I've been on beta blockers for anxiety for years now and I recently decided that I finally wanted to quit.
How naive of me.
I found out that quitting may be impossible. Why? Because we have outlawed all alternatives to Big Pharma meds of this kind. Meanwhile, the daily use of a beta blocker has changed my body's biochemical baseline such that my body 'panics' when it no longer senses the drug in its system.
DOGMATICALLY BLIND PSYCHIATRISTS
In researching this issue online, I was surprised to find a lot of glib praise for anxiolytic beta blockers from psychiatrists... and almost no talk about the difficulty of withdrawal, except for the usual sanctimonious and self-serving spiel admonishing us to see one's doctor for help in getting off such meds. Yes, they want us to 'get help' from the same doctors who got us hooked on these drugs in the first place. This is 'all of a piece' with the psychiatrist's support for dependence-causing antidepressants. Psychiatrists see no problem with mucking about with a patient's biochemical baseline, provided that they can do so in a way that turns that patient into a client for life.
Such indiscriminate praise for beta blockers is not just bad science, it's bad philosophy: it conveys the idea that drugs should be used merely to make life livable and not to help a person thrive. In fact, both beta blockers and antidepressants seem designed to KEEP a patient from thriving.
A WAR ON CREATIVITY
I can't imagine Allen Ginsberg writing 'Howl!' while under the influence of mood-damping drugs like Inderal and Prozac -- but then maybe that's the point: the powers-that-be do not want poets writing poems like 'Howl!', which is a caustic lament against the unimaginative materialism of Americans-- nor do they want authors like HP Lovecraft writing opium-inspired stories like 'Celaphais,' in which the homeless protagonist wanders through 'the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams,' nor do they find any benefit whatsoever in the exquisite appreciation of nature provided by the use of drugs like morphine, as described most particularly by Edgar Allan Poe in 'A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.'
So when materialist psychiatrists approve only of psychiatric drugs that neither elate nor inspire (in contradistinction to time-honored plant medicines, for instance, which often do both), they are not giving us some scientifically objective verdict about what actually works in this world: they are telling HOW they think we should go about curing ourselves: namely, in a seemly way that does not conduce to undue happiness or excitement on our part.
In short, 'Everything as it should be, just like good Christians,' as the phlegmatic old nanny wistfully remarks in 'Uncle Vanya' by Anton Chekov.
But such assumption-laden pharmacological beliefs can be philosophically gainsaid by ordinary people without a medical degree... unless, of course, we legally require Americans to approach the world from a materialist viewpoint. How? By outlawing all substances that would help us approach the world of spirituality, healing and medicine from an holistic point of view, the nature-friendly viewpoint that is both explicitly and implicitly adopted by indigenous credos around the world, as in the Cosmovision of the Andes.
ALLEN GINSBERG V MATERIALISM
Speaking of Allen Ginsberg, he was way ahead of his time in diagnosing the materialistic tyranny of the War on Drugs, as is demonstrated by the following citation from the beat poet as referenced by editor Oliver Harris in 'The Yage Letters Redux' by William Burroughs.
'A materialist consciousness is attempting to preserve itself from dissolution by restriction and persecution of experience of the transcendental. One day perhaps the earth will be dominated by the illusion of separate consciousness, the bureaucrats having triumphed in seizing control of all roads of communication with the divine and restricting traffic. But sleep and death cannot evade the great dream of being and the victory of the bureaucrats of illusion is only an illusion of their separate world of consciousness.' -- Allen Ginsberg 1
Unfortunately, almost all the 'movers and shakers' in the war against the Drug War are materialists and work in environments where the funding comes ultimately, directly or indirectly, from the pockets of chemically dependent Americans like myself. (Where else do you think that Big Pharma gets its enormous budget for studying psychiatric meds?) I'm talking about authors like Rick Strassman2, Rick Doblin3, DJ Nutt4 and Carl Hart5. They are dogmatically incapable of understanding the full injustice of the materialistic War on Drugs, at least to the extent that they are true to their materialistic bona fides and remember upon which side their toast is buttered. And why? Because as materialists, they are obliged to ignore all glaringly obvious and time-honored benefits of drugs (all uses that make sense merely because of common sense psychology) and to search instead for proof of efficacy under a microscope and/or in studies that attempt to meticulously ignore all the contextual psychological 'biases' that are crucial in making holistic drugs effective in the first place.
