stop studying the hell out of it and teach safe use instead
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 6, 2024
An open letter to Dr. Jessica Maples-Keller1, principal investigator for the 'MDMA Plus Exposure Therapy for PTSD' at Emory University.
Dear Dr. Maples-Keller:
As a chronic depressive retiree, I take exception to the glacially advancing way that drugs like MDMA are being studied today. Such meds work in an holistic manner and should not be subject to materialist criteria for "efficacy." They work. Everybody knows it. This requirement for scientific proof is really just a way to slow down re-legalization of such drugs and to make sure that it will have as little impact as possible on pharmaceutical companies if and when it finally occurs.
Thanks to this willful ignorance on the part of science, I will be DEAD long before institutions like Emory ever get around to "proving" that MDMA might be effective in some way for me.
And so I will not be eligible for your trials, on the grounds that I merely am depressed and do not "have" PTSD. And yet I obviously have PTSD in a philosophical sense. EVERYBODY has PTSD to some degree: that's what neurosis is all about: it is the ingrained subconscious memorization of counterproductive emotional responses engendered by incidents in the past (whether the triggering conditions are consciously remembered or not).
And yet everyone plays along with the idea that a board-certified PTSD has nothing to do with me -- and that's just a materialist bias, thanks to which we reify conditions like PTSD as things in themselves. This is convenient for drug makers because it gives them endless markets to exploit: as many markets as we decide to devise separate and discrete "illnesses" for in the DSM. But this "disease mongering" is based on philosophical assumptions that are sharply at odds with the ideas of holism championed by the Cosmovision of the Andes and the indigenous attitude in general according to which health is a balance of a wide range of factors. Materialists, to the contrary, seek to limit the number of variables in their studies, thereby bolstering their hubristic pretensions for having perfect knowledge about all things. But the price they pay is that their conclusions do not apply to real people in the messy world of intertwined causes and effects, but merely to abstracted stand-ins, denuded of everything that makes them human.
Actually, however, it is common sense that MDMA could help me. Common sense! (Just read the standard reports of users and tell me it is not a wish list for busting depression -- not just from the drug use itself but from the health-inspiring benefit of ANTICIPATION of use, something that materialists never consider!) But materialist Drug Warriors would have us MAKE BELIEVE that we do not know that entheogenic medicines work. They demand that real help must be proven scientifically in a very expensive and time-consuming way -- and then only by thinking of MDMA with respect to one single board-certified condition at a time. This is really just a new way of suppressing the kind of holistic drugs that "only" work according to indigenous peoples -- or according to anecdote, which scientists these days feel free to ignore, even when the use of MDMA promoted unprecedented peace, love and understanding on the dance floors of Britain in the 1990s.
That Camelot was brought to an end when the UK police cracked down on Ecstasy use, after which alcohol became the drug of choice and the dance floors devolved into chaos -- requiring that concert organizers hire special forces troops to keep the peace!!!
And why? Because a 100-pound girl died from dehydration because UK leaders preferred to demonize Ecstasy rather than to teach safe use2.
This is one of many problems with the drug approval process at least when it comes to psychoactive medicine: not only does the FDA ignore glaringly obvious drug benefits as mentioned above, but they never take into account the risks of NOT approving a drug -- which, in the case of MDMA, means, for one thing, the increased use of alcohol.
I am writing this because I received a heads-up from the MAPS organization3 that you were in search of participants for an FDA trial. Notwithstanding the above complaints, such studies as yours are "the only game in town" for people who wish to access MDMA legally for health reasons. However, as I appear to be barred from benefiting from MDMA legally -- at least in this lifetime -- I wanted at least to go on record as deploring the glacial pace of drug re-approval that is keeping a godsend medicine from those in need -- all under the warped idea that the best drug policy is to teach fear and to demonize substances rather than to learn how to use them as safely and as wisely as possible.
Sincerely Yours
PS All drugs obviously have negative potentials. But this is an FDA that approves of brain-damaging shock therapy and of the psychiatric pill mill, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma meds for life4. You cannot tell me that their scruples about MDMA safety make sense given this back story, least of all in a country that countenances tens of thousands of deaths each year due to alcohol5, a drug whose use MDMA could help to decrease!
Author's Follow-up: September 6, 2024
A reader might complain, "Yes, but we live in a materialist society, so we have to play by the rules of science." To which I say, we need to expose this materialist bias, not pretend that it does not exist. Only by exposing it can we show that the demonization of drugs is not common sense but is rather based on human presuppositions that are open to debate, especially insofar as the US view has never been championed by indigenous communities. If we cannot get the US and its ideological partners to change their dogmatically jaundiced views of psychoactive medicine, then maybe we can at least get them to recognize that the philosophy underlying their hatred is not universally accepted and so get them to stop bullying other countries into hating drugs too, especially when confronted with the observation that doing so is nothing less than pharmacological colonialism.
Folks like Sabet accuse folks like myself of ignoring the "facts." No, it is Sabet who is ignoring the facts -- facts about dangerous horses and free climbing. He's also ignoring all the downsides of prohibition, whose laws lead to the election of tyrants.
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war:
"clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."
Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.
Materialist scientists cannot triumph over addiction because their reductive focus blinds them to the obvious: namely, that drugs which cheer us up ACTUALLY DO cheer us up. Hence they keep looking for REAL cures while folks kill themselves for want of laughing gas and MDMA.
Meanwhile, no imaginable downside could persuade westerners that guns and alcohol were too dangerous. Yet the DEA lies about almost all psychoactive drugs, saying there are no good uses. That's a lie! Then they pass laws that keep us from disproving their puritanical conclusion.
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.
We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.
Oregon has decided to go back to the braindead plan of treating substance use as a police matter. Might as well arrest people at home since America has already spread their drug-hating Christian Science religion all over the world.
There are hundreds of things that we should outlaw before drugs (like horseback riding) if, as claimed, we are targeting dangerous activities. Besides, drugs are only dangerous BECAUSE of prohibition, which compromises product purity and refuses to teach safe use.
Listen to the Drug War Philosopher as he tells you how you can support his work to end the hateful drug war -- and, ideally, put the DEA on trial for willfully lying about godsend medicines! (How? By advertising on this page right c'here!)
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You have been reading an article entitled, Hello? MDMA works, already!: stop studying the hell out of it and teach safe use instead, published on September 6, 2024 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, Hello? MDMA works, already!: stop studying the hell out of it and teach safe use instead, published on September 6, 2024 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)