My 96-year-old mother who suffers from progressive dementia was in quite "a state" last night at the assisted living complex. It was difficult to figure out what the problem was, or if there even was a problem, objectively speaking, especially since I was speaking with her via my computer screen and so was not actually in the room with her. She would point, first to her TV screen and then at the nearby hallway, complaining (as far as I could tell) of a group of conspiring children (the young caretakers on site?) who were foiling her in her attempt to do something: perhaps to leave the building in search of her parents, or perhaps merely to watch TV undisturbed, I could not tell precisely. The only thing that I knew for certain was that she was quite "worked up" and that there was very little that I could do or say to help her.
I say there was very little that I could do. But upon looking back on this incident this morning, I realize a still greater problem: that there is very little that modern medicine can do, either. When we call a doctor in on such cases, we expect a pep talk for the patient and perhaps the prescription of a one-size-fits-all cure for extreme anxiety, which today means nothing more than a tranquilizer. We do not really want to make the patient feel good - that would be giving her "drugs." We want them to be quiet and peaceable. This has been the leitmotif of psychiatry through the 20th century and beyond: a search for treatments and drugs that pacify the patient rather than inspire them. That is why Antonio Moniz won a Nobel Prize for creating the protocol of electroshock therapy: not because it inspired patients or made them feel good, but because it quieted them down so that they caused less trouble for their overseers. Lithium, Thorazine, enemas and ice baths: all were used with the same goal in view: to render the patients placid, either by using these treatments or by merely threatening their use. Nor have the goals of psychiatry changed much over the years. Whatever one says about SSRIs today, no one has accused them of making users leap for joy and see the world in a new and brighter way.
But that's what my mother really needed last night.
The funny thing is, however, I cannot imagine a doctor administering this kind of medicine. Today's doctor qua doctor is a materialist who wants to "really" fix something and it's beneath their dignity merely to make their patients laugh. "Any drug dealer could do that, after all," they would sniff.
But that's the whole point: any drug dealer COULD do that, and doctors won't. So much the worse for doctors.
The fact is that my mother did not need a doctor last night in any case. By assigning doctors to such cases we are medicalizing and pathologizing an entirely natural manifestation of spiritual angst. That's not a field in which doctors have any special insight. My mother did not need a doctor looking down at her from the icy realm of professional objectivity. She needed an empathic individual, albeit one who is trained in psycho-pharmacology from a scientific and a sociocultural point of view. She needed a friend who is ready and authorized to use ANY SUBSTANCE IN THE WORLD that can help her deal with her extreme angst and confusion by elating and inspiring her! (Any substance in the world - imagine that!) And drugs for this purpose abound, starting with MDMA 1 and the hundreds of related substances synthesized by Alexander Shulgin.
The empath I envision would listen to my mothers concerns while hugging her and drinking tea with her, which in this case would contain the medicines that the empath deemed useful under the circumstances for calming and clearing the sufferer's mind of worry. Nor would these medicines be administered "on the sly" but rather with the patient's full knowledge that they are receiving a medicine to help them process their current situation -- not just their immediate physical situation, such as one's residency in a care home, but also their overall situation in the grand scheme of things, as a unique human being on planet earth with connections to the world around them. The goal? Make them happy with simply sitting and talking about their situation and concerns with this newly minted shamanic "professional" by their side, perhaps while leafing through a scrapbook of old photographs from the sufferer's past.
Just imagine the enormous amount of psychological suffering that is going on right now in care homes and assisted living facilities around the world, all because we have been taught from grade school that we should hate drugs rather than use them for the benefit of humankind. If we really care about preventing suffering, then this attitude must change. We must consider psychoactive medicines as our friends, not our enemies. When that day comes, I hope that the above suggestions will provide at least a hint of a protocol that can be used to leverage the power of psychoactive medicine for the elderly.
Author's Follow-up:
October 31, 2025
It's poignant, if not sad, for me to read this essay in late 2025, just over a year now after my mother's decease. But I am happy to find that I would not take back a word of it. I would, however, like to address a concern that has been raised by some of my X followers -- or should I say some of my "ex" X followers? I am told that there are already too many drugs being foisted off on the elderly and that the last thing we need is to give them more.
This may sound like a plausible argument, but that is only because these dissenters have gotten ahold of a half truth and run with it. It is definitely true that Big Pharma is working with doctors to put elderly patients on a ridiculously long list of drugs; any adult offspring of an institutionalized parent knows this. But why is the list of drugs so long -- aside from the fact that the medical and pharmaceutical industries want to make money?
