How the Drug War has blinded Gabor Maté to the great addiction crisis of our time
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
May 11, 2020
began reading Gabor Maté's popular book on addiction yesterday ("In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts") but gave it up in disappointment after the first 20 pages convinced me that the author was in the thrall of not only Drug War propaganda, but also of the propaganda of Big Pharma as well. My original interest in the book was prompted by the story of his use of ayahuasca to treat addicts and the predictable state suppression that it brought about as Canada attempts to keep in lockstep with America's anti-patient war on mother nature's plants, more commonly (and misleadingly) referred to as the Drug War. But if we want countries like Canada to change their policies on these topics, we have to see through the Drug Warrior lies and assumptions to what's really going on, and Maté seems to be just as blinded on this topic as virtually everyone else in mainstream Western society.
First of all, the very use of the term "addiction" invites us to moralize and pry into a user's past to investigate their inner demons. But this judgmental word, "addiction," only came into fashion with the Drug War itself, before which opium enthusiasts, for instance, were merely designated neutrally as "habitues" when they used the drug with a frequency that rendered withdrawal difficult. The judgemental term "addiction" is attractive to Westerners because it helps us Medicalize what we consider to be "the drug problem" - but Gabor's notion that virtually all addiction (i.e. habituation) can be traced to inner pain is just plain wrong. Was Benjamin Franklin dealing with inner pain when he liberally availed himself of opium? Was Sigmund Freud dealing with inner pain when he used massive amounts of cocaine? Was Richard Feynman dealing with inner pain when he casually popped pills that we would derisively refer to today as "speed"? Is a blues musician, for that matter, dealing with inner pain when he or she uses daily marijuana in order to "keep in the groove"?
Let's be honest: the real crime of folks like Franklin, Freud and Feynman is that they self-medicated. They had the gall to bypass the medical establishment which claims to have a monopoly on deciding when and how a human being should adjust their mood.
So this is the first mistake that Gabor makes: he is simply wrong that all (or even most) addiction can be explained by a person's inner pain.
But Gabor compounds this error by his apparent blindness to the great addiction crisis of our time. I say "apparent blindness" because the first 20 pages of his highly praised book on addiction says absolutely NOTHING about this massive addiction: namely, the fact that one in eight American males (and one in four American females) are addicted to Big Pharma medications, antidepressants and benzodiazepines (and I'm sure there are comparably egregious statistics among Maté's fellow Canadians). Is the take-home message from this stealth drug crisis merely that large segments of the American population are dealing with inner pain? No. The take-home message is that Big Pharma is cranking out highly addictive medications while simultaneously suborning the medical world into remaining silent about the overmedicated dystopia that it is thereby creating.
The problem is that Maté, like most Western academics, seems to think that there's a meaningful difference between "addiction" and "chemical dependency." According to this line of reasoning, substances like heroin truly addict you and are therefore "drugs," while substances like antidepressants merely render you chemically dependent and are therefore "medications." But the supposed differences here are largely illusory, especially from a user point of view. To see why, let's examine Webster's definition of the term "addiction":
Addiction: The compulsive uncontrolled use of habit-forming drugs beyond the period of medical need or under conditions harmful to society.
One could argue that the antidepressant user is not compulsive and does not behave in an uncontrolled fashion. Yes, but why is that so? That is so because the supply of medication is always forthcoming. A patient in need of an SSRI is never told by the pharmacist that the supply will be delayed due to the recent arrest of a drug runner. Nor does a pharmacist ever "top off" the contents of an SSRI capsule with boric acid or baby powder as a cost-saving measure. And so we're unlikely to see ragged-out white collar workers, sweating and puking on the streets because they're going cold turkey on an anti-depressant or have consumed tainted product. The safe and pristine supply of their go-to drug is guaranteed and, as they're admonished by their own doctor to take the drug for life, withdrawal symptoms never have a chance to occur, least of all in public venues where we can see the cramping and vomiting and think to ourselves, as we do of the strung-out heroin addict: "Tsk-tsk, that poor SSRI addict!"
And so SSRIs do not meet the criterion of "addiction" according to which they must be used "beyond the period of medical need," but this is only because the doctors who prescribe them claim that the period of medical need never ends, which is a very convenient claim indeed, considering that these drugs, which were originally meant for short-term use only, have since proven to be highly habit-forming.
