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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




America's "health" system was always screaming at me about the threat of drug dependency. Then what did it do? It put me on the most dependence-causing drugs of all time: SSRIs and SNRIs.

Westerners have "just said no" to pain relief, mood elevation and religious insight.

Many articles in science mags need this disclaimer: "Author has declined to consider the insights gained from drug-induced states on this topic out of fealty to Christian Science orthodoxy." They don't do this because they know readers already assume that drugs will be ignored.

When psychiatrists write about heroin, they characterize dependency as enslavement. When they write about antidepressants, they characterize dependency as a medical duty.

Until we legalize ALL psychoactive drugs, there will be no such thing as an addiction expert. In the meantime, it's insulting to be told by neuroscience that I'm an addictive type. It's pathologizing my just indignation at psychiatry's niggardly pharmacopoeia.

The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.

So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.

I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.

Folks like Sabet accuse folks like myself of ignoring the "facts." No, it is Sabet who is ignoring the facts -- facts about dangerous horses and free climbing. He's also ignoring all the downsides of prohibition, whose laws lead to the election of tyrants.

Today's doctors are "quacks" because they fail to see any of the many obvious uses for psychoactive substances.


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