March 29, 2020
The DEA's War on Alzheimer's Research
and how philosophers completely ignore the great philosophical problem of our times
Funny how we all come to regret some basic decisions in our lives. Take me, for instance. I am just a trifle galled by the fact that I did not become a board-certified philosopher in my 30s when I had that chance, because now, everything that I write on the subject of drugs is merely my opinion, (lil ol' me, one among billions), and so my thoughts on these topics are just as easily ignored as the next fellow's insane musings. That said, I will maintain until my dying day that philosophy, (to the extent that it's currently staring at its board-certified navel, wondering if reality even exists -- and here I will mercifully refrain from naming such over-rationalizing offenders as Daniel Dennett and Donald Hoffman), is studiously ignoring the great philosophical problem of our times: the way that humanity has created a problem out of linguistic whole cloth merely by referring to natural godsends pejoratively as "drugs," beginning round about 1914 when the Harrison Narcotics Act decided that the root of substance abuse was to be found, not in human behavior, amoral capitalism and social arrangements, but rather in PLANTS, the very plants that surround us, thus turning nature overnight into a great temptress rather than a great healer.
Since then, a faux morality has arisen under the battle cry of "Just say no to drugs!" -- which is clearly a political statement, since nobody ever means that statement literally (given its implied exemption for alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, Valium, and anti-depressants, etc.) : hence that statement always means: "Just say no to those substances that have been politically determined to be bad for you and which we are not allowed to study because they are too evil to even touch!"
The use of the word "drugs" these days is so loaded with false and dubious presuppositions that you'd think philosophers would have a field day ending the drug war, not with the usual statistical arguments, but by appealing to first principles, beginning with the absurdity of outlawing mother nature's plants.
Instead, they're musing about whether any of us really exist, whether we're not all victims of a Matrix conspiracy, one so clever that it actually made Martin Luther King seem like a hero to us back in the '60s when he may have well been a mere holographic projection of some great hidden alien manipulator who got a kick out of forcing us puppets to become passionate and compassionate about mere mirages. (Yeah, right.)
Just when the world needs philosophy the most, the philosophers have literally gone mad, and modern science along with it. (Even the seemingly sensible Neil deGrasse Tyson has asserted that we humans may well be mere data points that are being manipulated by some God-like computer programmer, and if that's what the sensible scientists are thinking, heaven shield us from the irrational ones.)
Some readers (assuming this stuff is eventually read, if only decades from now) might say that "drugs" are a parochial issue, since many folks get along just fine using only the politically approved substances available to us, but this is wrong. The drug war has devastating effects on everybody's health, no matter how determined a particular individual may be to avoid illegal substances.
Take Alzheimer's disease. One would assume that everyone, including the government, is in a hurry to defeat that scourge.
Wrong. The DEA has outlawed the mere research of a whole class of drugs (namely psychedelics) which show the power to regenerate memory and facilitate -- if not actually cause -- the growth of new neurons. In a sane world, these tantalizing hints would be followed up with a huge government investment in research in order to glean the therapeutic benefits of this new discovery.
But the scientistic drug war logic has so blinded us to our own interests that we knowingly prevent this vital research, merely because it would involve the free use of substances that politicians have decided to demonize and ban.
This situation won't change until philosophers stop counting aliens on pinheads and finally take up the task of unveiling the illogical and disingenuous premises behind America's imperial drug war, which it maintains worldwide on threat of invasion. Is a country leaning toward socialist policies of which America disapproves? No problem. Let's invade in order to topple a "narcoterrorist." Is an eastern country growing plants that pose a threat to the liquor industry? No problem. Cut off their aid until they let us come in and burn their plants.
America is just plain screwed by the drug war, and American authors are self-censoring. Thus folks write whole books about the depression problem -- entirely ignoring the role that the drug war plays in limiting our emotionally therapeutic arsenal to a handful of addictive Big Pharma meds. Thus folks write whole books about relaxation techniques, totally ignoring the fact that the drug war outlaws all substances that could help us understand and adopt the kind of peaceful mindset that the authors are promoting.
I could go on and on -- were it not for the fact that I failed to get the above-mentioned philosophy certifications 30 years ago and thus have to go back to my day job even as we speak.
But I hope someone digs up this post after I'm gone and does me the favor of recognizing that America is on the wrong politically motivated track -- and that philosophers need to wake up and take notice: not for vague libertarian reasons but for the health of world democracy and ourselves when we grow old -- when, God forbid, we ourselves suffer from the Alzheimer's curse for which our very own perverse drug war premises have prevented us from finding cures.
Who is responsible for the 24/7 moaning of millions of elderly Americans in nursing homes?
The DEA and the Drug War, based on the mind set that outlawed opium in 1914, so that now only outlaws have opium. The depressed elderly must make do with psychiatry's highly addictive and less helpful drug alternatives. Scientific materialists are terrified lest they give the elderly good dreams for a change. (Humph! How very unscientific. Let them suffer instead!)
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March 26, 2020
Music Appreciation Class in the Year 2120
If there’s one thing that the drug warrior (and psychiatry) steadfastly ignores, it is the power of many criminalized substances to sharpen the mind and increase appreciation of the world around us. That’s why Thomas De Quincey indulged before visiting the opera, not in order to “party down” but rather to delightedly devote his full mental capacities to the orchestra; that’s why Edgar Allan Poe’s Augustus Bedloe indulged before exploring mother nature, not to “get high” according to the drug warrior’s vulgar definition of that term, but to be sure that he delighted in each and every botanical wonder that came before his eyes, rather than stumbling through a world of vague greenery, which is all that generally registers in the blurry eye of the hurried “ennuye man of the world,” as Poe would have put it.This pharmacological propensity of Mother Nature’s plant medicine is often so pronounced, in fact, that I believe we can look forward to a day in which society sanctions the strategic use of such substances for the express purpose of bringing about such otherwise elusive goals as “music appreciation,” even in subjects for whom a minuet by Bach (let alone a concert by Mahler) might have hitherto sounded like a mere cacophony of seemingly purposeless audio waves.
The only thing stopping us from employing such pedagogical strategy (other than drug law, of course) is the unexamined notion that there is something wrong with using Mother Nature’s plants to improve our cognition and enjoyment of the world around us. This belief, however, is nothing but a matter of Christian Science faith on the part of the drug warrior. There is, in fact, no rational reason why human beings should forego the benefits of Mother Nature’s pharmacy. We certainly do not adopt that prejudice when it comes to physical health; to say that we should employ it in the realms of mental health and human consciousness is mere Christian Science prejudice.
Here’s where the hypocritical drug warrior will wring his or her hands about the supposed potential for addiction in such a scheme, failing to notice that America is already the most addicted country in the world, not because of opium and magic mushrooms but because of the daily prescription of anti-depressants to more than one-tenth of America’s population, some of which “medicine” has a recidivism rate equal to that of heroin.
Despite drug war hysteria to the contrary, the fact is that opium and cocaine are not addictive when used in moderation, whereas modern antidepressants are addictive (or cause chemical dependence) EVEN WHEN THEY ARE USED AS DIRECTED. Besides, the most powerful music appreciation drug of all is probably a psychedelic substance, and psychedelics are about the least addictive drugs of them all. At any rate, the pedagogical utopia of which I write presupposes a world in which we’ve exchanged the Drug Enforcement Agency with the Drug EDUCATION Agency, an organization that presents only statistical facts about substance-use outcomes for every psychoactive substance in the world – including alcohol and anti-depressants, along with a list of not only the potential drawbacks of these substances, but their potential benefits as well.
Once America stops enforcing Christian Science sharia, music appreciation class will finally truly be music APPRECIATION class.
From the movie VWF (2019), about a vicious opioid gang (man speaking on talk show): "The cops can't do any more. There's not enough of them."
Law enforcement has done too much already. By outlawing plant medicines (many of them non-addictive or far less addictive than synthetics), they have created the very crisis that we're now asking them to fix! Meanwhile, their drug-war propaganda, full of half-truths and lacking crucial caveats, has served to obscure the true dangers of highly addictive synthetic drugs. But the caller to this talk show wants the police to make things worse by locking up as many people as possible.
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March 20, 2020
Virus Update
Keeping track of the dreaded Drug War Virus
Just a quick message to let our readership know that we are doing everything we can to fight the drug war virus. The first and most important step is to recognize the symptoms of an infected person:1) Pathological obstinacy. Those infected with the Drug War Virus stubbornly fail to recognize that criminalizing medicinal plants is the unconstitutional enforcement of Christian Science with respect to psychological healing.
2) Selective amnesia. Infected persons conveniently "forget" that Mother Nature's plants and fungi are the birth right of every human being under the natural law to which the American Declaration appealed in arguing against British injustice.
3) Logical confusion. The infected person also fails to realize that all the problems of drug abuse are either directly brought about or greatly exacerbated by the Drug War itself.
What can you do?
The key is to practice social distancing. Keep at least 6 feet away from every known or suspected drug warrior and their specious arguments. In so doing, you will underscore your contempt for the shoddy reasoning and fascist tendencies apparent in every carrier of the Drug War virus.
By means of this drug[LSD], people can view themselves objectively and can then accept themselves which is a great step forward in the care of mental illness.
Dr. Kahan, Executive Director Mental Health Saskatchewan, The Leader-Post, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, July 20, 1961
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March 19, 2020
The Totally Unspoken Truth About Drugs
America (and hence the world) will never understand substance use until it grasps the following so-far unacknowledged truths:Besides being used in order to secure what the puritan drug warrior would call "a cheap high," many of the substances that we love to hate can be (have been and will be) used for:
- experiencing religious transcendence
- gaining creative inspiration
- gaining motivation
This is all common sense that not only the drug warrior but modern psychology largely ignore, preferring instead to classify illegal drug use as drug abuse and therefore conveniently ascribing it to disease in the DSM manual and so not having to deal with the philosophical motivations of such use. In fact, according to popular wisdom, a personality becomes pathologically addictive precisely to the extent that they manifest a desire for the above outcomes through their substance use.
This is all drug war folly however that does not stand up to the least bit of philosophical scrutiny. Early Vedic religion was founded to celebrate the religious transcendence afforded by a psychoactive plant or fungi. Meanwhile forbidden psychoactive plants have fostered creative visions that led to the discovery of DNA and the authorship of classic literature. As for motivation, Freud was what today's puritan drug warrior would have called a "drug fiend," but it is mere Christian Science faith to suppose that his enormous vocational output would have been passed down to posterity without his frequent use of cocaine.
Psychiatry is doubly hypocritical in ignoring the philosophical ramifications of this latter case, since it begs the question: If Freud successfully combated his own self-limiting demons using the real politik of cocaine, why should his patients be forced to rely on theoretical cures and the starkly limited pharmacopeia of the drug war?
Why is it crucial that America recognize the above-noted reasons for so-called "drug use"? Because only then will it be clear that the vicious DEA crackdown on mere possession of substances is far more than a crackdown on juvenile delinquents and other "undesirables": it is a crackdown on consciousness, transcendence, artistic possibility, and spirituality in the deepest sense of those words. It is a limitation not simply on thought, but on the very way that we are allowed to think. It is the Christian Science celebration of "sobriety" as the ultimate good, a religious stance which, like any religious stance, should be tolerated in a free country but never, as in drug warrior America, made the law of the land. "Sobriety" itself is a philosophically fraught word, of course: we are all influenced by chemicals -- the sober individual is simply he or she who has the default chemicals in their system, including in America's case plenty of caffeine, both in coffee and in the rabidly marketed pep pills of 21st century America. So even our use of the word "sobriety" is hypocritical, for it shelters the drugs of caffeine, tobacco, alcohol (and indeed Big Pharma anti-depressants) under its linguistic wing thus shielding their use from the otherwise meticulous moral scrutiny of the hypocritical drug warrior.
By ignoring the above truths, we allow for a world full of unnecessary suffering: the depressed elderly moaning to themselves in homes for the elderly, the suicide who died for want of the motivation that a mere plant could have afforded but which we denied him in our self-righteous Christian Science callousness, the would-be artist whom we have shackled in their own emotional self-doubt by superstitiously denying them the motivating plant-medicine that, until 1914, had been that individual's birth right under natural law merely for having been born on planet earth.
For the past half-century the American people have engaged in one of the most ruthless wars-- fought under the colors of drugs and doctors, diseases and treatments-- that the world has ever seen.
Ceremonial Chemistry: The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. Thomas Szasz.
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March 14, 2020
Alternative Medicine as a Drug War Creation
a philosophical review of The Quantum Doctor by Amit Goswami
In "The Quantum Doctor
, Amit Goswami discusses the different uses of so-called alternative (or "integral") medicine versus allopathic medicine, in an effort to claim that each has its proper place in the medical world. What he fails to point out, however, is that this distinction between homeopathy and allopathy is really a creation of two related forces: the drug war and capitalism, and is not fundamentally a result of differing medical views. If there are different medical ideologies at play here, they themselves were fostered, if not created, by the drug war (its stark limitations on what may be legally prescribed) and capitalist practice (the need to find one-size-fits-all cures that will be most profitable to the doctor and pharmaceutical companies that provide them).Amit Goswami, for all his valuable insights, makes the mistake of almost every other author when it comes to discussing these subjects: he ignores the role of the drug war in influencing the "facts on the ground," writing as if the American healthcare system existed on a level playing field when it comes to deciding what sorts of medical treatment we should value and pursue. The fact is that literally all of the most powerful and efficacious "mood medicines" of Mother Nature have been outlawed by the drug war, so that we can only guess what sorts of treatment Americans would choose if they were actually given the freedom to make such a choice.
Amit's goal seems to be to promote "alternative" therapies in a way that will not be a turn-off to allopathic doctors, by saying that each treatment style (homeopathy and allopathy) has its usefulness. A better approach would be to argue for complete medical freedom via the abolition of drug-war restrictions, after which a doctor will be encouraged to use all possible approaches, without attempting to recognize or draw a sharp line between the medicines based on the philosophical systems that their use seems (to us at least) to presuppose. As Amit himself points out, some allopathic drugs function homeopathically (in preventing illness). Amit, however, claims that "alternative" therapies do not function rapidly -- but, again, he is reckoning here without the drug war. The fact is that many natural (alternative) "mood medicines" DO function rapidly. The problem is that they are illegal and simply cannot be used.
"With LSD as an aid," the report said, "it has been possible to reach and work with patients who are otherwise unresponsive to psychotherapy."
Kingsport News, March 4, 1960
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March 4, 2020
Surprise Drug Test!
No sharing answers -- or urine!
Hup! Stay right where you are. This site is implementing a surprise drug test on all site visitors.Hey, zip your zippers back up, guys! My word! This is not THAT kind of drug test -- though I see that the Drug War has already conditioned you folks to submit meekly to the unConstitutional demands of America's Christian Science Sharia, according to which no one is allowed transcendence except through alcohol, with Mother Nature's plants being completely off-limits for that purpose.
Have a seat, and please use a number two pencil -- or a mouse. Whatever.
1) I only have a true right to the plants that government has decided are politically acceptable for personal use. True or false?
2) The drug war is flawed because it can't work. True or false?
3) Opium is a drug from hell and should be eradicated at all cost. True or false?
4) Cocaine is evil because it is associated with murder, money laundering, and inner-city violence. True or false?
[five minutes later]
I see several of you are still furiously scribbling -- which is odd, first because this is not an essay test and second because you should probably be using your mouse, not your pencil.
Those of you who are finished should put your heads down on your desk top, just like in grade school.
Psych! Not really. I'm just seeing how far you guys will abase yourselves, given the fact that 99% of you would gladly give your urine to faceless corporations for them to verify that you have been a patriotic American and forsworn Mother Nature's medical bounty entirely.
Mind you, I can't blame you, since American Sharia states that you either submit to that body check or you starve, insofar as you are pushed out of the drug-testing work environment. Drug testing, indeed. Let's see them start testing to see if anyone drank alcohol in the last month. That would be REAL drug testing. Everything else is just Anheuser Busch's way of cornering the market on providing human transcendence.
Now, where was I? Oh, yes. STOP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Jimmy, will you collect the papers, please? And zip your fly up while you're at it. For Chrissakes!
OK, here are the answers:
1) I only have a true right to the plants that government has decided are politically acceptable for personal use. True or false?
The answer is false. Our access to (and use of) plants is guaranteed by natural law, by no less an authority than John Locke. Common law (and what law is more common than the drug law) cannot justifiably rescind our right to access and use Mother Nature's plant medicines.
2) The drug war is flawed because it can't work. True or false?
False! The drug war is a violation of natural law. It is the institution of Christian Science sharia in the States and Drug War colonialism abroad. It doesn't matter whether it could "work" -- the point is that it should not and must not work. The miracle powers of mother nature's medicines are not something government has a right to dole out or withhold based on political considerations. When they try to do so, they create a violent black market and run roughshod over the rights of ancient civilizations and cultures, forcing them to turn to alcohol rather than the moderate time-honored use of opium and the coca plant. That colonialism must not succeed. The drug war is flawed, root and branch.
3) Opium is a drug from hell and should be eradicated at all cost. True or false?
False. Opium has been used in moderation by cultures for millennia. When the upstart US travels abroad to eradicate the opium poppy, they are simply forcing other countries to accept alcohol as the drug of choice. Likewise, when the DEA stomps onto Monticello in jackboots and steals Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants, they are simply insisting on the supremacy of alcohol as the one and only allowable drug of transcendence in the United States -- a shabby vomit-inducing substance when compared to the moderate use of the substances which we have decided to hate as a matter of political policy.
4) Cocaine is evil because it is associated with murder, money laundering, and inner-city violence. True or false?
False. Yes, cocaine is associated with murder, money laundering and inner-city violence, but why this connection? Answer: Because of the drug war, which creates a violent black market, as do any laws that forbid the use of a popular and prevalent substance. Was the coca plant the plant from hell when it helped Sigmund Freud attain self-fulfillment in life through incessant work? Is it a plant from hell when used ritually in South America? No, coca is from hell only in the minds of the Drug Warrior who thinks that any drug comes from hell if it dares to compete with alcohol when it comes to providing human beings with relaxation and self-transcendence.
Score Your Results
1 wrong: You are bamboozled by the drug war. Your punishment? Read Ceremonial Chemistry by Thomas Szasz.
. It should clear your head of the remaining illogical cobwebs spun there by the hyperactive spider of drug war propaganda.2 wrong: You are really confused, my child. Your penance is to read not only Ceremonial Chemistry by Thomas Szasz.
but at least one other book from the Anti-DEA bookstore here at abolishthedea.com.3 wrong: The bad news is, you have been totally bamboozled by drug war propaganda. The good news is, I've got some swamp land in New Jersey for you that I can pass on at a bargain price! Meanwhile, for your punishment, buy and read at least THREE books from the Anti-DEA bookstore here at abolishthedea.com.
4 wrong: Your name wouldn't happen to be Jesse Jackson, Sr., would it? No? How about Donald Trump? Because it's hard to know who is more screwed up by Drug War prejudice these days, the left or the right. Your punishment... Oh, never mind, you're hopeless, I'm afraid. Unless you really WANT to change, in which case I plead with you to buy and read at least FOUR (count 'em, FOUR) books from the Anti-DEA bookstore here at abolishthedea.com.
By the way, if you got them all right, congratulations! Please get in touch with me and tell me so, because I'd love to hear that I'm not the last man on earth that understands these things, now that the clear-eyed but shamefully ignored Thomas Szazs is no longer with us. If you don't think that Thomas Szazs' insights are shamefully ignored, just read pretty much any article in the mainstream (or, indeed, even fringe) media on the subject of the drug war. Every single one of them that I've read is in the thrall of one or more of the kind of nonsensical drug-war assumptions highlighted above. It's not just that they don't agree with Szasz, it's that they never even bother to address his many cogent points, let alone refute them, so convinced are they of one or more of the tacit assumptions held dear by the good old-fashioned patriotic drug warrior of 21st-century America.
What Have We Learned
It's amazing how many of my students get question number two wrong, even though they consider themselves to be solid foes of the drug war.
But the fact is that any time I hear or read someone say "The Drug War isn't working," I know that they, too, have been bamboozled by drug war propaganda.
Why, I want to ask them, SHOULD the drug war be allowed to work? That's the question.
The Drug War is an instance of the common law trumping the natural law, which should be constitutionally impossible in America. For what could be more patently obvious than that the products of Mother Nature are mine solely by dint of my having been born on planet Earth? Thus the Drug War must be opposed on first principles, without regard to its supposed efficacy in fighting a politically established whipping horse such as "drug abuse." Once we grant that government may legitimately allow or withhold access to the various plants and fungi of the world, we have already surrendered to the drug warrior ideology whereby government allows or forbids personal transcendence at will.
Why do so many otherwise sensible freedom advocates make this mistake? It's because they are under the thrall of another bit of drug war propaganda according to which natural plant medicines (such as opium, coca, and psychedelics) can have no possible use except in supplying a hedonistic "high" for morally challenged individuals.
The obvious response to this complaint, were it true, should be so what? These are still plant substances and it is not in your power to prevent me from using them in a country that is founded on natural law. Yes, you can punish me if I endanger others, but in that case you must punish me for that endangerment, not for the pre-crime offense of using plants.
But, in fact, the drug warrior is missing a whole realm of drug use which has nothing to do with hedonism: that use in which a person enters a mind-expanded state in order to improve performance (as in the case of Sigmund Freud) or to become more creative (as in the case of Poe and Lovecraft) or to commune with deity (as in the case of Native Americans and soma-worshipping Indians) or simply to lead a happy life while making others happy (as in the case of Robin Williams or Benjamin Franklin). Besides, even when substance use presents all the outward signs of a hedonistic practice, it yet provides the user with a relaxing break from pressing mortal concerns, and this relaxation can have demonstrably therapeutic results (lower blood pressure, the happiness that naturally arises in anticipation of achieving such occasional blissful states). It doesn't help matters that psychology itself typically ignores these benefits of illegal substances, insisting with the Drug Warrior that our bio-pharmacological whipping boys can have nothing but negative effects for the user.
Unfortunately, many (indeed most) enemies of the drug war commit this same mistake, insofar as they often argue as follows: "Yes, illegal drug use is irresponsible and regrettable, but it's going to happen anyway, so let's allow it."
It’s tepid arguments like this that allow the drug warrior to get on a moral high horse, travel abroad, and, in an act of breathtaking imperialism, unilaterally outlaw plant medicines that compete with alcohol, where substances like coca and opium have been used responsibly for millennia, often in religious and ceremonial ways. We simply say, “Drink our alcohol instead,” and threaten to punish countries militarily and/or financially should they demur.
How do we live with ourselves after committing these colonialist outrages? We tell ourselves that the substances we have banned are not good for human beings, never questioning why we should be making that determination for the entire world (in the face of millennia of history that says otherwise), especially since our actions represent the de facto promotion of liquor as the one-and-only go-to drug for achieving release and transcendence – a shabby drug whose truly hedonistic use is routinely associated with vomiting, blackout and headaches – to be contrasted starkly with the personal insight and self-awareness that the judicious use of many outlawed plants has been shown to foster.
Why don’t even drug war opponents get this? Because they’re in thrall to the drug war notion that the mere use of illegal substances constitutes, in and of itself, “drug abuse.”
To those who think that they are somehow saving the world from addiction, please wake up. America is the most addicted country in the world, with well over 1 in 10 Americans a bounden slave to anti-depressants, some of which have a relapse rate identical to heroin, to say nothing of America's thousands of alcoholics. Which reminds us of the hypocrisy of the drug warrior, who sees alcoholism as a personal weakness or disease and considers psychiatric medicine to be scientific and thus beyond reproach. But if one has a problem with any other substance, then it is suddenly the fault of the substance, not the individual.
And so society portrays liquor use as perfectly fine if done responsibly, while ahistorically insisting that there is no such thing as responsible use of substances that our politicians have decided to ban.
"Surely it is difficult to evade the conclusion that the use of alcohol and the use of tobacco have become deeply ingrained habits in Christian and English-speaking countries, and that we therefore consider these substances good; and that, because the use of marijuana (hashish) and the use of opium are pagan and foreign habits, we consider those substances bad."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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March 3, 2020
Drug Warriors Fiddle while Rome Gets Nuked
If beer-swilling Drug Warriors are fidgety and want to dedicate themselves to a cause other than drug war colonialism and the overthrow of natural law in America, they might consider channelling their hypocritical hyperactivity toward the worthy goal of preventing nuclear winter. Readers familiar with Ellsberg’s “Doomsday Machine” and Schlosser’s “Command and Control” know that we are sitting on a time bomb thanks to the proliferation of thermonuclear weapons – weapons for which the Hiroshima A-bomb is simply a fuse. Yet, somehow the big enemies today are all of mother nature’s godsend plants. (Huh?)
In short, our priorities are about as wrong as they can be. We ignore one ginormous problem in order to focus on a problem of our own making: namely, the violence and unrest that naturally results from outlawing naturally occurring substances (not to mention the needless suffering of billions of mortals, forced to go without medicines that have emotionally solaced humanity for millennia).
Have you ever heard of the Damascus Incident, that nearly blew up Arkansas and irradiated a third of the country? How about the nuclear bomb that landed on Goldsboro, North Carolina and miraculously failed to detonate?
An intelligent people would be grateful for these narrow escapes and demonstrate that gratitude by implementing major reforms, the exact same reforms that would have been demanded by an outraged public had either of these potential catastrophes actually taken place: reforms involving the end of nuclear proliferation with the goal of outlawing such weapons universally. If America needs to flex its muscles overseas, this would give it a chance to do so in a moral cause, rather than in the colonialist folly of telling other countries which plants they are allowed to consume.
Yet America’s Congress and its military have conspired to hush up the fact that we are living on borrowed time. Meanwhile, they distract us with a Quixotic scheme to prevent the use of any plant substance that poses a threat to liquor distributors.
Ironically, I believe that nature’s psychoactive plants, far from being our enemies, are the only hope for humankind. I know that a number of old-school psychedelic enthusiasts now consider themselves to have been naïve for positing that LSD and such could bring about world peace. But I say to them, not so fast. How can we pronounce on the merits of an enterprise that drug-law has thus far forbidden us to meaningfully undertake? That LSD is not an answer in itself I can readily grant. But there are thousands of psychoactive plants out there, many of which could (especially in the proper “set and setting”) restore to the human creature the ability to feel deep empathy for its fellows.*
Far from banning such research, we should be fast-tracking and encouraging it, with a goal of nothing less than saving the human race from its own other-hating disposition.
For, given the dicey “situation on the ground” right now viz nukes, I believe our only real hope is to pharmacologically alter human beings such that they all feel a deep natural empathy for each other. And there is every reason to believe that plant medicines, wisely chosen and wisely employed, can go far in accomplishing this task. When a human being is sick, you give it medicine; likewise when an entire species is sick.
I ask those who demur to suggest a more promising strategy to get humanity out of this booby-trapped world that we’ve created for ourselves.
For me, at least, the cliché is proving itself to be true: “All you need is love.” That’s truly all the human species needs to survive. What we’ve failed to realize, however, is that this love is not optional. Without sincere inner love for each other, the human race’s days are numbered. And anyone who thinks that this love can be brought about without the help of mother nature’s medicines is even madder than the normal human crackpot. Nor is there any reason to reject the freely offered help of mother nature in this regard, unless, like the drug warrior, we have a Christian Science disdain for the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet.
In which case, I ask the drug warrior to look at all of the trembling, inexperienced, lackadaisical and grumpy fingers on the nuclear buttons these days and ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do you, punk?
*Of course, you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. Check out this article entitled "What Would Happen If Everyone Truly Believed Everything Is One," by Scott Barry Kaufman in Scientific American.
Who barged on to Jefferson's Monticello and destroyed Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants? 1) The Mob 2) Juvenile delinquents 3) Terrorists 4) The DEA
The DEA
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March 3, 2020
Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser
author of 'The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous'
Gabrielle,I hope you’re open to the following honest criticism about an excellent article that you wrote for the Atlantic entitled “The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous.”
Yours Sincerely,
Brian Quass
abolishthedea.com
Like almost every other writer on the topic of addiction, you write as if we are living in a free country as far as scientific research is concerned and that we can therefore draw adequate generalizations from the status quo. To the contrary, we live under a drug-war sharia that strictly outlaws almost all research of psychoactive drugs, many of which could work wonders with alcoholics and other addicts. Although you don’t mention this, Bill Wilson himself had great initial success in treating alcoholics with LSD. It was not science that stopped such treatment, but rather politics, when Richard Nixon decided to launch a war on Timothy Leary and hippies by outlawing their drugs of choice, namely psychedelics. And US-inspired drug law remains as anti-patient as ever, as therapist Gabor Mate was recently forced to stop his promising treatment of Canadian alcoholics with the entheogenic concoction known as ayahuasca.
So if AA is ineffective -- as I would definitely agree – it is as much the drug war’s fault as it is that of Bill Wilson and his theories.
Given the existence of the unscientifically motivated drug war, it may well be true that Naltrexone is a relative godsend for alcoholics. That said, this is a huge “given.” We should remember that we are choosing from a starkly limited pharmacopeia when we make that choice. There are thousands of potential psychoactive godsends out there that we are forbidden from studying, notwithstanding our pretensions at being a scientific country. By failing to acknowledge this outrage, we may be giving far more kudos to Naltrexone than it deserves. How good is it, you ask? How can we know until we compare it to the thousands of other potential therapies that we have chosen to ignore? It may well be the best thing currently “going” for alcoholics, and for that I yield to the experts – while yet pointing out that there really are no experts on addiction treatment per se since the drug war has essentially placed all the potentially valuable therapeutic substances off-limits, not merely to individuals but to addiction researchers as well. No surprise there. We’d have just as few aviation experts today if the only legally available planes were gliders.
Also there is a real irony in the use of Naltrexone to block the action of opiates, at least when used in a drug warrior country such as the USA. By waging drug-war colonialism, we have sent our military abroad to destroy opium crops that have been used in moderation in the east for millennia, forcing other countries to turn to the western drug called alcohol to achieve, in general, a far uglier form of self-transcendence and relaxation than that supplied by the judicious poppy user. Not content to destroy the poppy in the East (always against the will of the local people, who have no say in the matter), we now seek out a drug that will obviate the poppy’s effects, thus ensuring the prosperity of American Big Liquor for centuries to come. This is fundamentally a racist and anti-scientific war on the poppy, one which dogmatically recognizes only evil in the plant, failing to acknowledge its role in providing human transcendence over the ages – a viewpoint that keeps Anheuser Busch heirs smiling on their way to the bank (just as they were no doubt smiling when the DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1985 to steal Thomas Jefferson’s poppy plants).
This brings me to the other problem with the Naltrexone approach, namely that it is all stick and no carrot. Yes, the substance helps to destroy the addiction but it also gets rid of the transcendence which the addict was seeking in the first place. Psychedelics, on the other hand, work by actually providing the sought-after transcendent experience and it is that very transcendent experience from which the psychedelic user often emerges with new insights into their earthly condition and a new mental flexibility in dealing with their drinking problem.
One other bone to pick: I would ask you to question your apparently strong faith in science, at least as practiced in the States.
It is the alleged “scientific” approach to psychiatry that has led to the great but unacknowledged addiction of the American people, in which 1 in 8 Americans are now chemically dependent on antidepressants, all under the discredited theory (promulgated by a full-court media press by academic talking heads under the pay of Big Pharma) that these substances fix a chemical imbalance. As Roger Whitaker demonstrates, however (in “Anatomy of an Epidemic”), this is pseudoscience, not science. These antidepressants (SSRIs and SNRIs) have been shown to CAUSE the imbalances that they purport to fix. They certainly don’t work for me after decades of use, and I am now forced to take Effexor the rest of my life against my will – Effexor, a drug that has a relapse rate just as high as heroin.
But I’ve yet to hear of one single addiction “specialist” wringing their hands on my behalf, or on behalf of the tens of thousands of unacknowledged antidepressant addicts actively cursing modern psychiatry online even as I speak – cursing it for one’s loss of empowerment, one’s unsought-for life-time role as an “eternal patient,” having to apply to a doctor for their monthly fixes. (Part of the professional silence is based on the convenient myth that there’s a meaningful difference between addiction and chemical dependency. Tell that to an Effexor addict after he or she has gone cold turkey for three days.)
Since psychiatry has no problem with thus addicting users like myself -- and to ineffective medicines at that – they have no leg to stand on in warning me that I might become chemically dependent upon, say, opium, should I be given the same legal access to that drug that I would have had in 1913, and they have even less standing in remonstrating against my use of totally non-addictive psychedelics. If such drugs are not even considered for treating alcoholism it is thus merely for political reasons, not scientific ones. So let’s not write so as to imply that these therapies have somehow been tried and found wanting, when in reality such therapies remain unthinkable to Western researchers under the thrall of drug war propaganda.
CONCLUSION: I believe we have no right to opine on the relative insolubility of addiction problems until we have re-legalized Mother Nature’s medicines. Until then, any conclusions we reach on this topic should be followed by a huge footnote, both for the patient’s benefit and by way of protest, stating that the addiction problem, for aught we know, could turn out to be far more soluble than we currently suppose, once the United States finally renounces its anti-patient drug war, along with its efforts to enforce that war worldwide by way of the financial blackmail of its friends and foes alike.
The fact that a contemporary American's, and especially physician's, advocacy of tolerance with respect to drugs is generally viewed as an endorsement or support of undisciplined licentiousness in the use of "dangerous drugs" signifies that we are now at the height of an "anti-narcotic" inquisition.
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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March 2, 2020
The Myth of the Addictive Personality
When I was a teenager, I was always begging the field of psychiatry to do more. It seemed to me that there must be so many medicines out there, surely something would set my mind straight.The result of my naivete? I was promptly pronounced "an addictive personality."
I've now had 40 years to think about that diagnosis and I call bull crap.
Imagine a field like psychiatry, that limits itself to prescribing a handful of addictive medicines, suspicious of anyone who dares hanker for more. That hankering is, in reality, utterly sensible.
Suppose you walk into a jewelry store and they have only one kind of diamond. You ask for other kinds of diamonds and they label you ungrateful and greedy. That's what psychiatry does when someone dares to allude to a larger pharmacopeia that psychiatry has dogmatically forsworn, whether in conformance with drug law, scientism, and/or the interests of the pharmaceutical companies that crank out the starkly limited formulary of politically acceptable mood medicines.
How dare I want to pick and choose from among the thousands of rain forest godsends. Why can't I just go along with the modest medicine cabinet of addictive substances that chemists have created to narrow down our choices to a nice politically acceptable roster?
Of course, the true irony of this state of affairs becomes plain when we consider that well over 1 in 10 Americans are addicted to modern-day antidepressants, some of which (such as Effexor) have a recidivism rate every bit as high as heroin. So psychiatry may have a problem with SOMETHING, but it's clearly not with addiction (even though they'll mince words to insist that chemical dependency somehow doesn't really count as addiction; be that as it may, I, for one, will be on Effexor for the rest of my life, and against my will).
The so-called addictive personality is actually "on to something." They realize that there's a vast pharmacopeia out there and they want psychiatry to use it. Psychiatry, for its part, must label such individuals as pathological, lest their craving for more should serve to illuminate the niggardliness of psychiatric offerings and demonstrate all too clearly that the entire field operates in crass subservience to anti-patient drug war law and ideology.
Iran has maintained itself as a nation for more than two thousands years, with its people using opium in moderation, mainly to help them endure their harsh and barren lives. Why, then, did it have to enact Opium Prohibition all of a sudden in 1955? 'Prohibition was motivated,' writes Kamm, 'largely by prestige reasons.... It did not fit with the image of an awakening, Westernizing Iran that the Shah was creating.'"
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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February 25, 2020
Glenn Close but no cigar
Four Good Days full of drug war propaganda
Shame on Glenn Close for starring in the drug war propaganda movie “Four Good Days,” especially at a time when Donald Trump is threatening to use the death penalty to kill minorities who dare to use and sell the plant medicines of mother nature. For shame!Every horror that Glenn Close’s character blames on heroin is actually caused by the drug war itself:
- The lack of a safe supply of the drug: the drug war’s fault
- The contamination of product: the drug war’s fault
- The lack of objective info about all drugs: the drug war’s fault
- The lack of non-addictive alternatives from the rain forest: the drug war’s fault
- The expense of a habit: the drug war’s fault
Let’s examine some of the movies illogical assumptions one at a time by considering a variety of drug-war-biased sound bites of which the movie is so full:
Deb to daughter Molly: “The deal was, you wouldn’t come back until you were clean.”
Clean? The mother’s use of the word “clean” here exposes the puritan Christian Science metaphysics that the drug war presupposes. Psychiatry has addicted me personally to Effexor, but no one has told me that I’m dirty for using it, and it has a relapse rate every bit as high as heroin! Apparently, I’m not “dirty” as long as I settle for being hooked on the drugs that enrich pharmaceutical companies.
High school student to Molly: “I would have never allowed myself to fall that far.”
Cruel but true. The fact is that the vast majority of kids do not fall as Molly did, even when the drug war does all it can to confuse them with propaganda instead of straightforward objective accounts of drug effects. Molly's irrelevant response to this challenge is simply to tearfully reiterate how hard she (Molly) has struggled and how continuously she (Molly) has resolved to go straight, but to no avail. Her goal seems to be to imply that there are devil drugs out there that will snag anyone, but smarter kids know that substances are only substances and that the terms "good" and "bad" only apply to how they are used, for what reasons, and in what doses, etc. To think otherwise is to call on government to wage a bloody war on drugs to protect fools like Molly from herself, a drug war that ironically creates the very incentives that cause drug sellers to peddle addictive meds in the first place.
Deb after seeing drug dealer: “That guy should be shot.”
Great. Thanks for that, Glenn. That’s all we need to hear from a cinematic representative of middle America, now that we have a president who is all-too-eager to take your suggestion literally and start murdering Americans, mainly minorities at that – and why? – for merely meeting the needs of the market that the drug war itself has created. Unless we suppose that the profit motive will someday disappear from human hearts and that human beings will renounce their desire for spiritual transcendence, a "war on drugs" can only bring about endless killing, first on inner city streets and then on the public scaffolds.
The answer is clear, Glenn: remove the profit motive by ending the drug laws that create it. Then turn the Drug Enforcement Agency into the Drug Education Agency, an organization tasked with objectively informing the public of the statistically verifiable dangers (yes, and benefits) of every psychoactive substance on earth: from Big Pharma antidepressants to cocaine, from alcohol to cigarettes.
Meanwhile, if someone needs to be shot, how about shooting those who create legislation that 1) violates natural law, 2) keeps godsend medicines from the depressed, 3) turns inner cities into shooting galleries, 4) locks up 10s of thousands of minorities, thus stealing elections for conservatives, 5) justifies drug war colonialism, 6) prevents Earthlings from accessing the plants that grow at their very feet, and 7) makes Christian Science the state religion when it comes to psychological healing. I'd rather not shoot anybody, of course, but if you think we have to, let's get our priorities right first when it comes to targeting.
The answer is clear, Glenn: remove the profit motive by ending the drug laws that create it. Then turn the Drug Enforcement Agency into the Drug Education Agency, an organization tasked with objectively informing the public of the statistically verifiable dangers (yes, and benefits) of every psychoactive substance on earth: from Big Pharma antidepressants to cocaine, from alcohol to cigarettes.
Meanwhile, if someone needs to be shot, how about shooting those who create legislation that 1) violates natural law, 2) keeps godsend medicines from the depressed, 3) turns inner cities into shooting galleries, 4) locks up 10s of thousands of minorities, thus stealing elections for conservatives, 5) justifies drug war colonialism, 6) prevents Earthlings from accessing the plants that grow at their very feet, and 7) makes Christian Science the state religion when it comes to psychological healing. I'd rather not shoot anybody, of course, but if you think we have to, let's get our priorities right first when it comes to targeting.
Mother Deb, in reference to her detoxing daughter: “She’s in hell right now.”
Too true, Deb, but did you ever stop to ask WHY she’s in hell? She’s in hell because the drug-war has outlawed all the non-addictive substances that might otherwise be used during the withdrawal process to ease withdrawal symptoms, and/or give the patient the psychological insight to better tolerate them. For even the detox centers are in the thrall of the drug war, throwing addicts on cots and forcing them to go cold turkey when there are hundreds of psychoactive godsends that we’re not even allowed to study, let alone use, medicines that can change attitudes and give addicts a new start in life.
Deb to Molly: [There's your] boyfriend Eric. Outside that flophouse.
Flophouse? Deb's referring to the bombed-out building in which Molly used to "shoot up," of course, but then what is the detox center but a flophouse, with meals included? The difference is that the rent is much higher, but otherwise they just flop you down on a cot and let you suffer, without ministering to you with any of the thousands of psychoactive balms of the rain forest, many of which, if used with reverence, can temper the mind of the addict to allow them to envision new realities and thus to make the desired changes in their life -- all without going through the hell that the Christian Science Drug Warrior insists that they must suffer.
Detox Doctor Ortiz: “Heroin has a 97% relapse rate.”
What Doctor Ortiz fails to point out is that antidepressants like Effexor have almost identical relapse rates.
Speaking of the Doctor, it's rather amusing to see him puffed up with professionalism in his white coat and carefully trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, obviously in the prime of his professional life, and yet for all these customary bells and whistles, his job seems to consist merely of injecting Naltrexone and nodding gravely or cheerfully, as circumstances warrant. If appearances weren't everything in such treatments, a cost-sensitive CEO would instantly replace him with an LPN.
Dr. Ortiz has not one single weapon in his pharmacological arsenal, not one (though thousands of rain forest meds are practically crying out to be assayed for such therapeutic purposes), except for Naltrexone, which, however, for him must seem a literal godsend, since it keeps a person from "getting high," which is the absolute no-no in drug warrior parlance, even though one person's "getting high" (off of, say, a non-addictive substance such as the psilocybin mushroom) can be another person's "spiritual transcendence."
Speaking of the Doctor, it's rather amusing to see him puffed up with professionalism in his white coat and carefully trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, obviously in the prime of his professional life, and yet for all these customary bells and whistles, his job seems to consist merely of injecting Naltrexone and nodding gravely or cheerfully, as circumstances warrant. If appearances weren't everything in such treatments, a cost-sensitive CEO would instantly replace him with an LPN.
Dr. Ortiz has not one single weapon in his pharmacological arsenal, not one (though thousands of rain forest meds are practically crying out to be assayed for such therapeutic purposes), except for Naltrexone, which, however, for him must seem a literal godsend, since it keeps a person from "getting high," which is the absolute no-no in drug warrior parlance, even though one person's "getting high" (off of, say, a non-addictive substance such as the psilocybin mushroom) can be another person's "spiritual transcendence."
Worst of all, the heroin addict is constantly lighting up a cigarette containing tobacco -- about the worst drug on the planet -- and the clueless mother sees absolutely no irony in that fact. As long as the drug being consumed supports capitalism, Glenn Close's usually apoplectic character is as quiet as a mouse. It's only when she see someone attempt to seek transcendence without the use of a board-certified doctor that her character's hackles start to rise. The mother herself freely rushes to the refrigerator for a stiff peg whenever she becomes overwhelmed with her addict daughter's erratic behavior, blissfully ignorant of her own hypocrisy in so doing.
One can only conclude that the mother’s problem is not so much with the daughter’s addiction as it is with her failure to conform to the usual social norms of the coffee-swilling, cigarette-smoking, alcohol-swigging drug warrior.
People who make liquor are businessmen, not the "members of an international ring of alcohol refiners"; people who sell liquor are retail merchants, not "pushers"; and people who buy liquor are citizens, not "dope fiends."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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February 24, 2020
Clueless Philosophers
Rationality self-destructs in the face of authoritarian abuse of power
You've heard of Rome burning while Nero played the fiddle? Well, how about human rights floundering while philosophers examined their metaphysical navels?Do we still need morality?
Yes, this was a recent topic of discussion among a learned body of panelists at the IAI (the Institute of Art and Ideas, artandideas.org), leading me to conclude that modern philosophy is, indeed, dead (though not for the reasons that Stephen Hawking speculated, since philosophy is really just playing dead out of cowardice) -- and that philosophy is useless when it comes to fighting back against the authoritarian tendencies of our time.
This is one case where my response to the IAI topic had to be about the topic itself, rather than the no-doubt brainy way with which it was discussed, parsed and philologically categorized by the esteemed panel convened for that purpose.
My response:
The very fact that modern philosophy is asking this question shows that rationality, pursued in the abstract, leads to self-destructive madness. The United States was created on the notion of natural law, that there is indeed something more important than the arbitrary decisions of despots. Instead of fretting whether this natural law (and hence basic human rights) even exists, philosophers should be engaged in an all-out struggle to castigate tyrants for replacing the natural law with common law, as has been done in the case of the drug war. The drug war is the triumph of contingent common law over natural law, imposing arbitrary limits on a human being's right to mother nature's plants, and thereby massively incarcerating minorities and keeping a myriad of godsend psychoactive plants not merely from "druggies" but also from depressed patients and soldiers with PTSD, even blocking research on such godsends. So if we want to see the results of considering morality to be illusory, we have to look no further than America's overcrowded prisons or the record-breaking instances of depression in America, or the drug war-created violence in impoverished cities. Please, philosophy, stop counting angels on a pin and start dealing with the real world: take natural law (and hence human rights) as a given so that you have a leg to stand on when confronting tyrants such as Donald Trump, who now plan to start executing the minorities that the common law has allowed America to throw in jail for the last 50 years.
Meanwhile, if you're starved for good philosophical topics, how about the following: Resolved: that the drug war is the enforcement of Christian Science Sharia?
The natural law is premised on the idea that an ultimate morality exists. Once we start questioning that assumption, then any tyrant can justify any action based on force and expediency. Slavery, under such a view, is never fundamentally wrong, but only wrong insofar as it does not prove expedient and/or is incapable of being maintained by force of arms.
In B.C. [British Columbia]... LSD has produced 70 percent "cures" among 60 alcoholics at Hollywood Hosptical within the past nine months, according to medical director Dr. J. Ross MacLean.
