There is a somewhat lengthy backstory as to why I am addressing these concerns to the Discovery Institute. But since I do not have the time to clarify this connection, I hope the reader will consider the issues here on their own merit without an undue regard for my choice of correspondent. Of course, if I'm honest with myself, I might as well have addressed this essay to the Moon, given the infantessimal odds of this organization responding in anything but the most impersonal and rote manner. But SOMEONE has to eventually win the Powerball Lottery!
I think it's great that you are pointing out the downsides of materialism and how many scientists have a "pre-commitment" to ignore such criticism.
I fear that, as an avowedly "conservative" group, the Discovery Institute may have a blind spot of its own, however, namely a previous commitment to the War on Drugs.
Materialism has conspired with the Drug War to hook 1 in 4 American women on big pharma meds that were touted (falsely) as curing depression via a reductionist approach.
Meanwhile, we have outlawed all substances that could be used intermittently to elevate mood -- either on a regular basis, as for instance the Peruvian Indians chewed the coca leaf daily for over a thousand years, or via the life-guiding epiphanies that can be wrought in the guided therapeutic use of psychedelics.
Materialism + the Drug War has kept us searching for "real" cures (i.e. reductionist cures) for mental issues while denying us the godsends that grow at our feet. Why? Because the actions of the latter drugs are holistic in nature and cannot be referred to a known reductionist cause.
In other words, materialists ignore medical godsends for the same reason that they ignore intelligent design and teleology in general: namely, their previous commitment to reductionist causes.
This is why Dr. Robert Glatter could write an article in Forbes magazine in 2021 with the absurd title: "Can Laughing Gas help fight Treatment Resistant Depression"?
Even the Reader's Digest knows that "laughter is the best medicine."
But Robert's answer is a very worried "Maybe." He wants to keep the chronically depressed from using the substance that inspired the philosophy of William James -- because it might be dangerous.
He ignores, of course, the dangers of letting the depressed remain depressed -- not to mention the sociopolitical dangers of outlawing philosophical research a la William James.
The materialist approves of euthanasia -- but does not want folks to use medicines that would make them want to live -- like the hundreds of psychedelics synthesized by Alexander Shulgin which elate and inform without addicting.
The materialist would rather damage the brain of the depressed with ECT than to let them use godsend and time-honored medicines like Soma that have inspired entire religions.
I hope, therefore, that the Discovery Center does not have a "previous commitment" to the Drug War-- because it is the Drug War combined with materialism that has kept me now from using godsend medicines for 45 years!
I urge you not to fall for the notion that drug prohibition is a conservative doctrine. It is a brand-new unprecedented American idea, surprisingly coming from a nation that claims to be founded on Natural Law, including what Locke called the right to the use of the land and all that lies therein. But the Drug War represents a prehistoric mindset which feeds us the following lie: that some substances have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, at any time, ever.
In reality, there are no substances of that kind. Even botox and cyanide have valid uses.
The Drug War is thus a war on science and scientific understanding and should be denounced as such by the Institute. But again, I fear that conservatives have a previous commitment to scaring us about drugs rather than teaching us about them.
I hope this email will inspire dialogue on this subject at Discovery. I would be glad to take part. I have tried for years to get philosophers to discuss this matter and they're terrified.
Of course, this is the kind of email that is usually ignored, but I hope you will share it with the likes of Behe and Meyer.
Materialist reductionism has more downsides than the fact that it keeps us from understanding the origins of life. It also keeps us from using obvious godsends to treat mental shortcomings, forcing us to search instead for the holy grail of reductionist drug research: a cause found in brain chemicals, which is the approach that results in modern antidepressants to which 1 in 4 American women are now addicted to Big Pharma meds for life: a veritable Stepford Wives come true, and no philosophers even notice it.
The Drug War also gives materialism an advantage in talks about origins because the Drug War outlaws all the substances that give us experiential evidence of a greater reality. Nitrous oxide convinced William James that we only see a small part of reality in our daily lives, but Drug Warriors in Britain are already doing their best to outlaw the substance and thus keep philosophers from following up on such leads.
