems by blaming all such problems on "drugs." No more need to invest in pesky programs like education and inner-city infrastructure. Just invoke the eternal problem of "drugs" and you can jail the adults whom you failed to properly educate as kids, thereby reaping the rewards of your racism without being held accountable for it.

Prohibition yanked laudanum from our medicine cabinets, ostensibly to prevent excess drug use. And where has that gotten us today? 80 million Americans (1 in every 4) now take psychiatric drugs every day of their life. (source: Citizens Commission on Human Rights International)




Editor's Comments:

May 23, 2025

female editor holding pencil


Brian is painting in broad strokes here in order to inspire discussion. He actually thinks psychiatrists are great -- to the extent that they are empathic. But he feels that they are caught up in a behaviorist field that downplays the importance of common-sense psychology. If this were not the case, then psychiatrists would be shouting from the rooftops on behalf of their clients' right to use the many godsend medicines that have been outlawed wholesale by drug prohibition. Instead, most psychiatrists speak of their arsenal of materialist medicines as if they were good in and of themselves. This is like a chef working in a world in which the government has outlawed all meals except for clam chowder. The chef insists on the endless health benefits of his clam chowder, never mentioning the fact that all alternative meals have been outlawed. The chef may even claim that his soup is the best meal in the world. And why not? All the other meals have been outlawed so there is no opportunity for anyone to prove that the chef is wrong.











Notes:

1: 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 DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The DEA is a Schedule I agency. It has no known positive uses.

If I should die of some unusual concatenation of circumstances, I want my survivors to pass "Brian's Law," a law stating that we will no longer pass laws based on hard cases and so needlessly fill our prisons by taking common-sense discretion out of the hands of judges.

Kids should be taught in grade school that prohibition is wrong.

Americans HATE big government -- and yet they have no problem with government using drug prohibition to control their pain relief and how and how much they can think and feel in this life.

Today's drug laws tell us that we must respect the historical use of sacred medicines, while denying us our personal right to use them unless our ancestors did so. That's a meta-injustice! It negatively affects the way that we are allowed to experience our world!

Psychedelic retreats tell us how scientific they are. But science is the problem. Science today insists that we ignore all obvious benefits of drugs.

Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could believe it.

"The Oprah Winfrey Fallacy": the idea that a statistically insignificant number of cases constitutes a crisis, provided ONLY that the villain of the piece is something that racist politicians have demonized as a "drug."

"Users" can be kept out of the workforce by the extrajudicial process of drug testing; they can have their baby taken from them, their house, their property -- all because they do not share the intoxiphobic attitude of America.

Almost all of today's magazine articles about human psychology should come with the following disclaimer: "This article was written from the standpoint of Drug War ideology, which holds that outlawed substances can have no beneficial uses whatsoever."


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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