As a veteran addict of mind-fogging anti-depressants, I sometimes ask myself why so many of my fellow addicts seem to be happy (or at least satisfied) with the psychiatric status quo. Why would they be satisfied with a psychiatric pill mill that shunts them off onto a handful of highly addictive synthetic medicines when Mother Nature has already grown for them a large store of psychoactive medicines that can work psychotherapeutic wonders when administered thoughtfully?
Of course, there's the obvious answer to this question, namely that said addicts are not permitted to access Mother Nature's medicines thanks to the Drug War and so the question is moot -- but that still doesn't explain why these depression sufferers don't view this situation as an intolerable obstacle to their mental health and do not protest the Drug War accordingly. For the vast majority of such sufferers never connect the dots between the Drug War and their own personal lack of treatment options. Instead, they make a virtue of necessity and turn the Big Pharma pill-choosing game into a lifelong quest to find the addictive golden grail that works best for them, a quest to be discussed at social get-togethers, where fellow depressives mingle and share their own idiosyncratic list of the Big Pharma pills (and pill combinations) that seem to be "working" for them.
I have recently concluded that this blase acceptance by patients of the anti-patient status quo has at least the following three causes:
1) Just as we can't know what we can't know, we can't feel what we can't feel. I unwittingly ingested a psychedelic at age 19. The result was so mind opening that I began crying: I began crying because I saw that the world was so full of possibilities that I had hitherto overlooked. Now, the point is this: Had you asked me if I was depressed before the "trip," I might well have said no -- but after that trip, my depression was so obvious to me that it made me cry for the lost hours and years that I had spent failing to take advantage of the opportunities right in front of me. In other words, one can be depressed as hell but not realize the fact until they clearly SEE what that depression has been hiding from them: namely hope and possibility.
2) Psychological health surveys ask the wrong questions. They rely on self-reporting about mood. But if a person has never experienced true happiness and understanding (see point one above), they cannot report their mood objectively. They are prone to report their mood as satisfactory merely because they do not have any idea what it's like to experience true psychological happiness. They're like a car buyer thinking that a beat-up car is in great shape, merely because he or she has never seen a car in perfect condition. A far better question to ask in a psychological examination would be: "How many of your important goals have you accomplished in the last year?" That's how I first realized through rational introspection that my own depression was bad: not by thinking "oh, I feel sad," but by reckoning up the myriad "brilliant ideas" that I had come up with over time but failed to follow through on despite having had plenty of time to do so. My depression, it turned out, was bad indeed, because it had stopped me from taking the actions that I needed to take in order to realize my most important goals in life. To paraphrase the book of Matthew: "You will know them by their LACK of works," at least when it comes to the depressed.
3) Psychiatric nostrums are designed to help us survive, not to thrive. Anyone who reads the horror story of psychiatry's early years in America will realize that the psychiatric goal, for well over a century, has been to render patients "docile," not to render them happy or fulfilled. This is why treatments like insulin shock therapy and frontal lobe lobotomy were both hailed as miracle cures in their time. The raves were not coming from patients: they were coming from the psychiatric establishment itself, whose staff were finding their jobs easier once their psychiatric patients were rendered peaceable. As author Richard Whitaker points out, there is an eerie continuity in this philosophy when it comes to the modern psychiatric go-to drugs of benzodiazepines and anti-depressants1. Benzodiazepines were never meant to help one solve a problem or find insight: they were meant to induce satisfaction with (or at least tolerance for) the status quo. The same can be said for modern anti-depressants. This brings to mind "The Stepford Wives" by Ira Levin. Westerners think of that story as a satire about women's place in society, but today it reads more like non-fiction. One in 4 American women are addicted to mind-fogging Big Pharma antidepressants, medications that conduce to exactly the sort of emotional flat-lining and bland acceptance of life that Levin skewers in his book2.
Author's Follow-up: March 22, 2023
Of course, the whole point of antidepressants is to tranquilize. The best that modern antidepressants can boast is that they keep folks from killing themselves -- but then a blow on the head with a hammer would do the same thing, by so muddling the brain as to make suicide unlikely. Meanwhile the meds we have outlawed can actually give folks a reason to live. The world knows this. A recent London Times Poll showed 83% of online respondents favored drug decriminalization, but as George Tyler notes in Billionaire Democracy3, no laws get past or repealed in America today without the help of the richest 3% and the many Congressional representatives that are on their payrolls.
Author's Follow-up: February 1, 2024
I have just recently discovered that Mariani Coca Wine is, for me, a wonderful antidepressant. It's irritating (bordering on unconscionable) that modern psychiatrists do not prescribe Coca Wine rather than dependency-causing pills. They literally pretend as if coca does not exist4.
