The ultimate sin in the eyes of the psychiatrist is for a person to 'self-medicate.' But what exactly is wrong with self-medicating1? Everybody used to self-medicate while laudanum was still available in the 19th-century medical cabinets of England.
Babies crying? Give them a few drops of laudanum. Tooth ache? Crack out the laudanum. In exquisite pain? Reach for the laudanum.
Of course, this practice cuts out the role of the physician in so many cases that it is natural that the latter would consider the very concept of self-medicating to be heresy.
But let's consider some of the psychological reasons why people might wish to self-medicate.
Many of us want to live large in this world, to transcend the misgivings and fears that hold us back in life, keeping us from being all that we could be. This is the simplest of psychological facts but one that the Drug Warriors completely ignore in their efforts to demonize all "drug users" as irresponsible hedonists. And what are the legal options of such seekers? We encourage them to visit a psychiatrist. And what will the psychiatrist provide: not a substance that will help them to live large, but rather an expensive tranquilizing med upon which they will be dependent for life.
In light of these facts, it is perfectly natural that folks would seek medical help outside the system. In fact, except for the fear of arrest, it is perfectly logical to make such a choice. If I have to use a drug every day for the rest of my life, I'd rather that drug be provided by a dealer who is not going to pry into my emotional life than by a bearded man in a three-piece suit who is going to pompously catechize me every three months of my life about my innermost feelings and the probability of my committing suicide. Moreover, I'd far rather use an illegal medicine that inspired the writings of HG Wells than a legal one that inspires nobody to write anything at all.
But the Drug War is all about dividing Americans, turning formerly law-abiding citizens into "dealers" through extreme economic incentive and then urging us to look upon such dealers as "scumbags" and "wastes of space." We are encouraged to be as cold-hearted and unforgiving toward dealers as Glenn Close's self-righteous character in "Four Good Days" (see also ). When she sees a teenage "pusher" on the streets, she mumbles, "He should be shot," before she rushes indoors and throws back an unusually large glass of wine, that is.
The fact is that people want to live as fully as possible and have, from the beginning of time, sought pharmacological means toward that end. The answer to this "problem" is not massive arrests and a demonization campaign to make us hate our fellow human beings; the answer is re-legalization 2 of psychoactive medicines and a full and honest and ongoing discussion about their benefits and drawbacks. The answer, in short, is a rational approach, not the superstitious approach of the Drug War which falsely tells us that demonized substances have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, at any time, ever.
"Society's prevailing view is that being medicated by a doctor is drug use, while self-medication is drug abuse. This justification rests on the principle of professionalism, not on pharmacology. [This] concept of drug abuse symbolizes scientific medicine's fundamental policy that laymen should place their care under the supervision of a physician. This is similar to the belief, prior to the Reformation, that laymen should not communicate directly with God but should place their spiritual care under the supervision of a duly accredited priest. The self-interest of the church and of medicine in such policies are obvious. These policies also relieve individuals of the burden of responsibility for themselves."-Thomas Szasz
Author's Follow-up:
April 04, 2025
The idea that we should not self-medicate only makes sense when we believe in the myth of mental illness3. After all, if our depression is the same kind of thing as liver disease or a heart ailment, then we laypeople clearly know nothing about treating it. right? (We will answer yes for the purposes of this analysis, but please look below for some important caveats on this topic. )
However, it was clearly a category error to place materialist doctors in charge of mind and mood matters to begin with. This is obvious given that doing so has led to absurd results, and as Whitehead wrote in "The Concept of Nature"...
"The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us."
What absurd results?
Answer: the fact that our materialist drug researchers cannot find positive uses for the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions. And yet the Hindu religion only exists today because of the use of a drug that inspired and elated.
"The man with whom thou fillest thee with Soma deems himself a pious worshipper." --The Rig Veda4
Modern materialist researchers cannot even figure out if laughing gas could help the depressed, when, in a sane world, we would issue laughing gas 5 kits to the suicidal just as we now provide Epi pens to those with severe allergies.
They are telling us to ignore common sense and to rely on a materialist cure for what ails us. That approach should sound familiar. It is the approach that has led to the biggest mass dependency of all time, namely, that of the psychiatric pill mill 6 thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma 78 drugs for life.
The whole search for a psychiatric "cure" for depression took place in dogmatic ignorance of the vast psychoactive pharmacopoeia of Mother Nature and the synthesized medicines that have been inspired thereby. The chemists involved searched for a drug whose effects would constitute a one-size-fits-all "cure" that would pass muster with conservative politicians. In other words, there was no concern for the desired outcomes of drug use for individual patients, there was instead a plan to come up with a drug whose use would create a certain sort of individual when it comes to moods and emotions, one which is not too depressed to shop yet who is not so inspired as to make a scene or to advocate the creation of new religions, etc.
And yet the Hindu religion was inspired by a drug that elated and inspired. From this it follows that the outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of religious liberty.
Seen in this light, self-medication is a duty. To the extent that such a pursuit is dangerous, we have the Drug Warriors to blame, first, because they refuse to educate about safe use, and second, because they refuse to acknowledge the value of substances that have inspired entire religions.
But I need to backpedal a little here.
Even if the ailments we are talking about are what we would call physical in nature, it does not follow that we cannot medicate ourselves advisedly with regard to them. Whether or not such ministrations will cure the illness is a question whose answer depends on the specifics of any given case, but in many cases, our self-medication could render the negative effects dormant or irrelevant from the psychological point of view.
