In reading about the history of pharmacology this morning, I discovered that it never occurred to the leaders in that field that the scientific method might not apply to certain subjects. Yet how can you apply the scientific method to the study of a psychedelic whose benefits depend on one's attitude toward those substances, as the indigenous might put it, or on the "set and setting," as American psychonauts might say? The scientific method tells us to limit the variables that we wish to study to a few important ones. But how does the researcher choose what's important when it comes to human behavior? Who died and made them God that they could make that call in the first place? Meanwhile, a litany of philosophical concerns arise when we start talking about using blinding in such cases. The researcher's attempt to avoid the placebo effect is highly problematic. Indeed, blinding is unethical in the case of the study of psychedelics, where the results of use are so obviously a joint production of both the user and the drug itself. To use blinding is to encourage "bad trips," since it forces study participants to encounter psychedelic effects without the requisite psychological and/or spiritual preparation. Nor will researchers see the expected predictable correlations between dose and response when studying psychedelics, since a small dose may facilitate a profound response while a large dose may result in nothing -- all thanks to the fact that the user, for some reason that may be clear or mysterious, is not particularly susceptible to the drug's beneficial effects at the specific time of use.Materia Medica (Wikipedia) 6, The Origins of Pharmacology in the 16th Century 7, The Early Development of Psychopharmacology in America 8, A Historical Overview of Pharmacology 9, History of Pharmacy in the United States (Wikipedia) 10, History of Pharmacology: From Herbal Traditions to Modern Science 11, The Pharmaceutical Sciences in America, 1852-1902 12
Democratic societies need to outlaw prohibition for many reasons, the first being the fact that prohibition removes millions of minorities from the voting rolls, thereby handing elections to fascists and insurrectionists.
Harm Reduction is not enough. We need Benefit Production as well. The autistic should be able to use compassion-enhancing drugs; dementia patients should be able to use drugs that speed up and sharpen mental processes.
No substance is bad in and of itself. Fentanyl has positive uses, at specific doses, for specific people, in specific situations. But the drug war votes substance up or down. That is hugely anti-scientific and it blocks human progress.
If drug war logic made sense, we would outlaw endless things in addition to drugs. Because the drug war says that it's all worth it if we can save just one life -- which is generally the life of a white suburban young person, btw.
Drug use is judged by different standards than any other risky activity in the western world. One death can lead to outrage, even though that death might be statistically insignificant.
Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.
Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war:
"clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."
The drug war is a scare campaign to teach us to distrust mother nature and to rely on pharmaceuticals instead.
Ug! Fire bad!
There were 4,731 fire-related deaths in America in 2023.
Learn more at the Partnership for a Death Free America.
Musk and co. want to make us more robot-like with AI, when they should be trying to make us more human-like with sacred medicine. Only humans can gain creativity from plant medicine. All AI can do is harvest the knowledge that eventually results from that creativity.
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