Back in late January of this year, I went on record as the only philosopher in the country to point out that assisted suicide for the depressed cannot be discussed ethically without also discussing the drug prohibition which makes it necessary, at least in the minds of the depressed1. In other words, I pointed out that you cannot talk ethically about assisted suicide for the depressed without at least mentioning the fact that our government outlaws all substances that inspire and elate. I was sharing this insight in response to a New York Times article by "global healthcare reporter" Stephanie Nolen about the attempts of depressed Canadian Claire Brosseau to qualify for state assisted suicide, a story in which nobody mentioned the fact that drug prohibition had outlawed drugs that could help make Brosseau wish to live2. Surely, I felt, I merely needed to point out this glaring omission on the part of the principals in Claire's case and they would speak out against drug prohibition as a violation of Claire's right to heal, the more so in that failing to do so could lead to Claire's unnecessary death by convincing her that she was truly out of hope.
In fact, I wrote to Claire herself, urging her to stop advocating for her totally unprecedented right to be killed by the state and to advocate instead for her time-honored right to heal, to advocate instead for her right to feel relief, to advocate instead for an end to drug prohibition.
Well, it's been a frustrating but eye-opening three months -- because I found that no one connected with Claire's case (not even Claire herself) saw any connection whatsoever between drug prohibition and assisted suicide for the depressed. I've written to at least 20 of the mainstream "players" in the online debate over assisted suicide for the depressed in the last three months, and I have been either ghosted or gaslighted by them all. And so I asked myself, where do I go from here? I was basically making the seemingly modest claim that drug use is better than dying, and yet people were disagreeing with me, if only implicitly. How am I supposed to argue after that? Do I have to start listing the downsides of being dead, with footnotes referencing academics who have done studies on the subject to support those conclusions? I really felt like the mainstream was gaslighting me on this topic. But I soon realized what the real take-home message was from this politically correct silence about my claims. I realized that Americans truly were brainwashed by Drug War propaganda into believing that drugs can have no positive uses -- otherwise they would cry "foul" when the state began killing people who might otherwise have been encouraged to live with the help of outlawed medicines.
It's a tough subject to write about. What do you say when the most powerful and obvious arguments fail to convince?
Fortunately, I have at least one option remaining to me. If I can't convince the "experts" to acknowledge common sense, at least I can play the role of a Socratic gadfly by posting some politically incorrect comments in response to their mainstream essays on sites like Mad in America. I say sites LIKE Mad in America, but actually this is the only site I know where I have the ability to post my comments prominently in response to brand-new mainstream essays. This ability came about after I purchased a year's subscription to the site under the mistaken belief that they would actually publish my essays on these topics. This was before site and organization founder Robert Whitaker started gaslighting me about the perfectly obvious relevance of drug prohibition to the case of Claire Brosseau, whom, if she dies, will have been sacrificed on the Christian Science altar of America's superstitious attitudes toward drugs. But I decided to keep the subscription as long as it guaranteed me the right to turn up the heat on the mainstream with some straight talk about drug benefits in the comments section.
By the way, this setup seems too good to be true, so I will try not to be surprised when my ability to comment has been restricted or withdrawn by Robert and company.
In the meantime, however, let's see how many chains I can rattle with the following comments posted today in response to a new MIA essay by Psychologist Richard Sears entitled “It Was Like They Crushed a Beautiful Flower”: Families Speak Out on the Harms of ECT.
The term "hard" is just our modern term for the kinds of drugs that doctors of yore used to call panaceas
I can't believe people. Somebody's telling me that "drugs" is not used problematically. It is CONSTANTLY used with a sneer in the voice when politicians want to diss somebody, as in, "Oh, they're in favor of DRUGS!!!" It's a political term as used today!
A company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.
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.
The U.S. government created violence out of whole cloth in America's inner cities with drug prohibition -- and now it is using that violence as an excuse to kick the people that they themselves have knocked down.
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.
There are a potentially vast number of non-addictive drugs that could be used strategically in therapy. They elate and "free the tongue" to help talk therapy really work. Even "addictive" drugs can be used non-addictively, prohibitionist propaganda notwithstanding.
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?
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.
In response to a tweet that "some drugs cannot be used wisely for recreational purposes": The problem is, most people draw such conclusions based on general impressions inspired by a media that demonizes drugs. In reality, it's hard to imagine a drug that cannot theoretically be used wisely for recreation at some dose, in some context.
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