The Vancouver Sun, August 11, 1959
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February 21, 2020
The American Stasi
putting Americans in their place since 1973
It's amazing. When I tell friends and family members that I'm working on a website to abolish the DEA, they generally go silent. This seems a truly taboo topic for many Americans. And this is surprising to me. These are the same Americans, after all, who express themselves so vehemently about hot-button topics such as sexual harassment and global warming, ready to lay down in the streets and demand immediate justice in these areas, yet they suddenly get stage fright when the subject turns to the drug war. Suddenly they're afraid to speak. They sometimes even look at me after I raise the topic, in a kind of mute reproach, as if to say: "Ooh, the DEA. Are we even allowed to CRITICIZE them? Better be careful there, son."And I'm like: What happened to my big loud-mouth rebel? Which anti-democratic cat has suddenly got their tongue?
Answer: the anti-American DEA.
This is just not an agency that should exist in a free country, an agency that's armed to the teeth and ready to intimidate would-be protestors by dint of its sheer militarized existence, an agency devoted to protecting us from naturally occurring plants, an agency whose job is to enforce a harsh Christian Science sharia in a never-ending task of separating Americans from Mother Nature and separating human beings from the profit motive. Of course, neither of these tyrannies can succeed except by cruel authoritarianism, under craven leaders like Donald Trump, who are glad to take existing injustices and run with them, not simply imprisoning harmless minority Americans but executing them into the bargain.
It's about as anti-American as can be -- so much so, apparently, that Americans have learned to shut up and let the DEA have its anti-scientific (anti-patient and anti-minority) way, much as East Germans once resigned themselves to the seemingly inevitable injustices perpetrated by the Stasi.
American Stasi, stay away from me
American Stasi, mama, let me be
Don't come kicking down my door
Enforcing purblind common law
I got a right to Nature's meds
Ain't no business of the Feds
Common law can't override
The rights for which my fathers died
Plants that grow are mine by birth
Stop criminalizing Mother Earth
Thomas J was all shook up
When you dug his garden up
To steal the poppies that Nature grew
What the hell is wrong with you?
It is only fitting that as formerly the most faithful Christians favored the most un-Christian ferocity against witches, so now the most faithful capitalists recommend the most anti-capitalist ferocity against the entrepreneurs who trade in "dangerous drugs."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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February 19, 2020
Calling All Philosophers
Stop counting angels on a pin and speak up against the drug war
Stephen Hawking said that philosophy is dead. I beg to differ. It may appear to be dead, but that is only because it has been hiding its head in the sand, ostrich-like, ever since the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. That was when Congress first set the illogical and unconstitutional precedent of criminalizing plants, which had hitherto been considered our birth right as mere Earthlings under natural law. Since then, the Drug War and its anti-scientific laws have thrived in the hands of tyrants based on a propaganda campaign of sloppy logic, superstitious metaphysics and linguistic equivocation, all designed to make us look upon Mother Nature as a drug kingpin rather than as our medical benefactor and the source of countless therapeutic godsends. In other words, the “Drug War” is the philosophical problem par excellence of our time for it thrives on a series of misunderstandings and presumptions that only a true philosopher can hope to parse with nicety and expose in such a way as to make the need for reform obvious to the man or woman on the street – and thus to the man or woman in Congress. That’s one of the reasons that I’ve created this website, as an attempt to get the friends of liberty to start attacking the Drug War on philosophical grounds, rather than on the feeble grounds that the Drug War just does not work as advertised. Such latter arguments yield enormous ground to the Drug Warrior, implying that militarized tyranny, domestic surveillance, SWAT raids on unarmed citizens, foreign intervention and the suspension of natural law would be fine if only it cut down on the use of naturally occurring substances. SWAT raids and domestic surveillance, in a supposedly democratic society, to cut down on the use of substances? And why exactly do we assume that it is good to cut back on the use of naturally occurring substances? That is a mere Christian Science prejudice, not a logical conclusion from any set of agreed-upon propositions. A drug war critic who argues in this way may as well find another button-pushing injustice about which to opine, since the Drug War cannot be ousted by those who hastily grant all the false unspoken premises upon which it is founded.
If philosophers should read this, there’s plenty of work to do, so let’s not stand upon ceremony. “Grab a musket and get in rank,” as my Jeffersonian ancestors used to say. Here are a few promising projects to fire your respective imaginations.
1) Elucidate the theological, political, and ideological links between the following events: The Drug War of modern times, Emperor Theodosius’s 392 AC banning of the psychedelic Eleusinian Mysteries, and the Conquistadors' scorn for the plant-based psychedelic rites of MesoAmerican cultures.
2) Explain how modern employee “drug testing” is the extrajudicial enforcement of Christian Science with respect to psychological healing.
3) Trace the modern antipathy to “substance use” to the distrust of witches and their use of psychoactive plant medicines.
Not until we distinguish more clearly than we now do between the chemical and ceremonial uses and effects of drugs shall we be able to begin a sensible description and a reasonable discussion of so-called problems of drug abuse and drug addiction.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz.
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February 17, 2020
What We Mean When We Say 'Drugs'
How the drug war is a creation of language
The term "drugs" as used in the West is really just a pejorative epithet designed to stigmatize naturally occurring psychoactive substances and those who use them. The superstitious metaphysics underlying this stigma is identical to the mindset that countenanced witch hunts in the 14th through 17th centuries. It is the metaphysics of Christian Science as applied to psychological states, the unverifiable notion (i.e., opinion, or faith) that it is in some sense wrong to avail oneself of psychoactive substances to alter consciousness, and that those who do so are, in some sense, devilish.That this belief is superstitious is easily seen, since those who use this term pejoratively have almost always done so in wilful ignorance of the precise function (or even identity) of the psychoactive substances in question, implying that a mere detailed knowledge of psychoactive plants placed a woman (and today a drug "user" of any sex) under grave suspicion of non-Christian behavior and intent.
When a "witch" of the old school imbibed extract of mandrake and similar trance-inducing substances, it was (at least according to the stuffed shirt Witch Warriors of the time) in order to commune with devils. But from the witch's point of view, it was surely to seek personal transcendence, whether to engage in what she took to be divination, or simply to relax. When a rock star imbibes plant-based substance, it is also to transcend his or her customary personality and inhibitions on stage, this time not for divination but for vocational success.
Yet psychology insists that anything a star could do on stage using a substance could be done twice as well without that substance.
What wilful self-deception! This is not to say that every rock star or mad comedian REQUIRES substance use (though surely the probability rises as the art form entails an increasingly dramatic split between the artist's on-stage persona and their off-stage behavior, as do both rock-and-roll and hip-hop, and increasingly so, as yesterday's behavioral outrages become today's norms). There are a vast variety of people, and in many cases, the social, cultural and familial stars and planets will so align as to allow the performer to be his or herself on stage, completely, without any impulse to hold back, requiring no chemical incentive other than the baseline chemistry provided by his or her daily metabolism.
But if the vast majority of us are really going to let our hair down, it is completely understandable that -- barring 21st-century laws and mores to the contrary -- we would want to achieve some form of the ecstasy of the witches of yore to help us "let go," such that our "nay-saying" childhood (in which we were psychologically tortured, albeit unintentionally so, by the implicit and/or explicit condemnations of parents, family and friends) are not allowed to stop us from bringing out the Jimi Hendrix in ourselves.
But psychology ignores the ancient need for transcendence, stubbornly insisting, with the drug warrior, that we can get all the transcendence we need by simply "telling ourselves" to be happier -- for that's what the whole self-help genre field consists of (not to mention the whole field of psychotherapy itself, at least until the pill-popping paradigm took hold): words, to tell us how to be happier, as if rationality could control our feelings, a central tenet of Western society, which is just plain wrong upon the slightest serious reflection.
Nor is a poor upbringing a necessary prerequisite for seeking transcendence through plant medicine -- at least for those who wish to explore what they are truly capable of in life, those who reject the Christian Science credo that it is somehow wrong to adjust mood via plant medicine.
Even Freud knew better. He did not attempt to improve his life by talk therapy. He engaged in the psychological real politik of cocaine use, early and often, a fact that psychologists ignore at their own peril, thus keeping their discipline out of touch with the real impulses of humankind.
All because the psychologists believe in this thing called "drugs," by which certain substances (i.e., psychoactive plants) are superstitiously believed to possess nothing but evil qualities: the same know-nothing credo that motivated the witch hunters, who cast a jaundiced eye on any woman who dared so much as learn about psychoactive plants, let alone used them.
The word "drugs" works wonders for law enforcement. Imagine if we saw a SWAT teach ramrodding a house while a helicopter flew overhead, all because the owners of the house possessed PLANTS! Then it would be instantly clear how tyrannical the onslaught was. The police and politicians know this: that's why they never talk about a war on plants, but rather a war on "drugs." This is how the police departments grow in wealth: the darker they paint this whipping horse of "drugs," the more money is thrown there way by way of funding and forfeitures -- and the American people sit by idly, lulled into complacency by the malevolent use of a synonym.
"With LSD as an aid," the report said, "it has been possible to reach and work with patients who are otherwise unresponsive to psychotherapy."
Kingsport News, March 4, 1960
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February 14, 2020
How the DEA determines if a religion is true
after two millennia of disagreement on that subject among philosophers and theologians
In granting exceptions to the laws prohibiting use of psychedelics, the DEA makes exceptions for religious practices that they determine to be genuine. This raises an interesting question: how precisely does the DEA determine something that even great philosophers across the ages have been unable to agree upon, namely, which religions are genuine and why? Not to worry. I have uncovered a government form that is apparently used by the DEA to make precisely the sort of metaphysical determinations mentioned above. So, theologians, take note: Here's what the DEA will be looking for should you ever happen to adhere to a religious belief whose ceremonials involve the use of plant life that the DEA has seen fit to criminalize.
DEA Form 8011-B-C-1
Guidelines for determining the veracity of a religious belief
In determining the authenticity of a religious belief, the DEA agent in charge shall consider the following points:
1) Is the claimant snickering at any time during the application process? If so, claim should ordinarily be rejected-- since we all know that real religion is a serious matter.
2) Is the claimant prone to excessive partying? This is often a red flag indicating that the exception seeker equates religion with hedonism, which again is against the Protestant Ethic -- er, I mean, the U.S. Government's ethical code of conduct, of course.
3) Does the claimant's religion accept (or plan to accept) "worshipers" from out of state? This is often a red flag, since it is well known that real religions -- with the possible exception of Rock Church -- are somewhat stodgy, formal affairs that are unlikely to inspire long-distance fidelity in the absence of questionable incentives. This in turn suggests that a large percentage of such a "church's" commuters will be winking lasciviously en route, salivating in anticipation of a tawdry "high," rather than rejoicing in the Blood of Our Redeemer, Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior, without whom -- er, I mean as just one bona fide above-board REAL honest-to-God religious example, of course.
4) Does the claimant harp on and on about the fact that alcohol is addictive and kills thousands of people every year while we at the DEA are criminalizing plants that have been used for centuries in therapeutic ceremonies? Does he or she point out that LSD was used successfully to cure alcoholics, by no less a person than Bill Wilson himself of AA, before we in our wisdom shut down such therapies? Does the claimant dare to point out that the DEA permits the peddling of highly addictive anti-depressants by BIG PHARMA, while we are shutting down research on non-addictive alternatives from nature? If so, politely remind the claimant that it is our job to determine THEIR morality, thank them very much, not the other way around.
Psst! Hey, Job Seekers...
DEA Seeking Demigod to Rule on the Validity of so-called "religions." Must be willing and able to evince inflexible certainty on a topic that the world's greatest thinkers have disagreed about for millennia, namely what constitutes a true religion.
For many, [LSD] seems to lead to self-help -- long overdue.
Dr. Keith Ditman, Semi-Weekly Spokesmen-Review (Spokane, Washington), Nov. 8, 1959
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February 12, 2020
Traitor President Calls for Executing Drug Dealers
Herding minorities into overcrowded prisons no longer enough for booze-swilling Drug Warriors
Self-professed traitor Donald Trump has now called for the execution of drug dealers, which should come as no surprise from a president who has openly collaborated with authoritarian Russia to destroy basic democratic institutions in America. But if one’s fearing for the lives of cigarette and alcohol producers (whose products kill tens of thousands a year), you can relax. Nor need we lose sleep over the wellbeing of our local psychiatrists, who, even as I type, are running socially-sanctioned pill mills across the country (by means of which 1 in 10 Americans are addicted to the daily use of Big Pharma “meds”). No, as usual, the drug warrior animus is not directed at the substances that cause the most harm to Americans, but merely those substances that the drug warriors have decided to criminalize for political and religious reasons, though many of these “drugs” are found to be growing unbidden across the planet. Thus they override the hitherto unalienable natural law which gives Americans the right to the use of what John Locke calls “the earth and all therein,” replacing it with a capricious common law interdiction based on the propaganda-induced fears of 21st-century Americans, in this case a kind of Christian Science “Sharia,” every bit as intolerant as any legislation that was ever enacted in that name.This Constitution-based objection to Trump’s authoritarian gambit cannot be overstressed, because the mainstream media these days is dangerously missing the point. The left and libertarian response to such totalitarian proposals as Trump’s is to point out that such a draconian strategy would not work to reduce “drug” use, typically by adducing the failure of similar approaches in other countries. But to argue in this way is to yield crucial ground to the enemy of freedom, since this “argument from efficacy” implies that executing drug dealers would be just fine if it only served to decrease the use of naturally occurring substances in America. And to argue thus is to demonstrate one’s limited grasp of the subject at hand, by implicitly granting that government has a right, in the first place, to prevent Americans from reaching out and using the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet, a proposition which Jefferson would have found absurd and even conducive to tyranny if not rejected at once on constitutional grounds.
And that tyranny that Jefferson would have predicted has come to pass. It started in 1914, when bigoted politicians decided that too many undesirables were using the opium plant. Their answer: make a natural substance illegal, thus setting the precedent that some plants were no longer the birthright of a free citizenry to use as they saw fit. In a rush to penalize the lower class and the ethnic Chinese, few American politicians of that era noticed the contravention of natural law that was implicit in this government intrusion into personal decisions about health and happiness. If they had really cared about the health of these minority populations, they would have educated them about the wise use of psychoactive substances rather than criminalizing a plant.
Fast-forward 50-plus years, when President Richard Nixon takes advantage of that anti-Constitutional precedent to punish his enemies, with so-called anti-drug laws that were designed, not to protect the health of Americans, but to land his political prisoners in jail and, if possible, remove them from the voting rolls by charging them with felonies.
Fast-forward another half a century, and Traitor Trump is now ready to pick up where Nixon left off, harnessing America’s unconstitutional drug law for the purposes of becoming a dictator with the power of life and death over his vassals. It is not enough for Trump’s power lust to merely incarcerate millions of mainly minority “drug dealers,” (those who dare sell the plants and fungi for which drug law itself has created the black market), he wants to get rid of them entirely, which I suppose is useful, since it allows him to limit the number of minority offspring which might otherwise grow up to eliminate the drug war entirely, along with totally amoral politicians like Trump himself who strategically parlay those laws into populist victories.
So let me get this straight: a doctor can legally addict my anxious 92-year-old mother to the most powerful synthetic drugs on the planet, and with Trump’s blessing, but should I arrange for her to get miraculous, non-addictive relief from a mere plant – a mere plant, mind you – the source of that godsend can be strung up at high noon?
When policy’s such as the drug war yield such absurd results, they must be fundamentally wrong, at least for a freedom-loving people. But we can’t stand up to drug war tyrants on the basis of statistical charts that “prove” that tyranny doesn’t work. We must deny those tyrants the right to outlaw Mother Nature in the first place – and the power for that pushback is waiting there in the US Constitution, whose very genius lies in its elevation of natural law over common law, and if natural law tells us anything, it tells us that human beings have the right to the use of “the earth and all therein,” and that no law can justifiably supplant that right – ever.
For the past half-century the American people have engaged in one of the most ruthless wars-- fought under the colors of drugs and doctors, diseases and treatments-- that the world has ever seen.
Ceremonial Chemistry: The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. Thomas Szasz.
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February 9, 2020
Self-Censorship in the Age of the Drug War
The more I learn about western society’s wilful ignorance of naturally occurring psychoactive medicines, the harder it is for me to find good books to read. Almost all self-help books studiously avoid any reference to the power of psychoactive plants to facilitate the miraculous psychological changes that the authors advocate. Almost all scientific books pretend to be giving us the last word on consciousness and meaning, while yet ignoring the profound insights on these subjects that psychoactive plants can provide. Almost all books on depression speculate on what can be done with modern anti-depressants and/or talk therapy, as if psychoactive plants did not exist, as if the drastically limited pharmacy available to us under the drug war was a natural condition with which all suggested treatment protocols must conform in order to be scientific. In other words, all of these books take the drug war prohibitions as a natural given of life, and thence proceed to speculate and deduce at will, with the author never realizing that he or she is engaging in self-censorship in order to curry favour with the puritan sensibilities of the drug war. I don't know what's worse, however, authors who ignore speaking about psychoactive substances or those who speak about them -- because the latter authors almost ALWAYS adopt invalid drug-war premises when they attempt to analyze the so-called "drug problem" in America.
Take the book by David and Nic Sheff called "High." They say that you can't judge a book by its cover, but this is clearly the exception that proves the rule.
One can just look at the cover to see that the authors subscribe to all the usual drug-war assumptions. The cover features a frenetic and jagged color-scheme obviously intended to be the abstract depiction of an abnormal state of mind associated with the phenomenon of "getting high."
Thus the authors accept the drug-war presupposition that psychoactive substance use (when not prescribed by a board-certified physician, keen to get one addicted to big pharma meds) can only be for hedonistic purposes -- which is simply false. One person's high is often another person's self-enlightenment, is another person's making peace with the world, is another person's healthy break from reality -- in the same way that moderate alcohol is said to constitute healthy relaxation.
Are the tribal members of the Native American Church getting "high" when they consume peyote for religious purposes? Are alcohol addicts getting "high" when they take ibogaine to kick that habit? Was Sigmund Freud getting "high" when he used cocaine to get his work done in the wee hours of the night? Was Benjamin Franklin getting high when he resorted -- frequently -- to the use of opium?
Of course not.
So the depiction of the word "High" on such a book cover is pejorative and meant to imply all the narrow views of the drug warrior -- designed to separate Americans from mother nature's medicines under the drug-war lie that such substances can only be used for the nonsensical and dangerous practice of "getting high."
This is time-saving, however. I simply need not read the Sheff's books, because their very book cover shows that they're philosophically in the thrall of all the usual drug war propaganda and presuppositions. And given the dictum that "confused thinking in, confused thinking out"... the judicious reader will move on.
In southern Mexico, the jail and prison officials experience great difficulty in trying to prevent the smuggling into their institutions of the seductive mariguana (sic). This is a kind of "loco" weed more powerful than opium.
The Iola Daily Record, Iola, Kansas, Jan 1, 1900
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February 9, 2020
Addicted to Ignorance
problems with the 'no pain, no gain' school of de-tox therapy
The drug warrior holds many logic-challenged assumptions, but one of the worst in terms of its human consequences is the notion that withdrawal from illegal substances must necessarily be hell.Really? How would we even know? No one with pharmacological savvy has ever been free to use psychoactive plants in America, shaman-like, with a specific addict in mind. Who knows what would be possible if every psychoactive plant were at hand to be employed advisedly in improving the mental output and resilience of a specific individual?
What exactly is addiction, anyway? Whence comes this hell of which we speak?
It is the result of the body screaming bloody murder for want of a substance to whose presence it has become accustomed.
Well, an answer to that problem readily suggests itself, albeit one that's sure to rub the Christian Scientists among us the wrong way: that of fighting fire with fire: treating the addict with psychoactive substances that push back against and obfuscate the hellish withdrawal symptoms as the user seeks to "get off of" his or poison of choice, a plant substance that will attempt to shout "feel good!" every bit as loudly as the withdrawal symptoms are shouting "feel bad!" If such treatment cannot totally suppress the negative physiological symptoms of withdrawal, then it can at least render them psychologically bearable thanks to the positive attitudes induced by the ritual use of entheogens carefully chosen for that purpose according to the facts of the case.
Absent our prudish drug war assumptions, we could even find a variety of substances that positively ELATE the addict at set intervals, thus giving the patient something to look forward to during the most negative emotions of withdrawal, since I speak from experience in saying that the real hell of withdrawal is the feeling that the negative feelings will never end -- and we can palpably teach the patient otherwise with what we might call (at the risk of irritating the puritan) the occasional administration of "feel good" entheogens to remind them that happiness still exists in the world, that everything is not merely grey skies and drizzle, now and for all time.
This is the process of fighting bad drugs with more drugs (as Google purports to fight bad speech with more speech), a paradigm in which the pharmacological artist that I envision (the replacement for yesterday’s pill-peddling psychiatrist) would drown the addict’s negative physiological reactions to withdrawal in a sea of positive feelings engendered by yet other carefully chosen psychoactive substances, such that the entire withdrawal process can take place without the addict experiencing the intense psychological suffering that we have hitherto concluded was the addict’s due.
Presumably the drugs used for this purpose would be non-addictive, either by nature or by dint of their carefully timed administration. That said, we have no right to denounce such a cure should it lead to a new addiction, provided that the new addiction is, as is to be expected, one with which the patient can live a productive life. Psychiatrists have for decades now administered pills that their patients are required to take daily for a lifetime, so psychiatry has no leg to stand on in denouncing medications for requiring daily or weekly administration (whether that medication be Effexor or opium). The question only is: is that addiction something that the patient is both willing and able to live with?
But the patient should be free of all "drugs," you say? Fine. That's your opinion, based on your philosophical assumptions about what constitutes the good life. The decision is up to the addict, based on their own metaphysics, thank you very much. But should the addicts themselves choose this "drug-free" course, more power to them, for there are an almost endless number of possible entheogen-assisted therapies that, singly or in aggregate, have every chance of achieving this hitherto improbable goal, given the strategic alignment of therapy with patient goals. But we can't make such therapies available until we renounce an unscientific and anti-patient drug war that stops us from merely even investigating such cures.
(Even the use of the term "addict" is a nod to drug war sensibilities, since it implies a character fault, whereas the early 19th-century term of "habitue" remains a far more objective descriptor for the unique human lives that we are discussing here. But then the drug war depends on the strategic use of words such that merely broaching them implies a politically correct viewpoint and thus the speaker's acceptance of the corrupt status quo. Thus Big Pharma pills require daily “administration,” but drugs like cocaine and heroin require daily “fixes.” It’s not the actions that repel us – we can take Prozac and Effexor daily until the cows come home -- but the disdainful connotations that we selectively impose upon those actions through the politicized language of a drug war society.)
In short, there is a vast world of treatment options out there for the so-called “addict” once we envision a free world in which a highly trained empath can customize psychoactive protocols to meet the needs and goals of specific individuals. But until government gives that freedom back to the medical world, we have no business opining on the supposed intractability of the addiction problem, since the inadequacies of the current approaches can all be explained with reference to the drug warriors’ ongoing efforts to drastically limit the pharmacological arsenal with which we might otherwise respond to this problem. The problem itself may well be solvable – should the government ever be so magnanimous as to give us renewed free and unrestricted access to the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet. (Funny. And I used to think that such access was my birth right as a resident of planet Earth, ensured via natural law, which, at least until the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, was supposed to trump common law in America.)
Yet many addiction specialists believe today that detox can't be detox if it doesn't include muscle spasms, cold sweats, fever, vomiting, paranoia, and insomnia.
What's the customary process for detox in anti-scientific America? Dump the patient on a cot, monitor them as they go through hell for three days, charge them through the roof, and then let them go.
How dare we consign these sufferers to such hell when there are psychological balms out there by the thousands, all of which we have been intimidated into ignoring thanks to the drug war?
This will surely seem like the barbarous neglect that it is in some future enlightened era in America, when both drug and liability legislation is reformed to allow for the highly personalized treatment of drug addiction, wherein a pharmacologically savvy empath can choose freely from an entire world of therapeutic plant medicines to minister to the mind and soul of the addict, beginning with ibogaine, ayahuasca, psilocybin -- to encompass the thousands of psychoactive plants that seem custommade to reboot broken lives, psychologically speaking.
Another reason why detox doesn't work: Because psychology does not recognize the value of entheogenic transcendence. They therefore dismiss the phenomenon of "getting high" with the drug warrior conviction that it is mere hedonism. Instead, they should recognize the reality of a search for transcendence in all human beings (a search for "escape," if the therapist prefers that prejudicial and assumption-laden term) and provide that for the patient, through one of the many psychoactive plants that can provide that experience.
Instead, they assume that the whole challenge of detoxification is to stop the patient from "getting high," an approach that it is all stick and no carrot. It ignores the fact that the addict's drug use had a purpose: namely, self-transcendence, rashly assuming that this spiritual quality can be safely dismissed as mere hedonism (which, admittedly, even the user may do, but only because they lack the self-awareness to linguistically parse their drug experience with any degree of nicety). And so the therapists wring their hands, wondering why there are so many relapses in the world.
Better yet, we can nip counterproductive addictions in the bud by abolishing the Drug Enforcement Agency altogether and replacing it with a Drug EDUCATION Agency, an organization which will report objectively on the specific addiction profile of every known psychoactive substance in the world, clearly indicating when and how such substances become addictive (based on real statistics, not politically-inspired guesstimates), so that those who decide to use the plants of Mother Nature for psychological healing are enabled to do so advisedly, without having to rely on the superstitious propaganda of so-called anti-drug organizations who do everything they can to paint illegal plants as substances from hell.
We must also abolish the naive drug warrior conviction that all addictions must be dead-ends. Benjamin Franklin was no doubt "addicted" to opium, at least according to the censorious and fastidious "medicalized morality" of 21st-century America, but no one of the man's own time would have viewed him as anything but a great man, for they had yet to develop the notion that a man was to be judged by something other than the way that he actually behaved every single day of his life, which is to say intelligently and with flair. But today's drug warrior treats the modern Ben Franklins of the world as threats to society and would gladly judge such a person's entire life based on the mere fact that the modern aesthete partook of a natural substance that politicians had taken such great pains to demonize.
AFTERTHOUGHTS: To see the folly of modern addiction therapy, consider the 12-step approach in which a small group of addicts sits around in a circle retailing morbid autobiographical stories, all under the problematic Western world presumption that cures come from merely talking about a problem and "understanding" it, as if understanding and feeling have ever been synonyms. Many a suicide understood their situation all too well before pulling the trigger or tightening the noose. Compare this with a group who meet together under a starlit sky to undergo psychedelic therapy that encourages them to confront their true self in relationship to the world at large. The latter approach actually has the possibility of changing lives, sometimes even overnight. The former has the depressing recidivism rate that we are already familiar with. Moreover, many of those who do not technically backslide in the 12-step approach do not go on to achieve anything approaching self-fulfillment, since that is not even the goal of therapy. Its goals are far more limited and pessimistic at heart: One day at a time, this too shall pass. Fine sentiments for a stoic, perhaps, but not for an ambitious American seeking to realize their full potential in 21st-century America, let alone one seeking to appreciate the wonder and diversity of the exquisite natural world that surrounds them.
AFTER AFTERTHOUGHTS: When we speak of withdrawal, everyone thinks of heroin and opiates. No one thinks of an attempt to get off of a modern anti-depressant, such as Effexor, which has a relapse rate almost identical to heroin. In other words, modern psychiatry has no problem with addiction per se. It's just that they want to have the authority of dealing out the medication in question. Never mind that continual use of Effexor (which was never initially intended for lifetime use) conduces to anhedonia, lethargy. Such antidepressants help a depressive to live, yes, but such drugs also actively impede that person from thriving, vouchsafing them not so much as a glimpse of the deep interest that life can have for someone therapeutically treated with entheogens. Yet we dutifully "take" our blessed antidepressant "medicine" per the authoritative doctor's orders, while the scumbags are "scoring" their damnable "hits." With what hypocrisy do we thus linguistically protect all the great piles of wealth that are firmly invested in maintaining the drug war status quo.
Any idea or act that gives men and women a sense of what their life is about or for-- that, in other words, gives their existence meaning and purpose-- is, properly speaking, religious.
Ceremonial Chemistry: The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. Thomas Szasz.
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February 7, 2020
Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature
on behalf of my 92-year-old mother
Today I sent the following e-mail to Republicans in the Virginia state legislature. I was both peeved and in a hurry when I wrote it, but I trust that I've made my basic points plainly enough. Don't laugh, Democrats, you're on my list too. I'm just following a hunch of mine that the right side of the aisle remains most in favor of intolerance and injustice when it comes to the drug war -- or rather the war on plants -- or rather the war on the elderly. Take your pick: there's plenty of injustice to go around when it comes to the so-called drug war.
Dear Representative:
Please stop fighting the wretched drug war.
By doing so, you are preventing my 92-year-old mother from getting relief from the many natural godsends of mother nature, so many of which have been stupidly and unscientifically banned by the DEA even for simple research -- the DEA, a corrupt agency that has a HUGE conflict of interest in "scheduling" substances, since their jobs depend on those substances being illegal. The DEA acted against the advice of its own counsel and kept MDMA illegal for the last 35 years, and to hell with the thousands of soldiers that could have gotten relief from the substance.
Stop cracking down -- unless you're like Donald Trump and want to kill and torture folks who dare to use Mother Nature's plants -- or like Natalie Reyes in the movie "Running with the Devil," a DEA agent who murders and tortures drug suspects for using plants -- while SHE SMOKES A CIGARETTE containing tobacco, the worst drug on the planet!!!
If you really want a drug war, let's arrest everybody that uses cigarettes -- or has so much as a cigarette stub on their person. Let's confiscate their houses. Let's remove them from the voting rolls. Let's confiscate any book profits that they may make by writing about their arrests.
Then let's do the same for alcohol use or possession.
That's a drug war I could get behind because it exposes the hypocrisy of our approach against natural substances and gives the drug warrior a taste of his or her own medicine.
Or, if you think this is wrong, then stop the anti-patient drug war, this war on plants, that's depriving my suffering mother from natural and non-addictive godsends, shunting her off onto a handful of addictive drugs from Big Pharma doled out by today's psychiatric pill mill.
Please stop the war on mother nature's plants -- plants that we all have a right to use by natural law -- which should trump common law in America. Stop making substances a scapegoat for bad actors and bad social conditions.
As John Locke wrote in his Treatise on Government:
“The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being.”
This is a right that cannot be usurped by common law, if America is to remain the America about which Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Brian Quass
PS Tried to get medical marijuana today for my 92-year-old mother and found out that Virginia does not want my mother to have relief from anxiety -- except through addictive Big Pharma meds. What nonsense. Do you think Thomas Jefferson thought that some of the plants he grew should be banned??? Do you think he didn't spin in his grave when the jackbooted DEA barged onto his property in 1985 and stole his poppy plants???
It is only fitting that as formerly the most faithful Christians favored the most un-Christian ferocity against witches, so now the most faithful capitalists recommend the most anti-capitalist ferocity against the entrepreneurs who trade in "dangerous drugs."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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February 6, 2020
American Sharia
the drug war as Christian Science
The 2019 movie "Running with the Devil" features a DEA heroine who tortures one drug suspect and murders another - this latter murder being committed while the hypocritical heroine is smoking a cigarette containing tobacco, a drug that has killed far more Americans than the natural substances that the murder victim happened to be peddling at the time. Meanwhile, we have elected a president who has openly praised the murderous Duterte for killing so-called "drug suspects" in the Philippines, i.e. Filipinos who dared to access the plants and fungi of Mother Nature. This is a president who openly envies the power of dictators and thus would gladly turn America into a country where the film heroine’s no-nonsense drug war strategy was countenanced by law. In short, the nation (both its leader and its hoi polloi) is in the thrall of a Christian Science sharia, every bit as fanatical as the worst Islamic law of that name, dehumanizing enemies and treating them like garbage merely because they dare to partake of naturally occurring plant medicines provided by Mother Nature.It may be said that the movie, at least, is fiction, but I have yet to hear a DEA spokesperson come out to denounce the film as libel. Meanwhile, the online reviews of the movie prove that the American people still don’t get it. I have yet to see a review that slams the movie as dangerous drug war propaganda, as making the case for torture and murder as government policy. To the contrary, I’ve read multiple reviews whose authors sympathize with the DEA murderess, regretting that still more can’t be done to fight this menace from all those evil naturally occurring plants out there. Meanwhile the website Common Sense, though quick to warn parents about the movie’s dirty words, has absolutely nothing to say about the anti-democratic lesson that the movie was peddling: namely that torture and murder are okay as long as the violence is directed toward scumbags who dare to access the plants that politicians have banned.
So if you’re wondering what it’s like to live under strict Islamic law, stop wondering: Americans are already living under a strictly enforced Sharia, targeted against those infidels who dare to look upon Mother Nature as a goddess rather than a drug kingpin.
By means of this drug[LSD], people can view themselves objectively and can then accept themselves which is a great step forward in the care of mental illness.
Dr. Kahan, Executive Director Mental Health Saskatchewan, The Leader-Post, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, July 20, 1961
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February 5, 2020
Letter to Lamar Alexander
written upon the acquittal of Donald Trump
I find it horrifying that we have a president who can get away with treason, selling us out to the Soviets and openly calling for dirt on his opponents. Maybe the country NEEDS to be ripped apart if half of it believes that we should live in a dictatorship under an insane and evil demagogue, who has never met a dictator that he didn't like. If that's true, then I want to live in the other half of the country, that still believes in democratic institutions.How dare America carry on its wretched drug war, imprisoning an election-swaying million minorities a year for mere possession of substances that are our right under NATURAL LAW -- and yet the president gets to COMMIT CRIMES BRAZENLY ON NATIONAL TELEVISION CALLING FOR SOVIET AND UKRAINE INVESTIGATION OF HIS RIVALS?????
The Justice Department has lost all credibility and now can only do its job by brute force.
For shame!
What are Republicans going to do when this new IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY is occupied by a DEMOCRAT?
In the course of this war against an exceptionally hard-working and law-abiding people, their characteristic habit-- smoking opium-- became the leading symbol of their "dangerousness." After all, Americans could not admit that they hated and feared the Chinese because the Chinese worked harder...
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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February 4, 2020
There is no such thing as DRUGS
there are just substances that, like anything else, can be used and misused
There is no such thing as "drugs," the way that the modern drug warrior defines that term. There are simply substances that can be used or misused. To think otherwise is to be superstitious. To think otherwise is to scapegoat substances and thus ignore true social problems that would otherwise cry out for solutions. To think otherwise is to create a make-work program for modern psychiatry, prison guards, sheriffs, the DEA, and Big Pharma.Yet America is all about keeping Americans and the world from accessing the plants that grow at their very feet under the fiction that politically demonized substances are evil incarnate. This is a power grab that elevates common law over natural law, destroying the human being's right to Mother Nature, which is about as basic a natural law as possible. Not happy thus merely to deprive Americans of godsend medications, drug war colonialism spreads the war on Mother Nature planet wide, ensuring eternal suffering of the mentally ill and their continued dependency on Big Pharma's addictive meds, all so that imperial America can intervene at will in the countries of its choice, under the pretext of enforcing the American Empire's drug laws.
Run by a corrupt Justice Department run by a corrupt president who has claimed he is above the law.
Of course, I would never personally say "down with President Trump," for fear of being investigated by the Secret Service as a terrorist. However, under the unjust circumstances, we can definitely IMAGINE someone ELSE saying:
"Down with presidents who envy foreign dictators their power to kill drug suspects-- i.e. citizens suspected of using mother nature's plants for emotional healing!"
In fact, I think I can hear folks shouting that even as I type! Ooh, they are pretty brave. Mind you, I would never personally say...
"Down with President Trump, lover of despots!"
...but I can definitely imagine good reasons why someone else might say that!
Heck, such people might even shout:
"Down with presidents who hold themselves above the law while simultaneously incarcerating tens of thousands of minorities merely for the possession of naturally occurring substances -- all in the name of fighting the modern boogeyman called 'drugs'!"
The center for the international operations of the Medical Inquisition is located in Switzerland, mainly in Geneva, in the offices of the various anti-addiction and anti-drug abuse bureaucracies of the United Nations. Needless to say, these agencies are not concerned with drug habits such as drinking, smoking, or "methadone maintenance," but are concerned only with those habits that are induced and maintained by people unsupervised by doctors and involving substances which the United Nations classifies as "illicit drugs."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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February 2, 2020
Is Rick Doblin Running with the Devil?
The drawbacks of collaborating with a corrupt system
I’m a big fan of Rick Doblin and his attempts to mainstream the therapeutic use of psychedelics through MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Rick is obviously a courageous man with the patience of a saint, given the slow-and-steady mindset that his ambitious project calls for. That said, I’m beginning to wonder if his strategy of compromise does not entail a Faustian pact with the devil – or rather with two devils, as noted below. DEVIL 1: THE DEA
Take the DEA, for instance. I realize that Rick is teaming with the DEA for practical reasons, in order to make legal research possible, but I fear that such cooperation tends to legitimize the agency’s role as the rightful gatekeeper for scientific drug research, as if the government should be playing such a politicized role in the first place when it comes to scientific investigation. This is the same DEA, after all, that has deprived depressive folks like myself of thousands of potential rain forest godsends for the last four decades, making our lives a shadow of what they might have been, psychologically speaking, in terms of self-fulfillment, self-realization, and the simple, humble appreciation of the wonderful world of nature that grows at our very feet.
Had researchers been given mere scientific freedom to follow up on the breathtaking therapeutic results of the work of Strassman, Fadiman, Grof et al., America would surely no longer be the most depressed country in the world, where a tenth of the population is yet addicted to the handful of mind-fogging antidepressants dealt out by modern psychiatry – an institution for which pill-peddling is unabashedly promoted as the new therapeutic paradigm. But the DEA has long said no to the mere scientific research of psychedelics, classifying them unscientifically as “schedule 1,” thereby ensuring the agency’s own law-enforcement workload for decades to come, all at the expense of the health, happiness and sheer human potential of the American people.
As one of the countless victims of the DEA’s politically motivated crackdown on psychoactive substances (part of an eclectic victims list that runs the gamut from imprisoned minorities to morose nonagenarians wasting away in a nursing home), I can’t help but think that our role as freedom-loving Americans is to loudly protest the injustice being perpetrated here, not to play by the rigged handbook of a political institution designed to strictly limit conscious awareness and keep effective medicines out of public hands.
DEVIL 2: THE SCIENTIZATION OF PSYCHEDELICS
This points to a second problem with the MAPS back-door approach to psychedelic legalization: it seeks to destigmatize psychedelics by professionalizing their use, by putting them in the hands of materialist scientists who will analyze such substances “every which way to Sunday” in order to find the exact chemical interactions associated with their efficacy. Even if this reductionist analysis prompts the scientific community to “sign off” on the efficacy of psychedelics for treating various illnesses, the folks who will be empowered are not suffering individuals, but rather large pharmaceutical companies. If not otherwise constrained, Big Pharma will soon strip the psychedelics of all consciously noticeable effects, especially those unscientific “hallucinations” that they seem to cause, in an attempt to derive therefrom a socially acceptable “one-size-fits-all” cure for depression, yet another daily pill regimen that they can market aggressively to the statistically over-depressed American people by running slick but ethereal advertisements during commercial breaks for “Dateline NBC” and “48 Hours.”
This is why leaders of the Native American Church are, I believe, justifiably leery of the new psychedelic revolution, because it is being advanced under the banner of materialist medicine, not under the banner of human freedom, personal humility, and a sincere desire to learn about oneself and one’s place in the universe. To put it another way, it’s one thing to destigmatize psychedelics, it’s quite another to denude them of all their awe-inspiring qualities, and that’s what happens when psychedelics are wrenched from the hands of a shaman and placed under the microscope of a clinician.
CONCLUSION:
Don’t get me wrong: I congratulate Rick Doblin on his so far successful, if frustratingly slow, approach to legalizing psychedelic therapy in America, an approach which might be described here as “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” As for the concerns that I’ve highlighted above, I’m sure that MAPS is aware of them all and that they are working to obviate them wherever and whenever possible. I write this, not in order to play Sunday morning quarterback, but to remind Rick’s fan club (to which I myself belong) that there is another way to address the intertwined problems of unjust drug laws and the lack of effective psychotherapy in America today. My personal alternative to Rick’s strategy of compromise can be easily outlined as the following two-step process:
1) Reclaim the human being’s right to naturally occurring substances via appealing to natural law (which, as John Locke writes, gives us unfettered access to “the earth, and all that is therein”).
Then, once this basic human right has been reclaimed from power-hungry politicians…
2) Replace psychiatrists with empathic and pharmacologically savvy shamans who will improve their “patients’” psychological well-being with plant-assisted therapy, using ANY PLANT IN THE WORLD that said shaman deems propitious for achieving the goal(s) of the patient in question.
Then again, maybe I am a Sunday morning quarterback, for I see my approach to drug legalization as a kind of “hail Mary” pass, denying the right of politicians to outlaw plants in the first place, whereas Rick’s strategy involves gaining a series of fiercely contested first downs by exploiting the various minor weaknesses of his opponent.
Despite our different strategies, however, we’re both headed toward the same goal line, i.e. the legalization of psychedelic substances for the psychological benefit of humankind, and I’ll be the first to congratulate Team MAPS should they reach the end zone before me.
"It is impressive testimony to our powers of self-deception that we believe we can expand our civil liberties by opposing threats to it from politicians, while at the same time inviting and embracing threats to it from physicians and psychiatrists."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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January 24, 2020
The Therapeutic Value of Anticipation
towards a realistic psychology of substance use
The use of the term "recreational" to describe substance use is misleading. Those who use the term are ignoring the fact that enjoyable or interesting drug-induced experiences often provide a psychological respite from the dullness and difficulties of so-called sober life. And thus, although a drug experience may be defined as "recreational," that does not imply that the substance use was ONLY recreational (which is generally the way in which drug warriors intend the term). To the contrary, such use is often psychologically therapeutic, and in two ways, the second of which psychology has yet to recognize: 1) It is therapeutic thanks to the relaxation and/or diversion that the actual drug experience affords, and, 2) It is therapeutic thanks to the relaxation induced by the MERE ANTICIPATION of the upcoming relaxation. DeQuincey wrote of this latter benefit of drug use when he praised the therapeutic value of anticipation in connection with his use of opium (this was before he began his ill-advised daily use of opium for the relief of physical pain, after which he necessarily lost the anticipatory benefits of his substance use).
Not only were the author's weekend experiences at the opera enhanced by opium, but his "sober" weekdays were rendered more bearable as well, not directly by the drug, but thanks to the author's sure and certain knowledge of the upcoming intellectual ecstasies that were awaiting him. It is this "something to look forward to" of which modern psychiatry stubbornly refuses to take cognizance in estimating the value of occasional substance use, preferring instead to categorically demonize substances such as opium and cocaine as having no therapeutic value whatsoever, in slavish deference to the politically inspired laws against such drugs. Such substances are then held to health and safety standards that no one would ever think of applying to alcohol and tobacco, let alone to the Big Pharma antidepressants to which 1 in 10 Americans are addicted, in a scandal that has yet to make the hypocritical and purblind drug warriors lose a minute of sleep.
(One can only conclude that addiction is not the real bugaboo for the anti-drug fanatics, that what really alarms them is the marketing of substances for which big business is not getting its fair share of the profits.)
Thus, the bi-monthly use, say, of psychedelics cannot be dismissed as "recreational" merely because the user has assigned no nobler purpose to the use, for the anticipatory aspect of any positive experience -- drug-induced or otherwise -- can itself conduce to relaxation and a happier life. Thus such use can be psychologically therapeutic even if the user fails to explicitly note that fact.
LSD-25, a drug capable of bringing back childhood memories with the sharpness of a 3-D movie, is helping fight mental illness in persons formerly considered hopeless, two psychiatrists said today.
"Hopeless Mental Cases Given Aid By Drug Discovery," The Daily Item, Sunbury, Pennsylvania, March 24, 1960,
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January 20, 2020
John Locke on Drugs
It’s funny. I’ve read and re-read Locke’s Treatises on Government, and I have yet to discover a principle whereby government can justifiably confiscate the naturally occurring substances to which we have legally claimed ownership. To the contrary, section 26 of his Second Treatise of Government (Book 2) tells us:“The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being.”
You’ll notice that Locke did not say, ““The earth, and all that is therein, with the obvious exception of psychoactive plants, which the government may justifiably confiscate at will, while vigorously persecuting the owner of the property upon which said demon-plants reside.”
Thomas Jefferson shared Locke’s views on property, insofar as he wrote to Virginia Lawyer Samuel Kercheval:
“A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings.”
In other words, Jefferson understood the right to property as existing under natural law.
We cannot therefore suppose that Jeffersonian democracy would countenance a common law exception to property rights based on a politicized scare campaign about dangerous substances – least of all one in which the drug warriors claim that alcohol and tobacco, the two most dangerous drugs in the world, are going to be exceptions to the substance criminalization that they otherwise advocate.
Certainly, Jefferson had no need of referencing a list of government-banned plants before arranging his extensive and ever-changing gardens at Monticello. Why? Because Jefferson considered that his right to his own botanical property was self-evident, based on natural law, and thus not subject to abridgement by the common law of a politically motivated government. What’s more this ban on government meddling was meant for all time, insofar as natural law is considered to be both universal and immutable.
We conclude therefore that the DEA violates the rational dictates of natural law when it criminalizes naturally occurring plants, and that it is therefore not simply the right of Americans to protest this usurpation, but their duty. For the drug war represents a repudiation of the principles upon which this country was founded, especially property rights as defined by John Locke (i.e., the right to “the earth and all that is therein”).
Considered in this light, the DEA’s 1987 confiscation of poppy plants from Monticello should have been a wakeup call for America. In this action, the DEA was demonstrating its scorn for both Locke’s natural law and the unalienable rights as alluded to (and partially enumerated) by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s poppy plants simply had to go. Why? Because the government had decided that this particular bit of personal property was somehow “bad” in and of itself.
