I have begun fighting a liberation campaign to rescue hundreds of my audiobook files from the greedy clutches of Amazon’s Audible platform. Not only does Audible monitor my reading on their app (the better to serve me relevant ads during and after listening), but they are now adding previews and teasers to the end of my audiobooks in an attempt to get me to spend more money, a practice which I find highly irritating. When I bought the audiobook, I bought the audiobook, after all, not Audible advertisements. So now, with the use of the Audacity app, I am setting my computer to work overnight to re-record my kidnapped titles, so that I can bring them home, wash them clean of all Audible propaganda, and thenceforth listen to them in blissful indifference to the money-grubbing policies of Jeff Bezos, the coward who folded when our murderer-in-chief shouted “Boo!”

Wow. That is probably the first paragraph that I’ve ever written on this site that does not have some reasonably obvious connection with American drug attitudes. And yet even the above rant does have tie-ins as well. I can guarantee you, for instance, that I would have liberated my hostage audiobooks years ago had I been able to use a variety of those substances that sharpen the mind, encourage strategic thinking and improve mood. That’s one of the things that I’ve noticed about drugs that work: they suddenly make me notice problems that have been lingering for ages. I suddenly think things like: “Why the hell have I always walked by that broken-down chair on my front porch without thinking to discard it?” or in this case, “Why have I given up on the hundreds of books in my Audible account? I know that I hate the Audible platform, but why don’t I try to liberate my books from the clutches of Jeff ‘money-grubbing’ Bezos?”

As a rule, I think it’s bad form to refer to a living and identifiable human being as a “money grubber,” but the gloves came off when Bezos ordered his Washington Post not to endorse Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. The Post’s kowtowing editors subsequently nixed a political cartoon by Pulitzer cartoonist Ann Telnaes that protested that decision. I have since done everything I can to distance myself from Amazon -- although it’s not easy. I thought I’d by my books at Abe Books, only to find that they are owned by Amazon. But at least I’m trying to opt out. Most Americans have grown lazy about democracy. They’d like to protest these goings-on, but it’s just too damn convenient for them to buy stuff through Amazon, especially when the company is encouraging their laziness with the help of an advertising budget that is larger than the gross domestic product of most third-world countries.

In responding to my latest essay (Antidepressant Vending Machines), pharmacologist Richard Parrish II wrote as follows:

Remember that both cocaine and opium are legal substances in Schedule II. Cocaine is available as a topical and opium as a tincture, albeit they are Rx only pharmaceuticals and used for specific medical purposes. I think what you are referring to is directly from a natural source.

To which I responded as follows:

Yes, I should be more specific about what I mean. I really mean that cocaine and opium -- unless I’m very much mistaken -- are illegal for the purposes of altering mind and mood. In other words they are illegal in the one way that really matters to the depressed, to religious seekers, to philosophers, etc. It’s hard to keep up with the precise status of such drugs [at least it’s hard for me, as someone who is so easily irritated by the claptrap that one encounters in ferreting out such factoids] and to know wherein the exceptions lie for “physical” treatments, and yet any close observer of drug policy can see that drug prohibition follows a general rule: that forms of drug use are targets for demonization and outlawing precisely to the extent that they could serve to inspire, relax or elate the user and so pose a threat to the medical field -- although, of course, we will always be told that the motivation behind drug prohibition is the preservation of public health. This is why I was just waiting for the other shoe to fall when it came to Kratom, for politicians to start raising a hue and cry about the drug’s availability. This is also why I assume that there must be a political backstory to explain how ketamine slipped through the prohibitionist’s sieve in America, despite the fact that medical researchers in Asia have associated the drug’s overuse with urinary dysfunction.

Although I have not been aware of the specifics, I have always understood that prohibitionists did not so much hate cocaine and opium as they hated the use of such drugs for the purposes of changing mentation. They simply see no need for changing mentation. Change frightens them and makes them worry about their bank account. They are satisfied with their wine-fueled Christianistic view of the world and totally indifferent to questions about human perception, consciousness and the ultimate meaning of life. They believe that doctors should handle all psychical and psychological problems, in part because they hold stock in the companies that profit from that assumption. Meanwhile, they are strongly opposed to drug-aided religious experiences that could pose a threat to their own creed. They have the answers and they now want time to stand still. This is why it sent a chill up my spine when I first heard the elder Bush trashing “liberals.” I myself am highly critical of liberal excesses (which, properly speaking, are usually progressive excesses, in any case), but both Bushes seemed to me to be saying: “We have reached the ultimate stage of human evolution: that of the beer-loving capitalist. We need no further improvements on the psychological or psychic front -- our brains work just fine as they are, thank you very much. If there is any tweaking to be done with our mental apparatus, it can be provided by the Big Tech companies in which we own stock.”

To which I then added, after a little more cogitation...

Which, I guess, is really just a long way of saying, yes, I was speaking of access to the natural product and the ability to use it as one sees fit.

I received an email this morning suggesting that I contact a woman named Shelby after watching a YouTube video of hers entitled Shelby Exists And Makes Stuff. Shelby has numerous issues which she associates with her high IQ, and her attempts to find relief from the psychiatric field for these issues only left her “doped up” and in danger of being “committed.” My contact apparently feels that Shelby needs to know how drug prohibition has helped create her disempowered state by outlawing all sorts of medicines that could help her heal. And after viewing the video in question, I agree. I have therefore added the following comment to that video. Please see the extended quote below.

One might think that a high IQ would help Shelby to see through Drug War lies. I am hopeful, of course, but in my experience, high IQ alone is often not enough. Drug-hating ideology is “in the air” in the modern world and so even our apparent geniuses tend to accept drug-hating premises without reflection. Take the folks at the Harvard Psychology Department, for instance.

Those professors and deans are no doubt smarter than I am in many ways -- and yet none of them spoke up against the FDA’s 2023 attempts to treat laughing gas as a “drug”: no one spoke up on behalf of academic freedom and the legacy of the founder of their department, William James, whose entire philosophy was changed by his experience using such gases. Or take our medical ethicists. They are geniuses, no doubt, and yet none of them are speaking out against the fact that drug prohibition outlaws drugs that could make the depressed want to live, even in cases where the depressed person (as in the case of Claire Brosseau) is demanding his or her right to assisted suicide. In other words, ethicists will discuss the propriety of the state helping the depressed to die without discussing the propriety of the state outlawing drugs that could make the depressed wish to live.

