Any faithful reader of my site will have noticed my penchant for denouncing drug prohibition as a stealth and subconscious move on the part of fearful conservative politicians to establish drug-hating Christian Science as the de facto state religion in America1. There are, of course, other more palpable motivations for the Drug War, above all the attempt to disempower minorities by creating laws specifically for that purpose2. But the fact that such laws appear reasonable to Americans across a wide political spectrum implies for me an implicit and widespread belief in the Christian Science metaphysic, the idea that drugs are both unnecessary and immoral, at least when it comes to improving the psychological condition of the human mind. So, while the Christian Science mentality may not have caused the Drug War, properly speaking, it yet gives the Drug War staying power by making its antiscientific tenets appear plausible to the American people, especially since, as westerners, we lack the universal indigenous habit of using psychoactive medicines for religious and divinatory purposes. (To the contrary, we look with suspicion on such drug use, as might be guessed from our persecution of the generally female witches of the past who begged to differ with the western mainstream on this subject.3)
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And yet it occurred to me last night that Mary Baker-Eddy was "on to something," as we say, even if she herself did not realize what that "something" was. This is clear when we extract the sectarian religious element from Eddy's belief and recast her apparent hatred for drugs as a hatred for materialist cures that are uninformed by the powers of the human mind - by what we might call the powers and insights that come from "higher consciousness." Seen in this light, Eddy and I are on the same page, for we both attack the presumption inherent in placing materialist scientists in charge of mind and mood conditions4. We both believe that the human mind has powers that have never been properly leveraged and which we can use to fight so-called emotional disorders. The difference is that Eddy believed that the powers of the religious mind (of "higher consciousness") were up to the task of combatting ALL illness, and not just those metaphorical illnesses that are of a mental and emotional nature.
I can even agree with this latter extreme statement to a point. For the fact is that we do not yet know of what the human mind is capable for the simple reason that we have outlawed the quest to find out: we have outlawed all the drugs that show obvious potential in leveraging human consciousness for beneficial purposes. We have therefore outlawed the research that would be necessary to prove Eddy's thesis, or at least to tell us to what extent it is true and in what circumstances. Eddy's problem is that she declares her belief to be true in advance of performing the necessary research to prove that it is so. The mind (or consciousness) clearly has great power when it comes to treating psychological conditions, for the proof is extant, assuming that we do not make Eddy's mistake of ruling out the use of all drugs a priori based on metaphysical prejudices. The Hindu religion exists today thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated5. The use of coca inspired the Inca of Peru6. And the drug-user reports from Pihkal demonstrate that psychoactive drugs can produce extraordinary psychological improvements when used wisely and with intention by motivated individuals7. But the precise extent to which mental powers (drug-aided or otherwise) can alter so-called physical conditions remains unclear because untested - again, thanks to anti-scientific drug law.
It seems to me that our discussion of Eddy's thesis as westerners is rendered unnecessarily complicated, however, thanks to our Cartesian tendency to consider mind and matter as separate categories in the first place8. The truth seems to be that matter and mind are hopelessly entangled when it comes to cause and effect and that our attempts to deal with them as two ontologically separate categories can only lead to confusion. This is one of the many reasons why we need to re-legalize godsend medicines, by the way, for there can be no better way to investigate the distinctions and interactions between mind and body than by using psychoactive substances to leverage the power of mind, mood and imagination - to see both what can be accomplished thereby and what are the hard limits to such an approach. Far from being a niche issue, then, drug prohibition is nothing less than the outlawing of the most important philosophical research project imaginable, that of probing the true nature of our presupposed mind-body dualism. This is precisely the sort of research that William James himself conjured us to undertake as philosophers in "The Varieties of Religious Experience,9" but unfortunately this is a challenge that his alma mater, Harvard University, has censored from their online biography of the man, as they have his use of laughing gas 10 and his ideas on what he called the "anesthetic revelation 1112 ," which, in modern terms, is basically the topic of what drug use can tell us about the nature of reality13.
These opening shots across the bowsprit of today's vulnerable materialism 14 could serve as the beginning of a lengthy essay, but my main goal today is merely to establish that Christian Science is not simply the bad guy when it comes to today's hateful drug prohibition, that the founder of that religion entertained some valid scruples with respect to the mind-body problem and that drug laws prevent us from following up on those leads. We come then to the ironic conclusion that the metaphysics of Christian Science would seem to philosophically support the War on Drugs on a superficial level while yet questioning it profoundly on a still deeper level. These issues are deeply fraught with philosophical considerations which can no doubt be hotly debated. But I hope we can all agree on at least one thing: that the Drug War has outlawed the research required to answer the mind-body questions at issue here and that drug prohibition is therefore an outrageous violation of academic freedom. Should a materialist say otherwise, they are clearly declaring premature victory for their own behaviorist mindset under the cover of a legal system that privileges their own beliefs.
Harm Reduction is not enough. We need Benefit Production as well. The autistic should be able to use compassion-enhancing drugs; dementia patients should be able to use drugs that speed up and sharpen mental processes.
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
A Pennsylvanian politician now wants the US Army to "fight fentanyl." The guy is anthropomorphizing a damn drug! No wonder pols don't want to spend money on education, because any educated country would laugh a superstitious guy like that right out of public office.
The drug war is is a multi-billion-dollar campaign to enforce the attitude of the Francisco Pizarro's of the world when it comes to non-western medicine. It is the apotheosis of the colonialism that most Americans claim to hate.
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
Whether we judge people only by the words that they say or only by the substances of which they partake, we are ignoring the most important things: what they really mean and how they really behave.
In a sane world, we would learn to strategically fight drugs with drugs.
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.
FDA drug approval is a farce when it comes to psychoactive medicine. The FDA ignores all the obvious benefits and pretends that to prove efficacy, they need "scientific" evidence. That's scientism, not science.
There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.
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.
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