or why doctors and researchers are blind to common sense
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
December 22, 2024
I have written many essays on the connection between materialism 1 and substance prohibition. I have shown how a dogmatic reductive materialism blinds drug researchers to common sense and helps them toe the Drug War party line by professing to be in doubt about the efficacy of many drugs that oh-so-obviously work, not only according to user reports and historical records, but according to psychological common sense (like the once-simple notion that drugs that cheer one up do actually cheer one up, even if they fail to do so in a way that materialist scientists can demonstrate on a pie chart!) However, I have not yet specified the name of the psychological theory that seems to have greenlighted this dogmatic obtuseness in the first place. That psychological theory is Behaviorism.
The icy coldness of that psychological doctrine is clear in the following words of its founder, JB Watson 2 , as quoted in the 2015 book "Paradox" by Margaret Cuonzo:
"Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic.3"
What counts is what one can measure -- and since anecdotal and historical accounts of life-affirming drug use cannot be quantified, they are to be ignored. You say a drug helps you? What do YOU know? Doctors are the experts after all: doctors who are dogmatically deaf to your laughter and blind to your smiles while you are under the influence.
Behaviorism is the perfect ideology for a curmudgeon, because it lends a veneer of science to their inability to deal with human emotions. The Behaviorist is Dr. Spock with an attitude. The doctrine seems to justify all their inability to live large and fully. Indeed, taken to extremes, such curmudgeons would have to foreswear music itself, since there is nothing logical and quantifiable about the emotions that it inspires, even in Behaviorists. Such feelings are, after all, just "heritages of a timid savage past akin to magic."
Unfortunately, the attitude of such curmudgeons has knock-on effects because it teaches drug researchers to ignore common sense and to downplay or ignore all positive drug usage reports and historic lessons about positive drug use. The "patient" needs to just shut up and let the doctors decide what can help them. No need to even discuss one's hopes and dreams with the doc because that is all touchy-feely stuff and anti-scientific. Behaviorism is a doctrine that dovetails nicely with Drug War ideology, because it empowers the researcher to ignore the obvious: that all drugs that elate have potential uses as antidepressants 4.
That statement can only be denied when one assumes that "real" proof of efficacy of a psychoactive medicine must be determined by a doctor, and that the patient's only job is to shut up because their hopes and dreams and feelings cannot be accurately displayed and quantified on a graph or a pie chart.
Today's drug laws tell us that we must respect the historical use of sacred medicines, while denying us our personal right to use them unless our ancestors did so. That's a meta-injustice! It negatively affects the way that we are allowed to experience our world!
If we encourage folks to use antidepressants daily, there is nothing wrong with them using heroin daily. A founder of Johns Hopkins used morphine daily and he not only survived, but he thrived.
Oregon has decided to go back to the braindead plan of treating substance use as a police matter. Might as well arrest people at home since America has already spread their drug-hating Christian Science religion all over the world.
America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
Opium and cocaine have a vast host of potential rational uses -- yet we all have to pretend otherwise in the age of the Drug War.
Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" are horrible because they encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.
We should place prohibitionists on trial for destroying inner cities.
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.
The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?
A generally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear. --James B. Stockade.
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