“The depression lifted from my mind like the sun coming out of the clouds.“

This is what the depressed World War I vet discovered after his first use of cocaine in "Diary of a Drug Fiend." And yet America's "experts" on ethics and health are discussing assisted suicide for the depressed without mentioning the fact that such drugs exist. It's insanity with a body count! See my multiple essays on this topic, starting with How organizations like Mad in America normalize drug prohibition.

“I recollected every detail with the most minute exactitude. But the most vexatious and humiliating items meant nothing to me anymore. I took the same pleasure in recalling them as one has reading a melancholy tale.”

If a Martian came to our planet and learned everything about us but our drug prejudices, they would read such a line about the use of cocaine and they would scream aloud that we must find ways to use it for our trauma victims! Then an embarrassed diplomat would have to take Zoltan aside and explain to him how we as a society believed that drugs were the devil himself and that human beings were far too childlike to ever learn how to use drugs wisely for human benefit.

“People think that talking is a sign of thinking. It isn't, for the most part ; on the contrary, it's a mechanical dodge of the body to relieve oneself of the strain of thinking, just as exercising the muscles helps the body to become temporarily unconscious of its weight, its pain, its weariness, and the foreknowledge of its doom.”

Crowley here cuts to the heart of the real psychology that behaviorists are dogmatically obliged to ignore. He sees the downsides of excessive rationality, a pathological aspect of thought that he tells us Shakespeare clearly understood given his numerous paeons to "blessed sleep" -- a time when all the words-words-words are silenced. All of us understand this insofar as we see the benefits of having a "cold one" at the end of the day. Yet psychiatrists and counselors are dogma-bound to consider drug use as inexplicable, as a cry for help, apparently having learned nothing from the popularity of alcohol in the western world. No one will dare say that the drinking habit was adopted in the west because beer was considered to be a great new taste sensation.

“While eating and breathing and going about are permitted, we shall never be a really righteous race.”

Here we see Crowley (in the persona of Peter Pendragon) mocking the thoroughly regulated society that he saw coalescing around him after his return from the tropospheric battlefield of World War I.

“We were driving in the chariot of the Sun through the circus of the Universe.”

This is a snippet from Peter Pendragon's extravagant coke-fueled inner dialogue as he was flying 'Unlimited Lou' to Paris in his seaplane -- or at least attempting to do so. I include this quotation to make a point: namely, that the benefits you can accrue from psychoactive drugs will be dependent upon a wide variety of factors, but especially upon your education level and the power of your imagination. In the words of the advertisers, the chariot and the circus are "not included," or at best they are "sold separately." If you want cocaine -- or any drug, for that matter -- to send you to fantastic places, it definitely helps to have an education and an imagination so that you can give the drug "something to work with," so to speak. The effect of psychoactive drug use is a joint effort. This is what REALLY distinguishes a drug from a "med," the fact that beneficial drug use is the result of a partnership, whereas the results of a so-called "med" are supposed to be the same whether that drug is consumed by Shakespeare or the village idiot.

“Happiness lies within one’s self, and the way to dig it out is cocaine. But don't you go and forget what I hope you won’t mind my calling ordinary prudence. Use a little common sense, use precaution, exercise good judgment.”

And yet Americans say, by their actions and inaction, that it is actually better to commit suicide than to use cocaine. This is surely the most anti-health society in the history of the world -- the first society to deny human beings their right to take care of their own health, to deny them their right to happiness and pain relief, the first society to deny them a host of drugs that inspire and elate -- a society that insists, moreover, that they are suffering from an actual disease if they cannot content themselves with this impoverished status quo brought about by the unprecedented policy of wholesale drug prohibition.