by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
November 21, 2024
am somewhat surprised that you would not recommend MDMA for depression.
The reported effects of MDMA read like a wish list for the emotions that I would want to experience as a chronic depressive. Personally, I would cheer up right now if I knew that I was going to be using MDMA this coming weekend, for instance, thanks just to the therapeutic power of anticipation. I also fear that modern materialist science pays short shrift to common-sense psychology, as for instance when Dr. Robert Glatter doubted in Forbes magazine that laughing gas could help the depressed. Again, as a chronic depressive, I ask, "How could it NOT help?" I would cheer up immediately merely looking forward to occasional use of laughing gas. "Laughter is the best medicine," after all. And yet materialist science ignores the very laughter of the depressed based on their reductionist understanding of how efficacy is to be determined.
If there is a risk of serotonin syndrome when using MDMA with antidepressants, this can be controlled and would be well worth it for folks like myself.
Perhaps the benefits of MDMA are muddled or negated by those using antidepressants? If so, this, for me, would count as a strike against antidepressants (one of many, the chief of which being that they have turned me into a patient for life).
Any clarification would be appreciated.
I appreciate you taking the time and your suggestions are appreciated, as well. Unfortunately, though, both ketamine and psilocybin are extremely expensive on a legal basis and the requirement of using them in a clinical setting offsets much of their value, in my mind -- again, for basic psychological reasons, the ones that I fear materialist medicine tends to ignore.
Love to hear your thoughts,
Brian
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Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs
New article in Scientific American: "New hope for pain relief," that ignores the fact that we have outlawed the time-honored panacea. Scientists want a drug that won't run the risk of inspiring us.
Musk and co. want to make us more robot-like with AI, when they should be trying to make us more human-like with sacred medicine. Only humans can gain creativity from plant medicine. All AI can do is harvest the knowledge that eventually results from that creativity.
We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
That's my real problem with SSRIs: If daily drug use and dependency are okay, then there's no logical or truly scientific reason why I can't smoke a nightly opium pipe.
Imagine if there were drugs for which dependency was a feature, not a bug. People would stop peddling that junk, right? Wrong. Just ask your psychiatrist.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.
"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.
If there is an epidemic of "self-harm," prohibitionists never think of outlawing razor blades. They ask: "Why the self-harm?" But if there is an epidemic of drug use which they CLAIM is self-harm, they never ask "Why the self-harm?" They say: "Let's prohibit and punish!"
What are drug dealers doing, after all? Only selling substances that people want and have always had a right to, until racist politicians came along and decided government had the right to ration out pain relief and mystical experience.
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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, MDMA and Depression: another open letter to Charley Wininger, published on November 21, 2024 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)
