To say that addiction is a brain disorder is bad science, but even worse philosophy. It's just a little convenient that addiction should be diagnosed in precisely those cases where people show a marked predilection for substances of which politicians disapprove. This label of addiction, moreover, represents a judgment about what constitutes the good life. When we say that addiction is wrong, we are saying basically that the search for self-transcendence is pathological, that one should be happy with the world as it is without drugs that give insight into higher realms, that the mind should not be improved. This, of course, is a sociopolitical/aesthetic/religious judgment, not a scientific one, the more so in that society holds muddled views about self-transcendence. Society believes that some kids need a form of speed called Ritalin in order to concentrate in class while simultaneously believing that no adult human beings ever require a similar boost in their powers of mentation. That's a logically incoherent position. And even if the search for self-transcendence has negative consequences in one's life, we cannot fairly evaluate any given case without first acknowledging the role that prohibition itself played in rendering use problematic. How? By strictly limiting the quality and quantity of available drugs while insisting that it's defeatist treason in the War on Drugs to teach safe use.
Addiction, in fact, is a natural result of prohibition. The outlawing of mind-enhancing drugs leads to a severe limit in the substances to which an illicit user has access. No wonder users get stuck on one specific drug: they had to leap huge dangerous hurdles just to have access to that one specific choice; they do not have a smorgasbord of obvious alternatives from which to choose. Nor should this come as a surprise. After all, a trillion-dollar effort is underway to ensure that users have no illicit options whatsoever.
We believe that addiction is an almost insurmountable disorder because we are blind to the ways that this phenomenon could be treated or even nipped in the bud. Why? Because to combat addiction, we need to be willing and able to use drugs to fight drugs, and that's something that today's indoctrinated doctors cannot imagine, having been programmed by their government since grade-school in the drug-hating ideology of Mary Baker Eddy. Doctors have this anti-scientific belief that drugs as chemically different as MDMA and coca are basically all the same thing: i.e., "drugs," in the pejorative sense of that word. And so they are blind to a vast array of therapies that would be common sense for anyone who was not a member of the Cult of the American Drug War.
Our therapeutic imaginations have been stunted by Drug War prejudices. Here is a list of a few of the many drug-enabled treatments that our "addicts" might undergo - or rather CHOOSE to undergo - in a world in which politicians no longer control how (and how much) we are allowed to think and feel in this life:
The use of MDMA 1 to inspire faith in humanity and compassion for others
The use of morphine 2 to inspire a surreal appreciation of Mother Nature (See Poe's "Tale of the Ragged Mountains")
The use of opium in order to gain perspective on one's life and jog one's creative faculties
The use of salvia to encounter encouraging "spirits" from another world (thereby following up the work left us by William James himself in investigating the true nature of reality)
A trip on DMT to divert the mind, encounter "spirits," etc., maybe even get hints about ultimate realities
A trip on psilocybin to help clarify one's goals in life
I can feel Euro-Americans cringing at these suggestions. After all, did we not travel west over 500 years ago in order to bully the locals into renouncing their quest for drug-inspired transcendence? And where would the addiction industry be today if everyone had the right to use substances of which politicians disapprove?
What I'm writing about here is the process of obfuscation. Is the drug you're using causing problems (besides the many caused by prohibition itself)? Then let's distract your mind with the effects of a wide variety of other substances.
Right now, drug law basically gives the user one choice: use your poison of choice or use nothing at all. But in a free world, we would be able to crowd the field of use with so many diverse substances that there would no longer be the monomaniacal focus on one specific drug which is said to be the hallmark of addiction. And if the predilection is for opioids, fine. We would teach the user how that taste can be accommodated safely and sanely with the nightly smoking of opium .
Unfortunately, Drug Warriors prefer that we be ignorant about drugs instead and fear them. And now they are pointing to the very downsides of that inane policy as a reason to continue their War on Drugs.
The Drug War is a superstition: it tells us that substances that we call "drugs" have no positive uses for anyone, at any dose, for any reason, in any circumstance, ever. In reality, there are no substances of that kind on earth. Even cyanide has positive uses.
Until modern science rejects this superstition, society will remain blind to an awesome list of drug-enabled psychoactive therapies that is limited only by our imagination, an imagination, alas, which has been atrophied thus far by the western world's religious and cultural disdain for altered states.
This prejudice will be hard to shake, of course, since the philosophy of the West (with a few notable exceptions such as William James) has always ignored the power of psychoactive medicines to teach us anything at all. Post-Enlightenment philosophers like Kant, for instance, tell us ex-cathedra that there are severe limits to what we can know about ultimate reality, but they knew nothing about the hints and road signs that appear to users of drugs like salvia, peyote, ayahuasca, LSD and ibogaine. Hume seemed to share Kant's ignorance on this topic, but that did not stop him from quickly dismissing drugs as an impractical way to change culture. Marx at least indirectly recognized the power of drugs when he told us that religion was the opiate of the masses. Unfortunately, he never stopped to consider what the world might be like if opium itself were the opiate of the masses, as Jim Hogshire suggested. The 20th century might have been a lot less bloody had everyday folk been minding their own business and seeking liberation on the mental front rather than listening in rapture as demagogues agitated on behalf of a highly speculative interpretation of the philosophy of Friedrich Hegel.
Author's Follow-up: November 13, 2023
Jim Hogshire told us In 1999 that there were already sleep cures for opium 3 addiction, that reduced much of the time and suffering of physical dependency upon opiates. Imagine how such treatments could blossom in a world where they were studied full-time and in which the use of ANY substance was encouraged provided that it held out hope for the individuals concerned. Imagine a world in which we spent billions on research rather than incarceration 4 . As far as psychological dependency, there is no reason for such a phenomena in which all substances are legal and we encourage understanding. In that case, it takes merely a little creativity to develop any number of protocols to divert the attention of a would-be psychological "addict" with substances that elate and inspire and take the individual's mind completely off of the substance that might otherwise threaten to become a problem drug.
But Drug Warriors rely on addiction as their trump card to inspire a superstitious fear of drugs, so that they can continue to win elections by screaming about law and order, thereby incarcerating their political enemies by first tempting the poor with the massive profits of prohibition and then following up by arresting them and removing them from the voting rolls.
Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.
Politicians protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment and encourage drug testing to ensure that drug war heretics starve.
In "How to Change Your Mind," Michael Pollan says psychedelic legalization would endanger young people. What? Prohibition forces users to decide for themselves which mushrooms are toxic, or to risk buying contaminated product. And that's safe, Michael?
It is a truism to say that we cannot change the world and that therefore we have to change ourselves -- but the drug war outlaws even this latter option.
If I want to use the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions, fight depression, or follow up on the research of William James into altered states, I should not have to live in fear of the DEA crashing down my door and shouting: "GO! GO! GO!"
If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.
Morphine can provide a vivid appreciation of mother nature in properly disposed minds. That should be seen as a benefit. Instead, dogma tells us that we must hate morphine for any use.
The DEA should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for withholding godsend medicine from the depressed. Here is just one typical drug-user report that appeared in "Pihkal": "A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like..."
As such, "we" are important. The sun is just a chaos of particles that "we" have selected out of the rest of the raw data and declared "This we shall call the sun!" "We" make this universe. Consciousness is fundamental.
We live in a make-believe world in the US. We created it by outlawing all potentially helpful psychological meds, after which the number-one cause of arrest soon became "drugs." We then made movies to enjoy our crackdown on TV... after a tough day of being drug tested at work.
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