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.
Most substance withdrawal would be EASY if drugs were re-legalized and we could use any substance we wanted to mitigate negative psychological effects.
What I want to know is, who sold Christopher Reeves that horse that he fell off of? Who was peddling that junk?!
All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.
We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.
Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."
Hollywood presents cocaine as a drug of killers. In reality, strategic cocaine use by an educated person can lead to great mental power, especially as just one part of a pharmacologically balanced diet.
Americans love to hate heroin. But there is no rational reason why folks should not use heroin daily in a world in which we consider it their medical duty to use antidepressants daily.
No imaginable downside could persuade westerners that guns and alcohol were too dangerous. Yet the DEA lies about almost all psychoactive drugs, saying there are no good uses.
Two weeks ago, a guy told me that most psychiatrists believe ECT is great. I thought he was joking! I've since come to realize that he was telling the truth: that is just how screwed up the healthcare system is today thanks to drug war ideology and purblind materialism.
It's "convenient" for scientists that their "REAL" cures happen to be the ones that racist politicians will allow. Scientists thus normalize prohibition by pretending that outlawed substances have no therapeutic value. It's materialism collaborating with the drug war.
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