I made the mistake of sharing my common sense Effexor withdrawal scheme with the Surviving Antidepressants website. Here is my final email, after one respondee plucked my last and final nerve. The common sense view is that psilocybin has great promise -- but all that they could see in the plan was risk. That's what the Drug War is all about: highlighting the risk of drug use and ignoring the benefits. The attitude should be: Hey, let's see if this works! It makes obvious psychological sense! Instead the attitude is: Let's look for scientific reasons why this might not work.
Science is blind to the obvious -- and seeks to shoot down all positive effects by saying they have not been proven. Nonsense. They've been proven by the wide eyes of those inspired by psilocybin from 10,000 BC Mesoamerica to Johns Hopkins in 2024.
Thanks for the feedback. But the whole problem is that science focuses on these downsides to the exclusion of all else. I do not believe that psilocybin effects are unproven. That is the materialist point of view. They are proven by the laughter and achievement and even the religiosity of folks who have used the substance. I know atheists who are believers after using the substance.
You imply that psilocybin is just another drug. That is just unfair. Drug warriors want us to think suspiciously of this big man-made category of dangerous "drugs."
The fact that some drugs cause issues is totally irrelevant.
It's not that what you say is wrong, it's just that it's all based on science's jaundiced view of "drugs," science's determination to ignore common psychological sense.
Dr. Robert Glatter is a typical materialist: he wrote an article in Forbes magazine in 2021 asking if laughing gas could help the depressed. WHAT? That's idiotic.
Science makes drug approval extremely slow.
Materialists refuse to believe the evidence right before their eyes! that societies have used these drugs positively for ages... and that these substances even tell us something about human consciousness and the meaning of life. See "The Varieties of Religious Experience" by William James.
Scientists are NOT experts when it comes to psychoactive drugs. HUMANISTS and PHILOSOPHERS and MUSICIANS and RELIGIOUS LEADERS are the experts.
All science can do is tell us of potential physical problems.
Drug use is like mountain climbing or driving a car. OF COURSE it has risks. The Drug War is determined to make us think of drugs as uniquely risky, and that's rot.
I believe in the Mazatec conception of life as best viewed holistically, and I am not going to be held back by scientists who spend their time trying to find reasons why they can ignore the obvious benefits of godsend medicines.
This is not some fluke on my part: I'd rather die than stay on this crap and no one's going to convince me that I can't do it the way that makes plain psychological sense.
I'd much rather fail at this cause than adopt the materialist view that these drugs are best understood by looking at them through a microscope.
Author's Follow-up: August 8, 2024
Science studies all the bits and pieces out of context and then tells us "this causes that" and "that causes this." But the results of real drug use, good or bad, are produced by a wide variety of beliefs and practices and substance combined in unique and unpredictable ways. "This may cause that" in the laboratory out of all context, but "this does not necessarily cause that" as part of the big picture -- or it MAY cause that but it turns out that that's not a problem given OTHER elements of the big holistic picture.
Science simplifies the world as much as possible so that it can claim to give us absolute truth. But it is absolute truth about a hypothetical world that does not actually exist.
Yeah. That's why it's so pretentious and presumptuous of People magazine to "fight for justice" on behalf of Matthew Perry, as if Perry would have wanted that.
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.
UNESCO celebrates the healing practices of the Kallawaya people of South America. What hypocrisy! UNESCO supports a drug war that makes some of those practices illegal!
Even the worst forms of "abuse" can be combatted with a wise use of a wide range of psychoactive drugs, to combat both physical and psychological cravings. But drug warriors NEED addiction to be a HUGE problem. That's their golden goose.
"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.
But that's the whole problem with Robert Whitaker's otherwise wonderful critique of Big Pharma. Like almost all non-fiction authors today, he reckons without the drug war, which gave Big Pharma a monopoly in the first place.
The drug war is a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."
That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.
Just think how much money bar owners in the Old West would have saved on restoration expenses if they had served MDMA instead of whiskey.
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, Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website published on August 8, 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, Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website published on August 8, 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)