Imagine the irony if I were to move to Canada to avail myself of assisted suicide for the depressed. The state would ask me why I wanted to die. So I tell them it's because I am not allowed to use medicines that could cheer me up in a trice -- and that no website will publish my views on the topic and that, in fact, Google will not even index my essays.1 Nor will even Mad in America publish my views2. The experts there are considered to be academics, after all, none of whom write from my point of view as someone with skin in the game.
"I am the only one who uses the term 'assisted suicide' and 'drug prohibition' in the same sentence"
So the state says to me, "Oh, I see, yes. Western society really has marginalized the crap out of you, hasn't it? That sounds very depressing, indeed. Well, yes, I think you qualify for assisted suicide: it's not like either the behavioral determinists in the lab nor the racists in Congress are suddenly going to decide that you have a right to use Mother Nature's bounty, after all. You're certainly doomed in THAT regard. We would be happy to kill you, however. Let's see now... I'm afraid we're booked up this week. How does next Tuesday at 11 a.m. sound to you?"
That is the state of mental health care in the west today: we can discuss assisted suicide for the depressed as a potentially viable option, but we cannot discuss the use of drugs for beneficial reasons. To this day, I am the only one who uses the term 'assisted suicide' and 'drug prohibition' in the same sentence, even though the former topic cannot be ethically discussed without mentioning the latter3.
The perceptive reader (and, yes, I mean both of them) will have guessed that I am a trifle depressed today. (Good catch, by the way.) I am just coming down off a two-week high occasioned by a speaking engagement that I secured at a New York university4. I was thinking to myself, "This is where you have a breakthrough and start talking with movers and shakers in the relevant fields. This is where your ideas start to resonate!" As always, however, I am left singing the Peggy Lee song after the thing itself: "Is that all there is?" For my audience was on the small size, nor was there any indication that a repeat performance was in the cards. It truly seems like I am the only one on earth (aside from those two readers of mine, I mean) who see the potential for outlawed substances to be used wisely and for good purposes by the depressed -- or by everybody else, for that matter.
By using Google Search, I have found a few healthcare professionals and researchers who are sympathetic to the views of Thomas Szasz on psychiatry, but none of them seem to be interested in his insights about drugs, especially his observation that self-medication has always been a basic human right. So the typical Szasz fan will agree with me that psychiatry should have no monopoly on treating my depression, but they will by no means champion my own right to treat that depression either. They simply want me to seek out psychologists rather than psychiatrists for my problems, preferably while giving up on drugs altogether, as if the unconscionable peddling of dependence-causing "meds" by psychiatrists has somehow disqualified all drugs whatsoever from being used for psychoactive purposes, as if folks like myself should become Christian Scientists rather than to use the bounty of Mother Nature for healing purposes.
I wonder if this latter situation is not the symptom of a larger problem with American capitalist society. I am thinking specifically of the relatively new social norm that tells us that we should jettison our elderly loved ones like unwelcome ballast at some point in order to be able to live our own lives to the full. We are given a conscience sop by self-interested pundits who tell us that it is scientifically "best" for these elders to be under the care of board-certified doctors, as if there were not enormous psychosocial benefits to keeping a loved one in their home, not just for the loved one but for their relations as well, at least if their hearts are in the right place. I fought against the attempt to institutionalize my own mother, but I found myself up against three siblings who felt differently on the matter, though they may also have been under pressure from their "significant others" to insist on institutionalization. Of course, it is not easy, financially and practically speaking, to have in-home nurses, either, but that situation itself speaks to the low priority that our country places on the interests of the elderly.
While performing research for my recent trip to Panama, I learned that institutionalization of the elderly is not even a "thing" in the country because family is considered so important. It simply would not occur to them to pack their loved ones off like that, even to the most scientifically run facility. Of course, Panama is not the USA (at least not yet) and there are exceptions to every rule. But I am writing here of the default assumptions of societies regarding the elderly, and in this department, Panamanians are definitely on the moral high ground compared to the United States.
