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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

"Dope Sick"? "Prohibition Sick" is more like it. For me the very term "dope" connotes imperialism, racism and xenophobia, given that all tribal cultures have used "drugs" for various purposes. "Dope? Junk?" It's hard to imagine a more intolerant, dismissive and judgmental terminology.
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.
The DEA should be tried for crimes against humanity. They have been lying about drugs for 50 years and running interference between human beings and Mother Nature in violation of natural law, depriving us of countless potential and known godsends in order to create more DEA jobs.
Prohibitionists are also responsible for the 100,000-plus killed in the US-inspired Mexican drug war
What are drug dealers doing, after all? Only selling substances that people want and have always had a right to, until racist politicians came along and decided government had the right to ration out pain relief and mystical experience.
The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.
This massive concern for safety is downright bizarre in a country that will not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.
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."
The drug war is a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."
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.
More Tweets


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What Jim Hogshire Got Wrong about Drugs
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How the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
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Time to Replace Psychiatrists with Shamans
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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)