Forty-nine thousand Americans kill themselves every year, mainly because America has demonized and/or outlawed everything that could cheer them up, like laughing gas and cocaine, which Freud knew was a cure for depression.
I am one of those heretics who says that it is a category error to put materialists and doctors (and especially materialist doctors!) in charge of mind and mood medicine1. The benefits of illegal drugs come about through holistic processes, whereas materialist science is all about judging drugs outside of all context. This is why our "betters" in the medical industry are so laughably out of touch with reality on these subjects, as for instance when Dr. Robert Glatter 23 has to ask the question whether laughing gas could REALLY help the depressed! Laughing gas, for god's sake! (Gee, I wonder if it would help for a depressed person to feel wonderful?? What a poser??!) While they're studying that proposition in the laboratory, our materialists might also want to study whether having a "cold one" after work REALLY helps people relax! Or whether parents are REALLY helping their kids by giving them a hug now and then! What tough questions!!! These are the kinds of questions that only a DOCTOR could answer -- but then they are also the kinds of questions that only a doctor would even THINK of asking!!!
And so we are told that drugs like cocaine and laughing gas and opium 4 have no positive uses! What absurdity! What gaslighting 5 ! What they really mean to say is that those drugs cannot be shown to "work" in the reductive fashion that scientists demand of a drug. But so what? They work in an holistic fashion that doctors refuse to understand -- not just because these doctors are typically materialists, but also because they insist on toeing the line when it comes to Drug War orthodoxy, according to which drugs must be supposed to have no beneficial uses whatsoever. And so they practice their pharmacological colonialism. And so they gaslight the depressed. By demanding proof under a microscope, they elevate themselves to the role of experts on human emotions -- and tell the actual users of the drugs that "Hey, WE know more about how you feel and how you SHOULD feel than you do! Don't tell us what works for YOU -- WE'LL tell YOU what works for YOU!"
In case doctors are someday interested, though, here is what I mean by the holistic benefits of drugs. Drugs like cocaine help one get work done -- in the same way that coffee does, without jangling one's nerves. This means that one feels a sense of accomplishment in life and so feels better about themselves. Get it, doc? From this fact alone, a whole raft of knock-on benefits begin to accrue. The cocaine user stops procrastinating, they become more outgoing, they remember that family member's birthday that they might have forgotten -- or else have been too depressed to worry about. In other words, doc, the drug use establishes a virtuous circle. Any drug that inspires and elates can establish such a virtuous circle -- not because it moves chemicals about in a way that flatters materialist expectations, but because the positive feelings (and mood-improving anticipation) that the user feels creates a virtuous circle full of knock-on benefits! Freud understood this: he understood that cocaine was a godsend for the depressed67. But the doctors of his time saw nothing but evil in the drug -- and no wonder: They knew that their jobs were in jeopardy if depression ceased to be an epidemic. Better that hundreds of millions of the depressed should go without a cure than doctors should lose their jobs!
I feel silly pointing out such basic psychological truths to adults, that inspiration helps, that feeling good helps -- but these are truths that our behaviorist doctors ignore in their effort to medicalize and pathologize human behavior and thus set themselves up as experts in "curing" our psychological diseases. Such doctors help demonize cocaine by focusing only on misuse by a vast MINORITY of users, exactly as if we were to study alcohol use by focusing on drunkards. They completely ignored the needs of the depressed. We were not stakeholders, it seems. They never asked the depressed how THEY felt about using cocaine. Instead, they trashed the drug by associating it with only downsides -- and thereby utterly destroyed its reputation for healing. In so doing, they ensured their own careers. They ensured that depression would be "a thing" for years to come. They could now set themselves up as the well-paid experts for treating such "illnesses," the illnesses that they themselves had helped to bring about.
This reminds me of the Three Stooges episode in which the trio secretly releases mice into a mansion and then knocks on the front door to ask the lady of the house if she requires exterminating services.
The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.
Psychedelic retreats tell us how scientific they are. But science is the problem. Science today insists that we ignore all obvious benefits of drugs.
Here's the first step in the FDA process for evaluating a psychoactive drug:
Ignore all glaringly obvious benefits.
Daily opium use is no more outrageous than daily antidepressant use. In fact, it's less outrageous. It's a time-honored practice and can be stopped with a little effort and ingenuity, whereas it is almost impossible to get off some antidepressants because they alter brain chemistry.
Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.
Researchers say that the New York Times has been flooding the world with Drug War agitprop.
The main form of drug war propaganda is censorship. That's why most Americans cannot imagine any positive uses for psychoactive substances, because the media and the government won't allow that.
I should have added to that last post: "I in no way want to glorify or condone drug demonization."
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.
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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