was recently moping around my local Kroger's food store, waiting for the refill on the Effexor to which I am chemically addicted, when I noticed a colorful Time supplement entitled "The Science of Creativity" in the magazine aisle. "Great," I thought to myself, "here's another politically correct attempt at explaining creativity without reference to the psychoactive substances that can so obviously help one achieve it."
Mind you, I haven't read the supplement, and maybe Time magazine got it right, but I'm not optimistic given the plethora of timid tips on cultivating creativity that have passed for self-help in American journalism over the past 50 years of psychoactive prohibition. Authors on feel-good pieces about creativity have never been in a hurry to rock the boat by suggesting the politically incorrect fact that psychoactive substances can generate creativity out of whole cloth in a receptive mind under the right circumstances.
Why this huge omission?
It's based on the unspoken Drug War assumption that psychoactive substances are (drumroll, please) evil "drugs" that must be avoided at all costs (as opposed to socially blessed "medicines," of course), and therefore the less said about these evil "drugs," the better... when in reality, a substance is a substance is a substance - and is only good or bad as any specific use should prove it to be.
But thanks to the political manipulation of the discussion by the Richard Nixons of the world, we Americans (and our global counterparts, whom we have financially blackmailed into adopting our own jaundiced viewpoint on this matter) take a Christian Science view of psychoactive drugs and thus have the puritanical expectation that "true" creativity is that which occurs without the influence of chemical substances - as if the human mind is ever free of chemical substances in the first place. The only real question, of course, is: which chemical substances should we knowingly imbibe?
The Drug War answer is simple: "Any drugs, as long as they do not provide anything that could be remotely considered to be a 'high'." And so the Drug War signs off on anhedonia-causing anti-depressants that foster chemical dependency while yet reviling non-addictive psychoactive drugs which have the unseemly property of actually making the user feel good in real-time. ("How scandalous is that!" cries today's stealth puritan.) In other words, {^the Drug War is not based on a rational concern for human welfare; it is just the modern-day expression of the know-nothing prudery of the 17th-century puritan, from whose misogynist and myopic mindset we have inherited today's illogical antipathy to Mother Nature's psychoactive medicines.}{
And so the clever modern articles about creativity provide the reader with only the most feeble hints as to how human beings can actually achieve the creative state: "get your omega-3's, sleep eight hours a night, eat whatever vegetable is currently at the top of science's ever-changing healthy food list, yada yada yada." Meanwhile, the authors on the subject of creativity willfully ignore the psychedelic gorilla in the room: namely, the fact that psychoactive drugs in the right setting can work wonders in generating the kind of free mindset that these authors are attempting to describe and recommend. It's as though the clueless authors were sitting outdoors beside a half-dozen psilocybin mushrooms in full bloom, asking themselves, as they look up at the sky with wrinkled eyebrows: "Gee, why is it so dashed hard for we adult human beings to be creative???"
Any sensible onlooker wants to shout at them: "Hello? You're sitting right next to a blankety-blank batch of magic mushrooms, for God's sake!"
No, God is not a drug kingpin. Neither is Mother Nature. Those plants have healing properties for a reason, and not just for physical complaints either.
Unfortunately, Americans have been brainwashed by the Drug Warrior lie that mother nature's plant medicines will fry our brains, when the reality is quite the opposite. HG Wells and Jules Verne used coca wine to increase mental focus. Benjamin Franklin used opium to increase creativity. And Francis Crick used psychedelics in order to think outside the box, thanks to which strategy he discovered the DNA Helix. In fact, if any substances fry the brain, they are the antidepressants to which one in four women are addicted today, pills that were never intended for lifetime use and which are often harder to quit than heroin.
But the Partnership for a Drug Free America isn't interested in telling Americans the truth, they're interested in scaring them away from the plant medicines that grow at our very feet. Incidentally, the Partnership mentioned is just a Christian Science front, for the idea that America should be drug free when it comes to mood medicine is a religious premise, based on assumptions about what constitutes the good life. It is not a logical conclusion that naturally recommends itself to an unbiased and rational mind. It is, in fact, a hypocritical refinement of the Christian Science ideology of Mary Baker Eddy.
