Materialism is a co-conspirator in America's Drug War, for it teaches us to ignore the obvious benefits of psychoactive drug use -- namely the blessed relief from "self" that it provides -- and urges us instead to look for chemical signs that a drug is actually working. This reductionist bias explains why Forbes magazine could publish an article in June 2021 with the extraordinarily naive title, "Can Laughing Gas (Nitrous Oxide) Help People With Treatment-Resistant Depression?"
A depressed person would never think to ask such a question. Of course it could help, namely by providing a vacation from destructive self-introspection. Also, the mere anticipation of that periodic vacation would be a mood-boosting godsend. Whether laughing gas would be a panacea for a given condition is another question of course, but scientists have lost all touch with living, breathing humans when they find themselves asking if "laughing gas " could possibly (maybe, just maybe) help the depressed! They have lost all their psychological common sense when they think this way.
I want to turn to them and say: "Look, give me the damn nitrous oxide and you guys continue looking for your angels on the head of a pin! I'm happy if the nitrous oxide merely works for me: I for one don't need it to REALLY work in some reductionist definition of that term."
The blindness of reductionist science would be funny to me, except that this way of thinking works in tandem with the Drug War to prevent folks like myself from accessing godsend medicines. On the one hand, we have the Drug Warrior demonizing godsend substances, chiefly by ignoring everything about them except their negative effects (potential or otherwise). On the other hand, we have the materialist demanding that these substances pass reductionist muster before they can be considered to be effective for fighting depression and improving cerebral functioning in general.
But worst of all, reductionist science has a body count. The search for a "real" cause of depression (a reductionist cause) led to the creation of the most dependency-causing substances in pharmacological history -- the modern anti-depressant -- which 1 in 4 American women must take every day of their life, for the rest of their lives (source: Julie Holland). Moreover, these anti-depressants were never created for long-term use and are now being found to conduce to anhedonia in long-term users, a tendency that I can affirm from personal experience.
So not only has reductionist science failed to help me with my depression, but they have made me an eternal ward of the healthcare state. Far from recognizing this fact, however, the pharmaceutical companies that tout these reductionist "remedies" constantly remind us through their well-paid surrogates that we have a positive DUTY to "take our meds." And so when it comes to demonized meds, you can be denied employment for using them, but when it comes to Big Pharma meds, you can be considered a bad patient if you FAIL to use them.
So let us get this straight: Reductionist science has created the greatest mass chemical dependency in human history, and yet at the same time, they tell me that I cannot use substances like "laughing gas " because they may not work for fighting depression??? Is this the kind of science in which the depressed should be placing their faith, one that suspends them like Tantalus, with a host of medical godsends dangling forever just out of reach of our desperately grasping hands?
So if you're depressed like myself and you expected science to protect you from the substance-demonizing Drug War, think again. Neither the Drug Warrior nor the scientist want you to use effective medicines. They both would much rather have you use addictive medicines whose use benefits Big Pharma and whose efficacy can be supported by pseudo-scientific appeals to reductionist chemistry, this despite the fact that America remains the most depressed country in the world thanks to this very approach to creating and approving psychoactive medicine.
Materialist reductionism, in short, helps give a plausible (if pseudo-scientific) veneer to Big Pharma 's attempt to render the world chemically dependent on their grossly ineffective nostrums.
The Links Police
Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, I wanted to give you a heads-up about this related anti-Drug War essay called:
August 29, 2022
Psychiatry's penchant for reductionist medicine is understandable, not just on account of "physics envy" but because the Drug War outlaws all useful medicines wherewith the doctor might have otherwise helped their clients in a non-reductionist manner. So the field makes a virtue of necessity by referring to reductionist cures as "real" cures and holistic cures as "crutches." Thus, if you follow in the footsteps of Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin and show a partiality for opium 1 , you are using a crutch: but if you use a Big Pharma pill that purports (falsely) to fix a chemical imbalance, then you are using a REAL cure.
But if this is so, then God save us from real cures! Like "scientific" Big Pharma meds, for instance, which have rendered 1 in 4 American women dependent upon them for life, while yet conducing to anhedonia in long-term users.
