Essay date: April 28, 2022

Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide




Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment-resistant Depression?  Only purblind reductionist science could ask such a question. Of course it would work!

he title of the Forbes article made me laugh: "Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment-resistant Depression?"

A truly depressed person would never ask such a question. Of course it would help! Whether it would be a cure-all is another question, of course, but it would HAVE TO HELP, by definition. It would not necessarily help in the way that chart-bound scientists would like, in a way that could be "proven" reductively -- but rather it would help by 1) giving the depressed reliable vacations from introspective gloom, and 2) by giving the depressed something to look forward to, which would make their non-drug-using time more endurable, if not enjoyable. This is all just basic psychological common sense, but it is common sense that reductive science has lost track of when it asks such naive questions as, "Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment-resistant depression?"

But laughter gave way to groans when I read the closing line of the Forbes article on nitrous oxide, in which Dr. Glatter opines:

"Like other substances in it's (sic) class, there is an abuse potential, so benefits would also have to outweigh the harm."


In other words, I'll have to live until I'm 128 years old for science to finally allow me to use a treatment that common sense tells me (and all other true depressives like me) would be a godsend here and now, both thanks to its immediate effects and to the positive feelings that anticipation of use would generate.

This despite the fact that the FDA greenlights the psychiatric pill mill to which 1 in 4 American women are addicted for life. This despite the fact that a constitutional amendment allows for the unhindered use of alcohol that kills almost 100,000 Americans a year. This despite the fact that Americans still puff away freely on a drug that kills half a million of them every year. This despite the fact that Big Pharma advertises drugs on prime-time whose rare side effects even include death.

But as for folks like myself, we'll just have to bide our time while the clueless reductionist researchers at the FDA try to figure out if laughing gas can help the depressed. Yes, what a real head scratcher -- for materialist imbeciles, that is!

"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.



The above was Brian's feedback on the article by Robert Glatter MD entitled 'Can Laughing Gas (Nitrous Oxide) Help People With Treatment-Resistant Depression?' from June 9, 2021.



May 25, 2022




There's another fundamental problem with the article: the use of the term "treatment-resistant depression" suggests that there's a cure out there that works just fine for depression, thank you very much, but some folks inexplicably do not respond to it. The real state of affairs is far gloomier: there are hundreds of potential cures out there, almost all of which have been outlawed by the federal government, and all that's legal are highly dependence-causing meds that conduce to anhedonia in long-term users. The fact is, we have no way of diagnosing treatment-resistant depression in the age of the Drug War. When we say that a person's depression is treatment-resistant in this age of enforced Christian Science for mood medicine, it's like saying that a person is treatment-resistant for headaches in a country that has outlawed aspirin. In reality, we have no idea if they are treatment resistant, because we have outlawed the best treatments. Using the term "treatment-resistant" is just a way of flattering Big Pharma, by implying that they have the cure -- except that certain freaks out there do not quite respond to it correctly.

It's a convenient way for Drug Warriors to feel good about the corrupt status quo.

Having spent a lifetime on these non-inspiring meds thanks to Drug Warrior lies and materialist-reductionist double standards, it's irritating to hear these noxious pills being implicitly praised like this.

Brian's admittedly charming article raises the following question: why are the depressed not considered major stakeholders when it comes to the decisions we make about legalizing medicines? Why this purblind focus on a distinct minority of juvenile delinquents? And whence comes this knee-jerk compulsion to respond to our Chicken Little fears by crafting drug laws? Why don't we craft education campaigns instead, using the money that we save on housing drug "misusers" in prisons?

June 1, 2022




Just answered one of my own questions: Why are the depressed not considered major stakeholders when it comes to legalizing medicines like MDMA and laughing gas? Because the Drug War is political, and therefore the FDA has to worry about sensational media stories about a handful of irresponsible kids misusing a substance. They know that drug-war politicians would parley such stories into a hue and cry about "drugs, drugs, drugs." As for the hundreds of millions of depressed around the world, the FDA doesn't care about them because the newspapers don't report on the silent despair of the millions, just on the outlandish highly visible hijinx of a few. In other words, millions of depressed have to wait until the day when idiotic behavior ceases altogether -- which is why laughing gas is forbidden me, MDMA is forbidden me, psychedelic plants are forbidden me, the Incan god called coca is forbidden me. All so that the FDA can please the racist and pharmacologically clueless politicians.