It's amazing how many philosophers believe that the Drug War is just its own separate issue, like, say, abortion or gun rights. What they fail to realize is that the Drug War ideology causes all sorts of issues that affect everybody. The Drug War ideology of substance demonization both discourages and outlaws research on psychoactive agents that have prima facie value in treating conditions like depression, Alzheimer's and autism, given the fact that psychedelics can grow new neurons. The Drug War, in other words, censors science, as much or more than it was censored in the time of Galileo. The Drug War also violates the Natural Law upon which America was found, meaning that the Drug War should be front and center in all discussions of American jurisprudence, yet I've audited entire lecture series on the history of the legal system in America and the professors have never even MENTIONED the Drug War, let alone described how it has overthrown Natural Law.
So, again, the Drug War affects all sorts of aspects of American life, and yet most experts in the variously affected fields are silent on the subject.
Some materialists are no doubt happy for this scientific censorship because it tends to outlaw only those medicines that work in an holistic way, leaving them free to ignore the hints about non-physical reality that philosophers from William James to Plato have gleaned from using psychoactive substances.
Materialism
In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James demonstrated how materialists are blind to the depth and meaning of psychological states of ecstasy and transcendence -- or in other words the states that are peculiar to mystics like St. Teresa... and to those who use psychoactive substances like laughing gas. The medical materialist is dogmatically dismissive of such states, which explains why they can pretend that godsend medicines that elate and inspire have no positive uses whatsoever:
"To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce."
And so materialist scientists collaborate with the drug war by refusing to see glaringly obvious drug benefits. They acknowledge only those benefits that they believe are visible under a microscope. The Hindu religion would not exist today had materialist scientists held soma to such a standard. But that's the absurd pass to which prohibition eventually brings us in a society wherein materialist science is the new god: scientists are put in charge of deciding whether we are allowed to imagine new religions or not.
This materialist bias is inspired in turn by behaviorism, the anti-indigenous doctrine of JB Watson that makes the following inhumane claim:
"Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic."
According to this view, the hopes and the dreams of a "patient" are to be ignored. Instead, we are to chart their physiology and brain chemistry.
JB Watson's Behaviorism is a sort of Dr. Spock with a vengeance. It is the perfect ideology for a curmudgeon, because it would seem to justify all their inability to deal with human emotions. Unfortunately, the attitude has knock-on effects because it teaches drug researchers to ignore common sense and to downplay or ignore all positive usage reports or historic lessons about positive drug use. The "patient" needs to just shut up and let the doctors decide how they are doing. It is a doctrine that dovetails nicely with drug war ideology, because it empowers the researcher to ignore the obvious: that all drugs that elate have potential uses as antidepressants.
That statement can only be denied when one assumes that "real" proof of efficacy of a psychoactive medicine must be determined by a doctor, and that the patient's only job is to shut up because their hopes and dreams and feelings cannot be accurately displayed and quantified on a graph or a bar chart.
A lot of drug use represents an understandable attempt to fend off performance anxiety. Why understandable? Because performers can lose their livelihood should they become too self-conscious. We call that use "recreational" only because we ignore common sense psychology.
Another problem with MindMed's LSD: every time I look it up on Google, I get a mess of links about the stock market. The drug is apparently a godsend for investors. They want to profit from LSD by neutering it and making it politically correct: no inspiration, no euphoria.
There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.
NIDA is a propaganda arm of the U.S. government. It ignores the obvious upsides to drug use and the obvious downsides to prohibition.
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
Almost all of today's magazine articles about human psychology should come with the following disclaimer:
"This article was written from the standpoint of Drug War ideology, which holds that outlawed substances can have no beneficial uses whatsoever."
The DEA should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for withholding godsend medicine from the depressed. Here is just one typical drug-user report that appeared in "Pihkal": "A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like..."
Drug warriors aren't just deciding for us about drugs. They're telling us that we no longer need Coleridge poems, Lovecraft stories, Robin Williams, Sherlock Holmes, or the soma-inspired Hindu religion.
William James claimed that his constitution prevented him from having mystical experiences. The fact is that no one is prevented from having mystical experiences provided that they are willing to use psychoactive substances wisely to attain that end.
We need to push back against the very idea that the FDA is qualified to tell us what works when it comes to psychoactive medicines. Users know these things work. That's what counts. The rest is academic foot dragging.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Materialism and the Drug War Part II: open letter to the Discovery Institute, published on February 28, 2023 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
You have been reading an article entitled, Materialism and the Drug War Part II: open letter to the Discovery Institute, published on February 28, 2023 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
