And so anyone today can claim to be an expert on Freud without even knowing about his advocacy of cocaine for the depressed. Those who catch wind of such advocacy are merely informed by their politically correct professors that Freud's interest in cocaine was a mistake. No proof of this fact need be adduced. Such slander will be readily believed by students who have been brainwashed since childhood in the substance demonizing ideology of the War on Drugs. We see then that Freud is considered a hero in academia, not because he found a practical cure for depression, but rather because his theoretical musings about psychoanalysis have provided fodder for endless remunerative academic projects. The depressed may be as gloomy as ever, but the academics have been promoted to the role of experts when it comes to the parsing and mythologizing of the real-world manifestations of our distress.
It's as if a tribe of paleolithic cave dwellers were shivering in the cold, racking their brains for ways to keep warm, yet never even thinking about building a fire for that purpose, so thoroughly have they come to believe that fire is bad!
Prohibition turned habituation into addiction by creating a wide variety of problems for users, including potential arrest, tainted or absent drug supply, and extreme stigmatization.
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 use is judged by different standards than any other risky activity in the western world. One death can lead to outrage, even though that death might be statistically insignificant.
Drug prohibition fails even on its own terms. Instead of protecting white American young people, it has exiled them to the city streets where they are sacrificed on the altar of the American religion of substance demonization.
The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?
If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.
If drug war logic made sense, we would outlaw endless things in addition to drugs. Because the drug war says that it's all worth it if we can save just one life -- which is generally the life of a white suburban young person, btw.
Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.
I'm interested in CBD myself, because I want to gain benefits at times without experiencing intoxication. So I think it's great. But I like it as part of an overall strategy toward mental health. I do not think of CBD, as some do, as a way to avoid using naughty drugs.
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
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