TWEET TO DR. GLATTER, June 16, 2022: The politicized drug approval process for treatments like N20 makes regulators indifferent to the quiet suffering of the millions, because they know that just a few rare cases of abuse by young people can be parlayed into a crisis by Drug War demagogues.


Author's Follow-up: August 20, 2022



When thinking about how scientists ask silly questions like, "Can laughing gas help the depressed?", I'm reminded of the (in)famous quote about modern scientists from evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin:

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. 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.


Notes:

1) And by "Divine Foot," Lewontin means "any teleology whatsoever." A fact that scientists are seldom clear about in their popular writings, for obvious commercial reasons. For who wants to read a book about the glories of nature wherein the author keeps reminding the reader: "There's nothing to see here, of course. All this apparent ebullience of flora and fauna is just the inevitable predetermined result of mindless processes in a clockwork universe that couldn't care less about our interest in it."

2) "no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated." Lewontin might have added, "No matter how frustrating for those who have to suffer unnecessarily for decades while materialists like Lewontin find a scientifically kosher way to wrap their heads around a hitherto obvious fact: namely that a drug that makes people happy actually makes people happy!"

Author's Follow-up: November 16, 2022



The problem here is that scientists are statistically challenged. When they talk about the harms of drug use, they are never considering all the stakeholders. Instead, they speak as if they need merely identify a small percent of teens who will potentially misuse a substance in order to declare that the substance is unsafe. But safety should be measured in context. The scientists need to consider the millions who would use the substance safely and who will suffer immensely (albeit in silence) if the substance is NOT legalized. But science is politicized by the drug so no researcher wants to advocate a policy that will generate bad headlines, like: "Five teens killed by misusing a newly legalized medicine! Maybe so? But what about the MILLIONS of smart users who benefited greatly from the same substance???


Related tweet: January 13, 2023

The use of laughing gas changed William James' ideas about the very nature of reality. To outlaw such substances is to outlaw human advancement.

Author's Follow-up: June 1, 2023

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.

Nitrous Oxide: Possession of laughing gas to be criminal offence"

Next essay: Moonfall
Previous essay: America's Imperialist Christian Science War on Drugs

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essays about
THE MEDIA AND THE DRUG WAR

How Logic-Challenged Journalists Support the Drug War
Attention American Screenwriters: please stop spreading Drug War propaganda
Drug War Copaganda
Why Hollywood Owes Richard Nixon an Oscar
Why CBS 19 should stop supporting the Drug War
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Cop shows as drug war propaganda
COPS: TV Show for Racist Drug Warriors
Common Nonsense from Common Sense Media
America's Obsession with Fascist Drug War Movies
Glenn Close but no cigar
How the Atlantic Supports the Drug War
How Variety and its film critics support drug war fascism
Karolina Zieba just doesn't get it
All these Sons
Colorado plane crash caused by milk!
Drug War Quotes in TV and Movies
10 Idiots who helped spread drug war propaganda on Listverse
The Runner: Racist Drug War Agitprop
Moonfall
Enough Drug War Propaganda Movies Already




old time radio playing Drug War comedy sketches














You have been reading essays by the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass, at abolishthedea.com. Brian is the founder of The Drug War Gift Shop, where artists can feature and sell their protest artwork online. He has also written for Sociodelic and is the author of The Drug War Comic Book, which contains 150 political cartoons illustrating some of the seemingly endless problems with the war on drugs -- many of which only Brian seems to have noticed, by the way, judging by the recycled pieties that pass for analysis these days when it comes to "drugs." That's not surprising, considering the fact that the category of "drugs" is a political category, not a medical or scientific one.

A "drug," as the world defines the term today, is "a substance that has no good uses for anyone, ever, at any time, under any circumstances" -- and, of course, there are no substances of that kind: even cyanide and the deadly botox toxin have positive uses: a war on drugs is therefore unscientific at heart, to the point that it truly qualifies as a superstition, one in which we turn inanimate substances into boogie-men and scapegoats for all our social problems.