"The idea of true healthcare freedom for the depressed seems to resonate with precisely nobody"
But let me be explicit about the connection here with patient rights in America. Americans accept a scientific argument to justify both the psychiatric pill mill and the institutionalization of the elderly. The implication here is that one is a Luddite if they insist on caring for their parent at home, just as they are a Luddite if they do not believe in the power of science to take care of depression. When patients merely use the substances that work for them without so much as a "by your leave" from science, we say that they are committing the unscientific sin of self-medicating. And yet "self-medicating" is just a neologism created by self-interested doctors to pathologize and almost even criminalize something that has always been a basic right of all human beings: namely, to take care of their own health as they see fit.
This, then, is one of the most unexpected discoveries that I have made over the last seven years of studying drug attitudes from the point of view of a med-dependent patient: the fact that the idea of true healthcare freedom for the depressed seems to resonate with precisely nobody, not even with the depressed themselves, who seem to pride themselves on being a good patient by taking a Big Pharma "med" every day of their life. And so I alone find it bizarre that the Americans who claim to hate drugs are forever reminding their obstreperous loved ones to "take their meds." Can they be so bamboozled as to not realize that "meds" ARE drugs, despite the marketing campaigns of pharmaceutical companies? Apparently so.
And, of course, those Americans are in good company. When British academic Ronald Hutton wrote a book about witches, he only mentioned drugs once, and then in a derogatory manner5. And yet he repeatedly mentioned "herbs" throughout the book, failing to realize that herbs ARE drugs in the same sense that meds are drugs: both are just politically correct words for "psychoactive substances."
I feel like a Hal David who was born just a little too late to work with Burt Bacharach. Had my timeline better synched with that of Thomas Szasz, I could have supplied him with a living, breathing example of a victim of the mindset against which he was writing, the idea that medicalizers and moralizers should decide how and when I should be able to take care of my own health. Instead, I am living in a world in which Szasz is being conveniently misremembered by those who do not wish to deal with the politically incorrect upshot of his teachings when it comes to drugs: that they can have benefits in specific cases and that they are not evil incarnate.
But I suppose I should not be surprised. We live in a capitalist country and there is no money to be made in supporting the rights of patients to take care of their own health. To the contrary, those who speak up for those rights are quite likely to be ostracized and barred from the public discourse. That's why we see a bunch of websites, like Mad in America, which feature Thomas Szasz Lite. They will emphasize Szasz's views about liberty and responsibility, but they will never go so far as to suggest that mere patients have a right to take care of their own health as they see fit. Where's the money in that, after all? Yes, they will criticize psychiatrists, but only so that they can replace them with academics and other self-interested cheerleaders for the drug-scorning Christian Science religion. The king is dead, long live the king. We depressed peons who experience the downsides of drug prohibition just have to sit back and listen to what our academic betters have to tell us about our conditions-- in between our trimonthly visits to a doctor who is one-third our age in order to pick up another expensive and underperforming prescription that is harder to kick than heroin.
Key Takeaways:
Assisted suicide cannot be discussed advisedly without discussing drug prohibition.
North Americans can discuss assisted suicide for the depressed but not drug re-legalization.
Self-medication is a basic human right.
Americans consider it scientifically best to institutionalize parents.
Scientific arguments are thought to justify both institutionalization and drug prohibition.
Americans think they are being scientific when they 'take their meds.'
Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.
My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine, 1884
I'm told that most psychiatrists would like to receive shock therapy if they become severely depressed. That's proof of drug war insanity: they would prefer damaging their brains to using drugs that can elate and inspire.
For those who want to understand what's going on with the drug war from a philosophical point of view, I recommend chapter six of "Eugenics and Other Evils" by GK Chesterton.
It wasn't until western prudery and racism came along that we started to judge people by the substances that they chose to ingest, rather than by their actual behavior in the world.
That's the problem with prohibition. It is not ultimately a health question but a question about priorities and sensibilities -- and those topics are open to lively debate and should not be the province of science, especially when natural law itself says mother nature is ours.
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda
(There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.)
If opium were legal, then most of the nostrums peddled by drug stores today would be irrelevant. (No wonder the drug war has staying power!)
America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
Philip Jenkins reports that Rophynol had positive uses for treating mental disorders until the media called it the "date rape drug." We thus punished those who were benefitting from the drug, tho' the biggest drug culprit in date rape is alcohol. Oprah spread the fear virally.
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