As someone who has written hundreds of philosophical essays about the Drug War, I would like to offer a comment or two on that email, specifically the link that reads
"What are medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD)? What are barriers to people getting them?"
I would like to suggest to you that medications for getting off of opioids are legion -- but that they are almost all outlawed. Mainstream medicine is blind to this fact because of the behaviorist-materialist approach to mind and mood medicine, which looks for answers to emotional problems under a microscope rather than recognizing psychological common sense. According to this philosophy, laughter and happiness do not count: only quantifiable data -- and so even if a person withdrawing from a drug is laughing their heart out, the materialist will tell him or her a la Dr. Spock of Star Trek that they are not "really" treating their addiction. But this is just a metaphysical claim, presupposing the correctness of the non-holistic western approach to medicine.
Take me, for instance. I have had enormous trouble getting off of Effexor3, which my psychiatrist told me has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users who attempt to stop the drug, worse than heroin 4 according to psychiatrist Julie Holland5. And yet what is recidivism but the result of a few hours of high-anxiety existential angst, often experienced in the wee hours of the morning? And those few hours could clearly be "gotten through" with the help of drugs that inspire and elate -- as, for instance, the use of the phenethylamines synthesized by chemist Alexander Shulgin6, or even the as-needed use of opium and coca or laughing gas . That latter substance inspires ecstasies and heavenly visions, as reported by William James, who conjured philosophers to use the substance to investigate the nature of perception and reality7. It is just psychological common sense that as-needed use of such substances could help one refrain from back-sliding in their attempt to get off an unwanted substance. They do not need materialist drugs that are custom-made for that purpose based on the reification of an opiate-related problem as a discrete "illness."
It is absolutely clear to me that I could get through the downsides of withdrawal -- easily -- with the strategic as-needed help of such substances as laughing gas and phenethylamines.
Consider these phenethylamine user reports from Pihkal8:
"I experienced the desire to laugh hysterically at what I could only describe as the completely ridiculous state of the entire world."
"Excellent feelings, tremendous opening of insight and understanding, a real awakening."
"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."
Surely, materialists are gaslighting 9 us10 when they say that such medicines are of no use in fighting unwanted opioid dependence. And they are doing so, in my view, because they have "reified" opioid problems as a sort of "thing apart" in the disease-mongering DSM, as a discrete monolithic biochemical pathology that has nothing to do with everyday human life -- as if those attempting to withdraw from the drug were aliens from Mars and not amenable to the common-sense psychological incentives of "normal" human beings.
To answer your questions then:
Question: What are medications for opioid use disorder?
Answer: Almost all the psychoactive medicines that America has outlawed.
Question: What are the barriers to people getting them?
Answer: Drug prohibition.
Drug prohibition, which is based on the following anti-scientific idea:
that a substance that could cause problems for white young people when used at one dose for one reason, must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
prohibition is the problem 11 , not drugs, but America will not see this fact as long as materialists connive in the Drug War lie that inspirational medicines have no positive uses, even when anecdote, history and common sense say otherwise.
Sincerely Yours
PS I feel strongly about this topic because Drug War ideology and materialist orthodoxy has deprived me for a lifetime now of godsend medicines that have glaringly obvious abilities to inspire and elate. Indeed, the Hindu religion itself was inspired by a drug that inspired and elated12 -- from which one fact alone it follows the drug prohibition is the outlawing of the religious impulse, to say nothing of our right to take care of our own psychological health as we see fit, without seeking help from a materialist medical establishment that profits from our distress.
Author's Follow-up:
April 24, 2025
"Opioid Use Disorder" is a victim-blaming epithet. The real disorder is Prohibition Disorder. It is prohibitionists who cause overdoses by refusing to educate, by refusing to ensure safe product, and by denying access to godsend alternatives that could keep an individual from obsessing over the use of one drug in particular and thus developing unwanted dependency.
And how odd it is that we would seek to end dependence on opiates by going to a mental health establishment that thrives on dependency, as seen from the fact that 1 in 4 American women take a Big Pharma drug every day of their life!!!
