in the form of an open letter to author Daniel Pinchbeck:
Thanks for "When Plants Dream," Daniel. It presents an enjoyable and well-rounded introduction to ayahuasca and the many issues that surround its use. That said, however, I'm afraid that, like most Western authors these days, you write under the subconscious influence of a number of Drug War assumptions that are either flat-out wrong or, at best, mere half-truths. I think that this sometimes skews your conclusions or unnecessarily limits their application.
Example 1
You imply when writing about cocaine that it has nothing but bad effects when used in Western society. This is Drug War dogma, of course, but why do we believe it? Why do we think that cocaine has no good uses in the West? How would we even know?
In a Drug War society, no one dares to write about the positive uses of cocaine, especially in newspapers (or in academia, for that matter) - and so we hush up the story of how cocaine helped Sigmund Freud achieve self-actualization (by "pushing him on" to enormous productivity) or stimulated insight in the Richard Feynmans of the world. But if all we're allowed to learn about cocaine is its negative effects, then we are being subject to a propaganda campaign in the West, not to objective scientific information. This is (or should be) very relevant to your book because these one-sided Drug War assumptions are what undergird and perpetuate the criminalization of desperately needed therapeutic plants such as ayahuasca.
But if indigenous people have used coca leaves advisedly for centuries (for visions, insight and/or mental focus), the obvious question is, why can't those benefits be transferred to the West? It may be that Westerners are just not mature enough to use the plant wisely.* But we should not make this assumption hastily in a country where we're only allowed to hear bad things about cocaine use -- and so Freud's use, for instance, is expunged from the psychology textbooks. This is a glaring omission for it keeps psychologists from confronting the $64,000 question: Why did Freud treat his patients based on theories and yet insist on improving his own life with cocaine? If Freud was having trouble getting out of bed, he did not turn to his own psychotherapy. He demanded the real politik of cocaine. Psychology ignores this fact and continues to insist that all psychological patients be treated according to the latest theory and that any use of a psychoactive plant is somehow a "cop-out" -- unless, of course, that plant is synthesized and packaged in such a way that Big Pharma gets its cut.
{^You're never too young to oppress your fellow Americans. Tell your kids about the FDWA, Future Drug Warriors of America. In our summer camps, we teach them how to kick down doors and throw elderly citizens and children on the ground while shouting at them and calling them scumbags for using Mother Nature's plants to gain psychological healing and insight. }{
*SPOILER ALERT: Of course, the real problem is capitalist exploitation. The profit motive, it turns out, has no place when it comes to encouraging the use of psychoactive plants.
Freud's hypocritical use of cocaine reminds me of the liberal who argues vehemently in favor of public schools but ultimately sends his or her own child to a private school. Theoretical benefits are all well and good, but at some point, success-oriented people demand REAL solutions.
Example 2
Like virtually all other authors who write about psychedelic therapy, you fail to state one of the main arguments in favor of that new paradigm: namely, the fact that more than 1 in 8 Americans (1 in 4 women, according to psychiatrist Julie Holland) are currently addicted to modern antidepressants, which were never even trialed for long-term use, some of which are harder to quit than heroin. I myself am addicted to Effexor - which I'm told I can NEVER get off of. Indeed, that is the conclusion of my own psychiatrist. He told me that there is a 95% recidivism rate (according to the NIH itself) for those who attempt to quit Effexor. This is on par with heroin - but I have yet to read any author who is outraged on MY behalf. To the contrary, most authors on these topics are still lecturing me about the supposed "evils" of cocaine and opium, advice that I find laughable in its ignorance and/or hypocrisy.
(To add insult to injury, modern antidepressants are contraindicated for those taking psychedelics. So we have an as-yet unrecognized irony: psychedelics can cure many addictions, but they cannot be used to cure the great addiction of our time: the addiction to SSRI antidepressants.)
When it became clear several decades ago that SSRIs were addictive, psychiatrists merely made a virtue of necessity and began telling their patients that they had to "take their meds for life" (thereby absolving psychiatrists from lawsuits and putting them in the position of the scientific "good guy"). These are the medicines, Daniel, that were promoted based on the erroneous notion that they fixed a chemical imbalance in the brain, whereas subsequent research (see Robert Whitaker) revealed that SSRIs actually CAUSE the imbalances that they purport to fix.
This mass addiction cries out for a remedy, and psychedelics are the obvious solution, since they provide self-insight, grow new neurons, and are non-addictive. (This compares favorably with SSRIs, which in my experience have been fiercely addictive, fog my mind, and conduce to long-term anhedonia.) By ignoring this politically correct addiction (as Drug Warriors dutifully do), your case for psychedelic therapy is far weaker than it need be. As you mention, there are, indeed, potential "down sides" to ayahuasca use, but these rare problems would be dwarfed if contrasted with the actual damage being done by SSRIs today.
This ignorance of the status quo is a feature of today's Drug War. The Drug Warrior has to hush up this legal addiction situation, lest we draw the obvious conclusion: that addiction is not bad, as long as the drugs in question are forthcoming. If that's true, why am I not allowed to use opium occasionally to increase my creativity and give me, as a chronic depressive, something to look forward to in life: namely, times of increased enjoyment of the world around me?
Example 3
I think you correctly suspect the Judeo-Christian outlook of scorning psychoactive plant remedies, but your analysis here does not go far enough. The fact is that the original Drug Warrior was none other than the founder of the Catholic Church, Emperor Theodosius, who, in 392 CE, outlawed the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries as a threat to Christianity. This ceremony had been ongoing annually for almost two-thousand years, and was reported by many attendees to be the highlight of their entire lives, in passages that could easily be mistaken for journal entries of an ayahuasca enthusiast. These entries speak of great revelations about the true nature of reality. But since such non-Christian revelation was anathema to the Emperor, he launched the Drug War to outlaw all insights that do not come from "the true religion," i.e. Christianity.