Author's Follow-up:
June 11, 2025
I do not want to be satisfied, I want to thrive. I therefore want to be free to use the kinds of substances that inspired the following user reports in Pihkal:
"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place. " --Alexander Shulgin, from Pihkal5
"Later in the experience (the 8 hour point) easy childhood memory recall." --Alexander Shulgin, from Pihkal6
"A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like... In fact, the entire experience was exquisite. Next day, same sense of serene, quiet joy/beauty persisted for most of the day. A true healing potential." --Alexander Shulgin, from Pihkal7
I want to smoke opium wisely, as such use is described in a 19th-century short story by Fitz-James O'Brien:
"Those hours of opium happiness which the Doctor and I spent together in secret were regulated with a scientific accuracy. We did not blindly smoke the drug of paradise, and leave our dreams to chance. While smoking, we carefully steered our conversation through the brightest and calmest channels of thought." --Fitz-James O'Brien, from the short story What Was It?8
I want to truly commune with Mother Nature with the help of morphine, as described in "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" by Edgar Allan Poe.
"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." --Edgar Allan Poe, from A Tale of the Ragged Mountains9
I want to have "a great disposition to laugh,10" as did Humphry Davy, under the influence of laughing gas.
In short, I want to improve my mentation and better appreciate the world with the help of the wise use of drugs. This is not pathology, this is a longing to transcend and improve in life. It is sanity itself. Politicians do not want us to eat of the fruit of such knowledge, however, and so they pathologize the desire to do so as an 'addictive tendency.' This is rich. First, the Drug War outlaws every substance whose use could improve our lives in real-time -- and then when we complain about the niggardly nature of this government-edited pharmacopoeia, we are told that we are ill, that we have an addictive personality. No, I have a desire to live large and not to accept the unprecedented limits foisted on me by an insane Drug War that puts racists and xenophobes in charge of prejudging medicines up or down, under the following inhumane and imperialist notion: that a substance that can be misused by a white young person when used at one dose for one reason, must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
This is why the War on Drugs is so much more than a battle against hedonism. It is a war on mental improvement and creativity. It is a war designed to limit how and how much we can think and feel in this life. It is therefore the ultimate tyranny, for it is a meta-tyranny. It represents the government nosing its way into our digestive systems and thereby controlling the very way that we are allowed to experience this world.
Finally, drug Prohibition is a public policy that is guaranteed to result in unnecessary cases of depression. How? By outlawing all the substances that could have otherwise cheered us up. This is obvious -- or it would be if we had not been so brainwashed as to believe that our unprecedented drug prohibitions are some kind of natural baseline, with no knock-on effects in the real world, a stance, alas, which almost all non-fiction authors adopt these days. As just one example, consider Ronald Hutton's scholarly book on Witches11, in which the author only mentions drugs once, and then in a pejorative manner, failing to realize that the herbs that the witches used back then were drugs just as surely as "meds" are drugs today: it is only the constant use of biased drug-war terminology that makes us think otherwise.
Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war:
"clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."
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.
I've been told by many that I should have seen "my doctor" before withdrawing from Effexor. But, A) My doctor got me hooked on the junk in the first place, and, B) That doctor completely ignores the OBVIOUS benefits of indigenous meds and focuses only on theoretical downsides.
Mariani Wine is the real McCoy, with Bolivian coca leaves (tho' not with cocaine, as Wikipedia says). I'll be writing more about my experience with it soon. I was impressed. It's the same drink "on which" HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their stories.
Cocaine use is a blessing for some, just a little fun for most, and a curse for a few. Just like any other risky activity. We need to educate people about drugs rather than endlessly arresting them for attempting to improve their mental power!
All uplifting drugs are potential antidepressants. Science denies that fact by claiming that drug efficacy must be proven quantitatively. And so they ignore anecdote, history and psychological common sense.
Irony of ironies, that the indignant 19th-century hatred of liquor should ultimately result in the outlawing of virtually every mind-affecting substance on the planet EXCEPT for liquor.
Drug warriors do not want to end "addiction": it's their golden goose. They use the threat of addiction to scare us into giving up our democratic freedoms, like that once supplied by the 4th amendment.
Was looking for natural sleeping aids online. Everyone ignores the fact that all the stuff that REALLY works has been outlawed! We live in a pretend world wherein the outlawed stuff no longer even exists in our minds! We are blind to our lost legacy regarding plant medicines!
In his treatise on laws, Cicero reported that the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries gave the participants "not only the art of living agreeably, but of dying with a better hope."
Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war:
"clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."