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I've got a bone to pick with Jim Hogshire

a philosophical review of 'Opium for the Masses'

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 5, 2023



Jim Hogshire is one of the least bamboozled of authors when it comes to the subject of so-called 'drugs.' He recognizes that opium is just a substance and that (spoiler alert) human beings can actually use it wisely for both therapeutic and artistic purposes. (Who knew? Certainly not the Chicken Little Drug Warriors who are forever trying to scare our kids about drugs rather than to educate them.) Moreover he knows that the regular use of opium is no more problematic than the regular use of coffee and that addiction to the former can be avoided by the strategic timing of consumption. And he knows that even habituation can be defeated relatively painlessly and quickly with modern pharma-aided therapies -- that is to say, therapies which were already available over 20 years ago in 1999 when Jim published his book, thanks to which a disillusioned or repentant habitue - what the moralists would call an addict -- could literally sleep through the major symptoms of physical withdrawal. Finally, he knows that any drug -- or indeed any habit -- can cause psychological addiction, but this kind of addiction, being pathological in nature, is, as he correctly notes, beyond the scope of a book about opium.

But I come not to praise Hogshire, but to parse him - or at least to parse those of his viewpoints that fail to pass philosophical muster with yours truly.

Relax, I only have one bone to pick with Hogshire's "Opium for the Masses" (so far, at least):



First (and so far last) bone:

Hogshire keeps describing opium dreams as hallucinations, and I am sure that by some definitions this is true. Yet these experiences can be so detailed and complex that it seems premature to dismiss them as mere "will-of-the-wisps" of the heat-oppressed brain. We may readily admit that the figures within them are not "real" in themselves , but the mere fact that we see such things in such byzantine clarity may well be telling us something about the nature of reality writ large. I realize, for instance, that the neon-green depictions of Mesoamerican royalty that I saw after consuming peyote four years ago were not "real" objects that I could touch and feel - and yet the mere fact that they should appear to me thanks to the consumption of a cactus alkaloid suggested deep potential holistic truths about reality, rendering those dreams far more to me than just materialistic hallucinations that will be someday accounted for by a neurologist.

We know, in fact, that many psychoactive plant and fungi concoctions conduce to exotic "dreams" in those who partake of them. Given this backstory, I think Hogshire is rash in dismissing opium dreams as hallucinations. It's more in keeping with the principle of Occam's Razor that we consider these dreams to be similar in kind to all the dreams inspired by botanical medicine. The alternative is to give unearned credit to random and pointless evolution for unintentionally creating a world full of incredible dreams, all of which can be improbably accessed by Homo sapiens by consuming... wait for it, folks... a plant or fungus! (Who would have guessed? Answer: nobody at all, and least of all a materialist!)

There we go, bone picked!

I do have one more point to add for Hogshire heads, though this is less a criticism than an observation that I trust will flesh out a point that the author has already made in part. I am referring to the notion that withdrawal can be treated pharmacologically. Jim apparently had some specific treatments in mind when he broached this topic, but I would point out that the world will be our oyster when it comes to treating withdrawal -- once we legalize any and all medicines that work! Only imagine: a world in which we can use any substance that works!

The number-one reason why addiction has been such a bugaboo is that we have outlawed all drugs that could make it otherwise. Feeling a little down while coming off of a drug A? Obfuscate that feeling by using drug B & C! But the Drug Warrior has bamboozled us into thinking that the cure for addiction is always a hypocritically defined sobriety. They really believe that this is scientifically true and that it is somehow morally sleazy to use drugs to fight drugs. But that's nonsense. That is a religious belief, not a logical one. If I'm blue and nervous while getting off drug A, give me B & C to cheer me up. That's not a crime. It's common sense. We think otherwise because we have been indoctrinated from birth to fear drugs rather than to understand them and profit from them.

Of course such creative use of psychoactive medicines to fight psychoactive medicines needs to be informed by pharmacological wisdom -- which is yet another reason why we must abolish the Drug War root and branch and denounce it for being in favor of a very dangerous ignorance.


Opium for the Masses: Harvesting Nature's Best Pain Medication, by Jim Hogshire


June 5, 2023 In standing up for the potential ontological significance of the opium dream, Brian is thinking of the thesis advanced by Aldous Huxley in "The Doors of Perception," according to which the world that we normally perceive is but a fraction of the universe -- parsed in such a way as to be of practical use to our limited comprehension here-below.

Related tweet: June 6, 2023


Perhaps the most fascinating thing about opium is that it does not get rid of pain, it externalizes it. It gives the user the conceptual ability of those fabled mystics to envision the pain from outside, as if it were happening to someone else.

Related tweet: June 6, 2023


It's a truly amazing drug, for it gives the user the kind of mental abilities that only a lifetime of meditation can provide, and then only for a handful of devoted aesthetes.

Author's Follow-up: June 6, 2023

I took a shot at materialism above and now I'd like to double down. For it is the materialist reductionist outlook that keeps us from recognizing the therapeutic value of substances like opium. When we're told that such substances have no recognized uses, that statement, if it's to have any truth value at all, has to presuppose the ideology of materialism. To the materialiat, the proof of efficacy has to reside in molecules and chemicals, not in undeniable anecdotes and human history. You say millions have found opium wonderful and it has inspired great poetry? That means nothing to the materialist. It's this myopic lack of common sense that causes otherwise brainy people like Dr. Robert Glatter to ask silly questions, like "Can laughing gas help people with treatment-resistant depression?", in an article of that title in the June 2019 edition of Forbes magazine. Of course laughing gas can hep the depressed, by definition even! The reason Glatter doubts it is because he's a materialist and only accepts reductive explanations of efficacy.

