Back in late January of this year, I went on record as the only philosopher in the country to point out that assisted suicide for the depressed cannot be discussed ethically without also discussing the drug prohibition which makes it necessary, at least in the minds of the depressed1. In other words, I pointed out that you cannot talk ethically about assisted suicide for the depressed without at least mentioning the fact that our government outlaws all substances that inspire and elate. I was sharing this insight in response to a New York Times article by "global healthcare reporter" Stephanie Nolen about the attempts of depressed Canadian Claire Brosseau to qualify for state assisted suicide, a story in which nobody mentioned the fact that drug prohibition had outlawed drugs that could help make Brosseau wish to live2. Surely, I felt, I merely needed to point out this glaring omission on the part of the principals in Claire's case and they would speak out against drug prohibition as a violation of Claire's right to heal, the more so in that failing to do so could lead to Claire's unnecessary death by convincing her that she was truly out of hope.
In fact, I wrote to Claire herself, urging her to stop advocating for her totally unprecedented right to be killed by the state and to advocate instead for her time-honored right to heal, to advocate instead for her right to feel relief, to advocate instead for an end to drug prohibition.
Well, it's been a frustrating but eye-opening three months -- because I found that no one connected with Claire's case (not even Claire herself) saw any connection whatsoever between drug prohibition and assisted suicide for the depressed. I've written to at least 20 of the mainstream "players" in the online debate over assisted suicide for the depressed in the last three months, and I have been either ghosted or gaslighted by them all. And so I asked myself, where do I go from here? I was basically making the seemingly modest claim that drug use is better than dying, and yet people were disagreeing with me, if only implicitly. How am I supposed to argue after that? Do I have to start listing the downsides of being dead, with footnotes referencing academics who have done studies on the subject to support those conclusions? I really felt like the mainstream was gaslighting me on this topic. But I soon realized what the real take-home message was from this politically correct silence about my claims. I realized that Americans truly were brainwashed by Drug War propaganda into believing that drugs can have no positive uses -- otherwise they would cry "foul" when the state began killing people who might otherwise have been encouraged to live with the help of outlawed medicines.
It's a tough subject to write about. What do you say when the most powerful and obvious arguments fail to convince?
Fortunately, I have at least one option remaining to me. If I can't convince the "experts" to acknowledge common sense, at least I can play the role of a Socratic gadfly by posting some politically incorrect comments in response to their mainstream essays on sites like Mad in America. I say sites LIKE Mad in America, but actually this is the only site I know where I have the ability to post my comments prominently in response to brand-new mainstream essays. This ability came about after I purchased a year's subscription to the site under the mistaken belief that they would actually publish my essays on these topics. This was before site and organization founder Robert Whitaker started gaslighting me about the perfectly obvious relevance of drug prohibition to the case of Claire Brosseau, whom, if she dies, will have been sacrificed on the Christian Science altar of America's superstitious attitudes toward drugs. But I decided to keep the subscription as long as it guaranteed me the right to turn up the heat on the mainstream with some straight talk about drug benefits in the comments section.
By the way, this setup seems too good to be true, so I will try not to be surprised when my ability to comment has been restricted or withdrawn by Robert and company.
In the meantime, however, let's see how many chains I can rattle with the following comments posted today in response to a new MIA essay by Psychologist Richard Sears entitled “It Was Like They Crushed a Beautiful Flower”: Families Speak Out on the Harms of ECT.
Mariani Wine is the real McCoy, with Bolivian coca leaves (tho' not with cocaine, as Wikipedia says). I'll be writing more about my experience with it soon. I was impressed. It's the same drink "on which" HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their stories.
Saying "Fentanyl kills" is philosophically equivalent to saying "Fire bad!" Both statements are attempts to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as safely as possible for human benefit.
I can think of no greater intrusion than to deny a person autonomy over how they think and feel in life. It is sort of a meta-intrusion, the mother of all anti-democratic intrusions.
The so-called "herbs" that witches used were drugs, in the same way that "meds" are drugs. If academics made that connection, the study of witchcraft would shed a lot of light on the fearmongering of modern prohibitionists.
Uruguay wants to re-legalize psilocybin mushrooms -- but only for use in a psychiatrist's office. So let me get this straight: psychiatrists are the new privileged shaman? It's a mushroom, for God's sake. Just re-legalize the damn thing and stop treating us like children.
Scientists are making entire livings from trying to figure out what's best for ME as a chronic depressive. They owe their jobs to drug prohibition.
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
Cop and detective shows are loaded with subtle drug war propaganda, including lines like, "She had a history of drug use, so..." The implication being that anyone who uses substances that politicians hate cannot be trusted.
Racist drug warriors make cities dangerous with drug prohibition -- then they use that danger as an excuse to send in the National Guard.
We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.
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