What do you guys make of the tweet that I read this morning by one "American Muskrat"?
"I am under the impression the Philosopher is speaking of improving the mind directly with drugs, consciousness expansion, that sort of thing. I don't buy into that anymore.
Insomnia sucks, it's why I'm drinking beer in a hotel bathroom at 4:40am."
I don't know about you, but I took this as a prohibitionist broadside. In other words, I thought that the Muskrat was dissing godsend medicines.
Based on that assumption, I took that tweet as a challenge and responded rapidly with the following indignant barrage.
Read folks like Alexander Shulgin1, James Fadiman2, and Stanislav Grof3 for documented evidence of how drugs can improve the mind and even grow new neurons. For the latest evidence, see Psychedelic Medicine by Richard Louis Miller4.
And this is before we even start talking about the obvious fact that almost ANY "pick me up" drug can be used to fight depression -- except that racist politicians have convinced us with non-stop indoctrination that humans are too infantile to ever use them wisely56.
I don't know how anybody can say that psychoactive drugs cannot help when there are thousands we have never studied and even the known drugs are studied through a lens of Christian Science biashttps://www.abolishthedea.com/citations.php.
They must not be aware of the way that drugs like MDMA 7 are being used, even now, to revitalize old relationships and marriages and to make talk therapy really work. See "Listening to Ecstasy" by Charles Wininger8.
Author's Follow-up: May 25, 2024
Update: The guy means it. Weird. It's always hard for me to believe that there are people out there who have swallowed America's drug-war propaganda hook, line and sinker. They actually tell us that they know that there is no benefit in drugs -- not realizing that they use drugs every day of their life: coffee, nicotine, alcohol, antidepressants 9, MONSTER energy drinks10. They mean there's no benefit in the drugs they don't like.
Typical American know-it-all-ism.
But then he's obviously a troll, since only a troll would tell a 65-year-old that he's "going through a phase."
Prohibitionists have blood on their hands. People do not naturally die in the tens of thousands from opioid use, notwithstanding the lies of 19th-century missionaries in China. It takes bad drug policy to accomplish that.
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
Wade Davis writes that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. What about the 49,000 that commit suicide every year because we have outlawed drugs that could cheer them up!!!
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.
I never said that getting off SSRIs should be done without supervision. If you're on Twitter for medical advice, you're in the wrong place.
The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.
In the board game "Sky Team," you collect "coffees" to improve your flying skills. Funny how the use of any other brain-focusing "drug" in real life is considered to be an obvious sign of impairment.
Guess who's in charge of protecting us from AI? Chuck Schumer! The same guy who protected us from drugs -- by turning America into a prison camp full of minorities and so handing two presidential elections to Donald Trump.
Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.
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.
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
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