And so, nit-picking aside, the daily use of antidepressants seems to qualify as an addiction according to Webster's Dictionary - until, that is, we read the final subjective criterion of the definition, namely that addiction occurs "under conditions harmful to society."
Here we come to the truth about addiction: it's a pejorative and subjective term, used only in connection with substances that we as a drug-warrior society have decided to denigrate and demonize as harmful. There is therefore a kind of political agenda behind the use of the term "addiction," that is, to implicitly demonize certain plant medicines (namely the illegal ones) while implicitly canonizing others (legally synthesized antidepressants and benzodiazepines). A society that is free of drug-war presuppositions, however, would simply class all psychoactive substances as psychoactive substances and treat them all equally according to the objective and statistical threats that they pose to an unwary user. Instead, we give Big Pharma a free pass to wreak damage with its "medicines," while we wave a disapprobatory finger in the face of those who use "drugs" like heroin. Meanwhile, we fail to register the fact that many of the latter "drug" users could live just as happily in society as their antidepressant-using neighbors, were their drug supply rendered as safe and reliable as that of their law-abiding fellows.
Of course, many people are fed up with being dependent on a given psychoactive substance, precisely because of the dependency itself. But here we encounter another drug-war bias in the way that we think about such topics. Drug Warriors will loudly decry the mere potential of addiction that certain illegal substances might seem to pose, but, like Maté himself in the opening of his book on this subject, they say absolutely nothing about the great dependency of our time: the fact that 1 in 8 American males and 1 in 4 American females are addicted to legal antidepressants, with similar numbers around the globe, at least in Western countries.
For my part, I've always thought that the worst part about an addiction was that it forced me to rely on other people. Yet I find that almost no one -- neither Drug Warriors nor psychiatrists - has a problem with the fact that my addiction to Effexor has made me reliant on prescribing psychiatrists and has thus turned me into an eternal patient and a ward of the state. Talk about disempowering. I have to travel 40 miles every three months to meet with a psychiatrist in a mental health clinic for a half-hour in order to tell him how I feel. God, I've been a patient for 40 years, what business is it of his???
This is why I make the following otherwise unheard-of claim: that not only can a so-called "drug user" be said to be "self-medicating," but he or she is often right to do so. Consider the options, after all, for someone who desires psychological healing. They can...
One: take the legal route, and become addicted for life to a drug that conduces to anhedonia, for which they will have to make regular pilgrimages to a mental health clinic, in order to receive a three-month drug supply for which they will have to pay dearly, all the time being reminded by this time-consuming rigamarole that they are an eternal patient and a ward of the state...
Or they can...
Two: Buy a psychoactive plant medicine on the black market and, if they've done their research and been lucky, get their head screwed back on straight inexpensively and without having been turned into an eternal patient by doing so.
Ironically, under the Drug War's starkly limited psychoactive pharmacopoeia of addictive pills, it almost seems like going the legal route would itself be a sign of mental illness, or at least of pathologically poor judgment.
My goal here is not to slam talk therapy per se, nor to deny that Gabor makes great progress with his patients. But the fact that he's been stymied in that goal by the Drug War itself means that it's imperative for him and other professionals like him to start seeing through the mist of Drug Warrior lies (the hypocrisy, the newspeak, and the hidden premises) and see clearly what is going on in the world with respect to psychoactive substances, their regulation, and the dilemmas that these legal circumstances pose for well-intentioned people who just want peace of mind without being treated like criminals by law enforcement (or being derisively dismissed as self-medicators by psychiatrists). Only by divining and then shunning the many false Drug War assumptions can we disenchant the world from the spell of that anti-patient and violence-causing crusade.
