My follower count keeps bouncing up and down like a heartbeat on an EKG machine attached to Charles Atlas in his glory days. The overall trend is up, thank goodness, but it's been a long and winding road to the dizzying heights of my (ahem) 1,000+ followers. [wait for applause] Of course, such numbers mean nothing, insofar as the lion's share of my followers may be serial killers for all I know (present company excepted, of course) - or more likely still, trolls and bots, and/or sworn enemies of mine who are keeping an eye on their nemesis with a view toward hoisting him by his own petard at the first possible occasion. ("Did he cite a problematic statistic in one of this hundreds of essays? Time to pounce!") But what to make of all this coming and going? Whence this fleeting fame? How am I so quickly turning everybody off after turning them on?
My guess is that I have blasphemed the modern God of Science. For even some of the most vocal enemies of the Drug War firmly believe that science has things "sorted" when it comes to fighting depression and anxiety, etc., and that "drugs" are only for recreational and/or spiritual purposes at best, but not for psychological conditions, which, so we're told, are susceptible to the one-size-fits-all cures of modern materialism: i.e., to blessed MEDS! Even Charles Hart1, author of "Drug Use for Grownups," toes that line, as does Rick Doblin2 and DJ Nutt3.
They all believe, tacitly or otherwise, that the only drugs that are legal today for the depressed (out of the thousands imaginable) just happen to be the ones that work. Of course, they have not been on the receiving end of those treatments for 40 years like myself, finding that they are depressed as ever, and now ineligible for psychedelic therapy thanks to serotonin syndrome. They are not, like my relative, living their life in a bedroom and faithfully switching from SSRI to SSRI, desperately convinced by their blind faith in science alone that there is a Big Pharma drug out there (or some miracle combination of those drugs) that is made just for them: one of these years they'll be sure to find it! (Meanwhile the clock of life keeps ticking, one missed opportunity at a time.)
Wake up, folks. Laughing gas or MDMA would get these people out of their bedrooms in double-time and into the real world, ready to start anew. A puff on an opium pipe would do the same, followed by a moderate dose of cocaine tomorrow morning, then by the guided use of salvia divinorum and then huachuma cactus, on the third and fourth days respectively of this common sense protocol. But scientists are blind to common sense in the age of the materialist Drug War. That's why Dr. Robert Glatter is actually unsure if laughing gas could help the depressed4, an astonishingly naïve viewpoint that only spurs on the FDA in their attempts to demonize the substance like any other "drug," notwithstanding the fact that William James5 himself told us that we must study the effects of such drugs in order to understand ultimate reality. In short, scientists WANT my relative to stay in her bedroom until such time as they COMPLETELY solve her depression with a one-size-fits-all-pill. My relative is clearly a luddite if she settles for a scientifically unacceptable cure.
I get it. I was a member of the Holy Church of Science 30 years ago. Science could solve any problem. I myself used to look down at people who scorned antidepressants as luddites - just like Jim Hogshire in "Pills a-Go-Go,"6 wherein the usually spot-on provocateur picks up the wrong end of the stick thanks to his blind faith in the ability of science, completely overlooking the goals of Big Pharma companies in flogging these highly dependence-causing pills and, worst of all, like almost all other authors these days, reckoning without the Drug War. For the question is not about antidepressants in the abstract, but the question is: do they make sense given the existence of all the criminalized alternatives available today in the real and synthetic worlds, all of which can be use far less addictively than modern antidepressants and some of which have inspired entire religions?!
Clearly not, Jim. For these miracle drugs in which you believe not only dull the brain, changing the personality unpredictably, but they ultimately render the user ineligible for godsend alternative therapies using psychedelics and entheogens. (What other drugs make it impossible to use alternative drugs, anytime, ever???) That's why SSRIs and SNRIs are an investor's wet dream: they turn the user into a patient for life, both by the fact that they cause dependence and by the fact that they render alternative drug therapies impossible thanks to contraindications such as serotonin syndrome, a generally mild side effect which, however, incentivizes clinicians, therapists and retreat managers to reject this demographic for fear of liability concerns and potential bad PR - concerns that they disguise, of course, in condescending boiler-plate blather about the potential impact on client health.
