o 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 to inspire faith in humanity and compassion for others
The use of morphine 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 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. 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.
Now the folks who helped Matthew get Ketamine must be sacrificed on the altar of the Drug War, lest people start thinking that the Drug War itself was at fault.y
Materialists are always trying to outdo each other in describing the insignificance of humankind. Crick at least said we were "a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Musk downsizes us further to one single microbe. He wins!
The press is having a field day with the Matthew Perry story. They love to have a nice occasion to demonize drugs. I wonder how many decades must pass before they realize that people are killed by ignorance and a corrupted drug supply, not by the drugs themselves.
In the board game "Sky Team," you collect "coffees" to improve your flying skills. Funny how the use of any other brain-focusing "drug" in real life is considered to be an obvious sign of impairment.
I passed a sign that says "Trust Trump." What does that mean? Trust him to crack down on his opposition using the U.S. Army? Or trust him not to do all the anti-American things that he's saying he's going to do.
What bothers me about AI is that everyone's so excited to see what computers can do, while no one's excited to see what the human mind can do, since we refuse to improve it with mind-enhancing drugs.
The sad fact is that America regularly arrests people whose only crime is that they are keeping performance anxiety at bay... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.
The drug war is being used as a wrecking ball to destroy democratic freedoms. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and freedom of religion and given the police the right to confiscate the property of peaceful and productive citizens.
Typical materialist protocol. Take all the "wonder" out of the drug and sell it as a one-size-fits all "reductionist" cure for anxiety. Notice that they refer to hallucinations and euphoria as "adverse effects." What next? Communion wine with the religion taken out of it?
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, How Prohibition Causes Addiction published on September 20, 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)
o 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.
You have been reading an article entitled, How Prohibition Causes Addiction published on September 20, 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)