It's amazing to me how many drug law reformers believe that the treatment of 'mental illness 1 ' 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 meds2. Jim Hogshire agrees: in fact, he considers those who reject Prozac as tantamount to imbeciles who are opposed to the progress of science3. Rick Doblin at Maps45 joins the folks at the Heffter Institute6 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'7 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)8. 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 Holland9, Irving Kirsch10.
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 brains11 of the depressed and yet we will not let them cheer themselves up with drugs like MDMA , or coca, or opium 12 , or the hundreds of psychoactive medicines created by Alexander Shulgin13.
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 LIVE14!
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 1516 med daily.
4) Drug researchers say they are unsure that laughing gas can help the depressed17 (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 unreal18.
"The evolution of modern medicine gave us our current, bifurcated view of drugs: the good ones that treat illness and the bad ones that people use to change their minds and moods." --Jacob Sullum, from Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, p. 25119
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 impressions20. 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 21 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 Am22 and Sci News23 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 24 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 2526, 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 mind27. 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 28 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.29'
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 shaman instead30: 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 physics31. 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.
Today's Washington Post reports that "opioid pills shipped" DROPPED 45% between 2011 and 2019..... while fatal overdoses ROSE TO RECORD LEVELS! Prohibition is PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE.
Ketamine is like any other drug. It has good uses for certain people in certain situations. Nowadays, people insist that a drug be okay in every situation for everybody (especially American teens) before they will say that it's okay. That's crazy and anti-scientific.
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.
One merely has to look at any issue of Psychology Today to see articles in which the author reckons without the Drug War, in which they pretend that banned substances do not exist and so fail to incorporate any topic-related insights that might otherwise come from user reports.
Some outlawed drugs grow new neurons in the brain. To refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!
The whole drug war is based on the anti-American idea that the way to avoid problems is to lie and prevaricate and persuade people not to ask questions.
If I should die of some unusual concatenation of circumstances, I want my survivors to pass "Brian's Law," a law stating that we will no longer pass laws based on hard cases and so needlessly fill our prisons by taking common-sense discretion out of the hands of judges.
Even fans of sacred medicine have been brainwashed to believe that we do not know if such drugs "really" work: they want microscopic proof. But that's a western bias, used strategically by drug warriors to make the psychotropic drug approval process as glacial as possible.
The best step we could take in harm reduction is re-legalizing everything and starting to teach safe use. Spend the DEA's billions on "go" teams that would descend on locations where drugs are being used stupidly -- not to arrest, but to educate.
I knew all along that Measure 110 in Oregon was going to be blamed for the problems that the drug war causes. Drug warriors never take responsibility, despite all the blood that they have on their hands.
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