Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy

as opposed to just Psychedelic Therapy

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

December 9, 2022

Question: Why do we never see calls for Psychoactive Therapy for mood disorders, only for Psychedelic Therapy for mood disorders?

April 2025 Update

Answer: Because 100+ years of prohibition propaganda (of focusing only on the downsides of 'drug use') have convinced almost everybody in America, and so in the mental health field as well, that psychoactive medicines that have any addictive propensities whatsoever must and will always be used unadvisedly and cause addiction.

?201?

But this belief is just that: a belief, not a fact. To the extent that it is true, it is because drug law makes it so by limiting the choice of the 'drug users' to a few addictive substances, sold by criminal organizations who profit (like Big Pharma , in fact) precisely to the extent that their nostrums bring about chemical dependence. Such drug use often ends in tragedy precisely because our laws are created with that goal in mind: the goal of ruining a 'user's' life. And so, the Drug Warrior will look triumphantly at someone who dies of drugs and cry: 'You see how horrible those evil drugs are?', meanwhile failing to notice that the death was brought about by ignorance combined with prohibition itself. As Andrew Weil points out in 'From Chocolate to morphine ,' even so-called overdose deaths from the 'devil drug' of heroin ¹ are actually caused by the lack of pure and predictable supply, which is a result of the Drug War itself, not heroin. Thanks to prohibition, the users may think they are consuming a safe and usual dose when in reality they are receiving a dose of twice or thrice the normal potency.

Speaking of Weil's brave and classic book, one that deals with the facts about drugs, 'warts and all,' it should be required reading in every school, since it gives kids the facts and urges them to make wise choices as adults with respect to the psychoactive substances that they choose to employ. But the Drug Warrior hates nothing so much as honest education about psychoactive substances. They want us to fear 'drugs,' not to understand them. Through word, deed, and legislation about 'drugs,' they teach Americans nothing except to 'Be afraid! Be very afraid!'

There's nothing that Drug Warriors hate more than honest education about drugs.
That's why Florida Senator held up a copy of Weil's book in a legislative session and denounced it. As Weil explained in a 2018 interview with Tim Ferriss:

"A Republican senator from Florida, Paula Hawkins, who was a crony of Nancy Reagan's, made it a campaign to get the book banned. And she stood up on the floor of the senate waving the book around.²"

Apparently she was shocked that students might receive an unbiased education about psychoactive substances. Actually, modern Drug War opponents should be grateful to Paula for her medieval sounding pronouncement makes explicit what the Drug Warriors had previously just implied, namely, that their goal is to frighten would be users, not to educate them.

Unfortunately, this fearmongering campaign has worked. The man behind the curtain has bellowed his hyperbolic threats about drugs and Americans have cowered accordingly.

That is why Drug War opponents are so often 'on the back foot.' They have grown up in a society where they have been taught to fear psychoactive substances, a world in which they received a teddy bear in grade school in return for a pledge to renounce their right to Mother Nature's bounty, a world in which TV and movies only showed 'drug use' in a negative light, and a world in which academics never studied 'drugs' except with the government-sanctioned goal of showing how harmful they can be, hence the proliferation of academic articles about 'misuse' and 'abuse' and the almost total absence of academic articles about positive use, potential or historical.

And so today's Drug War opponent, unwittingly influenced by such propaganda, often cuts a very apologetic figure in calling for legalization , saying, in effect, 'Yes, some of these substances are horrible indeed, but prohibition is not the answer.'

With friends like that in the legalization movement, we scarcely need enemies.

The fact is that drugs like cocaine ³ ⁴ , opium and even crack could be used on a therapeutic basis and without causing addiction -- even though an entire lifetime of propaganda has told us otherwise.

The ways that such meds could be used positively are so obvious that it's amazing that I have to even point them out -- and yet the Drug War ideology of substance demonization has so thoroughly scapegoated these substances that I have to speak as if to a child in making most Americans understand how psychoactive therapy could work.

First, we have to imagine the replacement of psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, western shamans who would be free to use any drug or combination of drugs in the world in conjunction with what is commonly referred to as 'talk therapy.' The goal of therapy would be the goal of the client, and that term is used advisedly, for such therapy would get rid of the very notion of a mental patient insofar as the shaman's visitors would be seeking not just to cure acknowledged pathologies such as depression but also to achieve a client's more general goals, such as improving their mental focus or their appreciation of nature or music, etc. The goal of the shamans, for their part, would be to identify the drug or drugs that will incline the partakers to be honest during therapy and to undergo experiences that, properly guided, could lead them to feelings and insights necessary for achieving the therapeutic goals that they have specified.

