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."
If America cannot exist without outlawing drugs, then there is something wrong with America, not with drugs.
The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.
The best harm reduction strategy would be to re-legalize opium and cocaine. We would thereby end depression in America and free Americans from their abject reliance on the healthcare industry, meanwhile ending gang violence and restoring the rule of law in Latin America.
I've been told by many that I should have seen "my doctor" before withdrawing from Effexor. But, A) My doctor got me hooked on the junk in the first place, and, B) That doctor completely ignores the OBVIOUS benefits of indigenous meds and focuses only on theoretical downsides.
In fact, there are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???
Ann Lemke's case studies make the usual assumptions: getting free from addiction is a morality tale. No reference to how the drug war promotes addiction and how banned drugs could solve such problems. She does not say why daily SSRI use is acceptable while daily opium use is not. Etc.
The drug war is a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."
All drugs have positive uses. It's absurd to prohibit them because one demographic might misuse them.
Most substance withdrawal would be EASY if drugs were re-legalized and we could use any substance we wanted to mitigate negative psychological effects.
It's a category error to say that scientists can tell us if psychoactive drugs "really work." It's like asking Dr. Spock of Star Trek if hugging "really works." ("Hugging is highly illogical, Captain.")
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