These are the kind of authors who talk about 'treatment-resistant depression,' thereby implying that SSRIs and SNRIs have 'sorted' depression,, as the Brits would say, but that there are a minority of folks whose finicky biochemistry does not accept these wonderful cures, in the same way that 30% of milk drinkers are lactose intolerant and cannot enjoy the blessings of milk.
But if materialists have 'sorted' depression, I never got the memo. Was I happy and did not know it? No. It's just that my definition of an effective antidepressant is one that allows me to live large, not one that merely makes my gloominess survivable, which is the low bar set by materialist science for such drugs.
Besides, the use of the term 'lactose intolerant' is just a linguistic exercise in blaming the victim: it is used by PR firms to whitewash the downsides of milk. This is a linguistic indulgence that we never dispense for demonized drugs. Far less than 30% of cocaine users are 'cocaine intolerant,' since the vast majority of drug users use responsibly, as Carl Hart reports in 'Drug Use for Grownups,' but we never blame users for their misuse of psychoactive substances but rather the substances that they misuse (bearing in mind that the term 'misuse' is often just a synonym for mere 'use' in the fanatically biased Christian Science lexicon of the Drug Warrior).
BLAMING DRUGS
This is the whole anti-scientific problem with substance prohibition: it blames drugs for problems that are caused by human beings and their bad social policies (including fearmongering, a refusal to educate, and a refusal to provide regulated product for desired substances). The Drug War is therefore superstitious and anti-scientific and just plain silly: it is as ignorant as outlawing fire because it can burn our fingers. And the worst part about it is: the Drug War is an eternal war. Agencies like the DEA do not want to end drug problems -- to do so would be to end their perceived relevance in the world and jeopardize their shamefully large multi-billion-dollar budget. They want to keep screaming 'drugs' (PCP, ICE, crack cocaine, oxy, Fentanyl!) thereby promoting their use by rebellious young people whom we refuse to educate about safe use (and whom we refuse to supply with regulated product), with the hope that more young people will die and that the agency can then turn around and blame these new DEA-caused deaths on drugs themselves, thus 'justifying' still more obscene allocations of money on behalf of locking up American minorities and killing socially conscious protestors in Latin America (see, for instance, 'Drug War Capitalism' by Dawn Paley6). What an enormous and seemingly never-ending scam!
In short, the Drug War kills far more Americans than would have ever died had the country not taking the unprecedented step of outlawing mother nature, a step which is so palpably anti-democratic and anti-Christian that the mind boggles, especially when so many of the defenders of this policy claim to be Christians themselves -- Christians whose ancestors came here to escape religious persecution, the same persecution that these 'Christians' now lavish upon those who find spiritual and emotional support in time-honored plant medicines and fungi, substances which the Judeo-Christian God himself told us were good.
THOMAS SZASZ WAS RIGHT
Thomas Szasz was right: Americans just need to grow up when it comes to drugs7. This means, first and foremost, that we need to stop holding drug use to safety standards that we do not apply to any other risky activity on planet Earth, no, not even to free-climbing or swimming with sharks -- or to driving a car, for that matter! If we had the same risk sensitivity for these latter activities, Americans would still be riding horses -- and even that activity would have been banned after the well-publicized death of Christopher Reeves, which would have scared us into renouncing horseback riding once and for all.
