ver since I was young, I have not understood the Drug War mentality. Why, for instance, could I not use cocaine in my late teens and early 20s when the symptoms that it produced were exactly what I was looking for at the time: namely, a release from morbid self-consciousness, thanks to which I could have capitalized on my innate talents for DJing - instead of self-destructing vocally before the microphone through self-doubt.
Freud himself praised cocaine to the skies, claiming that it relieved his depression without depriving him of energy needed for work. Indeed, he expected cocaine to 'win its place in therapeutics side by side morphine and superior to it.' Nor did the drug hopelessly addict him. To the contrary, he used cocaine while it was useful to his work and quit it without fanfare (or the release of a self-pitying autobiography) when the drug no longer served his purposes in life.
Yet whenever I talked like this to psychiatrists, I was met with blank stares, and eventually warned that I sounded like an 'addictive personality.' An 'addictive personality'! How ironic, considering that these same psychiatrists then went on to addict me for an entire lifetime to Big Pharma pills, which I must take every day of my life, to this very day, and which I couldn't quit if I wanted to, not because I lack willpower but because my own shrink has told me not to bother, since the Effexor I'm on has a recidivism rate equal to that of heroin.
An 'addictive personality,' indeed. Well, if you're just going to addict me anyway, why can't I be addicted to my poison of choice? Why can't I use cocaine instead of SSRIs and SNRIs?
The psychiatrist's absurd answer to that question illustrates all that is wrong with psychiatry today.
The psychiatrist will claim that cocaine 'only targets the symptoms,' you see, while Big Pharma has created pills that go right to the chemical imbalances that create depression in the first place.
This is wrong on a number of levels.
First of all, the idea that Big Pharma pills correct a chemical imbalance is a lie: in fact, there is reason to believe that SSRIs and SNRIs actually create the imbalances that they purport to cure (see 'Anatomy of an Epidemic' by Robert Whitaker).
Second, how can these pills be fixing a chemical imbalance when I'm as depressed as ever after 40 years of taking them? And it's not just me: America is the most depressed country in the world, statistically speaking, and yet we are the most drug-using nation on earth, to the point that 1 in 4 women are now taking these 'silver bullets' every day of their life. But then I suppose that pharmaceutical executives are happier than ever, seeing their bottom line grow enormously thanks to the psychiatric pill mill that they are furnishing with these brain-fogging 'godsends' (meds that were never even intended for long-term use).
Third, what's wrong with 'only treating the symptoms'? If by doing so you allow a person to achieve self-actualization in life, then problem solved. That's what happened for Freud: his enormous output under cocaine allowed him to achieve his fondest goals, leading to self-actualization. The experience of self-actualization then improved his own self-image and he grew psychologically stronger, in a sort of positive psychological feedback loop. No, cocaine did not directly create this happiness (through some as-yet unknown chemical path, for instance) but so what? It created the actual conditions whereby Freud could succeed in spite of his depression and self-doubts.
Notice that if the drug-warrior psychiatrist had had his or her way, Freud would never have been allowed to succeed in life. Cocaine, after all, would have been a big no-no. Instead, like myself, Freud would have been scheduled for weekly sessions where talk therapy would try to get 'to the bottom' of his depression, the supposed 'real' psychological cause - or where drugs would have been prescribed that would have supposedly targeted the 'real' chemical cause. Result: we would have never heard of Freud today, but you can be sure that he would have been dutifully 'taking his meds' until the last day of his life.
In fact, if the drug-warrior psychiatrist had gotten ahold of Robin Williams in time, the same thing would have happened to him: the world would have missed out on a comic legend, because Williams' coke use would have been considered a disease that needed to be cured so that Robin's 'real' problems could be addressed, by talk and/or Big Pharma chemicals.
Unfortunately, the drug-warrior psychiatrists did get ahold of me, however. That's why you've never heard of me as a DJ. The psychiatrists gave my self-doubt and depression free rein. My life was put on hold as I was told to wait for the 'real' cures to 'kick in.'
Well, it's been over four decades now, and I'm still waiting.
