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.
In "Four Good Days" the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.
Musk and co. want to make us more robot-like with AI, when they should be trying to make us more human-like with sacred medicine. Only humans can gain creativity from plant medicine. All AI can do is harvest the knowledge that eventually results from that creativity.
It is a crime against humanity to withhold cocaine from the depressed and those with impaired cognition.
Morphine can provide a vivid appreciation of mother nature in properly disposed minds. That should be seen as a benefit. Instead, dogma tells us that we must hate morphine for any use.
Drug prohibition is the perfect racist crime. It brought gunfire to inner cities, yet those who seek to end the gunfire pretend that drug prohibition has nothing to do with it.
If religious liberty existed, we would be able to use the inspiring phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the same way and for the same reasons as the Vedic people of India used soma.
There are a potentially vast number of non-addictive drugs that could be used strategically in therapy. They elate and "free the tongue" to help talk therapy really work. Even "addictive" drugs can be used non-addictively, prohibitionist propaganda notwithstanding.
So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.
I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.
Two of the biggest promoters of the psychedelic renaissance shuffle their feet when you ask them about substance prohibition. Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman just don't get it: prohibition kills.