bird icon for twitter bird icon for twitter


The Philosophical Significance of the Use of Antidepressants in the Age of Drug Prohibition

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 22, 2025



A meaningful discussion of the philosophical significance of antidepressants cannot be undertaken without acknowledging the context in which these drugs are used. If they were used in a free world in which they were freely chosen, we would not even be having this discussion, because we would then view the situation as a matter of free choice - and who am I to second-guess the health-related decisions of my fellow human beings? But this is not the case. Antidepressants are used in a world in which all psychoactive alternatives have been outlawed. Given this momentous caveat, it is clear why antidepressant use is problematic in the real world. For if they really "work" for millions of the depressed, then that means the following: that the only way that millions of Americans can feel comfortable in their own skins is to rely on dependence-causing medicines that are approved by their government - a government that has outlawed all plausible alternatives to such materialist-based nostrums. This is nothing less than government control of how you think and feel about your life - and nothing is more tyrannical than to limit how and how much I can think and feel in life. By comparison, the despotic regimes of yore were mere tyros. In the past, they sought to control what you could read - today they seek to control how you can think and feel about what you read - or whether you even have the spirit to read anything at all in the first place rather than just sitting back and wishing that you were dead.

I hope that my readers remember this downplayed backstory before characterizing me as a hothead and an extremist on the subject of drugs. There is, in reality, plenty for an observant critic of drug prohibition to be furious about, for what we have here is the ultimate tyranny: a world in which our very attitude about life is micromanaged by a government that is determined to keep us thinking "inside the box" when it comes to what is possible in life.

In other words, antidepressants are the new Soma - not the Soma of the Vedic religion that inspired and elated, but rather the Soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, a drug that helped the government to control its people.

DISCLAIMER

This essay was written in a world in which the government has outlawed all drugs that could have helped the author to concentrate and so to write more clearly. So, if you are not completely convinced by the argumentation above, then consider that very outcome to be yet another proof of the author's thesis: that drug prohibition is a meta-injustice because it outlaws my very ability to push back against the racist and violence-spawning fallacies of Drug Warriors.

AFTERWORD

This short essay rehashes one of my recurring themes on the subject of drugs: the idea, that so much of what we discuss in this world can be seen in two ways: in light of the reality of drug prohibition and in willful ignorance of that prohibition. The vast majority of authors today write about the world from the latter point of view, and so they pretend to give us the last word on the nature of human consciousness, or on conditions like depression and anxiety, all without ever mentioning the fact that we have outlawed a vast pharmacopoeia of drugs whose strategic use could inform our views on the subject and even suggest obvious cures to pathology. The reader of magazines like Psychology Today and Science News will come away from those magazines believing that depression is a tough nut to crack and that we need more heavily funded studies to get to the bottom of the condition. Why? Because the authors pretend that drug prohibition does not exist, or rather that it is a natural baseline for scientific study. But nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that depression could be solved "in a trice" by the strategic and common-sense use of a wide variety of drugs that inspire and elate... but we have ruled out this possibility a priori, for ideological reasons, based partly on the hypocritical puritanism of the Drug Warrior and partly on the modern scientists' embrace of passion-scorning behaviorism when it comes to drug effects. According to the behaviorist, the proof of drug benefits has to be established by looking under a microscope. If a drug merely "works" for a person from that person's point of view, tough luck. In the age of the materialist Drug War, the scientist claims to be the expert on how we think and feel - and we are encouraged to ignore our own assessments of our own mental health needs. What do WE know, after all? Sure, we may be laughing under the influence of laughing gas, but is it "real" laughter? That is the absurd metaphysical question to which we are reduced when we place materialist doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine, a step which I maintain is the great category error of modern times.

Of course, part of the challenge of someone in my position is convincing the brainwashed reader that drugs can and do have positive effects in the first place. Americans have been brainwashed since childhood to "feel" that this cannot be so. Speaking of which, I saw a banner headline yesterday about the trial of P. Diddy, stating in emboldened font that "Diddy was incredibly creative on drugs." As Horatio would point out, "There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave to tell us this." Yet, in the age of the Drug War, an age in which we discourage education, such common-sense statements end up, laughably enough, as front-page news, as who should say: "Hold the presses! Drugs might actually have positive uses after all!"

AFTER AFTERWORD

Speaking of depression, it is depressing to read the status quo articles on this depression. A casual search of "depression" tells us that it is a drastically undertreated condition. Those claims always come from self-interested parties who want to increase the numbers of "butts on seats" at the local mental health clinic. But these pleas on behalf of the medicalization of depression totally ignore the role that drug prohibition itself plays in disempowering the depressed in the first place and so leaving them at the mercy of the local mental health clinics! It is as if a country had outlawed everything but gruel, and then we created clinics to ensure that citizens could access high-quality gruel under hygienic conditions. That approach is all well and good, but it ignores the huge question: why the hell are we outlawing everything but gruel in the first place?!

