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Four reasons why Addiction is a political term



by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher



October 28, 2023



ddiction is not an objective term, it is a political term. It is another Drug War invention designed to pathologize the victims of prohibition.

To see this, let's first consider the way that the term is defined in Webster's Dictionary.


addiction: 'The quality or state of being addicted -- specifically : the compulsive uncontrolled use of habit-forming drugs beyond the period of medical need or under conditions harmful to society.'


Now let's consider four problems with that definition:

1) It's a little 'rich' to pathologize the 'compulsive uncontrolled use' of drugs with the pejorative label of 'addiction,' given that we live in a world where multibillion-dollar agencies are tasked with the job of making drug use as dangerous as possible. If, on the other hand, drugs were re-legalized and users had a smorgasbord of psychoactive options from which they could choose freely and were taught to use them safely, this 'compulsive uncontrolled use' would arguably not exist. A drug that caused undue compulsion would be replaced by other less compulsion-causing drugs. (Obsessive use of a contaminated Fentanyl supply could be replaced, for instance, with a relaxing nightly session of uncontaminated opium smoking.) But this is something that the Drug Warrior cannot imagine, of course, because their puritanical presumptions make it unthinkable to fight drugs with drugs.


2) 'beyond the period of medical need.' This qualification ignores the whole reason for USING psychoactive drugs in the first place: they are not used for medical purposes but rather for the very human purpose of attaining self-transcendence in life. By defining addiction in terms of 'medical need,' we put scientists and doctors in judgment of a decision about drug use that only the user is competent to make. Only the user can decide if use of a certain psychoactive drug can be justified by a cost-benefit analysis given the user's own priorities in life, given what they personally consider to be the 'summum bonum,' a good life. The scientists and researchers may advise the would-be user about physical risks of a given drug, but they cannot decide whether that risk is worth taking because they do not know what the user most values in life. (Perhaps the user is like the opium-loving physician Avicenna, who was said to have valued 'a short life with width to a narrow one with length.') Sure, the scientists and doctors can say that such illegal use would be wrong, morally speaking, as most would probably do these days, but that is not medical advice, that is legal and/or religious advice.

Even the determination of the amount of pain relief required in a given medical case is not a medical decision, except insofar as the doctor ensures that the dosages in question are not going to prove palpably injurious or lethal to a patient. Assuming that the patient's comfort is the goal of pain relief, then the decision about proper dosage must be informed by the patient's subjective experience of pain. This experience is in turn shaped in various ways and to various extents by social norms, as Ivan Illich discusses in Medical Nemesis. In other words, the patient is the expert when it comes to the amount of pain relief they require for a certain situation. It's barbarous that his or her preferences would be overruled by bureaucrats who intimidate doctors into prescribing niggardly doses of medicine in conformance to some supposed 'objectively correct dosage' based on a supposedly average patient. Such politically correct dosing ignores the obvious fact that every patient is both different and unique in how they tolerate and even define 'pain.' They should not be punished for having outlier reactions to pain based on a Bell's curve depicting statistically typical reactions.


3) 'under conditions harmful to society'? Who decides what is harmful to society? This is a subjective judgment. The Christian Scientist believes that any drug use is harmful to society, as do most politicians. The typical politician will also point to open-air drug markets and the mis-called 'opioid crisis' as signs of harm, but this is a mere political charge in a world in which the harms of prohibition are never acknowledged, let alone discussed. The Drug Warriors blame drugs for the downsides of prohibition in order to divert attention from the real culprit: prohibition itself, which limits choices, contaminates the drug supply, and refuses to even speak about safe use.


4) The definition implies that there's something wrong with habit-forming drugs. But this is not an obvious truth. Coffee is habit-forming and use is encouraged. Alcohol is habit-forming, cigarettes are habit-forming. 1 in 4 American women use SSRIs every day of their life. And we don't even call that a habit. To the contrary, we call that 'responsibly taking care of one's mental health!'