Make no mistake, however: they are concerned about their business's bottom line. For when it comes to drug use, safety comes first, unlike in any other risky activity on the globe. Horseback riding is the number-one cause of traumatic brain injury in the States, but equestrians unapologetically teach even kids to ride a horse. Why? Because we value freedom and personal growth - things that we put on the back shelf when the activity is drug use.
Of course, westerners have been taught from grade school to fear drugs, so they can see nothing but chaos resulting from their relegalization in America, or anywhere around the globe for that matter, since Americans are imperialists when it comes to drugs: for them to be drug free, they believe that the entire world has to follow suit: in other words, it's Christian Science uber alles: Mary Baker Eddy's way or the highway. But the problem has never been drugs, but rather our attitude toward drugs. And what is our attitude toward drugs? America's "philosophy of drug use" (to the extent that a hodgepodge of hateful biases merits such a lofty designation) is completely illogical and riddled with hypocrisy. If you want to see a rational attitude toward drugs, read up on the Cosmovision of the Andes. It is an entire humble philosophy of life, not just of drugs, whereas America's hatred of drugs is based on a variety of unexamined and false assumptions that recognize no guiding principles whatsoever, except insofar as the haphazard invocation of such tenets proves fortuitous in justifying a particular anti-drug law or action.
Do Caucasian Americans want to use peyote? No problem. The court can just manufacture a new principle out of whole cloth: that the right to practice a given religion is determined by your genetic makeup! Your genetic makeup! These are the kinds of outrageous ad hoc rulings that come about when you wage a Drug War based on nothing but expediency and the end result: you trash the American Constitution, in fact, which is how the 4th Amendment to the Constitution has already been de facto nullified by the War on Drugs.
We've got to end this infantile idea that substances can be evil in themselves. That attitude has negative consequences for which the Drug Warrior is never honest enough to take credit: violence, cartels, the militarization of police forces, the overriding of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, the election of despots like Donald Trump thanks to the sidelining of millions of minority voters, etc. etc.
And as if killing off democracy is not a big enough crime for the Drug Warrior, their substance demonization campaign has turned addiction treatment into a billion-dollar industry - one which works for everybody but the addict, whom we could easily cure if we stopped insisting that drugs and drug use are the root of all evil.
For answers to addictions are not hard to find. There are many common sense solutions that use drugs to fight drugs, protocols that rely on the value of anticipation, inspiration and motivation. But these are all touchy-feely subjects in the eyes of today's reductive materialist. ("What is this inspiration of which you speak? It does not show up on any of my charts?") Besides, America's Christian Science weltanschuung still makes it impossible for us to think of drugs as anything but a snare. That's why we've invented the word "meds," so that we can deceive ourselves into thinking that Big Pharma pills are somehow qualitatively different from all other psychoactive substances and so can be considered inoffensive, nay, positively meritorious.
But we are just fooling ourselves and, alas, the entire gullible world. Drugs are not the problem: the childish American mindset is the problem, one that refuses to see the blessings of Mother Nature as blessings. Until we stop our prehistoric demonization of inanimate objects, we ourselves are to blame for all the downsides that we so conveniently blame on "drugs," including the much-ballyhooed addiction problem, which is just a natural result of substance prohibition. Nor do we have an excuse. We all know that liquor prohibition created the Mafia as we know it today. To pretend that today's substance prohibition causes no problems is to play dumb in an inexcusable attempt to shift blame for social problems onto the backs of the poor and disenfranchised, by turning them into criminals and removing them from public life.
Uh-oh. My follower count just dropped to 998! See what I mean? One does not attack the prevailing religion without consequences. But who cares, right? They were probably just a couple of axe murderers anyway.
Author's Follow-up: April 22, 2024
You can hardly blame them. I mean, my short-lived followers should obviously not kill people with axes. But if they're currently using SSRIs and are optimistic about their results, I am the last person that they will want to be reading. And if they're psychiatrists who have been prescribing such drugs for decades, they certainly do not want to hear my message. But I am not running for political office, I am simply stating what for me is the hard-earned truth, without attempting to judge past actions, the more so in that I myself was a cheerleader for "Science uber alles" in my youth.
