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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 1 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 2 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 3 , 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?!











Notes for essay entitled The Philosophical Significance of the Use of Antidepressants in the Age of Drug Prohibition:

1: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
2: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)
3: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)




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The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.

The Hindu religion was inspired by drug use.

Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful.

Now the folks who helped Matthew get Ketamine must be sacrificed on the altar of the Drug War, lest people start thinking that the Drug War itself was at fault.y

Now the US is bashing the Honduran president for working with "drug cartels." Why don't we just be honest and say why we're REALLY upset with the guy? Drugs is just the excuse, as always, now what's the real reason? Stop using the drug war to disguise American foreign policy.

SSRIs are created based on the materialist notion that cures should be found under a microscope. That's why science is so slow in acknowledging the benefit of plant medicines. Anyone who chooses SSRIs over drugs like San Pedro cactus is simply uninformed.

You can get a Ph.D. in healthcare, and not learn a thing about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs, as demonstrated by history, anecdote and common sense.

DEA Stormtroopers should be held responsible for destroying American Democracy. Abolish the American Gestapo.

The so-called opiate crisis is really a drug prohibition crisis.

Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.


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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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