Author's Follow-up: October 28, 2023

Drug warriors will no doubt point to the case of hospital patients who are given a substance for pain relief and then become psychologically and perhaps even physically dependent on that drug. I have just three comments to attempt to pacify these statistically-challenged worrywarts.

1) The world is not perfect. We can never save everybody. Horse riding kills hundreds every year. Thousands of people die every year after taking aspirin. We have to put these things in perspective. It's cruel and unusual idiocy therefore to outlaw the use of time-honored godsends merely because they pose dangers to the unwary and thereby make children suffer in hospice. Even as I type this, there are many hospitals in India that do not stock morphine because of the Chicken Little fearmongering of puritanical American demagogues. Just think of all the terminal patients that are going through hell right now thanks to the irresponsible idiocy of stateside politicians. The Drug Warrior's answer is to deny adequate pain relief and relaxation (and spiritual quests, etc.) to billions and billions in order to save a handful of cases that can be portrayed on 48 Hours to a sound track of sobbing violins. This makes as much sense as denying food to your family because junior once choked on a chicken bone. It's also Christian Science gone mad.

2) When all drugs are legal and we have pharmacologically savvy empaths (instead of pill peddling psychiatrists), then such 'addictions' are not going to be the end of the world for anybody. If anything, they may lead the supposed 'addict' on a voyage of self-discovery with the responsible and guided use of empathogens and psychedelics. This is common sense -- but it's something that the Drug Warrior cannot imagine, for their puritan mindset renders them incapable of even thinking of fighting drugs with drugs. So much for the psychological aspects of so-called 'addiction.' The physical aspects can be treated by sleep cures of the kind that Jim Hogshire mentions in Opium for the Masses, and such cures can be expanded and perfected once we dump the anti-drug mindset that discourages such progress. In short, addiction need not be hell -- but Drug Warriors actually want it to be hell. Why? So that they can parlay the addict's pain into morality tales about the supposed evils of drugs.

3) Finally, as Carl Hart reminds us, the vast majority of drug users use drugs safely, despite the fact that their government is spending billions of dollars for the purpose of putting them in jeopardy.

Addiction






"The irreducible core of the disease theory of addiction is still as strong as ever -- the significant distinction between good and bad opiate use is whether it's medically supervised." --Emperors of Dreams by Mike Jay


Addiction is a hugely fraught subject in the age of the drug war. This is because the Drug War does everything it can to make drug use dangerous. It encourages addiction by limiting our access to all but the handful of drugs that dealers find it practical and lucrative to supply. It fails to regulate product so that drug users cannot know the dose or even the quality of what they are ingesting. Meanwhile, the drug war censors honest talk about drug use.

In short, until we end the drug war, we will not know how much addiction is a true problem and how much it is an artifact of drug-war policy. And yet materialist researchers tell us that addiction is a "disease"? Why is it a disease to want to improve one's life with drugs? One could just as easily say that people are diseased, or at least masochistic, if they accept their limitations in life without doing everything they can to transcend them.

Indeed, the very idea that materialists are experts on psychoactive drug use is wrong. It is a category error. The proof is extant. Materialist researchers today are in total denial about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs. They maintain the lie that psychoactive drugs can only be proven effective by looking under a microscope, whereas the proof of such efficacy is right in front of them: in endless anecdotes, in human history, and even in psychological common sense, the kind of common sense that scientists ignore in the name of both drug war ideology and the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism.