It is because modern medicine is not holistic -- not in the least. Hence our doctors have to treat all conditions outside of the psychospiritual context in which human beings actually live in the real world. Nor do they believe in the psychological benefits of wholeness. As physicist David Bohm lamented in "Wholeness and the Implicate Order:"
"Thus we arrive at the very odd result that in the study of life and mind, which are just the fields in which formative cause acting in undivided and unbroken flowing movement is most evident to experience and observation, there is now the strongest belief in the fragmentary atomistic approach to reality. 2"
And so our scientists have a pill for the liver, a pill for the kidneys, a pill for cholesterol, a pill for arthritis, a pill for anxiety, a pill for depression, and so on and so on, till death do we part -- or until our insurance runs out, whichever comes first.
Most outlawed drugs, on the other hand, work holistically. They do not specifically target ANYTHING. Rather, they boost mood and THEREBY raise immunity levels and help the user avoid those self-inflicted illnesses that come about -- or are at very least aggravated -- by the hypochondriacal predilections of the restless sober mind. Freud recognized this simple fact. He saw that the euphoria produced by cocaine was itself the active principle of the drug, that such euphoria has knock-on benefits which can inspire virtuous circles of productive behavior.
"The effect of cocaine occurs not by influencing the motor system but by improving the principal readiness for work." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine 3
In other words, mood matters.
Our behaviorist doctors, on the other hand, want nothing to do with the subjective world of mere feelings, least of all with politically incorrect feelings of euphoria. That is most unseemly for them as professionals! Humph! They want to talk in terms of chemical pathways and serotonin uptake inhibitors, concepts for which they have theories and charts. This is why our doctors refuse to see any benefit for the depressed in drugs like laughing gas, opium, and coca 4 -- all of which are, in a sense, actual psychological panaceas! "God knows what mere users might say," sniffs the materialist. "We scientists need hard data!"
These doctors may think that they are trying to help patients, but they are actually on a purely metaphysical quest to vindicate materialism by reducing human behavior to quantifiable data. The proof of this analysis is extant. How else can doctors sit there with a straight face and tell us that laughing gas could not help the depressed? How else could they tacitly support the notion that a long life of quiet desperation is preferable to the use of time-honored medicines like coca and opium? How else could they tacitly insist that brain-damaging shock therapy is preferable to the use of naturally occurring and time-honored medicines 5 ?
This is why there are so many medicines in the nursing homes. It is because doctors ignore the holistic nature of human existence and so are forced to treat the human being as a collection of unrelated parts. It follows that we need a different medicine for perceived problems in each and every one of those parts, hence the proliferation of pill bottles at the elderly patient's bedside. In the world that I promote, we would throw all those bottles out the window (except for common-sense exceptions for specific cases) and let the patients heal themselves. How? With the use of one or two user-chosen drugs that inspire and elate and so improve the user's ability to fight off so-called physical diseases.
One of the reasons why doctors balk at such ideas is that they have been taught that their job is to help a patient to live as long as possible, and if what survives is a miserable husk, so be it. Many of us, however, have other priorities in life. Many of us value productivity over lifespan. As for elderly people in specific, many would surely rather have an additional 10 peaceful and insightful years of life than to live 20 more years and be absolutely miserable while doing so.
And so the elderly (like everybody else) should have the right to smoke opium nightly if they wish to do so. They should have the right to use cocaine if they wish to do so. They should have the right to use psychedelics if they wish to do so. They should have the right to use phenethylamines if they wish to do so. Why? Because they have a natural right to medicine that will help them heal! This is a basic human right: the right to heal! It is a crime against humanity to write laws that deny them this right, a crime against humanity. Such laws consign hundreds of millions (of the elderly in particular) to lives of quiet desperation, a fact that anyone can verify for themselves by taking a field trip to the nearest "old people's home," where fear, resignation and quiet desperation are written on every other face.
Of course, I must, as always, remember that my readership has been brainwashed since childhood to fear drugs, thanks largely to our conglomerate media's ruthless censorship of all positive reports of drug use, both in history and modern anecdote. They will therefore see nothing but dangers in restoring this right to heal that was our birthright as human beings for millennia until racist politicians began using drug laws to marginalize minorities. I can reassure our indoctrinated Chicken Littles, however, that the elderly in such a free world would be fully apprised of the dangers that such drugs can pose in the abstract to certain people in certain circumstances.