At least some of the psychoactive drugs to be employed in these sessions would be drawn from among those that psychiatrists have hitherto stigmatized with the label of 'feel-good drugs.' And why do professionals refer to substances as 'feel-good drugs'? Partly in order to make a virtue of the necessity of intolerant drug laws (rather than protest the Drug War, claim that the drugs that it outlaws are therapeutically useless) and partly because of the false belief that psychiatry is a true science and therefore can only treat problems in a reductionist way, rather than 'merely' making people feel good. But if it's any consolation to Puritans, the good feelings involved here have a therapeutic purpose: namely, to open minds and mouths, in order to let talk therapy at last fulfill its so-far poorly fulfilled promise of actually helping people. For sober talk therapy has always had limited results, for the simple reason that many 'patients' self-censor themselves without even knowing it. I myself spent many wasted hours in therapy as a teen saying almost nothing, not because I was stonewalling, but because I really had no conscious insights into my situation and so really felt I had nothing meaningful to say.

One benefit of such therapy would be provided by its very existence: i.e., the therapeutic value of the anticipation generated by one's actually looking forward to a psychoactive session.

The depressed and anxious will necessarily be happier thanks to their anticipation of such therapy. Why? Because they know that the substances that are to be employed in the upcoming session will give them a blessed vacation from their gloomy introspection and nervousness.

The 'drugs' themselves could be administered in a ceremonial or religious fashion, if the client so desired, but also in a more prosaic manner, by merely handing the pills, plants, fungi, and/or liquids to the clients. The goal, after all, is to meet the client's needs and desires, not to turn them into flower children -- or into materialists for that matter.. This process would avoid addicting the patient for multiple reasons: first because the names of the drugs thus employed need not be shared with the user except at their request; second because the shaman would so vary the drugs used on any particular visit as to minimize the development of tolerance, thirdly because the drugs will often be employed in mixtures, making the repetition of use almost impossible unless both the shaman and client conclude that such repetition would move the therapeutic process forward, i.e., contribute to more honesty and self-insight.

The clients would also be able to choose drug-free sessions, even to the point of banning coffee and tea from the room if desired. And so the proposed therapy need differ very little from the status quo, especially for clients who share the Christian Science biases of Mary Baker Eddy. On the other hand, the pharmacological assistance may be provided entirely by psychedelics: it's the client's choice.

In other words, I'm not saying that there's a problem with the idea of psychedelic therapy itself. The point of this essay is to say, however, that the true goal in a sane world would be to advance the goal of PSYCHOACTIVE therapy in general rather than to campaign for the legalization ⁵ of psychedelic therapy alone.

Our failure to do so betrays our acceptance of the Drug Warrior lie that time-honored substances like opium and coca can have no beneficial uses -- at any dose, in any situations, for anyone, anywhere, ever. That's an anti-scientific lie, and no amount of Drug War propaganda should convince us to pretend otherwise.

editor note from abolishthedea.com

October 12, 2023

Brian isn't advocating for drugs to be legal in a medical setting only. The proposed therapy would be an option for users in a world wherein the government no longer decided how much you could think and feel in life -- that is, in a world wherein Mother Nature (and the medicines derived therefrom) were legal (once again). Many folks have empaths in their own life that could help in this way, once we wrench the therapeutic practice out of the hands of myopic reduction-prone materialists.

Author's Follow-up: October 12, 2023

follow-up on essay by the Drug War Philosopher

If you doubt that the Drug War is out to ruin the lives of users, check out 'Drug Warriors and Their Prey' by Richard Lawrence Miller, where the author reports that safe users were the pet peeve of Drug Czar William Bennett. He actually thought that responsible users set a bad example (that's right, a BAD example) and so should have their names published in newspapers and have their employers informed about their safe use. It's hard to say what's more breathtaking here, the intolerance or the stupidity.

Author's Follow-up: November 3, 2023

The idea that doctors should be in charge of treating people with psychoactive substances is crazy. It's like having a doctor teach people to ride horses. There is a lot more to horseback riding than physical safety. In fact, the majority of horseback riding is about things of which the doctor as such is blissfully ignorant. It's the same with psychoactive drugs. What does the doctor know of the users desire for self-transcendence and their ambition to think clearly with mind-focusing drugs, etc.? The doctor has zero qualifications in this field. As with horseback riding, he or she can speak to safety issues, but that's it.

Author's Follow-up:

April 09, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

Here is an important quotation from Andrew Weil in "From Chocolate to morphine ":

"The strong craving that characterizes opiate addiction has inspired many critics of the drugs to suggest that narcotics destroy the will and moral sense, turning normal people into fiends and degenerates. Actually, cravings for opiates are no different from cravings for alcohol among alcoholics, and they are less strong than cravings for cigarettes, a more addictive drug."

And yet how many movies ⁶ ⁷ and TV shows ⁸ paint opiate addiction as the ne plus ultra of torture -- whilst the protagonists themselves puff away ceaselessly on cigarettes?!

I have to carp at Andrew Weil as well, however, because he says nothing about the lifetime dependency of 1 in 4 American women on Big Pharma drugs, especially antidepressants ⁹.

There is this bizarre idea afoot in the psychiatric world that such latter drugs are fine because they do not cause cravings. What absurdity! The fact is that they are still hard to kick -- indeed, harder to kick than heroin, insofar as SSRIs and SNRIs muck about with brain chemistry! It seems then that psychiatrists hate people to have cravings but they are not at all bothered by people who merely sit at home wishing that they were dead.