It seems that there is no 1-to-1 correspondence between “genius” (as defined by Mensa) and a propensity for philosophical insight. But let’s hope that the correspondence is close enough, at least in Shelby’s case, that the following comment will convince her to direct her angst into a productive channel by protesting the drug prohibition that is outlawing her right to heal.

I urge you to consider how drug prohibition is depriving you of drugs that could be godsends for you. I encourage you to read the user reports in the book called “Pihkal” by American chemist Alexander Shulgin and compare the effects of the phenethylamines that he synthesized in the 1990s with the effects of the psychiatric drugs that fogged your mind. Here are just two typical reports. 1) “A remarkable effect of this drug is the extreme empathy felt for all small things; a stone, a flower, an insect. I believe that it would be impossible to harm anything, to commit an overt harmful or painful act on anyone or anything is beyond one’s capabilities.” And 2) “I am experiencing more deeply than ever before the importance of acknowledging and deeply honoring each human being. And I was able to go through and resolve some judgments with particular persons.”

As a chronic depressive myself, I have been stuck on underperforming and dependence-causing Big Pharma meds for 40 years. I have to see a doctor 1/3 my age every three months of my life in order to receive a refill on a drug that I have found to be harder to kick than heroin. That’s why I have written hundreds of philosophical essays in protest of drug prohibition as the outlawing of my right to heal. If this makes any sense to you, I invite you to see my hundreds of essays on these topics at abolishthedea.com and my related substack called The Drug War Philosopher. The media will not let us see reports of beneficial drug use, but those reports exist. Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin were big fans of opium. Nineteenth-century authors like Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas and HG Wells were big fans of coca wine. In fact, drug use has inspired entire religions, as the psychoactive Soma juice inspired the Vedic, and hence the Hindu, religion. Coca was considered divine by the Inca and is still an essential part of daily life for their Peruvian descendants. Hopefully, your elevated IQ will help you to see with me what others cannot grasp: that drug prohibition is the outlawing of our right to psychological healing and relief. I urge you to join with me in demanding an end to drug prohibition on behalf of our right to heal.

Indigenous people have long referred to psychoactive substances as “teacher plants.” Chemists like Shulgin have demonstrated that “teacher medicines” do indeed exist -- but the self-interested medical establishment does not want us to know this, let alone to profit from this information. And so the medical industry is basically working with Drug Warriors to keep such anaestethics illegal and to demonize them as evil ‘drugs.’

A long-distance reader has reminded me (for a second time now) that I should collect my writings and sell them in book form. I am now going to start to try to take that suggestion seriously. Having published for seven years while being ignored by so many billions, I was beginning to think that there was something inherently unreadable about my essays. I could not envision the existence of an audience to which to sell them. Yet the recent feedback of a published author and former Szasz colleague in the States, combined with the resonance of my ideas in a passionate if perhaps somewhat small virtual community in Eastern Europe, has alerted me to another possibility. Perhaps I am simply ahead of my time, so much so that my ideal readers may be a niche audience for which there is no one overarching recognizable demographic in this age of superstitious drug-bashing.

My audience, such as it is, would seem to consist of those statistically rare individuals who are able to see the world through lenses other than those provided by the corporate-controlled media. Such an audience could just be lying low in this age of Drug War Sharia, out of prudence and/or apathy, just waiting for someone to create a flag around which they can rally in the name of mental freedom and the right to heal, worship, philosophize, relax, and just plain think as they see fit. With this in mind, I hereby resolve to start taking my own essays seriously and to assume (in spite of statistical evidence) that at least some of them may strike a chord in human beings tired of the inhumane and anti-scientific status quo, a world in which we operate under the following progress-stopping algorithm: that a substance that can be misused by a white young person when used in one way for one reason, must not be used by anyone in any way for any reason.

Speaking of which, the spirit of prophecy has just come over me. I prophesy that future generations will see The Decade of the Brain in the 1990s as a joke, asking themselves, "How can you have a Decade of the Brain in an age when you outlaw all the substances whose use clearly demonstrates the miraculous ways in which that organ can work -- while also giving us hints about the nature of consciousness itself, not only as manifested in the brain but in the world at large?! That was NOT the Decade of the Brain," they will say to themselves, "that was the Decade of the Brain in a Vat! -- i.e., the decade of looking at the brain outside of all meaningful context."


….

I also want to acknowledge receipt of some critical thoughts about Libertarianism. I have never been satisfied with the Libertarian approach to drug use -- it concedes far too much to the prohibitionists. It says, in effect, "Yes, drugs are dangerous and people should not use them, but we should not spend our precious tax dollars on trying to protect drug users from their own stupidity."

Now, isn't that the pot calling the kettle black?! Nothing could be stupider than to assume that drugs -- some of which can inspire entire religions and give us amazing abilities to concentrate and to analyze -- can cause nothing but death and destruction. Anyone who says such things in 21st-century America should be embarrassed, for in so doing, they are making it clear that they know absolutely nothing about drugs, that they are simply following the mainstream script according to which they should "hate drugs with all their heart and all their mind and all their soul."

Remember Dr. McFillin from my July 26th post?

"It's Note Wednesday!"

Well, guess what? He may not have “liked” my comment -- but he did the next best thing. He “liked” a reply to my post that thanked me for my insight and forthrightness. In other words, the doc may not be as bamboozled as I feared. Since then, my July 26th comment on the doctor’s substack has received another reply, asking me if I had tried tapering Effexor “hyperbolically.” I responded as follows.

NOTE: I am not 100% sure of the current status of laughing gas in U.S. law. Of course, I could find out in an instant, no doubt, by Googling the matter or asking AI, but I am allergic to the kind of hysterical claptrap that such searches always bring up. What I’m saying here is that, technically speaking, laughing gas may not be totally outlawed in the U.S., but that it remains, as always, shamefully unavailable, as a practical matter, for the depressed -- to say nothing of the philosophers who wish to follow in the footsteps of William James. The irony here is that the drug prohibitionists fear the drug’s misuse, and yet it is precisely the outlawing (or at least the demonization) of such substances that make them dangerous, by forcing would-be users to become DIY chemists in order to access the substance on a practical basis.

