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The FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive drugs
The FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive drugs
Here's why.
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 14, 2024
The FDA sets a ridiculous standard of safety for drugs like MDMA 1 . This is because they focus only on the downsides of use. They do not care in the least about the millions who suffer in silence thanks to the outlawing of such drugs. This is why the approval of psychoactive drugs is always based on philosophical assumptions. For the question is not just, "How dangerous is a drug?" but rather "How important are freedom of thought and the power to control one's own mind?" And the FDA has no expertise in deciding such philosophical matters!
By ignoring the needs of such would-be beneficiaries of the drug, the FDA is essentially telling us that freedom of the mind is not important and that the prime imperative in life is to avoid risk at all costs, even if it means the silent suffering of vast swaths of humanity. Of course, this default philosophical premise is a mistake, even on its own terms, for it fails to calculate, or to even consider, the risk of leaving the world full of dissatisfied people, who may take out that dissatisfaction on themselves or others.
Author's Follow-up:
April 05, 2025
This is the same FDA that approves of Big Pharma 23 drugs whose side effects as advertised on prime-time television include death itself 4 . This is the same FDA that thinks that brain-damaging shock therapy is a valuable treatment. They will not let you improve your mood with phenomenally safe drugs, many of which grow at our very feet, but not to worry: if you get TOO depressed, the FDA is ready to help you damage your brain. It may not make you thrive in life, but it will take your mind off of your problems -- and everything else for that matter.
The important thing is, you will no longer be a problem for the nursing staff that you will henceforth require. You will be all compliance and not put up a fight.
This is proof that the materialist approach to mind and mood medicine is perverted and sick. It causes the behaviorist to ignore all obvious benefits to drugs and to prefer suicide 5 to drug use. When is America going to wake up?
People talk about how dangerous Jamaica is -- but no one reminds us that it is all due to America's Drug War. Yes, cannabis and psilocybin are legal there, but plenty of drugs are not, and even if they were, their illegality elsewhere would lead to fierce dealer rivalry.
"Abuse" is a funny term because it implies that there's a right way to use "drugs," which is something that the drug warriors deny. To the contrary, they make the anti-scientific claim that "drugs" are not good for anybody for any reason at any dose.
The Drug War is a religion. The "addict" is a sinner who has to come home to the true faith of Christian Science. In reality, neither physical nor psychological addiction need be a problem if all drugs were legal and we used them creatively to counter problematic use.
Immanuel Kant wrote that scientists are scornful about metaphysics yet they rely on it themselves without realizing it. This is a case in point, for the idea that euphoria and visions are unhelpful in life is a metaphysical viewpoint, not a scientific one.
If daily drug use and dependency are okay, then there's no logical or scientific reason why I can't smoke a nightly opium pipe.
Mad in America publishes stories of folks who are disillusioned with antidepressants, but they won't publish mine, because I find mushrooms useful. They only want stories about cold turkey and jogging, or nutrition, or meditation.
If there were no other problem with antidepressants, they would be wrong for the simple reason that they make a user dependent for life -- not as a bug (as in drugs like opium) but rather as a feature: that's how they "work," by being administered daily for a lifetime.
No imaginable downside could persuade westerners that guns and alcohol were too dangerous. Yet the DEA lies about almost all psychoactive drugs, saying there are no good uses.
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.
Drug-designing chemists have no expertise in deciding what constitutes a cure for depression. As Schopenhauer wrote:
"The mere study of chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher."
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
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