Thus the common law was suffered to triumph over natural law, getting things precisely backwards from the Founding Fathers’ point of view. And so the champions of Big Government won the day, committing brazen-faced robbery – of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, no less -- under the disingenuous and hypocritical banner of a superstition: the idea that some plant medicines are evil and somehow beyond the ability of free human beings to use wisely.
It was the age of the Christian Science propaganda campaign known as “just say no,” when Americans were not only persuaded by the government’s superstitious beliefs about plant medicines, but went so far as to renounce their privacy rights in a bid to show their patriotic support of America’s new secular religion known as the drug war, practically vying with one another to be the first to offer their urine for drug testing to demonstrate their allegiance to the new anti-Jeffersonian status quo. Through drug testing, the true believers could be separated from America’s new class of enemies, those who, like Jefferson, dared to consider their right to Mother Nature’s bounty as unalienable, as established by natural law. Thus big business conspired with government to ruin the lives of those who dared help themselves to Mother Nature’s plants in defiance of politically motivated common law.
It was in this anti-American atmosphere that the sight of jackboots invading Monticello failed to arouse so much as a whimper in the hoi polloi. (But was not the freedom-loving Thomas Jefferson literally spinning in his grave!) But then values were all askew back then. This was the era when Bush and Reagan were encouraging children to turn their parents in to the police for using politically stigmatized substances, a law-enforcement strategy that would have earned kudos from Joseph Stalin. What better proof that the drug-war is anti-democratic than that it leads to the normalization of such chilling totalitarian political tactics.
Ominously, this normalization of government evil has continued apace since the DEA’s Monticello raid, as the latest drug war movies from Hollywood openly extol the virtues of torture and murder as means of separating humankind from the therapeutic plants of Mother Nature. In “Running with the Devil,” DEA agent Natalie Reyes tortures one “drug suspect” and murders another, in a plot whose script seeks to render her as the hero of the film, a no-nonsense fascist determined to separate humankind from mother nature’s plants at any price – even that of turning America into a totalitarian police state. If millions of the depressed and lonely have gone without godsend rain forest medicines for 50 years thanks to her agency’s ban on drug research, that’s not Natalie’s problem. She’s just doing her job, that is, killing “scumbags” (meaning any Americans who dare to make use of the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet).
The popularity of such fascist-friendly films is a measure of the drug war’s success in alienating Americans from the Jeffersonian legacy of personal freedom and goading us toward the acceptance of a new totalitarianism based on the demonization of Mother Nature’s plants. This is an anti-American power grab by anti-Jeffersonian fascists who tell us: “Your pursuit of happiness may go thus far and no farther, lest we confiscate your property and throw you in jail.”
The government thus legislates as if Thomas Jefferson had added the following footnote to the Declaration of Independence: “Of course, these natural rights must give way should the government find it politically expedient to insert common law in their stead.”
Such a fascist power grab cries out for refutation and pushback by freedom lovers throughout the country – and throughout the world, in light of America’s drug war colonialism, whereby we financially blackmail our trading partners into toeing our government’s own superstitious party line about naturally occurring psychoactive substances.
“But actual liberty is dangerous!” cries the Chicken Little drug warrior.
Of course, any naturally occurring object can be dangerous when misused -- whether we're talking about Jefferson's riding horses or his poppy plants -- but so what? Nothing in Lockean theory limits a citizen's right to Mother Nature's bounty based on the danger that such liberty might seem to pose in the jaundiced eye of a busybody observer, let alone in the impersonal eye of a jealous and power-usurping government. For when it comes to the natural law on which our rights are founded, John Locke understood what the drug warrior has long forgotten, that mere things are neither good nor bad: only people are. Hence it follows that correcting behavior in a free society involves working with people to improve their lives, not scapegoating the ever-changing list of personal property with which we associate their bad or dangerous behavior as time goes by.
This basic understanding is implicit in everything that Locke wrote about natural rights: that people, not things, may be good or bad. If he did not always mention this explicitly, it was only because he never thought that a rational people could be so misled by political propaganda as to come to doubt such a manifest truth.
The plain historical facts are that before 1914, there was no "drug problem" in the United States; nor did we have a name for it.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz.
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January 15, 2020
Decriminalizing Mother Nature: the end game
A serious reader of this website might be asking themselves, what is the author’s end game? What would his ideal world look like after the anti-patient drug war mentality has been renounced once and for all.That’s easy.
What we call psychiatry today – which is really just the institutionalization of a Big Pharma pill mill – will transform into a shamanic-like practice, in which highly empathic professionals, well versed in the pharmacology and usage history of every psychoactive substance on earth, would match each sufferer individually with the natural substance(s) necessary to lead the sufferer to self-knowledge and in the direction of ultimate self-fulfillment in life. Having identified the promising plant-assisted therapies, treatment would commence, reverently and with specific pre-identified goals.
It's really that simple. The amazing thing is that such a common sense approach to mental suffering should strike Americans as somehow daring or outrageous. (Only imagine, psychiatrists being free to choose the medicine most likely to assist his or her patient!) This outrage no doubt comes from the fact that we expect psychiatry to function like the medical world, given the misleading metaphor according to which psychological pathology is “just another illness.” This metaphor was originally embraced to prevent the stigmatization of psychological illness (Johnny’s not a lunatic, he’s just “sick”), but when we take it literally, we are led astray. We then objectify the psychiatric patient as an impersonal human body (one of billions of interchangeable units) who is ready to be given a specific medicine in order to obtain a specific result.
Alas, human beings are far less predictable than that when it comes to emotions. Unfortunately, Big Pharma has long since taken up that metaphor and run with it, creating a small addictive pharmacy of one-size-fits-all antidepressants that are meant to kill an underlying “illness” that is not really there. It’s not there because the term “illness” was a metaphor all along. Big Pharma made trillions by creating drugs that were meant to take the metaphor seriously, and so they alleged that their nostrums were fixing a chemical imbalance that caused depression, when subsequent research revealed that the imbalance in question was being caused by the Big Pharma drugs themselves.
Yet folks stubbornly hold to this urban legend about a chemical imbalance, thus their willingness to continue popping those pills – many of which cause such chemical dependence that long-term users find them impossible to quit. Indeed, one such drug, Effexor, has a 95% recidivism rate for those who attempt to get off of it, and this according to the NIH itself. If any of the new potential therapies (MDMA, psilocybin, ayahuasca, ibogaine…) had a similar addiction rate, they would be blacklisted for all time, yet another instance of the breathtaking hypocrisy of the drug war. To the contrary, the new psychedelic therapies are almost entirely non-addictive, and yet they are the bad guys according to the DEA, not the substances to which 1 in 10 Americans are already addicted even as I type.
There are still more road blocks to the institutionalization of my pro-patient end game.
First and foremost, the drug war has led to a superstitious fear of substances in and of themselves, without regard for how they are used. Thus when we see photographs of cocaine online, we’re likely to see blood-soaked dollar bills nearby, and a hypodermic needle for good measure. We are thereby propagandized into believing that substances like cocaine are bad in themselves, regardless of how they are used and for what purpose. This is an anti-scientific point of view, which has devastating effects for those who can benefit from the wise use of substances, and until Americans realize how they are being snookered by government propaganda, they will refrain from demanding back their God-given right to the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet. (Hollywood does all it can to disseminate this propaganda by creating a whole genre of movies in which cocaine is the bad guy, while the good guys are the DEA agents who invade other countries to torture and murder drug suspects.)
We must spurn the silly drug-war conviction that a substance can be justly banned simply because it can be abused – for this anti-scientific outlook ignores the millions, even billions, of sufferers who could potentially make WISE use of such a substance. If the Drug War criterion for legality were in force when it comes to driving automobiles, there would not be one single car on the road. Some people will drive recklessly, so the drug warrior would cry, and so no one must ever be allowed to drive!
There will be additional conceptual difficulties in bringing back freedom.
The system I propose assumes a reverent (or at least serious) approach to the use of powerful substances in a private therapeutic setting. But this reverent attitude might be impossible to maintain if natural substances, particularly entheogens, are allowed to be marketed commercially, particularly in a cynical society that has been taught by the drug warriors to snicker and nod knowingly about substances that have been labeled illegal in the past, assuming that all such drugs are used for the tawdry purposes of “getting high.” The ultimate purpose of the use of entheogens is to gain access to a more fundamental reality and to learn from that experience -- and we must resist the drug-warrior temptation to deride that lofty goal with the dismissive label of “hedonism.” This means that the market in entheogens may need to be state-controlled.
Our goal, after all, is to get rid of anti-drug propaganda, according to which certain substances are bad in and of themselves. The last thing we want to do is replace that anti-scientific viewpoint with pro-drug propaganda, according to which certain substances are just plain good. For our problem with the drug war has always been this, that substances are neither good NOR bad, that such judgments can only be made with respect to the WAY in which such substances are used. Frivolous, uninformed use: bad; reverent, informed use: good. (Dear Mr. or Mrs. Drug Warrior, this is not rocket science, after all!)
There you have it, my end game for the use of Mother Nature’s uncensored pharmacy to treat psychological conditions, along with an effort to at least begin addressing the issues that may arise in our attempts to empower these new freedoms in the cynical capitalist world of our times.
Who is responsible for the 24/7 moaning of millions of elderly Americans in nursing homes?
The DEA and the Drug War, based on the mind set that outlawed opium in 1914, so that now only outlaws have opium. The depressed elderly must make do with psychiatry's highly addictive and less helpful drug alternatives. Scientific materialists are terrified lest they give the elderly good dreams for a change. (Humph! How very unscientific. Let them suffer instead!)
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January 13, 2020
Rationality Uber Alles
the philosophical link between the drug war and our scientistic contempt for human emotions
For years, I’ve been obsessed with answering the following question:Why are Americans convinced that it’s wrong to expand and improve one’s conscious mind with the help of plant substances?
After all, we’re more than eager to use plant substances for easing the pain of stomach or tooth ache. Why do we stint at using natural plants to improve our feelings?
This morning I awoke with a new answer: The problem is western philosophy.
Beginning with the pre-Socratics, western society became convinced that thought was the best way to understand and cope with the world around us: thought, not feeling. Our feelings could not be trusted, after all, whereas 2+2 was always 4.
This view is so basic now to the western world outlook that we’re unlikely to question it, the view that thought should always trump feeling as our guide to the world. But no matter how compelling this proposition must seem to a society in which its truth is taken for granted, there are reasons to believe that it is wrong, or at least that it provides a drastically inadequate means of approaching life and its problems from a human point of view.
For evidence of this one-sided focus on rationality, we have only to consider the absurd presupposition of Freudian psychotherapy: namely, that one will be cured of psychological problems merely by understanding them. Somehow merely explaining the origins of one’s bad feelings will make them go away. Such a proposition would not even make philosophical sense to us (it would read like the non-sequitur that it is) unless we presupposed the philosophical superiority of thought over feelings. In a world without that presupposition, an outspoken psychiatric patient would naturally be tempted to chide their Freudian psychotherapist as follows: “I’m hurting emotionally inside and you’re going to cure that problem with WORDS? How about giving me a hug, instead – or a plant-based entheogen – or both?”
Even the highly educated standard bearers of this rationality-based modality tacitly acknowledge its ultimate uselessness, as Freud ensured his own self-fulfillment not with psychotherapy but with the frequent use of cocaine.
Having rendered psychotherapy expensive and ineffective for well over half a century (before it was replaced by the even more expensive and ineffective pill-based therapy), this purblind reliance on reason alone (at the expense of feeling) is now boding a bleak future for society in general, as materialists like Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt strategically seek to make their users behave more like robots, and thus become more predictable for the purposes of surveillance capitalism. Such robotization, after all, is the end game of thought-based society, at least when it embraces the dreary tenets of materialism: namely, that human beings are nothing special, that consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon, and that there is no inherent meaning in life. If that’s all there is, as Peggy Lee might sing, then we may as well be robots.
But this preference for thought over feeling is not the only way to approach life. There is an alternative approach, based on feelings and experience, an approach that is aptly evoked by Quanah Parker of the Native American Church when he observes that:
“The White Man goes into church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his tipi and talks with Jesus.”
In other words, in religious matters, as in psychotherapy, western society finds it unseemly to actually experience strong emotions. We would rather talk about them. And so when it comes to religion, we are ready to talk the talk, but we would never feel comfortable actually walking the walk. To do so would make us feel like a classical waltzing pro who has been suddenly transported to a hip-hop dance floor. The whole experience would feel wrong and embarrassing to overthinking westerners like ourselves!
Likewise, psychiatrists are comfortable talking to their patients about emotional problems, but they would never think of pharmacologically inducing the actual positive mental states that a cure would represent – that would be too messy, with results too hard to capture on an Excel spread sheet. Better a cure that involves rational understanding than one that "merely" makes one feel better. (Luckily for the squeamish thought-obsessed psychiatrist, the drug war has thrown them a face-saving lifeline. By outlawing mother nature's vast array of mood-altering psychoactive substances, they have given psychiatrists an excuse for depriving humanity of no-brainer medication to improve their mood, medication in whose ritual use the patient can even come to appreciate his or her place in the universe -- a side effect that no one has yet to notice in the Big Pharma antidepressants to which more than one in 10 Americans are addicted even as I type this.)
So we have an answer, then.
Why are Americans convinced that it’s wrong to expand and improve one’s conscious mind with the help of plant substances?
Because we westerners are overthinking prudes. Being thought-obsessed, we feel it’s embarrassing to actually get out there and get our hands dirty in any real experience. So we make a virtue of our psychological necessity by pretending that the emotive world is not so important anyway, in fact it’s downright misleading, we say. And so reality for us is to be discussed and parsed, not to be enjoyed. But note that this is a conclusion based more on sour grapes than on logic.
But there is another way of being in the world, the world of feeling, wherein we strive to be a part of the world, rather than merely attempting to understand it from a supposed god’s-eye view – a viewpoint that is no longer even theoretically obtainable to us in any case given the observer-centric nature of the quantum universe.
It is amusing, and perhaps even informative, to realize that in a society in which feelings truly count, the Pied Pipers of the digital revolution would be considered madmen. They would be the inveterate curmudgeons of society who mope around the tribal fireside, mumbling “must be rational” in monotone, dogmatically eschewing the food of the gods, whilst the rest of the community dances ecstatically under a star-filled sky.
Here, then, in microcosm-- in a tiny Laotian village-- we see the American anti-narcotic crusade writ large. Like Christians burning mosques and temples to spread the word of Jesus, modern drug-abuseologists burn crops to spread the use of alcohol.
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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January 12, 2020
Just Say No to Surveillance Capitalism
How social physics teams up with the drug war to give a knock-out blow to human transcendence
As Shoshana Zuboff reveals in her 2019 book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” one of the biggest cheerleaders of that new data-based economic system is Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland of MIT, an expert in the creation of creepy software designed to harvest data about a wired Netizen’s feelings and intentions. But Pentland’s goals are more ambitious than just enabling a new approach to economic control. He envisions a Skinnerian world run according to the mathematical principles of “social physics,” a brave new world in which humans are controlled by the once-maligned processes of operant conditioning, with the behavior of formerly free citizens being nudged and corralled by data-controlled algorithms designed to steer their actions in “beneficial” directions, at least as the term “beneficial” is defined by Pentland’s deep-pocketed clients.“Such dehumanization sucks,” you may say, “because it treats human beings as widgets. But what does it have to do with the drug war and the DEA?”
Consider:
When the Conquistadores arrived in South America, they immediately saw the ritual use of psychoactive plants as demonic. Why? Because their rational European mind was laden with a material bias that denied any special abilities to the conscious mind. The idea that psychoactive plant use could open up new useful visions was therefore entirely foreign to them. They therefore had no compunction in abolishing such plant-based rituals, often abolishing the tribes that practiced them, too, for good measure.
The Conquistadores’ attack on the humanity of indigenous peoples can be seen as part one of a two-part process of social control spanning half a millennium. The Conquistadores stole the soul from the indigenous people in the 1600s by denying them one customary means of self-transcendence. Now, hundreds of years later, Social Physics has come along to tell us how the social reality of the dispossessed can be re-created, not through transcendent experiences with plants, of course (since the materialist Conquistador mentality maintains its grasp on the western mind, even in post-colonial times), but through the robotization of humankind.
Viewed in this light, all Americans (and the world, for that matter) face the plight of those indigenous people, for we have all been barred from accessing transcendence through plants, thanks to the drug war. And now, to add insult to this unconstitutional injury, materialists like Pentland come along to quantify the soulless residuum of our lives with algorithmic formulas to ensure that our stymied ambitions for transcendence become acceptable to us as the new status quo. If we’re unhappy about being transformed into Pentland’s predictable data-making robots, not to worry: algorithms will be written that will sense our distress and take appropriate action, adding a smiley face to our online calendar, perhaps, along with a link to a feel-good article about puppies that were recently rescued from a puppy mill.
Pentland’s ideal world seems to be one in which the richest capitalists are happy and the rest of us are pacified. This is a world that uses the average person as a widget to ensure the happiness of the top 1%. It is a despotic project that sees efficiency as the ultimate good, while viewing personal transcendence as the enemy. Why? Because transcendence can result in behavioral changes that cannot be predicted by data-crunching algorithms, changes that may even predispose some to overthrow the whole Big Brother project of social control entailed by social physics.
When it comes to humanity’s desire for personal transcendence, the drug war has already knocked us down “for the count.” Now Pentland’s “social physics” wants to come along and deliver the coup de grâce to our aspirations, by using data-based algorithms to construct a reality in which humanity will be taught to make its peace with a strictly material and economically focused world.
Conclusion: It's time to just say no to surveillance capitalism.
Opium... is simple and unpretentious: the dried juice of the poppy. No chemist, no pharmaceutical industry, no physician is needed to produce it or to administer it. This, I submit, is one of the important reasons why modern medicine has so ungratefully turned its back on the poppy, just as it had, earlier, on the wisewoman: each reminds the arrogant "doctor" -- aspiring to control rather than to cure his patient -- of his lowly origins.
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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January 10, 2020
Tune In, Turn On, Opt Out
Why fans of psychedelic medicine should just say no to Surveillance Capitalism
Any psychonaut who is aware of the anti-democratic practices of Big Data companies (and of what those practices portend for a free society) has to ask themselves the following question:Isn’t it time for Americans to “Tune in, turn on, and opt out” (opt out of participating in the digital world that is, to the extent that such a thing is still even possible these days)?
Psychonauts who do not immediately answer “yes” to this query are hereby invited to read “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff, a 2019 classic already considered by many to be “The Silent Spring” of the Digital Age. The book clearly reveals, in the words of the Silicon Valley uber-nerds themselves, the disdain for democratic processes that is implicit in and necessary for the triumph of Big Data companies, financial behemoths for whom human beings are commodities, mere sources of data to be analyzed for predictive purposes by businesses of every kind.
I got so spooked by reading the book last night that I turned off my location finder on my phone, having learned from Shoshana’s research that potentially hundreds of companies have access to the data that I may be unwittingly sharing through the handful of apps that I use on my Android device.
Things got even spookier the next morning, however, when my weight-monitoring app refused to record my latest weigh-in, stating in a pop-up message that Google insists on knowing my location if I wish this particular health-related app to be fully functional.
Fortunately I had read Shoshana’s book, so I knew immediately what Google was up to: they were out to find my destination by hook or crook, whether I wanted to supply it or no. “Fine,” I thought to myself, “I’ll just do without a graphic rendering of my daily weight, or else create one of my own, with good old-fashioned pencil and paper!”
I then settled down to some computer-based freelance work, forgetting all about Big Data’s creepy inroads into my private life – or at least attempting to. But when I checked out my e-mail in-box, I discovered a message from Google Maps with the subject line: “Brian, here’s your 2019 Timeline update.” Curious, but with a sense of foreboding (based on the morning’s events), I opened the e-mail and clicked “Explore Timeline,” only to discover an extensive annotated map clearly indicating everywhere I had been in the world for the last year. Without my knowledge or approval, Google had helped itself to my Android location data for 2019 and now was informing me of that fact by spitting out the data in a format that it supposed might seem useful to me. I felt kind of like a Mafia don had just thrown down the map in front of me and smiled a knowing smile, as if to say: “See? I know where you are whenever I need you.”
Had the government sent me such a map, I would have been horrified. Why am I supposed to be pleased when the same information comes to me from a multi-billion-dollar company like Google?
The e-mail in question said that I was receiving this map because I had turned on “location history.” But I had never knowingly done such a thing, and even if I had, it was probably because Google was holding an app’s functionality hostage until I did so. In any case, I never was informed that Google would be monitoring my every move based on that one uninformed click that I may or may not have made, perhaps as a prerequisite for playing chess on my smart phone or browsing through a digital version of the periodic table of elements.
The inhuman metaphysics of Surveillance Capitalism
But there’s another reason that fans of the psychedelic revolution should “Tune in, Turn on, and Opt Out,” and that is the inhuman metaphysics upon which Surveillance Capitalism is based. Big Data posits a human being as a means to an end, and a strictly materialistic means at that, one from which all relevant data must be extracted to benefit the needs of business. The psychedelic vision, on the other hand, posits the human being as a precious and ineffable part of nature, with a mysterious inner life that needs to be examined and understood over the course of a lifetime. Why? Because the psychonaut believes with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living. The pushback against Surveillance Capitalism should therefore be led by fans of psychedelic therapy, since they are the ones who know how much is to be lost when we consider human beings to be robots, mere cogs in an economic wheel, of value only insofar as they impart reliable data points to Big Data and its customers.
But what would it mean to “Tune in, turn on, and opt out”?
This obviously doesn’t mean abandoning the Internet entirely, since the Net, just like LSD, is neither good nor bad, except in the way that it is used or abused. This new “Leary challenge” does mean, however, that we should “call” Big Data on its penchant for claiming our data through surreptitious means, such as withholding app functionality until we agree to their grasping terms, or burying their ambitious data grabs in lengthy unreadable disclosures. Meanwhile, those of us who don’t consider ourselves to be robots should remind the Big Data companies of our point of view and put them on notice that our emotions and desires are off-limits to data mining, no matter how practical such an extraction may become in theory thanks to the increasing accuracy of digital mood detectors and the like.
Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Google’s Schmidt both insist that it's Manifest Destiny that our privacy rights are going to disappear, that the future will be one of ever-increasing efficiency, powered by a myriad of data-points supplied by obediently wired Netizens. It's inevitable they say, "so don't bother trying to stop us." But what about those of us who do not consider efficiency and profiteering to be the ultimate goals of life? Why should we play along in order to boost the profits of the most profitable companies in the world?
Fortunately, we champions of the human spirit can still opt out of this robotic dystopia that the Big Data companies are trying to foist upon us under the guise of its supposed inevitability. We can start by actually reading those disclosure and privacy notices and crying "foul" when they oblige us to part with privacy expectations that we have always taken for granted in analog life.
Meanwhile, we must realize that the Big Data end game is not simply to corner the market on our private information, but to use that data to change our behavior in accordance with the economic needs of its deep-pocketed clients. In this way, the goal of surveillance capitalism dovetails with the interests of the drug war: both are committed to keeping human beings as predictable as possible: one by rendering us more robotlike and programmable, the other by denying us the mind-expanding blessings of Mother Nature.
Iran has maintained itself as a nation for more than two thousands years, with its people using opium in moderation, mainly to help them endure their harsh and barren lives. Why, then, did it have to enact Opium Prohibition all of a sudden in 1955? 'Prohibition was motivated,' writes Kamm, 'largely by prestige reasons.... It did not fit with the image of an awakening, Westernizing Iran that the Shah was creating.'"
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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January 8, 2020
Urine Testers Needed
must be willing and able to piss on the US Constitution
A big player in the drug-testing business is looking for new urine testers. Must be willing and able to ruin the lives of Americans who attempt to profit therapeutically from Mother Nature's plants. Will check employee urine for every natural substance known to man -- except for the two most dangerous substances, of course, namely alcohol and tobacco. (Nor will the successful candidate be checking for addictive antidepressants, in keeping with the social status quo of ignoring THAT epidemic entirely. Hey, Americans can only handle so much truth at one time, you see.) Must, however, be willing and able to punish Christian Science heretics with expulsion from the U.S. job market based on no probable cause whatsoever, let alone proof that would hold up in court.Support America's drug war sharia: start checking urine today! Ruin the lives of those bastards who insist on accessing the therapeutic bounty that grows at their very feet!
Want to show your patriotism? Join the Great Piss Off, coming in July 4, 2020, when all right-thinking Americans will simultaneously piss into a special government-provided test tube at exactly 12 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, which they will then send off to a special DEA laboratory in Washington DC, as a clear sign to our Drug Czars that they have obediently scorned the therapeutic benefits of Mother Nature. To receive complete details, along with your own custom-marked test tube, call today: 1-800-PISS-OFF. That's 1-800-PISS-OFF.
Show America that you have nothing to hide -- piss off for America this July!
Meanwhile remember: Just say no to increased cognitive abilities! Tell Mother Nature, "Thanks, but no thanks, for the ontologically revealing plants. I'd just as soon see reality through the same dull grey fog as per usual, if it's all the same to you. No need for plant-supplied psychological insights here. I knows what I knows, and that's good enough for me!
Expanded consciousness? My parents and grandparents were as dumb as a post and they got by just fine with good old-fashioned sobriety -- albeit with a generous pull on the old Jack Daniels bottle when the going got tough, about every 24 hour or so. Besides, ain't it just witches and savages what use plants and fung-i for psychological purposes? Seems absurd to go that route after my conquistador forebears spent all that time wiping out whole cultures merely because they used the stuff."
Or an indignant apostrophe to that effect. Just be sure to let mother nature have it! Uggh!
FROM VFW (2019) movie: "I'd say they're drug addicts, for sure. There's a whole shitload of them, too."
This is how the drug war dehumanizes substance users. It's the drug-war-created black market that creates addicts in the first place, with the help of drug warriors who obscure the truth about drugs by implying that all illegal substances have no reasonable uses, despite hushed-up facts to the contrary, including Ben Franklin's use of opium, Feynman's use of so-called "speed," Freud's use of cocaine, plus millennia worth of responsible and religious psychoactive substance use overseas, which America uses as a pretext to run around the world burning plants in order to ensure the monopoly of the liquor industry.
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January 7, 2020
There is a Specter Haunting Science
the specter of the Drug War
An actual speech from an actually imagined meeting of the National Science FoundationLadies and gentlemen, I’m afraid there was a bit of a typo in the bulletin for today’s science lecture. My speech today is not going to be on, and I quote, “Genetic Variability in Hydrastis Canadensis.” (I’m not sure what your secretary was smoking when she came up with that title, since it bears so little resemblance to the actual topic of my proposed animadversions for this morning's session. Humph.)
The actual title of my address today is: “Scientists are Cowards: Yes, I’m talking to you.”
And I begin. Ahem.
There is a specter haunting Europe – and the entire free-world for that matter -- the specter of the anti-scientific drug war.
You doubt it? Just hear me out.
Suppose that the Catholic Church had come forth in the last half-century and told you that there were thousands of plants that you scientists were no longer allowed to study, on pain of being ostracized, removed from your job, or perhaps even arrested?
You guys would be up in arms. Especially the rabid atheists among us. Not to mention any names, of course (such as Daniel Dennett or Sam Harris or Michael Ruse or Richard Dawkins). You’d be like: How dare the Church tell science what it can and cannot study?
Enough with the hypocritical applause, folks, because guess what: you scientists DID let an outside force trump the cause of science over the last 50 years – it’s just that the force in question was the government, not religion.
The Drug Warriors declared that you must stop studying a wide variety of psychoactive plants (on pain of the aforesaid penalties), and you guys essentially said, in the immortal words of Sergeant Schultz from “Hogan’s Heroes”: “Jawohl, Herr Kommandant. I know no-think about such plants, I say no-think about such plants!”
QED: You scientists are cowards. End of discussion.
You failed to push back and declare science off-limits to political manipulation... read more
Local medical research has so far indicated that these drugs [LSD], when properly used by trained personnel in a psychiatric setting, bring about the release of long-repressed thoughts and emotions, intensify early memory, and generally enhance perception in ways that promote self-understanding and personality growth in persons with mental and emotional problems.
Hawaii Medical Association, as reported in The Honolulu Advertiser, September 12, 1960
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January 4, 2020
Torture 101 at DEA University
prerequisite: Subverting the U.S. Constitution
PROFESSOR: Welcome to Torture 101 here at DEA University. I’m Professor Himmler. Check your schedules, people. ”Subverting the US Constitution” is across the hall with Professor Goebbels. There’s no use in taking the roll while so many DEA recruits are wandering around the hallways like so many drug-addled zombies, so I’ll just start lecturing and see what happens.
Earth to the students loitering at the door: this is Torture 101. Either shit or get off the pot.
Now then, what comes to mind when I say the word ”torture”?
WILLIAM: A Justin Bieber concert.
*laughter*
PROFESSOR: Get out.
WILLIAM: I beg your pardon
PROFESSOR: Get out of my class. You disgust me.
WILLIAM: But—
PROFESSOR: This is a teaching moment, class: There is no room in the DEA for humor.
*gasps*
PROFESSOR: No, wait, I lie. It’s okay to let your hair down and laugh at the folks whose rights you have trampled...
But we must reserve that talk for the break room, where we can gloat in peace over the lives that we have ruined.
Ach! More zombies loitering at the door. I can see that we’re going to get nothing accomplished today.
Well, at least I can assign tonight’s homework: I want you folks to go home and watch ”Running with the Devil” starring Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne and Natalie Reyes.
Notice that the DEA agent (played by Natalie) takes her drug suspect to a nondescript storage hangar and suspends him from a meat hook.
MIKEY: Isn’t that illegal, sir?
PROFESSOR: Well, if you had taken Dr. Goebbel’s excellent course on subverting the U.S... read more
"To understand holy water, we must of course examine priests and parishioners, not water; and to understand abused and addictive drugs, we must examine doctors and addicts, politicians and populations, not drugs."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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January 2, 2020
Hypocritical America Embraces Drug War Fascism
a warning to any remaining friends of freedom
This morning I searched the vast image catalog of Shutterstock for some photographs that illustrated the general concept of abolishing the drug war. I was sure I’d find something since the site has over a billion images submitted by well over half a million contributors.Wrong.
To my dismay, there were very few if any images that suggested, even obliquely, that the drug war was folly. Instead, the site was full of propaganda images that associated cocaine in particular with all manner of vice. First we see an image of a white tabletop littered with bloody bullet casings and a credit card half covered with cocaine. Next we see a handgun lying in front of a half-dozen plastic bags full of white powder. One row down, there are the trademark lines of cocaine starkly displayed on a black tabletop, just waiting for some hedonist hit man to snort, no doubt before taking a scantily clad mistress in his arms and lavishing her with a highly salacious kiss. (Needless to say there are no images of Sherlock Holmes, using related substances to hone his observational skills, nor of Freud, using such substances to ensure the prolific output whereby he achieved self-actualization in life.)
Is America blind? Does no one realize that the dystopia thus depicted on Shutterstock is caused by the Drug War itself, the very war that we assume will solve our problems? Just as Prohibition created the Mafia, the Drug War has turned inner cities into shooting galleries.
The answer is obvious: decriminalize drugs, cocaine first and foremost, since it seems to be the natural substance of choice for marketing illegally... read more
Dr. T.C. Marks, a physician of experience and standing, has added another to the long list of things that can be profitably produced in the glorious climate of southern California. The particular substance this time is opium.
Los Angeles Herald, August 9, 1891
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December 30, 2019
Campfire Stories about America's Drug War
live from Lake Rights-Be-Gone
COUNSELOR RICK: Kids, gather around, I have a good horror story for you.KIDS: Oooh!
COUNSELOR RICK: That's right, ears in the full upright position. This one's downright eerie.
Now then, once upon a time, there were these godsend plants that could help people get over depression and conquer loneliness.
ANTOINE: THAT'S not scary!
COUNSELOR RICK: Oh, just you wait, Antoine. See, these plants grew all around us, they were our natural birthright as Earthlings, but then these bigoted people known as "drug warriors" decided that these plants were somehow evil.
GWYNN: That's silly, Counselor Rick. Plant medicines can't be evil, only people can be evil.
MARK: That's right. Medicines can be good OR bad: it all depends on how they're used.
COUNSELOR RICK: You know that, kids, and I know that, but these people were... well, how should I put this...?
ANTOINE: Dumb as crap?
COUNSELOR RICK: Well, let's just say they were superstitious.
MARK: Sounds like they were regular cretins to me.
COUNSELOR RICK: Now, now, Mark, be nice.
CINDY: Counselor Rick! Counselor Rick!
COUNSELOR RICK: Yes, Cindy?
CINDY: I think I've heard this one before... read more
In the course of this war against an exceptionally hard-working and law-abiding people, their characteristic habit-- smoking opium-- became the leading symbol of their "dangerousness." After all, Americans could not admit that they hated and feared the Chinese because the Chinese worked harder...
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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December 29, 2019
Depressed? Here's why.
Exposing the anti-patient drug-war lobby in Washington
The DEA is the enemy of depressed individuals worldwide because it has blocked the research (let alone the use) of godsend antidepressant medications now for over four decades. Technically, it has only done this in America, but Drug War colonialism has spread this anti-scientific policy worldwide, as America financially blackmails its trading partners into touting the anti-patient party line about so-called drugs.MDMA was legal in 1984 and ready to treat soldiers with PTSD. However, in 1985, the DEA acted against the advice of its own regulatory judge and criminalized the substance. The result: American soldiers have been without a godsend medication for PTSD during the last three and a half decades, during their fight with al-Qaida and the Taliban. While our forces were living through hell overseas, the DEA was hunkering down in its comfy Washington offices, determined to keep its jobs at any cost, even at the expense of soldiers' lives and well-being. Meanwhile, psychedelics (such as ayahuasca, psilocybin, and ibogaine) which showed profound potential for virtually curing alcoholism in the '50s, have been listed by the DEA as schedule I drugs since the DEA's inception (based purely on politics, not on science) ensuring that the depressed must continue to rely on Big Pharma meds that create chemical dependence.
But the DEA is not the only group that's determined to keep valuable medications from those who need them. To figure out who else is anti-patient in this way, just ask yourself: who stands to lose money if the drug war is finally terminated? A partial list of such groups follows... read more
Who barged on to Jefferson's Monticello and destroyed Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants? 1) The Mob 2) Juvenile delinquents 3) Terrorists 4) The DEA
The DEA
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December 27, 2019
The Drug War is a War on Patients
my letter to Republican senators of the 116th U.S. Congress
Dear Senator:Please end the Drug War. It is a war on patients.
I am a 61-year-old American who has been denied godsend medications for depression for the last 40 years, all because Washington legislators care more about punishing “drug users” than they care about helping those suffering from alcoholism, depression and PTSD.
When is Congress going to stop the war on drug research and the war on patients?
It is nothing less than a crime against humanity when the DEA knowingly withholds godsend medications from the American public – and lies while so doing.
Please end this war against patients today. Abolish the DEA and put its leadership on trial for causing immense and unnecessary suffering for America’s patients through its anti-scientific lies about substances like MDMA and psilocybin.
And stop financially blackmailing other countries to make them follow suit with America’s unscientific drug war. Is it not bad enough that you've made it impossible for me to get help in America? Do you really have to make sure that I can’t get help anywhere on the planet?
Substances are not evil, Senator. That is a drug-war superstition. They are good or bad, depending on how they are used.
Stop demonizing godsend medications just because they may be subject to occasional abuse.
Please stop denying godsend medication to millions merely because a few thousand may abuse them.
Get rid of the fascist DEA – the jackbooted thugs that stomped onto Monticello and stole Thomas Jefferson’s poppies -- and let scientists study any substance that they please without government interference – that is, if you really want to live in a free country... read more
Casting a ballot is an important act, emblematic of our role as citizens. But eating and drinking are much more important acts.
'Our Right to Drugs', Thomas Szasz
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December 26, 2019
DEA Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity
The DEA has blocked soldiers receiving MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder, in defiance of their own judge's recommendation that the therapy move forward. That judge said the therapy could go forward in 1985 -- but the DEA shut it down, based partly on bogus scientific reports written to curry favor with drug warriors.In doing this, the DEA is responsible for 30 years' (and counting) worth of unnecessary suffering for American soldiers.
They have blocked depressives and alcoholics from receiving godsend medications for four decades and counting.
In doing this, the DEA is responsible for 45 years' (and counting) worth of unnecessary suffering for alcoholics and the depressed.
They have blocked study of ayahuasca, even though it has been shown to grow new neurons in the brain. Pity the DEA fools who reach retirement age and start to unnecessarily suffer from Alzheimer's because they blocked this godsend plant from even being studied.
The question is no longer if the DEA is acting rightly. The answer is clear: the DEA is a despotic, violence-causing anti-democratic force determined to keep their jobs at the expense of the health and happiness of the American people. Just as alcohol prohibition single-handedly created the Mafia, substance prohibition has resulted in the creation of inner-city shooting galleries.
Abolishing the DEA is just the first step: Its officers need to be tried for crimes against humanity, to be hauled before a court to answer for their lies about mother nature's medicines, their self-dealing, their withholding of godsend therapies from the depressed, alcoholics and America's soldiers... read more
From the movie VWF (2019), about a vicious opioid gang (man speaking on talk show): "The cops can't do any more. There's not enough of them."
Law enforcement has done too much already. By outlawing plant medicines (many of them non-addictive or far less addictive than synthetics), they have created the very crisis that we're now asking them to fix! Meanwhile, their drug-war propaganda, full of half-truths and lacking crucial caveats, has served to obscure the true dangers of highly addictive synthetic drugs. But the caller to this talk show wants the police to make things worse by locking up as many people as possible.
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December 25, 2019
Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
an open letter to the Heffter Research Institute
In the book Psychedelic Medicine, Dr. Richard Louis Miller refers to a lack of support for psychedelic medicines, especially LSD, concluding that there are only a handful of specialists who are pursuing the work and that the public, especially in Britain, are largely indifferent to the whole topic.In my opinion, this indifference exists only because no one has yet attempted to connect the dots between the outlawing of psychedelic therapy and the current sad state of depression therapy in America, namely that addictive and starkly inadequate solution of Big Pharma known as SSRIs and SNRIs. If this connection were understood by the depressed public, I imagine they would be plenty motivated to support change.
The dots may be connected as follows:
Psychedelic therapy showed great promise for the depressed and it’s non-addictive.
The government banned that therapy half a century ago.
As a result, the depressed have been shunted off onto addictive medicines that simply do not work as claimed, drugs that actually create the chemical imbalance that they purport to fix. These ineffective medicines are expensive, must be taken daily and turn the pill-taker into an eternal patient, since they have to visit a psychiatrist every 3 months of their life in order to be catechized about their mental health. This is the exact opposite of an empowering therapy. Speaking personally, I consider it highly demoralizing (a fact that I’ve never heard psychiatrists recognize, let alone regret).
I personally have been a guinea pig for Big Pharma for the last 50 years, and their nostrums have not worked... read more
From the movie VWF (2019), about a vicious opioid gang: "It's turning into a f--ing war zone, man. I'll tell you what it is. It's all those goddamn drugs."
Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's the outlawing of plant substances that has forced the seeker of transcendence to seek dangerous synthetic substances marketed by outlaws. WAKE UP! All the evil that you attribute to plants can be laid at the doors of prohibition along with drug-war propaganda that obscures the true threats by painting every substance as black once it's been labeled as evil by politicians.
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December 21, 2019
Snoop Pearson's Muddle-Headed Take on Drugs
I don’t want to pick on Snoop, but I cannot resist because her confusion about so-called “drugs” is so typical of the muddle-headed thinking of Americans in general on this subject. So hopefully in clarifying her confusion, I’ll be of assistance to others who may be similarly bamboozled.First, let’s be honest about what we Americans mean by drugs, Snoopie: We do not mean liquor. We do not mean tobacco. And we certainly do not mean Big Pharma’s massively prescribed antidepressants to which at least 1 in 10 Americans are currently addicted.
No, by “drugs” we merely mean natural substances that our government has decided are bad for us. In other words, our hatred of drugs is simply Christian Science with respect to psychological well-being, it is the metaphysical idea that we have some moral duty to forego the mind-improving pharmacopeia of Mother Nature.
Why? It’s hard to say*. But our mistrust of Mother Nature is “all of a piece” with our historic fear of witches in the west and the way that they freely availed themselves of psychoactive plants. This fear in turn no doubt dates to societal PTSD from the Garden of Eden debacle. More recently, the psychoactive bounty of Mother Nature has become a threat to traditional medical practitioners, and they’re right to be concerned.
If the government allowed humanity to access its natural birthright of Mother Nature’s pharmacy, then who in their right mind would use the handful of addictive and inadequately effective synthesized drugs that Big Pharma has created to take Mother Nature’s place? No one, at least if the cure and/or benefit that we seek is psychological... read more
"Surely it is difficult to evade the conclusion that the use of alcohol and the use of tobacco have become deeply ingrained habits in Christian and English-speaking countries, and that we therefore consider these substances good; and that, because the use of marijuana (hashish) and the use of opium are pagan and foreign habits, we consider those substances bad."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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December 15, 2019
Lock 'em up! Lock 'em up!
you want a drug war, we'll give you a drug war
Welcome back to the DEA Lounge.
You know, the drug warriors don't want a real drug war.
That's right, because a real drug war would crack down, first and foremost, on the use of the two most devastating drugs in American history: alcohol and tobacco.
I kid you not.
If we launched a REAL drug war, then the hypocritical William Bennetts of the world would be the first so-called "scumbags" to be thrown into the slammer.
And when Billy complains, we'll be like: "Hey, we're just taking your own advice: cracking down on nasty drugs -- and the scumbag druggies like you who use them."
Mind you, in such a drug war we'd have to leave sentiment behind and get tough.
The William Bennetts, I'm afraid, will have to be removed from the voting rolls pronto.
And have their urine tested for tobacco and alcohol at least once a week by government-provided health experts. We should probably televise that testing, too, so that innocent Americans who are subjected to that debasing procedure for no reason at all (i.e., in the absence of all probable cause!) can see that we're not just singling them out.
[Dr. Watt declares] that the moderate use of opium is not more injurious than the moderate use of alcohol and even that its abusive use is less destructive to its victims than intemperance.
The Freeman's Journal, Dublin, Ireland, October 31, 1891
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December 13, 2019
Tweet to Alex Adams
author of How to Justify Torture
@AlexAdams5 In Running with the Devil, the DEA "hero" tortures one suspect. Then she murders another, while hypocritically smoking one of the most lethal drugs on the planet: tobacco.
Who barged on to Jefferson's Monticello and destroyed Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants? 1) The Mob 2) Juvenile delinquents 3) Terrorists 4) The DEA
The DEA
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December 6, 2019
What if Arthur Schopenhauer Had Used DMT?
Psychotropic plants as a cure for modern pessimism
In the "Wisdom of Life," Arthur Schopenhauer sums up an unspoken assumption of Western philosophy when he writes: "Every man is pent up within the limits of his own consciousness and cannot get directly beyond those limits any more than he can get beyond his own skin."
Indeed, Schopenhauer's famous pessimism is derived from the daily observance of this supposed "fact of life."
But what if it's not a fact? What if we discovered that human psychology was quite therapeutically pliable after all? Wouldn't such a finding require a revision, not only of Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy but of Western philosophy in general, insofar as it presupposes stark limitations on the ability of individual human beings to change their own psychology for the better? Wouldn't it require the doomsayers of today to admit that there may be hope for humanity after all, if we only open our eyes (and our research laboratories) to the astonishing psychological healing potential of psychedelic plants?
These are not just hypothetical questions, for a scientific study of psychoactive plants is now proving to Western researchers what partakers of these substances have known for millennia, namely that plants like ibogaine, ayahuasca, and psilocybin can be used strategically to foster new understandings in the human mind, to help one rise above a parochial and neurosis-making upbringing, as well as problematic genetics, and to thrive in the world, in spite of the negative cards that they may have been dealt both by nurture and by nature.
But Western philosophy has entirely missed the implications of these developments... read more
"We are repelled by the opium habit not because it is harmful, but the other way around: we regard it as harmful in order to maintain our justification for prohibiting it."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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December 2, 2019
Euthanasia in the Age of the Drug War
doctors can now kill patients but they can't make them feel better
If you want proof that the drug war is insane, think about the increasing popularity of euthanasia in the west, which is already the law of the land in Holland. Think about what euthanasia means in a country that has banned plant medicines.It means that I can ask my doctor to give me plant medicines that will make me happy and he will indignantly say “no.” But if I ask that same doctor for a drug that will kill me, he will say, “Your wish is my command.”
What more proof do we need that the drug war is a nature-hating sadomasochistic incarnation of Christian Science? It is the triumph of extreme puritanism that says that death itself is preferable to feeling good with the help of Mother Nature’s psychoactive plants.
Would a sane society allow doctors to kill their patients BEFORE first giving those doctors free rein to prescribe the naturally occurring medicines of their choice, many of which have been proven to help the elderly (and the rest of us, for that matter) make their peace both with life and death?
Only a society that had a pathological distrust of Mother Nature’s pharmacy could take such a heartless stance and then seek to enforce it by draconian laws.
"It is impressive testimony to our powers of self-deception that we believe we can expand our civil liberties by opposing threats to it from politicians, while at the same time inviting and embracing threats to it from physicians and psychiatrists."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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November 27, 2019
Unscientific American: the hypocritical materialism of Elon Musk
how sci-fi nerds ignore the healing power of Mother Nature
Elon Musk, founder of Neuralinks, wants to implant “threads” in our brains so that human beings can be provided with various digital therapies and eventually merge with artificial intelligence. Here is my response:America is a very unscientific country. When it comes to psychological healing, we are willing to alter the brain by brute force based on a highly debatable materialist premise (namely, in Musk's own words, that we are all "brains in a vat"), yet we entirely outlaw the therapeutic use of naturally growing plants that have been shown to change consciousness for the better and help us appreciate the beauty of the world around us. Thus we rush toward dangerous and highly theoretical fixes while shunning a time-honored solution that grows at our very feet. Why? Because the materialist presumes that we are basically computers ourselves, with no meaningful individuality, being conducive therefore to a one-size-fits-all therapy. We simply need to be programmed with Musk's electrochemical precision, and presto change-o, all will be well.