MEDS V DRUGS: This is not the first time that I have found reason to mention Dr. McFillin in my essays. Three years ago, in July 2023, I referenced the doctor in an essay called "Doping Arizona", in which I objected to the FDA’s approval of an antidepressant called Lexapro for kids. For kids! Dr. McFillin was on the right side of that specific issue, for which I am grateful. But as is the case with his recent Substack post about the value of therapy, he holds in disdain not simply antidepressants, but drug therapies in general, and not just for kids, but for adults as well. This is a premature aversion, to put it mildly, considering how little Americans know about the psychoactive substances with which it turns out that the world is full. Armed with preconceptions only (preconceptions foisted upon us by drug war propaganda and the censorship of all instances of beneficial drug use) Americans refuse to contemplate the possibility of psychologically obvious drug protocols, like using nitrous oxide to keep the suicidal from killing themselves. So, while I generally agree that drug use should be limited to grown-ups, even that dictum should be a guideline and not a rule. If my child were going to kill him or herself because of gloom or deep despair, I would want them to use drugs that inspire and elate. Yes, I know it’s odd, isn’t it? I just happen to think that it’s better for children to be alive and use drugs than to go to their premature graves as sober as a judge.

Do our doctors really think that indigenous communities, at least as ideally conceived, would refuse a lifesaving treatment to a young person simply because he or she was too young to receive it according to some general rule?

It’s odd, in a way. In one important sense, “meds” and “drugs” are exactly the same. They are both psychoactive substances — and the names of the categories in which we place them are simply part of a branding operation: those names provide “spin” as to how we are supposed to feel about the substances thus denominated. But in another way, “meds” and “drugs” are quite different things. “Meds” are substances for which dependency is a feature and which are said to “fix” a problem rather than to treat it symptomatically. “Drugs” are substances for which dependency is a mere bug and which work by alleviating the downsides of the human condition in real-time — rather than attempting to remove those downsides from the human condition altogether by biochemical means based on the notion that we are all chemical widgets amenable to the self-same interventions.

And so doctors like Mr. McFillin throw the baby out with the bathwater when they conclude that drugs are useless merely because “meds” have proven to be so. (Indeed, “meds” have been proven to be far worse than useless.) But the fact is that we scarcely know anything about drugs as a people. Our media has seen to that. And yet those of us who have read the forbidden sources, wherein the positive sides of drug use are freely spoken, know that there is a world of potential psychological benefits (to say nothing of spiritual and philosophical benefits) to be had from various drug use. The use of DMT inspires visions of DWARVES — a fact that raises all sorts of questions about the human mind and the nature of consciousness! The use of oneirogens inspire vivid and easily remembered dreams, suggesting obvious uses for those seeking to submit their unconsioucs lives to a therapeutic analysis a la Sigmund Freud. The use of laughing gas gives users glimpses of God him or herself, as documented in “The Varieties of Religious Experience” by William James. The use of heroin and related opiates come close to turning the well-educated Joe into an instant genius of sorts. As Aleister Crowley wrote in “Diary of a Drug Fiend”:

I suppose that one wouldn’t get much result by giving heroin and cocaine, however cunningly mixed, to the average man. You can’t get out of a thing what isn’t there…. But if you get the right man, the administration of a drug is quite likely to suppress his mental faculties, with the result that his genius is set free.

Aleister Crowley -- The Diary of a Drug Fiend

Aleister describes his use of heroin as placing him in an odd position: he both felt and exuded a kind of quick-wittedness such that his mere presence in a room seemed to constitute an implicit rebuke to the relative dullards in his presence.

And yet what is the American attitude toward all this potential? We are told that we have to pretend that it does not exist lest a substance should be misused by the young people whom we refuse to educate about safe drug use. In other words, life on Planet Earth must henceforth involve an unrelenting struggle to suppress the use of substances that help us transcend our sober mentality, no matter how self-destructive or misguided that mentality may be. Till the end of days, we must use police forces and the military to ensure that both society and individuals keep “thinking inside the box,” no matter how toxic that echo chamber may ultimately become. And yet somehow we must undertake this campaign against “drugs” while insisting on the propriety of the daily use of “meds” by as many Americans as possible, children included. And what do these “meds” do? Do they inspire and elate? Do they give tantalizing hints about the origins and meaning of the universe? Not quite. At best, they serve to make capitalist life livable (if only just) in a world in which “drugs” have been outlawed. It’s amazing how med-prescribing doctors can go about their daily business unfazed by these obvious contradictions, but then one supposes that cognitive dissonance is readily overcome when financial interests are at stake.

Far from being just a counterproductive policy, then, drug prohibition is an effort to re-create the world in a way that will suppress divergent viewpoints and keep minorities in their place. The sad thing is that right-thinking doctors like McFillin have been fooled into supporting this policy, at least in spirit, thanks to the media’s censorship of all talk of beneficial drug use. It’s amazing the extent to which the medical field has been able to shield itself from pushback against this med-centric status quo by the use of twisted logic The doctors now tell us that it is immoral to speak of positive drug use because such talk constitutes medical advice. Medical advice! The best way to push back against the medical field’s monopoly on mind and mood medicine is to highlight, as specifically as possible, the benefits of drug use — and yet the more that we enter into specifics, the more we are told that we are giving medical advice and must therefore be silenced. Mad in America is the poster child for such censorship: they refuse to publish my views because they claim I am giving medical advice whenever I suggest that drugs might actually have positive uses for the depressed. And so they can go on pretending that there is not even a debate here. As the Church Lady used to say: “How convenient!”

NOTE: I have been criticized in the past as follows:

COMPLAINT: “You say that no drugs are evil, and yet you clearly dislike antidepressants. This is hypocrisy.”

ANSWER: When I say that drugs are neither good nor bad, I mean it. Antidepressants are not necessarily evil in themselves. We should not outlaw them, or any drug. This is because we may someday find a use for such substances that is consistent with human freedom and human aspiration. Or the drugs may prove to be useful in veterinarian settings. Or in agriculture. Such drugs may also prove useful when combined with other drugs. There may be rare but crucial uses that I am personally unable to even imagine. The point is this: when we find a problem with a certain specific use of a drug, then that is all we have found, a problem with that specific use. We have not found a problem with the drug per se. This latter way of reasoning is the fallacy upon which drug demonization is based — the fallacy of misplaced generalization — and it remains a fallacy, whether we apply such thinking to “meds” or “drugs.”

This thinking is wrong, not simply because it keeps folks like myself from using godsend medicines, but because it prevents science from moving forward. I guess I am old-fashioned, but I still believe that scientists should be free to study all substances without regard to the prejudices of politicians. We can only guess what godsends we are willfully doing without these days thanks to our a priori demonization of drugs via the fallacy of misplaced generalization. Yet we can make some informed guesses already as to the therapies that we have dogmatically chosen to go without: we are doing without substances whose use could clearly sharpen the minds of dementia patients dramatically! we are doing without substances whose use could keep a desperately suicidal person from wishing to die — without having to fry his or her brain in order to achieve that goal! we are doing without substances whose use could inspire a modicum of compassion in haters, at least to the point where they would no longer be interested in killing human beings wholesale.