To repeat: the claim that antidepressants 'work' is a philosophical claim, not a scientific one, since the veracity of that claim depends entirely on how one defines the word 'work,' that is, on what one believes would or should constitute a 'cured' state for the depressed. For folks like myself, a cure for my depression would mean that I would be allowed to 'live large' and be the kind of person I want to be in life, but if antidepressants 'work,' they do not do so in that fashion. To the contrary, they hold me back from being all that I can be -- and the most that I can say for them after 40 years' worth of use is that they make depression livable, which is faint praise indeed, especially when we consider that outlawed drugs can exceed that stinting result by leaps and bounds.
PAUL STAMETS' CURE FOR STUTTERING
Paul Stamets cured his teenage stammering problem in one single afternoon with the help of a handful of psilocybin mushrooms, but the materialist does not consider such cures to be 'real.'8 Why not? Because the materialist expects to find proof of efficacy under a microscope or in studies so controlled as to ignore the potential for holistically inspired healing entirely. The best we can expect from them is for them to eventually schedule a clinical trial in which psilocybin is specifically studied for its power to end stuttering -- which will be decades from now, however, since the piecemeal approach of the materialist means that they must first study psilocybin for treating PTSD, then depression, then anxiety.... all under the absurd assumption that these conditions have nothing whatsoever to do with each other and are as causally unconnected as an ankle sprain and a headache. But again this is not objective science at work: it is dogmatic materialistic presumption which imposes separation where there is none in order to produce the shameless disease-mongering of the DSM manual.
CONCLUSION
It's no wonder that psychiatrists would be slow to jettison their materialist assumptions about drugs, however. They stand to lose a lot of money once they accept the proposition that drugs like psilocybin can be used holistically to achieve actual cures. Just think how much money the healthcare industry could have gotten out of Paul Stamets over the years had they gotten to him before he ingested those mushrooms. They could have diagnosed his problem as anxiety and put him on beta blockers for life. The money in psychiatry comes from TREATING the problems of patients, after all, not from curing them.
Author's Follow-up: January 4, 2025
Note that I am not saying that beta blockers are bad. To the contrary, they may have some good uses and may, for aught I know, be the best thing that's available for certain heart patients. I am not a Drug Warrior, and so I do not believe that drugs are bad in and of themselves, no, not even beta blockers and antidepressants. I may believe that we have not yet found a sensible use for these drugs -- or that most uses are ultimately negative in that they unnecessarily turn the user into a patient for life -- unnecessarily, given that we have outlawed better options. We must, of course, also distinguish between symptomatic use and daily lifetime use in making such judgments. It is far easier to sign off on symptomatic use, whereas daily lifetime use requires a much stricter standard of evaluation.
The main point is this: While prohibition is in force and it outlaws so many potential alternatives to the modern psychoactive pharmacopoeia, our evaluation of such drugs is 'rigged.' We may find that beta blockers, for instance, are the best thing out there for conditions A, B, and C -- but this is a false statement in the age of prohibition -- or at least it is a conclusion that we have no right to draw in light of prohibition, which has outlawed so many potential alternatives and rendered them difficult to even study.
Meanwhile, we cannot help but be suspicious about the fact that the nostrums continually advanced by big pharma for our mind and mood always seem to require us to take them daily for life. The fact that psychiatrists do not even acknowledge this as a downside shows how little value they place on human independence and self-respect. In some ways, I would rather be dependent on a drug dealer than a psychiatrist, for the former does not require me to be a 'patient' but rather just a customer. The former does not consider me sick. The former does not ask me about the last time I considered suicide. The former just charges me for the drugs, not for the privilege of being catechized on my emotional condition.
And yet even lifetime dependency is not bad in and of itself. What is bad is UNWANTED lifetime dependency. And therein lies the problem of prohibition. One may say that they are happy with a lifetime dependency on big pharma meds, but this declaration can only be made in ignorance. Why? Because one just has to assume that the vast pharmacopoeia of outlawed substances has nothing better to offer one. That's all too easy to assume, however, in the age of prohibition since the Drug War has discouraged precisely the kind of research that might convince us otherwise. The media encourages this ignorance by refusing to publish movies and articles that illustrate the positive use of demonized drugs.
