have trouble believing that any shaman would ever end a healing ceremony by concluding that their client required a gluten-free diet. True, the shaman's suggestions may include dietary habits that just so happen to minimize gluten intake, but the shaman would never believe that digestive complaints were caused solely and exclusively by one single factor, like the presence of gluten. This is very different from the western mindset, where we look for easy answers and so we search for villainous singletons: one particular substance upon which we can blame all that is wrong with our life, and gluten is one such scapegoat that is singled out these days by many modern hypochondriacs from the lineup of the usual controversial substances.
Please don't misunderstand me. I am sure that the ingestion of gluten can be positively correlated with health concerns in certain individuals. What I object to is the reification of gluten intolerance as a concrete physical illness: it is rather just a way that 20th century westerners can make sense of their suffering in a kind of causational shorthand. For the fact is that the discomfort that we associate uniquely with gluten intake can more properly be considered as an outcome of a vast array of life circumstances, including one's psychological outlook. The west, however, tends to consider gluten intolerance outside of all context, as a stroke of destiny with which one has to live for a lifetime, and that one need look no further for the culprit of one's discontents, for it has been caught red-handed, as it were: gluten is the self-sufficient villain of this piece. But life is really not that simple.
Take me, for instance. I used to suffer from stomachaches in my late teens after drinking a lot of milk. But I loved milk shakes and never considered myself lactose intolerant. Actually, the term did not even exist at the time, but the point is that I never considered milk to be the problem. Why not? Because like many teenagers, I was dealing with a lot of issues at the time and it somehow made sense to me (on some subconscious level at least) that my angst could affect my digestion. In fact, I had often noticed a direct correlation between my mood and my digestion during my teenage years. And indeed my apparent milk intolerance disappeared in subsequent years as the teenage angst was replaced by a somewhat more confident outlook on life and its troubles. Now, I could have "come out" in my teenage years as "lactose intolerant," had either of those terms been in public parlance at the time, but such a declaration would have simply disguised the more fundamental nature of my gastrointestinal problems, namely, my poor self-image. Yes, there was a positive correlation between milk drinking and stomach pain back then, but correlation is not cause - and certainly not the "final" cause of Aristotle's philosophy -- except when we seek easy answers to complex problems.
Of course, this is just the way science likes it. By focusing on this one apparent cause, which exists far downstream of many other unacknowledged factors and influences, science can claim both to have discovered a new disease, like gluten intolerance, and the "cure" for that disease, in this case with their prescription of a gluten-free diet for the suffering. And so the myth of all-knowing science is perpetuated, as it claims mastery both in the physical and the psychological realms (which, to materialists, however, are ultimately one and the same). Science, however, continues dogmatically to ignore the most important thing of all when it comes to our health: namely, one's psychological attitudes, about life, about love, and about oneself.
This is no surprise because materialist science considers that consciousness itself is a mere freak, an accident that came along as a result of mindless evolution. Just ask Richard Dawkins, or Neil deGrasse Tyson, for that matter. This, I think, is why we so often hear of doctors being astonished when patients have the nerve to keep living well in spite of being diagnosed as terminally ill based on clear medical facts: because the power of the mind has yet to be calculated and is only now becoming apparent in the usage reports of those seeking healing from entheogens, like psilocybin and ayahuasca. The latest reports I've been reading about psilocybin speak of it curing diabetes, in light of which it would be no surprise at all if a properly guided entheogenic experience could make "quick work" of gluten intolerance as well.
What, then, does the gluten-free proponent have in common with the Drug Warrior? They both are motivated by a search for easy answers. The gluten sufferer tells us that gluten is bad, end of discussion: not bad in this circumstance or that, but simply bad, bad, bad. When it comes to psychoactive drugs, the Drug Warrior tells us the same thing: that drugs are bad; not bad in this or that circumstance, but bad, bad, bad. And the knock-on effects of this childish attitude? We box with shadows instead of combatting the real villains in our lives.