Author's Follow-up: January 4, 2025
I don't often wince when I read my old essays, but this one... I do not reject its substantive claims, but the air of self-pity offends. To think that less than a year ago I was taking life in this manner. Since publishing the above, however, I have resolved to give up all hope of being "noticed" in this life and to simply keep stating the truth on a daily basis. I have resolved further to give up all hope of even being praised for that latter resolution!
Marcus Aurelius would approve of this new strategy of mine. And even Marcus Aurelius as filtered through Schopenhauer would agree. I would point out, however, that Marcus Aurelius liberally partook of opium. And if I had that option, I would never have felt the need to publish the above in the first place -- or I would have done so in a more playful, self-deprecating and diplomatic fashion.
Incidentally, I think that all future essays should be of this kind. They should contain updates providing the author's view of his work subsequent to its original publication. This is an improvement on Montaigne made possible by the digital world.
As for my supposed unpopularity, X is a platform run by an insurrectionist conspiracy theorist and faithful follower of the anti-democratic Donald Trump. God knows who my followers are on that platform. If I knew who they were, then I myself might delete them -- along with the many bots that X generates to give one the false impression that they are making headway. In any case, quality readers are few and far between. To act as if one believes otherwise is simply to display one's own ignorance about the world as it is. That's what good old Marcus would say, and my buddy Schopenhauer would surely add, "Hear, hear!"
Author's Follow-up: January 5, 2025
Not that Schopenhauer sets a good example for dispassionate philosophizing. In his work on Sufficient Reason7, he calls Hegel a "scribbler of nonsense" and a "notorious charlatan." And such putdowns are not just written in a transitory fit of pique. His original German translator urged him to redact the attack on philosophers in that work, but Schopenhauer refused. He likens the German philosophers of his day to ostriches that close their eyes in the belief that their nemeses will thereby be made to disappear from the world.
Nor is he shy about bragging. To illustrate his discussion of causality in the aforementioned work, he does not simply refer the reader to his essay on Free Will, but to his prize essay on Free Will. And all the time he makes it clear that he is the savior of the world when it comes to properly understanding Immanuel Kant, nay, in correcting him as needed and fleshing out the fraught conclusions that deductively follow from his analysis.
That said, he also often seems to have truth on his side, at least by comparison with the materialists against whom he was fighting.
Immanuel Kant
Anyone familiar with the philosophies of both Immanuel Kant and William James should understand that philosophers have a duty to investigate what we westerners call 'altered states' and hence have a duty to disdainfully deride and denounce the outlawing of psychoactive substances. Kant's basic message, as inspired by Hume, is that we cannot understand ultimate realities in words, but as James insists in "The Varieties of Religious Experience," it is our duty as philosophers to try to understand such realities EXPERIENTIALLY, i.e., with the help of psychoactive substances such as nitrous oxide.
"No account of the universe in its totality," wrote James, "can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."
This is why it is a shame that I am the only philosopher in the world who contacted the FDA to protest their recent plans to begin treating nitrous oxide as a "drug" and so further discourage its use in metaphysical research. Alas, such goal-driven substance use is already considered unthinkable by most academics thanks to their brainwashed fealty to the drug war ideology of substance demonization. Thus I was the only philosopher in the world who spoke up on behalf of the legacy of William James and on behalf of academic freedom, for that matter, by pleading with the FDA to refrain from further marginalizing an already vastly underused substance. (In a sane world, the suicidal would be given laughing gas kits in the same way that we provide epi pens for those with severe allergies.)