Summation: I do not say that antidepressants are evil. I say that their current use in drug-hating America is evil for a wide variety of reasons.

….

Here’s my response to a clown calling for Drug Prohibition on Substack, says the “track record” of decriminalization is a problem.

What about our track record with drug prohibition? 80,000 died in 2024 of completely unnecessary overdoses because drugs are not regulated as to quality, dosage, and even identity. Over 1.4 million people are arrested every year for drug possession, so many that a trial of one’s peers is a thing of the past. Now 97% of cases are handled with plea deals. That means that the DA threatens the suspect with long jail terms if they insist on their right to a fair trial. Hundreds of thousands have been killed in Mexico’s US-sponsored drug war and tens of thousands have been “disappeared.” Inner cities have been destroyed around the world thanks to the incentives created by drug prohibition. DRUG PROHIBITION IS THE PROBLEM, NOT DRUGS.

I got an email notification of a Substack article by a certain Dr. McFillin this morning. I’m not sure how I got subscribed, given the doc’s conventional view about drugs. It was probably because I felt compelled to respond to something on his page and he required that I subscribe first in order to have that privilege. Well, if that was the case, then he’s at it again, posting something that cries out for a sanity check from someone like myself with skin in the game. I won’t go into details about the backstory here. Those who are interested should consult the doc’s “Radically Genuine” Substack. Basically, there’s one guy here (Matt) making the drastically oversimplified generalization that therapy sucks; and there is Doc McFillin responding to that argument with what I find to be an almost equally oversimplified rejoinder.

FROM: Dr. Roger McFillin

What Matt Walsh Gets Right About Therapy. And What He Gets Wrong.

As a 67-year-old chronic depressive, I see both sides of this argument as missing the point. Each side argues from a Christian Science perspective, automatically assuming that drugs are bad for dealing with psychological issues. This is a tragic overgeneralization. I agree wholeheartedly that “meds” are bad as they are currently being used in America. For such drugs, dependency is a feature, not a bug. Such drugs have turned 1 in 4 American women into patients for life. They are underperforming and turn the user into a ward of the healthcare state. I have been on such drugs for 40 years and find Effexor far harder to kick than heroin. I have to see a doctor one-third my age every three months of my life to get a refill on a drug that I do not even want to be taking. It is total disempowerment, yet the ads for my drug on the Mayo website do not even mention long-term dependency. And when I complain, I am told that I have no standing. I am a mere “patient.” In other words, I should “shut up and take my meds.”

This is an obvious injustice. But it does not follow that drugs are not valuable for changing mindsets for the better. The Vedic religion was inspired by the use of a substance or substances that inspired and elated. The use of the invigorating coca plant has been part of the religious life of the Inca and their descendants for the last 500 years. Yet Americans hold it as an article of faith that drug use should be unnecessary to improve one’s outlook on life. This is no wonder given that the media will never show stories of beneficial drug use. But this viewpoint has consequences. It helps to “justify” the absurd claim by the DEA that drugs like opium, that have been considered panaceas since the time of Galen, have no positive uses whatsoever. And it is precisely this viewpoint about drugs that has left millions of folks like myself to suffer unnecessarily from depression for a lifetime while the “teacher plants” advocated by indigenous societies are off-limits to us. I would much rather that an adult child of mine smoke an opium pipe peaceably at home at night or use cocaine on occasion than to have them commit suicide in a state of “godly sobriety.”

Dr. McFillin, like Matt, sings the praises of sobriety, and yet it is precisely the sober state (the state of mind facilitated by one’s default biochemistry) that is problematic in the case of the depressed (as it is in the cases of PTSD and claustrophobia and stage fright, etc.). That is the state in which the depressed want to die, in which they lack all motivation, in which they think negative thoughts. Moreover, the work of William James clearly shows us that our default biochemistry provides us with just one way of seeing the world. There is no moral benefit to eschewing the many other worlds of consciousness. To the contrary, James told us that it was our duty to study these worlds in order to understand the true nature of perception, of consciousness and of ultimate reality. And yet so deep is our hatred of Mother Nature’s psychoactive bounty that we would prefer that the depressed kill themselves rather than to use “drugs.” This is clear from the fact that today’s ethicists discuss the propriety of assisted suicide for the depressed without discussing the propriety of the drug prohibition which outlaws all the substances which, wisely used, could help make the depressed want to live.

Americans remain as intolerant of holistic psychoactive drug use as was Pizarro and company in the 16th century. We insist that we can make people “better” by “talk, talk, talk.” Talk is, indeed, part of the answer -- talk with any compassionating soul -- but it is pure Pollyannaism to think that “talk” and blue skies is all that folks like myself ever needed. My entire life is disproof of that theory, a life of totally unnecessary depression treated only by talk and underperforming “meds” -- meds that seem to have been marketed with the express goal of turning me into a customer for life, both of Big Pharma and of the psychiatric establishment.

TOMORROW

It is quite an ego boost for me to write about drug-related philosophy in the age of drug demonization because I find myself ahead of some of the greatest thinkers in the world, at least on this general topic. Take Immanuel Kant, for instance. He premised his philosophy on the idea of a one-size-fits-all human consciousness. He therefore felt that he could come up with a comprehensive list of one-size-fits-all categories that demonstrate the limits of the human understanding. I alone seem to have noticed that his triumphalism is premature in light of the work of William James, who insisted that “rational consciousness,” so-called, is just one of many forms of consciousness, and that these new forms of consciousness must be studied as to their origin, nature and significance before we can claim to be writing the last word on the limits of our understanding. Before we conclude that our eyes are inherently closed to the deeper verities of life, we must first condescend to employ the tools that have the potential to pry those eyes open, including the “teacher plants” of the indigenous that we dismiss a priori by giving them the disdainful label of “narcotics.”

