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:
Ban laudanum and all other drugs with which human beings have ever or could ever 'self-medicate'1
List all of the psychological problems that result from this ban as discrete illnesses in a Diagnostic Statistical Manual
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:
Tell the world that drugs not prescribed by psychiatrists are just "crutches."
Teach the world that "self-medicating" is the worst possible medical sin.
If someone uses non-psychiatric drugs, tell them that they are doing so to run away from hidden pain.
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
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.
Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice.
In Mexico, the same substance can be considered a "drug" or a "med," depending on where you are in the country. It's just another absurd result of the absurd policy of drug prohibition.
The whole drug war is based on the anti-American idea that the way to avoid problems is to lie and prevaricate and persuade people not to ask questions.
We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?
The benefits of outlawed drugs read like the ultimate wish-list for psychiatrists. It's a shame that so many of them are still mounting a rear guard action to defend their psychiatric pill mill -- which demoralizes clients by turning them into lifetime patients.
The worst form of government is not communism, socialism or even unbridled capitalism. The worst form of government is a Christian Science Theocracy, in which the government controls how much you are allowed to think and feel in life.
To say that taking SSRIs daily is better than using opium daily is a value judgement, not a scientific one.
The Drug War is based on two HUGE lies: 1) that prohibition has no downsides, & 2) that drug use has no upsides.
Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.
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.
(up)