How the drug war turned me into an eternal patient… and why nobody cares
ne of the reasons why the anti-patient drug war has survived for over a century now (whereas liquor prohibition died a relatively quick death) is that Americans fail to see the connection between the drug war and the sad state of modern psychiatry.
Worse yet, Americans fail to even see the sad state of modern psychiatry, thanks to a full court PR press by Big Pharma, which foots the bill for prominent and popular doctors to go on shows like Oprah and make addiction to antidepressants seem like a civic duty to be undertaken by any God-fearing American who cares about his or her psychological health. Lately, we even see such well-paid opinion-shapers urging us to get our kids started on a regimen of highly addictive pills if we see any excessive signs of moonshine or hijinx in their childhood spirits. (That could be the deadly ADHD, don't ya know?) Such pill-pushing messages are reinforced at night during prime-time television, as Big Pharma goes directly to their potential client, urging them to pester their doctor into supplying them with a starter kit of highly addictive antidepressants and similarly addictive drugs for anxiety and bipolar illness, etc.
The result? One in eight American males, and one in four American females, are addicted to Big Pharma antidepressants, many of which are harder to kick than heroin.
That's why nobody wants to hear it when I complain about the psychiatric status quo and point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes: Nobody wants to hear it because Americans have too much invested in the status quo: too much money, too much time, and too much blind faith in the honesty and good intentions of psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry.
Indeed, belief in the pill-mill paradigm has become the American religion, to the extent that America has a religion. Despite clinical and statistical proof to the contrary, Americans have become convinced that we now have a scientific "fix" for depression and that sad Americans are stupid - perhaps even selfish - to ignore it and go without this supposedly vital "scientific" assistance. After all, depression is a "disease," so the credo goes, and so what could be more natural than to take a one-size-fits-all pill for that disease and to thus be done with it once and for all (albeit the pill in question has to be taken every day of one's life for the rest of one's life)?
What Americans fail to realize is that the rain forest is full of therapeutic psychoactive medicines, which, if used responsibly, could fix depression organically, by helping the sufferer to see the world in a new light and to creatively work around their mental roadblocks, using medicines that are either non-addictive, or at least far less addictive than the pills on which 1 in 6 Americans have been hooked by Big Pharma. And why do Americans fail to realize this? Because of drug war propaganda, which brazenly lies about Mother Nature's mood medicines, claiming that they "fry the brain," when the truth is the exact opposite, namely that substances like cocaine, opium and natural psychedelics actually strengthen and increase neuronal connections and help the user accomplish more in life.
Sigmund Freud didn't use cocaine to fry his brain, he used it to increase his mental capacity and stamina. Benjamin Franklin didn't use opium to fry his brain, he used it to increase his creative capacity and to ensure his overall affability. Francis Crick didn't use psychedelics to fry his brain, he used them to open his mind to the true nature of DNA.
That's why my plight as an eternal patient goes unnoticed, even though there are millions like me suffering the same disempowering and humiliating effects of the drug war. Drug War propaganda has been accepted as gospel truth by our bamboozled American populace.
Worse yet, if I write about these things, I get blacklisted on Reddit and lose my job as a commentator on Sociodelic.com. Folks just don't want to hear it: they believe in the one and only true Church, "Our Lady of the One-Size-Fits-All Depression Pill," and they don't want to hear from heretics who are unhappy with the pill-pushing paradigm, let alone one who suggests that there's an infinitely better approach that Drug War America is stubbornly overlooking - and ignoring on purpose, in fact, in the interests of the many drug war stakeholders (including, but not limited to, psychiatrists, pharmacists, law enforcement and Big Liquor).
But what exactly is this humiliating plight to which I refer?
Imagine that, like myself, you are a 61-year-old depression "sufferer" who has been "on" Big Pharma antidepressant meds for 40 years (drugs that are so addictive, even your psychiatrist tells you there's no point in attempting to get off them). You still suffer from depression, of course, as evidenced by your ongoing inability to follow through on the goals that are most important to you in life, never mind the fact that the drugs you're taking are supposed to be scientific godsends, (but apparently your brain never got that memo). And so the drug war turns you into the Ancient Mariner of psychiatry, forced to dock at Mental Health Harbor every three months and tell the scientistic landlubbers how you've been feeling over the last 90 days, so that they have the legal cover to write you yet another prescription for the pharmaceutical concoctions that your drug-warped body chemistry can no longer do without. Are you happy? Are you sad? Do you have trouble sleeping? Do you consider suicide? You have to tell the "good doctor" everything, every three months of your life.
Hello? What business is it of theirs after 40 long and patronizing years?
Here's a good answer to one such question, however:
{^Psychiatrist's question: Do you consider suicide?
Answer: Only when I consider the fact that psychiatry has humiliated and disempowered me by turning me into an eternal patient.}{
Just yesterday I called my shrink's office to request a refill on my addictive meds. They refused to approve the refill until I had made another appointment to see my doctor. Why? Because my existing psychiatrist was no longer employed there and I had to start over with a new one. And since the new one doesn't know me from Adam, he or she cannot prescribe medicine for me.