And yet the Drug War focuses all talk about drugs on downsides, clearly demonstrating that the Drug Warrior is a hypochondriac by proxy when it comes to drugs. That is one particular world view, a neurotic one at that, not an objective view with which all rational minds must consent.
The answer is to re-legalize substances so that folks can self-prescribe for mood and mind medicine based on their own values and their own ideas about the meaning of life -- self-prescribe, that is, with the ever-available help of pharmacologically savvy empaths that can teach them drug use strategies that have been proven to be effective in helping a would-be user to achieve the psychosocial outcomes that they desire -- that THEY desire, mind, not their doctors nor the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.
Fearmongering
Saying things like "Fentanyl kills!" makes just as much sense as saying "Fire bad!"
The drug war is the ultimate case of fearmongering. And yet academics and historians fail to recognize it as such. They will protest eloquently against the outrages of the witch hunts of yore, but they are blind to the witch hunts of the present. What is a drug dealer but a modern service magician, someone who sells psychoactive medicine designed to effect personal ends for the user? They are simply providing an alternative to materialistic medicine, which ignores common sense and so ignores the glaringly obvious value of such substances.
I have written dozens of essays about antidepressants and the Drug War, but it is important to read this one first, for it contains the most up-to-date info on my battle to get off such drugs. This reading order is important because I declared premature victory against the SNRI called Effexor in recent essays, only to discover that the drug is far more insidious than I gave it credit for. It turns out withdrawing, at least for me, eventually led to deep feelings of abject despair, far greater than the depression for which I started taking the "med" in the first place.
The frustrating thing is, these feelings could be combatted by a host of drugs that we have outlawed in the name of our anti-scientific and anti-patient war on drugs. That much is just psychological common sense. But we have been taught to believe that there are no positive uses for opium, nor for cocaine, nor for coca, nor for MDMA, nor for laughing gas, nor for peyote, nor for the hundreds of inspiring phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, etc. etc. etc.
The truth is, rather, that Drug Warriors (and the millions whom they have brainwashed) do not WANT there to be positive uses for such drugs. No, they want me to "keep taking my meds" instead and so to enrich their investment portfolios in the pharmaceutical sector. Meanwhile, those without a vested financial interest have been taught that antidepressants are "scientific" and so they cannot understand my desire to get off them. They cannot understand the hell of being turned into a patient for life and having to make regular expensive and humiliating pilgrimages to psychiatrists (who are half one's own age) to bare one's soul for the purpose of obtaining an expensive prescription for a drug that numbs one's brain rather than inspiring it - and a drug which seems to counteract, dampen and/or repress most of the positive effects that I might have otherwise obtained by the few semi-legal alternatives to antidepressants, such as psilocybin and ayahuasca.
But it is just psychological common sense that I could withdraw successfully from Effexor with the advised use of a comprehensive pharmacy, including but not limited to the demonized substances listed above. But materialist science is not interested in common sense. And so they tell me that such drug use has not been proven to "work." But materialist doctors are not experts in what motivates me as a living, breathing, unique individual. The heart has its own reasons that reductionist science cannot understand. If I could look forward, at this moment, to relaxing with an opium pipe tonight, my mood would improve NOW, not just tonight. I would have something to look forward to. I would not feel the need to reach for that bottle full of Effexor pills that I was hoping to foreswear. Likewise, if I could use a drug to laugh and "touch the hand of God" (as with laughing gas and phenethylamines respectively), I could laugh at the pangs of despair that Effexor tries to throw my way.
Science's eternal response to such ideas is: "There is no proof that such things work!"
No, nor will there ever be in the age of the Drug War, in which such common sense use is punished by long jail terms and would never be favorably publicized, even if successful, since America's prime imperative in the age of the Drug War is to demonize psychoactive medicines, under the absurd assumption-laden idea that to talk honestly about drugs is to encourage their use.
Well, we SHOULD be encouraging their use in cases where they actually work, in cases, for instance, when they prevent guys like myself from killing themselves thanks to the knowledge that they are a bounden slave to the combined forces of the Drug War and Big Pharma's pill mill.
