On a superficial level, Christian Science may be seen as a drug-hating religion and so its very existence tends to support the effort of Drug Warriors to outlaw godsend psychoactive medicines. On a deeper level, however, the religion's founder Mary Baker-Eddy was fighting not so much against drugs as against the failure of modern science to acknowledge the power of the human mind. In Mary's case, of course, this was the mind as influenced by Jesus Christ, but yet she recognized a principle with which even a non-believer can agree and which, moreover, is clearly true in light of drug user reports from the Vedic days to the present: namely, that the human mind has a great as-yet untapped power to control one's outlook on life and to therefore positively affect overall human health to some as-yet undetermined degree. Mary does seem to have overestimated the mind's ability to cure the body, of course, but it is worth noting in her defense that the government has outlawed the very research that would be required to determine exactly where the line should be drawn between the mind-curable condition and that which is beyond the help of this sort of holistic healing.
We would need to be able to use psychoactive medicines freely in order to generate the sort of user reports that could help us answer such questions adequately. And this would be research of the greatest philosophical importance, because it would essentially be a search into the true nature of mind-body dualism.
Mind-body dualism is like the weather when it comes to the field of philosophy: everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. Well, here is a chance for philosophers to launch a first-hand investigation of the interaction between mind and body and to thereby determine the nature of each -- as well as the nature of the interactive whole which they in some sense comprise. Philosophers just have to decide: Do they want to perform the kind of hands-on philosophic research that William James advocated viz. altered states, or do they want to keep pretending that the Drug War does not exist and that it has no downsides for philosophical research. For the opposite is so obviously true: namely, that drug prohibition forbids us from performing the kind of research that could blow the whole "mind-body" problem wide open from the western point of view and so inspire whole new fields of research.
For more on this subject, please see my essay entitled "
Christian Science and Drugs: what Mary Baker-Eddy Got Right.
'Synthetic Panics' by Philip JenkinsBlaming Drugs for Nazi GermanyBrahms is NOT the best antidepressantClodhoppers on DrugsDisease Mongering in the age of the Drug WarEven Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug WarFive problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick StrassmanIn the Realm of Hungry Drug WarriorsIntoxiphobiaMichael Pollan on DrugsNoam Chomsky on DrugsOpen Letter to Francis FukuyamaOpium for the Masses by Jim HogshirePsilocybin Mushrooms by Edward LewisPsychedelic Cults and Outlaw Churches: LSD, Cannabis, and Spiritual Sacraments in Underground AmericaReview of When Plants DreamRichard Rudgley condemns 'drugs' with faint praiseThe Drug War Imperialism of Richard Evans SchultesThe End Times by Bryan WalshWhat Andrew Weil Got WrongWhat Carl Hart MissedWhat Rick Strassman Got WrongWhiteoutWhy Drug Warriors are NazisDemonizing Human TranscendenceEven Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug WarHow the Archive.org Website Censors Free Speech About DrugsHow the Internet Archive Censors Free Speech about DrugsSelf-Censorship in the Age of the Drug WarWhen Drug Warriors cry 'Censorship!'America's Imperialist Christian Science War on DrugsAmerican ShariaBoycott SingaporeChristian Science and DrugsChristian Science RehabDrug Testing and the Christian Science InquisitionDrug War Uber AllesEven Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug WarGoodbye Patient, Hello ClientOur Short-Sighted Fears about Long-Term Drug UsePROTEST DRUG TESTING NOW!The Christian Science SWAT Teams of the Drug WarThe Drug War = Christian ScienceWhat You Can DoWhy DARE should stop telling kids to say noWhy the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia
The Drug War is all about censorship. If you don't believe it, just ask yourself how many movies and magazine articles you've seen about the safe and wise use of opium, or of coca, or of MDMA, or of psychedelics. As Carl Hart reminds us, most people use these drugs wisely, but you will not see such use portrayed in movies or books. Instead, you will see books and movies in which drugs are personified as evil incarnate in the form of "Cocaine Bears" and "Meth Gators." This is because the drug-war propaganda of censorship has rendered Americans childish about drugs. The American government is all about keeping us infantile in this way. The government is engaged in a full-blown campaign of drug-related censorship, with the White House actually working with TV producers to spread the party line on drugs in TV shows. That is why we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse and not a National Institute on Drug Use.
Meanwhile, the government's FDA refuses to approve MDMA, a drug which has killed no one, properly speaking, and yet they approve Big Pharma drugs whose side effects as announced on prime-time television include death itself, this in a world in which liquor causes 178,000 deaths a year. This is the same FDA that approves brain-damaging shock therapy for the depressed while refusing to sign off on naturally occurring drugs that could make ECT unnecessary. This fact is obvious. Common sense itself screams out loudly and clearly that this is so. But scientists ignore common sense these days for two reasons: first, because of their fealty to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization, and second because of their stubborn belief in the inhumane tenets of behaviorism, which tell us that user feelings and opinions do not matter when it comes to studying drug use, that all that counts is quantifiable data about brain chemistry and genetics.
