When Louis Theroux saw a young alcohol addict outside a London hospital, he mused: "What struck me was the sense of impotence I felt about how to help him. I only hoped he could find his way back to happiness and sobriety."
Louis fails to realize that it is the Drug War which renders us impotent in treating alcoholism because it outlaws all the psychoactive medicine that might be of real help to the alcoholic. That impotence is reinforced by our Christian Science focus on sobriety as a goal, thanks to which the patient is only considered "cured" if they are using no psychoactive medicine whatsoever (with the possible hypocritical exception of dependence-causing Big Pharma tranquilizers). If we thus counsel the addict both to foreswear medical godsends and to strive to achieve a state of completely drug-free sobriety, it's little wonder that we feel impotent when it comes to truly helping them. We might as well just tell the alcoholic, "Let go and let God," and then move on to the next alcoholic who is waiting for our "help."
The sane alternative to this Christian Science prescription for alcoholics and other addicts is to treat them with strategically chosen psychoactive medicines with the goal, not of making them sober (i.e. drug-free) citizens but rather of helping them to wisely use precisely those substances that allow them to succeed in life rather than to fail. That should be the goal in treatment, after all, not to turn the addict into a good Christian Scientist who dogmatically eschews the use of all psychoactive medicine whatsoever. To enforce the latter goal is to ignore the needs of the addict and to turn their experience into a morality tale, instead, a narrative that follows the usual drug-warrior narrative: a person is entrapped by evil substances, turns to God (or a higher power) , and finally realizes that he or she can do all that they need to do in life by becoming completely sober. Most Americans would be shocked by such Christian Science advice when it comes to physical disease, yet we feel justified in enforcing those same Christians Science principles by law when the goal of treatment is to expand or improve one's mental outlook.
Author's Follow-up: April 3, 2023
Besides popularizing MDMA, Alexander Shulgin has synthesized hundreds of drugs that could cheer up the alcoholics and help them screw their heads on straight, especially when employed therapeutically with the help of a pharmacologically savvy shaman or empath. It is really a crime that all substances of this kind are illegal -- it means that curing alcoholism is illegal. In the age of a Drug War, we do not want to help alcoholics, we want to make them "sober" as that term is hypocritically defined by western society. We want the alcoholic to go through hell so that we can turn their plight into a morality play, whose moral is that we should all turn to the Christian god for help, the god whom we conveniently disguise as a "higher power," of course.
Author's Follow-up: January 20, 2025
Imagine that we had been taught from childhood that operating on a human being is wrong. Then we walk down the street as an adult and encounter a guy with a broken leg. We would think to ourselves: "Oh, dear! I wish I could think of some way to help that guy -- but the problem of broken legs just seems to be completely insoluble!"
That would be idiotic -- but no more idiotic than looking at a drunkard on the street and saying, "Oh, if only there was a way to help him!"
Of course there's a way to help him -- one that no one has ever really pursued. That is to use common sense and select drugs that can get his mind off of his obsession with liquor and give him new alternatives and new ways of thinking. But we have been brainwashed since childhood to think that drugs are bad and so this does not even occur to us.
The fact is, we don't want to help such people. We would rather they remain drunkards than to have them using opium peaceably at home. We would rather they remain drunkards than letting them use ecstasy-providing non-addictive entheogens synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. We would rather they remain drunkards than letting them get insights and a new improved attitude from LSD.
We don't WANT to help such people. In the age of the Drug War, substance demonization comes first, THEN people.
Of course, in a sane world, we would not have to do anything for such people, because they would be empowered to act for themselves. Imagine, people being free to care for themselves! The concept must send chills up the spines of Drug Warriors and healthcare mavens alike.
Addiction
Addiction is a hugely fraught subject in the age of the drug war. This is because the Drug War does everything it can to make drug use dangerous. It encourages addiction by limiting our access to all but the handful of drugs that dealers find it practical and lucrative to supply. It fails to regulate product so that drug users cannot know the dose or even the quality of what they are ingesting. Meanwhile, the drug war censors honest talk about drug use.
In short, until we end the drug war, we will not know how much addiction is a true problem and how much it is an artifact of drug-war policy. And yet materialist researchers tell us that addiction is a "disease"? Why is it a disease to want to improve one's life with drugs? One could just as easily say that people are diseased, or at least masochistic, if they accept their limitations in life without doing everything they can to transcend them.
Indeed, the very idea that materialists are experts on psychoactive drug use is wrong. It is a category error. The proof is extant. Materialist researchers today are in total denial about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs. They maintain the lie that psychoactive drugs can only be proven effective by looking under a microscope, whereas the proof of such efficacy is right in front of them: in endless anecdotes, in human history, and even in psychological common sense, the kind of common sense that scientists ignore in the name of both drug war ideology and the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism.
Rick Strassman isn't sure that DMT should be legal. Really?! Does he not realize how dangerous it is to chemically extract DMT from plants? In the name of safety, prohibitionists have encouraged dangerous ignorance and turned local police into busybody Nazis.
"The homicidal drug is booze. There's more violence on a Saturday night in a neighborhood tavern than there has been in the whole 20-year history of LSD." -- Timothy Leary
Today's war against drug users is like Elizabeth I's war against Catholics. Both are religious crackdowns. For today's oppressors, the true faith (i.e., the moral way to live) is according to the drug-hating religion of Christian Science.
Philip Jenkins reports that Rophynol had positive uses for treating mental disorders until the media called it the "date rape drug." We thus punished those who were benefitting from the drug, tho' the biggest drug culprit in date rape is alcohol. Oprah spread the fear virally.
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.
The drug war follows me wherever I go. I was just researching "fun facts" about dogs, and http://petpedia.co told me that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as... searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?
One merely has to look at any issue of Psychology Today to see articles in which the author reckons without the Drug War, in which they pretend that banned substances do not exist and so fail to incorporate any topic-related insights that might otherwise come from user reports.
Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.
We drastically limit drug choices, we refuse to teach safe use, and then we discover there's a gene to explain why some people have trouble with drugs. Science loves to find simple solutions to complex problems.
AI is inherently plagiaristic technology. It tells us: "Hey, guys, look what I can do!" -- when it should really be saying, "Hey, guys, look how I stole all your data and repackaged it in such a way as to make it appear that I am the genius, not you!"
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 Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism: like almost every other would-be Drug War reformer on the planet, published on April 9, 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism: like almost every other would-be Drug War reformer on the planet, published on April 9, 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)