  • Addicted to Addiction: in Drug War USA
  • Addicted to Ignorance: problems with the 'no pain, no gain' school of de-tox therapy
  • Addiction
  • America's Great Anti-Depressant Scam
  • America's Invisible Addiction Crisis: And what it tells us about drug war hypocrisy
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War: an open letter to Professor Thad Polk
  • How Drug Prohibition Causes Relapses: an open letter to Jeffrey A. Singer of the Cato Institute
  • How Prohibition Causes Addiction
  • How the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality Tale
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors: How the Drug War has blinded Gabor Maté to the great addiction crisis of our time
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Libertarians as Closet Christian Scientists
  • Modern Addiction Treatment as Puritan Indoctrination
  • Night of the Addicted Americans
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate: ending the torture-friendly 12-step programs
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley: about addiction
  • Prohibition Spectrum Disorder: an open letter to Twitter follower Frank Smith
  • Public Service Announcements for the Post-Drug War Era
  • Sherlock Holmes versus Gabor Maté
  • Tapering for Jesus: how drug warriors moralize the withdrawal process
  • The aesthetic difference between addiction and chemical dependency
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism: like almost every other would-be Drug War reformer on the planet

  • Fearmongering






    Saying things like "Fentanyl kills!" makes just as much sense as saying "Fire bad!"

    The drug war is the ultimate case of fearmongering. And yet academics and historians fail to recognize it as such. They will protest eloquently against the outrages of the witch hunts of yore, but they are blind to the witch hunts of the present. What is a drug dealer but a modern service magician, someone who sells psychoactive medicine designed to effect personal ends for the user? They are simply providing an alternative to materialistic medicine, which ignores common sense and so ignores the glaringly obvious value of such substances.

  • 'Intoxiphobia' by Russell Newcombe: A critique
  • Addicted to Addiction: in Drug War USA
  • America's Blind Spot: Open Letter to Jospeh Koterski
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Canadian Drug Warrior, I said Get Away: an open letter to Cory Morgan, columnist for the Western Standard
  • Disease Mongering in the age of the drug war: a philosophical review of Stanley Krippner's essay on drug-inspired bliss
  • Drug Dealers as Modern Witches: an open letter to Ronald Hutton, author of 'The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present'
  • Fentanyl does not kill! Prohibition does!
  • Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do: in response to the misguided billboard campaign of Cindy DeMaio and Rachel's Angels
  • Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • Ignorance is the problem, not drugs: Toward a new psychiatric paradigm
  • Intoxiphobia: a philosophical review of the academic paper by Russell Newcombe
  • Kevin Sabet and What-About-Ism
  • Marci Hamilton Equates Drug Use with Child Abuse
  • Matthew Perry and the Drug War Ghouls
  • More Weed Bashing at the Washington Post
  • Oregon's Incoherent Drug Policy: in response to an article by Maria Holynova on Psychedelic Spotlight
  • Partnership for a Death Free America
  • Stigmatize THIS: More Drug War Agitprop from the Atlantic
  • The problem with Modern Drug Reform Efforts: an open letter to Professors Peter Reuter and Alex Stevens
  • What Goes Up Must Come Down?: So what? Drug use is about psychology, not physics.
  • Why Kevin Sabet is Wrong: philosophically speaking
  • Why Kevin Sabet's approach to drugs is racist, anti-scientific and counterproductive

  • Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths






    In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.

    This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just there way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.

    This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.

    How do I know this?

    Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.

    More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?

    This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."