The Drug War is, in fact, the philosophical problem par excellence of our time, premised as it is on a raft of faulty assumptions (notwithstanding the fact that most philosophers today pretend as if the drug war does not exist). It is a war against the poor, against minorities, against religion, against science, against the elderly, against the depressed, against those in pain, against children in hospice care, and against philosophy itself. It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions, Nazifies the English language and militarizes police forces nationwide.

It bans the substances that inspired William James' ideas about human consciousness and the nature of ultimate reality. In short, it causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, meanwhile violating the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. (Surely, Jefferson was rolling over in his grave when Ronald Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants.)

If you believe in freedom and democracy, in America and around the world, please stay tuned for more philosophically oriented broadsides against the outrageous war on godsend medicines, AKA the war on drugs.

Brian Quass
The Drug War Philosopher
abolishthedea.com

PS The drug war has not failed: to the contrary, it has succeeded, insofar as its ultimate goal was to militarize police forces around the world and help authorities to ruthlessly eliminate those who stand in the way of global capitalism. For more, see Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley. Oh, and did I mention that most Drug Warriors these days would never get elected were it not for the Drug War itself, which threw hundreds of thousands of their political opposition in jail? Trump was right for the wrong reasons: elections are being stolen in America, but the number-one example of that fact is his own narrow victory in 2016, which could never have happened without the existence of laws that were specifically written to keep Blacks and minorities from voting. The Drug War, in short, is a cancer on the body politic.

Rather than apologetically decriminalizing selected plants, we should be demanding the immediate restoration of Natural Law, according to which "The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." (John Locke)

Selected Bibliography

  • Bandow, Doug "From Fighting The Drug War To Protecting The Right To Use Drugs"2018
  • Barrett, Damon "Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the Impact of Drug Polices on Young People"2011 IDEBATE Press
  • Bilton, Anton "DMT Entity Encounters: Dialogues on the Spirit Molecule"2021 Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
  • Boullosa , Carmen "A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the 'Mexican Drug War'"2016 OR Books
  • Brereton, William "The Truth about Opium / Being a Refutation of the Fallacies of the Anti-Opium Society and a Defence of the Indo-China Opium Trade"2017 Anna Ruggieri
  • Burns, Eric "1920: The year that made the decade roar"2015 Pegasus Books
  • Carpenter, Ted Galen "The Fire Next Door: Mexico's Drug Violence and the Danger to America"2012 Cato Institute
  • Chesterton, GK "Saint Thomas Acquinas"2014 BookBaby
  • Filan, Kenaz "The Power of the Poppy: Harnessing Nature's Most Dangerous Plant Ally"2011 Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
  • Griffiths, William "Psilocybin: A Trip into the World of Magic Mushrooms"2021 William Griffiths
  • Hofmann, Albert "The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications"2005 Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
  • Irwin-Rogers, Keir "Illicit Drug Markets, Consumer Capitalism and the Rise of Social Media: A Toxic Trap for Young People"2019
  • James, William "The Varieties of Religious Experience"1902 Philosophical Library
  • Mariani, Angelo "Coca and its Therapeutic Application, Third Edition"1896 Gutenberg.org
  • Mortimer MD, W. Golden "Coca: Divine Plant of the Incas"2017 Ronin Publishing
  • Partridge, Chiristopher "Alistair Crowley on Drugs"2021 uploaded by Misael Hernandez
  • Rudgley, Richard "The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances"2014 Macmillan Publishers
  • Shulgin, Alexander "PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story"1991 Transform Press
  • Shulgin, Alexander "The Nature of Drugs Vol. 1: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact"2021 Transform Press
  • Smith, Wolfgang "Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief"0
  • Smith, Wolfgang "Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology"2022
  • St John, Graham "Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT"2021
  • Szasz, Thomas "Interview With Thomas Szasz: by Randall C. Wyatt"0
  • Wedel, Janine "Unaccountable: How the Establishment Corrupted Our Finances, Freedom and Politics and Created an Outsider Class"2014 Pegasus Books
  • Weil, Andrew "From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs"2004 Open Road Integrated Media
  • Site and its contents copyright 2023, by Brian B. Quass, the drug war philosopher at abolishthedea.com. For more information, contact Brian at quass@quass.com.