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
I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.
Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.
Psychiatrists never acknowledge the biggest downside to modern antidepressants: the fact that they turn you into a patient for life. That's demoralizing, especially since the best drugs for depression are outlawed by the government.
That's so "drug war" of Rick: If a psychoactive substance has a bad use at some dose, for somebody, then it must not be used at any dose by anybody. It's hard to imagine a less scientific proposition, or one more likely to lead to unnecessary suffering.
In his treatise on laws, Cicero reported that the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries gave the participants "not only the art of living agreeably, but of dying with a better hope."
If Americans want less government, they should get rid of the Drug War Industrial Complex, rather than abandoning democracies around the world and leaving a vacuum for Russia and China to fill.
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.
The best step we could take in harm reduction is re-legalizing everything and starting to teach safe use. Spend the DEA's billions on "go" teams that would descend on locations where drugs are being used stupidly -- not to arrest, but to educate.
A pharmacologically savvy drug dealer would have no problem getting someone off one drug because they would use the common sense practice of fighting drugs with drugs. But materialist doctors would rather that the patient suffer than to use such psychologically obvious methods.
In the age of the Drug War, the Hippocratic Oath has become "First, do no good."
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