Besides, there is no proof that hugging works, but we do not need Dr. Spock of Star Trek to launch a study into that issue: we all know that hugging works by bringing two souls together both physically and spiritually. We do not need a map of brain chemistry to figure this out: the proof is extant, the proof is in the pudding.
But I haven't given up yet despite the setback in my most recent plan. I'm going to search the world for a place where I can get off antidepressants in a way that makes some psychological common sense.
Right now, all I see in terms of resources are a bunch of companies who, for large fees, will help me go cold turkey on antidepressants., or companies that claim to have found the right combination of legal herbal formulas that should make withdrawal easier. But to me, these are all what Percy Shelley would call "frail spells," concocted under the watchful eye of the Drug Warrior to make sure that nothing potent and obviously effective will get added to the mix. In fact, if a space alien came to earth and asked what sort of psychoactive drugs were outlawed, one could honestly answer: "Anything that obviously works."
Meanwhile, drug laws make it impossible for me to visit psychiatrists remotely online, requiring me instead to physically visit my doctors, thereby limiting rural residents like myself to accessing hayseed psychiatrists whose one area of expertise seems to be the writing of prescriptions for antidepressants. Talk to them about anything else, and their eyes glaze over. "That's all unproven," they'll say, "Or, no, we have yet to fully study such things." As if we have to study in order to realize that feeling good helps and can have positive psychological effects.
I'm sure that part of the problem with my withdrawal scheme is that I tried to get off the drug too quickly. But I only tried that because I can find no doctor who will compound the drug for me in a way that makes psychological common sense, namely, with daily miniscule reductions in dosage. My current psychiatrist told me that such compounding was unheard of and that I should drop doses by 37.5 mg at a time, since that is the lowest dose that the pharmaceutical companies create. He said I could start "counting pill beads" once I am down to a 37.5 mg daily dose if I wanted to taper still further.
Count pill beads? Surely that's why compounding pharmacists exist: to count pill beads. (UPDATE: I was wrong about this. See my article on "Tapering for Jesus.")
I did find a compounding company that said it could compound Effexor in the way that I desire. But there's a big catch: they have to receive a prescription for that purpose. And I can find no doctor in the world who is willing to write me one. Even those who sympathize with my plight want me to become their full-time patient before they will even consider writing such a prescription.
So those who warned me against trying to get off Effexor were right in a way: it is extraordinarily difficult. But they feel to realize WHY this is so. It is not just because Effexor is a toxic drug, but also because the drug war has outlawed everything that could help me get off it.
This is why those pundits who sign off on the psychiatric pill mill are clueless about the huge problem with the war on drugs: the way it humiliates and disempowers millions. For it turns out that the phrase "No hope in dope" is true after all, but only when the dope in question is modern antidepressants.
OCTOBER 2024
Here are some of the many articles I have written about the philosophy of getting off drugs. Bear in mind that I am in the process of getting off Effexor myself and am exploring the power of "drugs to fight drugs" in so doing. And this is not a straightforward path given the sweeping limits that are imposed by drug law. So the question of exactly what might work (and how and when, etc.) is still wide open and I am advocating nothing, except the common sense notion that we can benefit from euphoria and mood boosts, yes, and that "drugs can be used to fight drugs," and in a safe way too -- a way that will prove far safer than prohibition, which continues to bring about daily deaths from drive-by shootings and unregulated product while causing civil wars overseas.
I guess what I am saying here is, this site is not purporting to offer medical advice. I avoid using such wording, however, because so many authors refuse to talk honestly about drugs, especially about positive drug use, for fear of being seen as giving medical advice, and this, of course, is just how drug warriors want matters to remain. It lets them shut down free speech about drugs.
