he DEA monitors prescriptions to make sure that doctors are not going overboard in prescribing addictive pills -- but this is politics and philosophy at work, not science. For what constitutes "going overboard"? Except in cases of outright poisoning, that is an aesthetic question, not a scientific one. After all, the DEA has no problem with the fact that one in four American women are chemically dependent on antidepressants for life. So apparently it's not "going overboard" if you prescribe multiple addictive pills for the same patient to be taken every single day of their life until death do they part. Why then is the DEA upset about a dependency on more exhilarating drugs, like opium and coca? These latter drugs are merely potentially addictive, after all, while the addictive quality of SSRIs is a feature of those medicines, not a bug. Besides, it's well known that one can live a full life while yet using heroin or morphine every day of that life. The problems only come when one withdraws from the med, but problems also come when withdrawing from SSRIs, so much so, in fact, that some Big Pharma drugs, like Effexor, have a 95% recidivism rate for those long-term users who seek to kick that habit. (This is a closely guarded secret, by the way. I once had a psychiatrist who was fired for sharing this factoid with me.)
The DEA has no scientific reason to pooh-pooh the so-called "hard drugs" while affirming Big Pharma nostrums. Rather the DEA first has a philosophical idea of what constitutes "the good life," and then they crack down accordingly. They believe that this good life is predictable, low-key and not subject to major mood swings: in short, the good life, according to the DEA, results in a good consumer, and pills are good to the extent that they lead to that end. Yet some of us want to live a fully engaged life in which we're constantly involved in the world, constantly wondering anew at mother nature, constantly feeling and experiencing, without any overreliance on the capitalist system and the next big and expensive thing. These are the live-wires of whom Jack Kerouac wrote: "The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn burn like fabulous yellow roman candles." (The Effexor I take daily reminds me more of a lobotomy on the instalment plan than a roman candle.)
Yet, the DEA, and the establishment it represents, are intimidated by such lives and so demonize those drugs that facilitate such a lifestyle. They call them "crutches," although they never tell us why Big Pharma meds are not crutches as well. It's just more Drug War hypocrisy: Big Pharma pills are important "meds", naturally occurring godsend medicines are "crutches."
Newspeak aside: Doctor Feelgoods are simply doctors who prescribe what their patient wants rather than what the DEA wants for that patient. But for the medical world to keep power, these doctors have to be suppressed, because in the age of criminalized plant medicine, it is the medical community that decides what we need, emotionally speaking, not the patient, and if we don't like their idea of the "good life," then tough luck. We can either play the game or incur the wrath of the medical gods by going "doctor hopping."
Of course, some Doctor Feelgoods take advantage of the poorly informed and young, but then so do psychiatrists, by putting them on meds that they will end up taking for life.
But when mature and responsible adults go to a doctor for mood medicine, they should ask and receive what THEY want, not what the medical community wants them to have based on that community's unspoken assumptions about what constitutes the good life.
Oh, and when a Doctor Feelgood dies, the patients will commit the big Drug War no-no of going "doctor hopping" in search of another doctor with the same prescription philosophy. Respectable doctors scream that this is morally wrong, but there is nothing wrong with doctor hopping. In fact, doctor hopping is a duty, if we're to be true to ourselves and our own needs and desires rather than those of the doctor (who in some of our cases is decades younger than we are). Doctor hopping would only be wrong if we assume that mental health therapy is entirely scientific and not based on assumptions about what constitutes the good life for individual patients. But anyone who believes that is kidding themselves. Mental health specialists may like to think that they're scientific because they're using pills that target a chemical imbalance, but that has long since been proven to be wrong: in fact the psychiatric pill mill dispenses meds that cause the chemical imbalances that they purport to fix. Even if it were not so, I want the prescriptions I receive to reflect my own needs and desires, not the needs and desires that the materialist creator of SSRIs thought I should have.
In short, there's nothing scientific about the crackdown on "Doctor Feelgoods." It's an esthetic call to decry their prescription practices. Of course, there are always "bad eggs" among every type of doctor, and some will abuse their position to prescribe addictive drugs to the immature. But the answer to these threats lies in education combined with re-legalization of mother nature's medicines, which would allow empathic doctors to shamanically, as it were, shift patients from one drug to another through guided incentivizing empathogenic journeys. In other words, even addiction is not the end of the world when psychoactive medicine is understood and used aggressively by empathic guides, rather than being feared and used in such a miserly way that we outlaw nature's pharmacopoeia almost entirely. In still other words, the answer to any addiction - to the extent that the addiction is not desired by the patient him or herself - is to harness the therapeutic power of entheogens and empathogens, after which psychiatric counselling can finally work like it was always supposed to do, with an honest and willing confab between client and healer. Indeed, some say that one day of MDMA therapy can do the work of years of counselling.
We need only to break the medical world's vise-like self-serving grip on the keys to the medicine cabinet, re-legalize Mother Nature, and let patients, not the DEA, decide how - and how much - they are allowed to think and feel in this life.
Author's Follow-up: September 30, 2022
Speaking of drugs that give you years' worth of 'counseling' via one drug experience: Paul Stamets tells us, in the 2019 documentary "Fantastic Fungi," that he was able to cure himself of his childhood stuttering problem thanks to one afternoon that he spent under the influence of a psilocybin mushroom (you know, one of the many psychoactive substances that the DEA tells us has no potential therapeutic uses whatsoever).
Author's Follow-up: April 21, 2023
Incidentally, the Drug Warriors are libeling God himself when they tell us that drugs have no positive uses and are "junk" and "dope." In the book of Genesis, the deity tells us that the world he created was good. For this reason, the Catholic church has always found that good or bad resides in individuals, and that they are labels that cannot meaningfully be ascribed to "things." In other words, the Drug War advances a religious viewpoint, one at odds with Christianity.
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. It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions, Nazifies the English language and militarizes police forces nationwide.
It bans the substances that inspired William James' ideas about human consciousness and the nature of ultimate reality. In short, it 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.
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
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
Miller, Richard Louis "Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle " 2017 Park Street Press
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
Rosenfeld, Harvey "Diary of a Dirty Little War: The Spanish-American War of 1898 " 2000 Praeger
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
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.
he DEA monitors prescriptions to make sure that doctors are not going overboard in prescribing addictive pills -- but this is politics and philosophy at work, not science. For what constitutes "going overboard"? Except in cases of outright poisoning, that is an aesthetic question, not a scientific one. After all, the DEA has no problem with the fact that one in four American women are chemically dependent on antidepressants for life. So apparently it's not "going overboard" if you prescribe multiple addictive pills for the same patient to be taken every single day of their life until death do they part. Why then is the DEA upset about a dependency on more exhilarating drugs, like opium and coca? These latter drugs are merely potentially addictive, after all, while the addictive quality of SSRIs is a feature of those medicines, not a bug. Besides, it's well known that one can live a full life while yet using heroin or morphine every day of that life. The problems only come when one withdraws from the med, but problems also come when withdrawing from SSRIs, so much so, in fact, that some Big Pharma drugs, like Effexor, have a 95% recidivism rate for those long-term users who seek to kick that habit. (This is a closely guarded secret, by the way. I once had a psychiatrist who was fired for sharing this factoid with me.)