Meanwhile, we should stop imputing pathology to drug users merely because they have chosen to buy plant medicines that have been unjustly proscribed by politicians, and in violation of natural law at that, especially when the drug user's alternative was to turn his or herself into an eternal patient, forced to visit a therapist every three months of their life and, like the Ancient Mariner, recite the same old personal narrative on every demoralizing visit.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Of course, Gabor has grabbed onto part of the truth. The Drug War does stop us from dealing with the underlying conditions that often lead to dysfunctional behavior. This makes it a godsend for conservatives, because if we weren't seeing everything through the lens of the Drug War, we'd have to deal with the great inequities of modern social life in terms of education and opportunities. And the Drug War has worked incredibly well for conservatives in this regard. It's no coincidence that the death of '60s idealism coincided with the creation of the DEA and the ascendancy of Drug War conservatives like Ronald Reagan, folks who wanted guns and business to be as unregulated as possible while they yet prosecuted an unprecedented crack down on mere possession of psychoactive plants. They wanted capitalism that was unfettered by the idealistic visions that tended to arise from expanded consciousness. So they simply made expanded consciousness a felony, to ensure their political hegemony by force of law.
Nor do I scorn Gabor's psychotherapeutic approach, an approach which I trust will be infinitely more fruitful in the future when it is aided by some of the psychoactive plant medicines that modern psychiatrists have dutifully ignored to date in deference to the Christian Science imperative of the Drug War.
Gabor's mistake, I believe, is to automatically associate illicit drug use with pathology -- when, as I've attempted to show above, there are many rational reasons why a thoughtful human being in search of mood medicine would seek a black-market alternative to the psychiatric status quo, a status quo that would otherwise turn him or her into an eternal patient and thus a ward of the health care state, destined to spend a life-time being emotionally catechized by strangers in order to receive yet another "fix" from Big Pharma's expensive, limited, and highly addictive pharmacopoeia. Indeed, if Gabor is in search of pathology, he may well find more of it in Americans who placidly submit themselves to such a life-sapping and disempowering status quo, since the ready acceptance of such a scheme, as legal as it might be, would seem to signal a poor self-image and masochism -- or at very least an inability to clearly see how the Drug War is depriving him or her of chemical godsends that might otherwise have afforded emotional salvation.
The Links Police
Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, I profiled you as a probable druggie. Pardon me while I search for some plausible reason to rifle through your car. Sadly, your tail lights all seem to be in order... While I'm nosing about like a noxious busybody, do me a solid and check out these additional essays on the topic of addiction...'
Most authors today reckon without the drug war -- unless they are writing specifically about "drugs" -- and even then they tend to approach the subject in a way that clearly demonstrates that they have been brainwashed by drug war orthodoxy, even if they do not realize it themselves. That's why I write my philosophical book reviews, to point out this hypocrisy that no other philosopher in the world is pointing out. (Hey, if I thought I would ever be recognized in this lifetime, I would be humble and patient -- but it's clear to me that I'm to be largely ignored here-below until such time as I bite some serious dust, so you'll just have to put up with my horn-blowing, fair enough?)
I have written dozens of essays about antidepressants and the Drug War, but it is important to read this one first, for it contains the most up-to-date info on my battle to get off such drugs. This reading order is important because I declared premature victory against the SNRI called Effexor in recent essays, only to discover that the drug is far more insidious than I gave it credit for. It turns out withdrawing, at least for me, eventually led to deep feelings of abject despair, far greater than the depression for which I started taking the "med" in the first place.
The frustrating thing is, these feelings could be combatted by a host of drugs that we have outlawed in the name of our anti-scientific and anti-patient war on drugs. That much is just psychological common sense. But we have been taught to believe that there are no positive uses for opium, nor for cocaine, nor for coca, nor for MDMA, nor for laughing gas, nor for peyote, nor for the hundreds of inspiring phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, etc. etc. etc.
The truth is, rather, that Drug Warriors (and the millions whom they have brainwashed) do not WANT there to be positive uses for such drugs. No, they want me to "keep taking my meds" instead and so to enrich their investment portfolios in the pharmaceutical sector. Meanwhile, those without a vested financial interest have been taught that antidepressants are "scientific" and so they cannot understand my desire to get off them. They cannot understand the hell of being turned into a patient for life and having to make regular expensive and humiliating pilgrimages to psychiatrists (who are half one's own age) to bare one's soul for the purpose of obtaining an expensive prescription for a drug that numbs one's brain rather than inspiring it - and a drug which seems to counteract, dampen and/or repress most of the positive effects that I might have otherwise obtained by the few semi-legal alternatives to antidepressants, such as psilocybin and ayahuasca.