But this view of humankind already has a body count: it has resulted in the addiction of 1/10 of the public to massively prescribed antidepressants marketed to America and the world under the materialist presumption that they fixed some chemical imbalance in the human brain, when subsequent research has shown that they create the very imbalance that they claim to fix... read more
The difference between someone "using a drug" and his being "addicted" to it is not a matter of fact, but a matter of our moral attitude and political strategy toward him. Indeed, we might, and must, go further than this, and note that the very identification of a substance as a drug or not a drug is not a matter of fact but a matter of moral attitude and political strategy.
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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November 26, 2019
Se Llama Mushrooms
Live from the DEA Lounge!
Welcome back to the DEA Lounge.
How many know that psychedelics are good for learning languages? Raise your hands?
Let’s see, 24, carry the one…
Looks like nobody here knows that.
No, seriously. That’s just one of the millions of things that we don’t know about Mother Nature’s pharmacy thanks to our government’s policy of placing her off-limits.
Wake up, folks: that’s as anti-scientific as it gets.
Think about it: Why do kids learn languages? Surely, it has something to do with the flexibility of their brains. Whereas the adult brain has gotten into a rut. Am I right?
Look at the guy at the bar over there. He’s like, “I can’t speak for the rest of us here, but my own brain is certainly nothing to write home about.”
I know you didn’t say anything, sir, but there is such a thing as telepathy, you know.
No, seriously. Mark my words: someday language courses will require the consumption of a modest amount of psychedelics during certain crucial lessons... read more
Dr. T.C. Marks, a physician of experience and standing, has added another to the long list of things that can be profitably produced in the glorious climate of southern California. The particular substance this time is opium.
Los Angeles Herald, August 9, 1891
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November 23, 2019
In Praise of Augustus Bedloe
In the short story “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” by Edgar Allan Poe, an artistic but moody young man named Augustus Bedloe walks off into the highlands, under the influence of an immoderate dose of morphine. As he begins to lose his way in the dense and foggy forest southwest of Charlottesville, Virginia, he describes the drug’s onset as follows:"In the meantime the morphine had its customary effect- that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf- in the hue of a blade of grass- in the shape of a trefoil- in the humming of a bee- in the gleaming of a dew-drop- in the breathing of the wind- in the faint odors that came from the forest- there came a whole universe of suggestion- a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought."
I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of wide-awake world that I want to live in – or at very least have access to – and I have no patience with the meddling drug warriors who insist by law that I renounce that desire. They seem determined to make me view Mother Nature with the same bleary eyes that they possess. “If God had wanted us to improve our minds,” they seem to say, “he would have boxed up the relevant therapeutic plants, stamped them with a bar code and placed them on sale at the local Rite-Aid or CVS Pharmacy. Besides, surely a blade of grass is a blade of grass. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Now, let’s go bowling and have some brewskis.”
Such drug warriors are like a self-satisfied Mr. Magoo who wants to outlaw glasses in the belief that his own natural vision is as good as it gets for anybody – or as good as it should get, according to Mr... read more
[Dr. Watt declares] that the moderate use of opium is not more injurious than the moderate use of alcohol and even that its abusive use is less destructive to its victims than intemperance.
The Freeman's Journal, Dublin, Ireland, October 31, 1891
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November 23, 2019
Let's burn some plants!
In the movie “JoJo Rabbit” by Taika Waititi, a Nazi school teacher turns excitedly to her young uniformed charges and shouts: "Now let's burn some books!"That’s a funny line to modern Americans, because we still recognize the obvious importance of free speech. Therefore burning books seems downright silly to us. But before we clap ourselves on the back for our democratic enlightenment viz. the Nazi past, let's remember that we ourselves live in a country that burns plants and holds them responsible for social failings, a so-called scientific country that even bans research on such substances.
Thus the myriad plants and fungi that can improve the mind are outlawed by a superstitious belief that these substances are somehow evil in and of themselves, without regard for the way that they are used.
Let’s hope that the idiocy of this drug-war zeitgeist will be apparent to the movie-goers of the future, so that the line “Let’s burn some plants” will someday elicit the same howls of amused derision that Americans reserve today for the line “Let’s burn some books.”
LSD is a powerful therapeutic tool.
Dr. C.G. Costello, Psychologist, Regina General Hospital, in "Truth About LSD," The Leader-Post, February 5, 1963
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November 14, 2019
Plants Divine, All Plants Excelling
Live from the Second Church of the Eleusinian Mysteries -- at a location that the DEA has been torturing suspects to discover for the last ten years...Let's all turn to hymn #355, "Plants Divine, All Plants Excelling." And a one, and a two, and a one, two, three, four...
Verse 1
Plants divine, all plants excelling
Not a gift for man to shun
Psychoactively restoring
Weary souls a sense of fun
But the prudish claim this bounty’s
From a source we should not tap
So they outlaw mother nature
What a pile of bovine crap
Verse 2
Age-ed souls in homes of sadness
Shorn of meaning and of hope
Find in psilocybin’s gladness
Ways to prosper and to cope
Yet the narc with IQ zero
Seeks to keep the status quo
Forcing sick and dying patients
To encounter needless woe
Verse 3
Thank we now the forest shaman
Who dispenses sacred balm
Plants and fungi from the jungle
Sure to teach us as they calm
Yet the despots slander nature
Curse the plants that ease the brain
Check our urine at the job site
To ensure we all refrain
Verse 4
Bursting with ungrateful chutzpah
Tyrants outlaw healing plants
Drugs that when provided rightly
Make the suicidal dance
Yet, the heartless politician
Claims that “drugs” are just the pits
Yet they never give up liquor
What amazing hypocrites
Verse 5
Ayahuasca’s non-addictive
Grows new neurons in the brain
Makes the most besotted drinker
From his poison to refrain
Yet, the shrinks from here to Parma
Make it clearly understood
We must buy pills from Big Pharma
Till we’re hooked upon them good
Okay, you may all be seated. Thanks for that rousing performance of hymn #355, “Plants Divine, All Plants Excelling,” a paeon of praise to the therapeutic power of rain forest plants, both known and yet to be discovered... read more
How many people know that hemp, coca, and the opium poppy are ordinary plants, understand how they became transformed into dreaded 'dangerous drugs,' and realize that in losing our rights to them we have surrendered some of our most basic rights to property?
'Our Right to Drugs', Thomas Szasz
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November 12, 2019
Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War
I've already found leisure to dilate on the anti-democratic impact of drug-war movies like "Running with the Devil," in which the DEA agent is the (ahem) "hero" who combats those bad guy plant sellers by torturing them and shooting them in cold blood. Although this kind of movie deserves to be panned for its ideological toxicity, don't hold your breath waiting for movie critics to bash the movie on that score. And as far as parental watch dog groups are concerned, count on them to lambaste such pics for nudity, violence, and naughty words, but don't expect to hear a peep from them about the pro-fascist message of such DEA propaganda. Johnny must not swear, of course, but if he wants to torture and murder folks who traffic in Mother Nature's plants, more power to him.But there is another genre of pictures that helps sell the pro-fascist drug war sensibility to gullible Americans: namely, comedies such as "Harold & Kumar go to White Castle," in which illegal plant substances are uniquely associated with sexual abandon and blatant irresponsibility. Such films would be innocuous enough in a culture that spoke honestly about drugs -- that recognized both their benefits and ills -- but in our drug-war society, which dogmatically recognizes only the misuse of outlawed substances, such movies reinforce the drug warrior supposition that there is no sensible reason to use the plants that the government has chosen to criminalize... read more
If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz
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November 10, 2019
How Variety and its film critics support drug war fascism
Letter to VarietyWhen are Variety and its movie critics going to stop celebrating drug war fascism? Dennis Harvey should be PANNING films like “Running with the Devil” that makes a case for torture and murder in prosecuting the drug war, not writing as if the abhorrent movie premise were somehow unremarkable. Not only does Natalie Reyes' DEA character torture a suspect -- and threaten to cut him open -- but she shoots the unarmed "cook" at the end -- WHILE SHE'S SMOKING A CIGARETTE CONTAINING TOBACCO -- a drug far worse than the coca leaves that the agent is determined to suppress. Yet, from the director’s point of view, the movie goer is clearly meant to sympathize with the DEA agent? That’s the sort of cinematic message that Stalin and Mussolini could have gotten behind (or Leni Riefenstahl for that matter), but Thomas Jefferson would have been appalled.
The last thing that a democratic country needs is a movie that glorifies violating the constitution in the name of the drug war. Nor does the DEA deserve to be glorified like this.
It is a lying and self-serving institution that has blocked valuable drug research ever since its founding in 1973 (still saying to this day that there's no therapeutic value in psychedelics, a flat out lie ignoring both recent cutting-edge clinical trials and thousands of years of breathtaking evidence, including the Eleusinian mysteries and MesoAmerican ritual), forcing folks like myself onto addictive Big Pharma antidepressants by default, when just a few sessions with outlawed and inexpensive psychedelics like psilocybin or ayahuasca could have given me a new outlook on life and insight into my human condition... read more
It is only fitting that as formerly the most faithful Christians favored the most un-Christian ferocity against witches, so now the most faithful capitalists recommend the most anti-capitalist ferocity against the entrepreneurs who trade in "dangerous drugs."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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November 7, 2019
Running with the torture loving DEA
Welcome back to the DEA Lounge!
I want to thank our public servants here for taking time out to join us. I know you've got a busy schedule, locking up liberals, so any time you can spare--
What did I say?
Hey, listen, I understand. By locking up liberals, you keep the drug warrior conservatives in power and thus maintain your crucial jobs of quashing dissent in America and limiting human consciousness.
No, seriously. I suppose the drug war was bound to happen eventually on planet earth.
It had to happen at the precise moment in human history when capitalism and modern transportation coincided with a new awareness of the psychoactive power of plants.
We could either greet this alignment of forces rationally or not, and guess which choice we made?
Suddenly, Chicken Little politicians were screaming: "Oh, me gosh, we have to outlaw plants!"
Wrong.
Earth to politicians: you should have outlawed the profit motive when it comes to those psychoactive plants, not the plants themselves.
I guess they had to scapegoat plants, though, since the alternative was to question the all-powerful god of capitalism.
The result? They thereby created such a violent world that we had to invent a whole new movie genre to accommodate all the bullets and bodies: namely, the drug war movie.
The plain historical facts are that before 1914, there was no "drug problem" in the United States; nor did we have a name for it.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz.
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November 7, 2019
Common Nonsense from Common Sense Media
So-called media watchdog scorns dirty words only, not dirty wars
Message sent to Common Sense Media in response to their review of the 2019 drug-war movie Running with the Devil, starring Natalie Reyes, Laurence Fishburne and Nicolas CageYour review of Running with the Devil misses the point. The movie sends a HORRIBLE message to kids, not because of four-letter words but because the government agent in the film willfully tortures a suspect and then shoots and kills another suspect in cold blood. A government agent does this! The film is thus educating children to embrace fascism!!! Why? To stop the bad guy from dealing in plants that should never have been criminalized in the first place. In other words, the drug war creates all the violence that the DEA is fighting in the movie!
And the hypocritical DEA agent is smoking a cigarette when she cold-bloodedly kills an unarmed man!!! Tobacco is one of the worst drugs on the planet in terms of addiction and health costs! And yet this hypocritical DEA agent is smoking the stuff while she self-righteously kills a man who's marketing plants -- a plant that is used to this day for spiritual purposes in South America. Please, tell your reviewers to wake up and start considering the true message of these movies. Stop focusing just on curse words and think what these movies are saying about American democracy.
This movie is saying: “to hell with democracy: we need fascism to fight the war on drugs!” In other words, the war on plants, the war on minorities, the war on patients – as the DEA “heroes” are the ones who lie about psychoactive plants in their scheduling system and thus leave millions of Americans – including my 92-year-old mother – without much needed medicine that could ease their minds and even help them make their peace with death.
If you really want to help kids, help them to steer clear of movies like this that glorify fascist police tactics and the Draconian enforcement of immoral laws.
The fact that a contemporary American's, and especially physician's, advocacy of tolerance with respect to drugs is generally viewed as an endorsement or support of undisciplined licentiousness in the use of "dangerous drugs" signifies that we are now at the height of an "anti-narcotic" inquisition.
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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November 6, 2019
Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabriel Maté
ending the torture-friendly 12-step programs
Dear Dr. Mate.My name is Brian Quass and I am the webmaster of AbolishTheDEA.com.
As the name of the site suggests, I am greatly bothered by the outlawing of natural substances in America, and therefore in the world. I think that the government has thereby made plants the scapegoats for societal problems while turning America into a penal colony and creating a whole new movie genre worth of violence, namely the drug war movie. The result, I believe, is not only ruined lives, but stolen elections, since the drug war results in tens of thousands of Americans being dropped from the voting rolls on account of felony convictions for drug offenses, thereby ensuring that the conservative drug warriors remain in power at election time, simply because their opponents cannot vote.
I am further motivated on this topic because I have spent over 40 years on what turned out to be mind-numbing and addictive LEGAL medicines, going a lifetime without self-actualization, all because my government has decided that I could have no recourse to psychoactive medicines from the rain forest, because, in effect, my government has outlawed the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet. This is why I tell everyone who will listen that the drug war is not just a war against minorities, but it is a war against patients everywhere – even a war against DEA agents themselves, many of whom will get old someday and find themselves lonely and depressed in a “home for the aged,” wanting to die, perhaps – a condition that could so easily have been remedied by the intelligent use of the entheogenic substances that the agent has spent a lifetime confiscating and burning... read more
[Dr. Watt declares] that the moderate use of opium is not more injurious than the moderate use of alcohol and even that its abusive use is less destructive to its victims than intemperance.
The Freeman's Journal, Dublin, Ireland, October 31, 1891
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November 2, 2019
The REAL Lesson of the Opium Wars
Like almost everyone else in America, John Halpern looks at the opium wars of the 19th century and draws two erroneous conclusions. I discuss and refute those two conclusions below.
1) Opium is a drug from hell.
Why do we think that opium is the drug from hell? Why? Because we never hear from the thousands of human beings who have used opium responsibly and to good effect. How many westerners know that Benjamin Franklin used opium? How many westerners know or care that opium had a great productive influence on writers like De Quincey, Poe and Lovecraft? How many westerners know that opium has been found to cure the common cold by many users?
This is the drug warrior strategy, by the way, to never admit to or point out any positive uses of Mother Nature's psychoactive drugs, to constantly highlight the negative, thereby leaving the impression that these substances truly are evil incarnate. If these people focused their polemics on driving, we would come to feel that driving only led to accidents and should therefore be outlawed. Unfortunately, the worst villain in this story is the news media. Cowed as they are by the DEA and public hysteria, they studiously avoid reporting positive news about substance use, thereby giving the impression, through selective negative reporting, that illegal substance use is always substance abuse.
Here's a headline you'll never see: "'Responsible opium use helps me write creatively and prolifically!'"
While it's true that opium can become addictive if used on a daily basis, this is a property of opium that no westerner has a right to complain about. As I type this, over 1 in 10 Americans are addicted to modern anti-depressants, a greater addiction rate than during the opium heyday of the 19th century. Besides, opium addiction can be "kicked" whereas certain modern anti-depressants like Effexor CAN NEVER BE STOPPED according to a recent study by the NIH itself, which reports a 95% recidivism rate for those quitting that drug.
2) We should therefore make opium illegal.
The lesson of the opium war is not that natural substances should be illegal. Opium itself never injured anyone in the 19th century. It was the PROFIT MOTIVE that made opium a bad thing. It was the PROFIT MOTIVE that flooded the market and brought forward only the most potent productions of the poppy plants. It was the same PROFIT MOTIVE that allows today's Big Pharma to get away scot-free with addicting an entire nation.
But writers like Halpern ignore this. Instead of blaming exploitative capitalism, they make a scapegoat out of the substances themselves. The real lesson of the opium war, however, is that the PROFIT MOTIVE should have no role when it comes to the sale of psychoactive substances, not because the substances are evil incarnate, but because the PROFIT MOTIVE encourages irresponsible and uninformed use of such substances.
Indeed, the whole opioid crisis today exists because of the PROFIT MOTIVE, not because poppy plants are the spawn of the devil, as the superstitious drug warrior prefers to believe -- probably because they can't bring themselves to criticize capitalism, and so Mother Nature's plants become convenient scapegoats.
Afterthoughts
Language counts because it is laden with stealth assumptions. When we say "Opium War," we superstitiously associate the evils of the conflict in question with a plant, turning Mother Nature into a scapegoat for human evil and giving a free pass to the phenomenon of unbridled and militaristic capitalism, which is really the villain of the piece.
"To understand holy water, we must of course examine priests and parishioners, not water; and to understand abused and addictive drugs, we must examine doctors and addicts, politicians and populations, not drugs."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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October 30, 2019
Running with the DEA -- er, I mean the Devil
REVIEW OF RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL starring Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne and Natalie Reyes"Running with the Devil" is the latest Hollywood film to glamorize the perverse logic of America's drug war, to celebrate the trampling of the U.S. Constitution and to glorify inquisitorial torture, all in the name of keeping Americans -- and the world -- safe from Mother Nature's plants.
Notice how the hypocritical DEA agent "hero" happily TORTURES her witness, and then has the nerve to tell a man who's selling NATURALLY-OCCURRING SUBSTANCES that he's "dirt."
Is this what American values have come to? Why is Natalia Reyes' character on a high horse when the Drug War is quashing research on valuable drugs for depression -- and single-handedly creating the violence that the DEA sets out to fight?
Hey, here's an idea: re-legalize MOTHER NATURE and then fight BAD BEHAVIOR, NOT PLANTS.
Don't Laurence Fishburne and Nicolas Cage have better things to do in Hollywood than produce propaganda for the DEA - an agency which steals elections for conservatives every year by locking up a million liberals for possessing naturally occurring substances and then taking those liberals off the voting rolls by turning them into felons?
U.S. elections aren't being swayed by the Russians, they're being stolen by American movie producers, including companies like Jaguar Bite and so-called Patriotic Pictures, who have done everything they can with this movie to bequeath DEA tyranny to their great grandchildren, by celebrating the perverse torture-friendly values of today's drug warriors.
The minister in the film laments that the fascist DEA agent's kin were lost to "this drug epidemic."
What drug epidemic? There is no more of a drug epidemic in America now than there was a drinking epidemic during prohibition. The drug impurities and violence that we wring our hands over are not a result of a drug epidemic -- they are a result of the drug war itself, which drives the price of drugs through the roof, makes it impossible to ensure the purity of purchased substances. And by criminalizing non-addictive psychoactive plants, the DEA makes it inevitable that those seeking medicines for their conscious state will end up on hard stuff.
Besides, the DEA has no right to talk about a drug epidemic since they completely ignore the great addiction of our time: the fact that 1 in 8 Americans are addicted FOR LIFE to Big Pharma antidepressants.
The drug warrior doesn't give a good gd about addiction -- they just want the user to be paying their drug money to big pharma -- using their addictive meds rather than using non-addictive psychedelics that could improve one's life in just a few uses.
And at the end of the film -- SPOILER ALERT -- the fascist DEA agent shoots the bad guy. This is what the war on patients -- the war on mother nature -- has done: it has turned Americans into supporters of torture and extra judicial killing. Why? Because we refuse to get the message that the drug war itself is creating the violence that we're fighting.
It's time for the fascist DEA to step down -- to stop criminalizing Mother Nature's godsend medications -- to start showing a little compassion for the millions that have gone without godsend medicines for the last 50 years thanks to DEA lies about psychoactive substances.
The first step is for Hollywood to stop releasing Drug War propaganda like "Running with the Devil."
Oh, by the way: Agent Natalia was smoking a cigarette just before she "offed" the bad guy. Talk about hypocrisy.
One of the most deadly drugs in history -- she's sitting there smoking it! And yet she's in such a self-righteous state that she's ready to kill an unarmed suspect???
Please. We should make cigarette possession a felony and let Agent Natalia see what others go through when their go-to natural substance is criminalized.
In fact, if we must have a drug war, then let's start by throwing callous drug war hypocrites like William Bennett in the pokey indefinitely. Chimney pots like Billy kill countless people every year by second-hand smoke. Oh, and let's not neglect to take away his voting rights and forbid him from running for public office.
If he so much as desires a job at Dollar General, I want William Bennett to submit to a urine and saliva test for the presence of the slightest bit of tobacco in his system before he earns a cent.
Mind you, I'd prefer to end the anti-patient drug war scam entirely, but if we're going to have one, let's start by running roughshod over the rights of the myriad hypocritical smokers and drinkers among the drug war zealots.
But back to the disgraceful DEA propaganda film aka Running with the Devil.
This is a particularly disappointing movie, by the way, because it seems to show how little we've learned. There's been a psychedelic renaissance of sorts in the last 20 years, as science has actually been given at least a teensy bit of leeway to study psychedelics and show how incredibly useful they can be for depression and other mental conditions. Yet here we have a Hollywood movie doing its best to reinforce the drug war superstition that a plant becomes evil incarnate just because we had the chutzpah to criminalize it. It's about time we faced facts, and stop letting politicians decide for their own selfish reasons what we should feel about nature's plants.
CHECK OUT THE horrible anti-American message of this movie. It is as follows:
The Drug War is still not working, so we need to crack down even harder?!
Still harder? We've already signed off on torture and murder and we're locking up so many leftists that conservatives now are stealing our elections. What is the end game here: total dictatorship?
And why? So that we can stop Americans from using natural plants to change their minds safely.
I hate to say it, but there's a kind of terrible poetic justice every time an ex-DEA agent starts moldering away in a retirement home, wishing they were dead. Too bad for them, because they have spent their lives keeping mind-easing medicines away from the American public -- so I don't want to hear one groan from them as they go miserably to their fate. They have worked all their lives to prevent minds from healing -- by outlawing Mother Nature. Now they must live with the consequences of their blind patient-hating ethics.
Fortunately my better angels will never let me actually be as evil toward DEA agents as they have been toward the American public, especially minorities. But what can I say? If those DEA agents persecute drugs that can grow new neurons, what right do they have to complain when they or their loved ones start needlessly suffering from Alzheimer's and dementia? They've lied about the substances for five decades and prohibited research and now they're going to lament the lack of progress in fighting brain diseases?
Well, if they want to stop and ask themselves why more hasn't been done in this area, I've got news for them: all they have to do is look in the mirror.
Iran has maintained itself as a nation for more than two thousands years, with its people using opium in moderation, mainly to help them endure their harsh and barren lives. Why, then, did it have to enact Opium Prohibition all of a sudden in 1955? 'Prohibition was motivated,' writes Kamm, 'largely by prestige reasons.... It did not fit with the image of an awakening, Westernizing Iran that the Shah was creating.'"
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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October 27, 2019
How Drug Warriors Steal American Elections
Welcome back to the DEA Lounge!
How many people realize that American elections are fixed? Let's see a show of hands.
You heard me. American elections are fixed, and they have been fixed for the last 40 years.
How? No, it has nothing to do with the Russians. It's because the drug war, each year, is locking up almost a million left-leaning voters.
Think about it. The folks that we're arresting for mere drug possession were never going to vote for conservatives, so it follows that it is in the conservative interest to keep the drug war going full tilt, to keep a million left-leaning Americans off the voting rolls every year.
This is why the drug war goes on, because we're arresting all the voters that would throw the drug warriors out of office.
Nowadays, we see national elections decided by mere thousands of votes -- so just imagine the enormous benefit that drug war conservatives receive when a million of their opponents are removed from the voting rolls every year thanks to a felony charge for possession.
Did I mention that this actually bothers me?
This is why, far from apologizing for being mad, I urge my fellow Americans to become as pissed as I am.
As for the Christian Science narcs in the room, relax. I'm just suggesting -- merely hinting -- that you just possibly might want to consider a career that does not entail the corruption of American elections and the denial of basic rights to your fellow Americans, that's all I'm saying. Just think about it. Just think that you might possibly (just maybe) want to stop ruining a million lives a year, thereby subverting American elections. Fair enough?
As for the rest of you lot, enough with the oh-so-cool cynicism about civic involvement. Hop out of the urine-testing line and complain for a change!
Baaaa!
All right, who just bleated? Don't make me come out there!
It is only fitting that as formerly the most faithful Christians favored the most un-Christian ferocity against witches, so now the most faithful capitalists recommend the most anti-capitalist ferocity against the entrepreneurs who trade in "dangerous drugs."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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October 25, 2019
Mad? I'll show you who's mad
Welcome to the DEA Lounge!
Let's hear it for Johnny English and the Band!
They've got a lot of nerve, starting their set off with "Quinn the Eskimo" like that.
In the DEA Lounge of all places.
Don't they know that the government does not allow improved thinking and expanded consciousness via plants -- the coca leaves included?
Never mind that indigenous South Americans have used them for ages to achieve mental clarity.
Never mind that Sigmund Freud himself achieved prodigious vocational output and thus self-fulfillment via cocaine.
Freud was like, "That psychotherapy mumbo jumbo is all well and good for my patients, but I demand REAL treatment in my own life, thank you very much!"
But it's funny trying to argue against the fascist drug war on line.
And I call it fascist advisedly, mind you, because the drug war is nothing but the enforcement of Christian Science with respect to mental states.
Stop gasping, folks. I feel like I'm in the Mayo Clinic for Chronic Asthma Disorders. Look at that disgruntled little man in the corner, nursing a brewski. He's like, "No, stop him! He's destroying all of my tidy little American pieties!"
No doubt he's read all the best sellers by that arch Christian Scientist William Bennett, telling him why Americans cannot be trusted with the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet. (Except for tobacco, of course, for which chimney pot Billy will gladly make an exception -- otherwise, it's off to prison with the rest of you, up to a million of you a year, the more minorities the better, right, Billy? Um, did somebody say 'fascist'?)
Yes, it's difficult arguing online because Web forums have rules like "You must argue unemotionally and civilly." And I'm like, what? There's a major injustice going on here -- the criminalization of PLANTS, for God's sake -- and you tell me that I have to argue politely and calmly?
I'll tell you one thing, the women's revolution of the '70s would never have gotten off the ground in that case, because women were pissed in the '70s and didn't care who knew it. They didn't write like: "Of course, I may be wrong, but with all due respect to my honorable male colleague from Tennessee, I would adduce the general inequality of the feminine race with respect to blah-blah-blah."
No, they said, "Cut it out, men! The situation sucks and we're justifiably pissed off about it!"
Likewise, when God's chosen ones were enslaved in Egypt, the deity in question did not hand the Pharaoh a philosophical treatise on the rights of man. No, he screamed with justified indignation: "Let my people go!"
Am I right or am I right? Poor God would have been banned from 90% of the discussion forums on Reddit for taking that attitude today.
Americans SHOULD be mad! By outlawing plants, we have forced millions world wide to suffer unnecessarily from depression, PTSD, and fear of death for the last 40 long years, forcing them to use mind-damaging treatments instead like SSRIs and even brain-injuring shock therapy in dire cases.
If you're not mad about the status quo, then you simply don't understand the facts!
In fact, what makes me maddest of all is that Americans are NOT currently mad, that they have been lulled into believing the fascist lie that mere plants and fungi can and should be outlawed in the first place -- and that we can ruin people's life for attempting to use such substances therapeutically.
Americans say "whatever" and submit their pee to Christian Science drug testers, indifferent to the unnecessary suffering of millions.
Ooh, dear, I'm getting hot under the collar. Better take me out of here, Johnny, before I'm banned from this lounge for not being calm and polite.
Great. Now the band is playing the '70s song that's actually CALLED 'Cocaine.' Do they have a death wish or something?
Earth to Johnny: you're playing the DEA Lounge, already!
Know your room, dude!
From the movie VWF (2019), about a vicious opioid gang (man speaking on talk show): "The cops can't do any more. There's not enough of them."
Law enforcement has done too much already. By outlawing plant medicines (many of them non-addictive or far less addictive than synthetics), they have created the very crisis that we're now asking them to fix! Meanwhile, their drug-war propaganda, full of half-truths and lacking crucial caveats, has served to obscure the true dangers of highly addictive synthetic drugs. But the caller to this talk show wants the police to make things worse by locking up as many people as possible.
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October 15, 2019
Review of When Plants Dream
in the form of an open letter to author Daniel Pinchbeck:Thanks for “When Plants Dream,” Daniel. It presents an enjoyable and well-rounded introduction to ayahuasca and the many issues that surround its use. That said, however, I’m afraid that, like most Western authors these days, you write under the subconscious influence of a number of Drug War assumptions that are either flat-out wrong or, at best, mere half-truths. I think that this sometimes skews your conclusions or unnecessarily limits their application.
Example 1
You imply when writing about cocaine that it has nothing but bad effects when used in Western society. This is Drug War dogma, of course, but why do we believe it? Why do we think that cocaine has no good uses in the West? How would we even know?
In a Drug War society, no one dares to write about the positive uses of cocaine, especially in newspapers (or in academia, for that matter) – and so we hush up the story of how cocaine helped Sigmund Freud achieve self-actualization (by “pushing him on” to enormous productivity) or stimulated insight in the Richard Feynmans of the world. But if all we’re allowed to learn about cocaine is its negative effects, then we are being subject to a propaganda campaign in the West, not to objective scientific information. This is (or should be) very relevant to your book because these one-sided Drug War assumptions are what undergird and perpetuate the criminalization of desperately needed therapeutic plants such as ayahuasca.
But if indigenous people have used coca leaves advisedly for centuries (for visions, insight and/or mental focus), the obvious question is, why can’t those benefits be transferred to the West? It may be that Westerners are just not mature enough to use the plant wisely.* But we should not make this assumption hastily in a country where we’re only allowed to hear bad things about cocaine use -- and so Freud’s use, for instance, is expunged from the psychology textbooks. This is a glaring omission for it keeps psychologists from confronting the $64,000 question: Why did Freud treat his patients based on theories and yet insist on improving his own life with cocaine? If Freud was having trouble getting out of bed, he did not turn to his own psychotherapy. He demanded the real politik of cocaine. Psychology ignores this fact and continues to insist that all psychological patients be treated according to the latest theory and that any use of a psychoactive plant is somehow a “cop-out” -- unless, of course, that plant is synthesized and packaged in such a way that Big Pharma gets its cut.
*SPOILER ALERT: Of course, the real problem is capitalist exploitation. The profit motive, it turns out, has no place when it comes to encouraging the use of psychoactive plants.
Freud’s hypocritical use of cocaine reminds me of the liberal who argues vehemently in favor of public schools but ultimately sends his or her own child to a private school. Theoretical benefits are all well and good, but at some point, success-oriented people demand REAL solutions.
Example 2
Like virtually all other authors who write about psychedelic therapy, you fail to state one of the main arguments in favor of that new paradigm: namely, the fact that more than 1 in 10 Americans are currently addicted to modern antidepressants, which were never even trialed for long-term use. I myself am addicted to Effexor – which I’m told I can NEVER get off of. Indeed, that is the conclusion of my own psychiatrist. He told me that there is a 95% recidivism rate (according to the NIH itself) for those who attempt to quit Effexor. This is on par with heroin – but I have yet to read any author who is outraged on MY behalf. To the contrary, most authors on these topics are still lecturing me about the supposed “evils” of cocaine and opium, advice that I find laughable in its ignorance and/or hypocrisy.
(To add insult to injury, modern antidepressants are contraindicated for those taking psychedelics. So we have an as-yet unrecognized irony: psychedelics can cure many addictions, but they cannot be used to cure the great addiction of our time: the addiction to SSRI antidepressants.)
When it became clear several decades ago that SSRIs were addictive, psychiatrists merely made a virtue of necessity and began telling their patients that they had to “take their meds for life” (thereby absolving psychiatrists from lawsuits and putting them in the position of the scientific “good guy”). These are the medicines, Daniel, that were promoted based on the erroneous notion that they fixed a chemical imbalance in the brain, whereas subsequent research (see Robert Whitaker) revealed that SSRIs actually CAUSE the imbalances that they purport to fix.
This mass addiction cries out for a remedy, and psychedelics are the obvious solution, since they provide self-insight, grow new neurons, and are non-addictive. (This compares favorably with SSRIs, which in my experience have been fiercely addictive, fog my mind, and conduce to long-term anhedonia.) By ignoring this politically correct addiction (as Drug Warriors dutifully do), your case for psychedelic therapy is far weaker than it need be. As you mention, there are, indeed, potential “down sides” to ayahuasca use, but these rare problems would be dwarfed if contrasted with the actual damage being done by SSRIs today.
This ignorance of the status quo is a feature of today’s Drug War. The Drug Warrior has to hush up this legal addiction situation, lest we draw the obvious conclusion: that addiction is not bad, as long as the drugs in question are forthcoming. If that’s true, why am I not allowed to use opium occasionally to increase my creativity and give me, as a chronic depressive, something to look forward to in life: namely, times of increased enjoyment of the world around me?
Example 3
I think you correctly suspect the Judeo-Christian outlook of scorning psychoactive plant remedies, but your analysis here does not go far enough. The fact is that the original Drug Warrior was none other than the founder of the Catholic Church, Emperor Theodosius, who, in 392 CE, outlawed the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries as a threat to Christianity. This ceremony had been ongoing annually for almost two-thousand years, and was reported by many attendees to be the highlight of their entire lives, in passages that could easily be mistaken for journal entries of an ayahuasca enthusiast. These entries speak of great revelations about the true nature of reality. But since such non-Christian revelation was anathema to the Emperor, he launched the Drug War to outlaw all insights that do not come from “the true religion,” i.e. Christianity.
Thus we can see that today’s Drug War is nothing but the enforcement of Christian Science with respect to mental states: the metaphysical idea (or belief) that it is somehow wrong to use substances to improve one’s mental outlook. Of course, this Christian Science is hypocritical, in that it supports psychoactive therapies – even addictive ones – provided that they do not seem to render a user “high” – something that is anathema to the puritan sensibilities of the Christian Scientists.
This Christian Science approach to drug law is aided and abetted by modern materialists, who have a dogmatic disdain for consciousness itself and so refuse to countenance any therapeutic solution that cannot be reduced to so-called “natural causes.” Thus the Drug War makes strange bedfellows indeed, as materialist atheists find common ground with intolerant Christians.
Conclusion
I hope these three examples have proven my thesis, Daniel: that even the most progressive writers on the subject of “drugs” are subconsciously biased by the erroneous beliefs of the Drug War and that this bias skews or limits the conclusions that they draw. In short, your case for ayahuasca therapy is compelling in itself, but it could win far more converts if you compared your proposal to the ugly nature of the addictive status quo.
Of course, this may be easier said than done. There is, after all, a “kids glove” attitude toward SSRIs based on decades of Big Pharma-financed proselytizing on their behalf. During this time, the APA has been in league with the pharmaceutical companies to make SSRIs look like lamb’s milk on shows like Oprah and Today. The result has been the creation of an American myth, according to which these drugs “fix” a chemical imbalance. This is just plain false, but it apparently has been drilled into Americans so successfully via a full-court media press that few people dare acknowledge its falsehood today.
(The proof is extant: I am as depressed today as I was 40 years ago, after taking legal antidepressants every single day of my life. If modern antidepressants are some kind of silver bullet, my brain chemicals never got the memo.)
Viewed in this light, I guess it’s little wonder that writers like yourself fail to point out this corrupt status quo, since it is so thoroughly believed by the public that it no doubt demands a separate book to address the issues in question.
At their best SSRIs make life livable – which would be fine if that’s all we had. But why should we settle for an addictive drug that simply makes life bearable when we could use a non-addictive one that can truly make life worth living?
What we need, I believe, is to replace psychiatry with shamanism, but only in a world in which the shaman is allowed to learn about and use any plant in the world – rather than a handful of addictive drugs that enrich the Fortune 500 while limiting users both financially and emotionally.
I fear this won’t happen, however, until Americans recognize the folly of outlawing Mother Nature in the first place.
PS When pushed, psychiatrists may claim that SSRIs and SNRIs are not addictive, that they only cause “chemical dependence.” But there is little difference from the point of view of a user. If I stopped using Effexor, I would go through hell. Just see the online testimony describing the many horrific but futile attempts to get off the drug.
"Surely it is difficult to evade the conclusion that the use of alcohol and the use of tobacco have become deeply ingrained habits in Christian and English-speaking countries, and that we therefore consider these substances good; and that, because the use of marijuana (hashish) and the use of opium are pagan and foreign habits, we consider those substances bad."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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October 14, 2019
Addicted to Christianity
People tell me that opium, heroin and cocaine are bad for me. Why? Because they cause dependence. But this is sheer hypocrisy. I've been on Effexor for 25+ years, and my shrink tells me I can never get off it because it's far too addictive. Meanwhile, it's frying my brain and keeping me from trying new psychedelic therapies - and not even coming close to lifting my daily depression. Yet no one's screaming bloody murder about my plight. No, no. In my case, I have to be a good little boy and keep taking "my meds" for a lifetime.
But if dependence is not wrong, as psychiatry now insists (in action, if not in word), then I should have been free to "choose my OWN addictive poison" 40+ years ago when I began subsidizing Big Pharma fat-cats with my monthly prescription purchases. I would have opted for opium at that time, to give me peace of mind and an occasional rest from reality and perhaps even a little artistic inspiration of the kind obtained from the drug by Poe and Lovecraft, rather than flattening out my emotional responses with SSRIs to turn me into a socially acceptable Babbitt. While it's possible that I might have become addicted to opium, by using it more frequently than directed, at least my opium addiction could have been kicked in theory. Besides, psychiatry has no leg to stand on when it comes to criticizing an opium addiction, considering that it makes no scruples about addicting the world to SSRIs.
Really, it's a no-brainer: do I want to be addicted to a substance that fogs my brain - or do I want to use a natural substance once grown by Thomas Jefferson and used by Benjamin Franklin, a substance which, for all its shortcomings, occasionally gives me great visions?
As for me in my house, I would have used opium.
I end with this paraphrase of a Christian song title because the only possible rationale that I can see for preferring SSRIs to opium is the fact that opium occasionally provides what the Puritan would consider a "high," and that is a no-no in the puritan world. This is why the war on drugs is a war on religion - because the drug warrior's goal is to keep the rest of the world from accessing spiritual states that the warrior believes to be at odds with Christianity.
Indeed, this is how the whole drug war started in 392 C.E., when the first drug warrior, Emperor Theodosius, outlawed the Eleusinian Mysteries because he saw them as a threat to Christianity. The psychedelic kykeon was helping folks like Plato and Plutarch to see the light - and this was blasphemy for religious imperialists who believed that the only true light was Christianity itself.
The center for the international operations of the Medical Inquisition is located in Switzerland, mainly in Geneva, in the offices of the various anti-addiction and anti-drug abuse bureaucracies of the United Nations. Needless to say, these agencies are not concerned with drug habits such as drinking, smoking, or "methadone maintenance," but are concerned only with those habits that are induced and maintained by people unsupervised by doctors and involving substances which the United Nations classifies as "illicit drugs."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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October 13, 2019
It's the Psychedelics, Stupid!
Welcome to the DEA Lounge!
[laugh]
How many of you have read Consciousness Medicine, by Francoise Bourzat? Let's see a show of hands.
Stay seated, everyone, I still haven't counted the folks in the back. Raise those hands up, high.
OK, let me see, now. 25, carry the one... It looks like... zero people have read that book.
Well, in fairness, it is pretty new.
It's all about the way that psychedelic medicines can heal psychological conditions.
Or rather, that's what it SHOULD be about. Unfortunately, Francoise keeps hawking the benefits of deep breathing and drum therapy, et cetera. Which I find a little off-putting, frankly.
Just like Stanislav Grof, when he came out with that breathing therapy. I'd rather these folks stay focused on the value of psychedelic therapy rather than to start promoting second-best cures that simply don't work for the vast majority of cases.
Hey, listen, folks, been there done that, with every manner of self-help approach you can imagine. How many unfulfilled lifetimes do I have to live before self-help mavens get the message: "It's the drugs, stupid!"
You know what I'm saying? Time for some real politik in treating what ails me.
I mean, Freud did not turn to psychotherapy (let alone to self-help fads) to help him get through life successfully. Like it or not, he turned to cocaine and theory be damned. Freud was not going to sacrifice his own self-fulfillment by becoming a guinea pig to psychology's unproven "cures." And as long as modern psychology does not even acknowledge, let alone come to terms with, Freud's therapeutic use of cocaine, we are never, for all our scientific pretensions, going to understand human motivation. Instead, we'll live in a fairy land where the effects of drugs are established for psychologists, not by proof, but by strong political prejudices that insist, via law, on what the truth SHOULD BE, that fairy land in which we pretend that substance use is ALWAYS substance abuse. (The DEA lives by this absurdity, for when they say that a drug is subject to abuse, they mean simply that it might be obtained without a prescription -- which is a tautological definition if there ever was one, since an illegal drug CAN'T be obtained with a prescription. But it helps work the drug warriors up into a frenzy to tell them that drug X is subject to abuse, so they need not know the philosophically shabby way in which that definition was derived.)
But, Francoise, bless her, writes as if psychedelic therapy is just one of many helpful strategies in life. The unfortunate corollary of this opinion is that the outlawing of such therapy is no big deal -- since cures for depression and related psychological problems are a dime a dozen, to be easily found in the self-help section of any bookstore or library.
But as a veteran depressive, I would have zero interest in the psychedelic renaissance if it held no greater transformative promise than that of breath work or yoga. I mean, how many unfulfilled lifetimes do I have to live in order to prove to the fad peddlers that their nostrums don't work in the long run? And why not? Because they presuppose the incentive and follow-through and self-insight that a successful depression therapy should generate rather than take for granted.
Psychedelics alone among drug therapies offers the possibility of true change based on self-insight.
Am I right or am I right?
My name is Brian Quass and I'll be here lambasting the drug war until the government thinks up a way to outlaw free speech.
Which can't be far off, by the way, given that they've already had the chutzpah to criminalize the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet! I mean, how anti-scientific, fascistic, and downright childish is that? What? I'm just sayin'!
Casting a ballot is an important act, emblematic of our role as citizens. But eating and drinking are much more important acts.
'Our Right to Drugs', Thomas Szasz
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October 6, 2019
So, you're thinking about starting on an SSRI...
The following post is my response to 'How did SSRIs help you?' in the "depression regimen" group on Reddit.
Look into Ketamine therapy.
Unlike SSRIs, ketamine is non-addictive (when used as directed) and has few or no side effects. I made the mistake of starting on SSRIs/SNRIs decades ago, and I am now told that I can NEVER get off them, as the SNRI that I’m taking, Effexor, has a worse recidivism rate for withdrawal than heroin. (According to the NIH, 95% of those who quit Effexor are back on it within three years.) Yes, modern antidepressants made my life bearable: they helped me survive, but they stopped me from thriving, since they inhibit creativity and, in the long run, bring about what’s called anhedonia, an inability to feel both highs and lows.
Remember, too, that we live in a world where all the good cures for depression are illegal, a world in which we’ve outlawed Mother Nature. The natural world around us is full of psychoactive plants that can bring peace of mind and personal understanding, substances like ayahuasca, and ibogaine, and psilocybin. Since these are outlawed, however, the depressed have nothing but a handful of addictive remedies from Big Pharma from which they can choose. Not only will you be paying for these meds for the rest of your life, but you’ll become an eternal patient, having to travel to your psychiatrist every few months to be asked about your personal life, as the doctor dutifully writes out yet ANOTHER prescription for the same-old-same-old. I find that both depressing and disempowering. And I speak from 40 years of experience.
That’s why I recommend ketamine. Although it is not a natural substance, it has some of the psychoactive properties of the natural substances that America has foolishly banned, and to repeat, it is not addictive when used in the recommended doses and at the recommended frequency. Above all, for some unknown reason, it is actually legal in the United States right now. (Someone at the DEA must have dropped the ball, since that organization is doing everything they can to block all non-addictive treatments for depression.)
I believe that U.S. medical care is slowly moving in the direction of treating depression with psychedelic substances from Mother Nature. You might be able to sign up as a participant in one of the ongoing clinical trials being held around the world, perhaps one that is studying psilocybin. If you become addicted to SSRIs, however, you will never be able to participate in this new health-care paradigm. This is because most modern anti-depressants cause serotonin toxicity syndrome if used in conjunction with psychedelic plants.
This is ironic because the “new” psychedelic therapies of which I speak (which really have a long but “hushed-up” history in Western culture, viz. the Eleusinian Mysteries) show great promise in treating opioid addiction and alcoholism. However these therapies cannot be used to treat the great addiction of our time: the addiction to SSRIs, to which over 1 in 10 Americans have fallen victim.
Finally, please remember: it’s an American myth that SSRI antidepressants fix a chemical imbalance. As Roger Whittaker shows in “Anatomy of an Epidemic,” these drugs have been found to CAUSE the chemical imbalances that they purport to fix.
PS: Some psychiatrists may tell you that SSRIs are not addictive, that they only cause chemical dependency. But trust me, from the user perspective, there is no difference.
For many, [LSD] seems to lead to self-help -- long overdue.
Dr. Keith Ditman, Semi-Weekly Spokesmen-Review (Spokane, Washington), Nov. 8, 1959
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September 29, 2019
Thought Crimes Blotter
More thought crimes reported in the tri-state area. Police in Rattleboro arrested 23 residents at the Deer Run condominium complex, charging them with attempting to "think outside the box." Department spokesman Gail McLean says that the suspects had enough psilocybin mushroom "to empower them to see whole new worlds." Said Donald Vant, the lead officer in the case: "We caught them just in time. They were getting ready to embark on entirely new lives, with much less need for the outputs of the modern industrial society."
