Like almost every other writer on the topic of addiction, you write as if we are living in a free country as far as scientific research is concerned and that we can therefore draw adequate generalizations from the status quo. To the contrary, we live under a drug-war sharia that strictly outlaws almost all research of psychoactive drugs, many of which could work wonders with alcoholics and other addicts. Although you don't mention this, Bill Wilson himself had great initial success in treating alcoholics with LSD. It was not science that stopped such treatment, but rather politics, when Richard Nixon decided to launch a war on Timothy Leary 123 and hippies by outlawing their drugs of choice, namely psychedelics. And US-inspired drug law remains as anti-patient as ever, as therapist Gabor Mate was recently forced to stop his promising treatment of Canadian alcoholics with the entheogenic concoction known as ayahuasca.
So if AA is ineffective -- as I would definitely agree - it is as much the Drug War's fault as it is that of Bill Wilson and his theories.
Given the existence of the unscientifically motivated Drug War, it may well be true that Naltrexone is a relative godsend for alcoholics. That said, this is a huge 'given.' We should remember that we are choosing from a starkly limited pharmacopeia when we make that choice. There are thousands of potential psychoactive godsends out there that we are forbidden from studying, notwithstanding our pretensions at being a scientific country. By failing to acknowledge this outrage, we may be giving far more kudos to Naltrexone than it deserves. How good is it, you ask? How can we know until we compare it to the thousands of other potential therapies that we have chosen to ignore? It may well be the best thing currently 'going' for alcoholics, and for that I yield to the experts - while yet pointing out that there really are no experts on addiction treatment per se since the Drug War has essentially placed all the potentially valuable therapeutic substances off-limits, not merely to individuals but to addiction researchers as well. No surprise there. We'd have just as few aviation experts today if the only legally available planes were gliders.
Also there is a real irony in the use of Naltrexone to block the action of opiates, at least when used in a Drug Warrior country such as the USA. By waging drug-war colonialism, we have sent our military abroad to destroy opium crops that have been used in moderation in the east for millennia, forcing other countries to turn to the western drug called alcohol to achieve, in general, a far uglier form of self-transcendence and relaxation than that supplied by the judicious poppy user. Not content to destroy the poppy in the East (always against the will of the local people, who have no say in the matter), we now seek out a drug that will obviate the poppy's effects, thus ensuring the prosperity of American Big Liquor for centuries to come. This is fundamentally a racist and anti-scientific war on the poppy, one which dogmatically recognizes only evil in the plant, failing to acknowledge its role in providing human transcendence over the ages - a viewpoint that keeps Anheuser Busch heirs smiling on their way to the bank (just as they were no doubt smiling when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 4 in 1987 to steal Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants).
This brings me to the other problem with the Naltrexone approach, namely that is all stick and no carrot. Yes, the substance helps to destroy the addiction but it also gets rid of the transcendence which the addict was seeking in the first place. Psychedelics, on the other hand, work by actually providing the sought-after transcendent experience and it is that very transcendent experience from which the psychedelic user often emerges with new insights into their earthly condition and a new mental flexibility in dealing with their drinking problem.
One other bone to pick: I would ask you to question your apparently strong faith in science, at least as practiced in the States.
It is the alleged 'scientific' approach to psychiatry that has led to the great but unacknowledged addiction of the American people, in which 1 in 8 Americans are now chemically dependent on antidepressants 5, all under the discredited theory (promulgated by a full-court media press by academic talking heads under the pay of Big Pharma ) that these substances fix a chemical imbalance. As Robert Whitaker demonstrates, however (in 'Anatomy of an Epidemic'), this is pseudoscience, not science. These antidepressants (SSRIs and SNRIs) have been shown to CAUSE the imbalances that they purport to fix. They certainly don't work for me after decades of use, and I am now forced to take Effexor 6 the rest of my life against my will - Effexor, a drug that has a relapse rate just as high as heroin 7.
