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The Placebo Effect and Drugs

How materialist doctors screw their patients in the age of the drug war

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 10, 2023



In "The Holographic Universe," Michael Talbot tells us how the placebo effect can do everything from excising cancer to removing warts. "Simple everyday belief can also have a powerful effect on the body," writes Talbot. "People with cancer live longer if they maintain a fighting spirit.... A slight change in attitude can mean the difference between life and death." In other words, attitude counts. The happy and optimistic individual lives longer.

Most doctors now accept this premise.

Unfortunately, most doctors fail to accept the logical corollary to this premise, namely, that the use of any substance that makes a person feel good can protect that person from disease and help them to heal easily. Any substance. That's why opium 1 smokers seldom get colds. They don't think the cold into existence in the first place, and if they're overcome in spite of this fact, they are enabled to think the cold out of existence, thanks to the mental agility and creativity inspired by the poppy plant. Other drugs that could help one stay healthy for the same reasons run the gamut from MDMA 2 to psilocybin, from methamphetamine to mescaline, from coca to ayahuasca. The mere fact that these drugs can make a person feel good - and, most importantly, look forward to feeling good - is health-making in and of itself.

How many millions have gone without godsend medicine over the last few centuries because western materialist doctors fail to recognize this fact? And yet, to repeat, this fact is but a natural corollary of the postulate that these same doctors readily accept, namely that positive attitudes can improve a person's health and cure or prevent disease.

Instead, most doctors toe the Christian Science Drug War line, which piously tells the patient that "drugs" do not "really" fix anything. For such doctors, cures have to come either from Jesus - or from reductive science, for which only the molecules under a microscope are real. Folks with chronic depression can tell such doctors that the above-mentioned drugs make them happy and optimistic till they're blue in the face, but the doctors will shake their heads and tell them to wait for a "real" cure - like the mind-numbing Big Pharma 3 4 meds upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life.

Nothing will change until materialists recognize the obvious - that happiness is happiness, even if it is inspired or facilitated by the use of the drugs that we've been taught to hate since we were grade schoolers, since we were first fed the lie that so-called "hard drugs" can only be used irresponsibly and that psychoactive substances have no good uses for anyone, anywhere, ever.









Notes for essay entitled The Placebo Effect and Drugs: How materialist doctors screw their patients in the age of the drug war:

1: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
2: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
3: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
4: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The New York Times gets it wrong again. Yes, kratom, like all drugs, has downsides. The problem is not kratom, it's drug prohibition which limits choice. Nor are young people the only stakeholders in the debate, as the Times always assumes.

AI is like almost every subject under the sun: it takes on a very different and ominous meaning when we view it in light of the modern world's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine.

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.

Healthline posted an article in 2021 about the benefits of getting off of antidepressants. They did not even mention the biggest benefit: NO LONGER BEING AN ETERNAL PATIENT -- no longer being a child in the eyes of an all-knowing healthcare system.

The Drug War is based on two HUGE lies: 1) that prohibition has no downsides, & 2) that drug use has no upsides.

This is the "Oprah fallacy," which has led to so much suffering. She told women they were fools if they accepted a drink from a man. That's crazy. If we are terrified by such a statistically improbable event, we should be absolutely horrified by horses and skateboards.

There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.

American businesses judge people, not by the color of their skin but by the contents of their digestive systems.

This is why America is creeping toward authoritarianism -- because of the prohibitionists' ability to get away with everything by blaming "drugs."

I could tell my psychiatrist EXACTLY what would "cure" my depression, even without getting addicted, but everything involved is illegal. It has to be. Otherwise I would have no need of the psychiatrist.


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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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