It's no surprise that "Doctor Feel Good" should be the ultimate put-down in a Drug War society. The Drug War, after all, has at least two major philosophical motivations: 1) the protestant ethic, which questions our right to happiness in this world and views any "immoderate" happiness as suspicious; and 2) the ontology of reductionist science, which places its faith in the quantitative world, from which everything is supposed to "spring," and therefore has no patience with the mere subjective reports of the patient, except insofar as they can be confirmed and, as it were, 'proven' by quantitative measurements (especially of brain chemicals in the case of psychiatry). This is why pundits like Dr. Glatter can write an article for Forbes Magazine entitled "Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment-resistant Depression?" In a sane world, this would be a no-brainer: of course it could help. But Glatter wants to know if it could "really" help based on quantitative analyses that are presumably yet to be performed or even specifically envisioned.
In other words, billions of depressed around the world have to wait for the balm of laughing gas while materialists like Glatter try to wrap their heads around the psychologically obvious: that laughing helps. Even the Reader's Digest has known that for decades, judging from its time-honored motto, "Laughter is the best medicine."
Thus a drug-war society creates its own answer to Doctor Feel Good: namely, Doctor Feel Bad.
Glatter is a Doctor Feel Bad, for starters, in denying lifelong depressives like myself access to a no-brainer treatment like laughing gas 1 .
But Doctor Feel Bads are also present at our bedside for our dying day. Whenever anyone (like Anne Heche, for instance) is "peacefully" taken off life support, Doctor Feel Bad is there to make sure everything goes well -- which is to say horribly for the patient. For instead of giving the patient "an immoderate dose of morphine " and allowing them to drift off painlessly to death, the doctor makes sure that no such help is provided and that we simply "starve the patient out" when it comes to achieving our goal of "giving them peace."
Talk about dedication to the Drug War, we will even enforce its anti-patient ideology on the death beds of our beloved.
Doctor Feel Bad is also present in hospices for children around the world, where countries, under the spell of the Drug War ideology of substance demonization, deny morphine 2 to children, thus forcing them to live in unnecessary pain during the final days of their short lives. (For more about this latter infamy, see Children of the Drug War.")
The Links Police
Do you know why I stopped you? No? Darn. I can't remember either. Hold on, maybe I've made a note of it in my memo pad. No, seriously, folks. There's more on this here subject of useless doctoring in the age of the Drug War:
Here is a sample drug-use report from the book "Pihkal":
"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place."
Prohibition is a crime against humanity for withholding such drug experiences from the depressed (and from everybody else).
The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.
In a sane world, we would learn to strategically fight drugs with drugs.
"If England [were to] revert to pre-war conditions, when any responsible person, by signing his name in a book, could buy drugs at a fair profit on cost price... the whole underground traffic would disappear like a bad dream." -- Aleister Crowley
That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.
The confusion arises because materialists insist that every psychological problem is actually a physical problem, hence the disease-mongering of the DSM. This is antithetical to the shamanic approach, which sees people holistically, as people, not patients.
America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
Governor Kotek is "dealing" with the homelessness problem in Oregon by arresting her way out of it, in fealty to fearmongering drug warriors.
There are endless creative ways to ward off addiction if all psychoactive medicines were at our disposal. The use of the drugs synthesized by Alexander Shulgin could combat the psychological downsides of withdrawal by providing strategic "as-needed" relief.
News flash: certain mushrooms can help you improve your life! It's the biggest story in the history of mycology! And yet you wouldn't know it from visiting the websites of most mushroom clubs.
Here is a sample drug-use report from the book "Pihkal":
"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place."
Prohibition is a crime against humanity for withholding such drug experiences from the depressed (and from everybody else).