But then this is the point of my entire website and the hundreds of essays that it contains: to demonstrate to the world that the drug war and prohibition are a cancer on the body politic and not just a matter of a few laws set up to discourage hedonists. For the idea that we should hate psychoactive substances is itself a metaphysical notion peculiar to the western mindset and not some logical truth that any unbiased mind must accept. Unfortunately, scientists seem to know, as it were subconsciously, that the drug war is a good thing, for it is clearly biased in the name of the materialism which they themselves profess. In the wake of the technological revolution, science is feeling omniscient, and so it naturally wants to avoid dealing with drug effects and the variability of human emotions. They cannot be quantified, as behaviorist materialism requires. So philosophers and scientists alike see a benefit in drug laws that outlaw substances that facilitate mystical feelings and ontological intimations: "Good riddance to such namby-pamby data," says the materialist in their "heart of hearts."
And so the drug war outlaws precisely those substances whose use conduces to a non-materialist view of the world, one in which we have intimations about the supposedly "unknowable" world of the noumena. And why is the noumena unknowable to us? First, thanks to the merely pragmatic nature of our perceptions as explained by Kant. But also thanks to the inherent limitations of that incomplete and fallible communication system that we call human language, whose inevitable shortcomings and vagaries seem to bar us from definitively saying anything that could not, at least in theory, be plausibly gainsaid in that same inherently malleable language.
These limitations of human language contrast tellingly, however, with the vivid experiential convictions about reality that are communicated by substance use according to the trip reports of the psychonauts of all ages. We can debate the ontological significance of such experiences, of course, but let us remember that it was precisely such "use" that opened James' mind to a world of potential realities of whose existence he had previously been blissfully unaware. Why? Because of his previous self-satisfied acceptance of materialist principles.
Unfortunately, modern philosophers have ceded their job of metaphysical investigation to psychonauts like James Fadiman, Alex Gibbons and Jim Hogshire. Not that there is anything wrong with the research of these latter truth seekers, but it is a shame that philosophers are not working with them to promote human progress and philosophical understanding. And so if metaphysics is dead in the 21st century, it is because today's philosophers have abandoned the pursuit of truth in the name of supporting America's hateful and superstitious war on psychoactive substances.
According to Kant, we can know nothing about the noumenal world, or ultimate reality, but this claim is not true*. In making that claim, Kant was unaware of the metaphysical insights provided by psychoactive drug use. There is such a thing as "experiential proof" inspired by such use -- an absolute conviction that is felt "in every fiber of one's being," as opposed to having been "proven" for one syllogistically in the fallible and eternally insufficient communication method that we call human language.
This is Kant's Holy Grail, had he only realized it, a way to move forward with metaphysical research: by looking for experiential proof of ultimate realities rather than merely logical ones.
A critic might say, yes, but metaphysics cannot be based on experience. But by that word, one has always meant sober experience. That implicit qualification was itself established before we understood the fallibility of the senses. The transcendent experience I reference here is of another kind, being contemplated in the mind and not processed through the sense organs typically associated with experience.
*Kant's claim could be salvaged, perhaps, by specifying the type of "knowledge" that we're talking about here. My point is simply that Kant seemed unaware of the power of psychoactive drugs to inspire states that provide us with convictions with respect to the noumenal world. Whether the source of those convictions is "knowledge" properly so-called is an interesting question, but one well beyond the scope of these comments and unnecessary for their rational evaluation.
Schopenhauer synthesizes the ideas of Immanuel Kant and Plato with the philosophy of eastern religions, according to which we human beings are unable to perceive Reality writ large. This limitation, however, which both Schopenhauer and Kant suggest applies to all human beings as such, may actually only apply to "sober" individuals, as William James was to point out a decade after Schopenhauer's death. James realized that the strategic use of drugs that provide self-transcendence can help one see past the so-called Veil of Maya. He went so far as to insist that philosophers must use such substances in an effort to understand ultimate realities -- advice that, alas, most modern philosophers seem committed to ignoring.
"No account of the universe in its totality," wrote James, "can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."
The exciting thing now is to consider Schopenhauer's philosophy in light of the revelations provided by certain drug use and to assess how such epiphanies tend to confirm, qualify or perhaps even refute the German pessimist's ideas about an eternal and unchangeable will, a will which the philosopher tells us is manifested in (or rather manifested AS) objects, animals, plants and persons. Schopenhauer tells us that the will corresponding to these entities is purposeful, for it seeks to create a specific kind of object or individual, but that the will is also meaningless, in the sense that the fact that it IS a specific kind of will is an arbitrary given, to which we need not ascribe any purpose, let alone a creator.
