ddiction is not an objective term, it is a political term. It is another Drug War invention designed to pathologize the victims of prohibition.
To see this, let's first consider the way that the term is defined in Webster's Dictionary.
addiction: "The quality or state of being addicted -- specifically : the compulsive uncontrolled use of habit-forming drugs beyond the period of medical need or under conditions harmful to society."
Now let's consider four problems with that definition:
1) It's a little "rich" to pathologize the "compulsive uncontrolled use" of drugs with the pejorative label of "addiction," given that we live in a world where multibillion-dollar agencies are tasked with the job of making drug use as dangerous as possible. If, on the other hand, drugs were re-legalized and users had a smorgasbord of psychoactive options from which they could choose freely and were taught to use them safely, this "compulsive uncontrolled use" would arguably not exist. A drug that caused undue compulsion would be replaced by other less compulsion-causing drugs. (Obsessive use of a contaminated Fentanyl supply could be replaced, for instance, with a relaxing nightly session of uncontaminated opium smoking.) But this is something that the Drug Warrior cannot imagine, of course, because their puritanical presumptions make it unthinkable to fight drugs with drugs.
2) "beyond the period of medical need." This qualification ignores the whole reason for USING psychoactive drugs in the first place: they are not used for medical purposes but rather for the very human purpose of attaining self-transcendence in life. By defining addiction in terms of "medical need," we put scientists and doctors in judgment of a decision about drug use that only the user is competent to make. Only the user can decide if use of a certain psychoactive drug can be justified by a cost-benefit analysis given the user's own priorities in life, given what they personally consider to be the "summum bonum," a good life. The scientists and researchers may advise the would-be user about physical risks of a given drug, but they cannot decide whether that risk is worth taking because they do not know what the user most values in life. (Perhaps the user is like the opium-loving physician Avicenna, who was said to have valued "a short life with width to a narrow one with length.") Sure, the scientists and doctors can say that such illegal use would be wrong, morally speaking, as most would probably do these days, but that is not medical advice, that is legal and/or religious advice.
Even the determination of the amount of pain relief required in a given medical case is not a medical decision, except insofar as the doctor ensures that the dosages in question are not going to prove palpably injurious or lethal to a patient. Assuming that the patient's comfort is the goal of pain relief, then the decision about proper dosage must be informed by the patient's subjective experience of pain. This experience is in turn shaped in various ways and to various extents by social norms, as Ivan Illich discusses in Medical Nemesis. In other words, the patient is the expert when it comes to the amount of pain relief they require for a certain situation. It's barbarous that his or her preferences would be overruled by bureaucrats who intimidate doctors into prescribing niggardly doses of medicine in conformance to some supposed "objectively correct dosage" based on a supposedly average patient. Such politically correct dosing ignores the obvious fact that every patient is both different and unique in how they tolerate and even define "pain." They should not be punished for having outlier reactions to pain based on a Bell's curve depicting statistically typical reactions.
3) "under conditions harmful to society"? Who decides what is harmful to society? This is a subjective judgment. The Christian Scientist believes that any drug use is harmful to society, as do most politicians. The typical politician will also point to open-air drug markets and the mis-called "opioid crisis" as signs of harm, but this is a mere political charge in a world in which the harms of prohibition are never acknowledged, let alone discussed. The Drug Warriors blame drugs for the downsides of prohibition in order to divert attention from the real culprit: prohibition itself, which limits choices, contaminates the drug supply, and refuses to even speak about safe use.
4) The definition implies that there's something wrong with habit-forming drugs. But this is not an obvious truth. Coffee is habit-forming and use is encouraged. Alcohol is habit-forming, cigarettes are habit-forming. 1 in 4 American women use SSRIs every day of their life. And we don't even call that a habit. To the contrary, we call that "responsibly taking care of one's mental health!"
Author's Follow-up: October 28, 2023
Drug warriors will no doubt point to the case of hospital patients who are given a substance for pain relief and then become psychologically and perhaps even physically dependent on that drug. I have just three comments to attempt to pacify these statistically-challenged worrywarts.
1) The world is not perfect. We can never save everybody. Horse riding kills hundreds every year. Thousands of people die every year after taking aspirin. We have to put these things in perspective. It's cruel and unusual idiocy therefore to outlaw the use of time-honored godsends merely because they pose dangers to the unwary and thereby make children suffer in hospice. Even as I type this, there are many hospitals in India that do not stock morphine because of the Chicken Little fearmongering of puritanical American demagogues. Just think of all the terminal patients that are going through hell right now thanks to the irresponsible idiocy of stateside politicians. The Drug Warrior's answer is to deny adequate pain relief and relaxation (and spiritual quests, etc.) to billions and billions in order to save a handful of cases that can be portrayed on 48 Hours to a sound track of sobbing violins. This makes as much sense as denying food to your family because junior once choked on a chicken bone. It's also Christian Science gone mad.
