Normally, I would consider it bad form for essayists to tell you that they are "feeling down today." It would be a case of what we used to call TMI as kids: "too much information." But this admission by a drug-war philosopher is highly relevant to his essays given that the lack of motivation referred to has been brought about by drug policy, which outlaws all substances that could help one to transcend this feeling and so be productive in life. This is why I call drug prohibition a meta injustice, because it does far worse than censor you as to what you can talk about: it seeks to limit the amount of passion and zeal that you can devote to your cause as a naysayer against the status quo.
Take me, for instance. There are numerous "behind-the-scenes" steps that I could take to improve the potential indexability of each of my essays. These steps would not take long and I have custom forms that I can, in theory, easily fill out for this purpose. And yet I find it quite hard to follow through. It's kind of like that broken yellow water dish that sits out on my porch under the table on which I place peanuts for my blue jays and cardinals. The plate has been sitting there for months now, and I never think much about it; but when I analyze my failure to act (to pick up the two large ceramic pieces and throw them in a trash bag at long last), I realize that I'm always basically thinking to myself: "Why bother?" I actually like neatness and attention to detail, and yet I have difficulty cleaning up "in real time."
Fortunately, I have long since learned to compensate for this shortcoming by conducting condo clean-up operations on a semi-regular basis on my "good days" while listening to a variety of provocative philosophical screeds on my Bose headset, thereby keeping the morbid reflections at bay. And so, as I tote the garbage bag to the door, I'm no longer thinking, "What's the point of doing this, the bag's just going to fill up again after all!"; instead, I'm thinking to myself: "Where does this so-called philosopher 'get off' concluding that the sober mindset is the nonpareil of unbiased baselines, emotionally speaking!? I'll show him: I'll write an essay about this claptrap this very minute -- or at least after the one-hour timer has sounded, announcing the end of this particular battle in my ongoing war against entropy."
Thanks to these compensatory skills that I have acquired over the years, my place is quite attractive, if I do say so myself. And yet there are so many broken yellow water dishes sitting on the metaphorical porch of my life -- so many steps that could in theory be taken to advance my goals -- were I only allowed the same freedom that everyone had just over 100 years ago, the freedom to control how I take care of my own mind and mood.
Of course, if a psychiatrist were to read these thoughts, they would conclude that I have an addictive personality. From their point of view, I don't need any symptomatic incentives (except maybe for coffee and beer, of course): I need to have my brain chemistry changed once and for all with a one-size-fits-all pill that I will have to take for the rest of my life. Speaking of which, this is one of the most surprising realizations that I have come to over my last seven years of studying American drug attitudes, the fact that healthcare pundits never seem to see any downsides in turning their clientele into patients for life. This is odd, because so many of these pundits preach sermons about the horrors of dependency when it comes to illegal medicines, yet they tout dependency as a positive patient attribute when it comes to Big Pharma meds. They have become so blasé on the subject that the Mayo Clinic does not even mention "dependence" in their write-up of Effexor1, which is surely one of the most dependence-causing drugs in the world2 -- a fact that will never be "scientifically" established, however, in a world in which biopharma pays 75% of The FDA’s drug division budget3.
Key Takeaways:
Drug prohibition outlaws motivation and incentive.
We all have -- or had -- the freedom to take care of our own mind and mood.
Healthcare pundits see no downsides in dependency on Big Pharma meds.
Outlawing substances like laughing gas and MDMA makes no more sense than outlawing fire.
Scientists are so used to ignoring "drugs" that they don't even realize they're doing it. Yet almost all books about consciousness and depression (etc.) are nonsense these days because they ignore what drugs could tell us about those topics.
Aleister Crowley actually TRIED to get addicted to drugs and found he could not. These things are not inevitable. The fact that there are town drunkards does not mean that we should outlaw alcohol.
Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.
The line drawn between recreational and medical use is wishful thinking on the part of drug warriors. Recreation, according to Webster's, is "refreshment or diversion," and both have positive knock-on effects in the lives of real people.
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.
To understand why the western world is blind to the benefits of "drugs," read "The Concept of Nature" by Whitehead. He unveils the scientific schizophrenia of the west, according to which the "real" world is invisible to us while our perceptions are mere "secondary" qualities.
Endless drugs 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 materialists and drug warriors to understand -- let alone materialist drug warriors!).
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.
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.
Normally, I would consider it bad form for essayists to tell you that they are "feeling down today." It would be a case of what we used to call TMI as kids: "too much information." But this admission by a drug-war philosopher is highly relevant to his essays given that the lack of motivation referred to has been brought about by drug policy, which outlaws all substances that could help one to transcend this feeling and so be productive in life. This is why I call drug prohibition a meta injustice, because it does far worse than censor you as to what you can talk about: it seeks to limit the amount of passion and zeal that you can devote to your cause as a naysayer against the status quo. 
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