Meanwhile, three members of a depression discussion group in South Belltown were brought in for questioning after an informant reported that they were getting ready to treat their depression with non-addictive psychedelic plants. McLean says that Sheriff Baumgartner put the fear of God into the trio, warning them that bypassing the addictive legal remedies of the modern health-care system was not an option.
Belltown has been busy lately when it comes to Thought Crimes. Just last week, police raided an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting after an enrolled informer reported that some members were planning to use psychedelic plants to kick their habit. "The only thing that's gonna get kicked in this case is butt," quipped arresting officer Joe Slaterday. "Listen, alcoholism was a dead-end in my daddy's generation, and I for one intend to respect that legacy and keep it alive for the foreseeable future."
From the movie VWF (2019), about a vicious opioid gang (man speaking on talk show): "The cops can't do any more. There's not enough of them."
Law enforcement has done too much already. By outlawing plant medicines (many of them non-addictive or far less addictive than synthetics), they have created the very crisis that we're now asking them to fix! Meanwhile, their drug-war propaganda, full of half-truths and lacking crucial caveats, has served to obscure the true dangers of highly addictive synthetic drugs. But the caller to this talk show wants the police to make things worse by locking up as many people as possible.
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September 24, 2019
Stand Up for Mother Nature
Welcome to the DEA Lounge!
Gee, I wonder why my agent booked me here. He does realize that I'm going to be riffing on the folly of criminalizing Mother Nature, right?
Oh, well, better he book me here than he book me in San Quentin, right?
Do you guys know that the DEA marched on to Monticello in 1987 and took away Jefferson's poppy plants?
I kid you not. Talk about rolling over in one's grave, Jefferson would have been pissed big time.
He's like, "what the f...!"
"I wasn't half right about the need for frequent revolutions!"
But seriously, isn't that screwed up?
Earth to America: they're plants, dude! What are we thinking?
Boo is right! I mean, it reminds me of Fahrenheit 451, in which a tyrannous government destroys books.
Mind you, I'd rather live under that tyranny. They just tell me WHAT to think, whereas modern-day drug laws tell me HOW and HOW MUCH I can think...
...because they destroy the mind-expanding drugs that actually help me think outside the box and grow new neurons, even!
Darn right, boo. Boo to the max, dawg. As in ruff!
What kills me is that in John Halpern's book "Opium," he paints the bland picture of the DEA reluctantly taking the plants away at the insistence of the Monticello Board of Directors. Whereas the way I hear it, the DEA stormed onto the place like so many...
Well, if the jackboot fits, wear it, right?
My name is Brian Quass and I'll be here lambasting the drug war until the government thinks up a way to outlaw free speech.
Hey, if a government can criminalize plants, all bets are off, right?
============================
For the past half-century the American people have engaged in one of the most ruthless wars-- fought under the colors of drugs and doctors, diseases and treatments-- that the world has ever seen.
Ceremonial Chemistry: The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. Thomas Szasz.
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September 22, 2019
In response to a lame review of the book
Here is my indignant response to the Kirkus Book Review of John Halpern's "Opium", whose uncritical critique ends with the typical wishy-washy drug warrior conclusion that "the drug problem" is insoluble.
Insoluble problem?
What did you drug warriors expect when you outlawed natural plants, the birth right of everyone born on the planet? In your effort to protect and punish, you created drug mafias in every major city on earth. You created a whole new genre of violent movie: the drug-war genre. You loaded the world with guns as drug gangs armed themselves to the hilt. Well done!
And now we're surprised that cartels are peddling synthetic forms of the plants that are infinitely worse than the original. What hypocrisy.
Then we create anti-drug organizations whose motto is: never say anything good about illegal drugs.
The result: No one knows how to use them wisely because anti-drug propaganda insists that they CAN'T be used wisely. Little wonder then that people get addicted.
Meanwhile, millions of depression sufferers worldwide are suffering needlessly because effective psychoactive medicines cannot even be researched thanks to the lying DEA, which lies about drugs to keep themselves in business. They say that psychedelics have no therapeutic value, when a who's who of Greeks and Romans used them annually for 2,000 consecutive years in the Eleusinian mysteries, folks like Plato and Plutarch, most of whom reported it was the greatest experience of their life.
Yet this so-called “scientific” nation of ours superstitiously burns plants, like the tyrannous government in “Fahrenheit 451” burned books. We may not tell Americans what to think, but we tell them HOW and HOW MUCH.
And you’re still scratching your head what to do about it?
Earth to Kirkus Review: How about re-legalizing the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet – and then start telling the cold hard truths about psychoactive plants: not just their downsides, but their benefits as well? While we’re being honest, we might want to point out that Americans today are far more addicted than ever – not to illegal drugs but to LEGAL ones – SSRIs that were never intended for long term use – until psychiatrists noticed they were highly addictive and therefore started telling patients that they had to take “their meds” for life.
Until the drug warrior at least acknowledges this problem, I can only laugh at their pretended befuddlement about the status quo. Hello? More than 1 out of 10 Americans are addicted to modern antidepressants. Why are the John Halperns of the world not screaming bloody murder about that fact, threatening to expose the doctors who pushed for this state of affairs? Possibly because they are psychiatrists, and many of them collaborated with Big Pharma to bring this state of addiction about, by going on the circuit, and “bigging up” pill-popping on Oprah Winfrey et al.
Insoluble? Hello? You outlawed bloody plants. Did you really not expect a little pushback – including the subsequent black-marketing of drugs that are infinitely worse than the products of Mother Nature that you banned?
FROM VFW (2019) movie: "I'd say they're drug addicts, for sure. There's a whole shitload of them, too."
This is how the drug war dehumanizes substance users. It's the drug-war-created black market that creates addicts in the first place, with the help of drug warriors who obscure the truth about drugs by implying that all illegal substances have no reasonable uses, despite hushed-up facts to the contrary, including Ben Franklin's use of opium, Feynman's use of so-called "speed," Freud's use of cocaine, plus millennia worth of responsible and religious psychoactive substance use overseas, which America uses as a pretext to run around the world burning plants in order to ensure the monopoly of the liquor industry.
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September 21, 2019
One Long Argument for legalizing drugs
Charles Darwin described his case for evolution as “one long argument,” presumably because there was no one single proof for the theory but rather reams of disparate evidence that all conduced, or so he felt, to establishing the same point: namely that evolution as Darwin understood it was a reality. Therefore Darwin had to make one point after another, trusting that the totality of his observations would ultimately convince the reader of the plausibility (if not the undeniability) of the theory of evolution. I find myself in a similar situation when attempting to prove the necessity of re-legalizing the pharmacy of Mother Nature. Since the drug war is premised on so many invalid but hidden assumptions, a drug law reformer like myself has to address seemingly countless objections, as if I’m trying to convince some muddle-headed Hydra of the urgent need for legislative change.
Muddle-headed Hydras
Unlike Darwin, however, I think I do have one conclusive point that, in a sane world, would convince all reasonable human beings of the correctness of my theory. And this is the notion that it was folly to outlaw mere plants and fungi in the first place. Not only does such a step naturally create a violent black market, but it denies human beings their medicinal and property rights with regard to the flora that grows at their very feet. In addition, it interferes with the role of scientists, who are forced to accept government-supplied judgments about the therapeutic potential of certain drugs (such as psychoactive mushrooms), and must even seek permission from the DEA to study them objectively and without fear of arrest.
The current state of affairs sounds like the plot of a science-fiction story by Ray Bradbury. Remember Ray? He wrote the novel “Fahrenheit 451,” in which a tyrannous government tries to control thought by burning books.
But imagine a sequel in which the government burns plants – not just to control thoughts, but to control how, and how much, we can think. That’s the state of affairs in today’s world in which we criminalize Mother Nature’s plants.
Psychotherapeutic Goldmines
We know better than ever now, based on recent research, that many of these plants expand the mind, give us new ways of seeing the world and help us get past our psychological roadblocks. Psychedelics have even been shown to grow new neurons! In short, some of these plants are psychotherapeutic goldmines if viewed rationally. By banning these plants, our government is forcing us to limit our thoughts to the mainstream, not to think outside the box, and thus, ultimately, not to question authority, or at least not to ask the sort of incisive questions that would justifiably put that authority on the defensive. This situation serves corrupt politicians well because it makes Mother Nature’s plants the scapegoats for societal shortcomings, so the tyrant is never under pressure to truly do anything about real societal ills, since they go unrecognized as such by a drug-obsessed society.
Eloquent Chicken Littles
But our war on Mother Nature has other equally disastrous consequences. By banning these plants, we bring about so much violence that we create a whole new movie genre based on that carnage: the drug-war film, in which armed gunmen from around the globe battle themselves and the feds in order to supply the sorts of plants that the government has banned – but often in corrupted and synthetic forms that are far more dangerous to the user than would have been the simple plants or fungi from which they were derived. Meanwhile eloquent Chicken Littles like Michael Pollan fret about making psychedelic plants legal to humanity (even though they have been legal for all but the last 60 years of human history). Visions of young irresponsible users dance in his head. “We simply can’t let users make up their own minds about how to use substances,” according to folks like Pollan, “that would be horrible!” (Pollan is practicing elitism here: he is personally able to get away with using psychedelics, but he’s in no hurry to extend that privilege to his readers, the mere hoi polloi, who must get by with existing addictive and mind-dulling anti-depressants if they want to change THEIR minds.) But where is Pollan’s concern for the children killed in the crossfire of drug dealer shootouts in the inner cities? Where is his concern for the prevalence of guns in America created by this government-produced black market?
Ice-cold Universe
And while Pollan is wringing his hands over the merely potential downsides of legalization, where is his concern for the millions of depressives that he’s forcing to live without hope, thanks to the drug laws that his worries help to reinforce? Where is his concern for the potential suicide for whom psilocybin could mean a new lease on life? Where is his concern for the depressed geriatric, whose days are all one bleary repetition of seemingly pointless activities – waking, eating a few scraps for breakfast, and then half-watching some mindless television, etc. There’s solid evidence that psychoactive drugs could give this sadsack a whole new reason for living. But no, Pollan’s worries about juvenile delinquents must have the last say and grandpa must die in what to him seems like a pointless and ice-cold universe. (Gee, thanks, Michael!)
In short, Michael Pollan has no compassion for the would-be rational “drug user,” partly because he fails to appreciate the huge therapeutic potential of these medicines (notwithstanding the psychologically superficial book that he wrote in tepid favor of LSD therapy), and partly because (like all drug warriors) he focuses dogmatically on punishing or protecting drug abusers, totally ignoring the rights and needs of the masses of patients who could benefit (often enormously) from the wise use of the substances in question.
American Pagans
Such an outlook only makes sense if we dogmatically assume that illegal drugs have no rational uses – and this is a government lie, not a scientific fact (a lie created and maintained to this very day by the self-serving DEA, in order to ensure that they’ll be ruining the lives of otherwise law-abiding citizens for decades to come, locking them up for the crime of daring to so much as possess a simple plant that grows at their very feet). If we’re to be a truly scientific nation, however, we must know that almost no substance is bad “in and of itself,” but becomes bad only when it is used at or above a certain dosage in a certain context. To think otherwise is to superstitiously treat drugs as evil incarnate, as evil spirits, a literally pagan viewpoint that’s completely at odds with America’s pretensions to being a modern scientific society (let alone THE scientific society par excellence).
All of these observations are part of my “one long argument” in favor of the need for re-legalizing the therapeutic medicines of Mother Nature. But all of the concerns that they address are trumped by the mere common sense consideration that it should be unconstitutional in the first place to outlaw the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet. This therapeutic bounty is surely the birth right of every human being merely by virtue of their having been born on planet Earth.
Ideological Hegemony
Of course, after over a century of viewing Mother Nature as a drug kingpin (starting with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914), Americans have convinced themselves that mere mortals are incapable of using her bounty wisely (and have gone on to convince the rest of the world, alas, which is ironic, given that world’s often bitter and ongoing complaints about the ideological hegemony that America is supposedly foisting upon said world). Thus folks like Pollan ask folks like me: “But how can you re-legalize plants and fungi without causing problems??!” But that question is beside the point. The drug-law reformer is under no obligation to say how drug legalization would work, although I’ve addressed Pollan’s concerns above for the record, so to speak, pointing out that his “concern” for the well-being of a minority of potential drug abusers is really just a callous disregard for the well-being of a majority of rational users.
But if they had criminalized free speech 100 years ago, the opponents of that move would be under no obligation today to explain how that right could be restored without causing problems. The right simply must be restored: end of story. Likewise, when it comes to the re-legalization of plants and fungi, it is not the reformer’s duty to say how this can be accomplished without a problem. Moreover, if a problem is indeed created by such a change, then the responsibility for that trouble lies squarely on the shoulders of the bigoted politicians who chose to outlaw Mother Nature’s bounty in the first place.
The War on Mother Nature
This is why my site is so different from the average site about reforming drug laws. Most sites are on the defensive, often amassing reams of statistical evidence to explain how drug legalization (or rather re-legalization) will not bring about Armageddon. This starting point of argumentation concedes the crucial and highly debatable point that government had the right to criminalize Mother Nature’s plants and fungi in the first place. They had no such right, particularly in a country like America, where we are specifically granted “the pursuit of happiness,” a right that is hollow when we deny Americans one of the essential therapeutic routes to attain that happiness. Then there are the hundreds of sites that attempt to point out (again, often by reams of evidence) that the drug war is a failure. But this starting point concedes yet another highly debatable point, namely that a drug war had the right to succeed in the first place. Is it right to prevent the citizens of a country from using plants therapeutically, to expand their minds, to help them think outside the box? No. Even if it were feasible, it would not be right. So the point is not that the drug war cannot succeed, but that it SHOULD not succeed.
The real question, then, is not whether the drug war makes sense – it doesn’t in a rational society – but whether a war on Mother Nature makes sense, for that’s what the drug war amounts to, the superstitious notion that nature is purposefully tempting us with substances that are inherently evil – rather than miraculously presenting us with powerful and highly improbable medicines whose considered use can bring about personal transformation.
Iran has maintained itself as a nation for more than two thousands years, with its people using opium in moderation, mainly to help them endure their harsh and barren lives. Why, then, did it have to enact Opium Prohibition all of a sudden in 1955? 'Prohibition was motivated,' writes Kamm, 'largely by prestige reasons.... It did not fit with the image of an awakening, Westernizing Iran that the Shah was creating.'"
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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September 20, 2019
Time to Replace Psychiatrists with Shamans
Response to Lou in metaphysical speculations: a Google Group hosted by author Bernardo Kastrup
Thanks for the link, Lou.
I'm looking forward to learning about Claudio Naranjo, and for the following reason:
I believe that psychiatry must become shamanism if it wishes to survive and be relevant, shamanism administered by "empaths" who are intimately familiar, not just with the handful of addictive "mind" drugs manufactured by Big Pharma, but with every single known psychoactive plant in the rainforest, and that they must use this knowledge to empower "lost souls" (or indeed anyone lacking self-fulfillment) with self-knowledge and clear-sightedness, choosing the plants to accomplish this goal in the way that a fashion designer chooses clothes to suit the person and to bring out the qualities that are missing but desired.
Only imagine: a new psychiatry that sees the “patient” as an actual individual and not one of an infinite set of human clones, all therapeutically susceptible to the same one addictive “miracle cure” that psychiatry claims to have on offer.
This, of course, requires that we cease outlawing the products of Mother Nature and re-legalize the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet. Unfortunately there are a number of old-guard forces that stand resolutely against this, four of which I’ve listed below:
1) PUNISHERS AND PROTECTORS: There are still plenty of Americans (and other anti-patient Nixon fans from Europe to China now) who believe that the need to punish abusers (and/or to protect them from themselves) trumps the psychological needs of the responsible masses who could benefit therapeutically from the re-legalization of natural substances. The quality of life of the masses means nothing to these groups: it’s all about punishing and protecting a minority of supposed abusers.
2) PSYCHIATRISTS: Even if we can convince such people that the laws that are created by their "concern" have resulted in the creation of countless violent drug gangs in every major city on Earth, we're still going up against the psychiatrists, who are not going to go gently into that good night of re-legalization, since they have profited handsomely from having a monopoly on prescribing psychoactive drugs.
3) MATERIALISTS: Meanwhile, materialists, in their physics envy, will continue to deny the utility of drugs whose means of action cannot be sufficiently captured and quantified by their blunt tools of analysis. They have no interest in drugs that produce mere “insight” or even "happiness" for that matter (whatever that is) – they want to fix some clinically discernible chemical imbalance that they postulate as the root of all biological evil (or at least they want to be seen as fixing such an imbalance, even if their synthetic drugs end up causing the imbalance that they sought to cure, as is the case with modern anti-depressants).
4) PURITANS: Then there’s the Westerner’s subconscious belief in Christian Science with respect to mental health, thanks to which they look with suspicion and disapproval on someone who uses natural psychoactive substances to improve their mind. Such people see psychoactive drugs as “crutches." (They consider this suspicion to be common sense when it is actually just a tenet of faith of the modern drug war, a belief that’s just as philosophically problematic as the Christian Scientist’s refusal to use aspirin for a headache.)
Glad to know about Claudio. Sounds like he will be a hero someday, when America stops convincing the rest of the world that it’s rational to view Mother Nature as a drug kingpin. What a treasure trove of healing we pass up by thinking in this dogmatic and ultimately anti-scientific way.
In the course of this war against an exceptionally hard-working and law-abiding people, their characteristic habit-- smoking opium-- became the leading symbol of their "dangerousness." After all, Americans could not admit that they hated and feared the Chinese because the Chinese worked harder...
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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September 17, 2019
Pity the Time Traveler
Both liberal and conservative drug warriors have it wrong. They both insist that we have to ensure the safety of all potential substance users before we legalize the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet.
But this is like saying that we have to ensure the safety of all readers before we can allow them to walk into a library, lest their reading gives them crazy ideas that cause them to injure themselves or others.
In reality, the safety of humanity has nothing to do with the issues involved here. As an ostensibly free society, we think of free speech as a fundamental right, a precondition of liberty, and therefore a right that cannot be trumped by other considerations. This is why "Fahrenheit 451" is (so far, at least) good science-fiction and not a description of reality, for we in Western society still see the folly of burning books.
We value a free press because we value freedom of thought.
How strange then that we accept the notion of burning precisely those plants that can expand our thought and help us to think more clearly, beyond the paradigms that our contemporaneous society naturally foists upon us by its sheer situational proximity.
CONCLUSION: Although we don’t want government telling us WHAT to think, we have no problem with them telling us HOW or HOW MUCH to think.
Pity the time traveler who arrives from the 1600s, bristling with a new idea for a science-fiction story:
Time-Traveler: "Hey, I've got this cool idea for a story in which some future despotic government goes out and burns plants to keep the populace from using those substances to improve their minds! I'm gonna call it 'Fahrenheit 452!'"
Me: "Sorry, dude, but that's not science-fiction."
Time-Traveler: "What? Maybe you don't hear so good. I said it's a story about government going out and getting rid of therapeutic plants!"
Me: "Right, and that's exactly what our government does today!"
Time-Traveler: "You're kidding me? I thought I traveled forward in this time machine, not backwards."
Me: "Hey, where are you going?"
Time-Traveler: "Back to my ship -- I'm gonna visit the Earth 200 years from now and see if they've finally got it right."
The majority defines what the scapegoated minority is like, and imposes that definition on him. Americans thus defamed not only the Chinese but opium as well. Significantly, while no educated person still believes the ugly nonsense heaped on the Chinese for decades by leading American authorities, most educated persons still believe the ugly nonsense heaped on opium.
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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September 13, 2019
My Review of 'Opium' by John Halpern
Although Halpern occasionally hints at the wide-ranging powers of opium (its ability to do everything from curing coughs to inspiring creativity) he focuses almost exclusively on its addictive potential, failing to point out that occasional use does not cause addiction, nor does the moderate opium user require increased doses to achieve the same effect. Thus in badmouthing the “infamous” Thomas De Quincey, Halpern ignores that author’s main point: that occasional use of opium did not cause problems and actually contributed to the author’s quality of life by giving him intense intellectual pleasure at the opera, along with something to look forward to in the “sober meantime.” It was only when De Quincey unwisely took the drug on a daily basis for physical pain that his problems arose. Thanks to this focus on the negative, Halpern ends up implying that the Manchu Dynasty was worried about its people’s health when it outlawed opium use in the 1800s. I think it’s far more likely that they outlawed opium because it permitted individuals to think differently, which might cause them to question the propriety of being ruled over by despots in far-away Beijing.
ANACHRONISTIC INDIGNATION
Halpern even pans the Shakers for dealing in opium, as if the drug had the same nefarious connotations back then as it has in the present-day, as if the Shakers should have somehow looked ahead to see our subsequent indignation and acted accordingly, as if the drug war sensibility is a timeless force and not a politically driven policy based on Christian Science and a desire to punish minorities and others whose psychological needs and desires we fail to understand or to consider important.
Halpern’s focus on addiction is hypocritical, too, for his field of psychiatry has made addicts of millions around the world, with SSRI and SNRI antidepressants, many of which are extremely difficult to “get off of.” The NIH recently performed a study of Effexor users, for instance, and found that 95% of those who got off the drug were back on it within three years. This is a far worse recidivism rate than for opium, so Halpern has no leg to stand on when he implies that opium is a drug from hell because of its addiction potential. The fact is that it can be used safely if used intermittently – and that the problems arise when this inconvenient truth is hushed up by drug warriors who consider it wrong to say anything positive about illegal drugs. It is this strategic silence on the part of the drug warrior that leads to irresponsible use, since potential users never hear the important news that occasional usage is called for to keep the user addiction-free.
THE BLAME GAME
Finally, Halpern rattles off a list of New England surnames, blaming them for complicity in the opium trade, and holding their descendants up for eternal scorn. But it’s not clear that all these families merit this opprobrium, since it is based on assumptions about who knew what and when. Moreover, it’s based on the assumption that opium offered nothing but problems for the Chinese, when surely there were rational Chinese users who would have begged to differ. But even if the drug caused universal addiction, how is that any worse than addicting a nation to anti-depressants, the psychiatrist’s drug of choice? And yet I’m sure that Halpern doesn’t want to publish a list of names of the dozens of prominent psychiatrists who brought about this “addict nation” by “bigging up” drugs like Prozac on talk shows and in popular magazines while getting secretly paid for their efforts by Big Pharma.
Despite this decades-long PR campaign, this full-court press in the media to normalize pill-taking in America, I know plenty of Effexor addicts who would have preferred in retrospect to have been given opium years ago for what ailed them – had they known that they would have to be on some sort of drug for life. But psychiatrists never explained this fact to their depressive patients up-front, that SSRIs must be taken for life, as the drugs were never originally intended for such use. Only when the addiction potential of modern anti-depressants became clear did psychiatrists begin telling their patients that they needed to “take their meds” for life, as if such pill-taking were an act of medical piety rather than a physiological requirement created by the pills themselves and the chemical imbalances that they were causing.
Finally, the Western world's willfully unexamined disdain toward opium is a little too convenient. By dissing a substance that has been used responsibly for millennia by non-Western cultures, the US is not ensuring the health of human beings, but simply safeguarding the role of alcohol in conquering the world as the drug of choice for relaxation and human transcendence. A shabby choice indeed, compared to the Elysium available to the responsible user of the substances that the West has demonized. So beware when America holds other countries responsible for the so-called "drug problem" stateside. That's just the politician's disingenuous way of justifying foreign intervention under our liquor-boosting drug war colonialism.
*Some say that modern anti-depressants cause chemical dependency, not addiction, but this is just quibbling. From the user’s standpoint, there is no difference between the two: in either case, the user is stuck on a drug for a lifetime and it is sheer hell for them whenever they go off of it.*
The plain historical facts are that before 1914, there was no "drug problem" in the United States; nor did we have a name for it.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz.
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September 8, 2019
Materialism's War on Drug Addicts and Alcoholics
The materialist focus on treating the supposed “real” physical cause of addiction makes modern psychology blind to the once obvious fact that merely making a patient “feel good” can have long-term benefits. This bias against directly producing happiness, combined with our pharmacopeia-limiting drug law, the protestant ethic bias against unrestrained pleasure (as well as the litigious nature of American society that discourages new paradigms), virtually ensures that the modern addict has few options but to turn his or her withdrawal into a morality tale, one to be generated and parsed with the help of a twelve-step group.
We can clearly see this bias against promoting happiness in the common drug-war assumption that recreational drug use stands in sharp contrast to medicinal drug use, when the two often overlap, even if the self-styled recreational user is unaware of that fact. This is because, one, the mere existence and availability of the illegal drug provides the user with the anticipation of some upcoming relief from the daily strains of life (as opium did for De Quincey), and two, as the latter benefit decreases the user’s overall anxiety, his or her physical health may benefit accordingly, as even materialist science recognizes that undo stress has a negative effect on physical health. Three, a person thus rendered happy is more likely to exercise, more likely to write, more likely to read: in short, more likely to pursue tasks that lead toward self-fulfillment, thereby indirectly improving his or her physical health still further.
It’s these sorts of indirect benefits of recreational drug use that modern psychology refuses to recognize, sold as they are on the long-debunked notion that every depressed person in the world can be treated by their handful of drugs, based on the fiction that said drugs target some chemical imbalance, something that the materialist can, at least in theory, touch and feel, and therefore something that is far more real to them than the mere subjective feelings of a patient.
Yes, some of these substances must be used wisely to avoid addiction. But opium users, for instance, can do this merely by using the drug intermittently, as Jim Hogshire reports. But drug warriors don’t want to hear that. It is an article of faith with them that illegal substances cannot be used safely. That’s why psychiatrist John Halpern (in his 2019 book “Opium”) writes as if every Chinese user of opium in the 1900s was an addict, which is a dubious supposition and even a little racist, given the fact that opium users such as Marco Polo and Benjamin Franklin are seldom characterized as addicts. By painting Chinese opium users in these bleakest of colors, Halpern comes close to “signing off” on Lin Zexu’s butchery, Lin Zexu, the pioneer drug warrior, whose methods included beheading users and burning their homes to the ground. (Halpern never entertains the possibility that the Manchu dynasty cracked down on opium use out of dictatorial self-interest, because it lessened their ability to control their own citizens, giving them thoughts that they were not supposed to be thinking in a tightly controlled society.)
It’s always a little funny to hear psychiatrists like Halpern lecture against addiction, by the way, given the fact that modern antidepressants such as Effexor are the most addictive substances on the planet, substances that even the NIH now says cannot be “kicked,” Effexor having a recidivism rate for withdrawal of 95% after three years. (If “pushed” on this point, psychiatrists mince words, claiming that SSRIs cause chemical dependency, not addiction, as if there was any meaningful difference between the two from the patient’s point of view.)
But despite America’s commitment to the “no pain, no gain” school of drug withdrawal, in which every addiction becomes a morality tale, there are other ways to approach the treatment of addiction, ways that have, to my knowledge, never been so much as broached in the popular literature on the subject. This new protocol involves treating drug addiction with more drugs, just as Google fights hate speech with more speech.
Thus, when a patient complains of anxiety, depression and fear during the withdrawal process, a chemist-shaman would treat him or her with various naturally occurring psychoactive substances that induce a feeling of well-being, carefully selecting said stimulants with regard to their methods of operation and varying the formula as necessary to ensure that the treatment does not result in any new addictions. In other words, this new treatment that I advocate (or rather whose study and serious consideration I advocate) involves the strategy of neuropharmacological obfuscation. It starts from the presumption that withdrawal symptoms are really just the body “screaming bloody murder” about a sudden change in its biochemical makeup. It proposes to counter this bodily hysteria by screaming back at the brain with rebuttal messages such as “all is well,” “the world is good,” etc.
Note that I do not have a disdain for “12-step groups” as such and the need for self-reflection. It’s rather that I find them an impotent substitute for the real politik of the sort of drug therapy that I’ve outlined above. (Even Freud didn’t treat himself with psychotherapy: he used cocaine instead.) The suggested course of treatment could involve serious self-reflection if desired, through the use of psychedelic plants as considered appropriate by the chemist-shaman. But mere un-aided self-reflection of suffering individuals should not be the last word that psychology has on the treatment of the addict. We shouldn’t give the addict such a dim prognosis until we’ve freed our scientific minds to consider the psychoactive powers of every plant in the natural world, not merely with regard for their ability to fix some hypothetical chemical imbalance, but for their power to make us feel good and develop better self-understanding. In short, we need more than a psychiatrist with a pre-filled prescription for SSRIs, we need an empathic shaman with a profound knowledge of the psychoactive benefits of natural plants – acting in a world in which mother nature’s produce is all legal, thereby denying us the ability to turn these substances into scapegoats for societal problems.
[Dr. Watt declares] that the moderate use of opium is not more injurious than the moderate use of alcohol and even that its abusive use is less destructive to its victims than intemperance.
The Freeman's Journal, Dublin, Ireland, October 31, 1891
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September 1, 2019
John Halpern's 'Opium': a pre-review
I’m nervously preparing to read “Opium” by psychiatrist John Halpern. I say “nervously” because almost every author who writes on such subjects has unconsciously signed off on a number of false drug-war assumptions that skew their proposed remedies in favour of policies that do more harm than good.
The first of these assumptions is the pernicious idea that the rights of a majority of would-be sensible substance users can be ignored when we perform cost-benefit analyses on drug legalization. Thus it takes only one well-publicized story of flagrant drug abuse by minors to have worrywarts clamouring for prohibition of the substance in question, without so much as one thought for the rights of the millions who may be using said drug responsibly and for good reasons.
Thus, for instance, we see much hand-wringing in early 20th century newspapers about immigrants using opium in excess (at least in the opinion of the writers), but never so much as one story on the millions of productive citizens who, like Benjamin Franklin, used opium without problems and found that it actually stimulated the artistic side of their personality. Sane and sensible substance users are simply never given a seat at the table of public dialogue about so-called “drugs.”
This leads us naturally to drug-war assumption number two, the idea that there is no such thing as a sensible use of illegal drugs, that all such use is necessarily recreational and therefore devoid of therapeutic value.
Yet the latest research on psychedelic therapy proves this assumption to be wrong. LSD, psilocybin and ayahuasca (among others) have been shown to foster personal growth in the user. Even opium, when responsibly used, can increase one’s interest in the world and one’s artistic delectation, as De Quincey reported, prior to his irresponsible daily use of the substance to combat physical pain. Then there’s the obvious fact that even “recreational” drug use can be therapeutic, as for instance when it decreases the user’s anxiety and gives them something to look forward to in life, thus lifting their overall spirit. (We can label Freud’s use of cocaine as “recreational,” of course, but only by ignoring the tremendous fact that the drug helped him to crank out a voluminous workload that resulted in nothing less than his personal sense of self-fulfillment in life. How’s THAT for therapeutic? And to think, all this was accomplished without correcting some supposed “chemical imbalance” in Freud’s brain!)
But I’m not going to hold my breath, waiting for Halpern to take into account the positive effects of opium and the lives of the Americans who used it responsibly.
But before I throw caution to the wind and turn to page one… let’s examine the biggest of all false assumptions of the drug war – one which, as far as I know -- no one but myself and Terence McKenna have ever sufficiently held up for the high level of scorn that it deserves:
namely, the false assumption that any government has the right to deprive its citizens of their access to Mother Nature’s medicinal pharmacopeia.
This, I believe, is the original sin of the drug war, this fascist gambit, this theft of personal property rights in the name of saving us from ourselves. This is the sin that has empowered the Pablo Escobars of the world, ruined the lives of thousands of otherwise law-abiding Americans, and eroded democracy to the point where presidents like Reagan and Bush can stand before the American public and, Stalin like, call on children to “turn their parents in,” in this case for daring to use the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet.
"To understand holy water, we must of course examine priests and parishioners, not water; and to understand abused and addictive drugs, we must examine doctors and addicts, politicians and populations, not drugs."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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August 30, 2019
How the Drug War Tramples on the Rights of the Depressed
INTRO
To show why I’m furious with the drug war, I have to be autobiographical. Only then does my outrage make sense. But when reading the following, don’t just think of me, but of the millions of others like me who are in similar situations thanks to America’s drug war: i.e., America’s anti-scientific attempt to criminalize Mother Nature and to turn chemically active plants and fungi into boogie-men, thus making them scapegoats for societal failings.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL BIT
The majority of my waking life, I am deeply immersed in my freelance work, which supports me, albeit without providing me with the full measure of self-fulfillment that I seek out of life. But this immersion does frequently produce in me a kind of partial Zen state in which I’m open to new ideas and opportunities. So while I’m slaving away for my daily bread, I tend to come up with great ideas to pursue, which I duly note on a to-do list, either on sticky notes or in a Gmail addressed to myself.
Today, for instance, I realized that I could easily create a popular e-book by collecting and publishing a variety of short, to-the-point cooking tips, with a preface explaining that I’m not a great cook myself but rather a diligent apprentice who is creating the book as much for his own needs as for the needs of the reader. The book would write itself, because its creation would be motivated by my own culinary needs and desires. The creation of such a book seems a no-brainer, so much so that I want to stop what I’m doing and begin researching the topic at once, if only my freelancing schedule would allow me to do so. I am convinced that the book would be a joy to create.
There’s just one problem: that feeling of confidence in this book project disappears utterly when I am outside of that Zen experience foisted upon me by freelance work. I may sit down at my computer to begin the book, but the feeling at such times is always “Why should I even bother?” So many of these Zen-inspired “bright ideas” of mine have come to nothing in the past, so that I have no confidence in my ability to follow through. What seemed like such an obvious plan in that previous Zen state is now just another pipe dream that I know I can never accomplish. So I sit around gloomily, vainly attempting to come up with some other worthwhile project that I might somehow be able to follow through on.
My point?
I know for a fact that there are naturally occurring plants in the world whose ingestion would immediately snap me out of the above-mentioned moping and set me on the path to accomplishing the goal in question. (Freud himself knew this and used cocaine accordingly.)
The problem?
America has outlawed all such plants. Not only that, but they’ve replaced Nature’s cornucopia of cures with just a handful of inadequate and addictive “one size fits all” drugs, namely SSRI and SNRI antidepressants. And such medications are obviously not up to the task of breaking this cycle of failure. The proof, as they say, is extant, since I myself have been taking the highest possible dose of one of the most potent of such drugs, Effexor, for 25 years now, and it is precisely during this time that I’ve experienced this inability to “follow through” on my most important goals.
That’s why I’m furious at the drug war. At its heart, it is anti-patient. Its concern is so focused on punishing drug abusers (as the Republicans want to do) or protecting them (as the Democrats prefer), that it runs roughshod over the rights of law-abiding citizens who want to use the substances in question in a responsible way and for the most important reason of all, psychologically speaking: namely, to achieve self-fulfillment in life.
POSTSCRIPT
But what about meditation?
I’m sure some meditation buffs are reading this thinking, “Why doesn’t Brian just take up a course of meditation?”
One could write a whole book dissecting the psychological naivete that is betrayed by such a question (if one could force their depressed self to actually write the book, that is). Suffice it to say for now that I am no more likely to follow through with this meditation idea than I was to follow through with writing that book about food. I’m even less motivated (if possible) to take up meditation, since the idea is coming from someone other than myself. The fact is I’ve tried meditation sporadically over the decades – just as I’ve tried to write books sporadically – and failed to keep with it. Had meditation been the silver bullet, granting me at least some measure of self-fulfillment, then I would not be writing this essay. It’s fine to insist that meditation should work for people like myself – the fact is that it doesn’t. My whole life constitutes the proof of that assertion. Perhaps I didn’t give it a good try – but that’s the whole point: I can’t give it a good try, since the very problem that we’re dealing with here is an absence of motivation.
But the problem with the average meditation proponent is not just that he or she fails to recognize the above-mentioned Catch-22; they also tend to take a jaundiced view of plant-inspired mental health, as if there was something wrong with using Mother Nature to achieve in minutes what the Zen master can only accomplish in hours or days, namely, that state of sharp focus and mental freedom whereby one can actually accomplish things in the real world.
I reject that view, for I consider it to be nothing but a puritan-inspired Christian Science with respect to mental health, and I reject Christian Science for mental health for the same reason that I reject it when it comes to physical health: for to refuse natural medicinal cures a priori is anti-scientific and thus superstitious, in my view.
The important thing is not how quickly one achieves satori, but rather the attitude with which one approaches the experience. I see nothing inherently evil in the consumption of natural substances created by Mother Nature, whether to achieve satori or to alleviate a headache. To think otherwise is to accept the superstitious drug warrior notion that psychoactive substances are boogie-men, that they are bad in and of themselves, without regard to the way that they are actually used in the real world. And this is the very anti-scientific position that I chided above, for the results of this way of thinking have been to deny responsible folks like myself our connection with the natural world around us, thereby forcing us to forego self-fulfillment.
And why? So that drug war zealots can indignantly punish and/or protect a minority of potential substance abusers, meanwhile turning a blind eye to the psychological welfare of the responsible majority.
Any idea or act that gives men and women a sense of what their life is about or for-- that, in other words, gives their existence meaning and purpose-- is, properly speaking, religious.
Ceremonial Chemistry: The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. Thomas Szasz.
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August 17, 2019
Thanks for Nothing, Alan Schatzberg
In response to Alan Schatzberg's comments in Is Ketamine an Opioid? on the Pain News Network, August 17, 2019.
Schatzberg's concerns about ketamine are based on two logical fallacies that are typical of today's drug warrior.
1) If a substance can be misused by a minority of irresponsible users, then it must be made off-limits to a majority of responsible users.
This is the same logic that kept depressed patients from using demonstrably valuable psychedelic therapy for the last 50 years, under the theory that psychedelics might be misused by a minority of so-called delinquents. (Of course, the term delinquent is subjective. In Nixon's case, a delinquent was merely any American who was not planning to vote for Richard M. Nixon.) But such so-called concern for the health of a minority of delinquents is really just a callous disregard for the health of the masses of suffering Americans.
2) In weighing the potential danger of new anti-depressants, we completely ignore the problems caused by the status quo.
Thus Schatzberg completely ignores the fact that over 1 in 10 Americans are currently addicted to modern anti-depressants, drugs that were never created for lifelong use but from which withdrawal has proven to be almost impossible. A recent NIH study finds that 95% of those who quit Effexor, for instance, are back on it within three years. Where is Schatzberg's concern for that demographic, or for the patients who are now complaining of anhedonia from the long-term use of SSRIs that were only intended for short-term use?
Far from recognizing their errors, the American Psychiatric Association is now developing new rationales to use these "wonder drugs" on children, callously moving forward with addictive therapies for grade-schoolers (now even including toddlers!) when we know that Mother Nature has non-addictive alternatives that our drug-war logic will not even let us research, let alone use to help the long-suffering depressed, alcoholics and victims of PTSD.
I myself am a victim of the "concern" of people like Schatzberg, whose hypocritical worries have forced me to go without non-addictive depression therapy now for 50 long years. So, thanks for nothing, Alan. Given the above-mentioned agenda of your APA, the last thing I need is for a psychiatrist to lecture me on acceptable risks.
Speaking of which, I don't question Alan's sincerity, but I do think that, as a rule, all psychiatrists should be required to come clean about their financial stakes (if any) in Big Pharma before they dash the hopes of depressed Americans regarding a new treatment -- especially if that "dashing" completely ignores the glaring drawbacks of the pharmaceutical companies' existing remedies.
"The adherents to our majority religions thus congregate at cocktail parties and 'smokers'; and have elaborate ceremonies symbolizing the virtues of mixed drinks and wines, cigars and cigarettes, pipes and tobaccos, and so forth. These are the holy communions of our age."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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August 15, 2019
Just Say Yes to Mother Nature's Pharmacy
Combatting the drug war is like peeling an onion. Each of the drug warrior’s harebrained assumptions turns out to be based on yet other harebrained assumptions, which have to be identified in their turn if one is to have any hope of convincing the mind-muddled masses, who continue to follow the logic-challenged ghost of Richard Nixon like he’s the Pied Piper of Drug-Free Hamelin.
Take the following drug-war proposition, for instance:
“Substances should be illegal if they are subject to misuse.”
First of all, I don’t know how the drug warrior can make that statement with a straight face, given the fact that more than 10% of Americans are chemically addicted to modern antidepressants – and the average drug warrior has absolutely nothing to say about that fact. It’s an addiction problem that the APA and Big Pharma “hush up” by claiming that these drugs need to be taken for life. That’s fine, except that the coalition never started making that claim until the addiction problem was first noticed. Only then did it conveniently occur to the drug pushers in question that these drugs required lifelong administration. What a coup by psychiatrists: they thus rendered lawsuits moot, while casting themselves as the saviors of the patients that they themselves had turned into addicts – not to mention the fact that the shrinks were now guaranteed to have clients for life.
But then under this rationale, we could solve the heroin problem in one fell swoop by announcing that heroin has to be taken for life. Problem solved. If we notice withdrawal symptoms, so what? It just means that the addict hasn’t taken his or her daily meds yet. (But don’t hold your breath waiting for psychiatry to “sign off” on this corollary to their self-serving logic on addiction.)
Putting aside this corporate-biased hypocrisy, why should the physical and emotional needs of millions of law-abiding Americans be ignored in favor of cracking down on a minority of those who cannot use a substance responsibly? For make no mistake: many currently illegal drugs have positive effects -- as Benjamin Franklin knew about opium, as Sigmund Freud knew about cocaine, and as the American Air Force once knew about amphetamines. As for psychedelics, they have been repeatedly shown to produce the sort of self-critical insight that has been the holy grail of psychiatry for the last 50 years – and if we want more proof, we need only recognize the psychedelic-fueled ceremonies at Eleusis, a yearly festival for almost 2,000 uninterrupted years, where a who’s-who of ancient Greeks and Romans reportedly underwent the most positive experiences of their entire lives.
And yet we still say:
“Substances should be illegal if they are subject to misuse”?
Nonsense.
From the movie VWF (2019), about a vicious opioid gang: "It's turning into a f--ing war zone, man. I'll tell you what it is. It's all those goddamn drugs."
Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's the outlawing of plant substances that has forced the seeker of transcendence to seek dangerous synthetic substances marketed by outlaws. WAKE UP! All the evil that you attribute to plants can be laid at the doors of prohibition along with drug-war propaganda that obscures the true threats by painting every substance as black once it's been labeled as evil by politicians.
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August 12, 2019
Making Mountains out of Microdosing's Mole Hills
Written in response to a post by Thomas Anderson and Rotem Petranker entitled Benefits and challenges of psychedelic microdosing – as reported by microdosers on the Biomed Central Blog Network, August 12, 2019.
Excellent article. Just two thoughts:
1) I would caution against the use of the judgmental term "recreational" to refer to psychedelic drug use at normal dosages. This is one reason why the drug war persists: because everyone assumes that "illegal" substance users are "recreational" users, meaning people who are out "to get their kicks," and this rubs puritanical Americans the wrong way. The fact is that many people seek out psychedelics to learn more about themselves and the world around them and to self-treat depression. By lumping this motivation under "recreational use," we help obscure the fact that drug laws are not just impacting supposed delinquents, but rather Americans who simply want to improve their mental lives.
2) In worrying about the long-term use of tiny doses of psychedelics, we should always put our concerns in perspective. We can do this by asking: how are Americans currently treating conditions like depression? The answer is, we are using SSRI/SNRI drugs that were never intended for long-term use and which were not adequately so tested. Some of these drugs, Effexor in particular, are extremely addictive (or induce severe chemical dependence, if you prefer). A recent NIH study finds that 95% of those who wean themselves off of Effexor are back on it within 3 years, making the recidivism rate similar to that of heroin. More than 1 in 10 Americans are taking psychiatry's expensive drugs (and at full dosage, of course) every single day of their lives, becoming human guinea pigs for the pharmaceutical companies, and this long-term use is increasingly associated with anhedonia in the user. So while we're fretting about merely hypothetical problems with the microdosing of psychedelics, let's remember that there are very real problems even as we speak with the status quo, problems that will be overcome only when psychiatry adopts a non-addictive paradigm involving the use of the natural therapies that grow at our very feet.
Who is responsible for the 24/7 moaning of millions of elderly Americans in nursing homes?
The DEA and the Drug War, based on the mind set that outlawed opium in 1914, so that now only outlaws have opium. The depressed elderly must make do with psychiatry's highly addictive and less helpful drug alternatives. Scientific materialists are terrified lest they give the elderly good dreams for a change. (Humph! How very unscientific. Let them suffer instead!)
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August 9, 2019
Drug Laws as the Punishment of 'Pre-Crime'
You don’t have to search the novels of Philip K. Dick to find tyrannous governments that punish pre-crime. Pre-crime punishment has been a feature of American law ever since the Harrison Narcotics Act began criminalizing plants and fungi in 1914. No longer was it necessary for you to commit a crime – to play music too loudly, to rob a bank, to strip in public, to threaten neighbors with a pistol. No, you merely had to possess a politically ostracized substance, one that had been slandered with the epithet “drug,” one that superstitious politicians believed (or purported to believe) had no possible effect but to render the user a threat to society. This, of course, was the lie par excellence of fascist governance, since if it were true, then the “drug” use of Benjamin Franklin, Sigmund Freud, and Richard Feynman would make no sense. How can these men be heroes in their respective domains and yet have liberally availed themselves of opium, cocaine, and speed respectively?
Of course, you’ve probably never heard of their “drug” use because to talk about it is to embarrass the drug warriors with an inconvenient truth, and anyone who speaks on Oprah or The View has to toe the party line, the one that’s enriching Big Pharma, psychiatry, and the movie industry, which makes a pretty penny by producing films about drug-war violence, never stopping to think that the real villain of the “piece” is not Pablo Escobar and co. but the unscientific American idiots who had the gall and fascist tendencies to criminalize Mother Nature in the first place.
(Gee, we outlawed natural substances and what do you know, an ultra-violent black market was formed to meet continuing demand: who would have thunk it? Answer: any rational person who wasn’t intent on using drug laws to punish people that he or she didn’t understand.)
