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Sherlock Holmes versus Gabor Maté

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 23, 2022



If you want to see the shortcomings of Gabriel Maté's views on addiction, just consider the case of Sherlock Holmes. According to Gabriel, the addicted individual is seeking to silence "inner pain" and therefore the addict's behavior is pathological. But was Sherlock Holmes seeking to silence "inner pain" when he used cocaine ? To the contrary, he was consciously and rationally "seeking escape from the commonplaces of existence." In other words, it was a life choice to use cocaine , not a sign of "inner pain." Holmes liked the clarity of mind that the drug provided and he made a conscious decision not to live a humdrum normal life. We do not consider him an "addict" in the pejorative meaning of that term simply because Holmes had the money and the connections to "take his medication of choice" regularly. He was therefore never "down and out on the street" and subject to the Christian Science moralizing of Drug Warriors.

Nor is it clear why we should demonize Holmes' choice of "poisons" any more than we should demonize the choice of 1 in 4 American housewives to become chemically dependent upon Big Pharma meds for life. In fact, when we judge things purely rationally, Holmes' choice of "poisons" was far more logical than that of said housewives, since the medication he was taking helped him live a fulfilled and interesting life, whereas the anti-depressants on which 25% of American women are dependent are known for creating anhedonia (emotional flat-lining) in long-term users. So Sherlock Holmes seems to be the smart one here when it comes to his substance use. Luckily for us, the Drug Warrior was not around at the time to ensure that his beneficial use of cocaine would end in rack and ruin. And how would the Drug Warrior ensure this direful outcome? By outlawing cocaine and forcing folks like Holmes to join a 12 step group run by the Gabriel Matés of the world, who see drug use through the distorted lens of an unacknowledged Christian Science metaphysic.

Holmes' choice of cocaine was preferable to a Big Pharma addiction for yet another obvious but completely unrecognized reason: that is the fact that Holmes' drug use did not turn him into a lifetime ward of the healthcare state. He was responsible for securing his own supply of his chosen drug, from folks who did not require him to fill out a multiple choice psychological test, whereas the Big Pharma 1 2 addict must visit a psychiatrist every three months of their life to discuss their innermost feelings with someone who is often half their age. Only then will they be "allowed" to visit the pharmacy and pay an exorbitant price for another three-months' supply of mind-numbing medicine that was falsely claimed to be a scientific "cure" for depression. (That it is not such is clear from the fact that America remains the most depressed and pill-taking country in the world, long after these SSRI "miracle" cures hit the market.)

Of course, Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character, but his case is instructive because he represents dozens of real geniuses of the 19th century who succeeded in life in part BECAUSE they used "drugs," i.e., because they used the coca plant and/or its cocaine alkaloid. Authors like HG Wells, Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas swore by Coca Wine, and not because they were treating inner pain but because they wanted to experience the mental focus and increased endurance that the coca leaf provided. This is a decision that the medical field is not in a position to judge: it is a life choice and should be respected as such. Of course, Freud somewhat ungratefully trashed the cocaine alkaloid after his uninformed overuse of the substance rendered him habituated, but even he was not a victim of inner pain. Instead, he was a victim of his own ignorance with respect to the nature of the substances that he was using. Had he been in possession of the facts, i.e., the truth about actual user outcomes, he would have either consciously opted for habituation like Sherlock Holmes or else renounced the cocaine 3 4 alkaloid entirely, in favor, perhaps, of the far less addictive coca leaf.

I am picking on Gabriel Maté here, but he is in good company. Almost every popular non-fiction author of our times reckons without the Drug War. They pretend, in fact, that the Drug War does not exist. And so they give us their great systems for treating Alzheimer's and autism and anger and depression, etc., while never pointing out the inconvenient truth that America has outlawed almost every psychoactive drug that could help us obtain our desired outcomes. For these authors have become totally convinced by Drug War propaganda that there really are such things as "drugs," which by definition can have no good uses under any circumstances for anybody whatsoever. The fact is, however, that there are no such substances in the world. Even the deadly Botox has good uses. And until authors and psychiatrists wake up to this once-obvious truth, we'll continue to be blind to the fact that folks like Sherlock Holmes succeeded in life, not IN SPITE of so-called "drugs," but (at least in part) BECAUSE of them.

