In my philosophical review of "Opium for the Masses" by Jim Hogshire, I took materialists to task for failing to recognize what we pedants would call the potential ontological significance of the opium dream experience -- which is to say the fact that opium dreams may tell us something about reality writ large. It's since occurred to me that the rap sheet for materialists is far longer than this seemingly isolated criticism might suggest. Materialists are, in fact, unindicted co-conspirators in the War on Drugs.
Here's where Shakespeare's Mistress Quickly would blurt out: "Make that good!"
To which I say: "Peace, my lady, give ear and perpend!"
It is the materialist reductionist outlook that keeps us from recognizing the therapeutic value of all sorts of godsend medicines, and not just opium.
Consider the astonishing proposition that such medicines have no therapeutic value whatsoever. How could that be? No positive uses for a drug that Galen himself considered to be a panacea? That statement, if it's to have any truth value at all, has to presuppose the ideology of materialism.
You see, to the materialist, the proof of efficacy has to reside in molecules and chemicals, not in undeniable anecdotes and human history. You say millions have found opium wonderful and it has inspired great poetry? That means nothing to the materialist. He wants molecular proof that can be added to a PowerPoint presentation, figures that can be quoted in a grant application, objective numbers that can be added to a database. The materialist is deaf to any subjective evidence.
It's this myopic lack of common sense that causes otherwise brainy people like Dr. Robert Glatter to ask silly questions, like "Can laughing gas help people with treatment-resistant depression?", in an article of that title in the June 2021 edition of Forbes magazine. Of course laughing gas can help the depressed, by definition even! The reason Glatter doubts it is because he's a materialist and only accepts reductive explanations of efficacy.
This is why Descartes denied that animals could experience pain, because reductive evidence did not prove it. Sure, dogs will howl when you hurt them, but Descartes tells us that's just noise. Likewise laughing, for materialists like Glatter, is just noise.
The fact is, however, that common sense is not that problematic! Happiness -- drug induced or otherwise -- is happiness. What's more, happiness -- and the anticipation of happiness -- are health-producing.
For this reason, any drug in the world that provides a pleasant feeling can be valuable in treating depression. Any drug in the world. Even opium. Nor is the possibility of dependency a reason to ignore opium, for with opium, dependency might be called a bug, but for modern anti-depressants (upon which 1 in 4 American women are hooked for life), dependency is a feature. This is why doctors keep unabashedly telling such women to "keep taking your meds." We see then the outlawing of opium is based on an aesthetic judgment about what constitutes the good life, not on some scientific evidence that shows us what does and does not actually work for the "user."
Author's Follow-up: June 7, 2023
In "Opium for the Masses," Jim Hogshire includes a section entitled "the Role of Pain in Freedom." I hope Michael Pollan reads this part carefully and that it helps him reconsider his view expressed in "How to Change Your Mind" that outlawing Mother Nature makes any kind of sense in a free society. For if Pollan thinks outlawing marijuana makes sense, he's certainly onboard with outlawing the poppy.
The poppy's central and indispensable position in our civilization makes access to it important, and thus forbidding public access to the poppy is staggeringly cruel. Ceding control of opiates means ceding control of pain relief to the State... which has shown truly morbid interest in inflicting pain and denying its relief in order to effect social change and maintain social control. This is power that free people should never relinquish easily or without a fight.
Again, I call on Michael to repent. Outlawing Mother Nature is a violation of both common sense and natural law. It is a wrong way of looking at the world. The book of Genesis tells us that God's creation is good. The Drug War represents a religious view that mother nature is evil until proven otherwise. In orthodox Christianity, however, there are no evil things: only evil people and the evil policies that they create. When we think in terms of evil things, like evil drugs, we go astray and hence the endless downsides of prohibition, including inner-city shootings, civil wars overseas and the suppression and censorship (usually self-censorship) of scientific research. Substance demonization and prohibition is unbecoming of a free country, Michael. Please repent! Teach, don't punish.
Author's Follow-up: February 4, 2025
In the Age of the Drug War, it's a big no-no for regular people to have any ideas about medicines. This is because we all make the assumption that psychoactive medicine is the same as physical medicine and should be governed by the same rules: namely, that our doctors know best. But the use of psychoactive medicines cannot be judged in this way. That is a huge bias. This is why the FDA can get away with telling us that drugs like MDMA have no positive uses, because they evaluate psychoactive drugs the same way that they evaluate physical drugs, without regard for the feelings of the 'patient,' which, however, in the case of mind and mood medicine are of paramount importance.
I can still, however, sense that the behaviorists in the audience are shocked that I would seem to be giving medical advice, so let me state explicitly what would be obvious in a sane world in which we were not all loaded with presuppositions about so-called drugs.