But on the upside, psychiatry's meds have made life just bearable. Perhaps that's the only benefit of modern SSRIs: they help one survive without achieving self-actualization in life. In fact, I am not a conspiracy theorist, but one could argue that the whole point of modern antidepressants is to turn the user into a good consumer, one who will be tranquilized just to the point that he or she can stand the absurdity of modern life - without turning the user into a potentially disruptive force by actually helping them achieve self-actualization.
How can psychiatry hold a viewpoint that is so at odds with common sense? How can they so blatantly ignore the 'patient's' need for self-actualization in life? Why do they insist that patients survive on theories rather than on the real politik of drugs that actually do something to positively effect behavior? In short, why was cocaine a godsend for Sigmund Freud but a devilish drug as far as I'm concerned?
Why?
Because psychiatrists have been cowed by the Drug War into denying the obvious: that many illegal psychoactive substances do have therapeutic uses: not because they 'cause' happiness in and of themselves (as the philosophically-challenged drug-warrior would require them to do) but because they facilitate behavior that creates success. As noted above, this success then improves self-image, creating a positive feedback loop viz the patient's personality. Result: the patient can succeed in life, oftentimes without the long-term use of the substance that created this 'virtuous circle' in the first place.
Until psychiatry realizes these simple truths and ceases its pretentious search for 'real causes' (that search that has resulted in the addiction of 1 in 4 American women to the supposedly real 'targeted cures' mentioned above) they will continue sacrificing the vocational lives of ambitious Americans like myself on the altar of Drug War superstition.
POSTCRIPT: Yes, I was an addictive personality: I was addicted to self-actualization and I demanded it. I wasn't willing to accept the second-best life that psychiatry was proposing for me with its feeble theoretical half-measures.
Author's Follow-up: November 17, 2023
Freud is kind of like Coleridge. He bites the hand that feeds him. He determines eventually that cocaine is just too attractive to normal people -- but it's mere Christian Science piety to think that Freud would be known today for publishing over 320 books had he not employed vast quantities of cocaine. But the only message we're allowed to take from such stories is that cocaine is evil.1
Wrong. Wrong. Anti-scientifically wrong.
The message is: cocaine did some great things. How can we harness such power as safely as possible?
If we ask the right questions, then we can begin to get useful answers.
How can we harness such power as safely as possible?
I don't know, maybe, just maybe, we can start by being honest about drugs. Imagine that. Not that that's going to happen anytime soon in a society in which we sell dependence-causing Big Pharma meds like they were candy on prime-time television. Actually, it's government policy NOT to be honest about drugs. That's why we don't have a National Institute on Drug Use. We have instead a National Institute on Drug ABUSE -- since in the mind of the Drug Warrior, use and abuse are the same thing. That's why the Vancouver Police are arresting people for teaching safe use.
So, how CAN we harness such power as safely as possible?
Common sense reveals the answer once we take off the blinders of Drug War ideology:
Legalize all meds, and use drugs to fight drugs when problems arise. Psychiatrists would be replaced with pharmacologically savvy shaman: empathic individuals who have the authority to use ANY SUBSTANCE IN THE WORLD that might be helpful for their customers (not 'patients') to achieve their goals in life.
We have to finally recognize the obvious: that symptomatic fixes work, and that, in fact, it's actually wrong and nightmarish to seek a 'cure' for human sadness, lethargy, anxiety and angst.
What has the materialist search for that cure led to, after all, in America? It's led to nothing short of THE BIGGEST PHARMACOLOGICAL DYSTOPIA OF ALL TIME: namely, the fact that 1 in 4 American women are dependent upon Big Pharma meds for life.
We need to stop medicalizing mood and mind medicine. The doctor should tell us some basic info such as which doses are necessarily fatal -- but after that, they need to butt out and let people help people when it comes to mood and mind medicine. For doctors qua doctors have no special insight into the goals and desires of individuals and their views on self-transcendence and the meaning of life.
