or, why Big Pharma is justifiably afraid of psychedelic medicine
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 13, 2024
Author's note: I received immediate feedback to this post stating that psilocybin does not cause flashbacks. But I was not using "flashback" in the pathological sense of that term. For me, a flashback (in the positive sense) is a relevant reminiscence that is vouchsafed the individual, as if by miracle, at precisely the time in their life when that information is crucial to them. I am not talking about a classic "Wayne's World" flashback in which past events materialize gradually in the ether as Mike Myers makes silly noises. I was instead on a low dose of a medicine that sharpened my mind to the point that the information I needed from the past was suddenly present to me at the precise moment that I needed it. That is a "flashback" in the positive sense of the term, before Drug Warriors redefined it to apply only to pathological instances of sudden unwanted recall.
I would retitle the article to lose the reference to "flashback" -- except that I refuse to give up that word just because Drug Warriors have claimed it for their own as a pejorative, just like they have turned "drugs" into a pejorative term, which has led to great terminological confusion in the debate about psychoactive substances ever since.
I had a flashback tonight under the influence of psilocybin. I suddenly recalled a summer afternoon in the 1970s when I walked into my bedroom and tore down a long strip of colorful international flags with which I had decorated my walls just one week previous. I was 16 years old at the time and something had just "happened," as they say, something that caused me to suddenly and decisively sour on life. Tonight, 50 years later, I realized that the day in question marked the beginning of my lifelong depression, a fact of which I had never been consciously aware during my many years of psychotherapy as a young adult. It seems that some things are just so obvious that the mind refuses to recognize them, kind of like that guy in the gorilla suit who walks by college students unnoticed in those 20th-century experiments about "inattentional blindness" at American universities.
But put your hankies away, folks. I won't be going into detail here about that psychological belly-punch of yore. Nor do I seek any retroactive pity, especially since I am by no means sure that I would deserve any. True, I can imagine a good filmmaker convincingly portraying my teenage self as a clear-cut trauma victim. I can even see Jack and Jill America leaving the theater in tears on behalf of the former "me." Yet I fear that an even better filmmaker would dig through my adult archives and produce a movie to demonstrate convincingly that I deserved everything I got back then, and then some.
My point here is merely this, that this long-forgotten U-turn in my life came to mind tonight under the influence of psilocybin, as I was doing something quite unusual for myself as a chronic depressive: namely, creating a colorful display for my office walls not unlike the one that I had torn down in abject despair half a century ago.
I trust the reader grasps the significance of that last remark: Not only did the consumption of a mushroom reignite my passion for colorful decoration tonight, but it "tipped me off" to the specific event in my life that quelched my interest in eye-catching interior design in the first place.
No wonder Paul Stamets says that Big Pharma is worried about psilocybin. It actually works! It accomplishes in one night what psychiatrists try in vain to accomplish in an entire career.
Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!
In the 19th century, author Richard Middleton wrote how poets would get together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses."
If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
Today's war against drug users is like Elizabeth I's war against Catholics. Both are religious crackdowns. For today's oppressors, the true faith (i.e., the moral way to live) is according to the drug-hating religion of Christian Science.
"In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us where to find it." --Antonin Arnaud
My consciousness, my choice.
Psychedelic retreats tell us how scientific they are. But science is the problem. Science today insists that we ignore all obvious benefits of drugs. It's even illegal to suggest that psilocybin has health benefits: that's "unproven" according to the Dr. Spocks of science.
It's an enigma: If I beat my depression by smoking opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag subject to immediate arrest. But if I do NOT "take my meds" every day of my life, I am a bad patient.
Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.
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You have been reading an article entitled, My Psilocybin Flashback: or, why Big Pharma is justifiably afraid of psychedelic medicine, published on October 13, 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, My Psilocybin Flashback: or, why Big Pharma is justifiably afraid of psychedelic medicine, published on October 13, 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)