As Alfred North Whitehead reminds us, all English sentences are elliptical. That is, they assume some knowledge on the part of the reader. For instance, if I say, "I love cathedrals," I am really saying that, "I love cathedrals when they exist in appropriate places and are built in a style that I associate with cathedrals," etc.
Just so, when I write that doctors should prescribe opium for the depressed, I have an elliptical statement in mind, which would run something like this:
"Doctors should prescribe opium as appropriate in particular cases based on the depressed patient's psychological predilections and physical sensitivities in order to help them through a variety of creative drug-aided protocols, as opposed to limiting their therapies for the depressed to those suggested by the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism, which denies the importance of actual felt experience," etc.
Any faithful and educated readers of my essays (assuming there were any) would understand my initial spare sentence to mean the same thing as the verbose rendition above. It's true that those who do not bother to learn my overall philosophy of drugs and drug use might reach a wrong conclusion about my intentions, but then they have no business reading philosophy if they are looking only for soundbites. If anyone is to blame for such misunderstandings, it is society and their parents, neither of which taught them any better.
Nevertheless, I hope that the verbose statement just provided will make my meaning clear even to those who cannot be bothered with learning the philosophy with which I approach the whole subject of drugs and drug use.
Opium
Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal in the United States. It took drug laws to accomplish that. By outlawing opium and refusing to teach safe use, the drug warrior has subjected users to contaminated product of uncertain dosage, thereby causing thousands of unnecessary overdoses.
Currently, I myself am chemically dependent on a Big Pharma drug for depression, that I have to take every day of my life. There is no rational reason why I should not be able to smoke opium daily instead. It is only drug-war fearmongering that has demonized that choice -- for obvious racist, economic and political reasons.
You have been lied to your entire life about opium. In fact, the drug war has done its best to excise the very word "opium" from the English vocabulary. That's why the Thomas Jefferson Foundation refuses to talk about the 1987 raid on Monticello in which Reagan's DEA confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. It's just plain impolite to bring up that subject these days.
It's hard to learn the truth about opium because the few books on the subject demonize it rather than discuss it dispassionately. Take the book by John Halpern: "Opium: How an ancient flower shaped and poisoned our world." It's a typical Drug Warrior title. A flower did not poison our world, John: our world was poisoned by bad laws: laws that were inspired first and foremost by racism, followed closely by commercial interests, politics, misinformation and lies.
To learn something approaching to "the truth about Opium," read the book of that name by William Brereton, written to defend the time-honored panacea from the uninformed and libelous attacks of Christian missionaries.
Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing. They don't blame such deaths on horses and mountains; neither should they blame drug-related deaths on drugs.
Drug War censorship is supported by our "science" magazines, which pretend that outlawed drugs do not exist, and so write what amount to lies about the supposed intransigence of things like depression and anxiety.
The problem for alcoholics is that alcohol decreases rationality in proportion as it provides the desired self-transcendence. Outlawed drugs can provide self-transcendence with INCREASED rationality and be far more likely to keep the problem drinker off booze than abstinence.
Google founders used to enthuse about the power of free speech, but Google is actively shutting down videos that tell us how to grow mushrooms -- MUSHROOMS, for God's sake. End the drug war and this hateful censorship of a free people.
NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition.
There are hundreds of things that we should outlaw before drugs (like horseback riding) if, as claimed, we are targeting dangerous activities. Besides, drugs are only dangerous BECAUSE of prohibition, which compromises product purity and refuses to teach safe use.
Prohibitionists are also responsible for the 100,000-plus killed in the US-inspired Mexican drug war
Someone should stand outside Jefferson's estate and hand out leaflets describing the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello to confiscate poppy plants. That raid was against everything Jefferson stood for. The TJ Foundation DISHONORED JEFFERSON and their visitors should know that!
It's a category error to say that scientists can tell us if psychoactive drugs "really work." It's like asking Dr. Spock of Star Trek if hugging "really works." ("Hugging is highly illogical, Captain.")
What are drug dealers doing, after all? Only selling substances that people want and have always had a right to, until racist politicians came along and decided government had the right to ration out pain relief and mystical experience.
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, Why doctors should prescribe opium for depression: how materialists collude with drug warriors to keep us from using godsend medicine, published on June 6, 2023 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)
In "Opium for the Masses," Jim Hogshire includes a section entitled "the Role of Pain in Freedom." I hope Michael Pollan reads this part carefully and that it helps him reconsider his view expressed in "How to Change Your Mind" that outlawing Mother Nature makes any kind of sense in a free society. For if Pollan thinks outlawing marijuana makes sense, he's certainly onboard with outlawing the poppy.
You have been reading an article entitled, Why doctors should prescribe opium for depression: how materialists collude with drug warriors to keep us from using godsend medicine, published on June 6, 2023 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)