Besides, I reject the idea that materialist doctors are the experts when it comes to how we think and feel about life. The best they can do as materialist is to tell us the potential physical risks of using holistically-operating drugs, but individuals are the experts on what motivates them in life, on their own particular hopes and dreams and on what risks they deem necessary to obtain them, to pursue happiness, that is, which objective our legislators outlawed when they outlawed all substances that can help facilitate happiness in the properly motivated and educated individual.
The real answer is not for authors to give groveling apologies for being honest, however: the real answer is for kids to be educated about the basics of wise substance use -- and for America to come to grips with the fact that we will always be surrounded by "drugs" -- and that the goal should be to ensure safe use, not to keep endlessly arresting minorities and removing them from the voting rolls on behalf of the clinically insane idea that we should outlaw mother nature to protect our kids -- and this in a purportedly Christian country whose very deity told us that his creation was good.
In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James demonstrated how materialists are blind to the depth and meaning of psychological states of ecstasy and transcendence -- or in other words the states that are peculiar to mystics like St. Teresa... and to those who use psychoactive substances like laughing gas. The medical materialist is dogmatically dismissive of such states, which explains why they can pretend that godsend medicines that elate and inspire have no positive uses whatsoever:
To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce.
And so materialist scientists collaborate with the drug war by refusing to see glaringly obvious drug benefits. They acknowledge only those benefits that they believe are visible under a microscope. The Hindu religion would not exist today had materialist scientists held soma to such a standard. But that's the absurd pass to which prohibition eventually brings us in a society wherein materialist science is the new god: scientists are put in charge of deciding whether we are allowed to imagine new religions or not.
This materialist bias is inspired in turn by behaviorism, the anti-indigenous doctrine of JB Watson that makes the following inhumane claim:
"Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic."
According to this view, the hopes and the dreams of a "patient" are to be ignored. Instead, we are to chart their physiology and brain chemistry.
JB Watson's Behaviorism is a sort of Dr. Spock with a vengeance. It is the perfect ideology for a curmudgeon, because it would seem to justify all their inability to deal with human emotions. Unfortunately, the attitude has knock-on effects because it teaches drug researchers to ignore common sense and to downplay or ignore all positive usage reports or historic lessons about positive drug use. The "patient" needs to just shut up and let the doctors decide how they are doing. It 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.
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 bar chart.
In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.
This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just there way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.
This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.
How do I know this?
Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.
More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?
This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."
The existence of a handful of bad outcomes of drug use does not justify substance prohibition... any more than the existence of drunkards justifies a call for liquor prohibition. Instead, we need to teach safe use and offer a wide choice of uncontaminated psychoactive drugs.
The DEA stomped onto Thomas Jefferson's estate in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. And the TJ Foundation helped them! They sold out Jefferson.
Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks: J'excuse! People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took prohibition to bring that about.
In "Psychedelic Refugee," Rosemary Leary writes:
"Fueled by small doses of LSD, almost everything was amusing or weird." -- Rosemary Leary
In a non-brainwashed world, such testimony would suggest obvious ways to help the depressed.
"Is cocaine use good or bad?" The question does not even make sense. Cocaine use is a blessing for some, just a little fun for most, and a curse for a few. Just like any other risky activity.
It's funny to hear fans of sacred plants indignantly insisting that their meds are not "drugs." They're right in a way, but actually NO substances are "drugs." Calling substances "drugs" is like referring to striking workers as "scabs." It's biased terminology.
People magazine should be fighting for justice on behalf of the thousands of American young people who are dying on the streets because of the drug war.
Drug warriors have harnessed the perfect storm. Prohibition caters to the interests of law enforcement, psychotherapy, Big Pharma, demagogues, puritans, and materialist scientists, who believe that consciousness is no big "whoop" and that spiritual states are just flukes.
Politicians protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment and encourage drug testing to ensure that drug war heretics starve.
We know that anticipation and mental focus and relaxation have positive benefits -- but if these traits ae facilitated by "drugs," then we pretend that these same benefits somehow are no longer "real." This is a metaphysical bias, not a logical deduction.
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, Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs published on November 6, 2024 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, Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs published on November 6, 2024 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)