By the way, if you want to be personally censored, just try publishing an article about safe and wise drug use online -- say, about the wise use of opium. Such accounts are simply not allowed by most publishers -- not because they are not true, but because they spread a message that is contrary to the drug-war ideology of substance demonization and so must be suppressed. I myself have been blocked numerous times from posting comments and publishing articles simply because I point out positive real uses of drugs -- safe and productive drug use that has actually taken place despite the fact that the government does everything it can to make drug use risky by refusing to regulate product and refusing to teach safe use. The Mad in America website solicits life stories from victims of the psychedelic pill mill, but they refuse to publish mine, despite the fact that I have used such drugs for 40 years now. The life story that I submitted to them contained neither lies nor proselytization, and yet the organization told me that it might be seen as medical advice. This is how publishers shut down free speech about drugs, by claiming that factually honest accounts about drug use constitute medical advice.
They will then tell us that we should see our doctors about such topics -- failing to realize that it was our doctors themselves who rendered us dependent on Big Pharma to begin with! Their drugs cause greater dependence than anything nature has to offer, and yet we are only allowed to discuss drugs with these folks whose entire careers depend on the psychiatric pill mill itself!
This is why I say that the Drug War is a cancer on the body politic and must be eliminated if Americans want to restore democracy and make it last this time.
If we need to censor any speech, it should be the speech of Drug Warriors. They are the ones who advocate policies that have turned inner cities into shooting galleries around the world and resulted in the disappearance of 60,000 Mexican citizens in the last 20 years, while turning the rule of law into a joke in much of Latin America.
What am I advocating after all? Merely intellectual and spiritual freedom. Merely the end of censorship. Merely the renewed freedom of religion. Merely the return of freedom of speech. Merely the informed use of psychoactive drugs, especially entheogens like MDMA, to help bring people together in this age when hate has put our species on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
And yet I am beyond the pale? Say rather that the Drug War Industrial Complex is beyond the pale -- supported as it is by the same sort of short-sighted idiots who made the criminal decision in the 1950s to develop thermonuclear weapons, the same people who were to denounce the peace-loving 'flower children' of the next decade as Communist subversives.(Drug Warriors hated both "summers of love" -- the U.S. version in the 1960s and the U.K. version in the 1990s, and used drug hysteria to quash both and to turn the world into haters. After they cracked down on Ecstasy in the U.K., the dance floors erupted into such alcohol-fueled violence that event organizers had to hire special forces troops to keep the peace.)
Incidentally, anyone who doubts our society's willingness to suppress free speech need only look at the blacklisting of Americans by HUAC in the 1950s. It must be remembered that this persecution of dissenters was not based on the outing of any supposed criminal activities that they had committed but rather on their mere championing of ideas that were anathema to the powers-that-be. The government loves censorship and always has.
And the Internet Age has not changed anything. To the contrary, it has rendered censorship far more easy and efficient for cowardly publishers thanks to the use of algorithms written anonymously by philosophically challenged techies.
'Synthetic Panics' by Philip JenkinsBlaming Drugs for Nazi GermanyBrahms is NOT the best antidepressantClodhoppers on DrugsDisease Mongering in the age of the Drug WarEven Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug WarFive problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick StrassmanIn the Realm of Hungry Drug WarriorsIntoxiphobiaMichael Pollan on DrugsNoam Chomsky on DrugsOpen Letter to Francis FukuyamaOpium for the Masses by Jim HogshirePsilocybin Mushrooms by Edward LewisPsychedelic Cults and Outlaw Churches: LSD, Cannabis, and Spiritual Sacraments in Underground AmericaReview of When Plants DreamRichard Rudgley condemns 'drugs' with faint praiseThe Drug War Imperialism of Richard Evans SchultesThe End Times by Bryan WalshWhat Andrew Weil Got WrongWhat Carl Hart MissedWhat Rick Strassman Got WrongWhiteoutWhy Drug Warriors are NazisDemonizing Human TranscendenceEven Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug WarHow the Archive.org Website Censors Free Speech About DrugsHow the Internet Archive Censors Free Speech about DrugsSelf-Censorship in the Age of the Drug WarWhen Drug Warriors cry 'Censorship!'
The fact that drugs have positive uses for human beings is a psychological corollary of Husserl's phenomenology and Whitehead's philosophy of organism.