In the introduction to his exhaustive commentary on The Critique of Pure Reason1, Norman Kemp Smith warns his readers that Kant's definitive viewpoints can only be understood by considering his work as a whole, and that the reader should therefore resist the temptation to consider any of his statements out of context. I feel compelled to extend a similar warning to my readers about my philosophy of drugs. I always do my best to imagine all possible objections to my philosophical positions and to answer them "on the fly," so to speak, in my essays, but I hope that any serious reader will consider my work as a whole before erecting straw men in their mind based on my failure to answer any given potential objection in any given essay. There are so many caveats, explanations, and qualifications that are called for in order for a philosophical maverick to render himself intelligible to a readership that has been indoctrinated in contrary viewpoints since their childhood. One cannot be expected to address them all in every single essay. 
"In the presentation of a novel outlook with wide ramifications, a single line of communications from premises to conclusions is not sufficient for intelligibility. Your audience will construe whatever you say into conformity with their pre-existing outlook." --Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature2
I hope that this essay has helped to clarify my basic stand on Big Pharma antidepressants: namely, that such drugs are not the problem in and of themselves. That is the Drug Warrior's fallacy, to believe that drugs are a problem rather than the social policies that render their use problematic. The real problem is drug prohibition, which turns those drugs into "the only game in town" when it comes to treating depression.
Case in point: As a youth, I was "slipped" a psychedelic at a party, thanks to which I suddenly clearly saw all the opportunities that life had to offer -- and I actually began to grieve for the vast swaths of time that I had seemingly wasted in introverted blindness to so many possibilities. "The right to chew or smoke a plant that grows wild in nature, such as hemp (marijuana), is anterior to and more basic than the right to vote." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p xvi13
"Imagine how many people would have benefited during the past half-century had the government respected their autonomy and their right to self-medicate." --Jeffrey A. Singer, Your Body, Your Health Care --p. 9714
It is amazingly ironic that Sigmund Freud is known today in the west for time-consuming and expensive psychoanalysis. This can only be because academics and the medical community are controlling the narrative. They themselves profit from time-consuming and expensive psychoanalysis, if not as doctors then as researchers and professors. Any knowledgeable depressed person could tell you, however, that Freud's real discovery was that cocaine was a godsend for the depressed. But then the depressed themselves were never asked how they felt about cocaine. Self-interested doctors demonized the drug because they saw it as a threat to their livelihood. And the result has been the infantilization of human beings when it comes to taking care of their own psychological health.
We should start taking names. All politicians and government officials who work to keep godsends like psilocybin from the public should be held to account for crimes against humanity when the drug war finally ends.
We throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.
Americans love to blame drugs for all their problems. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. The prohibition mindset is the problem, not drugs.
That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.
All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.
"In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us where to find it." --Antonin Arnaud
David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.
If we can go overseas to burn poppy plants, then Islamic countries should be free to come to the United States to burn our grape vines.
Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.
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!
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