2) When all drugs are legal and we have pharmacologically savvy empaths (instead of pill peddling psychiatrists), then such "addictions" are not going to be the end of the world for anybody. If anything, they may lead the supposed "addict" on a voyage of self-discovery with the responsible and guided use of empathogens and psychedelics. This is common sense -- but it's something that the Drug Warrior cannot imagine, for their puritan mindset renders them incapable of even thinking of fighting drugs with drugs. So much for the psychological aspects of so-called 'addiction.' The physical aspects can be treated by sleep cures of the kind that Jim Hogshire mentions in Opium for the Masses, and such cures can be expanded and perfected once we dump the anti-drug mindset that discourages such progress. In short, addiction need not be hell -- but Drug Warriors actually want it to be hell. Why? So that they can parlay the addict's pain into morality tales about the supposed evils of drugs.
3) Finally, as Carl Hart reminds us, the vast majority of drug users use drugs safely, despite the fact that their government is spending billions of dollars for the purpose of putting them in jeopardy.
Addiction
Addiction is a hugely fraught subject in the age of the drug war. This is because the Drug War does everything it can to make drug use dangerous. It encourages addiction by limiting our access to all but the handful of drugs that dealers find it practical and lucrative to supply. It fails to regulate product so that drug users cannot know the dose or even the quality of what they are ingesting. Meanwhile, the drug war censors honest talk about drug use.
In short, until we end the drug war, we will not know how much addiction is a true problem and how much it is an artifact of drug-war policy. And yet materialist researchers tell us that addiction is a "disease"? Why is it a disease to want to improve one's life with drugs? One could just as easily say that people are diseased, or at least masochistic, if they accept their limitations in life without doing everything they can to transcend them.
Indeed, the very idea that materialists are experts on psychoactive drug use is wrong. It is a category error. The proof is extant. Materialist researchers today are in total denial about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs. They maintain the lie that psychoactive drugs can only be proven effective by looking under a microscope, whereas the proof of such efficacy is right in front of them: in endless anecdotes, in human history, and even in psychological common sense, the kind of common sense that scientists ignore in the name of both drug war ideology and the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism.
The drug war is the ultimate case of fearmongering. And yet academics and historians fail to recognize it as such. They will protest eloquently against the outrages of the witch hunts of yore, but they are blind to the witch hunts of the present. What is a drug dealer but a modern service magician, someone who sells psychoactive medicine designed to effect personal ends for the user? They are simply providing an alternative to materialistic medicine, which ignores common sense and so ignores the glaringly obvious value of such substances.
If anyone manages to die during an ayahuasca ceremony, it is considered a knockdown argument against "drugs." If anyone dies during a hunting club get-together, it is considered the victim's own damn fault. The Drug War is the triumph of hypocritical idiocy.
Oregon has decided to go back to the braindead plan of treating substance use as a police matter. Might as well arrest people at home since America has already spread their drug-hating Christian Science religion all over the world.
Trump is the prototypical drug warrior. He knows that he can destroy American freedoms by fearmongering. He has seen it work with the Drug War, which got rid of the 4th Amendment, religious freedom and is now going after free speech.
The line drawn between recreational and medical use is wishful thinking on the part of drug warriors. Recreation, according to Webster's, is "refreshment or diversion," and both have positive knock-on effects in the lives of real people.
This is the "Oprah fallacy," which has led to so much suffering. She told women they were fools if they accepted a drink from a man. That's crazy. If we are terrified by such a statistically improbable event, we should be absolutely horrified by horses and skateboards.
In an article about Mazatec mushroom use, the author says: "Mushrooms should not be considered a drug." He misses the point: NOTHING should be considered a drug: every substance has potential good uses.
Rick Strassman isn't sure that DMT should be legal. Really?! Does he not realize how dangerous it is to chemically extract DMT from plants? In the name of safety, prohibitionists have encouraged dangerous ignorance and turned local police into busybody Nazis.
"When two men who have been in an aggressive mood toward each other take part in the ritual, one is able to say to the other, 'Come, let us drink, for there is something between us.' " re: the Mayan use of the balche drink in Encyc of Psych Plants, by Ratsch & Hofmann
LA Police Chief Daryl Gates said drug users should be summarily executed. William Bennett said drug dealers should be beheaded. These are the attitudes that the drug war inculcates. This racist and brutal ideology must be wiped out.
Scientists are censored as to what they can study thanks to drug law. Instead of protesting that outrage, they lend a false scientific veneer to those laws via their materialist obsession with reductionism, which blinds them to the obvious godsend effects of outlawed substances.
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, Four reasons why Addiction is a political term published on October 28, 2023 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)
ddiction is not an objective term, it is a political term. It is another Drug War invention designed to pathologize the victims of prohibition.
Drug warriors will no doubt point to the case of hospital patients who are given a substance for pain relief and then become psychologically and perhaps even physically dependent on that drug. I have just three comments to attempt to pacify these statistically-challenged worrywarts.
You have been reading an article entitled, Four reasons why Addiction is a political term published on October 28, 2023 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)