Brian sent the following message today to Roy Benaroch, M.D. Professor, Emory University, in regard to his course on Wondrium entitled: "The Skeptic's Guide to Health, Medicine, and the Media."
I know this is a touchy topic in America, but with all due respect, Dr. Benaroch, I do not understand how a course about medical skepticism can overlook the fact that America has outlawed almost all of Mother Nature's godsend psychoactive medicines. Meanwhile, Americans have been taught the unscientific proposition that if such drugs have a bad effect for anyone, then they must not be available for anyone, at any dose, for any reason, ever. It is for this reason that I have gone an entire lifetime now without godsend medicines, being shunted off instead onto Big Pharma 12 meds that dull the mind rather than inspire it.
Skeptic's guide to health? Surely, no one's a REAL skeptic unless they realize that the Drug War has outlawed almost everything that WORKS, psychologically speaking.
This outlawing of medicine also impacts research, both scientific and philosophic. William James himself said that we must study the effects of "drugs" to better understand the nature of consciousness. The Drug War tells us that such research is a crime.
I tried to post the above thoughts on your Wondrium course page, but the moderators told me they were inappropriate. It seems that it is beyond the pale these days to disagree with the Christian Science ideology of the Drug War.
I know you mention marijuana in your course, but that is just one example of an enormous trend: namely, the unprecedented control of Mother Nature by government, in violation of the natural law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America.
Author's Follow-up: February 4, 2025
I tried to convey these sentiments on the Wondrium website, but the Wondrium censors deleted my post. It is truly considered bad manners these days to speak honestly about drugs. I responded, by the way, by canceling my longstanding Wondrium account. I had audited one too many courses of theirs in which the professors pretended that drug prohibition did not exist and that drug use had nothing to tell us about consciousness or human psychology or spiritual states, etc. etc.
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
This is why I call the drug war 'fanatical Christian Science.' People would rather have grandpa die than to let him use laughing gas or coca or opium or MDMA, etc. etc.
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.
I'm interested in CBD myself, because I want to gain benefits at times without experiencing intoxication. So I think it's great. But I like it as part of an overall strategy toward mental health. I do not think of CBD, as some do, as a way to avoid using naughty drugs.
John Halpern wrote a book about opium, subtitled "the ancient flower that poisoned our world." What nonsense! Bad laws and ignorance poison our world, NOT FLOWERS!
The FDA uses reductive materialism to justify and normalize the views of Cortes and Pizarro with respect to entheogenic medicine.
Today's war against drug users is like Elizabeth I's war against Catholics. Both are religious crackdowns. For today's oppressors, the true faith (i.e., the moral way to live) is according to the drug-hating religion of Christian Science.
I agree that Big Pharma drugs have wrought disaster when used in psychotherapy -- but it is common sense that non-Big Pharma drugs that elate could be used to prevent suicide and obviate the need for ECT.
This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.
The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?