If someone like myself had been depressed just over a century ago, they could have occasionally used opium to take the edge off of life and see beyond their problems and thus get a little perspective on their place in the world. Problem solved. No morose brooding. The sadsack in question would have had a little 'somethin' somethin'' to look forward to in their life: namely, the blissful mental relief provided by a medicinal dose of opium .
But this was before puritans (like William Jennings Bryant) and anti-Asians (like Francis Burton Harrison) decided that Americans didn't have the right to use natural plants just any way they saw fit. Thus a crackdown was launched on opium 1 with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, a clear violation of the natural law upon which our country was founded, and America (and, alas, the entire copycat world) began the age of the illegal plant, an era in which Mother Nature is viewed as a dangerous drug kingpin rather than a provider of useful medicines to humankind. (Of course, Big Liquor was thrilled at this turn of events which promised them a monopoly in the arena of providing human transcendence and relaxation -- never mind the fact that liquor provided a shabby psychological payoff indeed compared to the inspiring bliss derived from the responsible use of those time-honored substances that America was now going to demonize using every means of propaganda at its disposal -- above all the dogmatic failure to ever mentioning anything positive about the competition whatsoever).
This is an insane war on patients funded by Big Pharma 23 with the help of the American Psychological Association, who, together, continue to put on a full-court press to normalize a medical system which hooks one in four women on anti-depressants, many of which are more addictive than heroin 45.
Needless to say, the situation for the depressed only got worse during the presidency of know-nothing Richard Nixon, who further criminalized Mother Nature in order to prevent the use of pretty much all psychoactive substances by Americans, thus shoring up psychiatry's monopoly on treating depression, forcing the depressed to seek second-best solutions for their ills by using 'meds' that were to prove more expensive and addictive than the natural bounty that politicians had rendered illegal.
So, please, let's not profess surprise at the epidemic of depression in America. After all, the truly effective treatments for this so-called 'disease' have all been taken away from Americans by a busybody passel of puritans, politicians, and profiteers. It's no wonder then that depression reigns now.
If we want to get rid of depression, the first step is obvious: end the War on Drugs.
Might as well face it, you're addicted to SSRIs...
Author's Follow-up: April 12, 2023
Psychiatry is not content to merely have its psychoactive competition outlawed; it follows up this tour de force of tyranny by dissing the outlawed substances as 'crutches' -- used only by folks who want to avoid their REAL problems, which, of course, are invisible to mere humans like us depressed folk and can only be seen by scientists with microscopes. How ironic it is that the 'cures' thus discovered are effectively tranquilizers upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life: these are the very definition of crutches -- and crutches FOR LIFE proffered by psychiatry itself -- substances that do not help you experience life but rather to sleep THROUGH IT!!!
But psychiatry has another way to appease its physics envy: if the problems with a chronic depressive are not chemical in origin, then they are REPRESSED a la Sigmund Freud -- and hence (conveniently for shrinks) can only be 'sorted' with the help of a professional.
Either way, psychiatry wins, by positioning itself as the one and only legal and valid source for help for mental issues -- and thus they leverage drug prohibition to maximum effect.
Meanwhile psychiatry pathologizes anyone who still dares to use psychoactive substances, with folks like Gabriel Mate telling us that we have 'inner pain' whenever we suffer the consequences of prohibition, like interruption in supply or overdose due to amateur dealers, who compound their substances with the devil knows what: baby powder, cyanide or whatever.
But don't ALL humans have inner pain, Gabriel? Isn't that the human condition?
What really pains ME is the fact that the Drug War has outlawed almost every psychoactive godsend in the world!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That's MY INNER AND OUTER PAIN!
It is that unprecedented prohibition that has turned me into a tranquilized ward of the healthcare state.
And this in a country that claims to the value the empowerment of the individual above anything else.
Author's Follow-up: May 2, 2023
American 'experts' keep scratching their heads about treating depression. It's as if a society of starving people were sitting beneath blossoming fruit trees wondering how to find something to eat. By re-legalizing the coca leaf, we could solve the supposed depression epidemic overnight. The long-lived Inca chewed it daily, in the same way as we drink coffee daily. The fact is there are endless pharmacological answers to depression, most of which can be just as non-addictive as we want to be. But the world has never stopped and asked the simple question: what would a pharmacologically savvy empath 6 suggest?
Right now, in fact, the closest things to 'real' experts on depression are drug dealers, or at least that small subset of drug dealers who really know something about pharmacology and also care about their customers. Why? Because they're not burdened with the materialist-capitalist limitations which say that a drug must work in a reductionist fashion to 'really' fight depression or anxiety, etc. They don't care if a drug 'really' works -- (according to reductionists or Freud) -- they are happy merely to make their customer happy -- and yes, in a way that is sustainable.
Prohibitionists have blood on their hands. People do not naturally die in the tens of thousands from opioid use, notwithstanding the lies of 19th-century missionaries in China. It takes bad drug policy to accomplish that.
The government causes problems for those who are habituated to certain drugs. Then they claim that these problems are symptoms of an illness. Then folks like Gabriel Mate come forth to find the "hidden pain" in "addicts." It's one big morality play created by drug laws.
The war on drugs has destroyed America's faith in the power of education. In fact, it has made us think of education as WRONG in and of itself. It has made us prefer censorship and fear-filled ignorance to education!
There is more hope in dope than there is in the psychiatric pill mill.
Many psychonauts (like Terence McKenna) praise psychedelics while demonizing other psychoactive substances. No substance is bad in itself. All substances have some use at some dose for some reason for some people in some circumstance.
The media called out Trump for fearmongering about immigrants, but the media engages in fearmongering when it comes to drugs. The latest TV plot line: "white teenage girl forced to use fentanyl!" America loves to feel morally superior about "drugs."
Pundits have been sniffing about the "smell" of Detroit lately. Sounds racist -- especially since such comments tend to come from drug warriors, the guys who ruined Detroit in the first place (you know, with drug laws that incentivized profit-seeking violence as a means of escaping poverty).
That's the problem with prohibition. It is not ultimately a health question but a question about priorities and sensibilities -- and those topics are open to lively debate and should not be the province of science, especially when natural law itself says mother nature is ours.
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?!
If I smoke opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag. If I use Big Pharma "meds" every day of my life, I am a good patient.
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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