In the early 1900s, Charles Fort 1 wrote "Book of the Damned 2 ," in which he mentioned how science is an attempt to systemize our knowledge while keeping basic assumptions in mind. Any data that does not serve to substantiate those assumptions is "damned," i.e. ignored. But Charles Fort "didn't know from damnation." Since his day, the Drug War has damned a whole pharmacy worth of evidence by pretending that psychoactive substances have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, ever. Click the links below to listen to and/or read this classic book3.
By the way, Wikipedia's summary of this book is insufficient, to put it mildly.
Wikipedia tells us that "the book is historically considered to be the first written in the specific field of anomalistics." But this is a very shallow book review. The book is actually a harsh satirical criticism of modern science, which as Fort believes, does not investigate anything at all -- but rather sets out to prove things that it already believes. This explains why science today ignores (or "damns," in the language of Fort) any positive stories about drug use -- because it is not interested in investigating drugs per se, but rather in establishing that drugs are bad.
This is why we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse rather than a National Institute on Drug Use. The facts about positive use -- dating back to prehistoric times -- have been damned (ignored) by modern science. Science's goal in our time is to systemize knowledge about drugs based on the assumption that drug use is always unnecessary, dangerous and bad in the long-term: in other words, science is dedicated to "proving" puritanical beliefs about drugs and ignoring the fact that all tribal peoples have used drugs, for both personal and sociological improvement, as noted by the first ethnobotanist, Richard Schultes4.
Fort's book, by the way, is quite amusing, at least to non-materialists. Here are a few of my favorite quips.
"Sometimes cannonballs are found embedded in trees. Does not seem to be anything to discuss; doesn't seem discussable that anyone would cut a hole in a tree and hide a cannonball, which one could take to bed and hide under one's pillow just as easily."
"The volume of smoke that went up (from the Krakatoa volcano of 1883) must have been visible to other planets — or, tormented with our crawlings and scurryings, the earth complained to Mars; swore a vast black oath at us."
"I think it looks very much like what I think it looks like."
"He 'identifies' this matter as sand from an African desert — but after deducting organic matter. But you and I could be 'identified' as sand from an African desert, after deducting all there is to us except sand."
"Users" can be kept out of the workforce by the extrajudicial process of drug testing; they can have their baby taken from them, their house, their property -- all because they do not share the intoxiphobic attitude of America.
Politicians protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment and encourage drug testing to ensure that drug war heretics starve.
John Halpern wrote a book about opium, subtitled "the ancient flower that poisoned our world." What nonsense! Bad laws and ignorance poison our world, NOT FLOWERS!
In a sane world, we would learn to strategically fight drugs with drugs.
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.
Drug Warriors should be legally banned from watching or reading Sherlock Holmes stories, since in their world, it is a crime for such people as Sherlock Holmes to exist, i.e., people who use medicines to improve their mind and mood.
Brits have a right to die, but they do not have the right to use drugs that might make them want to live. Bad policy is indicated by absurd outcomes, and this is but one of the many absurd outcomes that the policy of prohibition foists upon the world.
I never said that getting off SSRIs should be done without supervision. If you're on Twitter for medical advice, you're in the wrong place.
Scientists are so used to ignoring "drugs" that they don't even realize they're doing it. Yet almost all books about consciousness and depression (etc.) are nonsense these days because they ignore what drugs could tell us about those topics.
Did the Vedic People have a substance disorder because they wanted to drink enough soma to see religious realities?
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