hen I was a teenager, I was always begging the field of psychiatry to do more. It seemed to me that there must be so many medicines out there, surely something would set my mind straight.
The result of my naivete? I was promptly pronounced "an addictive personality."
I've now had 40 years to think about that diagnosis and I call bull crap.
Imagine a field like psychiatry, that limits itself to prescribing a handful of addictive medicines, suspicious of anyone who dares hanker for more. That hankering is, in reality, utterly sensible.
Suppose you walk into a jewelry store and they have only one kind of diamond. You ask for other kinds of diamonds and they label you ungrateful and greedy. That's what psychiatry does when someone dares to allude to a larger pharmacopeia that psychiatry has dogmatically forsworn, whether in conformance with drug law, scientism, and/or the interests of the pharmaceutical companies that crank out the starkly limited formulary of politically acceptable mood medicines.
How dare I want to pick and choose from among the thousands of rain forest godsends. Why can't I just go along with the modest medicine cabinet of addictive substances that chemists have created to narrow down our choices to a nice politically acceptable roster?
Of course, the true irony of this state of affairs becomes plain when we consider that well over 1 in 8 Americans are addicted to modern-day antidepressants, one out of four when it comes to women, and that many of these drugs are harder to kick than heroin. So psychiatry may have a problem with SOMETHING, but it's clearly not with addiction. My own doctor told me not even to bother trying to "get off of" Effexor, given its 95% recidivism rate. And so I become an eternal patient, with all the demoralizing emotional baggage that comes with that condition. It's pretty much the exact opposite of empowering a patient, to make them a ward of the state, forever to be defined by their so-called illness.
The so-called addictive personality is actually "on to something." They realize that there's a vast pharmacopeia out there and they want psychiatry to use it. Psychiatry, for its part, must label such individuals as pathological, lest their craving for more should serve to illuminate the niggardliness of psychiatric offerings and demonstrate all too clearly that the entire field operates in crass subservience to anti-patient Drug War law and ideology.
I think what Brian's saying here is that it's meaningless to talk about addictive personalities in a society in which we criminalize most psychoactive medicines and teach people to fear and loathe them rather than to understand them. In a society wherein all pharmacological dangers were clear and folks knew how to get the kind of transcendence they were looking for in the safest possible way, no one would knowingly opt for the deadliest possible medicine. The problem is that Drug Warriors completely ignore this motivation for substance use -- namely the search for some kind of self-transcendence in life: for religious purposes, for on-demand motivation, to find some new spiritual truth, or to just take a break from a negative inner voice that is keeping one from achieving one's goals in life and/or performing a particular activity without self-destructing.
The Drug War brings about addiction by limiting the would-be user's knowledge of and access to all but a handful of drugs that the dealer is incentivized to sell. But in a world where mind medicines were legal and available, those who seek pharmacologically aided transcendence could do so non-addictively, either by using non-addictive substances like shrooms and MDMA or else by creating a drug use schedule which strategically alters the substances taken on a weekly basis in such a way that addiction to any given substance will never occur.
There was a documentary about PJ Brewster a few years ago in which we learned that PJ's friends did just that. They used a variety of "hard" drugs -- including crack cocaine -- but never became addicted because they were careful to never use the same drug twice in a row. Of course, the guy who volunteered this information has learned Drug War etiquette so he immediately added a non-sequitur apology saying, "Of course that was wrong."
Really? Why is it wrong to use psychoactive substances in a non-addictive way? It's wrong because the know-nothing Drug Warriors do not want Americans to know that such a thing is even possible! But the fact is, it is possible and it is the wise thing to do. In fact, this is what we should be teaching folks who seek pharmacological transcendence: how to use drugs (aka godsend mind medicines) in such a way that they will not get hooked -- unless they want to, of course: Unless they hit on the perfect drug (out of a freely available pharmacopoeia of thousands of such legalized medicines) that they don't mind taking for life, in the same way that 1 in 4 depressed women take a Big Pharma drug for depression every day of THEIR life.
