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
Author's Follow-up: January 15, 2025
No word back from Charlie, yet. I hope this merely means that the guy is busy, for these are topics that no one seems to want to discuss, and I'd hate to think that he is one of the many who shut down when they hear criticism of the materialist approach to mind and mood.
I seem to be on the "ignore for life" lists of drug-law reformers like Carl Hart, DJ Nutt, and Rick Doblin, all of whom believe -- or claim to believe -- in the all-sufficiency of materialist science to deal with mind and mood successfully. This is implicit in their use of phrases like "treatment resistant depression," which imply that reductive materialist approaches have "cinched" depression, and that there are just some finicky body chemistries out there that do not know a cure when they see one.
The fact is, however, that the materialist approach to mind and mood has been a disaster. It has turned one in four Americans into patients for life, while forcing us to ignore hundreds of time-honored medicines. Why? Because they only work for depression in an OBVIOUS way. That means nothing to purblind materialist science. Prudent strategic use of laughing gas, opium, cocaine, and all sorts of empathogens and phenethylamines can keep depression at bay -- and without turning users into patients for life. But materialists cannot see this.
And so Carl Hart opens his otherwise great book entitled "Drug Use for Grown-ups" by advising all depressed and anxious readers that drugs are not for them: drugs, Carl tells us, are only for recreational purposes1. Notice how Carl here is treating the word "drugs" as if it actually has an identifiable meaning. "Drugs" is a HUGE politically created category, and so it is absurd to dismiss all the substances that fall under that manmade rubric as recreational. It's certainly an anti-indigenous mindset that would do so. It is materialism riding rough-shod over those of us with holistic mindsets, telling us basically to just "shut up and take our meds."
Indeed, Carl Hart makes it clear in his book that he is an unapologetic materialist, that he feels there are no spiritual messages in altered states and that drug use is all about simple kicks. He believes that the efficacy of psychoactive drugs should be determined by looking under a microscope.
He has thus been blinded to psychological common sense! Someone who is about to commit suicide should have access to laughing gas, coca, opium -- anything, g---damnit, that would keep him or her from killing themselves. But the materialist FDA tells us that these drugs do not "REALLY" work for depression.
That latter claim is a metaphysical statement, however, not a logical one. It presupposes the efficacy standards of myopic reductive materialism, of positivism, of naturalism, and of behaviorism -- of all the ism's that tell us that the mere laughter and happiness of a patient means nothing -- that only SCIENTISTS can tell us when we are "REALLY" happy!
What a hateful doctrine, one that has kept me a patient for life by denying me the kind of inspiring medicines that all ancient physicians have recognized as panaceas. And yet materialists collaborate with the DEA to deny me these medicines on the fictional grounds that they actually have no positive uses whatsoever. These guys clearly take the American public for fools.
Between the defeatist doctrine of the Drug Warrior -- that drugs cannot be used wisely -- and the materialism of folks like Hart et al., we, the depressed and anxious, must rely on dependence-causing Big Pharma meds.
But it's no wonder that these guys ghost me. Their whole livelihood depends on them toeing the imaginary line that tells us that materialist premises should underlie a search for mind and mood medicine.
It is just pharmacological colonialism and it is the point of view that has turned me into a patient for life.
Let me remind the reader that my complaints are not with materialism -- but with materialism misapplied. It is a category error to put materialists in charge of deciding what drugs work for a human being, psychologically speaking. The drug user is the expert on what drugs work for them. Only they know what states of mind and mood are useful to them given their philosophy of life, their hopes and dreams, and their beliefs about ultimate meaning.
Materialist scientists need to end their disastrous hubris of telling us what would work for us. They have gotten it so wrong that they have turned 25% of American women into patients for life, while giving a veneer of plausibility to the HUGE Drug War lie that drugs which have inspired entire religions have no positive uses whatsoever. That's a lie, by the way, for which the DEA should be put on trial for crimes against humanity, in light of how much unnecessary silent suffering that doctrine has caused in the world. Unfortunately, the sufferers are not stakeholders in the drug approval process of the FDA -- or should I say the drug DISAPPROVAL process?
Materialism
Materialist scientists collaborate with the drug war by refusing to see glaringly obvious drug benefits. They acknowledge only those benefits that they believe are visible under a microscope. The Hindu religion would not exist today had materialist scientists held soma to such a standard. But that's the absurd pass to which prohibition eventually brings us in a society wherein materialist science is the new god: scientists are put in charge of deciding whether we are allowed to imagine new religions or not.
This materialist bias is inspired in turn by behaviorism, the anti-indigenous doctrine of JB Watson that makes the following inhumane claim:
"Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic."
According to this view, the hopes and the dreams of a "patient" are to be ignored. Instead, we are to chart their physiology and brain chemistry.
JB Watson's Behaviorism is a sort of Dr. Spock with a vengeance. It is the perfect ideology for a curmudgeon, because it would seem to justify all their inability to deal with human emotions. Unfortunately, the attitude has knock-on effects because it teaches drug researchers to ignore common sense and to downplay or ignore all positive usage reports or historic lessons about positive drug use. The "patient" needs to just shut up and let the doctors decide how they are doing. It is a doctrine that dovetails nicely with drug war ideology, because it empowers the researcher to ignore the obvious: that all drugs that elate have potential uses as antidepressants.
That statement can only be denied when one assumes that "real" proof of efficacy of a psychoactive medicine must be determined by a doctor, and that the patient's only job is to shut up because their hopes and dreams and feelings cannot be accurately displayed and quantified on a graph or a bar chart.
The FDA approves of brain-damaging shock therapy but will not approve MDMA for soldiers with PTSD. This is the same FDA that signs off on the psychiatric pill mill upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life. This is the same FDA that approves Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself! (Can somebody say "follow the money"?)
The DEA rating system is not wrong just because it ranks drugs incorrectly. It's wrong because it ranks drugs at all. All drugs have positive uses. It's absurd to prohibit using them because one demographic might misuse them.
Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It forces us to use shock therapy on the severely depressed since we've outlawed all viable alternatives. It denies medicines that could combat Alzheimer's and/or render it psychologically bearable.
We need a few brave folk to "act up" by shouting "It's the drug war!" whenever folks are discussing Mexican violence or inner city shootings. The media treat both topics as if the violence is inexplicable! We can't learn from mistakes if we're in denial.
They still don't seem to get it. The drug war is a whole wrong way of looking at the world. It tells us that substances can be judged "up" or "down," which is anti-scientific and blinds us to endless beneficial uses.
Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war:
"clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."
"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.
Some fat cat should treat the entire Supreme Court to a vacation at San Jose del Pacifico in Mexico, where they can partake of the magic mushroom in a ceremony led by a Zapotec guide.
Doc to Franklin: "I'm sorry, Ben, but I see no benefits of opium use under my microscope. The idea that you are living a fulfilled life is clearly a mistake on your part. If you want to be scientific, stop using opium and be scientifically depressed like the rest of us."
This is why I call the drug war 'fanatical Christian Science.' People would rather have grandpa die than to let him use laughing gas or coca or opium or MDMA, etc. etc.
M. Pollan says "not so fast" when it comes to drug re-legalization. I say FAST? I've gone a whole lifetime w/o access to Mother Nature's plants. How can a botanist approve of that? Answer: By ignoring all legalization stakeholders except for the kids whom we refuse to educate.
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)
am somewhat surprised that you would not recommend MDMA for depression.
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)