Related tweet: November 13, 2022



Was Benjamin Franklin suffering from inner pain when he used opium 5 regularly? Were HG Wells and Jules Verne suffering from inner pain when they drank coca wine? Drug warriors use prohibition to ruin lives and then they turn the disaster they caused into a big moral epic.



Notes:

1: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science (up)
2: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? (up)
3: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis (up)
4: On Cocaine (up)
5: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton (up)


Addiction




"The irreducible core of the disease theory of addiction is still as strong as ever -- the significant distinction between good and bad opiate use is whether it's medically supervised." --Emperors of Dreams by Mike Jay


Addiction is a hugely fraught subject in the age of the drug war. This is because the Drug War does everything it can to make drug use dangerous. It encourages addiction by limiting our access to all but the handful of drugs that dealers find it practical and lucrative to supply. It fails to regulate product so that drug users cannot know the dose or even the quality of what they are ingesting. Meanwhile, the drug war censors honest talk about drug use.

In short, until we end the drug war, we will not know how much addiction is a true problem and how much it is an artifact of drug-war policy. And yet materialist researchers tell us that addiction is a "disease"? Why is it a disease to want to improve one's life with drugs? One could just as easily say that people are diseased, or at least masochistic, if they accept their limitations in life without doing everything they can to transcend them.

Indeed, the very idea that materialists are experts on psychoactive drug use is wrong. It is a category error. The proof is extant. Materialist researchers today are in total denial about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs. They maintain the lie that psychoactive drugs can only be proven effective by looking under a microscope, whereas the proof of such efficacy is right in front of them: in endless anecdotes, in human history, and even in psychological common sense, the kind of common sense that scientists ignore in the name of both drug war ideology and the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism.

  • Addicted to Addiction
  • Addicted to Ignorance
  • Addiction
  • America's Great Anti-Depressant Scam
  • America's Invisible Addiction Crisis
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War
  • How Drug Prohibition Causes Relapses
  • How Prohibition Causes Addiction
  • How the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality Tale
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors
  • Libertarians as Closet Christian Scientists
  • Modern Addiction Treatment as Puritan Indoctrination
  • Night of the Addicted Americans
  • Notes about the Madness of Drug Prohibition
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
  • Prohibition Spectrum Disorder
  • Public Service Announcements for the Post-Drug War Era
  • Sherlock Holmes versus Gabor Maté
  • Tapering for Jesus
  • The aesthetic difference between addiction and chemical dependency
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    If religious liberty existed, we would be able to use the inspiring phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the same way and for the same reasons as the Vedic people of India used soma.

    And so, by ignoring all "up" sides to drugs, the DEA points to potential addiction as a knock-down argument for their prohibition. This is the logic of children (and uneducated children at that). It is a cost-benefit analysis that ignores all benefits.

    Michael Pollan is the Leona Helmsley of the Drug War. He uses outlawed drugs freely while failing to support the re-legalization of Mother Nature. Drug laws are apparently for the little people.

    Drug prohibition represents the biggest power grab by government in human history. It is the state control of pain relief and mental states.

    America's "health" system was always screaming at me about the threat of addiction from drugs. Then what did it do? It put me on the most dependence-causing meds of all time: SSRIs and SNRIs.

    If you're looking for an anti-Christ, just look for an American presidential politician who has taught us to hate our enemies. Gee, now, who could that be, huh? According to Trump, Jesus was just a chump. Winning comes before anything at all in his sick view of life.

    In "Psychedelic Refugee," Rosemary Leary writes: "Fueled by small doses of LSD, almost everything was amusing or weird." -- Rosemary Leary In a non-brainwashed world, such testimony would suggest obvious ways to help the depressed.

    Why does no one talk about empathogens for preventing atrocities? Because they'd rather hate drugs than use them for the benefit of humanity. They don't want to solve problems, they prefer hatred.

    Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.

    "Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."


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