Author's Follow-up: March 17, 2025
I can go on and on with suggestions for the unconvinced, but really all the Drug Warrior needs to do to understand me is to start considering common-sense psychology. This is not as easy as it sounds because materialism is the reigning ideology of our times and materialism is all about ignoring common sense when it comes to mind and mood. But if we can dare to be anti-scientific long enough to acknowledge common sense with respect to mind and mood medicine, then it becomes clear that drugs can be godsends. I can also guarantee the skeptic that all the problems that they no doubt envision from viewing drugs in this way can always be shown to be a result of some Drug Warrior belief or policy or law -- and not a result of the change of mindset that I recommend here.
That said, it must also be remembered that drug use is like every other risky activity on earth. Just like horseback riding and mountain climbing and drag-racing (not to mention alcohol drinking and gun firing), it will result in deaths. We have to accept that fact. We have to jettison the childish idea that one death is one death too many when it comes to drugs. We only hold such superstitious intolerance for 'drugs' because we fail to understand the endless ways that drugs can be beneficial to human beings. These benefits may not be obvious to scientists looking under a microscope, but they are clear even to a child. When a person is laughing and smiling after using laughing gas, the child, at least, knows that this person is laughing and smiling, and that this is a good thing in and of itself. What is REALLY funny is the fact that the lab technician has to spend millions in research funds in order to arrive at the same conclusion based on microscopic evidence. That would even be hilarious, were it not for the fact that such glacially-proceeding stupidity has the effect of depriving billions of godsend medicines that they need right now -- not in a hundred years, when researchers have finally figured out what even a child knows today.
I should add something here that should be obvious to those who have read enough of my site to understand my basic philosophy of drugs, and that is the fact that many other drugs besides cocaine could have helped me back in the day. I mentioned cocaine because it is a drug that most people have heard of and whose effects had obvious benefits viz. my former psychological needs. But the above essay was written five years ago, before I was aware of the work of Alexander Shulgin and the wide variety of psychological effects that could be garnered from the strategic use of a wide variety of phenethylamines2. What I am trying to say here is that the point of the above essay was not to sing the praises of cocaine in particular, but rather to point out a common-sense psychological principle that is so thoroughly ignored today: namely, that ANY drug that took me out of my self-censorious 'mode of being' back then and inspired beneficial action on my part would have been a godsend.
I should add something that will be obvious for those familiar with basic drug effects: namely, that marijuana would not have been the right choice for me back then, at least vocationally speaking, insofar as the drug tends to enhance and exaggerate existing moods -- and for an insecure depressive, that's obviously not a good thing. That said, marijuana is a favorite of many DJs -- a fact that reminds us of something that Drug Warriors never understand: that psychological health is a balance of factors and not the result of any one input, be that drug use or genetics or upbringing, etc. etc. etc.
But imagine if I had lived in a free world back then, one in which we sought to do everything we could to help individuals achieve self-actualization in life rather than outlawing a vast psychoactive pharmacopoeia a priori under the absurd idea that drugs were bad in and of themselves. Imagine if I had been able to use substances like those that inspired the following user reports in the pharmacological studies of Alexander and Ann Shulgin3:
'Tremendous humor and laughter, which was truly delightful.'
'The feeling was one of great camaraderie, and it was very easy to talk to people.'
'I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing.'
Could I have been destructively self-obsessed while in rapture? Come on, modern psychologists, GET REAL!
And lest anyone believe that such common-sense drug use could have turned me into an egomaniac...
'A remarkable effect of this drug is the extreme
empathy felt for all small things; a stone, a flower, an insect.'
Now, sure, it would take some work to find the best drugs for my purposes back in the day, but one thing is clear: I would need the help of a what I call a pharmacologically savvy empath to make that choice and NOT a psychiatrist, except insofar as the latter was willingly to renounce behaviorism for the nonce and acknowledge psychological common sense instead (psychology pre-JB Watson, that is). Such drug choices can be made without onsite help in the case of mature and educated adults.
Nothing could be clearer, once we jettison the purblind doctrine of behaviorism, that the business of choosing the right drugs for emotional and mental improvement is AN ART FORM, not a science.
Of course, we have all been brainwashed into envisioning a huge problem with addiction in embracing such common sense, but this is all based on Drug War presuppositions.
