a philosophical review of 'From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know about Mind-Altering Drugs'
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
December 28, 2022
espite his admirable honesty about drugs, Andrew Weil, too, has succumbed to some Drug War propaganda himself, at least when it comes to opiates. He tells us that they should never be used for 'recreational' purposes, which to Weil apparently includes the use of the drug by artists to inspire creativity, tho' Andrew never tells us why such use is to be considered as 'recreational,' as opposed to, say, occupational. Is coffee used for 'recreational' purposes in the morning? Is it not rather used for the practical purpose of waking ourselves up?
He has apparently bought into the Drug Warrior lie that some demonized substances can have no good use, for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in any dose, for any reason -- except, in this case, for bona fide pain relief due to some physical injury or illness.
That is just plain wrong. Poets used to use opium in the 19th century in what author Richard Middleton called "a series of quarterly carouses," in order to improve their creativity and give themselves new ideas. In other words, they knew that there was the potential for addiction and they scheduled their use accordingly. That's what happens when folks are educated about drugs rather than made to fear them.
And yet Andrew would agree with the Drug Warriors that even such wise use is to be forbidden -- or at least to be emphatically discouraged. If he had had his way in the 19th and early 20th century, we would have a far less inspiring oeuvre of horror stories by Poe and Lovecraft, who devised entire literary landscapes out of their opium-inspired dreams.
Much of his worry is over addiction -- and yet Andrew Weil says nothing about the Psychiatric Pill Mill to which 1 in 4 American women are addicted for life.
The question that he fails to answer is: why is opiate addiction so much worse than a Big Pharma addiction, especially when we're talking about the time-honored smoking of opium? Once you factor out the problems that are caused by the Drug War itself, we see that the difference between our reactions to addiction is an esthetic one: We are not upset when an SSRI patient suddenly goes off their meds because their suffering will be internal and take place in their home, where they will merely wish that they were dead. We can go about our business as usual. The heroin addict, however, is more likely to show up on the street and rob banks and so forth because his unnecessarily expensive medicine is not regularly available. This impacts us personally and so we consider heroin addiction to be a huge problem.
When it comes to Big Pharma drugs, however, we are not troubled at all. To the contrary, if these people are off their meds, we simply tell them to get back on them. Sure, the SSRI user has been turned into a ward of the healthcare state by the psychiatric pill mill, but that's their problem. This is an odd reaction, by the way, given that Weil's main charge against heroin is that it leaves one in a constant state of dependence. At least the heroin addict is not forced to share his innermost thoughts every three months with a psychiatric intern who is 1/2 or even 1/3 his own age.
Thus Weil inexplicably ignores the great pharmacological dystopia of our time. But he did say at least one thing about antidepressants that really struck home for me:
"Some commentators complain that widespread prescription of SSRIs has made many Americans less interesting and less creative."
I hate to say this, but that is so true in my experience -- and that's a down side that no one has ever ascribed to opiates. Meanwhile, the researchers who blissfully ignore the endless downsides of SSRIs and SNRIs are training their microscopes on MDMA even as we speak in an effort to find even the tiniest possible danger in that drug, so that they can dramatically cry: "See? MDMA has to be kept illegal forever, for anyone, in any dose, at any time, ever!" Meanwhile, Big Pharma peddles drugs on prime-time television whose side effects include 'death' itself and no one bats an eyelash.
This is enormous hypocrisy to which Americans are blinded thanks to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.
Yes, we should teach folks to avoid opiate addiction -- and we can do that. The poets cited by Middleton managed to pull that off. But we should not so obsess over downsides as to pretend that upsides do not even exist. To the contrary, in a sane world we would be studying how opium achieves its amazing effect of giving us metaphorical dreams in which we can mentally separate ourselves from our pains and problems. We should be studying how the brain works in conjunction with opium to render such insightful reveries. But instead, Weil agrees with the Drug Warrior that we should deny, a priori, the psychological benefits of opium in preference for demonizing that drug.
Finally, Weil seems unaware of the fact that the Chinese were responsibly using opium as a culturally sanctioned practice centuries before the British started selling it to them. The downsides of opium use only came on the Western radar when the British Anti-Opium League came along in the 19th century and did for opium what the American Anti-Saloon League would eventually do for liquor, namely, painted its use in the darkest moralistic colors imaginable.
