Why psychiatry must become pharmacologically informed shamanism
What follows is a short sketch showing how truly effective psychiatric treatment could take place once Americans have jettisoned the ignorant mindset of the Drug Warrior.
Okay, everyone take a seat. Glad to see you guys. Now, let me describe how we're going to help you with your alcohol withdrawal. You see, a hundred years ago, back in 2020, psychiatry finally began to realize that the hardest thing about withdrawal is the bad feelings. I know what you're thinking: why did it take them so long to realize it? Well, they had realized this before, but their superstitions about treatment made it impossible for them to see the obvious answer to this. If someone's feeling horrible, you make them feel good. Am I right, or am I right?
Well, a hundred years ago, the Protestant Ethic almost demanded that alcohol withdrawal be difficult, such that the Drug Warrior actually felt that it was wrong to make a patient feel good. You could talk to your patient until the cows came home in a half-baked effort to cheer them up and give them courage, but if you proposed using a godsend plant medicine from Mother Nature to help them feel good, you were considered a quack or, worse yet, a "Doctor Feelgood," which was the "put-down" par excellence of the Drug Warriors back then. They never stopped to consider the crucial question: "What is actually wrong with being a Doctor Feelgood?"
You might say that it would have been wrong because such a doctor would addict their patients, but that's no argument. First of all, the default psychiatric treatments back in 2020 were as addictive as they could possibly be. Many of them were harder to quit than heroin. Doctors actually told veteran patients not to bother trying to kick SNRIs like Effexor, since the NIH had demonstrated that they had a 95% recidivism rate. Secondly, a Doctor Feelgood can so vary his ministrations to his patients as to ensure that they never become addicted to any one specific substance. So even if we grant that addiction is wrong, a substance-savvy doctor need never addict his patients to anything. Of course, this is all assuming that there is no Drug War in place that will severely limit (at least as a practical matter) the pharmacopoeia to which this Doctor Feelgood of ours has access.
Fortunately, America has grown up over the last one hundred years and we now see that it's absurd and ungrateful to criminalize Mother Nature's plants and fungi (not to mention the fact that it's a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, as everyone has a right to what John Locke called "the earth and all that lies therein"). As a result, I as your humble doctor now have access to every psychoactive plant and fungi in the world. That means that I can now use this immense and varied pharmacopoeia strategically and with a view to keeping you strong in your renunciation of alcohol - while also providing you with plant-assisted insight into your relations with your fellow human being and the planet at large.
This program of weekly "altered states," if you will, will have two benefits for you: First the benefit of the insight and calm provided by each substance when it is used under the reverent and safe conditions that I will be putting into effect, with the help of my deep knowledge of the plants in question and the subtleties of their historically identified use.
But there is an important second benefit of the program, a kind of benefit that the psychiatry of the 2020s never even bothered to acknowledge: that is the value of the anticipation that these weekend sessions will generate. The reason for recidivism is not just that the withdrawal subject is feeling poorly, but rather that he or she is feeling poorly AND has no sense that these bad feelings will ever cease. That is the real hell of withdrawal, not the bad feelings themselves, but the lack of any believable prospect that things will ever get better.
You, however, will have the godsend blessing called anticipation, anticipation of an upcoming transcendent state. You will have the knowledge that you need only hold out until the weekend, at which point you will be allowed to escape from yourself. Not only that, but this escape will often help you find valuable insights about yourself and the world, which will, in turn, help you better cope with the problems that you encounter on the weekdays during the withdrawal process.
For you see, we're not going to meet here on the weekend "to get high," as the Drug Warrior would love to call it. We are going to meet here to transcend ourselves and see higher truth and relax... in such a way that we become open to self-criticism and insight about our place in the world. People who are feeling horrible have fogged minds and can get no insight. But we are not Protestant Drug Warriors who insist on you feeling poorly. We want to help you transcend your own limits for a few hours each week, and in a guided fashion that will conduce to greater understanding on your part about where you are at in the world - and where you need to go from here.
There you have it, the kind of therapy that would suggest itself to thoughtful doctors immediately, were they not living under the spell of the Drug War, which urges us to self-censor our therapeutic hopes at every turn, dismissing all options that attempt to leverage the incredible latent power of Mother Nature's entheogenic plant medicines - for we "know" that drugs (i.e. plant medicines) are somehow bad while Big Pharma "medicines" are officially good. Only when we renounce that Drug Warrior dogma (and the anti-patient drug laws that it claims to justify) can we let psychotherapy become the pharmacologically savvy shamanism that it needs to become if we are to place the interests of the patient above those of the money-driven status quo.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
NEW SHAMANISM SHOULD REPLACE PSYCHIATRY
The search for SSRIs has always been based on a flawed materialist premise that human consciousness is nothing but a mix of brain chemicals and so depression can be treated medically like any other physical condition.
PSYCHIATRY AND THE DRUG WAR
Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."
