uestion: Why do we never see calls for Psychoactive Therapy for mood disorders, only for Psychedelic Therapy for mood disorders?
Answer: Because 100+ years of prohibition propaganda (of focusing only on the downsides of "drug use") have convinced almost everybody in America, and so in the mental health field as well, that psychoactive medicines that have any addictive propensities whatsoever must and will always be used unadvisedly and cause addiction.
But this belief is just that: a belief, not a fact. To the extent that it is true, it is because drug law makes it so by limiting the choice of the "drug users" to a few addictive substances, sold by criminal organizations who profit (like Big Pharma, in fact) precisely to the extent that their nostrums bring about chemical dependence. Such drug use often ends in tragedy precisely because our laws are created with that goal in mind: the goal of ruining a "user's" life. And so, the Drug Warrior will look triumphantly at someone who dies of drugs and cry: "You see how horrible those evil drugs are?", meanwhile failing to notice that the death was brought about by ignorance combined with prohibition itself. As Andrew Weil points out in "From Chocolate to Morphine," even so-called overdose deaths from the "devil drug" of heroin are actually caused by the lack of pure and predictable supply, which is a result of the Drug War itself, not heroin. Thanks to prohibition, the users may think they are consuming a safe and usual dose when in reality they are receiving a dose of twice or thrice the normal potency.
Speaking of Weil's brave and classic book, one that deals with the facts about drugs, "warts and all," it should be required reading in every school, since it gives kids the facts and urges them to make wise choices as adults with respect to the psychoactive substances that they choose to employ. But the Drug Warrior hates nothing so much as honest education about psychoactive substances. They want us to fear "drugs," not to understand them. Through word, deed, and legislation about "drugs," they teach Americans nothing except to "Be afraid! Be very afraid!" T
Unfortunately, this fearmongering campaign has worked. The man behind the curtain has bellowed his hyperbolic threats about drugs and Americans have cowered accordingly.
That is why Drug War opponents are so often "on the back foot." They have grown up in a society where they have been taught to fear psychoactive substances, a world in which they received a teddy bear in grade school in return for a pledge to renounce their right to mother nature's bounty, a world in which TV and movies only showed "drug use" in a negative light, and a world in which academics never studied "drugs" except with the government-sanctioned goal of showing how harmful they can be, hence the proliferation of academic articles about "misuse" and "abuse" and the almost total absence of academic articles about positive use, potential or historical.
And so today's Drug War opponent, unwittingly influenced by such propaganda, often cuts a very apologetic figure in calling for legalization, saying, in effect, "Yes, some of these substances are horrible indeed, but prohibition is not the answer."
With friends like that in the legalization movement, we scarcely need enemies.
The fact is that drugs like cocaine, opium and even crack could be used on a therapeutic basis and without causing addiction -- even though an entire lifetime of propaganda has told us otherwise.
The ways that such meds could be used positively are so obvious that it's amazing that I have to even point them out -- and yet the Drug War ideology of substance demonization has so thoroughly scapegoated these substances that I have to speak as if to a child in making most Americans understand how psychoactive therapy could work.
First, we have to imagine the replacement of psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, western shamans who would be free to use any drug or combination of drugs in the world in conjunction with what is commonly referred to as "talk therapy." The goal of therapy would be the goal of the client, and that term is used advisedly, for such therapy would get rid of the very notion of a mental patient insofar as the shaman's visitors would be seeking not just to cure acknowledged pathologies such as depression but also to achieve a client's more general goals, such as improving their mental focus or their appreciation of nature or music, etc. The goal of the shamans, for their part, would be to identify the drug or drugs that will incline the partakers to be honest during therapy and to undergo experiences that, properly guided, could lead them to feelings and insights necessary for achieving the therapeutic goals that they have specified.
At least some of the psychoactive drugs to be employed in these sessions would be drawn from among those that psychiatrists have hitherto stigmatized with the label of "feel-good drugs." And why do professionals refer to substances as "feel-good drugs"? Partly in order to make a virtue of the necessity of intolerant drug laws (rather than protest the Drug War, claim that the drugs that it outlaws are therapeutically useless) and partly because of the false belief that psychiatry is a true science and therefore can only treat problems in a reductionist way, rather than "merely" making people feel good. But if it's any consolation to Puritans, the good feelings involved here have a therapeutic purpose: namely, to open minds and mouths, in order to let talk therapy at last fulfill its so-far poorly fulfilled promise of actually helping people. For sober talk therapy has always had limited results, for the simple reason that many "patients" self-censor themselves without even knowing it. I myself spent many wasted hours in therapy as a teen saying almost nothing, not because I was stonewalling, but because I really had no conscious insights into my situation and so really felt I had nothing meaningful to say.
One benefit of such therapy would be provided by its very existence: i.e., the therapeutic value of the anticipation generated by one's actually looking forward to a psychoactive session.
The depressed and anxious will necessarily be happier thanks to their anticipation of such therapy. Why? Because they know that the substances that are to be employed in the upcoming session will give them a blessed vacation from their gloomy introspection and nervousness.
