Addiction is a loaded term in the age of the Drug War. There are at least four reasons why this is so.
The Drug War does everything it can to make drug use problematic.
The Drug War outlaws all drugs that could help folks get off of an undesired drug. For more on this latter topic, see my essay on 'Fighting Drugs with Drugs.'
The Drug War ensures that users will have access only to the handful of substances that dealers find it profitable and practical to offer. It is therefore likely that the user will show a disproportionate interest in one particular drug, thereby increasing their potential for addiction.
This negative outcome is all the more likely in the age of the Drug War when public policy holds that it's wrong to educate, that it's wrong to speak honestly about drugs and drug use.
Until we end the Drug War and attempt to fight addiction with psychological common sense -- something that materialist science ignores -- we can draw no conclusions about the degree to which addiction is an enormous problem versus an artefact of Drug War ideology itself.
Meanwhile, it is a little 'too convenient' for materialist science to tell us that there are 'addictive types' out there. First of all, that is an anti-scientific conclusion for it assumes that substance prohibition is a natural baseline, whereas it greatly influences every aspect of drug use. We will not know how large a problem addiction really is until we renounce Drug War policies which do everything they can to render drug use problematic.
There is also an unrecognized moral judgment involved when we describe a desire for drug experiences as pathological. Drug use represents a desire to transcend one's apparent limits in life (whether psychological, vocational, familial, etc.) and should not be categorized as pathological in itself. Indeed, an argument could be made that one is pathological, or masochistic, when they accept an emotionally or vocationally stifled life without taking every step possible to transcend one's limitations, by hook or crook, whether by meditation and jogging or by drug use. And we can hardly blame the transcendence seeker for botching the job of drug use when we as a society have done everything we can to make drug use risky through failing to regulate product, failing to provide options, and failure to provide education.
It's 'rich' when materialist scientists tell us that our desire for drugs is pathological. These are the same people who cannot see any of the glaringly obvious benefits of drug use. Their behaviorist principles prevent them from even signing off on laughing gas 1 for the depressed. Who cares if we laugh while using it, the materialist insists on finding a 'real' cure for our depression, you know, like the Big Pharma antidepressants 2 upon which one in four American women are dependent for life. That's bad enough, of course, but the materialists practice a kind of aggressive myopia when they go on to tell us that we are actually physically ill if we insist on obtaining the transcendence that drugs could provide.
There is a materialist agenda at work here: one that holds that we are merely the product of invisible chemical forces and that psychology does not matter. It is the hateful doctrine that blinds modern doctors to common sense. The world is our oyster when we adopt a common-sense shamanic approach to drug use, when we look at drugs not as threats, but as a means to self-understanding and insight. Until we change our world view on this topic, reductionist science will continue taking us down the path of pill mills and victim blaming.
The answer lies in the realization that empathic and experienced drug users are the experts when it comes to altered states and drug use, not materialist scientists. These modern shamans would combine the best of the east and the west. They would have a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances worldwide and would focus on the ways that they have been used profitably, by individuals and by societies, to achieve positive goals in the lives of individuals and communities.
This is why I created this entire site back in 2019, because I realized that vanquishing the Drug War cannot be accomplished by merely tweaking laws. It cannot be accomplished by merely moving a few white-privileged substances from the 'drugs' category to the 'meds' category. We need to drive a stake through the heart of Drug War ideology itself, and that requires an entire change of attitude on the part of the western world. We need to realize that materialist scientists are not the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine and that human beings are not robots and that it is wrong to judge holistic-acting drugs by reductionist standards. The proof of efficacy of psychoactive drugs is to be found in anecdote and history and psychological common sense and not by looking under a microscope!
We could also add a fifth problem with the concept of 'addiction.' We live in a world in which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma 34 meds for life. This is not considered wrong: in fact, it is considered a positive good! We are told we need to 'keep taking our meds.' And yet if a person smokes opium 5 nightly, they are considered an addict. Apparently it is fine to be chemically dependent, but it's wrong to use a drug that, in theory, could cause cravings when stopped.
That's an insane standard. Why is it wrong for a drug to cause cravings when stopped but it's fine for a drug to make you merely feel like hell when it's stopped?
Insanity! Unexamined assumptions all down the line!
Author's Follow-up: January 18, 2025
The materialist will object that there are clear correlations that have been established between genetics and a propensity for, say, alcoholism. But this is not the issue here. The question is, how much would those propensities matter in an educated world in which alternatives to alcohol were freely available, alternatives that gave the 'users' the same (or better) emotional relief than that provided by alcohol?
In other words, those who study alcoholism are reckoning without the Drug War. They incorrectly assume that substance prohibition is a natural baseline from which to study so-called 'substance abuse,' whereas such social policy has a definite and enormous effect on the subject-related outcomes in the real world. Such researchers get to this point by ignoring psychological common sense. The Drug War (and our lack of drug education and research) leave the alcoholic with no way to get their desired 'lift' but with alcohol. Why are we then surprised when certain biochemically or genetically predisposed people develop a problematical relationship with liquor? We set them up for failure with the disastrous social policy of drug prohibition and enforced ignorance.
In a sane world, pharmacologically savvy empaths would find safe use protocols for using a wide variety of substances that we demonize today, such that we can profit from them as safely as possible, meanwhile avoiding those substances whose use is rendered unacceptably risky for us personally on account of our own personal genetic and biochemical makeup. We would no longer simply globally outlaw the substances that seem to pose a risk to white American young people in the fevered imagination of racist Drug Warriors -- those hypocrites who fight to outlaw time-honored panaceas while giving a greenlight to the infinitely larger threats of alcohol, guns, and cigarettes.
Cocaine use is a blessing for some, just a little fun for most, and a curse for a few. Just like any other risky activity. We need to educate people about drugs rather than endlessly arresting them for attempting to improve their mental power!
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?
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
I'm told that most psychiatrists would like to receive shock therapy if they become severely depressed. That's proof of drug war insanity: they would prefer damaging their brains to using drugs that can elate and inspire.
Most enemies of inner-city gun violence refuse to protest against the drug prohibition which caused the violence in the first place.
It's no wonder that folks blame drugs. Carl Hart is the first American scientist to openly say in a published book that even the so-called "hard" drugs can be used wisely. That's info that the drug warriors have always tried to keep from us.
The best harm-reduction strategy is to re-legalize drugs.
The Drug War brought guns to the "hoods," thereby incentivizing violence in the name of enormous profits. Any site featuring victims of gun violence should therefore be rebranded as a site featuring victims of the drug war.
Using the billions now spent on caging users, we could end the whole phenomena of both physical and psychological addiction by using "drugs to fight drugs." But drug warriors do not want to end addiction, they want to keep using it as an excuse to ban drugs.
When psychiatrists write about heroin, they characterize dependency as enslavement. When they write about antidepressants, they characterize dependency as a medical duty.
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