Thus we can see that today's Drug War is nothing but the enforcement of Christian Science with respect to mental states: the metaphysical idea (or belief) that it is somehow wrong to use substances to improve one's mental outlook. Of course, this Christian Science is hypocritical, in that it supports psychoactive therapies - even addictive ones - provided that they do not seem to render a user "high" - something that is anathema to the puritan sensibilities of the Christian Scientists.
This Christian Science approach to drug law is aided and abetted by modern materialists, who have a dogmatic disdain for consciousness itself and so refuse to countenance any therapeutic solution that cannot be reduced to so-called "natural causes." Thus the Drug War makes strange bedfellows indeed, as materialist atheists find common ground with intolerant Christians.
Conclusion
I hope these three examples have proven my thesis, Daniel: that even the most progressive writers on the subject of "drugs" are subconsciously biased by the erroneous beliefs of the Drug War and that this bias skews or limits the conclusions that they draw. In short, your case for ayahuasca therapy is compelling in itself, but it could win far more converts if you compared your proposal to the ugly nature of the addictive status quo.
Of course, this may be easier said than done. There is, after all, a "kids glove" attitude toward SSRIs based on decades of Big Pharma-financed proselytizing on their behalf. During this time, the APA has been in league with the pharmaceutical companies to make SSRIs look like lamb's milk on shows like Oprah and Today. The result has been the creation of an American myth, according to which these drugs "fix" a chemical imbalance. This is just plain false, but it apparently has been drilled into Americans so successfully via a full-court media press that few people dare acknowledge its falsehood today.
(The proof is extant: I am as depressed today as I was 40 years ago, after taking legal antidepressants every single day of my life. If modern antidepressants are some kind of silver bullet, my brain chemicals never got the memo.)
Viewed in this light, I guess it's little wonder that writers like yourself fail to point out this corrupt status quo, since it is so thoroughly believed by the public that it no doubt demands a separate book to address the issues in question.
At their best SSRIs make life livable - which would be fine if that's all we had. But why should we settle for an addictive drug that simply makes life bearable when we could use a non-addictive one that can truly make life worth living?
What we need, I believe, is to replace psychiatry with shamanism, but only in a world in which the shaman is allowed to learn about and use any plant in the world - rather than a handful of addictive drugs that enrich the Fortune 500 while limiting users both financially and emotionally.
I fear this won't happen, however, until Americans recognize the folly of outlawing Mother Nature in the first place.
PS When pushed, psychiatrists may claim that SSRIs and SNRIs are not addictive, that they only cause "chemical dependence." But there is little difference from the point of view of a user. If I stopped using Effexor, I would go through hell. Just see the online testimony describing the many horrific but futile attempts to get off the drug.
Author's Follow-up: July 14, 2022
Bear in mind, I wrote this three years ago, when I was still basically a kid. Couldn't have been more than 59, 60 tops. I freely admit I may have been a loose cannon back then, impatient of acknowledging the full nuances of my seeming opponents' positions before firing at them broadside. If so, a thousand pardons to Dan. (Now if only I had an online presence that permitted Daniel to both learn of this potential sleight and to at least partially forgive it based on this admittedly somewhat quirky appendix that I'm adding here. If I don't hear from him in a few months, I'll have to assume that he forgives me, at which point I'll append a thank-you right here on this web page for that supposititious forbearance on his part.)
I would add, however, that there is one drug-war lie that has kept the average American's mind-improving arsenal empty, forcing them to rely solely on the dependence-causing meds of Big Pharma: that is the idea that substances can be characterized as bad, in and of themselves, without regard for how, why, when or where they are used. Even crack cocaine and morphine can be used non-addictively in a regime designed for that purpose.
Once we free ourselves of the anti-scientific Drug War ideology of substance demonization, we can envision an empathic shaman using all substances freely in an attempt to cajole and instruct a person in life, without getting them addicted insofaras the patient does not even have to know with what substances he or she is being treated.
We can teach this non-addictive strategy to all human beings -- but with honesty, telling them about how Big Pharma meds cause lifetime chemical dependence, not as a possible side effect but as an actual feature.
This is a truth that corporate America and moneyed interests can't tolerate. They want our knowledge of "drugs" to be based on expensive TV ads designed to associate substances with warm fuzzy feelings. They want us to be children when it comes to psychoactive substances. This is why we demonize drugs, because drugs that expand the mind and inspire new religions have no place in a capitalist society that values the individual only insofar as they are a good consumer of products. That's why thought control via substance prohibition is just another step in capitalism uber alles.
When the police pull you over, they are really the "thought police," searching to find drugs in order to prove that you are conspiring to think more and/or differently than the capitalist status quo allows.
Just think how many ayahuasca-like godsends that we are going without because we dogmatically refuse to even look for them, out of our materialist disdain for mixing drugs with drugs.
Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."
Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.
The drug war is a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."
Scientists are not the experts on psychoactive medicines. The experts are painters and artists and spiritualists -- and anyone else who simply wants to be all they can be in life. Scientists understand nothing of such goals and aspirations.
I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.
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It's always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract. That's anti-scientific. It begs so many questions and leaves suffering pain patients (and others) high and dry. No substance is bad in and of itself.
The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.
I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.
Listen to the Drug War Philosopher as he tells you how you can support his work to end the hateful drug war -- and, ideally, put the DEA on trial for willfully lying about godsend medicines! (How? By advertising on this page right c'here!)
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You have been reading an article entitled, Review of When Plants Dream published on October 15, 2019 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
You have been reading an article entitled, Review of When Plants Dream published on October 15, 2019 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)