This is why Descartes denied that animals could experience pain, because reductive evidence did not prove it. Sure, dogs will howl when you hurt them, but Descartes tells us that's just noise. Likewise laughing, for materialists like Glatter, is just noise.

The fact is, however, that common sense is not that problematic! Happiness -- drug induced or otherwise -- is happiness. What's more, happiness -- and the anticipation of happiness -- are health-producing.

For this reason, any drug in the world that provides a pleasant feeling can be valuable in treating depression. Any drug in the world. Even opium. Nor is the possibility of dependency a reason to ignore opium, for with opium, dependency might be called a bug, but for modern anti-depressants (upon which 1 in 4 American women are hooked for life), dependency is a feature. This is why doctors keep unabashedly telling such women to "keep taking your meds." We see then the outlawing of opium is based on an aesthetic judgment about what constitutes the good life, not some scientific evidence of what does and does not work for the "user."

Materialism




In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James demonstrated how materialists are blind to the depth and meaning of psychological states of ecstasy and transcendence -- or in other words the states that are peculiar to mystics like St. Teresa... and to those who use psychoactive substances like laughing gas. The medical materialist is dogmatically dismissive of such states, which explains why they can pretend that godsend medicines that elate and inspire have no positive uses whatsoever:

"To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce."


And so materialist scientists collaborate with the Drug War by refusing to see glaringly obvious drug benefits. They acknowledge only those benefits that they believe are visible under a microscope. The Hindu religion would not exist today had materialist scientists held Soma to such a standard. But that's the absurd pass to which prohibition eventually brings us in a society wherein materialist science is the new god: scientists are put in charge of deciding whether we are allowed to imagine new religions or not.

This materialist bias is inspired in turn by behaviorism, the anti-indigenous doctrine of JB Watson that makes the following inhumane claim:

"Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic."

According to this view, the hopes and the dreams of a "patient" are to be ignored. Instead, we are to chart their physiology and brain chemistry.

JB Watson's Behaviorism is a sort of Dr. Spock with a vengeance. It is the perfect ideology for a curmudgeon, because it would seem to justify all their inability to deal with human emotions. Unfortunately, the attitude has knock-on effects because it teaches drug researchers to ignore common sense and to downplay or ignore all positive usage reports or historic lessons about positive drug use. The "patient" needs to just shut up and let the doctors decide how they are doing. It is a doctrine that dovetails nicely with Drug War ideology, because it empowers the researcher to ignore the obvious: that all drugs that elate have potential uses as antidepressants.

That statement can only be denied when one assumes that "real" proof of efficacy of a psychoactive medicine must be determined by a doctor, and that the patient's only job is to shut up because their hopes and dreams and feelings cannot be accurately displayed and quantified on a graph or a bar chart.





  • A Quantum of Hubris
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Behaviorism and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Common Sense and the Drug War
  • Constructive criticism of the MAPS strategy for re-legalizing MDMA
  • David Chalmers and the Drug War
  • Dogmatic Dullards
  • Every Day and in every way, you are getting more and more bamboozled by Drug War propaganda
  • Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman
  • How AI turned William James into a Drug Warrior
  • How Bernardo Kastrup reckons without the Drug War
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Scientific Materialism Keeps Godsend Medicines from the Depressed
  • I've got a bone to pick with Jim Hogshire
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Materialism and the Drug War
  • Materialism and the Drug War Part II
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Science News Unveils Shock Therapy II
  • The Inhumanity of Drug Prohibition
  • The Poorly Hidden Materialist Agenda at Scientific American
  • Unscientific American: the hypocritical materialism of Elon Musk
  • What Can the Chemical Hold?
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs
  • William James rolls over in his grave as England bans Laughing Gas
  • Without Philosophy, Science becomes Scientism





  • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    The fact that some drugs can be addictive is no reason to outlaw drugs. It is a reason to teach safe use and to publicize all the ways that smart people have found to avoid unwanted pharmacological dependency -- and a reason to use drugs to fight drugs.

    I thought mycology clubs across the US would be protesting drug laws that make mushroom collecting illegal for psychoactive species. But in reality, almost no club even mentions such species. No wonder prohibition is going strong.

    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.

    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. Instead, we need to teach safe use and offer a wide choice of uncontaminated psychoactive drugs.

    The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.

    A law proposed in Colorado in February 2024 would have criminalized positive talk about drugs online. What? The world is on the brink of nuclear war because of hate-driven politics, and I can be arrested for singing the praises of empathogens?

    I should have added to that last post: "I in no way want to glorify or condone drug demonization."

    Let's pass a constitutional amendment to remove Kansas from the Union, and any other state where the racist politicians leverage the drug war to crack down on minorities.

    It's just plain totalitarian nonsense to outlaw mother nature and to outlaw moods and mental states thru drug law. These truths can't be said enough by us "little people" because the people in power are simply not saying them.

    We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.


    Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






    Why doctors should prescribe opium for depression
    Drug War Jeopardy!


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