Worried about addiction? Once we legalize all mind medicine, a pharmacologically savvy shaman/empath could imagine thousands of ways to slowly move the user who is unhappy with one med to another less troublesome med. We call such changes impossible today for two reasons: first because we outlaw almost all the medicine in question here, and second because the Drug War's goal is to get the user "sober" according to America's hypocritical definition of that term, not to get them happy according to their own definition of that term, not to bring them self-transcendence. Once we jettison the drug-war's Christian Science requirement for drug-free sobriety, the world's our oyster in terms of pharmacological treatments for the unhappy, the unsuccessful -- or simply for those who want to see beyond the veil, beyond the practical but starkly limited perceptual world served up to us daily by our five meager senses.
Were drugs legal and understood -- rather than illegal and feared -- Amy Winehouse might still be alive today (see How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse: How the drug war both created Amy's problems and kept us from solving them.), for instead of just "tut-tutting" at her drug use (or recommending Christian Science rehab and a grim future of teeth-clenching "sobriety"), her friends would have shown her safe ways to gain the transcendence that she was after, not by "saying no to drugs," but by saying yes to the right drugs, used in the right way.
Addiction
Addiction is a hugely fraught subject in the age of the drug war. This is because the Drug War does everything it can to make drug use dangerous. It encourages addiction by limiting our access to all but the handful of drugs that dealers find it practical and lucrative to supply. It fails to regulate product so that drug users cannot know the dose or even the quality of what they are ingesting. Meanwhile, the drug war censors honest talk about drug use.
In short, until we end the drug war, we will not know how much addiction is a true problem and how much it is an artifact of drug-war policy. And yet materialist researchers tell us that addiction is a "disease"? Why is it a disease to want to improve one's life with drugs? One could just as easily say that people are diseased, or at least masochistic, if they accept their limitations in life without doing everything they can to transcend them.
Indeed, the very idea that materialists are experts on psychoactive drug use is wrong. It is a category error. The proof is extant. Materialist researchers today are in total denial about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs. They maintain the lie that psychoactive drugs can only be proven effective by looking under a microscope, whereas the proof of such efficacy is right in front of them: in endless anecdotes, in human history, and even in psychological common sense, the kind of common sense that scientists ignore in the name of both drug war ideology and the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism.
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
Clearly a millennia's worth of positive use of coca by the Peruvian Indians means nothing to the FDA. Proof must show up under a microscope.
The first step in harm reduction is to re-legalize mother nature's medicines. Then hundreds of millions of people will no longer suffer in silence for want of godsend medicines... for depression, for pain, for anxiety, for religious doubts... you name it.
Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could believe it.
Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.
Almost all addiction services assume that the goal should be to get off all drugs. That is not science, it is Christian Science.
I hope that scientists will eventually find the prohibition gene so that we can eradicate this superstitious way of thinking from humankind. "Ug! Drugs bad! Drugs not good for anyone, anywhere, at any dose, for any reason, ever! Ug!"
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!
We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.
The most addictive drugs have a bunch of great uses, like treating pain and inspiring great literature. Prohibition causes addiction by making their use as problematic as possible and denying knowledge and choices. It's always wrong to blame drugs.
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 Myth of the Addictive Personality published on March 2, 2020 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)
hen I was a teenager, I was always begging the field of psychiatry to do more. It seemed to me that there must be so many medicines out there, surely something would set my mind straight.
Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, because the Drug War gives me the right to be a noxious busybody. That, and I also wanted to suggest a few related essays, namely: Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism: The Drug War renders us impotent in treating alcoholism because it outlaws all the psychoactive medicine that might inspire the alcoholic to change., Addicted to Addiction: How the drug war leads to a morbid and hypocritical focus on addiction, Addicted to Ignorance: How the drug war prevents the effective treatment of addiction and withdrawal, forcing patients onto addictive Big Pharma meds while ignoring the godsend mind-changing medicines of Big Pharma, which are crying out to be used in psychiatric settings., How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse: How the drug war both created Amy's problems and kept us from solving them. and Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate: a new way of fighting addiction, using entheogenic plants, ending the needless torture of addicts.
You have been reading an article entitled, The Myth of the Addictive Personality published on March 2, 2020 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)