Modern Addiction Treatment as Puritan Indoctrination
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
December 29, 2022
In the 2019 movie "Four Good Days," (a classic piece of moralistic Drug War agitprop) the heroin 1-addicted daughter of an uptight and wine-swilling housewife (played by Glenn Close, shame on her) is sent to a $3,000-a-week rehab unit, where, after three days of cold turkey, a pompous and self-satisfied doctor administers a shot of Naltrexone and sends her on her not-so-merry way. That's it. Out of all the medications in the world the doctor could provide (including the hundreds of insight-provoking drugs discovered by Alexander Shulgin), the doctor only has one option: a drug that is specifically designed to give the user as little pleasure as possible and to make it chemically impossible for her to enjoy opiates of any kind in the future.
This is what passes for addiction treatment in modern America: we willfully ignore the very reason that the subject was "getting high" in the first place: namely to obtain self-transcendence and peace of mind.
There are hundreds of medicines that could improve an addict's (habitue's) mood and help them get on with life; even potentially addictive drugs could be used safely for this purpose if scheduled appropriately (on a calendar I mean, not on the DEA's mendacious scheduling system). And yet the Puritan medical industry has only one over-riding goal when it comes to addiction treatment: to make sure that the user's original desire for self-transcendence is never satisfied.
Andrew Weil got it half right: he said that drugs like methadone do not treat the real issue. But the real issue is not some Freudian crisis that the user has suppressed with drugs, the real issue is not chemical imbalance -- the real issue is that the user sought a good snappy feeling which helped her "get her head together." There is nothing pathological about that. We all want that, presumably. Sure, she chose an unreliable way to cater to that desire, if only because she lives in the age of a Drug War that is designed to make her fail in her quest for pharmacologically aided peace of mind, but that does not mean that the desire for mental clarity and euphoria is pathological in itself or the sign of some underlying pathology.
Modern addiction treatment is part of America's imperialist project to demonize and eradicate medicines that have been politically deemed to be without any beneficial uses according to Puritan Western politicians (as if any substance can have no good uses whatsoever, in any dose, at any time, for any person, ever). In foreign policy, we stalk abroad to wipe out poppy fields against the desires of the locals; in domestic policy, the government creates drugs that are designed to make self-transcendence biochemically impossible.
This is not science: this is Christian Science, the religion that tells us that "drugs" are bad and that we should get joy and self-transcendence from a lifetime of effort. The stingy and stinting modern addiction "treatment" represents the puritan punishment of those who seek relief through something other than hard work and booze2. The goal of the Drug War is to get us to live by America's hypocritical Puritan values. It is indoctrination in a certain kind of lifestyle, namely the lifestyle of the Christian Scientist. Addiction treatment under this system is not motivated by science but rather by the government's desire to turn Americans into God-fearing puritans -- citizens who have been infantilized by drug law3, told that they are powerless before "drugs" and that they must acknowledge a "higher power" in order to be cured.
This is puritan indoctrination, not addiction treatment.
Author's Follow-up: December 29, 2022
Had the US Government been installed in the Indus Valley in 1500 BCE, there would be no Vedic-Hindu religion today. America would have outlawed Soma, the natural medicine that inspired the religion. Defiant Soma users would then have been forced to switch to a government-supplied replacement for Soma: but that replacement would be tweaked so that it would provide no inspiration at all.
The so-called "herbs" that witches used were drugs, in the same way that "meds" are drugs. If academics made that connection, the study of witchcraft would shed a lot of light on the fearmongering of modern prohibitionists.
I might as well say that no one can ever be taught to ride a horse safely. I would argue as follows: "Look at Christopher Reeves. He was a responsible and knowledgeable equestrian. But he couldn't handle horses. The fact is, NO ONE can handle horses!"
If there was free speech in America, we would see billboards demanding freedom to use psychoactive substances for religious purposes, or to heal, or to follow-up on the research of William James regarding the nature of human consciousness.
Now the folks who helped Matthew get Ketamine must be sacrificed on the altar of the Drug War, lest people start thinking that the Drug War itself was at fault.y
I have yet to find one psychiatrist who acknowledges the demoralizing power of being turned into a patient for life. They never list that as a potential downside of antidepressant use.
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
Most people think that drugs like cocaine, MDMA, LSD and amphetamines can only be used recreationally. WRONG ! This represents a very naive understanding of human psychology. We deny common sense in order to cater to the drug war orthodoxy that "drugs have no benefits."
No wonder the "Justice" Department relies on plea deals; otherwise juries could use nullification to free those charged with mere drug possession.
The best long-term treatment for OUD would be to normalize the nightly smoking of opium at home, not to addict the user to government-supplied drugs that render them impervious to the benefits of the poppy plant.
The drug war normalizes the disdainful and self-righteous attitude that Columbus and Pizarro had about drug use in the New World.
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
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