"The irreducible core of the disease theory of addiction is still as strong as ever -- the significant distinction between good and bad opiate use is whether it's medically supervised." --Emperors of Dreams by Mike Jay
Addiction is a hugely fraught subject in the age of the drug war. This is because the Drug War does everything it can to make drug use dangerous. It encourages addiction by limiting our access to all but the handful of drugs that dealers find it practical and lucrative to supply. It fails to regulate product so that drug users cannot know the dose or even the quality of what they are ingesting. Meanwhile, the drug war censors honest talk about drug use.
In short, until we end the drug war, we will not know how much addiction is a true problem and how much it is an artifact of drug-war policy. And yet materialist researchers tell us that addiction is a "disease"? Why is it a disease to want to improve one's life with drugs? One could just as easily say that people are diseased, or at least masochistic, if they accept their limitations in life without doing everything they can to transcend them.
Indeed, the very idea that materialists are experts on psychoactive drug use is wrong. It is a category error. The proof is extant. Materialist researchers today are in total denial about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs. They maintain the lie that psychoactive drugs can only be proven effective by looking under a microscope, whereas the proof of such efficacy is right in front of them: in endless anecdotes, in human history, and even in psychological common sense, the kind of common sense that scientists ignore in the name of both drug war ideology and the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism.
Addicted to AddictionAddictionAmerica's Great Anti-Depressant ScamAmerica's Invisible Addiction CrisisFour reasons why Addiction is a political termHow Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug WarHow Drug Prohibition Causes RelapsesHow Prohibition Causes AddictionHow the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality TaleIn the Realm of Hungry Drug WarriorsLibertarians as Closet Christian ScientistsModern Addiction Treatment as Puritan IndoctrinationNight of the Addicted AmericansNotes about the Madness of Drug ProhibitionOpen Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor MateOpen Letter to Richard HammersleyProhibition Spectrum DisorderPublic Service Announcements for the Post-Drug War EraSherlock Holmes versus Gabor MatéTapering for JesusThe aesthetic difference between addiction and chemical dependencyThe Myth of the Addictive PersonalityWhy Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism
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!"