I would also be flattered by the fact that I am the only online pundit who sees any link between drug prohibition and assisted suicide for the depressed, were it not for the fact that this dogmatic ignorance on the world’s part has a body count. If depressed Canadian Claire Brosseau wins her right to assisted suicide, she will be sacrificed on the altar of the drug-hating status quo, according to which drugs are supposed to have no benefits whatsoever. This is perhaps the worst evil of the drug war: it destroys the power of our otherwise deep thinkers to see the obvious: namely, that drug use is -- at very least -- better than death. If Claire were my daughter, I would much rather that she smoke an opium pipe peaceably at home at night while chatting with intelligent friends or listening to inspirational music than that she commit suicide with the help of the state. Do our healthcare pundits really think otherwise, would they really prefer that their own daughters kill themselves rather than to engage in such a protocol? Since I cannot think so ill of our professionals, I can only conclude that they are so scared of violating drug-war orthodoxy with their comments, that they simply block the whole subject of drug prohibition from their minds whenever they pontificate on Claire’s situation. All the more reason for me to keep playing the gadfly on this topic by interrupting self-congratulatory discussion threads on the subject of healthcare ethics with some philosophical home truths of my own.

There are, however, a few authors before whom I can still bend the knee when it comes to the subject of drugs. It was thanks to the works of Thomas Szasz, both on the subject of psychiatry and of drugs, that I first began to notice the connection between drug prohibition and my disempowerment as a psychiatric “patient.” He wrote long before 1 in 4 American women had become wards of the healthcare state on dependence-causing “meds,” but he gave me the conceptional ammunition with which to fight back when I discovered that I myself was a victim of such healthcare disempowerment.

COMING UP

But in my essay for tomorrow, I will be focusing on a dark horse for my allegiance whose views I am finding to be increasingly relevant, at least on the subject about which I alone seem to be writing these days: namely, the way that drug prohibition has disempowered the depressed and closed the American mind to the importance of healthcare freedom and the indigenous ways of seeing the world. I am referring here to Ivan Illich and his 1975 classic, “Medical Nemesis.” I had already “read” the book once a few years ago after being goaded thereunto by a friend, but this time I “really read it,” and underscored at least a dozen thought-provoking quotes into the bargain. Actually, I only read half of it. The notes at the back of the book are as long as the text that precedes it and merits reading by itself thanks to the informative annotations provided by the author.

We’ll call it a date then: tomorrow, I will amaze all two of you with my thoughts on Ivan Illich and Medical Nemesis! Meanwhile, let me just leave you with one citation from the book for you to mull over at your convenience:

More often than not, the best a learned and conscientious physician can do is convince his patient that he can live with his impairment, reassure him of an eventual recovery or of the availability of morphine at the time when he will need it, do for him what grandmother could have done, and otherwise defer to nature.

Unfortunately, the doctor can no longer even reassure his patient of the availability of morphine -- but I hold my tongue. More tomorrow.

I have decided to respond to some of the plethora of Substack pundits who write in complete ignorance of the effects of drug prohibition on subjects like depression and assisted suicide, for instance. I'm finding as I do so that some Stackers post multiple notes daily, while others post click-bait: where they ask an open question, or better yet, solicit links to "interesting" posts. These would be great strategies if my goal were simply to elevate my short-term Substack enrolment, but as I am attempting to persuade real people to make real changes in the status quo, I will refrain. The good thing about responding to these posts, by the way, is that my responses write themselves. These notes irritate me so thoroughly that my fingers cannot keep up with the indignant input that my brain is sending their way. (My fingers are like: "Hold on there, we're typing as fast as we can!")

FROM: Joseph Everett (WIL)

NOTE: Gabor Mate is Wrong

RESPONSE: Yes, Gabor is wrong, but so are almost all psychologists and psychiatrists in the age of the Drug War. They all assume that drug use can only be a problem and that there are no benefits to drugs. Those are ahistorical lies that we have come to believe thanks to the media’s total censorship of all positive uses of drugs. Drugs like opium and coca VASTLY increase one’s mental powers. You don’t have to have deep hidden problems to want to use such drugs. Anyone who wants inspiration, motivation, and an almost surreal level of concentration could find reason to use them. I could flip the script. I could say that there are hidden problems with people who are so susceptible to propaganda that they cannot even imagine any beneficial uses for drugs — the substances that indigenous people use for human benefit rather than demonizing wholesale like we do in the west. It is just too convenient to say that people who believe in drug benefits are “sick” or have an “illness.” That sounds like a Stalinist diagnosis to me, one designed to enforce the status quo. And yet that is the way the Gabor Mates seem to see the world. Gabor’s seems to be a great person — but he should stick to one-on-one counseling while yet advocating on behalf of his patients for the end of drug prohibition, which outlaws his patients’ right to heal — and even their right not to BE patients in the first place.

FROM: Maria Veronica Laguna

NOTE: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice is a growing collaborative database with articles, books, events and multimedia resources on Psychoanalysis and Social Justice.

RESPONSE: PSJ should be all about ending drug prohibition, which gave psychiatry a monopoly on mind and mood medicine. Psychiatry used that monopoly to turn 1 in 4 American women into lifetime patients with the help of “meds” for which dependency was a feature and not a bug. As a 67-year-old chronic depressive, I have written hundreds of essays on this topic based on my 45 years’ worth of experience on the dependence-causing “meds” of Big Pharma. I now have to see a doctor one-third my age every three months of my life to qualify for yet another refill on a “med” that is harder to kick than heroin. It is humiliating and the ultimate disempowerment. And yet everyone tells me, in one way or another, to “shut up and take my meds.” And that includes Mad in America, who will not even publish my story. No one dares admit that outlawed drugs could have helped me -- even though some of the outlawed substances have been considered panaceas by all past cultures.

FROM: Bryan Shapiro, MD

NOTE: The taper that no one can agree on: recommendations for deprescribing a nation...

RESPONSE: I am an expert on this topic (or would be considered so in a sane world). I am a 67-year-old chronic depressive who has been “on” Big Pharma meds for over 40 years. The one I am on now is harder to kick than heroin and has turned me into a ward of the healthcare state, someone who has to see a “doctor” one-third his age every three months of his life to qualify for a refill on an underperforming and highly dependence-causing med. For me, the recommendation for “deprescribing a nation” is obvious: End America’s unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive substances which has denied me my right to heal for a whole lifetime now! Freud was right: cocaine is a godsend for depression — but self-interested doctors focused only on downsides. No one cared about the millions who suffer in silence when such drugs are outlawed. As Crowley said of his first use of cocaine: “The depression lifted from my mind like the sun coming out of the clouds.”

FROM: Mike Males

NOTE: Hundreds of splashy “studies” claiming social media harms teenagers are flooding press and political forums. 99.9% are completely worthless.

