It's amazing to me how many drug law reformers believe that the treatment of 'mental illness' has not been negatively affected by prohibition. Why? Because they believe that modern science has found the answer to depression. They seem to believe that Big Pharma has just happened to find the one cure that works -- and that it's just a coincidence that the US Government has happened to outlaw all of the thousands of possible alternatives to that cure.
So Carl Hart tells us in 'Drug Use for Grownups' that illegal drugs are not for depressive folks like myself, but rather that I should keep taking my meds1. Jim Hogshire agrees: in fact, he considers those who reject Prozac as tantamount to imbeciles who are opposed to the progress of science2. Rick Doblin at Maps3 joins the folks at the Heffter Institute4 in staging studies for what they call 'treatment resistant depression,' the implication being that depression has been adequately handled by science, but that there are still depressed people out there whose biochemistries do not recognize a good thing when they see it, just as 30% of Americans cannot drink milk due to lactose intolerance.
In attempting to convince others that these attitudes are wrong (indeed philosophically crazy, if the truth be told), I would first point out that there is huge money invested in the business of cultivating these very attitudes. Read 'Anatomy of an Epidemic'5 for an account of how Big Pharma pays doctors to endorse products (and attitudes toward 'meds') on shows like Oprah Winfrey. Such propaganda has helped create the drug apartheid of which Julian Buchanan writes, which encourages us to see two distinct classes of substances in the world: meds (made scientifically and so blessed) and drugs (made by nature and/or God knows whom and so cursed)6. Whitaker also shows how SSRIs seem to cause the very imbalances that they are supposed to be correcting. For further on these topics, see the writings of Julie Holland7, Irving Kirsch8.
But one way to evaluate a paradigm, like the materialist ideology of drug use, is to look at its results. If a paradigm leads to absurd results then the paradigm is surely flawed.
And what are the results of the materialist paradigm about drug use?
1) Today we will fry the brains of the depressed and yet we will not let them cheer themselves up with drugs like MDMA, or coca, or opium, or the hundreds of psychoactive medicines created by Alexander Shulgin9.
2) Today we will allow people to use drugs to kill themselves (what we call euthanasia) and yet we will not let those same people use drugs in order to make them WANT TO LIVE10!
3) Today we will demonize and arrest people for smoking a plant medicine nightly -- and yet we will tell them that it is their medical duty to take a Big Pharma med daily.
4) Drug researchers say they are unsure that laughing gas can help the depressed11 (or rather the 'treatment-resistant depressed' -- see above!) Laughing gas! (And I'm like: 'Give me the damn laughing gas while you continue looking for a way to make me 'REALLY' happy!')
These absurd outcomes are all a result of our faith in modern materialist science, which is based in turn on what Alfred North Whitehead called the bifurcation of nature, whereby we think that atoms are the real thing and that perceptions are secondary and unreal12.
Why else would a drug researcher ignore my laughter under laughing gas and tell me that I'm not 'really' happy? Why? Because my perceptions are not real -- what's real is the atomic and molecular. This view is manifested today in the inhumane tenets of behaviorism in the field of psychology, according to which what counts is quantifiable data and therefore the testimony of the 'patient' may be safely ignored. In the field of drug study, this means that the drug researcher is dogmatically blind to all the obvious benefits of drugs, as time-honored as they might be and as much as their benefits are clear to us via common sense.
This is why the Drug War is the great philosophical problem of our time: not just because it is based on a host of logical fallacies but because its anti-scientific demonization of psychoactive drugs has been given the veneer of science by what Whitehead saw as a 'muddled' metaphysic: one which believes that 'reality' consists of atoms and molecules and that feelings are secondary epiphenomena, meaning that patient reports of positive drug experience need not be acknowledged or counted as important. Millions have used Ecstasy safely over the past 50 years and reported positive experiences, but such accounts, to the scientific mind, are just opinions based on unscientific impressions13. The way scientists see it: only THEY, the scientists, can tell when a depressed person is REALLY happy, not by listening to them laugh but rather by looking at their brain and gut chemistry.
Today's harangue was inspired by a Tweet from a follower (probably now a FORMER follower) who pushed my buttons this morning (no doubt unwittingly) by referring to SSRIs as 'godsends for some.'
