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 1 , 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 23 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.
Scientists are not the experts on psychoactive medicines. The experts are painters and artists and spiritualists -- and anyone else who simply wants to be all they can be in life. Scientists understand nothing of such goals and aspirations.
Countless millions suffer needlessly in silence because of America's fearmongering about drugs.
Drug warriors are too selfish and short-sighted to fight real problems, so they blame everything on drugs.
The so-called "herbs" that witches used were drugs, in the same way that "meds" are drugs. If academics made that connection, the study of witchcraft would shed a lot of light on the fearmongering of modern prohibitionists.
NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition. We need a National Institute on Drug Use, not a National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Two weeks ago, a guy told me that most psychiatrists believe ECT is great. I thought he was joking! I've since come to realize that he was telling the truth: that is just how screwed up the healthcare system is today thanks to drug war ideology and purblind materialism.
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.
Drug warriors do not want to end "addiction": it's their golden goose. They use the threat of addiction to scare us into giving up our democratic freedoms, like that once supplied by the 4th amendment.
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda
(There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.)
UNESCO celebrates the healing practices of the Kallawaya people of South America. What hypocrisy! UNESCO supports a drug war that makes some of those practices illegal!
Scientists are not the experts on psychoactive medicines. The experts are painters and artists and spiritualists -- and anyone else who simply wants to be all they can be in life. Scientists understand nothing of such goals and aspirations.