If an American has a negative response to an anti-depressant, we sigh and say, "Oh, dear, they had a bad reaction." We ascribe no blame to the Big Pharma anti-depressant. The bad reaction is the fault of the user: their system simply fails to respond appropriately to the drug in question.
If an American has a negative response to a psychoactive plant medicine, we snarl and say, "Oh, dear, that is an evil drug!"
It's this kind of muddled thinking about substances that makes the Drug War the great philosophical problem of our time, because the Drug War is propped up and supported on a framework of bogus hypocritical assumptions like this.
Take the old canard of the "crutch," the idea that we should not use Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines because they are crutches.
Was coca a crutch when it helped HG Wells and Jules Verne write great stories? Was opium 1 a crutch when it increased Benjamin Franklin's creativity and friendliness? Were psychedelics a crutch when they provided Plato with metaphysical insights at the Eleusinian mysteries2? Was the natural substance called Soma a crutch when it single-handedly (or single-plantedly) inspired the Vedic religion?
If any substances are "crutches," they are the tranquilizing meds of Big Pharma , which, since the introduction of lithium, have been designed, not to help folks achieve self-actualization in life, but to render them more docile and accepting of the status quo. (When Antonio Moniz won the Nobel Prize for lobotomy, it was the nurses who were cheering, not the patients.) In this way, Big Pharma 34 meds are crutches designed to make the patient forget about the need to walk on their own two feet.
Author's Follow-up:
May 17, 2025
The Drug War is the great philosophical problem of our time. And yet most philosophers are in denial. I am the only philosopher on the planet who formally protested to the FDA about its plans to treat laughing gas 5 as a "drug."6 The use of nitrous oxide inspired the ontology of William James. He conjured philosophers to use the substance to investigate the nature of reality. And yet our government has outlawed such research by making the gas in question harder to use than ever. Laughing gas was already shamefully unavailable to the depressed as a practical matter. In a sane and compassionate world, we would provide laughing-gas kits to the severely depressed just as we provide epi pens to those with severe allergies -- but Americans actually prefer that the depressed kill themselves rather than use substances that have been outlawed by racist politicians.
And what is the "justification" for outlawing such substances? The fact that white American young people have found ways to use the substances dangerously. These are the same white American young people whom the prohibitionists refuse to teach about safe drug use! And now they are going to tell all demographics in the world that they cannot use these substances because said substances might harm the local white kids whom America refuses to educate.
Americans are so outrageously presumptuous -- and so blind to all the stakeholders in their drug debates. They have no interest in the needs of those suffering silently behind closed doors. They have no interest in academic freedom. They have no interest in the drive-by shootings that drug prohibition has brought to inner city neighborhoods. They have no interest in the fact that drug prohibition has destroyed the rule of law in Latin America. They just want to crack down on the drug-related incidents that are highlighted in our financially suborned media -- the problems that they themselves have caused by refusing to educate our children about the fact that they live in a world full of psychoactive substances, not thanks to drug dealers, but rather thanks to God himself, or to Mother Nature, or to evolution, etc. That's a fact of life. It behooves us as free and supposedly scientific individuals to learn about these substances and to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity rather than to demonize and fear them. Meanwhile, we must understand that shouting phrases like "Fentanyl 7 kills" is exactly like shouting "Fire bad!" -- all such statements promote the idea that we should fear potentially dangerous substances rather than learning how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.
The term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they connote.
Saying "Fentanyl kills" is philosophically equivalent to saying "Fire bad!" Both statements are attempts to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as safely as possible for human benefit.
Despite the 50 year-long war on drugs, the global cocaine supply has grown by 400%. --Elma Mrkonjic
When psychiatrists write about heroin, they characterize dependency as enslavement. When they write about antidepressants, they characterize dependency as a medical duty.
What is the end game of the drug warrior? A world in which no one wants drugs? That's not science. It's the drug-hating religion of Christian Science. You know, the American religion that outsources its Inquisition to drug-testing labs.
Mad in America publishes stories of folks who are disillusioned with antidepressants, but they won't publish mine, because I find mushrooms useful. They only want stories about cold turkey and jogging, or nutrition, or meditation.
Someday the world will realize that Freud's real achievement was his discovery of the depression-busting power of cocaine.
"Dope Sick"? "Prohibition Sick" is more like it. The very term "dope" connotes imperialism, racism and xenophobia, given that all tribal cultures have used "drugs" for various purposes. "Dope? Junk?" It's hard to imagine a more intolerant, dismissive and judgmental terminology.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.
We should not be talking about the potential harm of drugs -- we should be talking about the well-established harm of drug PROHIBITION.
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