Right. So the fact that I've been running in this pill-mill hamster cage for 40 years means nothing. I still have to be treated like a new mental health patient and come in and confess all my weaknesses and inner concerns to a complete stranger. I'm still the Ancient Mariner, but now there's a new wedding guest to whom I have to recite the story of my life.
It's funny that this status quo is acceptable to Americans, given that it is the exact opposite of what we call "empowerment" these days, which folks normally consider to be the ne plus ultra of psychological health.
And so it is that America is literally the most addicted country in the world, and yet nobody wants to hear the whistle blowers who say so. Instead, we rationalize, saying that SSRI users are habituated to their pills, not addicted to them, a shallow drug war equivocation that can be easily devastated by anyone who performs a close reading of the definition of "addiction" in Webster's.
So I can blow my whistle all I want, but I won't be heard as long as Americans remain in denial about the great addiction of our times. That's not the opiate addiction, but the fact that 1 in 6 Americans are addicted to Big Pharma "meds" - an addiction that would be unimaginable except in a world where health-care choices have been starkly limited by an anti-patient Drug War.
You have been reading essays by the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass, at abolishthedea.com. Brian is the founder of The Drug War Gift Shop, where artists can feature and sell their protest artwork online. He has also written for Sociodelic and is the author of The Drug War Comic Book, which contains 150 political cartoons illustrating some of the seemingly endless problems with the war on drugs -- many of which only Brian seems to have noticed, by the way, judging by the recycled pieties that pass for analysis these days when it comes to "drugs." That's not surprising, considering the fact that the category of "drugs" is a political category, not a medical or scientific one.
A "drug," as the world defines the term today, is "a substance that has no good uses for anyone, ever, at any time, under any circumstances" -- and, of course, there are no substances of that kind: even cyanide and the deadly botox toxin have positive uses: a war on drugs is therefore unscientific at heart, to the point that it truly qualifies as a superstition, one in which we turn inanimate substances into boogie-men and scapegoats for all our social problems.
The Drug War is, in fact, the philosophical problem par excellence of our time, premised as it is on a raft of faulty assumptions (notwithstanding the fact that most philosophers today pretend as if the drug war does not exist). It is a war against the poor, against minorities, against religion, against science, against the elderly, against the depressed, against those in pain, against children in hospice care, and against philosophy itself. It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions, Nazifies the English language and militarizes police forces nationwide.
It bans the substances that inspired William James' ideas about human consciousness and the nature of ultimate reality. In short, it causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, meanwhile violating the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. (Surely, Jefferson was rolling over in his grave when Ronald Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants.)
If you believe in freedom and democracy, in America and around the world, please stay tuned for more philosophically oriented broadsides against the outrageous war on godsend medicines, AKA the war on drugs.
PS The drug war has not failed: to the contrary, it has succeeded, insofar as its ultimate goal was to militarize police forces around the world and help authorities to ruthlessly eliminate those who stand in the way of global capitalism. For more, see Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley. Oh, and did I mention that most Drug Warriors these days would never get elected were it not for the Drug War itself, which threw hundreds of thousands of their political opposition in jail? Trump was right for the wrong reasons: elections are being stolen in America, but the number-one example of that fact is his own narrow victory in 2016, which could never have happened without the existence of laws that were specifically written to keep Blacks and minorities from voting. The Drug War, in short, is a cancer on the body politic.
Rather than apologetically decriminalizing selected plants, we should be demanding the immediate restoration of Natural Law, according to which "The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." (John Locke)
Selected Bibliography
Andrew, Christopher "The Secret World: A History of Intelligence" 2019 Yale University Press
Aurelius, Marcus "Meditations" 2021 East India Publishing Company
Mate, Gabriel "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" 2009 Vintage Canada
Maupassant, Guy de "Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques - Guy de Maupassant: Les classiques du fantastique " 2019
McKenna, Terence "Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution " 1992 Bantam
Miller, Richard Louis "Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle " 2017 Park Street Press
Pinchbeck, Daniel "When Plants Dream" 2019 Watkins Publishing
Poe, Edgar Allan "The Essential Poe" 2020 Warbler Classics
Pollan, Michael "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence " 2018 Penguin Books
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Streatfield, Dominic "Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography" 2003 Picador USA
Swartzwelder, Scott "Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy" 1998 W.W. Norton
Szasz, Thomas "Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers" 1974 Anchor Press/Doubleday
Whitaker, Robert "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America " 2010 Crown
Zinn, Howard "A People's History of the United States: 1492 - present" 2009
Zuboff , Shoshana "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" 2019 Public Affairs
Site and its contents copyright 2023, by Brian B. Quass, the drug war philosopher at abolishthedea.com. For more information, contact Brian at quass@quass.com.
ne of the reasons why the anti-patient drug war has survived for over a century now (whereas liquor prohibition died a relatively quick death) is that Americans fail to see the connection between the drug war and the sad state of modern psychiatry.
