It's really a hoot to have scientists tell us how to achieve a sense of purpose in the age of the Drug War. The scientist is in the position of a doctor who is permitted to recommend anything whatsoever for a headache except an aspirin. Mother Nature's psychoactive medicines are custom-made to give us a sense of purpose when used advisedly. The natural substance Soma produced such powerful insights of this kind that it spawned the entire Vedic religion. Opium increased Benjamin Franklin's sense of purpose and coca wine inspired the stories of such authors as HG Wells, Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas. Plato, Aristotle and Cicero were philosophically inspired by the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries1. Yet America, a supposedly scientific country (and one based on Natural Law at that) chose to start demonizing psychoactive plant medicines in 1914 and essentially forced the rest of the world to follow suit through economic blackmail. We even claimed the right to rush overseas and burn the plants of which racist stateside politicians disapproved, without, of course, bothering to ask the mere citizens of those countries how they felt about the matter.
The result: when our authors write about personal improvement, they ignore the therapeutic 64,000-pound gorilla in the room: viz plant medicine, leaving us with sterile theoretical adjurations from the world of science to eat these foods, sleep at these hours, consume these sorts of vegetables, and think all kinds of warm and fuzzy thoughts, under the demonstrably false assumption that we can think our way to psychological health, let alone to full-on self-actualization in life. But until we stop demonizing plant medicines and start figuring out how to use them wisely to achieve our psychological goals, I for one do not want to listen to science's latest theoretical advice about finding purpose in life. I've read countless articles of that kind before, and I'm still depressed as ever at age 62. The only difference is I'm not only depressed now, but I'm hooked on Big Pharma 23 's tranquilizing antidepressants 4 and will have to take them for the rest of my life, despite the fact that, unlike plant medicine, they were never created with my self-actualization in mind. Meanwhile, if Americans seek a purpose in life, let them start fighting the long-overdue battle to end America's disgracefully anti-scientific Drug War, which is also anti-minority, anti-patient, and the establishment of a religion: namely that of Christian Science, which tells us that we have some moral duty to say no to the life-enhancing plant medicines that grow at our very feet.
Author's Follow-up: December 2, 2022
Obama launched a BRAIN initiative while continuing to support the outlawing of almost all psychoactive substances that provide insight into the nature of consciousness and how the brain actually works5. Learn more in my essay entitled The Brainless Initiative.
Author's Follow-up:
September 19, 2025
You create a sense of purpose by succeeding in life. For many of us, this means transcending negative upbringings and that low-grade perpetual trauma that we call neurosis. This in turn can be accomplished with the help of drugs that focus the mind and permit one to transcend. Such drug use can create a virtuous circle. This is simple psychology which the behaviorists in academia ignore, thereby helping the materialist medical establishment to maintain its enormously profitable monopoly on mind and mood medicine. In their reductive focus, they connive with the Drug War in the BIG LIE that near panaceas like opium 6 and coca have no positive uses whatsoever.
This is a world of make-believe that we live in today -- a world where Freud is known for psychoanalysis -- when, in a sane world, he would be known for his common-sense realization that drugs like cocaine 78 can, for the majority of grown-ups, make the whole field of psychiatry COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT!
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.
I looked up the company: it's all about the damn stock market and money. The FDA outlaws LSD until we remove all the euphoria and the visions. That's ideology, not science. Just relegalize drugs and stop telling me how much ecstasy and insight I can have in my life!!
The drug war is is a multi-billion-dollar campaign to enforce the attitude of the Francisco Pizarro's of the world when it comes to non-western medicine. It is the apotheosis of the colonialism that most Americans claim to hate.
To understand why the western world is blind to the benefits of "drugs," read "The Concept of Nature" by Whitehead. He unveils the scientific schizophrenia of the west, according to which the "real" world is invisible to us while our perceptions are mere "secondary" qualities.
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.
The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.
The first step in harm reduction is to re-legalize mother nature's medicines. Then hundreds of millions of people will no longer suffer in silence for want of godsend medicines... for depression, for pain, for anxiety, for religious doubts... you name it.
When Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan call for continued prohibition to protect young people, they ignore the ENORMOUS fact that prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world. Wake up, guys! Prohibition is evil, not drugs! Ignorance is evil, not education!
"If England [were to] revert to pre-war conditions, when any responsible person, by signing his name in a book, could buy drugs at a fair profit on cost price... the whole underground traffic would disappear like a bad dream." -- Aleister Crowley
Someday the world will realize that Freud's real achievement was his discovery of the depression-busting power of cocaine.
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.