The search for SSRIs has always been based on a flawed materialist premise that human consciousness is nothing but a mix of brain chemicals and so depression can be treated medically like any other physical condition.
"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.
We don't need people to get "clean." We need people to start living a fulfilling life. The two things are different.
Sana Collective Group committed to making psychedelic therapy available to all regardless of income.
You have been reading essays by the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass, at abolishthedea.com. Brian is the founder of The Drug War Gift Shop, where artists can feature and sell their protest artwork online. He has also written for Sociodelic and is the author of The Drug War Comic Book, which contains 150 political cartoons illustrating some of the seemingly endless problems with the war on drugs -- many of which only Brian seems to have noticed, by the way, judging by the recycled pieties that pass for analysis these days when it comes to "drugs." That's not surprising, considering the fact that the category of "drugs" is a political category, not a medical or scientific one.
A "drug," as the world defines the term today, is "a substance that has no good uses for anyone, ever, at any time, under any circumstances" -- and, of course, there are no substances of that kind: even cyanide and the deadly botox toxin have positive uses: a war on drugs is therefore unscientific at heart, to the point that it truly qualifies as a superstition, one in which we turn inanimate substances into boogie-men and scapegoats for all our social problems.
The Drug War is, in fact, the philosophical problem par excellence of our time, premised as it is on a raft of faulty assumptions (notwithstanding the fact that most philosophers today pretend as if the drug war does not exist). It is a war against the poor, against minorities, against religion, against science, against the elderly, against the depressed, against those in pain, against children in hospice care, and against philosophy itself. (For proof of that latter charge, check out how the US and UK have criminalized the substances that William James himself told us to study in order to understand reality.) It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions (like the Vedic), Nazifies the English language (referring to folks who emulate drug-loving Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin as "scumbags") and militarizes police forces nationwide (resulting in gestapo SWAT teams breaking into houses of peaceable Americans and shouting "GO GO GO!").
(Speaking of Nazification, L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates thought that drug users should be shot. What a softie! The real hardliners are the William Bennetts of the world who want drug users to be beheaded instead. That will teach them to use time-honored plant medicine of which politicians disapprove! Mary Baker Eddy must be ecstatic in her drug-free heaven, as she looks down and sees this modern inquisition on behalf of the drug-hating principles that she herself maintained. I bet she never dared hope that her religion would become the viciously enforced religion of America, let alone of the entire freakin' world!)
In short, the drug war causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, meanwhile violating the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. (Surely, Jefferson was rolling over in his grave when Ronald Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants.)
If you believe in freedom and democracy, in America and around the world, please stay tuned for more philosophically oriented broadsides against the outrageous war on godsend medicines, AKA the war on drugs.
PS The drug war has not failed: to the contrary, it has succeeded, insofar as its ultimate goal was to militarize police forces around the world and help authorities to ruthlessly eliminate those who stand in the way of global capitalism. For more, see Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley. Oh, and did I mention that most Drug Warriors these days would never get elected were it not for the Drug War itself, which threw hundreds of thousands of their political opposition in jail? Trump was right for the wrong reasons: elections are being stolen in America, but the number-one example of that fact is his own narrow victory in 2016, which could never have happened without the existence of laws that were specifically written to keep Blacks and minorities from voting. The Drug War, in short, is a cancer on the body politic.
PPS Drugs like opium and psychedelics should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
Rather than apologetically decriminalizing selected plants, we should be demanding the immediate restoration of Natural Law, according to which "The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." (John Locke)
Selected Bibliography
Andrew, Christopher "The Secret World: A History of Intelligence" 2019 Yale University Press
Aurelius, Marcus "Meditations" 2021 East India Publishing Company
Bache, Christopher "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven" 2019 Park Street Press
Mate, Gabriel "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" 2009 Vintage Canada
Maupassant, Guy de "Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques - Guy de Maupassant: Les classiques du fantastique " 2019
McKenna, Terence "Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution " 1992 Bantam
Pinchbeck, Daniel "When Plants Dream" 2019 Watkins Publishing
Poe, Edgar Allan "The Essential Poe" 2020 Warbler Classics
Pollan, Michael "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence " 2018 Penguin Books
Reynolds, David S. "Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville " 1988 Oxford University Press
Richards, William "Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences Hardcover" 2015 Columbia University Press
Straussman, Rick "DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences " 2001 Park Street Press
Streatfield, Dominic "Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography" 2003 Picador USA
Swartzwelder, Scott "Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy" 1998 W.W. Norton
Szasz, Thomas "Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers" 1974 Anchor Press/Doubleday
Whitaker, Robert "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America " 2010 Crown
Whitaker, Robert "Mad in America"2002 Perseus Publishing
Zinn, Howard "A People's History of the United States: 1492 - present" 2009
Zuboff , Shoshana "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" 2019 Public Affairs
Site and its contents copyright 2023, by Brian B. Quass, the drug war philosopher at abolishthedea.com. For more information, contact Brian at quass@quass.com.