First, however, let's get one thing clear: dependence on a medicine is not the worst thing in the world. In fact, American society tacitly acknowledges this fact today given the psychiatric paradigm, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma drugs for a lifetime! We must also remember that for most of us, a failure to achieve vocational goals is a WORSE fate than that of becoming dependent on a substance. Moreover, in a free world, wherein ALL psychoactive drugs could be used creatively to motivate change, the problem of unwanted substance dependence would be solved in most cases -- and for obvious psychological reasons! I could have gotten off of Valium in a month back in the '90s had I been free to use other drugs to get me through a few tough hours here and a few tough hours there. Instead it took me TEN LONG YEARS -- and all thanks to psychological issues that could have been easily overcome in a trice had Americans had the common sense (and compassion) to allow me to fight drugs with drugs4.
See? As I said above, the problems that one imagines with my common-sense ideas are always a result of drug-war assumptions and laws and policies. Indeed, this is how the Drug War continues to survive today: because Drug Warriors always blame drug reform for the problems caused by lingering drug laws, policies and mindsets. This is why I always say that we need to do more than change laws, we need to change our whole mindset about drugs and drug use-- based as it is on a host of lies and misapprehensions -- and the inhumane doctrines of behaviorism and reductionism5.
Cocaine
Cocaine can be used wisely, believe it or not. Just ask Carl Hart. Or Graham Norton, the UK's quixotic answer to Johnny Carson. Just ask the Peruvian Indians, who have chewed the coca leaf for stamina and inspiration since Pre-Inca days. You have been taught to hate cocaine by a lifetime of censorship -- and by an FDA which dogmatically ignores all positive aspects of drug use, just as they ignore all downsides to prohibition.
Laws are never going to stop westerners from using cocaine, nor should they. Such laws are not making the world safe. To the contrary, laws against cocaine have made our world unthinkably violent! It has created cartels out of whole cloth, cartels that engage in torture and which suborn government officials, to the point that "the rule of law" is little more than a joke south of the border.
This is the enormous price tag of America's hateful policy of substance prohibition: the overthrow of democratic norms around the world.
The eerie bit is that most leading drug warriors understand this fact and approve of it. Too much democracy is anathema to the powers-that-be.
So... "Is cocaine use good or bad?" The question does not even make sense. Cocaine use is a blessing for some, just a little fun for most, and a curse for a few. Just like any other risky activity.
In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.
This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just there way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.
This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.
How do I know this?
Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.
More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?
This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."
Let's pass a constitutional amendment to remove Kansas from the Union, and any other state where the racist politicians leverage the drug war to crack down on minorities.
New article in Scientific American: "New hope for pain relief," that ignores the fact that we have outlawed the time-honored panacea. Scientists want a drug that won't run the risk of inspiring us.
More materialist nonsense. "We" are the only reason that the universe exists as a universe rather than as inchoate particles.
The problem for alcoholics is that alcohol decreases rationality in proportion as it provides the desired self-transcendence. Outlawed drugs can provide self-transcendence with INCREASED rationality and be far more likely to keep the problem drinker off booze than abstinence.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort shows how science damns (i.e. excludes) facts that it cannot assimilate into a system of knowledge. Fort could never have guessed, however, how thoroughly science would eventually "damn" all positive facts about "drugs."
I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.
It's always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract. That's anti-scientific. It begs so many questions and leaves suffering pain patients (and others) high and dry. No substance is bad in and of itself.
Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.
"Arrest made in Matthew Perry death." Oh, yeah? Did they arrest the drug warriors who prioritized propaganda over education?
It's "convenient" for scientists that their "REAL" cures happen to be the ones that racist politicians will allow. Scientists thus normalize prohibition by pretending that outlawed substances have no therapeutic value. It's materialism collaborating with the drug war.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, How Cocaine could have helped me published on August 16, 2020 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)
ver since I was young, I have not understood the Drug War mentality. Why, for instance, could I not use cocaine in my late teens and early 20s when the symptoms that it produced were exactly what I was looking for at the time: namely, a release from morbid self-consciousness, thanks to which I could have capitalized on my innate talents for DJing - instead of self-destructing vocally before the microphone through self-doubt. 
You have been reading an article entitled, How Cocaine could have helped me published on August 16, 2020 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)