The problem here is that the materialist medical establishment ignores all holistic and indirect approaches to health. If a substance cheers you up and keeps your mind off of a physical malady, that benefit in itself may be more than sufficient to overcome or at least to palliate the negative effects of one's physical illness. And yet the medical establishment is only interested in the ability of intervention A to cure problem B. They have no interest in an intervention that causes seemingly unrelated upsides D,E, and F, and only thereby renders the original target malady either impotent or unimportant. Such an indirect treatment of ills cannot be quantified and placed in a PowerPoint presentation for the purpose of eliciting research funds from the government. Besides, such cures depend on the unique traits of individuals, and the medical establishment concerns itself only with unique diseases, not with unique human beings.
It is psychologically obvious also that certain drug use can nip hypochondria in the bud by keeping our minds off of ailments and so keeping us from aiding and abetting their manifestation via our mental obsessions about them.
The point that I am trying to make here is this:
We have never freely worked with the vast pharmacopoeia of psychoactive medicines to methodically leverage their power to amplify and enforce the desires of the human will, or of human consciousness, if you prefer. We do not know what the mind is capable of simply because we have outlawed the quest to find out. We have never attempted to combine persuasion and hypnosis and affirmation and/or spirituality with the strategic use of drugs in a coordinated effort to overcome illness via mental means. We have no idea of what the mind is capable in this regard or where its limits lie when it comes to prophylaxis. Of course, the results of such a study in a free world would surely be highly dependent upon the education level and intent and interests of the participants employed, which is an obvious caveat that I add here only because Drug Warriors absolutely hate details. They want to draw pathological conclusions about drugs per se, and not bother with the pesky fact that human beings are unique and have different susceptibilities to different protocols.
To be more specific, consider the elation and inspiration that users have derived from the phenethylamines synthesized by chemist Alexander Shulgin as reported in his 1991 book entitled "Pihkal: A Chemical Love Affair.9" Consider how the use of drugs like these could take place in a set and setting custom-designed to bring about an attitude that would decrease the likelihood of a physical illness, meanwhile helping us to live peaceably with the symptoms of that illness to the extent that it manifests in our lives despite our efforts.
"Excellent feelings, tremendous opening of insight and understanding, a real awakening."
"I now know that the mind has a remarkable ability to control the particular place the psyche is in."
"The feeling was one of great camaraderie, and it was very easy to talk to people."
Opium, when used wisely, can change our whole outlook on physical illness11. see "The Crawling Chaos" by HP Lovecraft for an example of how opium use can inspire a user with a metaphorical outlook on their physical suffering. In the 1921 short story, the use of opium helps the protagonist to envision the throbbing pain in his head as the crashing of waves from a tormented sea, that is, as something apart from his self and no longer affecting him. in other words, it lets the user adopt for the nonce the mental powers that it takes the most devoted mystics of the world an entire lifetime to achieve.
The government is determined to keep us from knowing anything good about opium , but the truth has not yet been entirely eradicated from history. it is clear that opium use has the potential for leveraging the power of the human mind.
This is a hint from opium 12 that we should follow up on as curious human beings interested in the psychological and physical well-being of humanity. Instead we run from the very mention of the task in superstitious fear inspired by our cradle-to-grave brainwashing in the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. We should nevertheless be searching for positive drug-using protocols without being hindered by legislation which outlaws almost every possible inspiring drug in the world. only then can we begin for the first time in history to learn both the true powers of every psychoactive drug in the world and the true powers of the human mind, for that matter!
We don't need another "Decade of the Brain" -- we need a "Decade of the Human Mind... with the human being included!"
This may seem like a degression from the topic of self-medication, but these things are all related. The modern hatred of self-medication is inspired by the medical mindset that is keeping us from making the kinds of discoveries about the human mind that i advocate here. It is a mindset that considers subjective reactions to drugs to be unimportant. It is a mindset that completely ignores the powers of drugs to elate and inspire. It is a mindset therefore that is antithetical to common sense and even to religious freedom, for the Hindu religion would not exist today except for the use of drugs that inspire and elate. Soma 13 helped the Vedic people to deal with life's problems successfully and even with a sense of triumph. The Vedic people used drugs to end human suffering, regardless of the prohibitionist spin that the theologian might want to place on that use in order to avoid scandal.
Conclusion:
There would be no Hindu religion today had the Vedic people not self-medicated in 1500 BCE.
The drug war is the defeatist doctrine that we will never be able to use psychoactive drugs wisely. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the government does everything it can to make drug use dangerous.
I can't believe people. Somebody's telling me that "drugs" is not used problematically. It is CONSTANTLY used with a sneer in the voice when politicians want to diss somebody, as in, "Oh, they're in favor of DRUGS!!!" It's a political term as used today!
Materialist scientists cannot triumph over addiction because their reductive focus blinds them to the obvious: namely, that drugs which cheer us up ACTUALLY DO cheer us up. Hence they keep looking for REAL cures while folks kill themselves for want of laughing gas and MDMA.
Imagine a world in which we were told about both the potential benefits AND the potential harms of drugs like cocaine and opium.
National Geo published an article entitled "Coca: a Blessing and a Curse." Coca was never a curse. Most people used it wisely, just as most people drink wisely. Doctors demonized it because it really worked and it could put them out of business. https://abolishthedea.com/sigmund_freuds_real_breakthrough_was_not_psychoanalysis.php
Drug testing should flag impairment only. Any other use is a flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment.
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
@HKSExecEd The use of Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace and love to the British dance floors in the 1990s. When are political scientists going to acknowledge the potential for such substances to pull our species back from the brink of nuclear annihilation?
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!
Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.
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