RESPONSE: It’s just another manifestation of the Drug War mindset which tells us that one negative outcome is enough to justify new laws. The real question about these studies is, “Why did so many people NOT develop problems after using social media?” See my delightful essay entitled AI and Drugs to learn still more.

FROM: James Zech

NOTE: Genuine question for people who champion the psychedelic underground: Is there any set of laws that would make you happy enough to give up the underground altogether? Presumably, if the laws were perfectly in line with your own views, there’d be no reason to stay underground in the first place—so what would it look like?

RESPONSE: The psychedelic underground only exists because of drug prohibition. Drug prohibition exists because the media simply will not print stories about positive drug use, which, combined with fearmongering politicians and media, convinces Americans that drugs are evil. But saying “Drugs kill” is the philosophical equivalent of saying “Fire bad.” Both statements would have us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefits of humanity. As for psychedelics, William James himself encouraged us to use such substances to explore the nature of human consciousness. The filter theory of Bergson and Huxley shows how the west’s utilitarian “sober” consciousness is just one of many ways of perceiving the world. It is wrong to ignore or dismiss the importance of psychedelic states by associating them with a relatively unpopular demographic like the “hippies.” Yet I am the only philosopher who protested against the outlawing of laughing gas on behalf of academic freedom and the legacy of William James.

FROM: impoc

NOTE: Two-word solution to the hard problem of consciousness: drop physicalism.

RESPONSE: We don’t deserve to solve the problem of consciousness until we as academics have protested drug prohibition, which outlaws the research that William James encouraged us to undertake with respect to the topic. Kant presupposed a one-size-fits-all consciousness based on the strategically defined “sober” utilitarian mind of the westerner, but James discovered with his use of N2O that there are many kinds of consciousness. Yet I am the only philosopher who formally protested our FDA’s attempts to regulate laughing gas as a drug, thereby making it even less available than it already was on a practical basis to not only academics but to the severely depressed as well.

FROM: Eugene Lipov MD

NOTE: PTSD is not weakness. It is a nervous system that adapted to danger and never received the signal that it was safe to stand down. Understanding that changes everything about how we treat it.

RESPONSE: There are plenty of phenethylamines and tryptamines that can help those with PTSD. There are hundreds of drugs that we outlaw that have psychologically obvious uses for these conditions. But behaviorist psychiatrists and psychologists tacitly support the Drug War lie that outlawed substances can have no beneficial uses whatsoever. Americans have been brainwashed to the point where they would prefer that soldiers suffer from PTSD and that the elderly suffer from dementia rather than to treat them (or let them treat themselves!) with the brain-focusing drugs that we have been taught to despise. Cures and treatments come in second-place to our American religion of drug-hating. Our “experts” refuse to even point out that laughing gas has obvious uses for the suicidal. Drug propaganda has brought us to this sad prehistoric pass: that we now prefer death itself to the use of substances that we call “drugs.”

FROM: Julian Frazier, PhD

NOTE: The biggest lie that we were sold was that mental health and physical health are two different things.

RESPONSE: Holism is important, but the whole problem today is that we treat depression like a physical illness — and yet Mother Nature has created substances that can elate human beings in a trice! In a trice! As far as I can tell, every single psychologist and psychiatrist on Substack completely ignores this fact.

FROM: Aaron Balick

NOTE: Say what you want about Freud. He earned his keep with transference and projection alone.

RESPONSE: He earned his keep with the discovery that cocaine could end depression for most people. No one asked the depressed what they thought about the drug. Self-interested doctors decided to judge the drug only by its downsides, exactly as if they were to judge alcohol by studying only alcoholics. No one cared about the millions of depressed who would suffer unnecessarily and be turned into wards of the healthcare state by drug prohibition and shunted off onto “meds” that were harder to kick than heroin — people like myself.

Follow-up response after Aaron claimed that Freud never said that cocaine could end depression.

I disagree. Whether he actually said “end depression” is merely a technical point.

In “On Cocaine,” Freud wrote: “My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement...” But we outlawed cocaine to save me from “drugs”. The result? I am a 67-year-old who has to see a doctor one-third his age every three months of my life in order to get a refill on a “med” that he has found to be much harder to kick than heroin — after a year of self-paid hyperbolic reduction. Freud was ambitious. He moved onto psychoanalysis when he saw that cocaine was a nonstarter from the viewpoint of self-interested doctors. Besides, he was using the drug to help people who had obvious problems using drugs wisely. Whatever the background story, I would rather be dependent on a dealer’s drugs and be a man than to be dependent on the prescriptions of a condescending psychiatrist and be an eternal child. Sorry, but this is my life I’m writing about and I am so tired of all the experts seeing no benefits in obvious godsends — thanks, I guess, to the fact that the media will never show beneficial drug use. Mad in America will not erven publish my story. No one wants to mention “drugs” except in a negative light.

Aaron was kind enough to respond, saying that he had originally misread my comments as facetious....

Thanks, Aaron. I write with “skin in the game,” so I sometimes leave out important qualifiers, especially in discussion threads. The truth is certainly more complicated than “cocaine can end depression.” Even in a free world, that drug would be contraindicated in a variety of cases. However, I see drug prohibition as the outlawing of my right to heal. I have written hundreds of essays on these topics over the last seven years at abolishthedea.com. I have devoted my retirement years to the study of American drug attitudes from a philosophical point of view. I find that my views are so out of sync with the mainstream, that I always have to bear in mind the following advice from Alfred North Whitehead: “In the presentation of a novel outlook with wide ramifications, a single line of communications from premises to conclusions is not sufficient for intelligibility. Your audience will construe whatever you say into conformity with their pre-existing outlook.” Thanks again for taking the time to respond!

If one reads the rare accounts of cocaine use that slip through the sieve of drug prohibition censorship, one finds that its use does often end depression. Whether the risk is worth it in any given case is another question, but there is simply no doubt that the drug works for that purpose for many if not most people. It is from the divine plant of the Inca, after all. We “patients” get gaslighted by scientists when they tell us that real proof must be found at the molecular level and not in the real world of living human beings.

FROM: Based Psychiatrist

NOTE: A few short months ago, Taper Community didn’t exist. Now we have hundreds of people helping each other, and growing like crazy.