I am not, of course, suggesting that anyone change their diets here and now. If you have associated health issues with gluten, that association is probably real. As Vox magazine reports, "There are, in fact, a tiny fraction of people who have celiac disease or wheat allergies and truly can't eat gluten." But gluten intolerance for most of us is not the same as having blue eyes or red hair. It can be overcome, as can agoraphobia, and fear of heights, and fear of flying... or even lactose intolerance, for that matter. These conditions are life sentences only in the minds of westerners who have yet to learn of the mind-improving powers of psychedelics like psilocybin. Remember, Paul Stamets learned to stop his teenage stuttering in just one afternoon thanks to his consumption of psychedelic mushrooms. That's a far better outcome than needlessly embracing one's disability and being proud of it. "My name is Paul St-St-Stamets and I am pr-pr-proud to be a stutterer." We'd be like: "No, Paul, don't embrace your stuttering: rise above it with godsend medicines!"
Now, I have nothing against vegetarians and vegans. They may even be "right" in the metaphysical sense of that word when it comes to the morality of our food selections. But I have noticed that all the gluten-free people I know were (or are) also vegans, and all those vegans were also vegetarians in the past. In other words, there seems to be a trend here. To say that one is gluten-free these days seems to be a statement of personal identity as much as it is a comment about one's personal health-related shortcomings. What identity? Well, it depends on one's point of view. A generous soul might say that a gluten-free person is someone who is particularly careful about their health... whereas a curmudgeon might complain that they are hypochondriacs with a penchant for putting their moral superiority on display whenever the topic of discussion turns to food preferences. I am personally willing to take the sufferer at their word, that their claims of gluten intolerance are meant as statements of fact rather than as coy winks toward a certain sociopolitical outlook, but in that case, I hope they'll also reflect on the fact that digestion is not destiny and that they have the power to change in this age of the psychedelic renaissance.
Musk and co. want to make us more robot-like with AI, when they should be trying to make us more human-like with sacred medicine. Only humans can gain creativity from plant medicine. All AI can do is harvest the knowledge that eventually results from that creativity.
Folks who believe in the drug war should consider that it is a multi-billion-dollar campaign to enforce the attitude of the Pizarro's of the world when it comes to non-western medicines. It is the apotheosis of the colonialism that most people claim to hate.
Check out the 2021 article in Forbes in which a materialist doctor professes to doubt whether laughing gas could help the depressed. Materialists are committed to seeing the world from the POV of Spock from Star Trek.
Prohibitionists have blood on their hands. People do not naturally die in the tens of thousands from opioid use, notwithstanding the lies of 19th-century missionaries in China. It takes bad drug policy to accomplish that.
We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
Like when Laura Sanders tells us in Science News that depression is an intractable problem, she should rather tell us: "Depression is an intractable problem... that is, in a world wherein we refuse to consider the benefits of 'drugs,' let alone to fight for their beneficial use."
The benefits of entheogens read like the ultimate wish-list for psychiatrists. It's a shame that so many of them are still mounting a rear guard action to defend their psychiatric pill mill -- which demoralizes clients by turning them into lifetime patients.
Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks: J'excuse! People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took prohibition to bring that about.
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands? Prohibitionists, j'accuse!
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, Gluten-Free Drug Warriors: or why digestion is not destiny, published on July 4, 2024 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)
have trouble believing that any shaman would ever end a healing ceremony by concluding that their client required a gluten-free diet. True, the shaman's suggestions may include dietary habits that just so happen to minimize gluten intake, but the shaman would never believe that digestive complaints were caused solely and exclusively by one single factor, like the presence of gluten. This is very different from the western mindset, where we look for easy answers and so we search for villainous singletons: one particular substance upon which we can blame all that is wrong with our life, and gluten is one such scapegoat that is singled out these days by many modern hypochondriacs from the lineup of the usual controversial substances. 
You have been reading an article entitled, Gluten-Free Drug Warriors: or why digestion is not destiny, published on July 4, 2024 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)