That’s why De Quincey’s “Confessions of an Opium Eater” remains such a radical read even today: because that author did not take drugs in order to rob a bank or to strip in public – he took “drugs” (horror of horrors) in order to better enjoy the opera! How evil is that?
No, the punishment of pre-crime is old hat, much to the cost of tens of thousands of Americans who are jailed as we speak for having dared to use substances that so palpably benefited the lives of America’s hypocritically admired heroes.
The constraints on the power of the federal government, as laid down in the constitution, have been eroded by a monopolistic medical profession administering a system of prescription laws that have, in effect, removed most of the drugs people want from the free market.
'Our Right to Drugs', Thomas Szasz
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August 9, 2019
The Politically Incorrect Cure for the Common Cold
One thing is clear in reviewing newspaper references to opium in late 19th-century America. Almost no one -- except perhaps for the odd patent medicine huckster -- seems to have paid any attention to the drug's ability to foster creativity and increased joie de vivre in the judicious user. The focus was all on drug "fiends" and addicts and there was a clear attempt to demonize the drug, mainly by associating it with the sort of people and ideas of which the drug critic did not approve.
[This is a strategic trick of the drug warrior: never acknowledge any positive benefits about the plants that you've chosen to malign. It only confuses your otherwise gullible public and causes them to ask inconvenient questions, thus straying from the party line of 'plants bad, Big Pharma pills good.']
Meanwhile, if anyone had bothered to ask responsible users, they would have heard tales of opium curing the common cold.
Opium, curing the common cold?
There's nothing mysterious about that. The drug helps the depressed feel positive -- if only in anticipation of use -- and it's well-acknowledged today, even by many arch materialists, that positive thinking can help one fend off disease.
Yet modern psychology never connects the dots. Rather, they adopt the superstitious drug-war position that drugs like opium are bad in and of themselves, with no therapeutic value whatsoever -- and so, rather than launching a public education campaign to promote responsible use, they criminalize a mere plant, thereby bringing about the quiet suffering of millions, after which they begin proselytizing Americans with the blatant lie that "responsible use" of opium is somehow an oxymoron, which is clearly a political conviction rather than a scientific fact. [See the centuries-old use of the coca leaf that continues in indigenous South America to this very day, see Freud's use of cocaine to achieve prodigious vocational output and hence self-fulfillment in his own life.]
These are not mere abstract considerations on my part, for, to quote from Edgar Allan Poe, "I am not more sure that I breathe than that" the use of a small amount of opium could, at this very moment, bring some profound psychological relief to my elderly mother, who sits across the hallway from me now, suffering from her vague eternal fears... but, alas, such family members must remain the unacknowledged victims of America's politically motivated drug war. For while the newspapers tell us about the obvious harm that hated substances do, they are silent about the invisible benefits, to the point that they'll ignore a cure for the common cold if necessary to toe the party line on the subject. According to their fascistic ideology, the masses must think of illegal plant substances as evil incarnate, not as God-given cures and the birth right of every denizen of Planet Earth.
FOLLOW-UP NOTE: This is another unacknowledged cost of the Drug War. It biases science so thoroughly that we do not even notice it. Science purports to evaluate the physical world objectively, but it fails to do so in the case of natural substances once they have been rendered illegal. At that moment, science disappears from the lab and political superstitions about the substances in question are tacitly accepted as scientific gospel.
The ritual persecution of these pharmacological and human agents must be seen against the historical backdrop of the ritual persecution of other scapegoats, such as witches, Jews, and madmen.
Ceremonial Chemistry: The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. Thomas Szasz.
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August 8, 2019
Is the psychedelic renaissance doomed?
Posted in response to the question "Is the psychedelic renaissance doomed?" on the Metaphysical Speculations blog on Google Groups. Author Bernardo Kastrup poses the question in response to a new attempt by pharmacologists to remove the hallucinatory properties of psychedelics, to make them operate more like modern antidepressants.
The problem is modern psychiatry and its "physics envy." Its primary goal is NOT to make people happy or even productive; psychiatry's primary goal is to scientifically "cure" people with "mental issues," which today is broadly defined (conveniently enough for the APA-pharmaceuticals alliance) to mean almost everyone, grade-schoolers included) -- and that means finding (or at least purporting to find) the right chemicals to adjust in the brain: in other words, treating human beings as interchangeable units for therapeutic purposes (this from a profession that supposedly adopted the biochemical model to treat patients more "humanely" -- see Anne Harrington's "Mind Fixers").
I believe that a true psychedelic renaissance requires another sea change for psychiatry: just as they went from Freudian treatment to a biochemical focus in the 20th century, they need to go from a biochemical focus to a shamanic focus in the 21st. To accomplish this, however, we'll also need a sea change in drug policy, by which today we outlaw the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet (something that I trust will be wholeheartedly laughed at by the TRULY scientific societies of the future). This law change is necessary because to be effective, shamans must not only be empaths, but they must have unlimited access to all the psychoactive plants of Mother Nature. The shaman is an artist, not a scientist (or at least not JUST a scientist). Instead of choosing among the top 3 blockbuster drugs for depression, the shaman will work with the patient to design therapy using a smorgasbord of therapeutic options from Mother Nature, including psychedelic drugs whose proper use can create a willingness to change in the "patient" thus treated.
Until we allow for the freedom of a healer to choose, artist-like, among the available therapeutic options growing at our very feet, we have no business opining definitively on depression, anxiety and their supposed intransigence or cause. To say that we, even now, possess definitive treatments is folly when we have ruled out, on purely political grounds, a slew of naturally growing plants and fungi that could help improve lives dramatically.
Again, for those who fret about giving therapists (let alone ostensibly free Americans) unhindered access to Mother Nature's bounty, please don't compile a list of potential problems that may thus ensue. Even if you don't consider Mother Nature's bounty to be a natural right of human beings everywhere, it is your drug-war criminalization of Mother Nature that has created the problems: so much violence, in fact, that it has spawned an entire new movie genre where good-guy Americans beat up on bad guy drug dealers.
The recent shooting in El Paso may not have been directly related to drugs, but it is our drug policy that first caused underground America (and the world) to take up arms in a big way, to peddle the naturally-occurring substances that American prohibitionists decided to outlaw.
If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz
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August 7, 2019
The Mental Health Survey that psychiatrists don't want you to take
Rate the following statements 1 to 4, based on how much they have applied to you over the last two weeks:
1) I have little or no pleasure in doing things.
1-not at all, 2-a little bit, 3-a lot, 4-very much
2) I am convinced that plants of Mother Nature could help me enjoy my life again.
1-not at all, 2-a little bit, 3-a lot, 4-very much
3) I am pissed at government for denying me free access to these valuable medicines that could help me, like, say, psilocybin, peyote, etc.
1-not at all, 2-a little bit, 3-a lot, 4-very much
4) After all, we’re talking about plants from Mother Nature here, not demoniacal pills from Pablo Freakin’ Escobar the Third!!!
1-not at all, 2-a little bit, 3-a lot, 4-very much
5) I feel like America has not been a free country ever since the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914.
1-not at all, 2-a little bit, 3-a lot, 4-very much
6) I feel resentful and angry over having to visit a psychiatrist every f---ing three months of my life to get a so-called “maintenance prescription” of expensive and chemically addictive drugs that I have to take every single day and which, in the long run, do nothing more than numb my brain and make it hard for me to think clearly.
1-not at all, 2-a little bit, 3-a lot, 4-very much
7) I am particularly pissed because these so-called SSRIs and SNRIs are contraindicated in psychedelic use, meaning that even if psilocybin became available for me to use, I could not use it thanks to the Big Pharma Meds that psychiatry has hooked me on.
1-not at all, 2-a little bit, 3-a lot, 4-very much
8) Speaking of drugs, I’m pissed that Americans have rolled over and played dead when it comes to so-called “drug testing,” since that system represents the extrajudicial punishment of a misdemeanor offense (nay, even a non-offense) with starvation.
1-not at all, 2-a little bit, 3-a lot, 4-very much
9) Drug testing is also the enforcement of a state religion, namely Christian Science, which holds that our mental health should be maintained without the help of therapeutic medicines – except for the hypocritical exception of a handful of Big Pharma blockbuster pills that boost the Fortune 500 while slowly bankrupting their addicted users.
1-not at all, 2-a little bit, 3-a lot, 4-very much
10) I have trouble falling asleep when I think how Big Pharma, psychiatry, and clueless politicians have deprived me of my birthright, namely the therapeutic plants and fungi that grow at my very feet!
1-not at all, 2-a little bit, 3-a lot, 4-very much
Results: Total your response scores. If the result is less than 36, you clearly have been driven crazy by America’s Drug War. But whatever you do, do NOT seek professional help immediately! The helper in question is probably "on the take" from Big Pharma and so is likely to put you on mind-clouding psychiatric medicines that will addict you for life. Instead, read books by Terence McKenna, visit sites like Maps.org, and work for a world in which psychotherapy is performed by empathic shamans who are free to use any naturally-occurring substance in the world as a therapeutic adjunct.
"With LSD as an aid," the report said, "it has been possible to reach and work with patients who are otherwise unresponsive to psychotherapy."
Kingsport News, March 4, 1960
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August 1, 2019
How the Atlantic Monthly Supports the Drug War
Dear Editors of the Atlantic Monthly:
If you are in any way sympathetic with correspondent Graeme Wood’s misleading musings on the drug war (in his July 2019 homage to Mark Kleiman), then I plead with you to read the following, and read it with an open mind. I write this because I’m an enemy of America’s drug war, and I’m convinced that its “staying power” is due far more to liberal confusion on this topic than to conservative recalcitrance. As you must know, the drug war was commenced by Richard Nixon as a means of silencing his critics by turning them into felons and removing them from the voting rolls. It was not set up with America’s health in mind. Yet Nixon’s drug war remains entrenched in the American zeitgeist today. Why? Because even those who oppose it put forward weak and contingent arguments that unnecessarily yield ground to the drug warrior’s bogus concerns and justifications.
To make my points as clearly as possible, I will proceed by citing a variety of well-meaning liberal assumptions about the drug war, followed by my explanation of why they are misleading. Let me assure you in advance that this is not an exercise in liberal bashing, since I consider myself a liberal as well, albeit one in the stamp of GK Chesterton.
1) Liberals generally share the conservative viewpoint that human beings should not use mother nature’s bounty in order to improve their mental health. Such a viewpoint, however, is nothing less than the theology of Christian Science as applied to mental health. As such, it is a religious tenet, not a view based on scientific facts.
2) Liberals tend to talk about the misuse of drugs in isolation. Thus, if they see teenagers misusing drug A, they write movingly of the problem, considering that they are advancing an implicit knock-down argument for the criminalization of drug A. This kind of argument completely ignores the needs of millions (perhaps even billions) of human beings who could benefit from the responsible use of drug A. Furthermore, it ignores the millions of innocents who will be made homeless or killed on behalf of making drug A illegal, victims on both the domestic and foreign front, caught up in violence so prevalent that it has spawned an entire new genre of movies: the drug war genre. This genre includes films like Clockers, American Gangster, Empire, Cocaine Cowboys, L.A. Wars, etc., films in which self-righteous Americans gleefully violate the U.S. Constitution to “take down” Russian and South American “scumbags” (our custom-made bad guys created by the drug war out of whole cloth).
3) Liberals tend to take the criminalization of Mother Nature’s bounty as common sense. What they fail to realize is that this criminalization is a modern invention, established by corrupt and bigoted politicians, politicians who don’t so much object to drugs as to the folks who use them. Many, including myself, would make the argument that government had no right to outlaw the God-given medicinal bounty of Mother Nature that grows at our very feet – especially in a country where we’re granted the right to pursue happiness. America is a country built on natural law, and natural law has always supposed an Earthling's right to the plants and fungi that grow at his or her very feet. In the Jefferson America envisioned in the Declaration of Independence, there is no legitimate way for government to infringe upon our access and use of the plants of Mother Nature, a viewpoint clearly stated by John Locke, Jefferson's political inspiration, in Two Treatises on Government.
4) Liberals have rolled over and played dead when it comes to drug testing, to which no one seems to object today. In short, it is a total victory for Nixon’s know-nothing drug war. For what is drug-testing? It is the extrajudicial enforcement of Christian Science as applied to mental health. It is the punishment of a misdemeanor offense* with starvation, because anyone who dares use the medical bounty of Mother Nature is deprived of a job – in the absence of proof that said drug use would have impeded their job performance.
*Actually, it's the punishment of a non-offense, since the law does not generally punish the mere presence of illegal substances in the bloodstream.
5) Liberals tend to associate psychedelic plant medicines with hippies. They are thereby ignoring almost 2,000 years of western history, in which a who’s who of Ancient Greeks and Romans (Plato, Cicero, Plutarch, Aristophanes…) attended the yearly Eleusian mysteries, where they “communed with the goddess” with the help of a psychedelic substance, a secretive ritual which many participants later described as the most important event of their life. The ceremony was held yearly until it was tellingly shut down by a Christian emperor as a threat to religion. Just so we banish psychedelics today as a threat to the modern state religion of Christian Science as applied to mental health.
6) Liberals like Kleiman believe that we should legalize only SOME plants, and then do so “ever so carefully.” It’s as if the freedom of speech had been taken away from us by corrupt politicians and now liberals are advocating that we restore those rights “ever so carefully.” Why “ever so carefully”? Does Kleiman not realize that this is a matter of principle, a wrong that is demanding immediate redress? Kleiman can only draw such meek conclusions because he holds many of the false ideas outlined above. For starters, he bases drug policy on the potential and theoretical ills that it might bring, totally ignoring the enormous ills that the drug war is already bringing each and every day by ruining lives, overcrowding our prisons, killing inner-city residents, and justifying U.S. intervention in foreign countries.
There is much more to say, but I stop here because, quite frankly, I do not believe that you are going to read this, much less give it an objective hearing. These ideas of mine might have rung a bell with liberals 40 years ago, but it really seems like the drug-war mentality has triumphed in America. That said, I’ll assume the best and end by telling you why I feel so strongly on this matter.
As a depressed American, I have spent the last 45 years on the receiving end of psychiatry’s addictive nostrums. Like more than 1 in 10 Americans, I have to take an SSRI/SNRI for life, not because I want to but because I have grown to be chemically dependent on the substance. But why did I start on these addictive pills in the first place? Because Nixon’s drug war outlawed the non-addictive psychotherapies that had shown such promise in treating depression in the 1950s. And so I’m forced to remain on these mind-fogging meds for a lifetime thanks to the drug war. Moreover, I am banned from enjoying the therapeutic benefits of the psychedelic renaissance since most psychedelics are contraindicated for patients taking modern antidepressants.
Psychiatry has thus addicted me (first with Valium, later with antidepressants) BECAUSE of the drug war. Where is the liberal concern for myself and the millions like me, the casualties of Kleiman’s “slow and cautious” approach on legalizing psychedelics? And yet liberals like Graeme feel free to flippantly dismiss the value of psychedelics and wholeheartedly accept the fascist notion that plants and fungi can justifiably be criminalized.
Plants and fungi: criminalized! It sounds like a Ray Bradbury science-fiction story to me: a future tyrannical government outlaws plants! And yet this is the “enlightened” public policy that America is following in the 21st century? Unfortunately, humans tend to have myopic vision when it comes to recognizing the blatant injustices of their own time. So I’m not sure you catch the irony here.
But here’s hoping that you do! Here’s hoping that the Atlantic Monthly will think twice in the future before running stories that only serve to philosophically strengthen the drug war zeitgeist.
If I’ve convinced you that the default liberal position is blind to certain truths, feel free to forward me an advance copy of your next article in which one of your authors speculates on drug legalization.
I’ll be happy to highlight any mistaken philosophical assumptions on which the author is unwittingly basing his or her argument. Because, to repeat, the drug war remains in place, not because of conservative arguments in favor of it but because of the liberal critic’s inability to rebut those arguments clearly and with philosophical rigor.
The difference between someone "using a drug" and his being "addicted" to it is not a matter of fact, but a matter of our moral attitude and political strategy toward him. Indeed, we might, and must, go further than this, and note that the very identification of a substance as a drug or not a drug is not a matter of fact but a matter of moral attitude and political strategy.
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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August 1, 2019
Open letter to Ethan Watters, author of
Hey Ethan,
In your book "Crazy Like Us," you mention how difficult it is to escape one's cultural assumptions. I'm afraid in your case, this has blinded you to the existence of America's drug war and its impact upon the subject at hand -- since without the drug war, the very need for SSRIs might not have arisen, given the promising therapeutic use of psychedelics in the '50s -- all nipped in the bud by Richard Nixon.
When an author takes the drug war as a given, not worth even mentioning, he will write the following kind of sentence:
1) "ECT was necessary because all other drug therapies had failed."
But this is a lie. What the author really means is:
2) "ECT was necessary because the government had outlawed all non-damaging cures that seemed promising."
There is a huge difference between the two statements. I think the drug war persists today because it is left out of discussions like this, thus never properly taken to task for destroying lives (or, in this case, permanently damaging brains).
Perhaps someday you’ll write a book about how the drug war has deprived depressed Americans of powerful psychedelic medicines for 50 years now, barring us from psychedelics that can grow new neurons in the brain, while shunting us off onto SSRIs and SNRIs, many of which end up addicting the patient for life – and then making them ineligible for psychedelic therapy for fear of Serotonin Toxicity Syndrome.
So that’s my one complaint with your book: You write as if the drug war does not exist and therefore has no effect on the state of affairs – when in a sense Nixon’s know-nothing drug war gave rise single-handedly to the epidemic of addictive SSRIs, by outlawing the non-addictive therapy that would have existed in its stead.
From a person whose life has been in some ways ruined by this fact, it is disappointing that you do not even mention it.
To do you justice, though, almost no author these days bothers to hold the drug war properly accountable, so you're in good company.
Still, a great book - otherwise.
The constraints on the power of the federal government, as laid down in the constitution, have been eroded by a monopolistic medical profession administering a system of prescription laws that have, in effect, removed most of the drugs people want from the free market.
'Our Right to Drugs', Thomas Szasz
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July 31, 2019
Seven Ways that Liberals are Confused by the Drug War
The following is my response to an article in the July 2019 Atlantic Monthly magazine entitled The Life-Changing Magic of Tripping by Graeme Wood. Wood’s article is written as a kind of homage to drug policy analyst Mark Kleiman, who recently died from complications of a kidney transplant. But don’t let the title of the article fool you: It turns out that both Kleiman and Wood argue so feebly in favor of drug law liberalization that a supporter of that goal would almost wish they would keep quiet, rather than yielding so much ground to the drug warrior with their implicit but mistaken assumptions about the origins and solutions of that problem.
Graeme Wood’s article is instructive because it clearly shows how liberal Americans have been completely bamboozled by the half-baked logic of America’s drug war. One doesn’t know where to start in disabusing them of their pious verities, but here goes:
1) Graeme says that, “Kleiman thought certain hallucinogens should be legalized, ever so carefully.”
Ever so carefully? We’re talking about naturally growing substances that appear unbidden at our very feet, substances that had been legal as a matter of course until 1914, substances that were criminalized because of racist ideas about the populations that used them -- and in Nixon’s case to punish his enemies (by making them felons, thereby removing them from the voting rolls).
Yet we need to regain these freedoms “ever so carefully”?
Why do we concede the right of government to criminalize naturally occurring substances in the first place? They have no such right, particularly in a country that grants its citizens “the right to pursue happiness,” happiness which psychoactive plant medicines have been shown to provide or at least to facilitate.
If the government criminalized freedom of the press, our task would be simply to overturn that despotic law. We would be under no obligation to prove that freedom of the press could be allowed again without causing problems. If any problems occur when restoring our freedoms, it is the fault of the despots who wrote the corruptly-motivated laws in the first place.
2) If Graeme’s sensibilities were applied to driving, most of us would have to remain at home. Graeme would no sooner see an automobile accident involving teenagers than he would rush home and pen a “compassionate” article for Americans to stop driving. If Graeme does not accept this analogy as relevant to illegal drugs, then he is not “up” on the latest findings in psychedelic therapy, according to which psychedelics like ayahuasca and psilocybin can provide a user with mental resilience and grow new neurons in the brain. But in the drug warrior’s playbook, all these benefits are to be ignored simply because a minority of teenagers might find a way to abuse the substances in question.
3) Graeme focuses on minor and debatable anecdotal “problems” with psychedelics, while ignoring the real drug problem in America, the fact that 1 in 10 Americans are addicted to the drugs of Big Pharma for the treatment of depression and other mood disorders, conditions for which psychedelics are proving a powerful and non-addictive replacement. These Big Pharma nostrums (SSRIs, SNRIs, etc.) were never even studied for long-term use and yet now are being dispensed like candy. I myself have been told by psychiatrists that I have to take my anti-depressant for life. Why? Because a new NIH study shows it’s impossible to get off Effexor. Yet the moralizing drug-war mentality blinds Graeme to this REAL drug problem. Instead he harps on the need to withhold naturally occurring and non-addictive medications from the public based merely on his parochial fears about the potential misuse by delinquents. Better millions of depressed go without treatment than 10 delinquents misuse a drug of which Graeme does not approve, or so Graeme seems to think.
The fact that Effexor is more chemically addicting than heroin does not even register for the liberal drug warrior.
4) He also seems to think that only kooks would be particularly interested in psychedelics anyway, so we may as well make them legal, since oddballs will be oddballs. This merely demonstrates, once again, Graeme’s ignorance of the therapeutic findings of the psychedelic revolution, which shows that psychedelics are the psychotherapeutic drugs par excellence. They’re the perfect adjunct to “talk therapy” because they open the users minds to new possibilities and permit them to identify and challenge their own nonproductive assumptions about themselves and about life in general.
5) In dismissing psychedelic users as eccentrics, Graeme also shows his ignorance of Western history: namely, the fact that the Eleusian Mysteries existed on a yearly basis for almost 2,000 years (until the rituals were tellingly abolished by a Christian emperor), providing psychedelically enhanced visions to a who’s who of ancient Greeks and Romans, providing them what most participants later described as the most important experience of their life.
6) Graeme doffs his hat to freedom of religion but fails to realize that America’s drug war is itself the establishment of a religion: namely, the religion of Christian Science as applied to mental health. According to this religion, one “should not” use nature’s freely offered bounty to improve one’s mental health. That’s a religious tenet, though, not a fact. To insist that Americans abide by this belief is tyranny, for it is the establishment of a kind of Christian Science as state religion.
7) While myopically focusing on the potential fate of juvenile delinquents in a free society, Graeme completely ignores the actual hyper violence created by the drug war itself, which is such an enormous problem that it has spawned its own movie genre: the drug-war genre. Nixon almost single-handedly created this genre when he criminalized Mother Nature’s plants, a genre in which mainly Russian and South American “scumbags” are confronted by heavily armed and no-nonsense cops from America who openly laugh at the whole idea of due process and the other high-falutin legal protections that have been historically afforded to American citizens via the U.S. Constitution. Movies in this “drug-war genre” include: American Gangster, Asian Connection, Bobby Z, Clockers, Cocaine Cowboys, Empire, L.A. Wars, Marked for Death, Scarface, Rush, etc. etc. – just add the “bullet-riddled” movie of your choice.
Yet liberals like Graeme happily attend these films, hypocritically thrilled by the violence that the drug war creates, only to go home afterwards and write cautionary articles about the dangers of putting psychoactive plants and fungi in the hands of supposedly free American citizens.
Not until we distinguish more clearly than we now do between the chemical and ceremonial uses and effects of drugs shall we be able to begin a sensible description and a reasonable discussion of so-called problems of drug abuse and drug addiction.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz.
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July 27, 2019
Marci Hamilton Equates Drug Use with Child Abuse
In response to No, American Religious Liberty Is Not in Peril by Marci Hamilton in the Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2019
Dear Marci:
I think it is amazing that you equate the use of Mother Nature’s psychedelic plants with child abuse. It shows how far the Drug War has gone in superstitiously turning mere physical substances into demons, into the very incarnation of evil, something to be feared and reviled rather than to be analyzed dispassionately with an eye toward their potential benefits for humankind.
If you are keeping up on world events, you surely know that psychedelics are now being shown to grow new neurons in the brains of the depressed and, when properly administered, to give new hope and mental resilience to cases that had hitherto been impervious to all other treatments. Moreover, you’re surely aware that Nixon rendered psychedelics illegal, not to protect America’s health, but to punish his political enemies by making them felons and thus removing them from the voting rolls – and that, at the time Nixon did this, psychedelics were showing unprecedented benefit in actually curing alcoholics. You’re surely also aware that many legal antidepressant drugs are so addictive that they have to be taken for life – whereas the naturally-occurring psychedelics that you demonize are non-addictive and can sometimes facilitate mental cures in just one session!
As for the old Drug War canard that drugs “fry your brain,” psychedelics have been shown to actually grow new neurons. If any drugs fry the brain, it is modern antidepressants, which are increasingly implicated in causing anhedonia in long-term users.
In other words, there is no evidence that legalized psychedelics would destroy America, least of all when those substances are used in a religious setting. No doubt you could cobble together a few statistics to the contrary, but any damage you may document would be minuscule compared to that done by alcohol, cigarettes, and the legal drug therapy on which more than 1 in 10 Americans are now chemically dependent, destined to be drug users for a lifetime thanks to the “rights” of Big Pharma (business rights which, as a conservative, you no doubt think are just and proper despite their catastrophic effect on actual human lives!)
It’s funny that you should bring up the Christian Science attitude toward “childhood vaccination” in arguing against excessive religious rights – because the Drug War is nothing but Christian Science as applied to mental health: that is, the Drug War is based on the metaphysical premise that we should not use Mother Nature’s psychedelic medicines to improve our mental health. That is a religious belief itself that cannot even in theory be proven: it is a faith, one that many Americans do not share. So you show your religious intolerance in deciding that everyone must respect your jaundiced view of Mother Nature’s plants and fungi by eschewing the therapeutic use of those God-given substances. In short, if the anti-vaccination movement is ignorant, then so is the Drug War: for both argue against the use of demonstrably therapeutic substances.
You claim that the young people known as “nones” are on your side, philosophically speaking. I doubt that, but if you’re right, this won’t last for long. Research from the new psychedelic renaissance is proving that the guided use of Mother Nature’s psychedelic bounty can increase mental resilience and clarity and help one think outside the box – which is the very definition of a psychotherapeutic godsend. The “nones” are going to be smart enough to realize that the Drug War is all about keeping them from these naturally-occurring therapies – at which point these “nones” will take the lead in denouncing the folly of criminalizing Mother Nature’s therapeutic bounty.
It is my sincere hope that this pushback against the Drug War will result in new churches, in which Americans will seek transcendence together through the ritual use of Mother Nature’s psychedelic plants.
This would not represent the claiming of some new exotic right as you seem to think: it would be the re-claiming of a God-given right to the therapeutic bounty that grows at our very feet – this most basic of rights that was taken from us for political reasons by Richard M. Nixon.
Dr. T.C. Marks, a physician of experience and standing, has added another to the long list of things that can be profitably produced in the glorious climate of southern California. The particular substance this time is opium.
Los Angeles Herald, August 9, 1891
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July 22, 2019
There's nothing complicated about it -- legalize Mother Nature's plants and fungi today!
I belong to a Google group called Metaphysical Speculation, hosted by author Bernardo Kastrup. This morning, one member started a thread concerning Michael Pollan’s fears that it's too dangerous to legalize psychedelic plants – and the posting member (Robert) agreed, concluding that the whole subject of drug legalization is “complicated.”
I begged to differ vehemently, and I did so in the following response to Robert, Michael Pollan, and all the other Chicken Littles out there who fear that the sky will fall in if we legalize the plants and fungi of Mother Nature.
The “it’s complicated” argument has Richard Nixon smiling in his grave. He outlawed drugs in order to get his political opponents off of the voting rolls. Now Nixon finds, half a century later, that even his political opponents have convinced themselves that it’s too dangerous to restore the liberties that he took from us. Meanwhile, it’s quite all right for American presidents to engage in the Stalinist practice of asking children to report their parents for using the plants of Mother Nature. Those turncoat kids even get a photo op with Nancy Reagan. Nixon’s ghost must be ecstatic. His anti-minority drug war tapped into a deep vein of Big Brotherism and paranoia in the mind of the American public, both on the left and on the right.
It’s complicated to get our freedoms back? No it’s not.
If the government had taken away the freedom of the press and then launched a 50-year campaign to point out the dangers of unbridled speech, we might now be terrified of restoring the freedom of the press. But that does not change the fact that the freedom of the press must be restored – and ASAP. Nor does it mean that the defenders of this freedom are under an obligation to explain how this restoration can be accomplished without causing unrest or even violence. If the restoration of those freedoms brings its own set of problems, so be it. If anyone is responsible for that violence, it is the fascists who outlawed those freedoms in the first place.
Folks like Robert are worried about potential victims of decriminalization – meanwhile they ignore the actual fate of the millions of depressed and anxious that they walk by every day, law-abiding citizens who have been forced to use inadequate – AND ADDICTIVE – medicines because America is so focused on keeping NON-ADDICTIVE substances like psychedelics out of the hands of the minority who might (somehow) abuse them (even though psychedelics are hardly the “go-to” drugs for young people seeking a quick and guaranteed high).
With respect, the government DOES define our rights – in the U.S. Constitution – and among those rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
How can the U.S. government grant us the pursuit of happiness and then deny us the means to attain that happiness – by denying us the naturally growing medications that can increase our mental acumen and appreciation for life?
I’m sure Robert would be angry if the government tried to tell him what to think – how much angrier he should be if the government told him HOW and HOW MUCH he can think, but that’s what government does when it denies us the mind-improving therapeutic power of plants and fungi.
Robert frets about those who became addicted to opium. However the morally charged term “addiction” was created by the Drug Warrior to bring shame on opium users (especially the minorities with whom Caucasian prohibitionists associated opium use in the early 20th century). While opium was legal in the U.S., the term used was “habituation,” and many doctors didn’t even consider it to be a problem – until the drug war interrupted supply. Benjamin Franklin was a regular opium user, and there were no Nancy Reagans calling him out as a “wretch” in need of imprisonment and therapy. Moreover, although daily users could become habituated, the occasional use of opium did not cause habituation, nor did the user require ever greater doses to achieve comparable effects.
I’d much rather see opium legal than see the DEA stomp onto Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and confiscate all his poppy plants, as they did in 1987. Why is this outrage not patently obvious to freedom-loving people??? The DEA stomps onto Jefferson’s estate to confiscate PLANTS??? PLANTS!!! Sounds like a Ray Bradbury sci-fi about a future tyrannous government, not a story from our present-day America, at least as I’d like to think of it.
Folks like Robert and Michael Pollan are purblind: they vividly imagine addicts in the street the second that government (in its generosity) decides that we can use the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet. But they are blind to the millions of addicts that pass them on the street every day THANKS to America’s drug war. At least one in 10 Americans are currently addicted to antidepressant SSRIs, which became the go-to legal treatment for depression after psychedelics were outlawed. The APA ignores this VAST addiction, of course, or insists pedantically that we call it a “chemical dependency,” but from a user’s point of view, there is very little difference between chemical dependence and addiction. They are both demoralizing and expensive.
I have been STUCK on Effexor for 25 years. Six months ago, I got sick of being an eternal patient and told my psychiatrist that I wanted to get off of Effexor. He told me that there was no point in trying. He said there had been a recent NIH study that showed that 95% of those who attempted to get off of Effexor were back on it within three years. In other words, Effexor is far, far worse than opium and cocaine in causing addiction – yet Chicken Littles like Michael Pollan have absolutely no criticism for this state of affairs – probably because this American addiction is oiling the wheels of capitalism by giving pharmaceutical companies enormous riches and paying huge dividends for fat cats in the 1%, meanwhile giving psychiatrists overpaid jobs as glorified pill pushers, who disdain to have psychological discussions with their biochemically interchangeable patients. Also, Americans seem to have this Puritan streak in them: that’s the only way I can explain their preference for Effexor over Opium. “At least,” they reason, “the folks using Effexor aren’t doing so to enjoy the opera, like Thomas De Quincey – or to have inspiring dreams, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, thank God!”
Regarding the following question:
Why not just expect that use of psychedelics in a desacralized setting will be disruptive and should be?
That question is beside the point because it’s an attempt to reassure drug warriors that drug legalization will work. But as I’ve tried to show above, the freedom fighter is under no obligation to prove that the restoration of freedom can come without causing any problems.
That said, if we want the use of psychedelics to be sacred, then the best way forward is through legalization, which would undoubtedly result in the creation of churches (even some Christian churches) that use entheogens as a sacrament. If we take the wimpy path of legalizing psychedelics but keeping them in the hands of “professional clinicians,” then we can be sure that every vestige of the “sacred” will be removed from the psychedelic experience. After all, clinicians are materialists (or at least work in an emphatically materialist environment) and so they will naturally want to turn the use of psychedelics into another pill-popping routine, sterilized and routinized to the point that healthcare companies and Big Pharma can establish predictable price points upon which to base psychedelic services.
To sum up, the drug war will never disappear as long as its opponents claim that ending it is “complicated.”
It is not complicated to demand the restoration of a right.
Those who fear such change just do not adequately realize how much damage the drug war has done and is doing even as we speak.
Richard Nixon’s drug war has created so much violence that it has generated a whole new movie genre, in which good Americans (who generally disdain the niceties of the U.S. Constitution) beat-up on evil drug dealers who are simply filling the needs of the black market that we ourselves created for them. We might call this new movie category the “scumbag genre,” featuring classics like American Gangster, Asian Connection, Bobby Z, Clockers, Cocaine Cowboys, Empire, L.A. Wars, Marked for Death, Scarface, Rush – all of which owe their existence to the fact that Richard Nixon (with help from Francis Burton Harrison back in 1914) outlawed the plants and fungi of Mother Nature.
Ending the drug war is not complicated. It’s an imperative for a freedom-loving people.
If Michael Pollan wants to worry about something, let him worry about the hospital patients who, even as we speak, are undergoing unnecessary ECT procedures, potentially injuring the brain – all because our drug war has denied them non-addictive psychedelic medicines that show such promise in brightening their minds – all WITHOUT DAMAGING THE BRAIN.
Let him worry about the minorities that are being arrested every single day for the possession of naturally occurring substances, after which they are thrown into inhumanly overcrowded prisons.
Let him worry about the millions of Americans who are currently addicted for life to psychiatric drugs thanks to the outlawing of natural non-addictive plants and fungi.
Let him worry about the violence in the inner cities caused by gunfire among drug gangs – gangs that would not exist were the plants of Mother Nature merely as legal as they were 100 years ago.
Let him worry about the fact that drug testing is an extrajudicial way to punish a misdemeanor with starvation.
(Amazing. Minimum-wage employees have their urine tested to make sure they are being good Christian Scientists when it comes to mental health – then they go out to see a movie in which good Americans kill people who are violating that Christian Science sensibility about the use of natural medications – meanwhile their corporate CEO is in the Bahamas doing LSD and marijuana with rock stars on his multi-million-dollar yacht.)
Let him worry about the fact that millions of elderly Americans are moldering away in group homes, shorn of hope, when we know through recent research that guided use of entheogens could expand their lives, help them cope with mortality, put an end to their constant profitless fretting, and even grow more neurons for them thereby increasing their mental resilience – and all of these benefits are kept from the elderly by our anti-patient drug war.
Let him worry about… I could literally go on and on mentioning the many downsides of the Drug War that seem to be invisible to the modern Chicken Littles of the world.
In short, let Pollan stop worrying about merely potential victims of freedom and start worrying about the real victims of this fascist state of affairs where, though we’re not told what to think, we’re told HOW and HOW MUCH to think.
Finally, if the “it’s complicated” argument were extended to driving, Americans would have never hit the road. The first car accident would have resulted in hand-wringing and condemnation of the automobile as evil incarnate. But even Michael Pollan recognizes driving as a right – and no doubt drives by plenty of car accidents, like the rest of us, without feeling any moral imperative to go home and write a new book about the need to outlaw driving in America.
How sad it is that Americans who insist on the right to drive a car do not insist on the right to improve their own minds with the naturally occurring plants and fungi of Mother Nature.
I can see God now:
GOD: Blimey, I put those plants there to give them inspiration and to help them sense the unity of all life! Now they’ve bloody outlawed the things. Can you imagine, Gabriel, the hubristic idiots have outlawed my PLANTS!!!
GABRIEL: Well, sir, they do say it’s “complicated.”
GOD: Complicated? It’s a plant! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Gabriel: Human beings really do seem to have the power to muck up anything, absolutely anything at all!
Who is responsible for the 24/7 moaning of millions of elderly Americans in nursing homes?
The DEA and the Drug War, based on the mind set that outlawed opium in 1914, so that now only outlaws have opium. The depressed elderly must make do with psychiatry's highly addictive and less helpful drug alternatives. Scientific materialists are terrified lest they give the elderly good dreams for a change. (Humph! How very unscientific. Let them suffer instead!)
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July 21, 2019
Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
Americans consider addiction a good opportunity to convert a drug user into a Christian, or at least a Deist. That’s why we see so many 12-step programs. That’s why so many books on addiction read like a Pilgrim's Progress of the addict’s soul, as we see addicts not simply get off a given substance but also confront their demons, their inner child, their family conflicts, their innermost fears, etc.
This approach may be heartwarming to a Protestant minister or a dogmatic Freudian, but it is not in the interest of the patient, whom it obliges to undergo immense physical and mental suffering, while being pestered for intimate biographical details from well-meaning but therapeutically impotent counselors.
Why do we think that this form of addiction “therapy” makes sense, especially considering the high recidivism rate of its adherents – who, even if they recover, are encouraged to live life “one day at a time” and to delight in small victories, essentially renouncing any big dreams that they might have otherwise possessed for their life?
Why? Because we are living in a country that has outlawed almost all of the powerful drugs of Mother Nature that could help with the withdrawal process. Having shot ourselves in the foot like that, therapeutically speaking, we are left with no other option than to morbidly analyze the soul of the addict and to hope that he or she can somehow “snap out of it” through confession and self-abasement. But that does not mean that our therapeutic approach makes sense, only that we’re forced to use it because of our jaundiced outlook on drugs.
The answer is to change drug policy. Only then can we treat addiction sensibly, in a way that does not require the recovering addict to feel like hell.
How would we treat addicts sensibly?
We would hook them up with a new breed of shamanic-healer, a so-called “empath” who is highly skilled in interpersonal relations but also vastly knowledgeable about the subtle pharmacological virtues of Mother Nature’s psychoactive plants. These healers would be given carte blanche to use any and every plant medicine to aid the withdrawal process, not just the two or three synthetic medicines that Big Pharma salesmen have vigorously marketed for that purpose.
The healer would especially use those entheogenic plants and fungi that have been shown, when ritually used, to give the user insight into their condition on planet Earth, their place in the world – entheogens that increase one’s ability to relate to others lovingly and honestly, while actually growing neurons in the user’s brain, thus increasing the patient’s ability to creatively confront the withdrawal process and their new addiction-free life.
Meanwhile, the shamanic-healer would distract the addict’s mind from psychological withdrawal side effects (like sleeplessness and anxiety) by providing them with natural medications that bring the sufferer peace and allow him or her to see beyond the withdrawal issues that are being faced. These medicines would be chosen and applied so as not to cause any new addiction, but rather to make the withdrawal process tolerable to the patient (at times even enjoyable!) and to free his or her mind to discuss all related issues in an honest and insightful way with his or her designated shaman.
In other words, this approach does not get rid of talk therapy, but rather makes it realistic, by getting the patient in a state that he or she can talk freely about anything and everything with this designated shamanic “empath.”
Of course, this takes all the fun out of addiction from America’s point of view: Not only does it get rid of the hand-wringing 12-step programs, but it knocks Big Pharma out of the process too because the shamans would no longer restrict themselves to employing the handful of pill brands that they’ve had marketed to them by the pharmaceutical companies.
Unfortunately, the patient will only come first like this when America stops treating Mother Nature as a drug kingpin and instead considers her to be a supplier of a vast array of powerful medicines – medicines that are the birthright of the denizens of Planet Earth and which do not have to be processed and packaged by Big Pharma in order to be used advisedly by shamanic healers.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Let's remember that the word "addiction" itself is a moralizing replacement for the more neutral word "habituation." In early 20th century America, when opium was legal, some people became habituated to it by over-frequent use, but this habituation was not considered a moral shortcoming -- until 1914, when drug prohibitionists came along and wanted to denigrate opium use among mistrusted minorities. Suddenly habituation became an "addiction," a politically and morally charged term designed to justify repressive legislation by a new breed of "drug warrior" who believed we should outlaw Mother Nature's pharmacy to protect Americans from themselves.
AUTHOR'S LATER NOTE: Say what you will about drug dealers, but in some ways they have the right idea. You don't go to them to bear your soul, you go to them for answers. Of course, this is usually dangerous, because there is usually a severe limit to what they know and what they can sell. But picture a pharmacologically savvy dealer with access to Mother Nature's entire pharmacopeia. What a boon that kind of shaman would be to the alcoholic or the heroin addict. As much as the drug warrior wants to paint such people as evil incarnate, they would do a far better job than a 12-step group, giving the addict self-insight with non-addictive psychedelics and the highly selective use of other natural psychoactive plants, such that the addict would come out of treatment free of addiction and knowing more about themselves -- and NOT -- as in today's real world -- suddenly addicted to Big Pharma's ridiculously teensy pharmacy of addictive poisons, based on shabby science backed by false philosophical claims about fictional chemical imbalances -- or rather chemical imbalances that WERE fictional until the BIG PHARMA meds themselves created those imbalances!
This is just another way of saying that if psychotherapists wish to remain relevant in a world without ridiculous and anti-scientific drug laws, they must become empathic pharmacological shamans. The only reason that folks still go to shrinks today is because government, luckily for them, has outlawed all competition from the plants of Mother Nature. If freedom is to survive, this anti-Constitutional status quo must change -- and when it does, psychiatrists will finally have to make an honest living, one no longer subsidized (directly or indirectly) by Big Pharma.
AUTHOR’S STILL LATER NOTE: How ironic yet telling it is that Freud did not submit himself to intensive psychotherapy but used cocaine instead to keep up with his workload. Freud was like: “Theory is all well and good when it comes to my patients, but important people like myself require the real thing!” The field of psychology plays dumb, however, and refuses to draw the obvious lesson from this irony: namely, that politically ostracized drugs have a real place in therapy – “even though heaven and earth cry out against them.” Freud using cocaine reminds me of liberals who send their kids to a private school. In both cases, the theorizer demands real results in their own life and that of their family but insists that other people live according to dictates of mere theory (whether about the powers of psychotherapy or about the importance of public schools).
People who make liquor are businessmen, not the "members of an international ring of alcohol refiners"; people who sell liquor are retail merchants, not "pushers"; and people who buy liquor are citizens, not "dope fiends."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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July 20, 2019
Eight Reasons to End Drug Testing
1) Drugs were made illegal in the United States, not for health reasons, but to punish political enemies – by turning them into felons and thus removing them from the voting rolls2) Drug tests are not based on any known correlation between the use of any particular drug and an inability to perform any particular job
3) Drug testing seeks to establish Christian Science as a state religion by denying Americans the right to use medications to improve their mental condition
4) Drug tests are an extrajudicial form of law enforcement, which punishes misdemeanor cases of drug use with expulsion from the job market, thereby constituting cruel and unusual punishment
5) Many of the drugs that we test for have been shown to decrease depression, fight PTSD and even cure alcoholism -- and yet we reward those who dare to use them with unemployment?
6) Drug testing allows corporations to hire only docile employees who aren’t too finicky about their perceived “rights” as human beings and as workers
7) Drug testing is just another way for the billionaire 1% to lord it over the rest of us by forcing us to undergo humiliating and invasive searches while our CEOs freely use LSD and marijuana with rock stars on their multi-million-dollar yachts
8) Drug testing is based on the patently false assumptions of the Drug War, which has turned the U.S. into a penal colony and fomented violence and bloodshed overseas, justifying U.S. intervention to attack the bad guys that our own drug laws have created out of whole cloth
Did I say 8? I meant 9: The use of Mother Nature's plants is the birthright of every Earthling. It is a right guaranteed by natural law, for as John Locke asserts, we human beings have a natural right to "the earth and all that lies therein." Natural laws cannot justifiably be infringed by common law in a free country -- least of all the United States, the first country in the world to be explicitly founded on the notion of a natural law that trumps common law in order to keep despotism at bay.
FOR PHILOSOPHERS: Note that the urine tests presuppose the unproven proposition that having a given substance in your system makes you incapable of performing a specific job, that, for instance, you are unable to greet customers at Walmart because you smoked a joint three days ago. This, of course, is mere folly, an obvious lie. The truth is probably the opposite, that in many cases the toker might prove a most affable host. But since this drug-testing justification fails so obviously, what is the true purpose of employee drug-testing? Answer: to enforce unpopular laws through extrajudicial means, to turn a non-crime or misdemeanor into a death sentence that bars one from gaining active employment in America. Thus drug testing not only is extrajudicial punishment, but it comes with penalties far beyond anything that a court would ever impose, even for a suspected murderer: namely, eviction from the job market, where the Christian Science deprecation of natural substances is taken as scripture, as American Sharia, often enforced by liquor-swilling CEOs.
What has three letters and ruins the lives of people who want to maximize their potential using time-honored natural plants?
The DEA.
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July 19, 2019
Cup of Urine, Pissed By Me
Cup of urine, pissed by me
Got me work at Dollar Tree
Though they didn’t have the right
I gave forth without a fight
Bet the owner of these stores
Keeps his d--- inside his drawers
Local medical research has so far indicated that these drugs [LSD], when properly used by trained personnel in a psychiatric setting, bring about the release of long-repressed thoughts and emotions, intensify early memory, and generally enhance perception in ways that promote self-understanding and personality growth in persons with mental and emotional problems.
