The interests of capitalism dictate what politician-led Americans can think about substances. Psychoactive plant medicine need merely cause a problem for one demented youth and our politicians easily convince us that the substance must be eradicated from the face of the earth. Meanwhile if a Big Pharma antidepressant causes weight gain and suicide, we dismiss these as "bad reactions," essentially blaming the victim for their oddball reaction to the drugs, while insisting that the substance in question is a godsend for the vast majority of the depressed.
This is not surprising since unfettered capitalism has a history of keeping problems from being solved if the solution would negatively affect stock values. That's why we have no quick answers to heart problems and cancer, since the obvious solution would be for Americans to cut back drastically on red meat, and yet the American Heart Association is supported by precisely those industries that would lose out given such a truly scientific approach. Therefore such agencies are like OJ Simpson vowing to spend his life searching for the guy who killed his wife. If they truly wanted to find the reason for heart disease (etc.) in America, they'd take one long look in the mirror.
We'd have been driving electrically powered cars a century ago, using free electricity and cell phones too, except that capitalism quashed these inventions because they merely empowered humanity rather than the all-important stockholder.
Author's Follow-up:
It seems that capitalism requires a Drug War to exist. Capitalism depends on the glorification of things and the money to buy them -- and if we legalize the sorts of medicine that inspired the Hindu religion, God knows how American priorities would change. Surely, the need to keep up with the Jones's would be jettisoned.
In "The Man in the Crowd," Edgar Allan Poe quoted the philosopher La Bruyère to the following effect:
"Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul."
In other words, the main problem with today's Homo sapiens is their inability to be alone, that is, to live with themselves. I think of this quote whenever I see male protestors on the street wrecking the place in the name of doubtful causes. It is interesting that these are usually males, by the way, that women generally seem to be able to live with themselves and stay at home without feeling that they are missing out. These arsonists and vandals are people who never feel so alive as when they are in a crowd and acting up -- but place them at home alone with themselves with time on their hand, and they go crazy.
Now, drugs that elate and inspire can actually change that status quo. If you allow a human being to see a world in a grain of sand -- or simply to see Mother Nature more clearly and profoundly -- their need for superfluous commodities would be mitigated -- or rather they would suddenly be aware of the superfluous nature of many if not most of the commodities that the capitalist requires them to purchase.
No wonder capitalism outlaws drugs that elate and inspire. Such drugs inspired the Hindu religion. The capitalist does not want their potential customers to reimagine the world in a way that money and products matter less. Hence the obvious connection between capitalism and the Drug War.
This is something that you can bet is not covered in most political science classes: i.e., capitalism's inherent antagonism to the legalization of psychoactive medicine. But the connection is obvious and has consequences. Just go into any drug store and check out the shelves: what you will see there are treatments for discrete human ailments based on a totally non-holistic and disease-mongering approach to human illness, one that ignores the ability of holistic-working psychoactive substances to improve overall health. Capitalism has to ignore such holism, otherwise these drug-store shelves would disappear, and all the profits with them.
Capitalism requires disease-mongering -- and disease-mongering requires the suppression of medicines that work holistically, that work by improving mood and elating the individual AND THEREFORE improving their health overall.
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
Here's one problem that supporters of the psychiatric pill mill never address: the fact that Big Pharma antidepressants demoralize users by turning them into patients for life.
In the board game "Sky Team," you collect "coffees" to improve your flying skills. Funny how the use of any other brain-focusing "drug" in real life is considered to be an obvious sign of impairment.
Materialist puritans do not want to create any drug that elates. So they go on a fool's errand to find reductionist cures for "depression itself," as if the vast array of human sadness could (or should) be treated with a one-size-fits-all readjustment of brain chemicals.
If we can go overseas to burn poppy plants, then Islamic countries should be free to come to the United States to burn our grape vines.
John Halpern wrote a book about opium, subtitled "the ancient flower that poisoned our world." What nonsense! Bad laws and ignorance poison our world, NOT FLOWERS!
If opium were legal, then much of the nostrums peddled by drug stores today would be irrelevant. (No wonder the drug war has staying power!)
"My faith votes and strives to outlaw religions that use substances of which politicians disapprove."
UNESCO celebrates the healing practices of the Kallawaya people of South America. What hypocrisy! UNESCO supports a drug war that makes some of those practices illegal!
"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.
No substance is bad in and of itself. Fentanyl has positive uses, at specific doses, for specific people, in specific situations. But the drug war votes substance up or down. That is hugely anti-scientific and it blocks human progress.
Here's one problem that supporters of the psychiatric pill mill never address: the fact that Big Pharma antidepressants demoralize users by turning them into patients for life.