I greatly enjoyed the documentary "The End of Quantum Reality," which I was happy to purchase, and am now looking forward to reading Wolfgang's refutation of Stephen Hawking's "Grand Design."
Wolfgang seems to understand that the materialist quantitative bias has implications for everyone in all parts of our lives -- and yet I wonder if he can see something which almost every other smart person seems to be blind to today, and that is materialism 1's role in the Drug War and in our attitude toward medicine in general. We live in a world in which 1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent on Big Pharma 2 meds for depression -- meds justified on the scientistic ground that they fix a chemical imbalance (which is wrong for both philosophical and scientific reasons) -- and yet laughing gas and ultra-safe Ecstasy are illegal to use for depression. Why? Because today's drug researchers don't care how much the depressed laugh: they want to see quantitative proof the substance "really" works. Likewise, Descartes didn't care how animals screeched and howled -- he needed quantitative proof before he would say that animals could "really" experience pain. In other words, they want to study pain and depression in the physical world only, not the corporeal one. (As Rimbaud said: science is too slow for us -- too slow for animals and too slow for the depressed)
The results of this world view lead to reductio ad absurdum today, when doctors can ask with a straight face: "Can laughing gas 3 help the depressed?" (see essay link below)
I've written to over 100 philosophers on this subject without receiving any response. The Drug War terrifies folk. I just hope that Wolfgang has not been fooled by the Drug War propaganda campaign of self-censorship, thanks to which one never hears of the positive use of safe but criminalized substances, either in books or movies 45 or TV shows 6 -- and certainly never in cop shows, this despite the fact that the kind of drugs that we demonize today have inspired entire religions -- including the Vedic/Hindu religion that influences Wolfgang today.
I hope your organization will consider speaking out philosophically against the Drug War -- for science is not free in America, insofar as study of certain botanicals has been criminalized. Galileo knew he was censored by the church but today's scientists almost unanimously pretend that they are free when they are not. Otherwise they would write disclaimers after their articles, saying that their research on a given topic was limited by Drug War laws and the way that those laws discourage project funding.
Psychoactive plant medicine has been shown to grow neurons in the brain, and yet scientists write books about depression, addiction, Alzheimer's, etc., in which they seem to be giving us the final word on these topics -- but they are actually reckoning without their host, namely the fact that they live in the time of a Drug War, which starkly limits the places in which they can search for answers and cures. Researching the therapeutic value of MDMA is particularly difficult, insofar as the anti-scientific DEA treats MDMA 7 like highly fissionable material and requires researchers (should they be grudgingly approved to obtain the drug) to do the same.
I hope what I'm saying here means something to you, because it's hard for my ideas to gain traction in a world that's been full of Drug War lies and presuppositions ever since the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 first essentially outlawed a plant (the poppy). Wolfgang has seen through so much in his work -- I hope he can see through the anti-scientific Drug War as well -- especially since the Drug War outlaws the kind of plant medicine that inspired the Indian religion with which he is so understandably fascinated.
Thanks again to Wolfgang and those who brought his important work to my attention.
The Links Police
Do you know why I pulled you over? That's right, because the Drug War gives me carte blanche to be a noxious busybody. That, plus the fact that you might be interested in the following links related to materialism and the Drug War.
To wit...
Upon perusing various works of the author, I was sorry to notice that he shared some common drug-war prejudices, like the idea that hippies were nuts for using psychedelic medicine, or rather for using it for improper reasons. But the mindset of the 1960 hippies can only be fairly judged by contrasting it with the mindset of the age against which they were rebelling, a mindset which was responsible for thermonuclear weapons and the war in Vietnam. Against that backdrop, a huge lot of silliness and even childish irresponsibility is to be tolerated, being so immensely preferable to the alternative: namely, the world of today in which we outlaw the very psychoactive substances that inspired the philosophy of William James, those medicines whose use tends to demonstrate or at least hint at the unseen and neglected world(s) of which Smith otherwise approvingly writes.
Drug warriors like Michael Pollan look at the '60s and say: "Think of the young lives that could have been ruined back then!" To which I say: "Think of the billions of lives of all ages that could disappear thanks to the militaristic mindset against which these young lives were rebelling!"
The dinosaurs were around for 150 million years. Modern humans, thanks to that militaristic mindset, will be lucky to be around for 5,000 years.
Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing.
How else will they scare us enough to convince us to give up all our freedoms for the purpose of fighting horrible awful evil DRUGS? DRUGS is the sledgehammer with which they are destroying American democracy.
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 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.
Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?
The term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they connote.
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
The "acceptable risk" for psychoactive drugs can only be decided by the user, based on what they prioritize in life. Science just assumes that all users should want to live forever, self-fulfilled or not.
We don't need people to get "clean." We need people to start living a fulfilling life. The two things are different.
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