Brian sent the following message today to Roy Benaroch, M.D. Professor, Emory University, in regard to his course on Wondrium entitled: "The Skeptic's Guide to Health, Medicine, and the Media."
I know this is a touchy topic in America, but with all due respect, Dr. Benaroch, I do not understand how a course about medical skepticism can overlook the fact that America has outlawed almost all of Mother Nature's godsend psychoactive medicines. Meanwhile, Americans have been taught the unscientific proposition that if such drugs have a bad effect for anyone, then they must not be available for anyone, at any dose, for any reason, ever. It is for this reason that I have gone an entire lifetime now without godsend medicines, being shunted off instead onto Big Pharma 12 meds that dull the mind rather than inspire it.
Skeptic's guide to health? Surely, no one's a REAL skeptic unless they realize that the Drug War has outlawed almost everything that WORKS, psychologically speaking.
This outlawing of medicine also impacts research, both scientific and philosophic. William James himself said that we must study the effects of "drugs" to better understand the nature of consciousness. The Drug War tells us that such research is a crime.
I tried to post the above thoughts on your Wondrium course page, but the moderators told me they were inappropriate. It seems that it is beyond the pale these days to disagree with the Christian Science ideology of the Drug War.
I know you mention marijuana in your course, but that is just one example of an enormous trend: namely, the unprecedented control of Mother Nature by government, in violation of the natural law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America.
Author's Follow-up: February 4, 2025
I tried to convey these sentiments on the Wondrium website, but the Wondrium censors deleted my post. It is truly considered bad manners these days to speak honestly about drugs. I responded, by the way, by canceling my longstanding Wondrium account. I had audited one too many courses of theirs in which the professors pretended that drug prohibition did not exist and that drug use had nothing to tell us about consciousness or human psychology or spiritual states, etc. etc.
This hysterical reaction to rare negative events actually creates more rare negative events. This is why the DEA publicizes "drug problems," because by making them well known, they make the problems more prevalent and can thereby justify their huge budget.
If I smoke opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag. If I use Big Pharma "meds" every day of my life, I am a good patient.
Drug Warriors should be legally banned from watching or reading Sherlock Holmes stories, since in their world, it is a crime for such people as Sherlock Holmes to exist, i.e., people who use medicines to improve their mind and mood.
Even if the FDA approved MDMA today, it would only be available for folks specifically pronounced to have PTSD by materialist doctors, as if all other emotional issues are different problems and have to be studied separately. That's just ideological foot-dragging.
Suicidal people should be given drugs that cheer them up immediately and whose use they can look forward to. The truth is, we would rather such people die than to give them such drugs, that's just how bamboozled we are by the war against drugs.
The search for SSRIs has always been based on a flawed materialist premise that human consciousness is nothing but a mix of brain chemicals and so depression can be treated medically like any other physical condition.
Self-medicating has always been the most basic of human rights, until the medical industry demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.
The so-called opiate crisis is really a drug prohibition crisis.
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
If I have no right to mother nature's bounty, then I surely have no right to manmade guns. If hysterical fearmongering justifies the eradication of the Fourth Amendment, then the Second Amendment should go as well.
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