This is why progress has been so glacial in re-legalizing godsends and ending the War on Drugs. Even the good guys, the guys promoted by the Drug Policy Alliance, are bamboozled in their own way, namely, by materialist and behaviorist dogma. This will not change until Americans realize that it was always a category error to place scientists in charge of mind and mood matters in the first place. That move was predicated on an anti-indigenous and anti-holistic mindset that is patently inappropriate as seen by the fact that it leads to absurd results: namely, a world in which scientists pretend that drugs that inspire and elate have no obvious uses for the depressed, a world in which we behave as if suicide 13 and shock therapy were better than drug use. Hell, drugs that inspire and elate have inspired the creation of the Hindu religion. How can you sit there and tell me with a straight face that we have to do endless clinical studies -- for one "illness" at a time -- before we can tell if such substances can be of help? Clearly, such substances not only CAN be of help, but it is actually the outlawing of religion to keep them from anyone on the absurd grounds that scientists have not yet been able to quantify the effects for the purposes of creating a PowerPoint presentation for the FDA and Big Pharma 1415 .
Discussion Topics
May 23, 2025
Attention Teachers and Professors: Brian is not writing these essays for his health. (Well, in a way he is, actually, but that's not important now.) His goal is to get the world thinking about the anti-democratic and anti-scientific idiocy of the War on Drugs. You can stimulate your students' brainwashed grey matter on this topic by having them read the above essay and then discuss the following questions as a group!
Why is mainstream medicine blind to obvious treatments for so-called 'Opioid Use Disorder'?
Explain how laughing gas 16 could help with withdrawal symptoms, albeit in a way that materialist science cannot seem to appreciate.
Why does Brian say he feels 'strongly' about this topic?
Why does the Philosopher say that the mental healthcare industry relies on dependency?
Brian states that 'Opioid Use Disorder' is a victim-blaming epithet. Explain.
What should 'Opioid Use Disorder' actually be called?
How do prohibitionists cause overdoses?
How are 'even the good guys' bamboozled, according to Brian?
"After the Drug War" is a series of essays describing the philosophical principles of the world that will exist after prohibition -- one in which we seek to use all drugs for the benefit of humanity and in which the bad guys are ignorance and racism rather than drugs themselves. This is a world in which we finally admit what has been obvious since 1920s America, that prohibition is the PROBLEM, not drugs. This is a world in which we recognize that the Hindu religion itself was inspired by a drug -- a drug that inspired and elated -- from which it follows that it is the suppression of religious liberty to outlaw drugs that inspire and elate.
That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.
We have to deny the FDA the right to judge psychoactive medicines in the first place. Their materialist outlook obliges them to ignore all obvious benefits. When they nix drugs like MDMA, they nix compassion and love.
In a free world, almost all depressed individuals could do WITHOUT doctors: these adult human beings could handle their own depression with the informed intermittent use of a wide variety of psychoactive substances.
There are a potentially vast number of non-addictive drugs that could be used strategically in therapy. They elate and "free the tongue" to help talk therapy really work. Even "addictive" drugs can be used non-addictively, prohibitionist propaganda notwithstanding.
Many in the psychedelic renaissance fail to recognize that prohibition is the problem. They praise psychedelics but want to demonize others substances. That's ignorant however. No substance is bad in itself. All substances have some use at some dose for some reason.
I'd like to become a guinea pig for researchers to test the ability of psychoactive drugs to make aging as psychologically healthy as possible. If such drugs cannot completely ward off decrepitude, they can surely make it more palatable. The catch? Researchers have to be free.
Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.
"The Harrison [Narcotics] Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts.” --Robert A. Schless, 1925.
Healthline posted an article in 2021 about the benefits of getting off of antidepressants. They did not even mention the biggest benefit: NO LONGER BEING AN ETERNAL PATIENT -- no longer being a child in the eyes of an all-knowing healthcare system.
There are neither "drugs" nor "meds" as those terms are used today. All substances have potential good uses and bad uses. The terms as used today carry value judgements, as in meds good, drugs bad.
That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.