Antidepressants




WARNING: Don't bother trying to get off antidepressants unless you are truly committed to the idea in the name of healthcare liberty. You have to be committed to such a goal heart and soul, merely to have a chance at success. For long-term users, it can be a real challenge. It is interesting how psychiatrists flip the script on this subject, by the way: they claim that the hideous withdrawal symptoms somehow prove that the user needed the drug all along. But this is obvious nonsense. This can be seen in the fact that these same psychiatrists would never say such a thing about heroin users: that their angst upon quitting the drug is a sign that the drug was actually working for them.

Note that I am not saying that antidepressants are drugs from hell -- but rather that they BECOME drugs from hell thanks to drug prohibition. Drug prohibition outlaws all drugs that could help you get off of antidepressants and so live a fulfilled life without becoming a ward of the healthcare state. We need merely to re-legalize Mother Nature's medicines. Why do we fail to do so? Because we judge drugs based on the following silly and inhumane algorithm: namely, that a substance that can be misused, even in theory, by a white American young person at one dose when used for one reason in one circumstance must not be used by anybody at any dose in any circumstances...

Suppose you lived in the Punjab in 1500 BCE and were told that Soma was illegal but that the mental health establishment had medicines which you could take every day of your life for your depression. Would it not be an enormous violation of your liberty to be told that you could not worship Soma and its attendant gods and incarnations? Would it not be an enormous violation of your liberty to be told that you cannot partake of the drink of the Gods themselves, the Soma juice?

Well, guess what? Your liberty is suppressed in that very fashion by modern drug prohibition: you are denied access to all medicines that inspire and elate. Seen in this light, antidepressants are a slap in the face to a freedom-loving people. They are a prohibitionist replacement for a host of obvious treatments, none of which need turn the user into a patient for life, and some of which could even inspire new religions.

The Hindu religion would not exist today had the DEA been active in the Punjab in 1500 BCE.

So do antidepressants make sense?

This question has two very different answers, depending on whether you recognize that prohibition exists or not. Of course, most Americans pretend that Drug War prohibition does not exist, or at least that it has no effect on their lives -- and so they happily become Big Pharma patients for life. They flatter themselves that they are thereby treating their problems "scientifically." What they fail to realize, of course, is that it is a category error for materialist scientists to treat mind and mood conditions in the first place.

Why? Because scientists are behaviorists when it comes to drugs, which means that they ignore all obvious positive effects of drugs: all anecdote, all history and all psychological common sense -- and instead try to cure you biochemically. And what has been the result of this purblind approach to mind and moods, this search for the Holy Grail of materialist cures for depression? The result has been the greatest mass pharmacological dystopia of all time, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma pills for life.



  • America's Great Anti-Depressant Scam
  • And don't get me started on antidepressants!
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant
  • Depressed? Here's why you can't get the medicines that you need
  • Depressed? Here's why.
  • Depression is real, says the APA, and they should know: they cause it!
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • How the Drug War Screws the Depressed
  • How the Drug War Tramples on the Rights of the Depressed
  • How to end the war in Mexico, stop inner-city killings and cure depression in one easy step
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Philosophical Significance of the Use of Antidepressants in the Age of Drug Prohibition
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • What Malcolm X got right about drugs
  • Why doctors should prescribe opium for depression
  • Why SSRIs are Crap





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.

    Cocaine is not evil. Opium is not evil. Drug prohibition is evil.

    I can't believe people. Somebody's telling me that "drugs" is not used problematically. It is CONSTANTLY used with a sneer in the voice when politicians want to diss somebody, as in, "Oh, they're in favor of DRUGS!!!" It's a political term as used today!

    Drug-designing chemists have no expertise in deciding what constitutes a cure for depression. As Schopenhauer wrote: "The mere study of chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher."

    Just saw a People's magazine article with the headline: "JUSTICE FOR MATTHEW PERRY." If there was true justice, their editorial staff would be in jail for promoting user ignorance and a contaminated drug supply. It's the prohibition, stupid!!!

    Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.

    The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.

    America's "health" system was always screaming at me about the threat of addiction from drugs. Then what did it do? It put me on the most dependence-causing meds of all time: SSRIs and SNRIs.

    The "acceptable risk" for psychoactive drugs can only be decided by the user, based on what they prioritize in life. Science just assumes that all users should want to live forever, self-fulfilled or not.

    The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.


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






    The Philosophical Origins of the Drug War Mentality of Substance Demonization
    What's My Line?


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

    (up)