Modern Addiction Treatment as Puritan Indoctrination
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
December 29, 2022
n the 2019 movie "Four Good Days," (a classic piece of moralistic Drug War agitprop) the heroin-addicted daughter of an uptight and wine-swilling housewife (played by Glenn Close, shame on her) is sent to a $3,000-a-week rehab unit, where, after three days of cold turkey, a pompous and self-satisfied doctor administers a shot of Naltrexone and sends her on her not-so-merry way. That's it. Out of all the medications in the world the doctor could provide (including the hundreds of insight-provoking drugs discovered by Alexander Shulgin), the doctor only has one option: a drug that is specifically designed to give the user as little pleasure as possible and to make it chemically impossible for her to enjoy opiates of any kind in the future.
This is what passes for addiction treatment in modern America: we willfully ignore the very reason that the subject was "getting high" in the first place: namely to obtain self-transcendence and peace of mind.
There are hundreds of medicines that could improve an addict's (habitue's) mood and help them get on with life; even potentially addictive drugs could be used safely for this purpose if scheduled appropriately (on a calendar I mean, not on the DEA's mendacious scheduling system). And yet the Puritan medical industry has only one over-riding goal when it comes to addiction treatment: to make sure that the user's original desire for self-transcendence is never satisfied.
Andrew Weil got it half right: he said that drugs like methadone do not treat the real issue. But the real issue is not some Freudian crisis that the user has suppressed with drugs, the real issue is not chemical imbalance -- the real issue is that the user sought a good snappy feeling which helped her "get her head together." There is nothing pathological about that. We all want that, presumably. Sure, she chose an unreliable way to cater to that desire, if only because she lives in the age of a Drug War that is designed to make her fail in her quest for pharmacologically aided peace of mind, but that does not mean that the desire for mental clarity and euphoria is pathological in itself or the sign of some underlying pathology.
Modern addiction treatment is part of America's imperialist project to demonize and eradicate medicines that have been politically deemed to be without any beneficial uses according to Puritan Western politicians (as if any substance can have no good uses whatsoever, in any dose, at any time, for any person, ever). In foreign policy, we stalk abroad to wipe out poppy fields against the desires of the locals; in domestic policy, the government creates drugs that are designed to make self-transcendence biochemically impossible.
This is not science: this is Christian Science, the religion that tells us that "drugs" are bad and that we should get joy and self-transcendence from a lifetime of effort. The stingy and stinting modern addiction "treatment" represents the puritan punishment of those who seek relief through something other than hard work and booze. The goal of the Drug War is to get us to live by America's hypocritical Puritan values. It is indoctrination in a certain kind of lifestyle, namely the lifestyle of the Christian Scientist. Addiction treatment under this system is not motivated by science but rather by the government's desire to turn Americans into God-fearing puritans -- citizens who have been infantilized by drug law, told that they are powerless before "drugs" and that they must acknowledge a "higher power" in order to be cured.
This is puritan indoctrination, not addiction treatment.
Author's Follow-up: December 29, 2022
Had the US Government been installed in the Indus Valley in 1500 BCE, there would be no Vedic-Hindu religion today. America would have outlawed soma, the natural medicine that inspired the religion. Defiant soma users would then have been forced to switch to a government-supplied replacement for soma: but that replacement would be tweaked so that it would provide no inspiration at all.
Richard Evans Schultes seems to have originated the harebrained idea (since used by the US Supreme Court to suppress new religions) that you have no right to use drugs in a religious ritual if you did not grow up in a society that had such practices. What tyrannical idiocy!
Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.
We don't need people to get "clean." We need people to start living a fulfilling life. The two things are different.
Scientists are not the experts on psychoactive medicines. The experts are painters and artists and spiritualists -- and anyone else who simply wants to be all they can be in life. Scientists understand nothing of such goals and aspirations.
We should be encouraging certain drug use by the elderly. Many Indigenous drugs have been shown to grow new neurons and increase neural connectivity -- to refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!
Being less than a month away from an election that, in my view, could end American democracy, I don't like to credit Musk for much. But I absolutely love it every time he does or says something that pushes back against the drug-war narrative.
The idea that "drugs" have no medical benefits is not science, it is philosophy, and bad philosophy at that. It is based on the idea that benefits must be molecularly demonstratable and not created from mere knock-on psychological effects of drug use, time-honored tho' they be.
The drug war follows me wherever I go. I was just researching "fun facts" about dogs, and http://petpedia.co told me that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as... searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?
The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.
"There has been so much delirious nonsense written about drugs that sane men may well despair of seeing the light." -- Aleister Crowley, from "Essays on Intoxication"
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, Modern Addiction Treatment as Puritan Indoctrination published on December 29, 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)
n the 2019 movie "Four Good Days," (a classic piece of moralistic Drug War agitprop) the heroin-addicted daughter of an uptight and wine-swilling housewife (played by Glenn Close, shame on her) is sent to a $3,000-a-week rehab unit, where, after three days of cold turkey, a pompous and self-satisfied doctor administers a shot of Naltrexone and sends her on her not-so-merry way. That's it. Out of all the medications in the world the doctor could provide (including the hundreds of insight-provoking drugs discovered by Alexander Shulgin), the doctor only has one option: a drug that is specifically designed to give the user as little pleasure as possible and to make it chemically impossible for her to enjoy opiates of any kind in the future.
You have been reading an article entitled, Modern Addiction Treatment as Puritan Indoctrination published on December 29, 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)