First America takes away the citizens' right to manage their own pain by rendering opium illegal. Then the American psychiatric field decides that it will treat the resultant epidemic of depression by damaging the patient's brain, i.e. by treating depressed patients using electroshock therapy.
Imagine what this says about our attitude toward drugs: It means literally that we would rather damage a depressed patient's brain than allow them to be made happy, damage-free, by the occasional use of naturally-occurring medications such as opium that are not under the control of psychiatrists.
This is insanity.
I shared these thoughts online on Reddit, assuming that the point I was making was self-evident. To my horror, I found many otherwise sane-sounding individuals indignantly protesting that ECT was a valuable tool in the psychiatric arsenal, even though the therapy's very proponents admit that it can cause brain damage. I was finally, in fact, banned from posting on the Reddit Psychedelic Studies group because I had outraged the many fans of traditional psychiatry by my heretical stand on ECT - as well as other dubious "cures," such as addictive modern anti-depressants, to which one in four women are now addicted in America and which conduce to anhedonia and a loss of creativity in long-term users.
Even if we grant that ECT is "better than nothing" (a lax standard, indeed, for efficacy!) surely it is unconscionable to use such damaging and addictive treatments when emphatically successful benign treatments are staring us in the face in the outdoor pharmacopeia provided by Mother Nature, in the form of opium, mushrooms, ibogaine, etc.
Doctors claim that ECT is a last resort - but what they really mean is that all better options have been rendered illegal.
If ECT is really required these days, we should at least make it clear that we are forced to that expedient by inane drug laws - rather than pretending to ourselves that this is a inherently beneficial treatment choice that we have selected for its own peculiar merits.
In other words, the DEA and all who believe in it should be shamed every time we are forced to damage a patient's brain in order to relieve depression via ECT - since it is the Drug War's know-nothing mindset that has deprived the suffering of God-given natural medicine that could give them reason to live. So the next time we bemoan the newly vapid personality of a victim of ECT, let's remember to point fingers of blame at the self-righteous Drug Warriors.
The first step in combating the devastating Drug War is to acknowledge its inanity. This means that is the doctor's moral responsibility to turn every shock therapy session into a publicity stunt to shame the Drug Warriors who made the barbaric treatment necessary. If we fail to do that, then it is not just our drug policy that is crazy and immoral but Americans themselves, as witnessed by their patient acceptance of brain-damaging cures and their failure to recognize (let alone denounce) the fascist forces that have rendered such Pyrrhic treatments necessary.
{^Doctors say that "shock therapy is a last resort," but what they really mean is, "shock therapy is a last resort once we rule out all the hundreds of godsend psychoactive plants that the DEA does not allow us to use or even study." Not only are doctors in denial about the DEA's role in making shock therapy necessary, but authors are as well. Few authors (apart from genius Thomas Szasz) see the connection between hideous psychiatric treatment and America's anti-scientific Drug War.}{
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August 31, 2022
Was Brian groveling -- or at least kowtowing? This was before he (Brian) had shipped a copy of his (Brian's) book to Rick Doblin, who promptly began ignoring it. Which I completely understand, by the way, because Rick has enough on his hands without going after the addictive MO of modern psychiatry, which is chiefly what my book was about, or rather was attempting to illustrate with collage-like op-ed pics.
What concerns me is that Rick Doblin may truly believe in the modern religion of omnipresent psychiatry. I was rather disappointed to find that DJ Nutt was also a member of the psychiatric booster club, but then he's a psychiatrist after all, and it's no doubt hard for him to accept the fact that he's been doping up his patients to no purpose during the last decade or three. Not only do the pills in question not correct a chemical imbalance, they appear to actually cause one. That's why the SSRIs create chemical dependence, I figure, by establishing a new baseline for one's brain chemistry, which takes years (if ever) to correct.
Even if DJ and company deny the science, which shows that SSRIs fail, the psychological facts are that dependence makes me a ward of the health care state and an eternal patient, with all the emotional baggage that brings with it. Do you think I like regular 45-minute pilgrimages to the nearest city to watch kids 1/3 my age deciding whether I'm trustworthy enough to keep using their expensive substances upon which they have rendered me dependent. Also, if Big Pharma wants to cure my depression, they have to know how I define a "cure" for depression: namely, in my case, living large would cure my depression. So don't think you are curing my depression by tranquilizing me and making me settle for second best in my life.
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.
In response to a tweet that "some drugs cannot be used wisely for recreational purposes": The problem is, most people draw such conclusions based on general impressions inspired by a media that demonizes drugs. In reality, it's hard to imagine a drug that cannot theoretically be used wisely for recreation at some dose, in some context.
The Partnership for a Death Free America is launching a campaign to celebrate the 50th year of Richard Nixon's War on Drugs. We need to give credit where credit's due for the mass arrest of minorities, the inner city gun violence and the civil wars that it's generated overseas.
Alcohol is a drug in liquid form. If drug warriors want to punish people who use drugs, they should start punishing themselves.
The Holy Trinity of the Drug War religion is Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and John Belushi. "They died so that you might fear psychoactive substances with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."
There's a run of addiction movies out there, like "Craving!" wherein they actually personify addiction as a screaming skeleton. Funny, drug warriors never call for a Manhattan Project to end addiction. Addiction is their golden goose.
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
I agree that Big Pharma drugs have wrought disaster when used in psychotherapy -- but it is common sense that non-Big Pharma drugs that elate could be used to prevent suicide and obviate the need for ECT.
In "How to Change Your Mind," Michael Pollan says psychedelic legalization would endanger young people. What? Prohibition forces users to decide for themselves which mushrooms are toxic, or to risk buying contaminated product. And that's safe, Michael?
Katie MacBride's one-sided attack on MAPS reminds me of why I got into an argument with Vincent Rado. Yes, psychedelic hype can go too far, but let's solve the huge problem first by ending the drug war!!!
This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.