As a chronic depressive retiree, I take exception to the glacially advancing way that drugs like MDMA are being studied today. Such meds work in an holistic manner and should not be subject to materialist criteria for "efficacy." They work. Everybody knows it. This requirement for scientific proof is really just a way to slow down re-legalization 2 of such drugs and to make sure that it will have as little impact as possible on pharmaceutical companies if and when it finally occurs.
Thanks to this willful ignorance on the part of science, I will be DEAD long before institutions like Emory ever get around to "proving" that MDMA might be effective in some way for me.
And so I will not be eligible for your trials, on the grounds that I merely am depressed and do not "have" PTSD. And yet I obviously have PTSD in a philosophical sense. EVERYBODY has PTSD to some degree: that's what neurosis is all about: it is the ingrained subconscious memorization of counterproductive emotional responses engendered by incidents in the past (whether the triggering conditions are consciously remembered or not).
And yet everyone plays along with the idea that a board-certified PTSD has nothing to do with me -- and that's just a materialist bias, thanks to which we reify conditions like PTSD as things in themselves. This is convenient for drug makers because it gives them endless markets to exploit: as many markets as we decide to devise separate and discrete "illnesses" for in the DSM. But this "disease mongering" is based on philosophical assumptions that are sharply at odds with the ideas of holism championed by the Cosmovision of the Andes and the indigenous attitude in general according to which health is a balance of a wide range of factors. Materialists, to the contrary, seek to limit the number of variables in their studies, thereby bolstering their hubristic pretensions for having perfect knowledge about all things. But the price they pay is that their conclusions do not apply to real people in the messy world of intertwined causes and effects, but merely to abstracted stand-ins, denuded of everything that makes them human.
Actually, however, it is common sense that MDMA could help me. Common sense! (Just read the standard reports of users and tell me it is not a wish list for busting depression -- not just from the drug use itself but from the health-inspiring benefit of ANTICIPATION of use, something that materialists never consider!) But materialist Drug Warriors would have us MAKE BELIEVE that we do not know that entheogenic medicines work. They demand that real help must be proven scientifically in a very expensive and time-consuming way -- and then only by thinking of MDMA with respect to one single board-certified condition at a time. This is really just a new way of suppressing the kind of holistic drugs that "only" work according to indigenous peoples -- or according to anecdote, which scientists these days feel free to ignore, even when the use of MDMA promoted unprecedented peace, love and understanding on the dance floors of Britain in the 1990s.
That Camelot was brought to an end when the UK police cracked down on Ecstasy use, after which alcohol became the drug of choice and the dance floors devolved into chaos -- requiring that concert organizers hire special forces troops to keep the peace!!!
And why? Because a 100-pound girl died from dehydration because UK leaders preferred to demonize Ecstasy rather than to teach safe use3.
This is one of many problems with the drug approval process at least when it comes to psychoactive medicine: not only does the FDA ignore glaringly obvious drug benefits as mentioned above, but they never take into account the risks of NOT approving a drug -- which, in the case of MDMA, means, for one thing, the increased use of alcohol.
I am writing this because I received a heads-up from the MAPS organization45 that you were in search of participants for an FDA trial. Notwithstanding the above complaints, such studies as yours are "the only game in town" for people who wish to access MDMA legally for health reasons. However, as I appear to be barred from benefiting from MDMA legally -- at least in this lifetime -- I wanted at least to go on record as deploring the glacial pace of drug re-approval that is keeping a godsend medicine from those in need -- all under the warped idea that the best drug policy is to teach fear and to demonize substances rather than to learn how to use them as safely and as wisely as possible.
Sincerely Yours
PS All drugs obviously have negative potentials. But this is an FDA that approves of brain-damaging shock therapy and of the psychiatric pill mill 6 , thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma 78 meds for life9. You cannot tell me that their scruples about MDMA safety make sense given this back story, least of all in a country that countenances tens of thousands of deaths each year due to alcohol10, a drug whose use MDMA could help to decrease!
Author's Follow-up: September 6, 2024
A reader might complain, "Yes, but we live in a materialist society, so we have to play by the rules of science." To which I say, we need to expose this materialist bias, not pretend that it does not exist. Only by exposing it can we show that the demonization of drugs is not common sense but is rather based on human presuppositions that are open to debate, especially insofar as the US view has never been championed by indigenous communities. If we cannot get the US and its ideological partners to change their dogmatically jaundiced views of psychoactive medicine, then maybe we can at least get them to recognize that the philosophy underlying their hatred is not universally accepted and so get them to stop bullying other countries into hating drugs too, especially when confronted with the observation that doing so is nothing less than pharmacological colonialism.
The FDA approves of brain-damaging shock therapy but will not approve MDMA for soldiers with PTSD. This is the same FDA that signs off on the psychiatric pill mill upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life. This is the same FDA that approves Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself! (Can somebody say "follow the money"?)
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!
It's a category error to say that scientists can tell us if psychoactive drugs "really work." It's like asking Dr. Spock of Star Trek if hugging "really works." ("Hugging is highly illogical, Captain.")
America never ended prohibition. It just redirected prohibition from alcohol to all of alcohol's competitors.
The Drug War is based on two HUGE lies: 1) that prohibition has no downsides, & 2) that drug use has no upsides.
The Drug Warriors say: "Don't tread on me! (That said, please continue to tell me what plants I can use, how much pain relief I can get, and whether my religion is true or not.)"
When folks banned opium, they did not just ban a drug: they banned the philosophical and artistic insights that the drug has been known to inspire in writers like Poe, Lovecraft and De Quincey.
It's already risky to engage in free and honest speech about drugs online: Colorado politicians tried to make it absolutely illegal in February 2024. The DRUG WAR IS ALL ABOUT DESTROYING DEMOCRACY THRU IGNORANT AND INTOLERANT FEARMONGERING.
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
This is why America is creeping toward authoritarianism -- because of the prohibitionists' ability to get away with everything by blaming "drugs." The fact that Americans still fall for this crap represents a kind of collective pathology.
There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!