But it is just psychological common sense that I could withdraw successfully from Effexor with the advised use of a comprehensive pharmacy, including but not limited to the demonized substances listed above. But materialist science is not interested in common sense. And so they tell me that such drug use has not been proven to "work." But materialist doctors are not experts in what motivates me as a living, breathing, unique individual. The heart has its own reasons that reductionist science cannot understand. If I could look forward, at this moment, to relaxing with an opium pipe tonight, my mood would improve NOW, not just tonight. I would have something to look forward to. I would not feel the need to reach for that bottle full of Effexor pills that I was hoping to foreswear. Likewise, if I could use a drug to laugh and "touch the hand of God" (as with laughing gas and phenethylamines respectively), I could laugh at the pangs of despair that Effexor tries to throw my way.
Science's eternal response to such ideas is: "There is no proof that such things work!"
No, nor will there ever be in the age of the Drug War, in which such common sense use is punished by long jail terms and would never be favorably publicized, even if successful, since America's prime imperative in the age of the Drug War is to demonize psychoactive medicines, under the absurd assumption-laden idea that to talk honestly about drugs is to encourage their use.
Well, we SHOULD be encouraging their use in cases where they actually work, in cases, for instance, when they prevent guys like myself from killing themselves thanks to the knowledge that they are a bounden slave to the combined forces of the Drug War and Big Pharma's pill mill.
Besides, there is no proof that hugging works, but we do not need Dr. Spock of Star Trek to launch a study into that issue: we all know that hugging works by bringing two souls together both physically and spiritually. We do not need a map of brain chemistry to figure this out: the proof is extant, the proof is in the pudding.
But I haven't given up yet despite the setback in my most recent plan. I'm going to search the world for a place where I can get off antidepressants in a way that makes some psychological common sense.
Right now, all I see in terms of resources are a bunch of companies who, for large fees, will help me go cold turkey on antidepressants., or companies that claim to have found the right combination of legal herbal formulas that should make withdrawal easier. But to me, these are all what Percy Shelley would call "frail spells," concocted under the watchful eye of the Drug Warrior to make sure that nothing potent and obviously effective will get added to the mix. In fact, if a space alien came to earth and asked what sort of psychoactive drugs were outlawed, one could honestly answer: "Anything that obviously works."
Meanwhile, drug laws make it impossible for me to visit psychiatrists remotely online, requiring me instead to physically visit my doctors, thereby limiting rural residents like myself to accessing hayseed psychiatrists whose one area of expertise seems to be the writing of prescriptions for antidepressants. Talk to them about anything else, and their eyes glaze over. "That's all unproven," they'll say, "Or, no, we have yet to fully study such things." As if we have to study in order to realize that feeling good helps and can have positive psychological effects.
I'm sure that part of the problem with my withdrawal scheme is that I tried to get off the drug too quickly. But I only tried that because I can find no doctor who will compound the drug for me in a way that makes psychological common sense, namely, with daily miniscule reductions in dosage. My current psychiatrist told me that such compounding was unheard of and that I should drop doses by 37.5 mg at a time, since that is the lowest dose that the pharmaceutical companies create. He said I could start "counting pill beads" once I am down to a 37.5 mg daily dose if I wanted to taper still further.
I did find a compounding company that said it could compound Effexor in the way that I desire. But there's a big catch: they have to receive a prescription for that purpose. And I can find no doctor in the world who is willing to write me one. Even those who sympathize with my plight want me to become their full-time patient before they will even consider writing such a prescription.
So those who warned me against trying to get off Effexor were right in a way: it is extraordinarily difficult. But they feel to realize WHY this is so. It is not just because Effexor is a toxic drug, but also because the drug war has outlawed everything that could help me get off it.
This is why those pundits who sign off on the psychiatric pill mill are clueless about the huge problem with the war on drugs: the way it humiliates and disempowers millions. For it turns out that the phrase "No hope in dope" is true after all, but only when the dope in question is modern antidepressants.
OCTOBER 2024
Here are some of the many articles I have written about the philosophy of getting off drugs. Bear in mind that I am in the process of getting off Effexor myself and am exploring the power of "drugs to fight drugs" in so doing. And this is not a straightforward path given the sweeping limits that are imposed by drug law. So the question of exactly what might work (and how and when, etc.) is still wide open and I am advocating nothing, except the common sense notion that we can benefit from euphoria and mood boosts, yes, and that "drugs can be used to fight drugs," and in a safe way too -- a way that will prove far safer than prohibition, which continues to bring about daily deaths from drive-by shootings and unregulated product while causing civil wars overseas.
