The Poorly Hidden Materialist Agenda at Scientific American
in response to the September 2024 issue
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 16, 2024
Regarding Pain Relievers:
People want inspiration! Until modern psychology admits this simple truth, your search for the perfect pain medicine (ones that do not inspire) will also be political in nature. And why is it bad for me to take opium daily when it is good for me to take antidepressants 1 daily? There is no moral difference. Drug warriors do not want me to be free to dream! They ultimately WANT people to be depressed so that scientists can "cure" that disease, rather than to allow people to be happy, like Ben Franklin, without the help of the scientific community and all their "experts" on depression.
It was the Drug War that created the big problems of addiction: people used opium 2 peaceably at home before 1914. Now they're in the streets, because the Drug War put them there. But of course the Drug Warrior blames this (and all the other downsides of prohibition) on the drugs themselves. We can wait for human psychology to change, for people to give up on self-transcendence and new religions, or we can end the hateful War on Drugs, which is a de facto war on behalf of the drug-hating Christian Science religion -- and a way to support the suppression of indigenous ways of healing.
Regarding AI:
Your love for AI is odd! Why don't we first see what we can accomplish with all the mind-improving and mind-expanding medicines that we have outlawed, before we turn human beings into robots for the sake of efficiency?
PS All your articles about consciousness, addiction, and depression should come with a disclaimer: namely, that the Sci-Am Editors are taking the massively censored psychoactive pharmacy of the Drug War as a natural baseline for the study of these topics. Until you start doing this, you are being scientifically false while helping to normalize the hateful Drug War.
The best harm-reduction strategy is to re-legalize drugs.
Americans love to blame drugs for all their problems. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. The prohibition mindset is the problem, not drugs.
The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?
Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.
The term "hard" is just our modern pejorative term for the kinds of medicines that doctors of yore used to call panaceas
Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.
If fearmongering drug warriors were right about the weakness of humankind, there would be no social drinkers, only drunkards.
Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."
Here is a typical user report about a drug that the DEA tells us has no positive uses whatsoever:
"There is a profoundness of meaning inherent in anything that moves." (reported in "Pikhal" by Alexander Shulgin)
The best harm-reduction strategy is to re-legalize drugs.