I could not disagree more, but unfortunately it took this entire essay for me to explain why. I did at first try to respond through a series of frenetic Tweets, however, so I will close with a list of the same in the hope that they spread some additional light on this subject.
America's religion is science -- that's why everyone from George Bush to Carl Hart thinks that I should keep taking my meds. WRONG! The only reason the pill mill was created was because we outlawed endless uplifting godsends, like the hundreds created by Alex Shulgin.
Now, if the question is: would a woman be better off to stop taking an SSRI at this very moment, that's an entirely different question. The question is: should they have been started on them in the first place, or should we not rather have re-legalized MOTHER Nature? Psychiatrists try to shut down discussion on this topic by confusing the two questions. The question of whether SSRIs make sense is a completely different question from, 'Should I personally stop using them at this moment in time?'
Alex Shulgin synthesized chems that occur in the human brain. The outlawing of the godsends he created was absurd. The best we can say about SSRIs against the backdrop of this prohibition is that they are probably better than nothing in some cases -- but that's not saying much. Also, whatever benefits they create must be weighed against the fact that they turn the user into a patient for life by causing chemical dependency. This is a hugely demoralizing arrangement, or I think should be for a freedom-loving individual -- and it is expensive and time-consuming into the bargain.
It's our faith in this materialist science that makes us think it's okay to fry the brain of the depressed but it's not okay to give them medicines that elate and inspire. It's the same doctrine at work with SSRIs: Don't elate them -- try to 'cure' them -- a fool's errand.
This is why I tend to lose half the followers I get -- because science is America's religion and I am a heretic. Even Carl Hart tells me that I should take my pills, not use drugs. It's this warped belief that science has conquered depression. My entire 65 years of life says otherwise.
Let's give SSRIs real competition, then we can talk about popularity and efficacy. Let's see: 'I can take a drug that inspires me, puts me on seventh heaven, and is not addictive -- or I can take an SSRI that dulls my mind and which I have to take for an entire lifetime!'
I can't say that SSRIs destroy creativity, but it is a frequent complaint of pundits on this subject. So we should at least not recommend their use except for the suicidal -- and then ONLY BECAUSE we've outlawed everything that's much much better.
The problem is, almost EVERYONE ignores the Drug War when they write. For instance, they'll say, 'SSRIs are a godsend.' But what does that mean? That they're a godsend in and of themselves? Or they're a godsend because we have outlawed everything else? There's a huge difference.
Author's Follow-up: January 14, 2024
This is why it's often very difficult to discuss drug issues rationally, because folks do not admit that they're taking prohibition as a natural baseline. Magazines like Sci Am14 and Sci News15 help foster this kind of insincere argument by failing to add disclaimers to their many articles in which they pretend that outlawed substances do not exist. Take Laura Sanders' series in Sci News on what I call 'Shock Therapy 2.0.' Laura tells us how depression is a seemingly intractable problem for many -- but the question I have for Laura is:
Is depression an intractable problem per se, or is it intractable because we have outlawed almost every substance that could help the depressed?
Clearly it is only intractable in the latter sense, since even the seemingly hopeless would-be suicide could be laughing in the next 10 minutes were we to recommend their use of laughing gas -- or MDMA, or one of the hundreds of empathogens synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. The fact that Sci News does not mention these options shows that they are taking the drug prohibition to constitute a natural baseline -- which, however, is so far from being logically obvious that they should note this assumption as a disclaimer on all articles on such a topic. Unfortunately, they know that their audience has been brainwashed to believe that drugs are bad and so will already assume that the article in question was written from the point of view of a Christian Scientist when it comes to the topic of psychoactive medicine.
And so we see not only that science is not free in America, but that it is not honest either: otherwise it would tell its readers that it believes so thoroughly in prohibition that they (the magazine's authors) are going to pretend (caveat lector) that outlawed medicines do not even exist. Otherwise their 'science' would be unintelligible and filled with non-sequiturs, at least in the mind of someone who had not yet been indoctrinated in the drug-hating religion of the Drug War.
