It's really a hoot to have scientists tell us how to achieve a sense of purpose in the age of the Drug War. The scientist is in the position of a doctor who is permitted to recommend anything whatsoever for a headache except an aspirin. Mother Nature's psychoactive medicines are custom-made to give us a sense of purpose when used advisedly. The natural substance Soma produced such powerful insights of this kind that it spawned the entire Vedic religion. Opium increased Benjamin Franklin's sense of purpose and coca wine inspired the stories of such authors as HG Wells, Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas. Plato, Aristotle and Cicero were philosophically inspired by the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries1. Yet America, a supposedly scientific country (and one based on Natural Law at that) chose to start demonizing psychoactive plant medicines in 1914 and essentially forced the rest of the world to follow suit through economic blackmail. We even claimed the right to rush overseas and burn the plants of which racist stateside politicians disapproved, without, of course, bothering to ask the mere citizens of those countries how they felt about the matter.
The result: when our authors write about personal improvement, they ignore the therapeutic 64,000-pound gorilla in the room: viz plant medicine, leaving us with sterile theoretical adjurations from the world of science to eat these foods, sleep at these hours, consume these sorts of vegetables, and think all kinds of warm and fuzzy thoughts, under the demonstrably false assumption that we can think our way to psychological health, let alone to full-on self-actualization in life. But until we stop demonizing plant medicines and start figuring out how to use them wisely to achieve our psychological goals, I for one do not want to listen to science's latest theoretical advice about finding purpose in life. I've read countless articles of that kind before, and I'm still depressed as ever at age 62. The only difference is I'm not only depressed now, but I'm hooked on Big Pharma 23 's tranquilizing antidepressants 4 and will have to take them for the rest of my life, despite the fact that, unlike plant medicine, they were never created with my self-actualization in mind. Meanwhile, if Americans seek a purpose in life, let them start fighting the long-overdue battle to end America's disgracefully anti-scientific Drug War, which is also anti-minority, anti-patient, and the establishment of a religion: namely that of Christian Science, which tells us that we have some moral duty to say no to the life-enhancing plant medicines that grow at our very feet.
Author's Follow-up: December 2, 2022
Obama launched a BRAIN initiative while continuing to support the outlawing of almost all psychoactive substances that provide insight into the nature of consciousness and how the brain actually works5. Learn more in my essay entitled &596&.
Author's Follow-up:
September 19, 2025
You create a sense of purpose by succeeding in life. For many of us, this means transcending negative upbringings and that low-grade perpetual trauma that we call neurosis. This in turn can be accomplished with the help of drugs that focus the mind and permit one to transcend. Such drug use can create a virtuous circle. This is simple psychology which the behaviorists in academia ignore, thereby helping the materialist medical establishment to maintain its enormously profitable monopoly on mind and mood medicine. In their reductive focus, they connive with the Drug War in the BIG LIE that near panaceas like opium 6 and coca have no positive uses whatsoever.
This is a world of make-believe that we live in today -- a world where Freud is known for psychoanalysis -- when, in a sane world, he would be known for his common-sense realization that drugs like cocaine 78 can, for the majority of grown-ups, make the whole field of psychiatry COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT!
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is a drug war collaborator. They helped the DEA confiscate Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in 1987.
We should be encouraging certain drug use by the elderly. Many Indigenous drugs have been shown to grow new neurons and increase neural connectivity -- to refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!
Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.
Even fans of sacred medicine have been brainwashed to believe that we do not know if such drugs "really" work: they want microscopic proof. But that's a western bias, used strategically by drug warriors to make the psychotropic drug approval process as glacial as possible.
Drug warriors are full of hate for "users." Many of them make it clear that they want users to die (like Gates and Bennett...). The drug war has weaponized humanity's worst instincts.
How else will they scare us enough to convince us to give up all our freedoms for the purpose of fighting horrible awful evil DRUGS? DRUGS is the sledgehammer with which they are destroying American democracy.
Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.
In fact, that's what we need when we finally return to legalization: educational documentaries showing how folks manage to safely incorporate today's hated substances into their life and lifestyle.
The main form of drug war propaganda is censorship. That's why most Americans cannot imagine any positive uses for psychoactive substances, because the media and the government won't allow that.
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.