I am still trying to wrap my head around that latter claim, by the way, the idea that there can be teleology without design. I think I am slowly beginning to understand what Schopenhauer means by that claim in light of Kantian distinctions, but I am by no means sure that I agree with him. Yet I am not qualified to push back at this time. Further reading is required on my part before I can either refute him advisedly, or else concede his point. I do find, however, that Schopenhauer occasionally makes definitive-sounding claims that are actually quite open to obvious refutations.
In "The World as Will and Idea," for instance, he states that tropical birds have brilliant feathers "so that each male may find his female." Really? Then why are penguins not decked out with technicolor plumage? To assign "final causes" like this to nature is to turn animals into the inkblots of a biological Rorschach test. Not only is Schopenhauer being subjective here, but he has an agenda in making this particular kind of claim: he wants to underscore his belief that there is a logical causative explanation behind the fact that "wills" of the tropical birds would manifest in this colorful way, that it was not some act of extravagance on the part of a whimsical creator. But this kind of explanation is not the least bit compelling since one can imagine dozens of equally plausible "final causes" for the feature in question: the birds want to attract mates, the birds want to warn off predators, the birds want to mimic other yellow birds, the birds want to collectively camouflage themselves while roosting as one big yellow object (or more accurately, the birds' wills want to do these things).
One senses that Schopenhauer would respond as follows: "Fine. Give any reason you like, Ballard. But whatever you do, do not tell me that some suppositious God likes variety!"
And what about this famous pessimism? It's so typical of curmudgeons to try to make a universal law out of their own psychological issues. Schopenhauer does not seem to understand that attitude matters. As Hamlet said, "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." It is neither the shortness of life nor the inhumanity of our fellows that ruins life for most people -- but rather their attitude TOWARD such circumstances. Every manic-depressive knows that a blue sky and party cake does not make a person happy, nor living amid postcard scenery. One can commit suicide in Disneyland just as well as Skid Row. It is attitude, attitude, attitude that matters -- from which it follows that it is a sin to outlaw substances that can help us adopt a positive attitude toward life. That's why it's so frustrating that philosophers like Schopenhauer pretend that life can be judged by circumstances alone. Only once we acknowledge that attitude matters can we clearly see the importance of the many mind-improving medicines of which Mother Nature is full, the meds that we slander today by classing them under the pejorative label of "drugs."
We need a Controlled Prohibitionists Act, to get psychiatric help for the losers who think that prohibition makes sense despite its appalling record of causing civil wars overseas and devastating inner cities.
Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.
The Drug War is based on two HUGE lies: 1) that prohibition has no downsides, & 2) that drug use has no upsides.
America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.
If there were no other problem with antidepressants, they would be wrong for the simple reason that they make a user dependent for life -- not as a bug (as in drugs like opium) but rather as a feature: that's how they "work," by being administered daily for a lifetime.
Rather than protesting prohibition as a crackdown on academic freedom, today's scientists are collaborating with the drug war by promoting shock therapy and SSRIs, thereby profiting from the monopoly that the drug war gives them in selling mind and mood medicine.
The idea that "drugs" have no medical benefits is not science, it is philosophy, and bad philosophy at that. It is based on the idea that benefits must be molecularly demonstratable and not created from mere knock-on psychological effects of drug use, time-honored tho' they be.
Drug testing labs should give high marks for those who manage to use drugs responsibly, notwithstanding the efforts of law enforcement to ruin their lives. The lab guy would be like: "Wow, you are using opium wisely, my friend! Congratulations! Your boss is lucky to have you!"
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.
We need to push back against the very idea that the FDA is qualified to tell us what works when it comes to psychoactive medicines. Users know these things work. That's what counts. The rest is academic foot dragging.
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, Too Honest to Be Popular?: Why people hate me, published on April 22, 2024 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, Too Honest to Be Popular?: Why people hate me, published on April 22, 2024 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)