Author's Follow-up: March 1, 2025
The modern incarnation of the bifurcationist mindset can be seen in the behaviorism of JB Watson, according to whom all that matters are quantifiable results in the world of human psychology. This inhumane lie was obviously an attempt to soothe the egos of the modern psychologists by claiming that their field was a 'real' science, just like physics, one that was based on facts and figures and not on the variable and multiform vagaries of the human mind. But the success of behaviorism came with an enormous price tag: namely, the disempowering of the individual with respect to their own emotional states. Suddenly scientists were the experts on our own feelings. We were now duty-bound to ignore common sense and wait for help from our betters when it came to emotions: our scientists. This was exactly like putting Dr. Spock of Star Trek in charge of emotional states, as can be seen by the fact that modern doctors are blind to the glaringly obvious benefits of substances like laughing gas and MDMA in a way that only a soulless materialist could ever be.
The principles of behaviorism give scientists a dogmatic license to ignore patient laughter and the health-giving power of anticipation. It permits them to ignore anecdote and history and even the universal desire for self-transcendence and to connive with the DEA in asserting that drugs that have inspired entire religions have no known positive uses whatsoever -- for the simple reason that none of the laughter and spirituality that they create has yet been demonstrated to exist on a data-driven pie chart.
This logical outcome of behaviorism is an obvious case of reductio ad absurdum, and it was Whitehead himself who wrote in 'The Concept of Nature':
'The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us.12'
Unfortunately, billions of dollars of scientific funding are riding on the truth of behaviorism. Were we to take these absurdities seriously, we would have to dethrone that paradigm. We would have to admit that it was always a category error to crown materialist scientists as experts when it came to mind and mood medicine and to leave that study instead to pharmacologically savvy empaths and shaman17: real people who have actually used drugs and are familiar with how they can be used and abused -- people who understand that drug use is like any other risky activity on earth, that it has risks and benefits and that the goal can never be to eliminate victims of the practice but merely to reduce them to the lowest possible number consistent with human liberty and democratic government, something that the Drug War gets so massively wrong by causing hundreds of thousands of completely unnecessary deaths by both refusing to teach safe use and by incentivizing violence around the globe by outlawing an endless list of potential godsend medicines, many of which grow at our very feet.
CONCLUSION
The Pied Piper of behaviorism has led humanity into a make-believe world in which common-sense psychology is ignored. Ironically, this behaviorism is at odds with the picture of a holistic and contextual universe that is emerging from the study of relativity and quantum physics18. And so we see that a theory that was proposed in order to make psychology a science has actually served to mire its adherents in the deterministic pseudoscience of the past. Worse yet, it has done so by disempowering human beings with respect to their own psychological states while lending a veneer of science to the hateful outlawing of mother nature's mind and mood medicines, under the entirely metaphysical assumption that only scientists can provide us with 'real' treatments for mind and mood disorders.
Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths
In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.
This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just there way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.
This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.
How do I know this?
Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.
More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?
This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."
I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.
NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition.
Meanwhile, 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. That's a lie! Then they pass laws that keep us from disproving their puritanical conclusion.
We need to push back against the very idea that the FDA is qualified to tell us what works when it comes to psychoactive medicines. Users know these things work. That's what counts. The rest is academic foot dragging.
The problem for alcoholics is that alcohol decreases rationality in proportion as it provides the desired self-transcendence. Outlawed drugs can provide self-transcendence with INCREASED rationality and be far more likely to keep the problem drinker off booze than abstinence.
It is consciousness which, via perception, shapes the universe into palpable forms. Otherwise it's just a chaos of particles. The very fact that you can refer to "the sun" shows that your senses have parsed the raw data into a specific meaning. "We" make this universe.
The front page of every mycology club page should feature a protest of drug laws that make the study of mycology illegal in the case of certain shrooms. But no one protests. Their silence makes them drug war collaborators because it serves to normalize prohibition.
Timothy Leary's wife wrote: "We went to Puerto Rico and all we did was take cocaine and read Faust to one another." And there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with that!!! The drug war is all about scaring us and making illegal drug use as dangerous as possible.
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!
MDMA legalization has suffered a setback by the FDA. These are the people who think Electro Shock Therapy is not used often enough! What sick priorities.
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, The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War: How modern science helps normalize prohibition, published on January 14, 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, The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War: How modern science helps normalize prohibition, published on January 14, 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)
