It's no surprise that "Doctor Feel Good" should be the ultimate put-down in a Drug War society. The Drug War, after all, has at least two major philosophical motivations: 1) the protestant ethic, which questions our right to happiness in this world and views any "immoderate" happiness as suspicious; and 2) the ontology of reductionist science, which places its faith in the quantitative world, from which everything is supposed to "spring," and therefore has no patience with the mere subjective reports of the patient, except insofar as they can be confirmed and, as it were, 'proven' by quantitative measurements (especially of brain chemicals in the case of psychiatry). This is why pundits like Dr. Glatter can write an article for Forbes Magazine entitled "Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment-resistant Depression?" In a sane world, this would be a no-brainer: of course it could help. But Glatter wants to know if it could "really" help based on quantitative analyses that are presumably yet to be performed or even specifically envisioned.
In other words, billions of depressed around the world have to wait for the balm of laughing gas while materialists like Glatter try to wrap their heads around the psychologically obvious: that laughing helps. Even the Reader's Digest has known that for decades, judging from its time-honored motto, "Laughter is the best medicine."
Thus a drug-war society creates its own answer to Doctor Feel Good: namely, Doctor Feel Bad.
Glatter is a Doctor Feel Bad, for starters, in denying lifelong depressives like myself access to a no-brainer treatment like laughing gas 1 .
But Doctor Feel Bads are also present at our bedside for our dying day. Whenever anyone (like Anne Heche, for instance) is "peacefully" taken off life support, Doctor Feel Bad is there to make sure everything goes well -- which is to say horribly for the patient. For instead of giving the patient "an immoderate dose of morphine " and allowing them to drift off painlessly to death, the doctor makes sure that no such help is provided and that we simply "starve the patient out" when it comes to achieving our goal of "giving them peace."
Talk about dedication to the Drug War, we will even enforce its anti-patient ideology on the death beds of our beloved.
Doctor Feel Bad is also present in hospices for children around the world, where countries, under the spell of the Drug War ideology of substance demonization, deny morphine 2 to children, thus forcing them to live in unnecessary pain during the final days of their short lives. (For more about this latter infamy, see Children of the Drug War.")
The Links Police
Do you know why I stopped you? No? Darn. I can't remember either. Hold on, maybe I've made a note of it in my memo pad. No, seriously, folks. There's more on this here subject of useless doctoring in the age of the Drug War:
A law proposed in Colorado in February 2024 would have criminalized positive talk about drugs online. What? The world is on the brink of nuclear war because of hate-driven politics, and I can be arrested for singing the praises of empathogens?
The drug war controls the very way that we are allowed to see the world. The Drug War is thus a meta-injustice, not just a handful of bad legal statutes.
We've got to take the fight TO the drug warriors by starting to hold them legally responsible for having spread "Big Lies" about "drugs." Anyone involved in producing the "brain frying" PSA of the 1980s should be put on trial for willfully spreading a toxic lie.
Most enemies of inner-city gun violence refuse to protest against the drug prohibition which caused the violence in the first place.
I know. I'm on SNRIs. But SSRIs and SNRIs are both made with materialist presumptions in mind: that the best way to change people is with a surgical strike at one-size-fits-all chemistry. That's the opposite of the shamanic holism that I favor.
Racist drug warriors make cities dangerous with drug prohibition -- then they use that danger as an excuse to send in the National Guard.
We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.
Attempts to improve one's mind and mood are not crimes. The attempt to stop people from doing so is the crime.
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
(up)