But I've yet to hear of one single addiction 'specialist' wringing their hands on my behalf, or on behalf of the tens of thousands of unacknowledged antidepressant addicts actively cursing modern psychiatry online even as I speak - cursing it for one's loss of empowerment, one's unsought-for life-time role as an 'eternal patient,' having to apply to a doctor for their monthly fixes. (Part of the professional silence is based on the convenient myth that there's a meaningful difference between addiction and chemical dependency. Tell that to an Effexor addict after he or she has gone cold turkey for three days.)
Since psychiatry has no problem with thus addicting users like myself -- and to ineffective medicines at that - they have no leg to stand on in warning me that I might become chemically dependent upon, say, opium 8 , should I be given the same legal access to that drug that I would have had in 1913, and they have even less standing in remonstrating against my use of totally non-addictive psychedelics. If such drugs are not even considered for treating alcoholism it is thus merely for political reasons, not scientific ones. So let's not write so as to imply that these therapies have somehow been tried and found wanting, when in reality such therapies remain unthinkable to Western researchers under the thrall of Drug War propaganda.
CONCLUSION: I believe we have no right to opine on the relative insolubility of addiction problems until we have re-legalized Mother Nature's medicines. Until then, any conclusions we reach on this topic should be followed by a huge footnote, both for the patient's benefit and by way of protest, stating that the addiction problem, for aught we know, could turn out to be far more soluble than we currently suppose, once the United States finally renounces its anti-patient Drug War, along with its efforts to enforce that war worldwide by way of the financial blackmail of its friends and foes alike.
Author's Follow-up: March 12, 2025
I wrote the above letter almost five years ago to the day, and I am happy to say that I still agree with every word that I wrote. I need hardly add that Gabrielle Glaser has not seen fit to respond. But this is not surprising. Why not? Because I have yet to find any pundit, researcher, academic or psychiatrist who will answer objections such as mine. They all know that their job status and reputation would be placed in jeopardy if they pushed back against the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. They know, moreover, that they cannot acknowledge the category error involved by putting materialists in charge of mind and mood medicine, because this would place them at odds with materialists in general, those who believe that science can conquer all. If scientists can devise hadron colliders and moon rockets, then surely they can solve the problems of mind and mood, right? That is the modern assumption. And to maintain otherwise is to become a heretic in the modern medical establishment.
And so our scientists continue to look under a microscope to see what they can do for the poor addict - steadfastly ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of outlawed drugs that could elate and inspire and which could be used with common sense protocols to get alcoholics back on their feet and keep them there. They will, of course, claim that there is no proof for that statement, to which I respond: 'Yes, but why is that so?' That is so because no one has ever sat down before the entire psychoactive pharmacopoeia available to humankind (both in nature and in the laboratory) and asked the question: How can we use these drugs, singly or in combination, as part of a psychologically common-sense protocol to keep the 'addicts' mind off an unwanted substance and to help them think outside the box of their ingrained thought patterns? Actually, this has been done before to certain extents and succeeded. It is just that all proof is hidden due to the fact that it involved illicit drug use about which no one is going to be publishing results. Besides, the Drug War's key propaganda strategy is to censor all positive reports of drug use - so such wise use would never be published even if it were to occur.
There is another reason why no proof of my thesis will be forthcoming, and that is because materialists are behaviorists when it comes to mood medicine. They assume a priori (i.e., in advance) that the only 'real' cures are those that can be quantified, from which it follows dogmatically that there can be no cures that 'simply work.' You may say that laughing gas 9 cheers you up and that its use gives you something to look forward to, thereby dramatically improving your overall life. But the materialist will respond: 'That's what you think, but you cannot be REALLY cured unless we can change something in your biochemistry quantifiably speaking.' This latter attitude, of course, is a metaphysical conclusion on the part of materialists, not a logical one. It is an assumption of modern materialism 10, not a proof of that doctrine. It is nothing but the inhumane assumption of behaviorism, which discounts everything that the 'patient' says and forces them to wait for 'cures' that work according to materialist science - which is to say the kind of Big Pharma 'cures' that make them dependent for life and thus turn them into wards of the healthcare state.