This is the one aspect of drug use in which materialist scientists can play a useful role: they can remind us of potential dangers of drug use as considered outside of all context -- and then leave it up to individuals to decide if the risks of using any particular substance are worth it given their own situation in life: their own attitudes, their own goals in life, their own priorities, their own age, their own biochemistry, and so forth.
Finally...
Let me answer another X criticism while I am at it, one that is also based on a half-truth. I had an on-line prohibitionist tell me once that you cannot get something for nothing, that so-called drugs will always leave you with a corresponding depression after their effects wear off 6. This is simply not true, however. How COULD it be, considering that the word "drugs" is a catchall for a wide variety of disparate substances, with nothing in common but the fact that they have been singled out for demonization by racist and xenophobic politicians 7 ?
Take cocaine, for instance. I hate to disappoint the moralists, but its psychoactive ecstasies are not paid for with correspondingly intensive agonies. As Sigmund Freud 8 wrote, based on his own use of the drug during the three most prolific years of his life:
"Long intensive mental or physical work is performed without any fatigue. . . . This result is enjoyed without any of the unpleasant aftereffects that follow exhilaration brought about by alcohol.” --Freud, as quoted by Thomas Szasz in Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers 910
Nor did any of the user reports in "Pihkal 1112" report aftermath affects from their use of phenethylamines, except for positive ones, that is.
"All the next day I felt like 'a citizen of the universe' rather than a citizen of the planet, completely disconnecting time and flowing easily from one activity to the next."
"The come-down from the experience was very gradual and smooth."
"The afterglow was benign and rich in empathy for everything."
But the dissenter was partly right. Some drugs can produce hangover effects in certain situations. The dose, the frequency of use, and even the method of administration all matter -- you know, all the factors that the prohibitionist ignores in favor of childishly judging drugs "up" or "down outside of all context. Opium, when smoked in moderation, does not cause hangovers any more than does the drinking of a glass of wine 13. But the immoderate use of opium can, indeed, send the user on an emotional roller coaster ride, from ecstasy to despair, a fact to which "super user" Edgar Allan Poe was referring when he wrote in Ligeia of "the trammels of opium" or in The Fall of the House of Usher concerning "the hideous dropping off of the veil." But then alcohol can bring about similar seismic mood changes, as Poe also knew from personal experience. Hence the narrator's rhetorical question in The Black Cat: "What disease is like alcohol!"
It should also be noted that the phenethylamine MDMA is reported by many (but not all) to bring about a minor feeling of depression on the day after use 14. The X critic mentioned above would no doubt see this as a knock-down argument against the use of MDMA (or Ecstasy). Indeed, it is perhaps this drug that the prohibitionist had in mind when making his ridiculous and seemingly religiously inspired generalization above. The fact is, however, that this downside is not inevitable, there is a way to "beat it" -- or at least there would be in a free world, one in which our natural right to heal was respected. I scarcely dare mention this "cure," however, in this age wherein Americans have been brainwashed since childhood to hate drugs.
The cure is simply to use other psychoactive substances to obviate the effects of that depression 15. In a free world, for just one example, one might treat oneself to the wise use of laughing gas on the day after using MDMA. Laughing gas, by the way (aka nitrous oxide), is another of the many psychoactive substances which do NOT cause the "gotcha" aftereffects that the X poster seems to think are the inevitable and proper punishment for anyone who tries to use drugs for human benefit (drugs other than alcohol and coffee, that is). Even the famous "drug blamer," Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had to give laughing gas its due in this regard:
"It is said that every excitation is followed by a commensurate exhaustion. The excitation caused by nitrous oxide is an exception at least, it leaves no exhaustion on the bursting of the bubble." --Samuel Taylor Coleridge as quoted by Mike Jay in Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century 16
The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.
There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.
Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" are horrible because they encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.
Some fat cat should treat the entire Supreme Court to a vacation at San Jose del Pacifico in Mexico, where they can partake of the magic mushroom in a ceremony led by a Zapotec guide.
We're living in a sci-fi dystopia called "Fahrenheit 452", in which the police burn thought-expanding plants instead of thought-expanding books.
The drug war is a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."
"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau
Drug Warriors rail against drugs as if they were one specific thing. They may as well rail against penicillin because cyanide can kill.
Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."
In the age of the Drug War, the Hippocratic Oath has become "First, do no good."
The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.
