"Like other substances in it's (sic) class, there is an abuse potential, so benefits would also have to outweigh the harm."
"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question--for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness." -- William James.
We take the side of science in spite of the
patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill
some of its extravagant promises for health and life, in spite of the
tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories,
because we have a prior commitment to materialism 10. It is not that the
methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material
explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are
forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of
investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no
matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in
the door.
The use of laughing gas changed William James' ideas about the very nature of reality. To outlaw such substances is to outlaw human advancement. The good doctor says benefits have to outweigh the harms before he will sign off on the use of laughing gas. What he means is, if a statistical handful of the uneducated can find a way to misuse it, hundreds of millions of the depressed must do without it.
The DEA is a Schedule I agency. It has no known positive uses.
If you're looking for an anti-Christ, just look for an American presidential politician who has taught us to hate our enemies. Gee, now, who could that be, huh? According to Trump, Jesus was just a chump. Winning comes before anything at all in his sick view of life.
The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.
Classic prohibitionist gaslighting, telling me that "drugs" is a neutral term. What planet are they living on?
We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.
I just asked New York Attorney General Letitia James how much she was getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out that the drug war created the gangs just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.
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.
The UN of today is in an odd position regarding drugs: they want to praise indigenous societies while yet outlawing the drugs that helped create them.
"Those gentlemen who adopt the anti-opium doctrine... are only comparable to the monomaniac, who, sane upon every subject but one, is thoroughly daft upon that." --William Brereton
I have yet to find one psychiatrist who acknowledges the demoralizing power of being turned into a patient for life. They never list that as a potential downside of antidepressant use.
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