Again, no one has ever responded to these objections of mine over the course of the six years now in which I have been broaching them. One can only conclude that modern psychology is a fake science - though for reasons far different from the ones that would be cited by Donald Trump and the gullible conspiracy theorists of our time. It is a pretend science, designed not to solve real-world problems but rather to flatter materialism. This is what happens when a science about subjective phenomena tries to rebrand itself as a 'hard science,' one based on objective facts alone. It adopts the inhumane principles of behaviorism, according to which doctors are the experts when it comes to matters of mind and mood. The only job of our psychological suffering humanity is to sit back and wait for 'cures' from the Dr. Spock's of the world, from those doctors who dogmatically ignore all common sense, such as the obvious power of laughter and anticipation to improve our lives. They search instead for one-size-fits-all biochemical fixes for the enormously variegated problem of human sorrow. This is a lucrative undertaking if there ever was one, for the materialist approach conduces to non-stop disease-mongering. Since the parts matter instead of the whole, the materialist doctor reifies conditions such as 'postpartum depression' and 'seasonal affective disorders,' claiming that each must respond to a unique biochemical intervention. This anti-holistic approach slows human progress to a glacial pace as we place all obvious godsends aside and wait instead for pharma-funded scientists to find discrete 'cures' for everything that ails us.
The result is an absurd world in which we actually prefer suicide 11 to the use of 'drugs' - a world in which we actually prefer brain-damaging shock therapy to the use of 'drugs.' And so your loved one goes to an emergency room because of severe depression. Do they give her a drug that will quickly elate and inspire her? Of course not! That would not be scientific! They start her on a course of drugs that will tranquilize her and turn her into a ward of the healthcare state. If she kills herself before those Big Pharma 1213 drugs kick in, too bad! We must be scientific, after all!
The materialist will object that there are known biochemical and/or genetic correlates to given psychological conditions -- to which I say, of course there are! But the question is whether these correlations are both necessary and sufficient in causing the pathologies in question. The fact that these correlates can exist in the absence of pathology says otherwise. This is the whole problem with the drug-war mentality: it sees health and illness as something caused by a few specific things, rather than being the result of a balance of a vast variety of forces, which include an individual's upbringing, their genetics, their personality, ad infinitum. When we simplify the human being for the purposes of the materialist conception of life, we leave out so many things that matter -- not least of all that individual's attitude toward life. Only by thus blinding ourselves to common sense can we ignore the obvious power of drugs to cheer us up overall AND THEREFORE improve our ability to fight the many overlapping human conditions that the materialist dices up into discrete pathologies. Disease-mongering of this kind may be of benefit to insurance companies, but it is a disservice to the human beings whose emotional lives we thereby cheapen in the course of our self-congratulatory and hubristic prognoses.
The whole problem is caused by a category error: the crazy idea that materialists should have anything to do with mind and mood medicine in the first place. Who should? Someone whom I describe as a pharmacologically savvy empath. To learn more, please read the following.
Outlawing drugs is outlawing obvious therapies for Alzheimer's and autism patients, therapies based on common sense and not on the passion-free behaviorism of modern scientists.
I might as well say that no one can ever be taught to ride a horse safely. I would argue as follows: "Look at Christopher Reeves. He was a responsible and knowledgeable equestrian. But he couldn't handle horses. The fact is, NO ONE can handle horses!"
Even fans of sacred medicine have been brainwashed to believe that we do not know if such drugs "really" work: they want microscopic proof. But that's a western bias, used strategically by drug warriors to make the psychotropic drug approval process as glacial as possible.
The International Observer says the "core issues" causing Mexican drug violence are: "corruption, inequality, and the demand for narcotics in the U.S." Wrong, wrong, wrong. The core issue is DRUG PROHIBITION.
When Americans "obtain their majority" and wish to partake of drugs safely, they should be paired with older adults who have done just that. Instead, we introduce them to "drug abusers" in prerecorded morality plays to reinforce our biased notions that drug use is wrong.
The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.
The drug war normalizes the disdainful and self-righteous attitude that Columbus and Pizarro had about drug use in the New World.
Prohibitionists have blood on their hands. People do not naturally die in the tens of thousands from opioid use, notwithstanding the lies of 19th-century missionaries in China. It takes bad drug policy to accomplish that.
Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."
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."
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