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How Scientific American reckons without the drug war
How Scientific American reckons without the drug war
in response to 'A Talking Cure for Psychosis' by Matthew M. Kurtz
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 6, 2023
open letter to Professor Matthew M. Kurtz, in response to 'A Talking Cure for Psychosis' in the March 2023 print edition of 'Scientific American'
Dear Professor Kurtz:
When we say that drugs by themselves have not solved the problem of psychosis, I think we must specify which drugs we are talking about. As you know, we live in a country in which almost all psychoactive medicine is outlawed. So when we say that "drugs are ineffective," we are really saying that "drugs that work according to reductionist criteria" are ineffective. The latter is a very different statement from the former.
I would also caution against the reductionist approach in treating psychological disorders. I have been chemically dependent for over 40 years now on drugs that purported to treat my depression via scientific reductionist criteria. Not only has my depression not been "cured," but I have been turned into a ward of the healthcare state, taking expensive pills that tranquilize me rather than empower me to live large.
You write of a "new era of psychology," but psychology remains blind to all the obvious reasons why banned psychoactive drugs could help the depressed: Even if these substances did nothing but elate, they could be used intermittently to give the patient something to look forward to (which is far better than shocking a patient's brain or having them commit suicide). Moreover, coca wine has empowered the lives of HG Wells and Jules Verne, helping them to work harder, giving them greater self-esteem, creating a virtuous circle. In the 19th century, poets used opium 1 wisely, in what author Richard Middleton called "a series of magnificent quarterly carouses,2" improving their work and giving them "something to look forward to," again creating a virtuous circle. Alexander Shulgin has synthesized hundreds of non-addictive drugs that elate and inspire the user. These drugs have not been found to be ineffective in treating psychological problems: rather they have been completely ignored in fealty to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.
Scientists are blind to the benefits of such "drugs" because to acknowledge them would be to violate Drug War orthodoxy, which tells us that certain substances have no positive uses, for anybody, anywhere, at any time, ever -- which, of course, is an anti-scientific lie, as there are no substances of that kind in the world. Even cyanide and botox have legitimate medical uses.
Science today is censored by the Drug War. And this will never end as long as we continue to pretend that the Drug War does not even exist.
Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.
As great as it is, "Synthetic Panics" by Philip Jenkins was only tolerated by academia because it did not mention drugs in the title and it contains no explicit opinions about drugs. As a result, many drug law reformers still don't know the book exists.
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
No wonder conservatives are terrified of drugs. It is not safety that worries them, else they would demand education. They are terrified of new ways of seeing life. The outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of whole mindsets. It is a meta injustice.
America won't be grown up until we start blaming drug misuse on people and/or policies rather than on drugs.
Getting off some drugs could actually be fun and instructive, by using a variety of other drugs to keep one's mind off the withdrawal process. But America believes that getting off a drug should be a big moral battle.
The FDA uses reductive materialism to justify and normalize the views of Cortes and Pizarro with respect to entheogenic medicine.
"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"
Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful.
It's almost impossible not to have a problem with drugs in a world in which the government is spending over $50 billion a year to render drug use problematic.
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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