RESPONSE: I am a 67-year-old who has been on Big Pharma meds for a lifetime now. I found Effexor harder to kick than heroin after one year of hyperbolic tapering. It is my belief that all med-dependent “patients” should be protesting drug prohibition as the outlawing of their right to heal, rather than just trying to make withdrawal “work,” which is something that Big Pharma and psychiatrists should be working on in any case. As it is, Viatris Pharmaceuticals does not even offer a small-dose version of their Effexor for tapering purposes, nor does it allow compounding pharmacists to use the company’s extended-release formula when compounding the drug. Drug prohibition made the pill mill possible by outlawing all substances that inspire and elate, most of which can be used without causing dependency (Drug War propaganda notwithstanding). Sigmund Freud knew that cocaine was a godsend for most depressives, before self-interested doctors focused only on downsides, never bothering to ask the depressed how they felt about the drug. As Aleister Crowley said of his first use of cocaine: “The depression lifted from my mind like the sun coming out of the clouds.” Med-dependent Americans need to join together to fight drug prohibition and to hold it responsible for the fact that it has turned them into patients for life.

FROM: Westley Spiro MD

NOTE: Something I learned in medical school that truly shocked me. Alcohol isn’t just hard on your liver. It’s a Group 1 carcinogen, which is the same category as tobacco and asbestos.

RESPONSE: There are certainly dangers to alcohol. There are dangers to everything. We have to develop a holistic view of substances so that people can assess risks, not based on factoids taken outside of context, but based on their entire life story. This is why drug prohibition is so wrong. It makes a one-size-fits-all assumption about substances based on worst-possible cases, always with the assumption that death itself is preferable to treating things like depression with the psychoactive bounty of Mother Nature. Had indigenous people behaved as we do, they would have foresworn the entire pharmacopoeia of the rainforest.

FROM: Daniel Moseley

NOTE: Can we tell whether a severely depressed patient is competent to choose death?

RESPONSE: The propriety of assisted suicide cannot be discussed ethically without discussing the propriety of drug prohibition, which outlaws all the substances that can help make people wish to live. As Aleister Crowley said after his first use of cocaine: “The depression lifted from my mind like the sun coming out of the clouds.”

Daniel responded, saying he had written about ethical considerations. I read the revelant papers but found nothing about drug prohibition.

Thanks, Daniel.

I have written over a dozen essays on the topic of depressed Canadian Claire Brosseau and her attempts to qualify for assisted suicide.

https://www.abolishthedea.com/how_drug_prohibition_will_end

As a chronically depressed and med-dependent “patient for life,” I found that story bizarre. None of the principals in the case (as reported by Stephanie Nolen in the New York Times in December 2025) ever mentioned drug prohibition. None of them answered my emails on that topic. It seems that most psychiatrists and ethicists (and depressed people and health reporters) are simply unaware of the power of drugs to inspire and elate -- having grown up in a world in which the media will simply not publish reports of beneficial drug use. And yet Aleister Crowley said of his first use of cocaine: “The depression lifted from my mind like the sun coming out of the clouds.” Or consider the user reports of the phenethylamines created by American chemist Alexander Shulgin in the early 1990s: “I acknowledged rapture in the very act of breathing.” Claire herself tells us that she “loved” using illicit drugs. Even if we suppose that Claire was not susceptible to the bliss that others receive from psychoactive substances, surely we can all agree that strategic drug use could inspire her to the point that we can justifiably ask her to “buck up” with the help of informed drug use and live life like the rest of us westerners, a people who are popularly supposed to be living “lives of silent despair” in any case.

I write from the standpoint of a 67-year-old male who has been unnecessarily depressed his entire life because drug prohibition has denied me the use of godsend medicines. Opium has been considered a panacea since the time of Galen and yet Drug Warriors tell us that it has no beneficial uses whatsoever, at least not psychologically speaking, and yet the known effects are so surreal and inspiring that it is simply a shame that fearmongers have made us foreswear such drugs completely. In doing so, they have turned me into a patient for life. And now they offer folks like myself the option to commit suicide because of the very depression that they have helped create and foster? If I were to accept that option, I would be dying on the altar of the west’s unreasoning fear and hatred of psychoactive substances. In so doing, I would be helping to normalize the drug prohibition which has turned me into a ward of the healthcare state and destroyed the American legal system by throwing so many people in jail that the idea of a fair trial is no longer relevant, with 97% of cases being decided by plea deals. A plea deal comes about after the DA has successfully threatened the drug suspect with long jail terms if they insist on their right to a fair trial by a jury of their peers.

But I digress. I just will never understand how we can be talking about the propriety of assisted suicide for the depressed when we are not also talking about the propriety of drug prohibition. It seems that the state will let us use drugs to kill ourselves but it will not let us use drugs that might help make us wish to live.

And yet I am blocked from this discussion. I am told, in one way or another, to “shut up and take my meds.” Mad in America will not even publish my viewpoint. The “experts” on my emotions are behind academic paywalls, carrying on a discussion in which the uselessness and irrelevance of psychoactive substances is always assumed.

As for your fear of going back to a time before drug prohibition when all drugs were still legal, I urge you to bear in mind all the problems that substance prohibition causes which you do NOT see. Americans think drug prohibition works – but that is only because drug prohibition outsources drug-related problems to poor communities by creating incentives for desired substances, hence domestic gunfire and civil wars overseas. But there are victims of drug prohibition even in white suburbs. It’s just that they all suffer behind closed doors – and never fully appreciate life thanks to drug prohibition, which outlaws everything that actually works. But such people and such stories never make the evening news. But if one single young person misuses drugs – those people whom we have never taught safe use and for whom we have never regulated product – then we see whole documentaries (produced with the encouragement and help of the self-interested DEA) about the lives lost to drugs. It is just a bad joke designed to foster in the westerner the same disdain for the indigenous holistic mindset about drugs that Francisco Pizarro and his Conquistadors evinced toward the Inca’s use of coca.

I write as someone who has “skin in the game.” I have to see a doctor one-third my age every three months of my life to qualify for a refill on an underperforming and expensive “med” that I have found far harder to kick than heroin.

Finally, if assisted suicide really makes sense for Claire, then it makes sense for myself as well. This is why I have written to Claire, urging her to give up this fight for a “recherche” new right, a right that no one has had before in world history, and to fight instead for a right that everyone has always had before, until the west began its unprecedented campaign to outlaw Mother Nature’s psychoactive medicines wholesale. I have asked her to fight for her right to take care of her own health as she sees fit, and that means ending the unconstitutional outlawing of Mother Nature’s bounty.

