The whole concept of rehab is nonsensical in a Drug War society, where the cure always means Christian Science sobriety, whether the "patient" likes it or not. In a Drug War society, we dutifully ignore all the psychoactive remedies of Mother Nature, even though some of those medicines have been responsible for inspiring entire religions, like the Soma of the Vedic peoples and the mushrooms of a wide variety of Mesoamerican tribes, including the Taino people. They were enslaved by Columbus and "persuaded" to make alcohol their drug of choice.
Sure, todays's "rehab" cure may involve "drugs," but only if they're from Big Pharma 12 -- like the antidepressants 3 on which 1 in 4 American women are dependent: a whole nation of Stepford Wives that gets a big fat MULLIGAN from the modern hypocritical and racist Drug Warrior. But dependency on SSRIs does not require rehab, of course, because the Christian Scientist is happy as long as Americans do not dare use the evil pharmacy of Mother Nature. Psychoactive medicine can be used responsibly to help patients achieve self-actualization, but the Christian Scientist fetishizes over the moral perfection of their hypocritically defined "sobriety" instead.
Author's Follow-up: May 18, 2024
Modern rehab should be about helping the participant live out their dream life and feel a sense of empowerment. Instead, today's rehab is designed to turn the participant into a good Christian Scientist, one who not only forswears all of nature's godsend medicines, but one who holds such substances in contempt. And yet Americans wonder why rehab programs have such huge recidivism rates. Yet that's precisely what we should expect when we outlaw all the medicines that could help make that rehab a success.
Westerners have "just said no" to pain relief, mood elevation and religious insight.
Imagine if there were drugs for which dependency was a feature, not a bug. People would stop peddling that junk, right? Wrong. Just ask your psychiatrist.
The Drug War is the legally enforced triumph of human idiocy. We have rigged the deck so that our dunces can be right. The Drug War is a superstition. Indeed, it is THE modern superstition.
I passed a sign that says "Trust Trump." What does that mean? Trust him to crack down on his opposition using the U.S. Army? Or trust him not to do all the anti-American things that he's saying he's going to do.
If politicians wanted to outlaw coffee, a bunch of Kevin Sabets would come forward and start writing books designed to scare us off the drink by cherry-picking negative facts from scientific studies.
Laughing gas is the substance that gave William James his philosophy of reality. He concluded from its use that what we perceive is just a fraction of reality writ large. Yet his alma mater (Harvard) does not even MENTION laughing gas in their bio of the man.
Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could believe it.
If opium and cocaine were re-legalized, hospital buildings would no longer be the secular cathedrals of our time. Some of that wealth would actually go to healthy people.
Oregon's drug policy is incoherent and cruel. The rich and healthy spend $4,000 a week on psilocybin. The poor and chemically dependent are thrown in jail, unless they're on SSRIs, in which case they're congratulated for "taking their meds."
The Drug War shows us that American democracy is fundamentally flawed. Propaganda and fearmongering has persuaded Americans to give up freedoms that are clearly enunciated in the U.S. Constitution. We need a new democracy in which a Constitution actually matters.