No one is worried about folks trying to get off of antidepressants because no one WANTS them to get off THOSE drugs. But the opium user... that's another story.

What absolute nonsense. America never should have outlawed opium ¹⁰ . Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. It took drug prohibition to accomplish that.

I am always saying that modern writers "reckon without drug prohibition," but the amazing thing is that even Weil reckons without the Drug War in "From Chocolate to Opium." Drug prohibition gave a monopoly to Big Pharma for treating depression, a fact that resulted in the greatest mass pharmacological dystopia of all time: One in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma drugs for life -- and yet Weil says nothing about this in book. Nothing.

He is even misleading about the whole topic of antidepressants. He gives the impression that there are no issues with getting off such drugs.

"Often," quoth Weil, "even depressed patients who are helped by them like to cut dosage to a minimum and do without them altogether when they can."

This quotation is doubly misleading. First, it implies that antidepressants are unequivocally beneficial, or at least nonproblematic, and second it suggests that "depressed patients" can stop and start them at will. Both of those statements are clearly false -- especially in light of the work of Robert Whitaker, who has demonstrated how antidepressants actually cause the chemical imbalances that they purport to solve. To be fair to Weil, his book was published several years before Robert's.

Still, it always amazes me when drug-war critics say nothing about the psychiatric pill mill. The existence of that dystopia is one of the most powerful arguments one can adduce about the downsides of outlawing godsend medicines: the fact that you do not thereby just deny wonderful drugs to folks with pathologies, but that you also turn them into wards of the healthcare state by placing them on Big Pharma ¹¹ ¹² medicines that were designed with the goal of turning users into patients for life.

The hypocrisy here is staggering. One could have been forgiven for thinking that the Drug War was all about getting people OFF of drugs -- and yet drug prohibition has the result of putting more people on drugs than ever before in human history. It is clear, then, that Drug Warriors do not really hate drug use -- they just want us to use the "right" drugs from the drug-warrior point of view.

Any author who fails to discuss these matters in a supposedly comprehensive book about drugs has an obvious mental block -- apparently the result both of Drug War propaganda and of materialist ideology -- which pretends that behaviorist chemists are the specialists when it comes to mind and mood medicine. Weil seems to think as follows: "The scientists are on the job, what more can we ask?" What Weil fails utterly to realize is that it was a category error to place materialists in charge of mind and mood matters in the first place. For materialists are behaviorists when it comes to psychology: they therefore are dogmatically blind to common sense when it comes to evaluating drugs. They ignore all obvious benefits -- obvious from anecdote, history and from the non-dogmatic imagination of humankind -- and focus instead on "real" non-holistic cures -- the very cures that have turned 1 in 4 women into patients for life!

Weil fails to adequately appreciate something here: namely, that the Hindu religion owes its existence to drug use: to the use of a drug that inspired and elated and that it is therefore the outlawing of religion -- nay, of the religious impulse -- to outlaw drugs that inspire and elate.

Indeed, I hold that no comprehensive book about drug use makes sense without a reference to this fact. But this just shows us how thoroughly bamboozled Americans are on the subject of drugs, that even the most free-thinking and sane book on the market on such subjects, "From Chocolate to morphine ¹³ ," is still written from the point of view of hidden drug-war biases.

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Notes for essay entitled Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy: as opposed to just Psychedelic Therapy:

1: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
2: The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Dr. Andrew Weil (#350) The Tim Ferriss Show, 2018 (up)
3: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
4: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
5: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
6: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
7: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
8: The Dead Man DWP (up)
9: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
10: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
11: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
12: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
13: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Drug war pundits need to stop using the word "snorts" when it comes to cocaine. We "take" our "meds," and yet we "snort" cocaine, just like a pig. That is NOT neutral language, folks!

America won't be grown up until we start blaming drug misuse on people and/or policies rather than on drugs.

When Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan call for continued prohibition to protect young people, they ignore the ENORMOUS fact that prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world. Wake up, guys! Prohibition is evil, not drugs! Ignorance is evil, not education!

Thomas Szasz was not an extremist when it comes to drugs. The extremists are those who feel that psychiatrists know more about our mind and mood than we do.

What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.

America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.

There are definitely good scientists out there. Unfortunately, they are either limited by their materialist orthodoxy into showing only specific microscopic evidence or they abandon materialism for the nonce and talk the common psychological sense that we all understand.

I'm told that most psychiatrists would like to receive shock therapy if they become severely depressed. That's proof of drug war insanity: they would prefer damaging their brains to using drugs that can elate and inspire.

I've been told by many that I should have seen "my doctor" before withdrawing from Effexor. But, A) My doctor got me hooked on the junk in the first place, and, B) That doctor completely ignores the OBVIOUS benefits of indigenous meds and focuses only on theoretical downsides.

Drugs like opium and cocaine 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."

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(up)

Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy

as opposed to just Psychedelic Therapy

Author's Follow-up: October 12, 2023

Author's Follow-up: November 3, 2023

Author's Follow-up:

April 09, 2025

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend