In response to "Are We Overlooking Homicidal Ideation in Psychiatry?" by Jordyn Tovey1COMMENT: Thank you for your article. I have just two thoughts regarding issues that were not raised.
1) I know that in America, confidentiality can no longer be assumed to be operative in conversations with a “professional,” whether we’re talking about a conversation with a priest or a psychiatrist. This creates an uncertain climate for the “patient.” They will be less likely to be honest about their anger precisely to the extent that they “plan to do something about it.”
2) There are a class of drugs called entheogens, which includes MDMA. America has been too busy hating drugs to notice that such drugs help inspire compassion. In a sane world, surely we would be using entheogens in counseling sessions to help angry patients “feel” for their perceived enemies.
The use of Ecstasy (the street version of MDMA) in the British rave scene of the 1990s resulted in unprecedented peace on the dance floor. Unprecedented! But MPs cracked down on the drug, and dancers switched to alcohol, a drug that kills 178,000 a year in the US alone. After the crackdown, the dance floors erupted into violence, all “justified” by the fact that a few young people had died after using Ecstasy. Why? Because drug prohibition had denied them regulated product and information about safe use.
These are drugs that help people feel compassion! Surely, this is hugely relevant to the topic of counseling angry patients. Consider the following quotations from DJs in Britain, as they describe the peaceful 1990s rave scene that existed with the help of Ecstasy. The following quotes are from the 2020 documentary by Terry Stone entitled “United Nation: Three Decades of Drum & Bass.”
“It was the first time that black-and-white people had integrated on a level… and everybody was one.” — DJ Ray Keith.
“It was black and white, Asian, Chinese, all up in one building.” — DJ MC GQ.
“Everyone’s loving each other, man, they’re not hating.” – DJ Mampi Swift.
And MDMA is just one of endless phenethylamines that could exist in a free world. Chemist Alexander Shulgin had the rare freedom to synthesize hundreds of phenethylamines in the 1990s, resulting in user reports such as the following:
“The feeling was one of great camaraderie, and it was very easy to talk to people.”
“I was able to go through and resolve some judgments with particular persons.”
“No more axes to grind. I can be free.”
New article in Scientific American: "New hope for pain relief," that ignores the fact that we have outlawed the time-honored panacea. Scientists want a drug that won't run the risk of inspiring us.
The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.
A company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.
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.
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.
Scientists are censored as to what they can study thanks to drug law. Instead of protesting that outrage, they lend a false scientific veneer to those laws via their materialist obsession with reductionism, which blinds them to the obvious godsend effects of outlawed substances.
One merely has to look at any issue of Psychology Today to see articles in which the author reckons without the Drug War, in which they pretend that banned substances do not exist and so fail to incorporate any topic-related insights that might otherwise come from user reports.
Cocaine is not evil. Opium is not evil. Drug prohibition is evil.
The government causes problems for those who are habituated to certain drugs. Then they claim that these problems are symptoms of an illness. Then folks like Gabriel Mate come forth to find the "hidden pain" in "addicts." It's one big morality play created by drug laws.
When Americans "obtain their majority" and wish to partake of drugs safely, they should be paired with older adults who have done just that. Instead, we introduce them to "drug abusers" in prerecorded morality plays to reinforce our biased notions that drug use is wrong.
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