Depressed? Here's why!

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Depressed? Here's why!

Exposing the anti-patient drug-war lobby in Washington

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

December 29, 2019

The DEA is the enemy of depressed individuals worldwide because it has blocked the research (let alone the use) of godsend antidepressant medications now for over four decades. Technically, it has only done this in America, but Drug War colonialism has spread this anti-scientific policy worldwide, as America financially blackmails its trading partners into touting the anti-patient party line about so-called drugs.

MDMA ¹ was legal in 1984 and ready to treat soldiers with PTSD. However, in 1985, the DEA acted against the advice of its own regulatory judge and criminalized the substance. The result: American soldiers have been without a godsend medication for PTSD during the last three and a half decades, during their fight with al-Qaida and the Taliban. While our forces were living through hell overseas, the DEA was hunkering down in its comfy Washington offices, determined to keep its jobs at any cost, even at the expense of soldiers' lives and well-being. Meanwhile, psychedelics (such as ayahuasca, psilocybin, and ibogaine) which showed profound potential for virtually curing alcoholism in the '50s, have been listed by the DEA as schedule I drugs since the DEA's inception (based purely on politics, not on science) ensuring that the depressed must continue to rely on Big Pharma meds that create chemical dependence.

But the DEA is not the only group that's determined to keep valuable medications from those who need them. To figure out who else is anti-patient in this way, just ask yourself: who stands to lose money if the Drug War is finally terminated? A partial list of such groups follows. Those who oppose America's anti-patient Drug War would do well to monitor the political advocacy of these groups who have a vested interest in the ongoing arrest of minorities for mere possession of Mother Nature's plants and fungi:

WHO'S KEEPING THE DRUG WAR GOING?

FOLLOW THE MONEY.

GROUPS THAT PROSPER FINANCIALLY FROM THE DRUG WAR:

Prison guards -- whose jobs proliferate as the prison population swells to record numbers

Sheriffs -- whose departmental income skyrockets thanks to the lucrative confiscation of "drug" property (think of the Drug War as a make-work program for law enforcement)

Big Pharma -- whose bottom line skyrockets thanks to their monopoly on the treatment of depression using medicines that foster chemical dependency in the user

Psychiatry -- whose clientele grows enormously since psychiatrists are the only legal distributor of Big Pharma ² ³ 's addictive nostrums

Alcohol producers -- who profit handsomely by the world-wide war that the American government wages against opium ⁴ on their behalf, putting an end in a few generations to a millennia-old practice in the east, primping themselves up as the health-conscious good guys for this drug-war colonialism

-- and all the subsidiary businesses that profit indirectly from doing business with the above anti-patient cartel.

It's not enough to abolish the DEA and hold it responsible for its decades of patient-harming lies: those who advocate a patient-friendly drug policy must identify these sorts of natural enemies of a free market and call them to account any time they are caught attempting to buy politicians.

AFTERTHOUGHT:

Of course, the whole idea of "drugs" is absurd, insofar as that word connotes a substance that is thought to be evil in and of itself. Any sane person knows that substances are only good or bad in relation to the way that they are used. When Neil Patrick Harris snorts cocaine ⁵ ⁶ off of the eagerly proffered tush of a naked pole dancer in "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," we might want to call it evil (especially if we're busybody prudes of the protestant old school), but when smart cookies use a similar substance to sharpen their analytic minds (think Sherlock Holmes in fiction or Robin Williams in reality) it is by no means clear that the substances that they thus employ are evil - unless 1) we who make that judgment are jealous psychiatrists, who would have preferred that these famous clarity-seekers fog their minds with modern antidepressants ⁷ -- or 2) we are Christian Scientists, who hold the metaphysical notion that there is something wrong with improving mental states with the help of Mother Nature's pharmacy, in which case we should state our metaphysical presuppositions forthrightly and thus admit that the Drug War is religiously motivated. This would accord with the facts, too, since the first Drug Warrior in the west was Emperor Theodosius, the founder of Catholicism, who shut down the psychedelic Eleusinian mysteries in 392 BC because he considered that ritual to be a threat to Christianity ⁸.

Antidepressants

Notes:

1: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
2: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
3: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
4: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
5: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
6: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
7: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
8: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

High suicide rates? What a poser! Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the US has outlawed all substances that elate and inspire???

The book "Plants of the Gods" is full of plants and fungi that could help addicts and alcoholics, sometimes in the plant's existing form, sometimes in combinations, sometimes via extracting alkaloids, etc. But drug warriors need addiction to sell their prohibition ideology.

Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.

I'm grateful to the folks who are coming out of the woodwork at the last minute to deface their own properties with "Trump 2024" signs. Now I'll know who to thank should Trump get elected and sell us out to Putin.

The massive use of plea deals lets prosecutors threaten drug suspects into giving up their rights to a fair trial.

Almost all addiction services assume that the goal should be to get off all drugs. That is not science, it is Christian Science.

Americans love to blame drugs for all their problems. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. The prohibition mindset is the problem, not drugs.

Problem 2,643 of the war on drugs: It puts the government in charge of deciding what counts as a true religion.

First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws.

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx

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