  • Addicted to Addiction: in Drug War USA
  • Addicted to Ignorance: problems with the 'no pain, no gain' school of de-tox therapy
  • Addiction
  • After the Drug War: what a free world would look like
  • After the Drug War part 2
  • Another Cry in the Wilderness: open letter to US Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant: A critique of The Emperor’s New Drugs
  • Case Studies in Wise Drug Use
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal: an open letter to Austin of the Huachuma Project
  • Declaration of Independence from the War on Drugs
  • Drug Use as Self-Medication
  • Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy: an open letter to Joshua Falcon, author of Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness
  • Ego Transcendence Made Easy: or how Schopenhauer was reckoning without drugs before it was cool to do so
  • Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war: an open letter to Charley Wininger, author of 'Listening to Ecstasy'
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client: a new shamanic approach to drug use and mental healing
  • Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War
  • Heroin versus Alcohol: an open letter to Professor Steven Gimbel of Gettysburg College
  • How Cocaine could have helped me
  • How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient: and what we should do about that
  • How the Drug War Blinds us to Godsend Medicine
  • How the Drug War is a War on Creativity
  • How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse
  • How The Drug War Killed Andy Gibb
  • How the Drug War Punishes the Elderly
  • How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs: and leads to the preventable suicides of our loved ones
  • How to Unite Drug War Opponents of all Ethnicities: Open letter to Sean McAllister, drug policy reform lawyer
  • Hypocritical America Embraces Drug War Fascism: a warning to any remaining friends of freedom
  • In Praise of Doctor Feelgood: Why psychiatry must become pharmacologically informed shamanism
  • In Praise of Drug Dealers: replacing the modern barbaric treatment of so-called addicts with pharmacologically informed shamanism
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy: as opposed to just Psychedelic Therapy
  • Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion: it's just that we have outlawed them all
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart: author of 'Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear'
  • Open Letter to Erowid: about a misleading 2018 article by Karolina Zieba
  • Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser: author of 'The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous'
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling: whose documentary about Chicago violence does not even mention the Drug War!!!
  • Pihkal 2.0: Finding drugs that work for users rather than for pharmaceutical companies
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism: The post that got me banned for life from the Reddit Psychiatry group
  • Science is not free in the age of the drug war: an open letter to The American Council on Science and Health
  • Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms
  • Someone you love is suffering unnecessarily because of the war on drugs
  • Thank God for Erowid: in response to a 2015 Vice article by Adam Rothstein
  • Thank God for Soul Quest: It's time to stop blaming others for the problems caused by drug prohibition
  • THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG: combatting drug war propaganda and lies, one post at a time
  • The Drug War and Armageddon: An open letter to Bryan Walsh, author of End Times
  • The Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time
  • The Mother of all Western Biases: an open letter to Science News
  • The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War: How modern science helps normalize prohibition
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • The Origins of Modern Psychiatry: How to create a billion-dollar industry in three easy steps
  • The Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression: on replacing psychiatry with pharmacologically savvy shamanism
  • What Jim Hogshire Got Wrong about Drugs: a philosophical review of Pills-a-Go-Go
  • Why America's Mental Healthcare System is Insane: and how the work of Alexander Shulgin can inspire us to fix it
  • Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use: how the drug war blinds us to lifesaving medicine
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism: like almost every other would-be Drug War reformer on the planet
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs: an open letter to a reader





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    Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

    Today's Washington Post reports that "opioid pills shipped" DROPPED 45% between 2011 and 2019..... while fatal overdoses ROSE TO RECORD LEVELS! Prohibition is PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE.
    News flash: certain mushrooms can help you improve your life! It's the biggest story in the history of mycology! And yet you wouldn't know it from visiting the websites of most mushroom clubs.
    Imagine if we held sports to the same safety standard as drugs. There would be no sports at all. And yet even free climbing is legal. Why? Because with sports, we recognize the benefits and not just the downsides.
    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. 3:51 PM · Jul 15, 2024
    I'm told that science is completely unbiased today. I guess I'll have to go back and reassess my doubts about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
    We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?
    We need a few brave folk to "act up" by shouting "It's the drug war!" whenever folks are discussing Mexican violence or inner city shootings. The media treat both topics as if the violence is inexplicable! We can't learn from mistakes if we're in denial.
    In a blog post about cohoba, the psychedelic used by the Taino people, the author says, "In no way shape or form am I advocating for the use of any kind of drugs." What groveling! You SHOULD be advocating for the use of sacred medicines and against imperialist prohibition!
    The FDA should have no role in approving psychoactive medicine. They evaluate them based on materialist standards rather than holistic ones. In practice, this means the FDA ignores all glaringly obvious benefits.
    The so-called "herbs" that witches used were drugs, in the same way that "meds" are drugs. If academics made that connection, the study of witchcraft would shed a lot of light on the fearmongering of modern prohibitionists.
    More Tweets



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    You have been reading an article entitled, Four reasons why Addiction is a political term published on October 28, 2023 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)