Oh, sorry, there is one more thing that Andrew Weil got wrong in his book. He keeps implying that heroin users have an underlying problem that needs to be addressed. But this is just a drug-war canard. Sure, we all have problems, but why do we pathologize the desire to be perky and alive and vibrant and bursting with energy? Surely, that's an understandable desire, the desire to feel euphoric and "good to go." That desire is not something that we have to refer to some Freudian trauma or other. If anyone has an underlying problem, it's those of us who (like myself) naively put their emotional lives in the hands of a psychiatric establishment that is going to addict them for life to ineffective meds that not only fail to make them euphoric, but which actually rob them of their creativity as well! When are the Gabriel Mate's of the world going to look into the underlying pathologies that turned folks like myself into custom-made patsies for the psychiatric pill mill?
But Weil is only human. We've all been told that the political category of "drugs" is junk for the last 100+ years and both academics and screenwriters have written accordingly. That's why I'm constantly reading on this topic, to uncover the false beliefs that I myself hold as a result of my life long indoctrination with Drug War ideology. So far in my reading, Weil seems to be one of the least brainwashed authors on Planet Earth, but even he could benefit from living by the following maxim which I have created for my own use: question everything you have ever been told or thought about so-called "drugs"? And after you've done so, question yourself again. For to paraphrase a line from William Shirer's classic book on Hitler: "No one who has not lived for years in a DRUG WAR SOCIETY can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda."
The term "recreational" is very problematic when it comes to psychoactive drug use, since recreation itself can be therapeutic. The term seems to be a puritanical put-down of certain kinds of use, as who should say, "Use opiates for pain, but for God's sake, don't enjoy it!"
Author's Follow-up: September 7, 2023
This sounds like humor, but this is in fact the ideology that the DEA follows: folks are to use opiates for pain and if they enjoy that, then the prescribing doctor must be penalized. This is puritanism run amok. If you want to know if a newly discovered drug is going to be "scheduled," just ask yourself, does it bring about unseemly laughter or mirth? Then the answer will be yes. This is not science, of course, but Christian Science.
Book Reviews
Most authors today reckon without the drug war -- unless they are writing specifically about "drugs" -- and even then they tend to approach the subject in a way that clearly demonstrates that they have been brainwashed by drug war orthodoxy, even if they do not realize it themselves. That's why I write my philosophical book reviews, to point out this hypocrisy that no other philosopher in the world is pointing out. (Hey, if I thought I would ever be recognized in this lifetime, I would be humble and patient -- but it's clear to me that I'm to be largely ignored here-below until such time as I bite some serious dust, so you'll just have to put up with my horn-blowing, fair enough?)
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
Drug warriors aren't just deciding for us about drugs. They're telling us that we no longer need Coleridge poems, Lovecraft stories, Robin Williams, Sherlock Holmes, or the soma-inspired Hindu religion.
I looked up the company: it's all about the damn stock market and money. The FDA outlaws LSD until we remove all the euphoria and the visions. That's ideology, not science. Just relegalize drugs and stop telling me how much ecstasy and insight I can have in my life!!
These are just simple psychological truths that drug war ideology is designed to hide from sight. Doctors tell us that "drugs" are only useful when created by Big Pharma, chosen by doctors, and authorized by folks who have spent thousands on medical school. (Lies, lies, lies.)
Alcohol is a drug in liquid form. If drug warriors want to punish people who use drugs, they should start punishing themselves.
There are endless drugs that could help with depression. Any drug that inspires and elates is an antidepressant, partly by the effect itself and partly by the mood-elevation caused by anticipation of use (facts which are far too obvious for drug warriors to understand).
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.
More materialist nonsense. "We" are the only reason that the universe exists as a universe rather than as inchoate particles.
Mad in America solicits personal stories about people trying to get off of antidepressants, but they will not publish your story if you want to use entheogenic medicines to help you. They're afraid their readers can't handle the truth.
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, What Andrew Weil Got Wrong: a philosophical review of 'From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know about Mind-Altering Drugs', published on December 28, 2022 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)
espite his admirable honesty about drugs, Andrew Weil, too, has succumbed to some Drug War propaganda himself, at least when it comes to opiates. He tells us that they should never be used for 'recreational' purposes, which to Weil apparently includes the use of the drug by artists to inspire creativity, tho' Andrew never tells us why such use is to be considered as 'recreational,' as opposed to, say, occupational. Is coffee used for 'recreational' purposes in the morning? Is it not rather used for the practical purpose of waking ourselves up?
The term "recreational" is very problematic when it comes to psychoactive drug use, since recreation itself can be therapeutic. The term seems to be a puritanical put-down of certain kinds of use, as who should say, "Use opiates for pain, but for God's sake, don't enjoy it!" 
You have been reading an article entitled, What Andrew Weil Got Wrong: a philosophical review of 'From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know about Mind-Altering Drugs', published on December 28, 2022 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)