I guess what I am saying here is, this site is not purporting to offer medical advice. I avoid using such wording, however, because so many authors refuse to talk honestly about drugs, especially about positive drug use, for fear of being seen as giving medical advice, and this, of course, is just how drug warriors want matters to remain. It lets them shut down free speech about drugs.
Besides, I reject the idea that materialist doctors are the experts when it comes to how we think and feel about life. The best they can do as materialist is to tell us the potential physical risks of using holistically-operating drugs, but individuals are the experts on what motivates them in life, on their own particular hopes and dreams and on what risks they deem necessary to obtain them, to pursue happiness, that is, which objective our legislators outlawed when they outlawed all substances that can help facilitate happiness in the properly motivated and educated individual.
The real answer is not for authors to give groveling apologies for being honest, however: the real answer is for kids to be educated about the basics of wise substance use -- and for America to come to grips with the fact that we will always be surrounded by "drugs" -- and that the goal should be to ensure safe use, not to keep endlessly arresting minorities and removing them from the voting rolls on behalf of the clinically insane idea that we should outlaw mother nature to protect our kids -- and this in a purportedly Christian country whose very deity told us that his creation was good.
The DEA is a Schedule I agency. It has no known positive uses and is known to cause death and destruction.
To understand why the western world is blind to the benefits of "drugs," read "The Concept of Nature" by Whitehead. He unveils the scientific schizophrenia of the west, according to which the "real" world is invisible to us while our perceptions are mere "secondary" qualities.
I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.
Ann Lemke's case studies make the usual assumptions: getting free from addiction is a morality tale. No reference to how the drug war promotes addiction and how banned drugs could solve such problems. She does not say why daily SSRI use is acceptable while daily opium use is not. Etc.
The problem for alcoholics is that alcohol decreases rationality in proportion as it provides the desired self-transcendence. Outlawed drugs can provide self-transcendence with INCREASED rationality and be far more likely to keep the problem drinker off booze than abstinence.
The confusion arises because materialists insist that every psychological problem is actually a physical problem, hence the disease-mongering of the DSM. This is antithetical to the shamanic approach, which sees people holistically, as people, not patients.
The idea that "drugs" have no medical benefits is not science, it is philosophy, and bad philosophy at that. It is based on the idea that benefits must be molecularly demonstratable and not created from mere knock-on psychological effects of drug use, time-honored tho' they be.
It also bothers me that gun fanatics support the drug war. If I have no rights to mother nature, then they have no rights to guns. If the Fourth Amendment can be ignored based on lies and ignorance, then so can the Second.
The Drug War is based on a huge number of misconceptions and prejudices. Obviously it's about power and racism too. It's all of the above. But every time I don't mention one specifically, someone makes out that I'm a moron. Gotta love Twitter.
Until we legalize ALL psychoactive drugs, there will be no such thing as an addiction expert. In the meantime, it's insulting to be told by neuroscience that I'm an addictive type. It's pathologizing my just indignation at psychiatry's niggardly pharmacopoeia.
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, In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors: How the Drug War has blinded Gabor Maté to the great addiction crisis of our time, published on May 11, 2020 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)
began reading Gabor Maté's popular book on addiction yesterday ("In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts") but gave it up in disappointment after the first 20 pages convinced me that the author was in the thrall of not only Drug War propaganda, but also of the propaganda of Big Pharma as well. My original interest in the book was prompted by the story of his use of ayahuasca to treat addicts and the predictable state suppression that it brought about as Canada attempts to keep in lockstep with America's anti-patient war on mother nature's plants, more commonly (and misleadingly) referred to as the Drug War. But if we want countries like Canada to change their policies on these topics, we have to see through the Drug Warrior lies and assumptions to what's really going on, and Maté seems to be just as blinded on this topic as virtually everyone else in mainstream Western society.
You have been reading an article entitled, In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors: How the Drug War has blinded Gabor Maté to the great addiction crisis of our time, published on May 11, 2020 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)