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."
The Drug War is a religion. The "addict" is a sinner who has to come home to the true faith of Christian Science. In reality, neither physical nor psychological addiction need be a problem if all drugs were legal and we used them creatively to counter problematic use.
Everyone's biggest concern is the economy? Is nobody concerned that Trump has promised to pardon insurrectionists and get revenge on critics? Is no one concerned that Trump taught Americans to doubt democracy by questioning our election fairness before one single vote was cast?
Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.
Problem 2,643 of the war on drugs:
It puts the government in charge of deciding what counts as a true religion.
"There has been so much delirious nonsense written about drugs that sane men may well despair of seeing the light." -- Aleister Crowley, from "Essays on Intoxication"
Attention People's magazine editorial staff:
Matthew Perry was a big boy who made his own decisions. He didn't die because of ketamine or because of evil rotten drug dealers, he died because of America's enforced ignorance about psychoactive drugs.
All drugs have positive uses at some dose, for some reason, at some time -- but prohibitionists have the absurd idea that drugs can be voted up or down. This anti-scientific notion deprives the modern world of countless godsends.
Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."
If media were free in America, you'd see documentaries about people using drugs wisely for a wide variety of praiseworthy purposes.
I'm interested in CBD myself, because I want to gain benefits at times without experiencing intoxication. So I think it's great. But I like it as part of an overall strategy toward mental health. I do not think of CBD, as some do, as a way to avoid using naughty drugs.
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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