The "drugs" themselves could be administered in a ceremonial or religious fashion, if the client so desired, but also in a more prosaic manner, by merely handing the pills, plants, fungi, and/or liquids to the clients. The goal, after all, is to meet the client's needs and desires, not to turn them into flower children -- or into materialists for that matter.. This process would avoid addicting the patient for multiple reasons: first because the names of the drugs thus employed need not be shared with the user except at their request; second because the shaman would so vary the drugs used on any particular visit as to minimize the development of tolerance, thirdly because the drugs will often be employed in mixtures, making the repetition of use almost impossible unless both the shaman and client conclude that such repetition would move the therapeutic process forward, i.e., contribute to more honesty and self-insight.
The clients would also be able to choose drug-free sessions, even to the point of banning coffee and tea from the room if desired. And so the proposed therapy need differ very little from the status quo, especially for clients who share the Christian Science biases of Mary Baker Eddy. On the other hand, the pharmacological assistance may be provided entirely by psychedelics: it's the client's choice.
In other words, I'm not saying that there's a problem with the idea of psychedelic therapy itself. The point of this essay is to say, however, that the true goal in a sane world would be to advance the goal of PSYCHOACTIVE therapy in general rather than to campaign for the legalization of psychedelic therapy alone.
Our failure to do so betrays our acceptance of the Drug Warrior lie that time-honored substances like opium and coca can have no beneficial uses -- at any dose, in any situations, for anyone, anywhere, ever. That's an anti-scientific lie, and no amount of Drug War propaganda should convince us to pretend otherwise.
October 12, 2023
Brian isn't advocating for drugs to be legal in a medical setting only. The proposed therapy would be an option for users in a world wherein the government no longer decided how much you could think and feel in life -- that is, in a world wherein Mother Nature (and the medicines derived therefrom) were legal (once again). Many folks have empaths in their own life that could help in this way, once we wrench the therapeutic practice out of the hands of myopic reduction-prone materialists.
Author's Follow-up: October 12, 2023
If you doubt that the Drug War is out to ruin the lives of users, check out "Drug Warriors and Their Prey" by Richard Lawrence Miller, where the author reports that safe users were the pet peeve of Drug Czar William Bennett. He actually thought that responsible users set a bad example (that's right, a BAD example) and so should have their names published in newspapers and have their employers informed about their safe use. It's hard to say what's more breathtaking here, the intolerance or the stupidity.
Author's Follow-up: November 3, 2023
The idea that doctors should be in charge of treating people with psychoactive substances is crazy. It's like having a doctor teach people to ride horses. There is a lot more to horseback riding than physical safety. In fact, the majority of horseback riding is about thinks of which the doctor as such is blissfully ignorant. It's the same with psychoactive drugs. What does the doctor know of the users desire for self-transcendence and their ambition to think clearly with mind-focusing drugs, etc.? The doctor has zero qualifications in this field. As with horseback riding, he or she can speak to safety issues, but that's it.
Being a lifetime patient is not the issue: that could make perfect sense in certain cases. But if I am to be "using" for life, I demand the drug of MY CHOICE, not that of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry, who are dogmatically deaf to the benefits of hated substances.
We don't need people to get "clean." We need people to start living a fulfilling life. The two things are different.
The MindMed company (makers of LSD Lite) tell us that euphoria and visions are "adverse effects": that's not science, that's an arid materialist philosophy that does not believe in spiritual transcendence.
Mariani Wine is the real McCoy, with Bolivian coca leaves (tho' not with cocaine, as Wikipedia says). I'll be writing more about my experience with it soon. I was impressed. It's the same drink "on which" HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their stories.
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
A lot of drug use represents an understandable attempt to fend off performance anxiety. Why understandable? Because performers can lose their livelihood should they become too self-conscious. We call that use "recreational" only because we ignore common sense psychology.
Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."
There's a run of addiction movies out there, like "Craving!" wherein they actually personify addiction as a screaming skeleton. Funny, drug warriors never call for a Manhattan Project to end addiction. Addiction is their golden goose.
We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?
This hysterical reaction to rare negative events actually creates more rare negative events. This is why the DEA publicizes "drug problems," because by making them well known, they make the problems more prevalent and can thereby justify their huge budget.
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, Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy: as opposed to just Psychedelic Therapy, published on December 9, 2022 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)
uestion: Why do we never see calls for Psychoactive Therapy for mood disorders, only for Psychedelic Therapy for mood disorders?
If you doubt that the Drug War is out to ruin the lives of users, check out "Drug Warriors and Their Prey" by Richard Lawrence Miller, where the author reports that safe users were the pet peeve of Drug Czar William Bennett. He actually thought that responsible users set a bad example (that's right, a BAD example) and so should have their names published in newspapers and have their employers informed about their safe use. It's hard to say what's more breathtaking here, the intolerance or the stupidity.
You have been reading an article entitled, Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy: as opposed to just Psychedelic Therapy, published on December 9, 2022 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)