Hawaii Medical Association, as reported in The Honolulu Advertiser, September 12, 1960
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July 19, 2019
This is your brain on Neuralink
In response to Elon Musk's Neuralink plan to fix brain disorders
Musk’s idea might sound funny, were it not for the fact that many equally nutty ideas have been implemented in the name of psychiatric “science” over the past 150 years: enema therapy, insulin coma therapy, Metrazol therapy, fever therapy, enforced isolation, and even forced sterilization – all piously claiming a scientific basis for their method of action. As if this past menu of hubristic horrors is not enough, we have modern psychiatry to thank for the fact that, even as I type this, more than 1 in 10 Americans are chemically dependent on SSRIs for a lifetime – never mind the fact that these pills were originally trialed and marketed only as short-term remedies.
To be sure, Musk’s comments focus on the use of implanted AI to treat Alzheimer’s, but he also makes the grandiose insinuation that no mental trouble will eventually be beyond the mind-correcting powers of his implemented device. (Hopefully there will be an ad-free version of Musk’s implant so that our new, improved grandma is not forced to hear occasional commercials for iHop during her neuronal renaissance.)
I used to laugh at the Kurzweils of the world who ran around screaming that “the Singularity is at hand,” while I, for my part, could not even make myself understood by a corporate phone-bot, not even when using the most basic of highly articulated English-language phrases. But now I see that the AI proselytizers have to be taken seriously, not because they are on the brink of solving the world’s problems, but because they THINK they are and so are liable to create real problems for real patients, unless we see through their enticing sci-fi pretensions to the vapid philosophy that underlies it: materialism, which is to say the philosophy according to which all the nonsense cures cited above once claimed to be justified.
Don’t get me wrong: I would be thrilled if Musk could electronically tweak the brain so as to essentially cure Alzheimer’s, but his ambitions go far beyond that. He’s out to cure “brain disorders” in general, which, given his materialist assumptions, presumably means depression and anxiety as well.
That’s where I say “hold everything.”
We already know of plants whose use can create new neural connections in the brain, yet we do not even consider using them to treat mental illnesses. Why? Because Americans, who otherwise boast of their scientific prowess, have yet allowed those plants to be rendered illegal for over a half a century now. Plants! To be rendered illegal! In a scientific society? Hello?
We have no right to go casting about in the electronics cupboard for cures for depression and anxiety under such anti-scientific circumstances. Scientists and researchers should instead be rising up en masse to overthrow this government-sponsored prohibition on medical progress. (Better late than never: had they not been snookered by politics and materialist prejudices against psychedelics, scientists would have risen up in this way 50 years ago.)
Instead, almost to a man (and to a woman), scientists ignore their loss of freedom, expunging it from history in the very sentences that they speak. Thus a clinician will claim that they use ECT as a last resort, because everything else has failed for a given patient, when what they really mean is: “We’re using ECT because the government refuses to let us use non-damaging and non-addictive plant-based therapies instead.” That honesty would serve a profound purpose, by reminding the tabloid-led public how hysteria-based drug laws end up harming everyone in the long run.
I mention these indefensible drug laws because Musk’s ambitions only make sense in the light of their pernicious existence. If the depressed and anxious were able to proceed with the informed used of psychedelics to treat their depression and anxiety, then I think Musk’s AI plans would appear as laughable to them.
“Let’s see,” says the giggling psychonaut: “I can use this natural plant here to expand my mind, thus following in the footsteps of the mysteries at Eleusis in which Plato himself took part… or I can have this Elon Musk fellow implant some operating software in my brain – which he’ll no doubt update from time to time à la Windows Updates.”
Then, reflecting on the countless PCs that have been ruined by Windows' bug-filled Updates…
“Uh, thanks, Elon, but I think I’ll stick with my plants!”
From the movie VWF (2019), about a vicious opioid gang: "It's turning into a f--ing war zone, man. I'll tell you what it is. It's all those goddamn drugs."
Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's the outlawing of plant substances that has forced the seeker of transcendence to seek dangerous synthetic substances marketed by outlaws. WAKE UP! All the evil that you attribute to plants can be laid at the doors of prohibition along with drug-war propaganda that obscures the true threats by painting every substance as black once it's been labeled as evil by politicians.
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July 16, 2019
Some Tough Love for Drug Addicts
in response to comments posted on DailyMail.com for the article entitled Trial using MDMA
It amazes me that Brits want to continue the disastrous Drug War of Richard Nixon who only started it to punish his enemies. Kudos to reformed addicts, but please do not tell us to outlaw drugs to help save your lives: you’re not the only ones in the universe. Because we set drug policy based on the actions of irresponsible and uninformed drug takers like yourself, we deny powerful medicines to millions of depressed people around the world and foment violence overseas fighting a drug war that can never be won, because people will never give up their God-given right to self-medicate, especially when using the plants of Mother Nature, which are our birthright as denizens of Planet Earth. (What's more, they never SHOULD give up that right -- thus the drug war not only cannot succeed -- but it SHOULD NOT, at least for those of us who value freedom and democracy.)
What has three letters and ruins the lives of people who want to maximize their potential using time-honored natural plants?
The DEA.
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July 16, 2019
America's biggest drug pusher: The American Psychiatric Association:
How the disastrous materialist paradigm ruined psychiatry and addicted entire generations of Americans
I am an expert on the down side of the anti-depressant craze, having been over 40 years on the receiving end of materialist nostrums that I was told would correct my brain chemistry. Now I find that they have hopelessly screwed up that chemistry and have debarred me from profiting from the new psychedelic renaissance in depression therapy, thanks to the fact that SSRI + psychedelics causes Serotonin Toxicity Syndrome -- or, in any case, dampens the effects of psychedelics. Nor am I alone. It is a tragic irony that those of us who have dutifully followed the antidepressant bandwagon are now ineligible for the new non-addictive psychedelic therapy that is meant to replace it.
I decided to get off Effexor to try psychedelic therapy, either in South America or in clinical trials in America. When I mentioned this to my psychiatrist, however, he told me that it was literally IMPOSSIBLE to get off of Effexor. He cited a new NIH study that shows a 95% recidivism rate after three years for those who quit the drug. Bizarrely, my shrink seems to think that this proves that Effexor works. I don't know where to begin in correcting his problematic logic in reaching that conclusion.
If I had been told I was going to be addicted to a drug for life, I would have certainly chosen opium -- like Benjamin Franklin -- and not the drug Effexor. Despite our moral bluster, opium would be drastically better for me, since I could use it on weekends only (which would make the intervening weekdays far more bearable, as it did for De Quincey before an injury led him to take the drug on an addictive daily basis) – and even if I did become addicted, so what? That addiction becomes a problem only if supply is interrupted – and in this sense SSRIs are just as bad as opium. In fact, Effexor is far worse than opium, which an addict can at least theoretically get off of after some major short-term suffering – whereas I’m told that I can NEVER get off of Effexor: ever.
The article that you posted points out some of the problems with relying on self-reporting about SSRI effects. But you failed to mention one problem. Those who find SSRIs to be valuable (at least initially) have nothing to compare their feelings to. Had they had an entheogenic encounter in their life, wherein they were overawed with beauty and meaning, then they would not necessarily consider the SSRI effects to be wonderful. In other words, while entheogens may help them "be all they can be," SSRIs may simply help them become satisfied with an unnecessarily humble status quo, never giving them a therapeutic taste of the heights of self-fulfillment that they might have otherwise reached in their lives.
Long-term Effexor use has not goaded me on to ever new heights: to the contrary, I feel a kind of numbing that I’m told is described by the word “anhedonia.” At best, Effexor has made life bearable – but it has never inspired me and I have felt my creative spirit actually diminishing year by year. Moreover, Effexor has depressed me by turning me into an eternal patient and a ward of the healthcare state and a lifetime subscriber to Big Pharma. I used to think that the APA recognized addiction as a bad thing, but they seem to have no problem with it as long as they can call it “chemical dependence” instead – though from a user’s point of view, there is really no difference: getting off the drug is hell.
If one is going to pay the high price of addiction, they might at least be on a drug that provides actual emotional highs, if not insights and a sharpened mind. (But materialist APA considers that so much “woo-woo”: they’re claiming to fix a chemical imbalance after all, not make me merely feel good! )
Yet another reason to end the drug war: Psychiatry hasn’t a leg to stand on when it tells folks like myself to “just say no,” since they have become the very epitome of the drug pusher, only with complete civil sanction. The corruption of psychiatry is evident in the fact that 1) they don’t acknowledge the fact that they have turned folks like myself (for all practical purposes) into addicts and 2) they won’t even try to help us get off of their SSRI poison – insisting instead that we make our peace with SSRIs and “take our meds” like the good little interchangeable humanoids that they seem to take us for.
This is why I’ve started the website ABOLISHtheDEA.com.
Still waiting for an Effexor withdrawal program that will wean me off of Effexor WHILE weaning me ON to the occasional use of therapeutic psychedelics. Most addiction counselors insist on making the addict feel horrible first – partly because they’re legally unable to use meds that would ease the pain and partly because of an unexamined Puritan assumption that addiction cures must be painful.
I don’t agree – not if the plants of Mother Nature were actually legal again and resourceful and knowledgeable shamans were given carte blanche to use them.
In any case, I don’t have time to feel horrible. I have to make a living while dealing with my Effexor addiction.
What has three letters and ruins the lives of people who want to maximize their potential using time-honored natural plants?
The DEA.
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July 9, 2019
This is your brain on Drug War propaganda
If you want evidence that the American people have been bamboozled by the Drug War, just search the Web for “famous drug users.” Almost all of the “hits” will feature the judgmental term “addiction” (rather than “habituation” or “use”) and almost none of the “hits” will refer to addiction to LEGAL drugs, thereby ignoring the astounding fact that 1 out of 10 Americans are chemically dependent on SSRI antidepressants even as I type this.
This evidence is proof of at least two things: 1) that the Drug War has scrambled our brains when it comes to logical thinking, and 2) that the Drug War is not about America’s health: it’s about disempowering Americans when it comes to controlling their own mental state, meanwhile turning that power over to “health care professionals” and their arsenal of addictive synthetic medications supplied to them by Big Pharma.
In short, it’s all about keeping the DEA, psychiatrists, and drug companies in business for many years to come (and patients be damned, addicted and charged high prices), by continuing the American government’s immoral and unconstitutional criminalization of the plants of Mother Nature, the birthright of every human being. It's all about what Thomas Szasz called the infantilization of Americans when it comes to psychoactive substances.
It must warm the heart of any DEA hardliner to scan these links which describe Mother Nature as a drug kingpin and describe us human beings as mere babies when it comes to psychoactive substances, as if we’re all totally unable to advisedly use the plants of Mother Nature to sharpen our mental acumen and see behind the veil.
The facts show otherwise – as if in a sane and free world we should even need to justify our prima facie human right to the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet.
Bill Gates used “drugs,” Richard Feynman used “drugs,” Sigmund Freud used “drugs,” Thomas Edison used “drugs,” Benjamin Franklin used “drugs,” Omar Khayyam used “drugs,” Marcus Aurelius used “drugs,” even Plato himself used what we’d call “drugs” at the Eleusinian mysteries – but you won’t see the beaming faces of any of these highly successful people splattered over the front-pages of these moralizing anti-drug websites. Instead, look for the deathly pale head shots of John Belushi, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin, the holy trinity of anti-heroes which the Christian Scientists of the Drug War want to keep before our eyes, lest we humans take it into our head that we have the power and the right to decide what plants we’ll eat and which we will avoid.
The Drug Warriors (which is to say 95% of the American public, judging by the plethora of moralizing pages returned in the above-mentioned Web search) want the whole “drug” story to be about the John Belushis of the world, the irresponsible drug users, and those who make bad choices. Why? Because they need to keep distracting our attention from the unprecedented injustice that they perpetrated on humanity in the 20th century when they criminalized plants, of all things, thereby denying human beings free access to the therapeutic output of Mother Nature that grows at their very feet. They want the whole narrative to be about 12-step programs and fallen humanity, with nothing about those luminaries who have chosen wisely from Mother Nature’s psychoactive bounty and come away better for the experience, with more focus, energy and empathy for humankind.
Americans will play along with the maudlin Drug Warrior narrative (of a weak humanity, ever threatened by nature’s far-too-powerful substances) until we finally notice that the Drug War is a religion: namely, Christian Science as applied to psychoactive substances: i.e., the metaphysical notion that we “should not be” using nature’s substances to improve our minds.
The latest research on psychedelic therapies shows that this creed is not only wrong, but that it has resulted in untold suffering over the last 50 years, thanks to the fact that the Drug War mindset has strongly discouraged research and clinical trials of these promising new treatments.
We’ll know we’re finally on the right track when a Web search for “famous drug users” turns up unbiased Web pages that unapologetically reveal how famous Americans have improved their minds with the help of the psychoactive bounty of Mother Nature. What a welcome change that will be from the usual party-line Websites delivering the usual maudlin narrative according to which every so-called “drug” user is a latent John Belushi.
Until then, the drug war remains a violation of natural law and a political pretext to invade other countries on behalf of securing the monopoly interests of Big Liquor against all comers, including those substances that America loves to hate (such as coca, opium and entheogenic plants) that have been used responsibly by non-western cultures for millennia.
People who make liquor are businessmen, not the "members of an international ring of alcohol refiners"; people who sell liquor are retail merchants, not "pushers"; and people who buy liquor are citizens, not "dope fiends."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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July 8, 2019
Why Clinton Was Wrong about Drugs
Bill Clinton once quipped that if Mother Nature’s plants were not outlawed, then his brother Roger would be dead. This claim is worth analyzing because it embodies all the reasons that the Left has joined the law-and-order bandwagon of the Right in denying valuable medicines to American citizens.
1) With all due respect to Roger Clinton, the actions of an irresponsible drug user should not dictate the availability of drugs to those who desperately need them and are determined to use them wisely.
2) The freely provided plants and fungi of Mother Nature are the birthright of every Earthling and cannot be justly denied to him or her, even if the free use of those substances causes harm to the irresponsible and the uninformed.
3) The legalization of Mother Nature’s substances could – and should – be accompanied by a public education campaign, one free of Drug War moralizing, which simply reveals addiction and harm statistics – including those associated with brand-name synthesized drugs, lest we imply that only plants of Mother Nature have the power to do harm. The info thus provided must make it clear that controversial "drugs" like opium and cocaine have been used by highly successful people (Thomas Edison, Richard Feynman, Benjamin Franklin, Sigmund Freud, Plato, etc.) rather than insisting that Janis Joplin and John Belushi be the poster child for every substance that is banned by Christian Science America.
4) Government money should no longer support “Just say no” campaigns, since such initiatives are predicated on the religious philosophy of Christian Science as applied to psychoactive medications: namely, that human beings “should” live their lives without the psychological assistance of Mother Nature’s plants. Given the well-documented mind-improving attributes of psychedelic medicines, this priggish outlook on psychoactive drugs is no longer scientifically tenable. When the government finances a "Just Say No" campaign it is supporting the religion of Christian Science. It is proselytizing a highly debatable creed that plants should not be used to improve mental health -- except perhaps when they are synthesized by Big Pharma and turned into addictive substances from which the industry can reap windfall profits.
5) The Left and Right share the neo-Hobbesian fear that society will fall into anarchy if Americans regain their right to freely access the plants and fungi of Mother Nature. Even if this dubious theory proved to be true, why not reply to the resulting chaos with a crackdown on misbehavior, rather than the usual attack on drug users, which is really just the enforcement of pre-crime law in any case, in which we arrest based on the highly flawed assumption that illegal drug use will inevitably lead to crime. Wrong. So save those resources. If you must bust heads, bust the heads of those who misuse drugs (such as Roger Clinton). Give THEM the long prison terms – and more power to you, since those are the ones who have been depriving the rest of us the freedom to use Mother Nature’s plants wisely!
6) Let's grant that Roger Clinton is better off when we fight a war on natural plants -- but what about the residents of inner cities worldwide who get caught in the crossfire of drug gangs which naturally arise in a capitalist system that outlaws plants? Should we kill hundreds, thousands, even millions -- all in order to protect the Roger Clintons of the world from themselves? If anyone doubts how much violence the drug war creates, just remember that it has spawned a whole new movie genre focused on drug war-related gun violence. A whole new movie genre of violence -- all so Roger Clinton won't make a bad decision -- never mind the fact that when Roger made his previous bad decisions, it was during a time when drug laws were fully in force. Columbine, Vegas and Newtown shootouts didn't arise out of whole cloth. They arose because Americans armed themselves to the teeth to push the drugs that government banned. That's the result of drug laws that banned natural substances. So we are hypocritical now in wringing our hands about gun violence. Mass shootings in America may not be directly drug-related, but they're rendered likely when a country like America is armed to the teeth -- and that is a direct and predictable result of the banning of natural substances, for which there will always be a market in a capitalist country.
In the course of this war against an exceptionally hard-working and law-abiding people, their characteristic habit-- smoking opium-- became the leading symbol of their "dangerousness." After all, Americans could not admit that they hated and feared the Chinese because the Chinese worked harder...
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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July 5, 2019
To Pee or Not to Pee
Ever wonder what Shakespeare might have written had there been drug testing in his time? Well, apparently someone did ask for the bard's piss at some point, given the tenor of this hastily indited rejoinder that William seems to have fired off in response. It's frankly pretty bad poetry, but that only proves how much the wordsmith was rattled by this outrageous demand.
It reads a little bit like the distracted poesy of the Muhammad Ali look-alike in “Police Squad”: “Roses are red, violets are blue – I’m gonna break your face!”
…
To pee or not to pee, that is the question:
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The blatantly unreasonable search of outrageous fascists –
Or to take up arms against the servile status quo
And tell my corporate bosses where to shove it.
...
To protest, perchance to starve: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that valiant stand against drug testing what hunger may come
When we have shuffled off the corporate coil
Must give us pause – there’s the respect
That makes calamity of fighting back;
...
And thus the native hue of just indignation
Is sicklied oer with the pale cast of cowardice
And those who ache to throw their bottle of piss
Right in the face of the Constitution-challenged bastards who are testing them
With this regard their currents turn awry
and lose the name of action. (mumble mumble mumble...) ...
EDITOR'S NOTE : I think Shakespeare has a point. I mean, if demanding a urine test is not "unreasonable search" (especially in the absence of any reasonable suspicion), then what is? Where do these corporate inquisitors (suborned by the U.S. government) draw the line? Perhaps they still balk at requiring candidates for minimum-wage jobs to submit to anal probes for drugs? Forgive the crassness, but one really doesn't know what else to suppose given the anti-American nature of it all.
First the government outlaws the plants of Mother Nature -- then, not satisfied with that usurpation of power, they suborn corporate America to take the very piss of the lower-class work force, to ensure that Americans are kept in their place, banned from improving their minds and seeing past the injustice of it all.
I think if billionaire companies are going to take part in this humiliation and demoralization of the lower-class workforce, then the billionaire CEOs should be forced to publicly provide their own urine samples on live TV -- just to show that the CEO is not above humiliating him or herself as well -- all for the high American motive of criminalizing Mother Nature, bigging up the police force, and denying the depressed and lonely any hope of overcoming -- except through addictive drugs from Big Pharma.
*Author's note, update July 20, 2019: I should have known better. Turns out, Schultz is no hero. He objected to polygraphs, yes, but he thought that drug tests were "scientific" -- in other words, he had no principled stand about his constitutional rights, let alone about the folly of turning Mother Nature into a drug kingpin.
LSD-25, a drug capable of bringing back childhood memories with the sharpness of a 3-D movie, is helping fight mental illness in persons formerly considered hopeless, two psychiatrists said today.
"Hopeless Mental Cases Given Aid By Drug Discovery," The Daily Item, Sunbury, Pennsylvania, March 24, 1960,
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July 2, 2019
Arrest Warrant for DEA Commissioner John C. Lawn
Wanted
1980s Commissioner John C Lawn
For enforcing drug law by poisoning American citizens with Paraquat
Warning: Lawn is armed with unscientific ideas about Mother Nature's plants and should be concerned a threat to American democracy.
The plain historical facts are that before 1914, there was no "drug problem" in the United States; nor did we have a name for it.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz.
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June 29, 2019
Mycologists as DEA Collaborators
In response to "Drugged, Castrated, Eager to Mate: the Lives of Fungi-Infected Cicadas", by JoAnna Klein, in the June 28, 2019, edition of The New York Times.
Your article about the cicadas was simultaneously fascinating and depressing. Am I the only one who finds it sad that the DEA has to be consulted by a scientist before he or she can even investigate certain kinds of mushrooms and their byproducts? The fungi in question are grown by Mother Nature after all, not by Pablo Escobar: and where does the government draw its moral right to criminalize the freely offered bounty of Mother Nature?
The government's interference in mycology must steer a lot of scientists away from that field. What scientist would want the government looking over their back on every mushroom-hunting foray? I can't help feel, therefore, that those who remain in the field are complacent about government interference in science and may actually take pride in being DEA collaborators first and mushroom hunters second.
Dr. Kasson himself seems to be in thrall to the Drug War based on his use of terminology. He twice refers to mushrooms as “narcotics,” when from a scientific standpoint, this is just plain false. Psilocybin is a psychedelic, not a soporific agent. But in our society, "narcotic" is a drug-war pejorative, and so Kasson's use of the term betrays his knee-jerk desire to libel those substances of which the DEA does not approve, thereby making a patriotic virtue out of a government-imposed necessity.
As strange as the cicada story sounds, Kasson would not be so flummoxed by it had he read the book by Giorgio Samorini entitled "Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness." That's a politically incorrect book par excellence, because it demonstrates that the desire to alter consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the animal kingdom, not some evil impulse limited to 20th-century hippies and 21st-century ravers. (As Samorini points out: moths get drunk on the nectar of the datura flower, caribou trip on fly-agaric mushrooms, and cows have such a penchant for locoweed that it caused an agricultural crisis in Kansas in 1883.)
English Biologist JBS Haldane once said (a la Werner Heisenberg’s comments about the universe): “Nature is not only odder than we think, but odder than we CAN think.” This is no doubt especially true for those who expect the animal kingdom to respect our modern drug-war sensibilities about psychoactive plants.
The fact that a contemporary American's, and especially physician's, advocacy of tolerance with respect to drugs is generally viewed as an endorsement or support of undisciplined licentiousness in the use of "dangerous drugs" signifies that we are now at the height of an "anti-narcotic" inquisition.
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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June 28, 2019
Illegal Drugs and the Imp of the Perverse
- You strive to be free of thinking too much about what you're doing. -- David Gray
- To indulge, for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost. - Edgar Allan Poe
In illegal drugs, we have found an all-powerful boogeyman that we can safely moralize about and condemn regardless of context.
Did Elton John use “illegal drugs”? Then it follows for us in this simplistic psychological view that his success was always IN SPITE of those horrible substances, and that his musical output would have been so much better had he only said “no.”
This is mere wishful thinking on the part of a society that has been deluded by the unscientific moralizing of the drug warrior.
True, John may have had a far safer life by “saying no” to drugs (or rather saying no “to non-doctor-administered mental health treatment”) but it is mere speculation on our part to say that he would have produced as much and been as popular without the aid of his poison of choice.
To think otherwise is to ignore the psychological phenomenon of “the imp of the perverse,” which Edgar Allan Poe explained 150 years ago today, though modern psychiatry continues to pretend that this phenomenon does not exist. “The imp of the perverse” is that voice in the ear of the public singer that whispers: “Oooh, what if my voice came out weak and my throat became constricted: wouldn’t that be horrible???” As Poe wrote, merely to think such thoughts is to be lost: for to fearfully imagine such hideous acts of masochism is to bring them about. Is it any wonder then that insecure performance artists will occasionally avail themselves of illegal mood enhancing substances to silence that self-doubting masochistic voice?
Answer: It’s no wonder at all – yet we still shake our heads in clueless disbelief whenever we hear of a public performer using “drugs.” “Tsk-tsk! Why would they do something so senseless?” we say, thereby displaying our ignorance of what Poe called “the prima mobilia of the human soul,” the aforementioned “imp of the perverse,” that ineradicable inner voice whose one and only goal is to keep its victim from reaching the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of self-fulfillment.
Despite all the de rigueur hand-wringing over Elton John’s drug use, what we’re really upset about as a society is the fact that he had the nerve to medically control and improve his mood without the assistance of established psychotherapy (in other words without getting on a program of chemically addictive SSRI antidepressants for life!)
But Americans insist on viewing illegal drug use as mere inexcusable hedonism; to think otherwise would force them to confront the fact that the drug war is being fought on behalf of modern medicine; its goal: to disempower Americans by forcing them to rely on others when it comes to controlling one’s own mood and mental acumen.
It is only fitting that as formerly the most faithful Christians favored the most un-Christian ferocity against witches, so now the most faithful capitalists recommend the most anti-capitalist ferocity against the entrepreneurs who trade in "dangerous drugs."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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June 27, 2019
The Psychedelic Secret of Self-Help Books
Have you ever noticed that most psychological self-help books merely describe, over and over again, a way to look at the world that can be engendered naturally with the guided use of entheogens? "Be calm, be focused, be imaginative," they say, "and above all, feel yourself to be part of the great creative forces of the universe that flow around you! See the world in a grain of sand! Dissolve into nature and become a new creative being! Yada yada yada!!!"
Sounds great, but how do we accomplish this feat, exactly? The authors never say. The implication is that we should "just do it," as if their readers were able to control their emotions in the same way that they control their arms and legs. Earth to self-help authors: this does not work.
If the Seth Godins of the world know what's good for them, they should be fighting tooth and nail against the legalization of psychedelics, because the properly guided use of substances like psilocybin, peyote, ayahuasca and even LSD will finally allow the psychologically challenged human being to BE the sort of person that self-help authors only want such people to READ about.
*NOTE: Credit where credit's due: I'm the first one to point out how the self-help movement supports the war on drugs, philosophically speaking. It does so because self-help authors imply that the human being is endlessly malleable, psychologically speaking, to the point where they can accomplish any goal if they only put their minds to it.
Bollocks.
But note that if anyone truly believes this demonstrably false proposition, this American mythology, then it follows that one has no need of psychological medicines -- least of all those naturally growing medicines that the government has told us to forget about under penalty of law.
That's why I wish mindfulness writers would put up their pens -- until such time as they have the guts to point out in their books that the best way to mindfulness, for many people, would be through the guided use of psychoactive plants, were they only made legal. By failing to note this inconvenient truth, these self-help authors are tacitly advancing a sort of Christian Science view of psychedelics, according to which we are only entitled to as much higher consciousness as we can achieve WITHOUT the help of Mother Nature.
Meanwhile the drug warriors are delighted with this muddled reasoning: “See, they say," pointing to these endless shelves of self-help books from which the subject of psychoactive drugs has been expunged by the author's self-censorship: "You can do anything you want WITHOUT the help of Mother Nature. All the more reason to arrest you if you use psychoactive plants!"
Local medical research has so far indicated that these drugs [LSD], when properly used by trained personnel in a psychiatric setting, bring about the release of long-repressed thoughts and emotions, intensify early memory, and generally enhance perception in ways that promote self-understanding and personality growth in persons with mental and emotional problems.
Hawaii Medical Association, as reported in The Honolulu Advertiser, September 12, 1960
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June 26, 2019
My Letter to Dennis McKenna
Hi, Dennis.
I hope this message reaches you. I’ve found that when a person like yourself has reached a certain level of celebrity, they become quite difficult to reach online, and even if the message gets through, they may not welcome the imposition on their busy schedule, as I learned to my cost in attempting to contact Rick Strassman last year.
My goal in this message is to advocate a new shamanic therapy to replace psychotherapy as we know it in the United States. I hope you’ll find time to read on…
INTRODUCTION
My name is ... and I am the 60-year-old founder of a website called AbolishTheDEA.com, which I describe as a series of essays constituting “one long argument” against America’s drug war.
That’s just by way of introduction, mind. I’m not writing to plug my website but rather to pick your brain on a novel idea that I have about the shamanic use of psychedelics in such a way as to help millions of depressed Americans. I am thinking specifically of the millions of Americans who are currently unable to profit from the new psychedelic renaissance in medicine for the reason that the SSRIs that they are taking are contraindicated in most psychedelic therapy. So, for instance, these Americans cannot profit from LSD, psilocybin, or ayahuasca therapy for fear that using these substances will result in so-called Serotonin Toxicity Syndrome.
I have a personal interest in the matter.
Like tens of millions of my fellow Americans, I have been forced onto Big Pharma’s addictive (or dependence-causing) SSRI antidepressants thanks to the drug warriors’ criminalization of the non-addictive bounty of Mother Nature. In my case, I am dependent on Effexor, which appears to be the most chemically addictive substance in history. I say this in light of a recent NIH study which shows that over 95% of those who wean themselves off of Effexor are back on it within three years. My psychiatrist claims that this recidivism rate is proof that Effexor works, but by the same logic, we could say that heroin works for depression, since depression will inevitably return when an addict quits that drug. At least in the case of heroin, the user would have been warned in advance of the addictive nature of frequent heroin use, whereas no such warning was ever given me about the use of SSRIs (though psychiatrists may quibble that SSRIs are not addictive but merely cause chemical dependence, as if this made a difference from the entrapped user’s point of view).
THE PROBLEM
To sum up the problem: a large number of depression sufferers in America (perhaps even a majority) are ineligible to benefit from the new psychedelic renaissance. They cannot participate in trials, nor can they travel to South America to take part in ayahuasca rituals and the like: all because of their chemical dependence on SSRIs, which are contraindicated in most psychedelic therapy.
THE PREREQUISITES OF A SOLUTION
I believe there is a solution for this problem, but it requires a whole new mindset for how we treat addiction and chemical dependency. Rather than relying on modern doctors (with their small arsenal of commercial drugs that have been pitched to them by corporate sales forces) we should rely on empathic shamans, whose pharmacy is the rain forest and the plants and fungi of Mother Nature in general.
We must also question the assumption of “no pain, no gain” when it comes to treating addiction and/or chemical dependency. Certainly, the “patient” in these cases must approach such treatment seriously and with good intentions, but the notion that addicts must join 12-step groups and don sackcloth and ashes must be reexamined. I contend that this approach is based on a puritanical mindset, one which is particularly manifested in our refusal to consider the use of medicines that provide on-the-fly mood elevation and entheogenic insight to the addicted or chemically dependent person “in real-time,” so to speak.
Materialism is also the foe of the sort of shamanic addiction therapy that I am advocating here. Materialists insist on treating specific physical “causes” of depression. This is the reductionist focus which gave rise to the fallacious sales pitch that SSRIs were targeting specific chemical imbalances in the brain which cause depression, whereas Richard Whitaker has subsequently shown that Big Pharma’s SSRIs actually CAUSE the chemical imbalances that they purport to correct.
Thus both Puritanism and Materialism impede progress in the treatment of the addict. They each have their own reason for distrusting the symptomatic treatment of discomfiture, that discomfiture which is so often the death knell of the addict’s attempts at withdrawal from a given substance.
They both also ignore the therapeutic quality of anticipation. As De Quincey wrote, until his back injury, he had no desire to take opium on a daily basis. Why? Because his mood was lifted merely by the foreknowledge that he was going to “use” opium on the weekend in order to better appreciate an opera. In short, he got a mood boost by merely looking forward to his opera experience. Likewise, if the SSRI addict knew that he or she was going to be provided with a mood-elevating psychoactive plant on a regular basis during the withdrawal process, they would have incentive to “keep the course.” Again, amazingly, our modern focus on “no pain, no gain” seems to blind us to the symptomatic use of drugs for keeping the addict on track. We want him or her to “struggle through the pain” (and even talk about that pain in front of their fellow addicts) rather than to be lifted by natural substances over the deepest, most painful stages of the withdrawal process.
Materialists cannot be big supporters of entheogens, in any case, since they consider spiritualism itself to just be so much “touchy-feely” nonsense.
I almost despair of making myself understood on this topic because my ideas on this subject are so far from the status quo. Even the most progressive books on addiction these days seem determined to turn a person’s depression into a big psychological melodrama focusing on archetypes and childhood memories. Meanwhile, medicines that would “cut straight to the therapeutic chase” are growing at the author’s very feet.
For a clearer idea of what I’m driving at, I invite you to read my essay entitled “What Psychotherapists Can Learn From Drug Dealers” on AbolishTheDEA.com. The essay title really says it all. For all the moral shortcomings of many “drug dealers,” (meaning those who deal in medicines of which the government does not approve) they deal with the real world when it comes to making their clients feel better. Our society’s current therapeutic approach, to the contrary, is firmly based on wishful thinking. We tell the addict to “grin and bear it,” as if we have no need to deal with their real-time discomfiture, as if the huge pharmacopeia of Mother Nature does not exist or is somehow off-limits in the symptomatic treatment of withdrawal symptoms. We’ve convinced ourselves that this psychologically naïve approach to withdrawal symptoms is somehow pious (to the puritanical mindset) and medically correct (from the materialist’s point of view).
SOLUTION
I have searched in vain for programs that help people get off of Effexor. And I’m sure that this is a problem for SSRI users in general. This is depressing to me because I find that I am ineligible for all the self-insight and mental relief and clarification that could be provided by entheogens, at least to a person who approaches the plants reverently, so to speak, and in good faith.
This absence of withdrawal therapy is a huge problem. I recently attended an online MAPS session about ayahuasca. And the most common question, according to the hosts, had to do with the interaction of SSRIs with ayahuasca. This is not surprising since, by some estimates, 1 in 6 Americans is taking an SSRI antidepressant. And so, thanks to the contraindication mentioned above, the most chronically depressed patients in America are precisely the ones that cannot now benefit from the psychedelic renaissance.
The answer, in my opinion, is the creation of a new world of shamanic therapy, one that avails itself of the vast pharmacopeia of Mother Nature, rather than just those few synthetic drugs whose sales benefit Fortune 500 companies.
In specific, I envision a treatment center at which the SSRI user tapers off of their Big Pharma antidepressant while receiving increasingly higher doses of entheogens. On week one, for instance, I might start using 225 mg of Effexor (given that my current daily dosage is 250 mg) and then given psilocybin or ayahuasca (etc.) at a very small dose. On the following week, I might start using 200 mg of Effexor and be given an entheogen at a slightly higher dosage, and so forth.
Meanwhile, the discomfiture that I experience as withdrawal side effects would be treated by other psychoactive plant and fungi substances of which the shaman is aware, in order to prevent relapsing. Note that the occasional use of euphoriants would be strongly indicated at such times. (I can hear the puritans gasping now – followed shortly by the “tsk-tsks” of the materialists.)
For once we put aside the objections of puritanism and materialism, we can realize (as even many “drug dealers” do) that it is the ANTICIPATION of “guaranteed upcoming joy” that makes life livable under tough conditions. As I know from decades of depression, it is never the depressed feeling itself that is intolerable – but rather the firm conviction on the part of the depressed that “this feeling will never end.” It is this fatalistic conclusion that leads to suicide, the conviction that the bad feelings will never end. But with the skillful employment of psychoactive plants, we can change the sufferers’ mindset by showing them that psychological relief is always “just around the corner,” which understanding, paradoxically, provides the addict with immediate psychological relief.
WHY I’M WRITING TO YOU IN PARTICULAR
Having read several books by your brother Terence, I think I have reason to believe that my ideas might make some kind of sense to you, Dennis. If so, I’d appreciate your feedback.
I only wish that I could offer myself to science as a guinea pig, to be a recipient of the kind of shamanic depression treatment that I’ve attempted to outline above. My goal is to finish my life completely freed from Effexor, after which I hope to occupy my remaining time on earth as a psychonaut, following the Socratic admonition to know myself. But there are currently no realistic options to do this.
Psychiatry itself says that I shouldn’t even bother trying to get off of Effexor. Psychiatry has thus made me an “eternal patient,” an effective ward of the state, and I find myself rebelling against that fate, so far to no avail. It’s not just that I wish to explore entheogens (from which the use of SSRIs debars me) but also the fact that Effexor use increasingly muddles my mind and leads to anhedonia and a loss of the creative spirit that I had prior to beginning my decades-long reliance on SSRIs.
I believe that I could be successfully guided off of Effexor with the help of plant and fungi medicines as used in shamanic-guided healing rituals – until such time as my psychological needs could be met entirely by the intermittent use of entheogens, and even marijuana. (Note: It’s my experience that Effexor mutes the effects of marijuana and quashes the longer-term feelings of peace that the drug used to provide me in my pre-Effexor days.)
Something needs to be done. There are thousands of depressed Americans like myself who are chafing at the bit of their SSRI addictions – and almost no one is doing anything about it.
Psychiatry as a profession refuses to even discuss the matter, insisting to this day that SSRIs are some kind of materialist wonder cure. Rather than addressing the issue of chemical dependency, they flip the script and tell patients that SSRIs (initially prescribed as short-term therapy) need to be taken for life, thus freeing themselves of the necessity of telling patients how to get “off” of these “wonder drugs.”
I hope you agree with me that, to be truly effective, the new psychedelic renaissance requires a new treatment approach, one that empowers empathic shamans to treat the psychologically suffering patient (addict or otherwise) by choosing advisedly from among the full panoply of psychoactive substances provided to humankind by Mother Nature.
"It is impressive testimony to our powers of self-deception that we believe we can expand our civil liberties by opposing threats to it from politicians, while at the same time inviting and embracing threats to it from physicians and psychiatrists."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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June 24, 2019
Dr. Houston, We Have a Problem
...with your "go slow" approach to ketamine, that is.
My response to the article by Dr Muiris Houston entitled "Is use of ketamine for treating depression a step too far?" in the Irish Times of June 24, 2019.
Psychiatry does not have a leg to stand on when it argues that ketamine may cause addiction. The treatment with SSRIs -- which were initially introduced for short-term use -- causes such severe chemical dependency in the user that psychiatrists finally made a virtue of necessity and insisted that the pills were intended to be taken for a lifetime.
I recently wanted to get off of Effexor -- to try some of the new depression treatments that you're no doubt worried about -- and my psychiatrist basically told me that it was IMPOSSIBLE. He cited a recent NIH study that showed that over 95% of those who weaned themselves off of Effexor were back on it within three years.
So please stop trying to keep me from using ketamine based on the idea that I might become addicted. Even if I did become addicted, at least ketamine is a drug that I could theoretically get off of again if I tried, unlike Effexor which turns one into an effective drug addict.
If you really want to steer me away from ketamine, then start fighting to give me access to a powerful potential alternative such as psilocybin and LSD. Our Nixon-inspired "go slow" approach (or rather "go nowhere" approach) on psychoactive drugs has set back depression therapy for 50 years already. Let's not set it back another 50 years by invoking a standard for safety that psychiatry itself has never met when it comes to SSRIs.
[Dr. Watt declares] that the moderate use of opium is not more injurious than the moderate use of alcohol and even that its abusive use is less destructive to its victims than intemperance.
The Freeman's Journal, Dublin, Ireland, October 31, 1891
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June 18, 2019
Looking for Magic in All the Wrong Places
Check out this line from “The Librarians,” spoken by a self-satisfied “magic hunter” who claims to understand M-Theory.
“Once I notice something, I can’t ignore it anymore. I have to find out everything about it.”
Really? Then why are you looking for magic in a Victorian frat house? Why not just walk outside and gather the psychoactive mushrooms that grow at your very feet? They are surely the ally “par excellence” in our search for magic in the world around us.
Instead, this know-it-all has censored her own search for magic, obediently looking for it only in those places that her government will allow her to look, in other words, in those places where she’s sure not to find it. The conclusion? This magic hunter can and does ignore things – so thoroughly, in fact, that she does not even realize that she is ignoring them! This self-induced amnesia is, in turn, a testament to the drug war’s insidious effect on free thinking.
She’s just as bamboozled by the drug war mindset as the fuddy-duddy professor in the same episode, the one who vehemently denies the very existence of magic. He’s correct, of course, but not for the reasons that he supposes: Magic really does not exist – but only because our government has criminalized the very plants and fungi that can open our eyes to it.
The plain historical facts are that before 1914, there was no "drug problem" in the United States; nor did we have a name for it.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz.
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June 15, 2019
Richard Nixon Gets the Last Laugh on Baby Boomers
I can’t help but think of all the depressed Baby Boomers who are starting to molder away in nursing homes, thinking to themselves, “Well, at least we gave Richard Nixon the boot during the Watergate crisis!”
Really? Don’t they realize that Richard Nixon has had the last laugh on them after all with his anti-patient drug war? By denying the elderly access to their medicinal birthright, namely the therapeutic bounty of Mother Nature (magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, peyote, etc.), Nixon has single-handedly ensured that depression and fear of death will unnecessarily affect millions (perhaps even billions) as they approach what might otherwise have truly been their “golden years” of life.
To illustrate this sad reality, consider the following typical scene that is taking place, even as we speak, at a nursing home near you:
SKETCH 1
MARY: Life is shit.
NURSE: Now, Mary, be nice. You’ve got a nice bingo game to look forward to this afternoon.
MARY: Just let me die.
NURSE: Now, stop that, gloomy puss, or I’ll report you to Dr. Pillman, and you know what that means.
MARY: More brain-fogging drugs: I know, I know.
NURSE: That’s right.
MARY: You call this life? I can’t even walk by myself…
NURSE: I’ve been trying to get you to attend rehabilitation exercises ever since you moved in here.
MARY: Not much point in walking when the only destination round here is the gloomy group meeting room.
NURSE: Oh, snap out of it. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s a lovely day outside.
MARY: Oh, just let me sleep.
NURSE: You’ve been sleeping all night: now, get up and get dressed. You can’t play Bingo in your night gown.
MARY (softly): You know what you can do with your Bingo.
NURSE: I heard that, Mary!
Now fast-forward 50 years, to a day when the medicinal output of Mother Nature is actually legal to access (can you imagine that – a day when our government trusts us mere private citizens with the responsibility of legally accessing naturally growing plants! How considerate of them!):
SKETCH 2
MARY: Awesome!
NURSE: What’s that, Mary?
MARY: What are those tall spiky purple flowers growing outside the window there?
NURSE: Uh… that would be anise hyssop, if I’m not mistaken.
MARY: Do you know, I’m seeing flowers for the first time since last night’s psilocybin session?
NURSE: Be that as it may, you’d better get dressed if you’re going to attend today’s Bingo playoff.
MARY: What’s that line: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”?
NURSE: Oh, yes. Dylan Thomas, I think.
MARY: Do you know, I actually feel that force today, both inside and outside of me.
NURSE: Well, fine, you can tell the Bingo club all about it, but do get going now!
MARY: Bingo? What a silly game.
NURSE: Now, now.
MARY: But you know what, Ellie? I actually think that I can DO silly now, after last night’s session, I mean.
NURSE: Good for you, Mary.
MARY: Yeah, it’s funny, but I think I can actually DO silly now!
NURSE: Whatever you say, Mary, but chop-chop, double time!
Granted, that latter sketch represents a best-case scenario in which the proverbially stubborn mind of old age is made to yield to persuasive and targeted psychedelic therapy. That said, there is every reason to believe that psychedelic therapy can work wonders in a large proportion of cases when facilitated by a modern-day Shaman (i.e. an empathic caregiver with a thorough knowledge of the psychoactive power of plants). We know, after all, that such substances have the power to override the “default mode network” of thought. They can also grow new neural pathways. In other words, these plants are godsends that can facilitate a whole new era of empathic psychiatric practice. Unfortunately, modern psychiatry is doing its best to ignore this fact, as it stubbornly clings to its status quo practice of pushing addictive and dependence-causing pills on the public on behalf of Big Pharma.
Conclusion
The Baby Boomers may have successfully removed Nixon from office, but they also “fell” for Nixon’s superstitious and bigoted rhetoric about “drugs.” They cheered on the drug war, gladly offered to urinate for drug tests, and eagerly went to see the latest shoot-em-up movies about good patriotic Americans cracking heads in Colombia. The Baby Boomers thought: “Sure, why not? Let’s make Mother Nature illegal: it does not affect me, after all. To the contrary, it gives me some exciting movies to watch!"
But the Baby Boomers were wrong, as they are now learning to their cost. It turns out that the same drug war that cracked heads in Colombia for the last 50 years has stifled drug research in America for that same amount of time. The result: the elderly baby boomers are now forced to endure old age without the therapeutic godsends that would otherwise have accrued to them had the psychedelic renaissance of the 1950s and 60s been allowed to continue.
These depressed baby boomers believed in the “drug war.” Now they themselves must pay the price for that belief.
In the course of this war against an exceptionally hard-working and law-abiding people, their characteristic habit-- smoking opium-- became the leading symbol of their "dangerousness." After all, Americans could not admit that they hated and feared the Chinese because the Chinese worked harder...
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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June 9, 2019
Addiction Therapy in the Year 2100
(a philosophical satire written to encourage a complete rethinking of our modern attitudes toward addiction and its treatment)
SCENE: 12 adults seated in a circle.
JOHN SMITH: My name is John Smith and I’m a miserable wretch.
[GROUP MEMBERS TITTER RELUCTANTLY, FINALLY BREAKING OUT INTO FULL-BLOWN LAUGHTER]
SMITH: What? What’s so funny?
[LAUGHTER CONTINUES]
LEADER: You’ll have to forgive us, Johnny boy, but you must not get around much these days.
SMITH: What do you mean? I thought the whole point of addiction therapy was for me to find the protestant God of the Bible.
LEADER: Oh, yeah?
SMITH: Or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.
[LAUGHTER RESUMES]
SMITH: That’s why I started out with the customary self-abasement and grovelling.
LEADER: That is so 21st century of you, dawg. The point of modern therapy is simply to SHOW YOU GOD – or “at least a reasonable facsimile thereof,” as you put it.
SMITH: What?
LEADER: Everything else follows from that point, bruh: self-respect, respect for others, temperance, you name it.
SMITH: And just how do you intend to show me God?!
LEADER: Earth to Smith: Americans stopped criminalizing Mother Nature over fifty years ago!!!
SMITH: Meaning?