But once we reject the Christian Science propaganda of the Drug War, we have no excuse for ignoring the subject of psychoactive plants when we write about creativity. To do so would be like ignoring the topic of water whenever we write about staying hydrated in the desert.
Author's Follow-up: October 11, 2022
I am not suggesting that any given drug will necessarily give creativity to any given person merely by imbibing said nostrum. Creativity comes about from a wide variety of factors, including the individual's past experiences, education, social upbringing and genetic makeup, etc. In fact, that's why materialist academia tends to look down on psychoactive substances because they are not "one size fits all" and there is no direct correlation between using such substances and any one given outcome. For when it comes to psychoactive medicine, the user plays a large role in what the outcome will be. Yet creativity for me comes when I'm in a good mood, relaxed and optimistic about the future, and psychoactive medicines properly employed as to time, place and dosage, can improve my mood, feeling of relaxation and my optimism, thereby increasing the likelihood that I will become more creative and productive.
There is also a more direct creativity that comes to the open minded user through the use of certain drugs like opium in particular, which is known for producing metaphorical dreams, as when throbbing pain is morphed through synesthesia into the deep tolling of a bell, and thus no longer perceived as pain. Because of its power of metaphorical transformation, opium could be a huge psychotherapeutic tool for psychological self-discovery, but no academic in the world dares even mention the word "opium" these days, since the Drug War has fed us the lie that it has no possible reasonable uses. We have been taught that any psychoactive substance that is addictive must always lead to addiction -- as if humankind is so infantile that it cannot learn how to use such godsend medicine wisely.
Had cavemen embraced that fearmongering approach to godsends, Prometheus would have been jailed for giving humanity fire, after which Og and company would have launched a "war on combustibles," in a dingbat effort to protect Og junior from burning his fingers. Meanwhile, talk about how to use fire safely would be banned for fear that it will put ideas into young prehistoric heads. Fire would be what opium is today: the devil incarnate.
Alexander Shulgin is a typical westerner when he speaks about cocaine. He moralizes about the drug, telling us that it does not give him "real" power. But so what? Does coffee give him "real" power? Coke helps some, others not. Stop holding it to this weird metaphysical standard.
Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It forces us to use shock therapy on the severely depressed since we've outlawed all viable alternatives. It denies medicines that could combat Alzheimer's and/or render it psychologically bearable.
Until we get rid of all these obstacles to safe and informed use, it's presumptuous to explain problematic drug use with theories about addiction. Drug warriors are rigging the deck in favor of problematic use. They refuse to even TEACH non-problematic use.
FDA drug approval is a farce when it comes to psychoactive medicine. The FDA ignores all the obvious benefits and pretends that to prove efficacy, they need "scientific" evidence. That's scientism, not science.
The proof that psychedelics work has always been extant. We are hoodwinked by scientists who convince us that efficacy has not been "proven." This is materialist denial of the obvious.
The Drug War treats doctors like potential criminals and it treats the rest of us like children. Prohibition does not end drug risks: it just outsources them to minorities and other vulnerable populations.
I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
The existence of a handful of bad outcomes of drug use does not justify substance prohibition... any more than the existence of drunkards justifies a call for liquor prohibition. Instead, we need to teach safe use and offer a wide choice of uncontaminated psychoactive drugs.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Fifty Years of Bogus Articles about Creativity published on May 10, 2019 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
was recently moping around my local Kroger's food store, waiting for the refill on the Effexor to which I am chemically addicted, when I noticed a colorful Time supplement entitled "The Science of Creativity" in the magazine aisle. "Great," I thought to myself, "here's another politically correct attempt at explaining creativity without reference to the psychoactive substances that can so obviously help one achieve it."
You have been reading an article entitled, Fifty Years of Bogus Articles about Creativity published on May 10, 2019 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
