It's no surprise that "Doctor Feel Good" should be the ultimate put-down in a Drug War society. The Drug War, after all, has at least two major philosophical motivations: 1) the protestant ethic, which questions our right to happiness in this world and views any "immoderate" happiness as suspicious; and 2) the ontology of reductionist science, which places its faith in the quantitative world, from which everything is supposed to "spring," and therefore has no patience with the mere subjective reports of the patient, except insofar as they can be confirmed and, as it were, 'proven' by quantitative measurements (especially of brain chemicals in the case of psychiatry). This is why pundits like Dr. Glatter can write an article for Forbes Magazine entitled "Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment-resistant Depression?" In a sane world, this would be a no-brainer: of course it could help. But Glatter wants to know if it could "really" help based on quantitative analyses that are presumably yet to be performed or even specifically envisioned.
In other words, billions of depressed around the world have to wait for the balm of laughing gas while materialists like Glatter try to wrap their heads around the psychologically obvious: that laughing helps. Even the Reader's Digest has known that for decades, judging from its time-honored motto, "Laughter is the best medicine."
Thus a drug-war society creates its own answer to Doctor Feel Good: namely, Doctor Feel Bad.
Glatter is a Doctor Feel Bad, for starters, in denying lifelong depressives like myself access to a no-brainer treatment like laughing gas 1 .
But Doctor Feel Bads are also present at our bedside for our dying day. Whenever anyone (like Anne Heche, for instance) is "peacefully" taken off life support, Doctor Feel Bad is there to make sure everything goes well -- which is to say horribly for the patient. For instead of giving the patient "an immoderate dose of morphine " and allowing them to drift off painlessly to death, the doctor makes sure that no such help is provided and that we simply "starve the patient out" when it comes to achieving our goal of "giving them peace."
Talk about dedication to the Drug War, we will even enforce its anti-patient ideology on the death beds of our beloved.
Doctor Feel Bad is also present in hospices for children around the world, where countries, under the spell of the Drug War ideology of substance demonization, deny morphine 2 to children, thus forcing them to live in unnecessary pain during the final days of their short lives. (For more about this latter infamy, see Children of the Drug War.")
The Links Police
Do you know why I stopped you? No? Darn. I can't remember either. Hold on, maybe I've made a note of it in my memo pad. No, seriously, folks. There's more on this here subject of useless doctoring in the age of the Drug War:
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
That's why I created the satirical Partnership for a Death Free America. It demonstrates clearly that drug warriors aren't worried about our health, otherwise they'd outlaw shopping carts, etc. The question then becomes: what are they REALLY afraid of? Answer: Free thinkers.
If I should die of some unusual concatenation of circumstances, I want my survivors to pass "Brian's Law," a law stating that we will no longer pass laws based on hard cases and so needlessly fill our prisons by taking common-sense discretion out of the hands of judges.
There are definitely good scientists out there. Unfortunately, they are either limited by their materialist orthodoxy into showing only specific microscopic evidence or they abandon materialism for the nonce and talk the common psychological sense that we all understand.
A lot of drug use represents an understandable attempt to fend off performance anxiety. Performers can lose their livelihood if they become too self-conscious. We only call such use "recreational" because we are oblivious to the common-sense psychology.
NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition. We need a National Institute on Drug Use, not a National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The existence of a handful of bad outcomes of drug use does not justify substance prohibition... any more than the existence of drunkards justifies a call for liquor prohibition.
Kids should be taught beginning in grade school that drug prohibition is wrong.
Freud thought cocaine was a great antidepressant. His contemporaries demonized the drug by focusing only on the rare misusers. That's like judging alcohol by focusing on alcoholics.
The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.
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