I would add that drug prohibition is relevant to ALL discussions of assisted suicide and not just those about assisted suicide for the depressed. This is because the propriety of assisted suicide is thought to crucially depend on the ability of the patient to live a meaningful life, and that ability is in turn determined in large part by the patient’s mental outlook. A condition that may be unbearable to a sober individual or to one using underperforming Big Pharma meds may yet be bearable (perhaps even enjoyable) to one using a strategically selected regimen of the kinds of substances that Americans love to demonize a priori. I would submit that those who do not agree with that statement are either not familiar with the state-of-the-art in the fields of pharmacology and ethnobotany, or else they are insisting on molecular proof of efficacy instead of looking at how people actually respond to psychological incentives in the real world.

FROM: Dr. Roger McFillin

NOTE: Psychiatry should be more concerned with the gut than the brain.

RESPONSE: As a 67-year-old chronic depressive, I see such arguments as a sideshow, Dr. McFillin. The headline news for me is that psychiatrists have used drug prohibition to turn me into a patient for life with dependence-causing pills that are harder to kick than heroin. I feel besides that the focus on the gut is a “western” approach to medicine in the problematic sense of that word: we’re always looking for a smoking gun, out of context, whereas the problems of the human condition are created by the interaction of a vast array of inputs, many of which we can never be aware. Finally, we will never know how inherently depressed we westerners really are until we re-legalize the ever-growing list of substances that can inspire and elate, some of which have inspired the creation of entire religions, as the drinking of the Soma juice inspired the Vedic, and hence the Hindu, religion.

I was planning to write an essay on “The Politics of Ecstasy” by Timothy Leary today, citing numerous passages to show that the man was far more than a grandstander. I was also going to copy the contents of my satirical site called Partnership for a Death Free America to my Substack. God love me, I was even going to create an original newspaper-style crossword puzzle for you lot on the subject of America’s hateful drug attitudes. It would have done your heart good just to see it. But then I made the mistake of looking at my stats and the wind just went right out of my sails. Six subscribers. Six. They say that I should be posting notes, and before I know it, I’ll have subscribers up the wazoo on Substack. “Okay, fine,” I think to myself, “I’ll try to remain patient.” And yet post as I might, I can find almost no one online who seems to resonate with my position, namely, that we should use drugs as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.

I can find Libertarians who think that we have the right to drugs based on utilitarian grounds, and plenty of healthcare professionals and bestselling journalists who think that we need to get away from dependence-causing meds — yet no one but myself seems to be putting the two thoughts together, concluding that we need to get away from meds, not while becoming drug-scorning Christian Scientists, but while re-establishing the rights of human beings to access the natural medicines that grow at their very feet.

So I got distracted this morning. I began looking for ways to open a whole bunch of apparently very heavy eyelids. In addition to adding audio files to my essays, I was canvassing the possibility of turning those audio files into videos with the help of AI, under the theory that people who demur at reading philosophical treatises might yet deign to listen to them while being entertained with the bauble of a little whimsical eye candy from the Getty’s Images film archive. So I started experimenting with the audio-to-video app at the Pictory AI website — an activity which began hopefully enough, but I soon discovered that I lacked the motivation to really roll up my sleeves insofar as I was still obsessing about the non-result in the stats department.

Speaking of which, while researching Substack, I saw a teaser graphic for a YouTube tutorial with a big arrow pointing to the number 23, apparently as a subscriber total on the platform, and then featuring the words “What to do about this!” And I’m thinking to myself, “What do you mean, ‘What to do about this?’ I’m jealous of anyone who has as many as 23 Substack subscribers! The real question is, how does an apparent one-off like myself reach such a milestone in the first place? Let’s deal with first things first before we start talking about the 1,000-plus subscribers that the Substack influencers assure me anyone can garner in three months with the least bit of effort.

It’s not like I don’t have a niche. I know of literally no one else who is writing about my subjects of choice from my perspective, that of a med-dependent patient for life who is not willing to go gently into that good night without giving the medical establishment a good tongue-lashing for disempowering me in this way — for colluding with the inhumane policy of drug prohibition in order to deny me the right to heal. Someone connected with the medical field might have at least stood up in 1914 in Congress and said, “Whoa, fellas! It seems to me that, by outlawing erstwhile panaceas like opium and cocaine, we’re basically outlawing the right of people to heal! Am I right, gentlemen, or am I right?”

My first two weeks on this platform have been an eye-opener however. While searching for thematically similar Substacks, I realized for the first time how completely the “experts” today on mind and mood matters live in a world of make-believe, one in which drug prohibition and the substances that it outlaws simply do not exist. Almost everything that they say about the needs of the depressed might be correct enough in a world wherein there was literally no other biochemical option for those patients but Big Pharma meds, but when considered in the light of drug prohibition, the question is just begging to be asked: “Why are all of these endless well-paid professionals who claim to care so much about the depressed not protesting against drug prohibition on the grounds of their patients’ right to heal; indeed, on the grounds of their patients’ right not to BE patients in the first place?”

I would rather have people just peaceably show up here of their own accord, so to speak, after saying to themselves: “Oh, yes, you’re darn tootin’. I want the freedom to take care of my own health as well, and come to think of it, I am getting quite tired of seeing this ridiculously young doctor every three months of my life. In fact, do you know what? You GO, Brian. You go.” But if people aren’t going to show up willingly, I might have to start making some noise. I need to keep posting inconvenient questions in the many self-satisfied feeds about mental health on Substack, in which literally all of the credentialed pundits are reckoning without drug prohibition. I need to become a Socratic gadfly on the topic.

I’ve only been on the platform for two weeks and I’ve already got a list of mainstream psychologists whom I suspect are ghosting me on Substack, including Mark Horowitz, Neil Harper and Awais Aftab himself, a certified subscription superstar on Substack (which is highly annoying, by the way, that someone who reckons without drug prohibition can hold the healthcare community of our time in thrall like that). One pays a high price for committing the faux pas of bringing up drug prohibition in a discussion thread about mental health these days: one is kicked out of polite society. We patients are supposed to shut up and take our meds, after all — or at least to shut up. If anything can end our depression, trust them, the experts will be sure to tell us about it! We need to just return to our seats and pipe down, remembering that doctors know best when it comes to our mental and emotional needs.

One is reminded of the scene in “High Anxiety” when a mere patient (i.e., Mel Brooks) questions his psychiatrist’s call for a series of therapy sessions:

DR. THORNDYKE: But, Professor, is it really nece--

PROFESSOR LILLOMAN: It IS “nece”! I know what is “nece”! Don’t tell ME what’s “nece,” I tell YOU what’s “nece.”