On a superficial level, Christian Science may be seen as a drug-hating religion and so its very existence tends to support the effort of drug warriors to outlaw godsend psychoactive medicines. On a deeper level, however, the religion's founder Mary Baker-Eddy was fighting not so much against drugs as against the failure of modern science to acknowledge the power of the human mind. In Mary's case, of course, this was the mind as influenced by Jesus Christ, but yet she recognized a principle with which even a non-believer can agree and which, moreover, is clearly true in light of drug user reports from the Vedic days to the present: namely, that the human mind has a great as-yet untapped power to control one's outlook on life and to therefore positively affect overall human health to some as-yet undetermined degree. Mary does seem to have overestimated the mind's ability to cure the body, of course, but it is worth noting in her defense that the government has outlawed the very research that would be required to determine exactly where the line should be drawn between the mind-curable condition and that which is beyond the help of this sort of holistic healing.
We would need to be able to use psychoactive medicines freely in order to generate the sort of user reports that could help us answer such questions adequately. And this would be research of the greatest philosophical importance, because it would essentially be a search into the true nature of mind-body dualism.
Mind-body dualism is like the weather when it comes to the field of philosophy: everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. Well, here is a chance for philosophers to launch a first-hand investigation of the interaction between mind and body and to thereby determine the nature of each -- as well as the nature of the interactive whole which they in some sense comprise. Philosophers just have to decide: Do they want to perform the kind of hands-on philosophic research that William James advocated viz. altered states, or do they want to keep pretending that the drug war does not exist and that it has no downsides for philosophical research. For the opposite is so obviously true: namely, that drug prohibition forbids us from performing the kind of research that could blow the whole "mind-body" problem wide open from the western point of view and so inspire whole new fields of research.
For more on this subject, please see my essay entitled "
Christian Science and Drugs: what Mary Baker-Eddy Got Right.
America's Imperialist Christian Science War on DrugsAmerican ShariaBoycott SingaporeChristian Science and DrugsChristian Science RehabDrug Testing and the Christian Science InquisitionDrug War Uber AllesEven Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug WarGoodbye Patient, Hello ClientOur Short-Sighted Fears about Long-Term Drug UsePROTEST DRUG TESTING NOW!The Christian Science SWAT Teams of the Drug WarThe Drug War = Christian ScienceWhat You Can DoWhy DARE should stop telling kids to say noWhy the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia
In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.
