egarding: "The Diet that Might Cure Depression," "The DASH Diet Helps Depression Symptoms," "Depression Isn't Contagious"... and everything else that the Atlantic publishes on the topic of depression.
Your articles on depression are censored, no doubt unconsciously, to avoid mentioning the 64,000-pound gorilla in the room: that is the fact that thousands of psychoactive plant medicines are dutifully ignored by depression researchers in obedience to America's anti-scientific Drug War. That's why, as a lifelong depression sufferer, I sigh any time I see a new article on the subject, especially when it comes in the form of one of the millions of dietary suggestions to which Americans are exposed with much fanfare during their lifetimes. Even if a diet did show promise, depression strikes at the very ability to keep a diet going, because it saps motivation on the front end. That's why we need the psychoactive plants of mother nature which, under empathic supervision, can provide motivation, follow-through, and a new sense of purpose in life.
Sigmund Freud considered cocaine to be a godsend for his own depression, and he got "off" cocaine when he no longer needed it, without feeling the need to write some self-congratulatory book about the difficulties he encountered in so doing. There are reams of anecdotal evidence dating back millennia that speak to the power of psychedelics to bring about a new sense of purpose in life, most recently in the thousands of detailed guided "trip" accounts provided by researchers such as James Fadiman and Stanislav Grof. Promising research is underway at this very moment to mainstream psilocybin and "ecstasy" for depression treatment - though this research has had to move forward glacially thanks to America's unwillingness to fund research that violates our Drug War sensibilities.
By failing to mention this "gorilla," the Atlantic is supporting Drug War propaganda, possibly because your editors have fallen for the Drug War lie that substances fry the brain the moment that they are demonized by politicians. But the facts are just the opposite. Cocaine sharpened Freud's focus. Opium facilitated Benjamin Franklin's creativity. Psychedelics helped Francis Crick envision the DNA helix. And "speed" is so far from frying the brain that the Air Force has required its pilots to take the drug in advance of critical missions. If any drugs fry the brain, they are Big Pharma anti-anxiety and antidepressant drugs, to which 1 in 4 American women are addicted (source: Julie Holland), but that's another fact that gets censored from your articles about depression, in dutiful conformance with Drug War propaganda.
The fact is that there is no such thing as free research on depression under the Drug War, and the Atlantic should be pointing this out in every article that it writes on the subject, rather than pretending that researchers are approaching the topic from some sort of reasonable baseline.
Mass Media and Drugs
The media have done all they can to support the drug war by holding the use of outlawed substances to safety standards that are never applied to any other risky activity on earth, meanwhile ignoring the fact that prohibition encourages ignorance and leads to contaminated drug supply. Thousands of American young people die each month because of unregulated supply and ignorance, not from drugs themselves.
The media also supports the drug war by failing to hold it accountable for all the problems that it causes. Just read any article on inner-city shootings -- today's journalists will trace the problem to a lack of jobs or to global warming, to anything but the drug war which incentivized violence in the first place. As for violence overseas, we're told that it's caused by evil rotten drug cartels -- without any acknowledgement that it was American drug policy that created those cartels out of whole cloth, just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia here in the States.
Meanwhile, the media have a field day superstitiously blaming drugs. It used to be PCP, ICE, oxy, crack, and now it's fentanyl... It's all part of the DEA's tried-and-true formula to stay relevant, as academic Philip Jenkins clearly demonstrates in "Synthetic Panics": Take a local drug problem and publicize it so that it goes national. Then work with a film crew at "48 Hours" to show that the drug in question threatens the white American middle class. Then go to Congress, hat in hand, and accept billions to 'solve' the latest drug problem.
And Americans fall for it every time. In fact, their gullibility seems to be increasing over time. They love to hate drugs, so much so that drugs have become the new horror trope. Recent movies have taken to personifying "evil" drugs in the forms of Crack Raccoons and Meth Gators. It's sad that America has become so superstitious and childish about drugs -- and the media can take much of the blame.
If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.
Rather than protesting prohibition as a crackdown on academic freedom, today's scientists are collaborating with the drug war by promoting shock therapy and SSRIs, thereby profiting from the monopoly that the drug war gives them in selling mind and mood medicine.
The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.
The FDA will be accepting comments through September 20th on the subject of ways to fight PTSD.
PTSD@reaganudall.org
Ask them why they support brain-damaging shock therapy but won't approve drugs like MDMA that could make ECT unnecessary.
Scientists cannot tell us if psychoactive drugs are worth the risk any more than they can tell us if free climbing is worth the risk, or horseback riding or target practice or parkour.
Like when Laura Sanders tells us in Science News that depression is an intractable problem, she should rather tell us: "Depression is an intractable problem... that is, in a world wherein we refuse to consider the benefits of 'drugs,' let alone to fight for their beneficial use."
There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.
Drug warriors have taught us that honest about drugs encourages drug use. Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.
Someone should stand outside Jefferson's estate and hand out leaflets describing the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello to confiscate poppy plants. That raid was against everything Jefferson stood for. The TJ Foundation DISHONORED JEFFERSON and their visitors should know that!
Rick Strassman reportedly stopped his DMT trials because some folks had bad experiences at high doses. That is like giving up on aspirin because high doses of NSAIDs can kill.
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 the Atlantic Supports the Drug War: a letter to the Atlantic editors, published on October 14, 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)
egarding: "The Diet that Might Cure Depression," "The DASH Diet Helps Depression Symptoms," "Depression Isn't Contagious"... and everything else that the Atlantic publishes on the topic of depression.
You have been reading an article entitled, How the Atlantic Supports the Drug War: a letter to the Atlantic editors, published on October 14, 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)
