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
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
"Depression Is Not Caused by Chemical Imbalance in the Brain" --Noam Shpancer Ph.D.
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.
"When two men who have been in an aggressive mood toward each other take part in the ritual, one is able to say to the other, 'Come, let us drink, for there is something between us.' " re: the Mayan use of the balche drink in Encyc of Psych Plants, by Ratsch & Hofmann
Prohibitionists are also responsible for the 100,000-plus killed in the US-inspired Mexican drug war
This massive concern for safety is downright bizarre in a country that will not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.
History is no friend of drug prohibition, which is why the question of why we have the laws which we do is almost never addressed in the stream of government sponsored anti-drug messages which has permeated public culture for two generations." --Emperors of Dreams, Mike Jay
The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.
Every video about science and psilocybin is funny. It shows nerds trying to catch up with common sense. But psychedelics work, whether the FDA thinks so or not. It's proven by what James Fadiman calls "citizen science," i.e. everyday experience.
Americans believe scientists when they say that drugs like MDMA are not proven effective. That's false. They are super effective and obviously so. It's just that science holds entheogenic medicines to the standards of reductive materialism. That's unfair and inappropriate.
If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.
Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" are horrible because they encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.
At best, antidepressants make depression bearable. We need not settle for such drugs, especially when they are notorious for causing dependence. There are many drugs that elate and inspire. It is both cruel and criminal to outlaw them.
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 Philosophical Significance of the Use of Antidepressants in the Age of Drug Prohibition published on June 22, 2025 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)
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. 
You have been reading an article entitled, The Philosophical Significance of the Use of Antidepressants in the Age of Drug Prohibition published on June 22, 2025 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)
