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The Origins of Modern Psychiatry

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

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher




December 5, 2022



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

  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!





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)

Author's Follow-up: December 5, 2022



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"






Author's Follow-up: November 14, 2023

RIGHT-WINGERS: 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.




Next essay: Blaming Drugs for Nazi Germany
Previous essay: Drug Use as Self-Medication

More Essays Here




Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

America is insane: it makes liquor officially legal and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.
Some fat cat should treat the entire Supreme Court to a vacation at San Jose del Pacifico in Mexico, where they can partake of the magic mushroom in a ceremony led by a Zapotec guide.
In fact, we throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The words as used today are extremely judgmental. The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.
The FDA is not qualified to tell us whether holistic medicines work. They hold such drugs to materialist standards and that's pharmacological colonialism.
We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate percentage from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
The front page of every mycology club page should feature a protest of drug laws that make the study of mycology illegal in the case of certain shrooms. But no one protests. Their silence makes them drug war collaborators because it serves to normalize prohibition.
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.
Yes. There is an absurd safety standard for "drugs." The cost/benefit analysis of the FDA & co. never takes into account the costs of NOT prescribing nor the benefits of a productive life well lived. The "users" are not considered stakeholders.
We need a Controlled Prohibitionists Act, to get psychiatric help for the losers who think that prohibition makes sense despite its appalling record of causing civil wars overseas and devastating inner cities.
More Tweets


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America's biggest drug pusher: The American Psychiatric Association:
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Depressed? Here's why.
Electroshock Therapy and the Drug War
How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
In Praise of Doctor Feelgood
In praise of doctor hopping
MDMA for Psychotherapy
Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism
The Drug War and Electroshock Therapy
The Myth of the Addictive Personality
The Prozac Code
Time to Replace Psychiatrists with Shamans
Doctor Feel Bad
Psychedelics and Depression
Drug Use as Self-Medication
This is your brain on Effexor
Depression is real, says the APA, and they should know: they cause it!
The Mental Health Survey that psychiatrists don't want you to take
The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
Don't Worry, Be Satisfied
America's Great Anti-Depressant Scam
Modern Addiction Treatment as Puritan Indoctrination
Why Rick Doblin is Ghosting Me
Lord Save us from 'Real' Cures
Disease Mongering in the age of the drug war
The War on Drugs and the Psychiatric Pill Mill
What Jim Hogshire Got Wrong about Drugs
Tapering for Jesus
America's Anti-scientific Standards for Psychotherapeutic Medicine
How the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
The Whistle Blower who NOBODY wants to hear
It's the Psychedelics, Stupid!
So, you're thinking about starting on an SSRI...

essays about
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There Must Be Some Misunderstanding
Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism
Time to Replace Psychiatrists with Shamans
Alexander Shulgin: American Hero
The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
Ignorance is the problem, not drugs
Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy
The Naive Psychology of the Drug War



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 Origins of Modern Psychiatry: How to create a billion-dollar industry in three easy steps, published on December 5, 2022 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)