The psychiatric pill mill 2 is not simply made up of bad medicine (as Robert Whitaker has shown), but bad philosophy as well. For if a reductionist says they're going to cure my depression, they must first tell me what they mean by the word "cure." If they mean that their drugs will make me a good consumer who can tolerate "second best" in life, then they have a different definition of "cure" than I do. My definition of cure is self-actualization and the ability to live large. So in the end, the scientific arguments about what SSRIs can (and can't) do are superfluous: we can say before the researchers even enter the laboratory that they can't cure MY depression, for the simple reason that our definitions of the word "cure" do not coincide. But psychiatry is a one-size-fits-all venture these days, and so a client who demands more than the habit-forming status quo is just a troublemaker, someone to be dismissed (ironically enough) as an "addictive personality."
Notice how psychiatry has created a variety of newspeak in an attempt to tacitly promote its philosophically untenable claims: "addictive personality," "crutch," and "real" cure.
I'm an addictive personality if I'm not satisfied with the niggardly offerings of one-size-fits-all psychiatry.
I'm using a crutch if my drug of choice does not work in a materialist reductionist fashion, according to which patients are just interchangeable widgets.
I don't have a "real" pharmacological solution if its efficacy cannot be proven to the satisfaction of materialist reductionists.
By means of this loaded terminology, psychiatry tries to bamboozle clients into "making do" with the shamefully limited options of the drug-war pharmacy, whereas, if the doctors had the patients' interests at heart, they would be in the forefront of a nationwide move to end the Drug War and promote education over incarceration 3 , finally putting an end to the absurd status quo in which politicians lie about psychoactive medicine, falsely claiming that medicines that have inspired entire religions in the past somehow have no positive uses whatsoever for anyone, anywhere in the 21st century.
In this way, the Drug War is not merely an attack on religion, but it is worse: it is an attack on the wellspring and fountainhead of the religious impulse itself, which is no doubt another reason for its popularity among WASP conservatives, who are ready to put the brakes on all competition to Christianity by any means necessary, even at the expense of America's basic principles of natural law and freedom of religion 4.
Author's Follow-up: January 18, 2023
Materialism is, in turn, aided and abetted by Freudian psychology. Both of these approaches encourage the doctor to ignore obvious outward signs and to search instead for inner issues. So, if I want to use laughing gas to cheer myself up, the materialist will say, "Not so fast, let me see how lab animals respond, chemically speaking, to N2O." Meanwhile, the Freudian says: "No, you are only using laughing gas 5 to repress your attraction to your mother! No N2O for you!"
So, between the Materialist and the Freudian, psychiatry is completely useless to me. It's worse than useless, for it's liable to put me on tranquilizing meds that are specifically designed NOT to give me any self-transcendence, since living large is unseemly to both materialist and Freudians, who want us to obsess about something which, even if it were a problem, they have shown no real ability to "fix." Meanwhile, the obvious treatments -- of joy-making drugs used responsibly -- are completely off their purblind radars.
In short, both Materialists and Freudians claim to be trying to treat the "real" mental or mood issue -- thereby ignoring the obvious and almost always failing in their stated goal in any case, never finding a life-changing answer -- or doing worse than failing by creating an unprecedented pharmacological dystopia by addicting 25% of adult American females to Big Pharma 67 drugs.
Well, today's Oregon vote scuttles any ideas I might have entertained about retiring in Oregon.
To understand why the western world is blind to the benefits of "drugs," read "The Concept of Nature" by Whitehead. He unveils the scientific schizophrenia of the west, according to which the "real" world is invisible to us while our perceptions are mere "secondary" qualities.
Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It forces us to use shock therapy on the severely depressed since we've outlawed all viable alternatives. It denies medicines that could combat Alzheimer's and/or render it psychologically bearable.
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda
(There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.)
Scientists cannot tell us if psychoactive drugs are worth the risk any more than they can tell us if free climbing is worth the risk, or horseback riding or target practice or parkour.
The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.
Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but drugs have never been evil. The evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about drugs.
In the 19th century, author Richard Middleton wrote how poets would get together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses."
Getting off antidepressants can make things worse for only one reason: because we have outlawed all the drugs that could help with the transition. Right now, getting off any drug basically means becoming a drug-free Christian Scientist. No wonder withdrawal is hard.
That's so "drug war" of Rick: If a psychoactive substance has a bad use at some dose, for somebody, then it must not be used at any dose by anybody. It's hard to imagine a less scientific proposition, or one more likely to lead to unnecessary suffering.
Well, today's Oregon vote scuttles any ideas I might have entertained about retiring in Oregon.