LEADER: Meaning we have amassed a whole pharmacy worth of psychoactive plants and fungi with which we can now ceremonially lead you on a voyage of inner discovery…
SMITH: Yeah?
LEADER: …after which you’ll see the folly of addiction – always assuming, of course, that you enter our program in good faith, committed to learning from Mother Nature.
SMITH: Oh.
LEADER: Get it?
SMITH (reluctantly): Well… I guess…
LEADER: Good.
SMITH: All I can say is that the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous is probably rolling over in his grave right now.
LEADER: To the contrary, the legendary Bill W. was a big fan of treating addiction with LSD therapy…
SMITH: Really?
LEADER: Until a corrupt politician by the name of Richard Nixon criminalized the substance in his effort to crack down on hippies.
SMITH: Oh.
LEADER: That’s right: “Alcoholics be damned,” said Nixon, “as long as I can get my own back against Timothy Leary!”
SMITH: Fair enough, I guess, but…
LEADER: Yes?
SMITH: I still don’t get how you’re gonna make me see God.
LEADER: As far as the specifics of the process, I’d better turn you over to our team pharmacologist, Terence McKenna VIII. Terence?
TERENCE: Well, jefe, the precise combination of plants that we use is a trade secret, of course, kind of like the 11 herbs and spices still used to this very day by KFC.
LEADER: True dat. (Love me some KFC.)
TERENCE: But I can give you a random list of some of the big-hitters in our line-up of therapeutic plants.
LEADER: Proceed when ready.
TERENCE: We’ve got Acorus calamus, Amanita muscaria, Anadenantherea peregrina, Ariocarpus retusus Scheidw, Atropa belladonna, banisteriopsis caapi, Boletus manicus Heim—
LEADER: Enough, dawg. We don’t want to provide a shopping list for our competitors in the therapy biz.
TERENCE: Not to worry, bruh: these substances are useless (yea, even deadly) when used in the wrong doses…
LEADER: I heard that.
TERENCE: …or in the wrong set and setting.
JOHN: But then why are we sitting around in a circle?
LEADER: So you guys can get acquainted before we start our plant-guided rituals next week.
JOHN: Oh.
LEADER: Speaking of which, why don’t you introduce yourself again?
JOHN: OK.
LEADER: But this time, go easy on the self-abasement, would ya?
JOHN: Will do.
LEADER: I think we can take it as a given that we all have much to learn from our plant friends. No need to dwell morbidly on that fact during this introductory session.
The plain historical facts are that before 1914, there was no "drug problem" in the United States; nor did we have a name for it.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz.
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June 7, 2019
The Hypocrisy of the Gun-Owning Drug Warrior
It’s amazing how many American gun owners fiercely defend their right to firearms while gladly relinquishing their right to the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet. Talk about misplaced priorities! Any government that claims the right to criminalize naturally growing plants will not refrain from outlawing man-made firearms should the winds of political expediency happen to blow in that direction. Yet these gun owners gladly (and even proudly) support the Drug War’s efforts to keep naturally-occurring plant remedies out of the hands of those who need them most: the depressed, the lonely, the anxious, and the victims of chronic pain – all because our government (conveniently assisted by tabloid journalism and a self-interested medical establishment) has launched a propaganda campaign to paint all such users of these substances as irresponsible outlaws and hooligans.
Gun owners like to style themselves as defenders of liberty, insisting proudly with Clint Eastwood that:
“They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.”
But if these gun fanatics were truly interested in individual rights (and not just in the fetishization of this man-made object known as a “gun”), then they would transform their defiant mantra as follows:
“They can have my psilocybin mushroom when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.”
"Surely it is difficult to evade the conclusion that the use of alcohol and the use of tobacco have become deeply ingrained habits in Christian and English-speaking countries, and that we therefore consider these substances good; and that, because the use of marijuana (hashish) and the use of opium are pagan and foreign habits, we consider those substances bad."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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June 6, 2019
Alan Schatzberg's One-Sided Views on Ketamine
The following is my reply to Mandy Erickson's article entitled 5 Questions: Alan Schatzberg urges cautious approach to ketamine use, posted on the Stanford Medicine News Center website on June 5, 2019.
1) While recreational addiction to ketamine should be taken into account, Schatzberg should distinguish between the daily use of ketamine at high abusive doses and the intermittent use of ketamine at lower therapeutic doses. To fail to do so is to ignore the basic fact of pharmacology: that any substance that is good at one level (whether it’s salt or ketamine) can be fatal at a higher level. Alan’s un-nuanced thoughts on this subject pander (albeit unwittingly) to the anti-patient mindset of the Drug Warrior, which says that if a substance can be misused by a subset of young adults, that substance must therefore be withheld from all responsible patients who are in need of that substance’s therapeutic benefits. It is dogmatic thinking like this that has withheld non-addictive antidepressant medicines from the public now for the last half-century, forcing us instead to become chemically dependent on the few remaining legal antidepressants that Schatzberg appears to champion.
2) Like most materialist scientists, Schatzberg has nothing but scorn for the dissociative state induced by ketamine, referring to it as "wigging out." There is, however, reason to believe that the dissociative state is a crucial factor in the ability of psychedelics to override the "mental default mode," thereby allowing the depressed patient to think more creatively about their condition and the world around them. For evidence of this claim, I would point Schatzberg to the detailed accounts of researchers such as Roland Griffiths and Amanda Feilding in "Psychedelic Medicine," 2017, Park Street Press, compiled by Richard Louis Miller.
3) Schatzberg speculates that esketamine may induce “a sort of dependence” because clinical studies have shown that depression returns in some folks who are taken off of the J&J spray in clinical trials. But this is just a case of putting a negative spin on a positive outcome. For if esketamine really works in a uniquely powerful way to break through the mental fog of depression, what could be more natural than that depression would return for those who stop using esketamine? If the returned depression now seems worse, it’s only because the patient is now comparing their dreary lifelong status quo to a new higher level of reality that he or she had not even known existed prior to using the spray.
4) Schatzberg seems to fear that such an efficacious but temporarily acting drug would need to be taken for a lifetime, but surely psychiatrists cannot complain about that. They routinely prescribe SSRIs ”for life” (although most of them were never originally intended as long-term cures) and some of these mass-produced anti-depressants are so chemically habituating that the patient could not cease to use them prematurely even if they wanted to. Effexor, for instance, is arguably the most chemically addicting substance on the planet. According to a recent study by the NIH, over 90% of long-term users were back on Effexor within three years after weaning themselves off of the drug.
In short, if modern psychiatrists want to argue convincingly against using ketamine to fight depression, they’ll have to do better than merely suggesting that it could cause “a sort of dependence.”
Opium... is simple and unpretentious: the dried juice of the poppy. No chemist, no pharmaceutical industry, no physician is needed to produce it or to administer it. This, I submit, is one of the important reasons why modern medicine has so ungratefully turned its back on the poppy, just as it had, earlier, on the wisewoman: each reminds the arrogant "doctor" -- aspiring to control rather than to cure his patient -- of his lowly origins.
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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June 5, 2019
This is your brain on Effexor
In response to the article entitled Psychedelic drugs: would you accept a prescription? It depends if you’ve tried them before by Adam Winstock and Rupert McShane.
1) Let's not rush to dismiss the dissociative state as a mere "side effect" of ketamine. Recent research suggests that it is precisely this dissociative state that helps the user rise above the so-called "default mode network" in their brain, thus enabling them to see their problems in a new, more creative light.
Let's not let today's materialist bias in science bring us to rashly assume that the psychedelic aspect of the ketamine experience is something that we should try to dispense with. It may be the goose that lays the golden therapeutic eggs.
2) The negative attitudes toward psychedelics that you reference are a mere artifact of the Drug War, during which the Drug Warrior has considered hyperbole and lies to be fair game in their fanatical efforts to denounce all illegal psychoactive substances. The Partnership for a Drug Free America bamboozled a whole generation of Americans with their ad which featured an egg sizzling on a frying pan while the deep-throated voice-over warned the viewer that "This is your brain on drugs."
This was an outright lie when it comes to psychedelics. Far from frying your brain, drugs like psilocybin, ayahuasca, and even ketamine have been shown to grow new neural pathways, new neural connections, and even new neurons.
Ironically, the "frying pan ad" would make sense if its purpose were to warn us about Effexor, a standard SSRI anti-depressant which has turned out to cause chemical dependency and anhedonia in long-term users. As a long-term user myself, I actually do have the feeling that Effexor is, slowly but surely, frying my brain. It's certainly not providing me with any creative insights into my condition here on planet earth, as psychedelics have been shown to do.
3) As for those in the survey who "wouldn't touch psychedelics," let's ask them again when they are considering psychedelic therapy as an alternative to committing suicide. Hopefully at that time, they won't be so bamboozled by our Drug War superstitions as to opt for the latter of those two choices.
4) Like most articles about treating depression, this one downplays the problems with the status quo. Commonly prescribed SSRIs such as Effexor create such a chemical dependence that users literally cannot kick the habit (according to a recent report by the NIH, which shows a relapse rate of 95% in those who attempt to "kick" Effexor after long-term use). It's amazing that I have to actually point out that this is a problem, so convinced are most Americans that the drug-war status quo is some kind of rationally considered baseline that we must accept without analysis.
Once America has a level playing field in which all drugs are legal, the doctor's goal will no longer be for a treatment to help a patient "get by" in life, but for a treatment will help them THRIVE.
As for Prozac, the question in the new age of psychedelic therapy will no longer be: does Prozac "work," but does Prozac help you "be all that you can be"? The answer, from my experience, is a definitive no. To the contrary, SSRIs in general prevent you from being all that you can be, since the user is debarred from using psychedelics to improve their cognitive resourcefulness.
This is because mixing most psychedelics with SSRIs causes symptoms of Serotonin Toxicity Syndrome. (Happily, ketamine is a rare exception to this rule and can be combined safely with many SSRIs.)
5) Finally, the price point for legal ketamine treatment is an outrage and points to a fundamental problem with the current healthcare system in America, if not the world. A depressed person of modest means might scrape together the 3,000 required for an initial two-week session of ketamine infusions, but only a depressed fat-cat will be able to afford the biweekly follow-ups of ketamine spray at $600 a pop. Meanwhile a street dose of the drug costs a mere $8.
Given that outrageous price disparity, can we really blame the depressed for violating our superstitious drug laws in order to access crucial treatment? It is not the safe route, of course, but it is the one that we are encouraging with our current Nixonian drug policies and their disastrous effects on drug availability and pricing.
Opium... is simple and unpretentious: the dried juice of the poppy. No chemist, no pharmaceutical industry, no physician is needed to produce it or to administer it. This, I submit, is one of the important reasons why modern medicine has so ungratefully turned its back on the poppy, just as it had, earlier, on the wisewoman: each reminds the arrogant "doctor" -- aspiring to control rather than to cure his patient -- of his lowly origins.
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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June 2, 2019
Ketamine Bashing at UroToday.com
I submitted the following complaint/comment to UroToday.com after reading their ketamine-bashing article by Thenappan Chandrasekar (see hyperlink below).
Good morning.
I am writing to express my concern about an article entitled AUA 2019: Urological Association of Asia Lecture: Ketamine Uropathy: A Decade On by Thenappan Chandrasekar.
The article discusses urinary problems associated with ketamine abuse but says nothing about the effects of ketamine when used at rational doses, nor does the article even mention the fact that ketamine is being used successfully today to treat depression. I know your site is about urology, but your writers should not ignore the rest of the world. By doing so, they give the impression that ketamine is a terrible drug, when in reality it is a life saver for depressed patients.
As a depressed patient myself who is interested in undergoing ketamine therapy, I wanted to double-check your article’s implicit claim that ketamine was bad for everyone. So I spoke by phone to Dr. Gerald Grass, founder of the Ketamine Institute and former director of the Yale Pain Medicine Fellowship Program. He told me that he has never encountered bladder problems in patients who have used ketamine at prescribed levels. You should clarify this in your articles. (He also pointed out that many ketamine abusers are known to abuse other drugs as well, meaning that the bladder problems being reported may be exacerbated or even caused by chemical agents other than ketamine.)
Regarding Dr. Chu, the featured scientist in your article: She claims that her biggest accomplishment was making harsher penalties for ketamine use in Hong Kong. She apparently felt that these penalties were necessary because ketamine could cause bladder problems at high doses. But under the same rationale, she should be pushing to ban Tylenol in Hong Kong, too, since it can cause liver problems at high doses.
In short, her conclusions about ketamine are illogical and unscientific. Scientists and philosophers have known from the time of the Ancient Greeks that substances are neither good nor bad in the abstract: they are good or bad depending on the doses at which they are used. There’s no reason to ban salt, for instance, merely because it would kill you if you ate two pounds of it at one sitting.
Dr. Chu's illogical crusade against ketamine demonstrates what's wrong with Drug Warriors: they always want to create laws to target drug abusers; what they forget is that those same laws that they create are going to have a huge negative impact on those who wish to use the drugs in question in a responsible way and for good reasons.
I find it highly improbable that Dr. Chu’s efforts to further criminalize ketamine have wiped out ketamine abuse in Hong Kong, as she claims. But even if that were so, she has no reason to pat herself on the back. For those same efforts of hers have also ensured that thousands of depressed and suicidal residents of Hong Kong will have to wait many years, perhaps many decades, to receive those reasonable and therapeutic doses of ketamine that might have even saved their lives.
Who is responsible for the 24/7 moaning of millions of elderly Americans in nursing homes?
The DEA and the Drug War, based on the mind set that outlawed opium in 1914, so that now only outlaws have opium. The depressed elderly must make do with psychiatry's highly addictive and less helpful drug alternatives. Scientific materialists are terrified lest they give the elderly good dreams for a change. (Humph! How very unscientific. Let them suffer instead!)
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May 30, 2019
What Psychotherapists Can Learn from Drug Dealers
So, you’re hooked on the antidepressant Effexor, which you find to be increasingly ineffective and mind-numbing. You’d like to switch to the therapeutic use of psychedelics (presumably available somewhere in South America) to truly lift you above the fog of depression.
Let’s first imagine what psychotherapy can do for you, and then let’s see what a savvy drug dealer has to offer.
WHAT PSYCHOTHERAPY CAN DO
DOC: So, Brian, you want to get off of Effexor in order to try new psychedelic treatments?
BRIAN: Bingo, Doc. You got it in one.
DOC: Because psychedelics can't be used by folks taking most SSRIs.
BRIAN: That's right.
DOC: Well, I'm sorry, my man, but the latest NIH study shows that getting off of Effexor is essentially impossible.
BRIAN: WHAT?
DOC: Yes. They found there’s a 96% relapse rate within three years for those who have weaned off of it.
BRIAN: That’s horrible.
DOC: To the contrary, that shows that Effexor works!
BRIAN: What?!
DOC: It must work, since you get so damn depressed after giving it up!
BRIAN: Huh? It works??? [mumbling] Apparently my emotions never got the memo!
DOC: What’s that, Brian?
BRIAN: Never mind.
WHAT A SAVVY DRUG DEALER CAN DO
DEALER: So, Brian, you want to get off of Effexor in order to try new psychedelic treatments?
BRIAN: Bingo, dawg. You got it in one.
DEALER: No problemo.
BRIAN: Sweet.
DEALER: We’ll decrease your Effexor intake by 25mgs per week…
BRIAN: Yes, yes?
DEALER: …while occasionally giving you some unidentified “happy pills” to help you through the negative symptoms and to give you incentive for achieving your goal.
BRIAN: Cool beans.
DEALER: In other words, no matter how bad it gets on a given day, you’ll always know that you’re less than a few days away from a sweeeeet-feeling break from your withdrawal symptoms!
BRIAN: Fair enough.
DEALER: And that will keep you going, get it?
BRIAN: I got it.
DEALER: It’s just plain common psychological sense after all.
BRIAN: But what if I get addicted to the happy pills?
DEALER: Not to worry, dawg. Unlike modern-day psychiatry, I have a large enough pharmacopeia available to me that I can give you a variety of feel-good drugs, each of which works by different mechanisms, hence you will not become addicted…
BRIAN: Cool.
DEALER: …certainly not as addicted as those bastards made you to Effexor, which they now say that you can NEVER get off of!
BRIAN: Now, now, be nice.
DEALER: Then, once I’ve got you off that Big Pharma junk and kept you from freaking out…
BRIAN: Yes, yes.
DEALER: …we can switch you to that non-addictive psychedelic therapy that you hanker after.
BRIAN: You rock, dawg.
DEALER: Hey, I’m only doing my job.
BRIAN: Yeah. Now if psychiatry would only do THEIR job and actually start making people feel good – rather than serving as a mere distribution arm for Big freakin’ Pharma.
Disclaimer: Relax, I’m not suggesting that anyone visit a drug dealer to beat depression; I’m just satirically pointing out some inconvenient truths about the sorry state of psychotherapy in America, where the “pharmacopeia” for fighting depression consists of a mere handful of synthetic drugs that foster chemical dependence – and which debar the user from trying any of the new potent therapeutic psychedelics that are showing such promise in recently revived clinical trials.
The fact that a contemporary American's, and especially physician's, advocacy of tolerance with respect to drugs is generally viewed as an endorsement or support of undisciplined licentiousness in the use of "dangerous drugs" signifies that we are now at the height of an "anti-narcotic" inquisition.
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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May 29, 2019
Drugging Our Kids on Behalf of Eli Lilly
Posted in response to When anxiety happens as early as preschool, treatments can help by Sujata Gupta in Science News magazine, April 21, 2019.
Isn't Big Pharma happy enough having 1 in 6 adult Americans on SSRIs? Now they have to go after the preschool market? This is irresponsible in the extreme (see Richard Whitaker's "Anatomy of an Epidemic" for many of the obvious reasons why this is immoral). What about the demoralizing effect of placing a child on a substance that could make them a pill popper for life? and the anhedonia that eventually results from such a regimen? Why should we trust psychiatry to treat our child when their "go to" pharmacopeia consists of a mere handful of chemically addicting drugs -- while hundreds of powerful non-addictive psychoactive medicines are growing at our very feet but are outlawed by our anti-patient drug wars? Let's not fog the kids' minds to make them manageable in the short run, only to make them chemically dependent in the long run.
"We are repelled by the opium habit not because it is harmful, but the other way around: we regard it as harmful in order to maintain our justification for prohibiting it."
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz
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May 27, 2019
How Huston Smith was Bamboozled by the Drug War
The late Huston Smith ended his preface to the second edition of “The Road to Eleusis” by posing the following question:
“Can a way be found to legitimize, as the Greeks did, the creative, constructive use of entheogenic heaven and hell without aggravating our serious drug problem?”
The very wording of this question suggests that Huston was writing under the influence of Richard Nixon’s muddle-headed drug policy. Can psychedelic medicines be used without aggravating the drug problem? The question is beside the point.
The real question is:
Did government have the right to outlaw access to the freely given bounty of Mother Nature in the first place?
For those of us who insist that the answer is a loud “no,” it is superfluous to worry about any hypothetical misuse of the substances in question: psychoactive plants and fungi are both freely bestowed gifts of Mother Nature: get over it. If a minority of citizens are hellbent on misusing plants and fungi, that does not imply that our birthright to Mother Nature’s bounty should be withdrawn from everyone, any more than we should renounce jury trials, property ownership, or free speech, merely because some people are determined to abuse those rights.
When we fail to acknowledge Mother Nature’s bounty as a birthright, we fall prey to the childish Drug War assumption that any scandalous newspaper story about drug abuse presents, in and of itself, a knock-down argument in favor of drug prohibition. The hypocrisy of this assumption becomes clear when we consider that the folks who hold such a view would never want to fight drunk driving by banning liquor, even after reading a news article about the death of a dozen or more young children in a horrible drink-related accident.
Whence the double standard? It results from the fact that the Drug War propagandists have taught us to see all illegal drug use as hedonistic, as lacking any therapeutic or cognitive benefits, and thus we feel free to hold such use to a standard of safety that can never be met – since there will always be some “drug-related” scandal somewhere that’s vying for space in the local tabloid.
That’s why the DEA continues to lie to this day by denying the therapeutic value of psychoactive plants in its self-serving and anti-patient drug scheduling system; for if they actually told the truth, Americans would see that the DEA’s chief “success” over the past 50 years has been withholding valuable psychoactive cures from suffering soldiers and the millions of other victims of depression and PTSD.
Can psychedelic medicines be used without aggravating the drug problem?
One is tempted to “play ball” with Huston and answer his question by pointing out that psychedelics WERE indeed used in a safe and effective manner before the arrival of Richard Nixon’s drug war, as therapy for alcoholics and the chronically depressed. But by thus answering Huston’s question prosaically and with a straight face, the respondent “signs off” on Huston’s problematic assumption that government had a right to take naturally growing entheogens from Americans in the first place.
They didn’t – and those of us who promote the spiritual use of entheogens should go on the offensive to point that fact out loudly and clearly, that the government has stolen our God-given birthright. There is no need whatsoever to go on the defensive, as Huston’s question implies, to assure our materialist opponents that these psychoactive substances will never be misused after they regain their time-honored legal status. That would be like arguing for freedom of speech in a totalitarian country by assuring one’s fascist opponents that this particular freedom will never be abused. Not only is it impossible to give such a guarantee, but we’re under no obligation to provide it given the fundamental nature of the right that we are demanding.
The ritual persecution of these pharmacological and human agents must be seen against the historical backdrop of the ritual persecution of other scapegoats, such as witches, Jews, and madmen.
Ceremonial Chemistry: The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. Thomas Szasz.
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May 25, 2019
Too White to Use Mushrooms
In 1975, a U.S. court ruled that the Church of the Awakening could not use “magic mushrooms” in its rituals because (get this…) the congregants were white and hence came from a people that had no history of using entheogens in religious ceremonies.
First, that premise is wrong (besides being blatantly racist, of course). The Eleusinian Mysteries were celebrated in the West on a yearly basis for almost 2,000 years, and this longevity (along with the many mystical accounts of the rite) only makes sense under the supposition that a powerful entheogen was involved. You don’t continue a tradition 2,000 years, non-stop, if it’s just another convivial fad.
Second: based on this rationale, I could never convert to Islam because “my people” had no experience with that religion. Nor need we grant civil rights to African-Americans under this theory since they often came from non-democratic countries that had no history of such protections.
In other words, the 1975 ruling reveals the fundamental tyranny of the Drug War: not only does it deny Americans the pursuit of happiness (by outlawing the substances that can facilitate that happiness) but any exceptions to the rule are based on racist and anti-democratic rationales.
What could be less American than telling me that I cannot attend a given church due to the color my skin?
For many, [LSD] seems to lead to self-help -- long overdue.
Dr. Keith Ditman, Semi-Weekly Spokesmen-Review (Spokane, Washington), Nov. 8, 1959
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May 19, 2019
My Cure for Addiction
I’m watching another one of those movies wherein the antihero is struggling with opioid addiction and is constantly tempted to relapse. Movies like this are always depressing because Hollywood (like western society itself) considers such serious addictions to be largely unbeatable. The viewer just knows that the on-screen addict is going to eventually relapse – and for the rest of the movie, the addict is behaving so damn anxiously that the viewer almost wishes they WOULD relapse at long last and get it over with! At least they’d be happy for a few more moments in their otherwise miserable lives!
But, Earth to Hollywood: there is an answer to this problem of opioid addiction, even though it’s one that our puritanical and materialist mindset has so far refused to even imagine, let alone to thoughtfully consider.
DIRECTIONS:
You set these nervous nellies up on a monthly (or even bi-monthly) schedule to visit a psychiatrist’s office, where an empathic spiritual guide administers psychedelics (anything from vision-making LSD to the pseudo-psychedelic ketamine) to a group of addicts in a set and setting that’s designed to give them peace and to facilitate self-understanding. You then proceed to wean them off of the opioids on a slow-but-steady basis.
That’s it. Cure accomplished.
Why would this work, you ask?
The simple psychological fact (always ignored by materialist psychiatry) is that an addict can easily put up with the downtimes in their life PROVIDED THAT they can see a ray of light at the end of the anxiety-spawning tunnel that they appear to inhabit. They don’t need to take the traditional addictive meds such as Valium or Xanax every day of their life to cope with their emotional downtimes, they simply need to know – for certain – that help is on the way. The reason that an addict stares so wistfully at that remaining supply of fentanyl that they’ve hidden in their dresser drawer is because they have no other relief to look forward to, no guarantee of ever regaining the peace of mind that they seek except through the use of that one particular substance to which they’ve become addicted.
But by instituting the psychedelic therapy suggested above, the addict suddenly DOES have the realistic hope of achieving peace and understanding WITHOUT the use of terribly addictive substances. And so these monthly psychedelic sessions are valuable in two separate senses: first, they foster self-insight through the psychoactive properties of the psychedelic drugs themselves; and second, they make life psychologically bearable for the addict, since he or she knows that they are never more than one month away from experiencing at least a modicum of peace and understanding that these psychedelic sessions provide, hence they have the incentive and patience to withstand the siren call of the opiates. Again, this is because the opiates no longer have a monopoly when it comes to making them feel “okay with their world.”
Why is this obvious cure for addiction never even considered by western society, let alone made available to the psychologically suffering on an ASAP basis? It’s because of our anti-patient drug laws that are created and supported by the unholy trinity of puritanism, materialism, and law-and-order conservatism. Puritans mistrust ecstasy, materialists dislike emotions, and law-and-order conservatives assume that those who use psychedelics are mere hedonists – and worse yet, they are hedonists that can be counted on to vote for the other candidate in every election (which is little wonder, really, considering the conservative’s brainless determination to rid the world of powerful non-addictive treatments for depression and addiction).
DISCLAIMER: The purpose of this article is merely to advance a philosophical rationale for treating addiction with psychedelics. Any specific therapy of this kind would, of course, require the involvement of a qualified physician to determine the relevant kinds and doses of psychedelics to achieve the desired effect given the patient’s history and the precise details of their addiction.
What has three letters and ruins the lives of people who want to maximize their potential using time-honored natural plants?
The DEA.
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May 18, 2019
The Philosophy of Getting High
The world has been so thoroughly bamboozled by Richard Nixon’s jaundiced view of so-called “drugs” that it cannot begin to visualize anybody “getting high” for any but the most selfish and irresponsible of reasons. This is a shame, because the philosophical mindset of the Western world was chiefly established by folks who got high. In fact, these people not only got high, but they considered their moments of inebriation to be the best and (ironically) the most real moments of their lives. I’m speaking, of course, about the famous alumni of those long-running Eleusinian mysteries (circa 1600 b.c.e. to 392 c.e.), wherein a psychoactive substance (probably ergot) was used to put the participant in touch with immortality and the meaning of life.
Socrates’ belief in forms, Aristotle’s belief in catharsis, Plutarch’s belief in an afterlife: these were not just armchair philosophies based on abstract premises: these were truths that were confirmed to the ancient Greeks and Romans upon drinking the psychedelic kykeon. The fact that we modern humans disdainfully refer to such profound experiences as “getting high” betrays our puritan distaste for improving our consciousness with the help of Mother Nature’s bounty. This distaste might have originally been justified on religious grounds, perhaps under the assumption that such a psychedelic intervention was somehow an affront to the deity, but in these modern agnostic times, we have no such religious excuse for ignoring the therapeutic value of drug-induced ecstasy.
Unfortunately, our puritan biases are so ingrained that it took the disingenuous bluster of only one determined law-and-order politician, namely Richard Nixon, to revive our contempt for any pharmacologically altered state of consciousness. (Almost overnight, truth seekers became scumbags, should they attempt to fathom the world with the help of natural psychoactive substances.) And thus Richard Nixon forced us by law to “just say no” to almost 2,000 years’ worth of compelling evidence for the therapeutic value of psychedelic drugs, forcing the depressed wisdom seeker to rely instead on legal drugs that fogged the mind rather than illuminating it.
But then Nixon was not the first despot to tell us to “just say no” to drug-induced mental clarity and cosmological insight. The Eleusinian mysteries were shut down in 392 c.e., not because they were a long-running fad that had finally run its course, but because the Christian emperor Theodosius saw the popular mysteries as a challenge to Christian orthodoxy – more proof (at least to those ears that will hear) that the modern Drug War represents the establishment of a de facto religion, albeit a materialist religion that takes a dim view of Mother Nature and of its potential role in improving human consciousness.
[Dr. Watt declares] that the moderate use of opium is not more injurious than the moderate use of alcohol and even that its abusive use is less destructive to its victims than intemperance.
The Freeman's Journal, Dublin, Ireland, October 31, 1891
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May 15, 2019
How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Drug War
It all started in 1914 when bigoted politician Francis Burton Harrison decided that lower-class Americans could not be trusted to use opium wisely. Suddenly Mother Nature went from being a gift-giving goddess to a common drug kingpin. Enter Richard Nixon in the sixties, who decided to further blaspheme Mother Nature by criminalizing a host of additional psychoactive substances that happened to be used by his political enemies.
It’s always disappointed me that Americans have thus far hobbled together so little pushback against this denial of a birthright, this outlawing of the freely given gifts of Mother Nature, this unprecedented coup against the therapeutic goddess of humanity. The government took away our right to control our own pain and to control our own psychic condition and Americans seem to have merely sighed, asking their government, “Okay, so you want me to give up my natural birthright? Fair enough. Oh, and you want me to urinate on command to prove that I am faithful to my government? No problemo. Gee, isn’t democracy just swell?”
Nowadays, when the DEA asks us to jump, American’s simply say “How high?”
For just one obvious example, browse some mycology pages online. You’ll find that many mushroom hunters (professionals and hobbyists alike) want it to be known that they will have nothing to do with psychedelic mushrooms that they happen to come across. “Look at me,” they seem to say, “I’m a professional mushroom hunter who is obediently ignoring the most interesting part of Mother Nature at the behest of the U.S. government. So don’t expect me to write anything about your tawdry psychedelic shrooms!” Far from screaming bloody murder about their unprecedented loss of human rights, their forced separation from Mother Nature’s bounty, many online mycologists pride themselves in pointing out that they study only those plants that their government will allow them to study. Thus they recast their own political timidity as patriotism.
But America’s response to this usurpation has been even worse than that. We have rewritten history so that we do not have to confront the fact that we have criminalized Mother Nature in the first place. This can be seen by any regular viewer of the Great Courses program, a collection of videos presenting college courses taught by some of the most popular professors in the world.
Although I am a regular viewer of the Teaching Company’s courses, I’ve yet to see one of their history professors so much as acknowledge the fact that the game-changing Elusinian mysteries of ancient Greece involved the use of a naturally occurring psychoactive substance similar to LSD. I’ve yet to see one of their biology professors allude to the psychoactive power of mushrooms. I’ve yet to see one of their anthropologists discuss the crucial role of natural psychedelic medicines in early South American ritual. Nor have I ever seen one of their political science professors ever mention the infamous DEA raid on Monticello in discussing the political legacy of Thomas Jefferson.
I guess this makes sense. It would be too painful for a supposedly free people to remember what we’ve given up, so we have rewritten history to help us pretend that Mother Nature’s pharmacy was never particularly useful to us in the first place. “Humph! Mother Nature: who needs her? Let the government and Big Pharma decide what I need – and when – and at what price, too.”
The good news is: modern research is showing us today how so many of the natural substances that our politicians have outlawed are proving to be godsends in therapeutic settings. My hope is that the penny will eventually drop and we’ll draw the obvious conclusion from this research, namely that no naturally occurring plant is bad in and of itself, and that, as Terence McKenna once said, it is “ridiculous and obnoxious” to criminalize the freely offered medicines of Mother Nature. Perhaps someday we’ll learn the ultimate lesson from today’s anti-patient drug war: that it is both scientifically stupid and a violation of basic human rights to turn Mother Nature into a drug kingpin.
In southern Mexico, the jail and prison officials experience great difficulty in trying to prevent the smuggling into their institutions of the seductive mariguana (sic). This is a kind of "loco" weed more powerful than opium.
The Iola Daily Record, Iola, Kansas, Jan 1, 1900
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May 10, 2019
Fifty Years of Bogus Articles about Creativity
I was recently moping around my local Kroger’s food store, waiting for the refill on the Effexor to which I am chemically addicted, when I noticed a colorful Time supplement entitled “The Science of Creativity” in the magazine aisle. “Great,” I thought to myself, “here’s another politically correct attempt at explaining creativity without reference to the psychoactive substances that can so obviously help one achieve it.”
Mind you, I haven’t read the supplement, and maybe Time magazine got it right, but I’m not optimistic given the plethora of timid tips on cultivating creativity that have passed for self-help in American journalism over the past 50 years of psychoactive prohibition. Authors on feel-good pieces about creativity have never been in a hurry to rock the boat by suggesting the politically incorrect fact that psychoactive substances can generate creativity out of whole cloth in a receptive mind under the right circumstances.
Why this huge omission?
It’s based on the unspoken Drug War assumption that psychoactive substances are (drumroll, please) evil ”drugs” that must be avoided at all costs (as opposed to socially blessed “medicines,” of course), and therefore the less said about these evil “drugs,” the better... when in reality, a substance is a substance is a substance – and is only good or bad as any specific use should prove it to be.
But thanks to the political manipulation of the discussion by the Richard Nixons of the world, we Americans (and our global counterparts, whom we have financially blackmailed into adopting our own jaundiced viewpoint on this matter) take a Christian Science view of psychoactive drugs and thus have the puritanical expectation that “true” creativity is that which occurs without the influence of chemical substances – as if the human mind is ever free of chemical substances in the first place. The only real question, of course, is: which chemical substances should we knowingly imbibe?
The Drug War answer is simple: “Any drugs, as long as they do not provide anything that could be remotely considered to be a ‘high’.” And so the Drug War signs off on anhedonia-causing anti-depressants that foster chemical dependency while yet reviling non-addictive psychoactive drugs which have the unseemly property of actually making the user feel good in real-time. ("How scandalous is that!" cries today's stealth puritan.) In other words, the Drug War is not based on a rational concern for human welfare; it is just the modern-day expression of the know-nothing prudery of the 17th-century puritan, from whose misogynist and myopic mindset we have inherited today’s illogical antipathy to Mother Nature’s psychoactive medicines.
And so the clever modern articles about creativity provide the reader with only the most feeble hints as to how human beings can actually achieve the creative state: “get your omega-3’s, sleep eight hours a night, eat whatever vegetable is currently at the top of science’s ever-changing healthy food list, yada yada yada.” Meanwhile, the authors on the subject of creativity willfully ignore the psychedelic gorilla in the room: namely, the fact that psychoactive drugs in the right setting can work wonders in generating the kind of free mindset that these authors are attempting to describe and recommend. It’s as though the clueless authors were sitting outdoors beside a half-dozen psilocybin mushrooms in full bloom, asking themselves, as they look up at the sky with wrinkled eyebrows: “Gee, why is it so dashed hard for we adult human beings to be creative???”
Any sensible onlooker wants to shout at them: “Hello? You’re sitting right next to a blankety-blank batch of magic mushrooms, for God’s sake!”
Any idea or act that gives men and women a sense of what their life is about or for-- that, in other words, gives their existence meaning and purpose-- is, properly speaking, religious.
Ceremonial Chemistry: The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. Thomas Szasz.
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April 29, 2019
The Drug War = Christian Science
Philosophically speaking, the Drug War is merely Christian Science as applied to psychoactive drugs. It is premised on an article of faith: namely, that the best life is one lived without the aid of psychoactive medicines. Therefore it is a violation of Church and State when government tells me I must live my life according to the Drug War ethic of prohibition. For I do not find it morally reprehensible for a man or woman to access the medicinal bounty of Mother Nature to improve his or her mind. It is not part of MY religion to repelled by such behavior. To the contrary, I find it a moral responsibility to be all that I can be in this life, and if that goal can be aided by Mother Nature's plants, herbs, and fungi, then I consider it a moral obligation to pursue that enlightenment.
LSD-25, a drug capable of bringing back childhood memories with the sharpness of a 3-D movie, is helping fight mental illness in persons formerly considered hopeless, two psychiatrists said today.
"Hopeless Mental Cases Given Aid By Drug Discovery," The Daily Item, Sunbury, Pennsylvania, March 24, 1960,
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April 27, 2019
The Hypocrisy of Bhutan's Gross National Happiness
Response to the article entitled 'The Laws and Drugs' on the Kuensel website:
The country of Bhutan claims to measure success by the statistic of Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Product. This is ironic, because Bhutan also outlaws the very medicines that can help its citizens achieve that happiness. In this way, Bhutan is just like the United States, where the government guarantees the pursuit of happiness while outlawing the medicinal means to attain it. Even as I type this sentence, thousands of Americans are on the brink of suicide, yet the administration of a non-addictive substance known as ketamine or psilocybin could almost instantly give them the mental resources to carry on and even thrive in life. But governments like Bhutan continue to follow the lead of corrupt president Richard Nixon in denying these lifesaving medications to the desperate and even jailing those who dare to acquire them.
Gross national happiness, indeed. The only people made happy by Bhutan’s drug war are law enforcement officials, who see their workload increase every year as their government cracks down on their citizens’ right to freely access the medicinal output of Mother Nature.
Any idea or act that gives men and women a sense of what their life is about or for-- that, in other words, gives their existence meaning and purpose-- is, properly speaking, religious.
Ceremonial Chemistry: The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. Thomas Szasz.
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April 26, 2019
Why I'm Afraid to Get 'High'
I'm afraid to purchase the new book by David Sheff entitled 'High,' because I'm sure that the author is going to base his arguments on the usual flawed premises of the Drug War, namely that there are two types of substances in the world: medicines, which are hunky-dory and prescribed by board-certified doctors (insert harp music here), and "drugs," which are evil incarnate and are purchased and used only by hedonists and ne'er-do-wells (insert heavy metal music here). I suspect this first because of the sensational title of the book, which uses the morally charged word 'high' to describe a "drug" experience, and second, because the book's subtitle is: "Everything you want to know about drugs, alcohol and addiction." By using the term "drugs" in this negative content, it is clear that Sheff accepts the aforementioned assumption of the drug war and will therefore concern himself with illegal drugs only when warning us about substance abuse, as if the illegality of a substance makes it dangerous, not the objective health risks posed by the substance itself -- in which case Sheff should devote a whole chapter, at least, to the chemically addicting power of modern antidepressants.
The infuriating thing about this assumption (the way that the drug war distinguishes between "drugs" and "medicine") is that it helps perpetuate the drug war by disguising the evils that it perpetrates. Even if the drug war represented a mere crackdown on irresponsible youth (as some drug warriors assume), it would still be mean-spirited and wrong, but the truth is that the drug war is also a crackdown on thought -- specifically on how and how much one can be allowed to think in this world, a crackdown on how one can use and improve their consciousness. This is what makes the drug war not only wrong, but insidious. For the drug war is actually a crackdown on human consciousness and its potential. Worse yet, it seeks to stymie consciousness by taking away something that has always been a human birthright, namely one's free and unfettered to the free-growing medical bounty of Mother Nature.
Mind you, I haven't read Sheff's book yet, so hopefully he will come at the subject from a different angle.
Any idea or act that gives men and women a sense of what their life is about or for-- that, in other words, gives their existence meaning and purpose-- is, properly speaking, religious.
Ceremonial Chemistry: The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. Thomas Szasz.
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April 25, 2019
Bad Guy to the Rescue in the Opioid Crisis
Last night’s NewsHour featured a handsome and well-groomed DEA official gravely announcing a new crackdown on opioid distributors to pharmacies. This was a little hard to stomach because it gave the impression that the DEA was on the side of the angels in the opioid crisis, when in reality they did everything they could to cause it.
They did so by using the drug scheduling system to outlaw all natural and non-addictive means of achieving personal transcendence through the help of Mother Nature’s pharmacy. They then turn around and act indignant that entrepreneurs have rushed in to attempt to satisfy this outlawed market in a quasi-legal fashion. But not to worry, the DEA is prepared to play "whack-a-mole" with those shady entrepreneurs until the end of time. We should be grateful, right? Your tax dollars at work, right?
Wrong.
The DEA is like a despot who has outlawed all soft drinks and then announced that he has confiscated a batch of poisonous contraband soda that would have killed those who drank it. The despot expects to receive kudos for this action; after all, he prevented deaths, didn't he? But the more logical response would be to blame the despot for having outlawed soda in the first place, thereby creating a black market in which soda quality cannot be ensured.
Dr. T.C. Marks, a physician of experience and standing, has added another to the long list of things that can be profitably produced in the glorious climate of southern California. The particular substance this time is opium.
Los Angeles Herald, August 9, 1891
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April 24, 2019
The Drug War as Religion
Those who support the Drug War do so based on a kind of materialist version of Christian Science. The Drug Warrior does not discount medical cures entirely, as does the Christian Scientist, but he or she insists that the medical pharmacy of Mother Nature "should not" be used to bring about psychological happiness and that such usage is somehow tawdry and unbecoming of a sane and sober American.
As a dissenter to this doctrine, I believe that there is no reason why Mother Nature's bounty cannot be justly used to improve my mind in the same way that I use Mother Nature's bounty to improve my physical health. In other words, I disagree with both the classic theology of Christian Science and its modern-day interpretation that is presupposed by the Drug Warrior. It is therefore a violation of my religious liberty to deny me access to Mother Nature's bounty on the theory that I should not require that bounty to live a happy and fulfilled life, for that is an unprovable and hence theological assumption and one that I do not share.
We talk about an aborigine's religious right to use time-honored natural substances such as peyote and ayahuasca, but this is beside the point. Indeed, to frame the issues in this way is to tacitly acknowledge the Drug Warrior's right to deny the rest of us our God-given right to access Mother Nature's bounty for the benefit of our own psyches. And how is this justified by the Drug Warrior? As stated above, it's justified based on a theological notion, a religious assumption, an article of faith: namely, that it is morally wrong to expand one's mind through the use of certain psychoactive substances.
To repeat, this is one possible way to look at life, but it is not the only way; so for the government to make me live my life according to this stealth theology is simple tyranny in the name of a government-sponsored religion.
LSD is a powerful therapeutic tool.
Dr. C.G. Costello, Psychologist, Regina General Hospital, in "Truth About LSD," The Leader-Post, February 5, 1963
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April 22, 2019
Americans have the right to pursue happiness -- but not to attain it
The following comment was posted in response to "Psychedelic therapy: The patients paying $2k to get high with their doctor," by Jesse Noakes, which appeared on April 22nd, 2019 on news.com.au.
Though the drug war originally targeted hippies, its real victims have been patients suffering from PTSD, depression, and anxiety. It is this latter demographic that the drug war has truly cracked down on by denying us access to powerful and time-honored psychoactive medicines over the last 50 years, thereby forcing us to rely on SSRIs: drugs that create dependence, turn the depressed person into a lifelong patient, and eventually produce the drowsy symptoms of anhedonia in the lifelong user. At best, such legal treatments make one’s life bearable, while drugs like LSD and psilocybin open the mind to possibilities to which a depressed mind was otherwise blinded. The latter drugs, in fact, empower the patient to start unlearning the damaging lessons of negative experiences by giving the user new ways to look at life: in other words such drugs are the Holy Grail of psychopharmacology – or they would be if skeptical materialists and political fascists would merely allow these drugs to do their job.
A good step in this direction would be for purportedly "free" peoples to reject the notion that government can rightfully declare Mother Nature's output to be "illegal" (a usurpation of power that Terence Mckenna rightfully called "ridiculous and obnoxious"). For if I have a birthright to anything in a free country, it is surely to the bounty of Mother Nature that grows freely at my feet. This is especially so in America, where the very constitution grants me "the pursuit of happiness" and then the government turns around and criminalizes precisely those plants that could bring me that very happiness.
"With LSD as an aid," the report said, "it has been possible to reach and work with patients who are otherwise unresponsive to psychotherapy."
Kingsport News, March 4, 1960
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April 21, 2019
How Drug Law Makes Brain-Damaging Shock Therapy Necessary
What follows is a letter to the editors of medicalexpress.com, regarding the matter-of-fact allusion to ECT in the third paragraph of a story entitled No laughing matter – nitrous oxide helps to unravel rapid antidepressant mechanisms, published March 27, 2019:
I'm always startled by the non-critical allusion to ECT in stories that discuss controversial psychoactive drugs like Ketamine, as if administering so-called “shock therapy” for depression was no more problematic, morally speaking, than prescribing aspirin for a headache. I beg to differ for the following reason.
I think it’s bizarre that doctors can bring themselves to knowingly injure the brain through ECT while failing to have explored the value of drugs like psilocybin, LSD, and ketamine, all of which have the potential of relieving long-standing depression without inflicting lasting damage to the brain. I would have no problem with ECT as a last resort, but the fact is it is not being used as a last resort for the severely depressed; instead, it is being administered by doctors who have never sufficiently advocated for the above-mentioned alternatives that would fulfill the Hippocratic oath of "first do no harm." Doctors may not be able to single—handedly change drug laws, of course, but they still have a moral obligation to speak up when drug-law restrictions oblige them to use a dangerous treatment for which safer alternatives are available.
Yes, patients may seem “happier” after ECT, but it is a sad success indeed, coming as it does thanks to a loss of brain function.
If, in the supposedly enlightened 21st century, we still are forced to use a harmful treatment such as ECT thanks to drug law, then the medical community owes it to society to make that fact loud and clear each time it throws the switch to shock a patient, saying: “American drug law is forcing us to take this potentially harmful step; American drug law is forcing us to put this patient at this unnecessary risk of having his or her brain damaged by ECT.”
Instead, the medical community remains largely silent, defending ECT while failing to admit that it’s a dangerous expedient that is only rendered necessary thanks to the fact that drug law in the U.S. is based on politics and not on public health considerations.
Iran has maintained itself as a nation for more than two thousands years, with its people using opium in moderation, mainly to help them endure their harsh and barren lives. Why, then, did it have to enact Opium Prohibition all of a sudden in 1955? 'Prohibition was motivated,' writes Kamm, 'largely by prestige reasons.... It did not fit with the image of an awakening, Westernizing Iran that the Shah was creating.'"
Ceremonial Chemistry - Thomas Szasz