just when you thought it was safe to go back into the insane asylum...
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
July 11, 2023
Letter sent to: Michael Gordon Voss, publisher of Science News
I am a 64-year-old chronic depressive whose uncle's brain was scrambled by ECT.
As such, I am horrified by the fact that Science News is championing invasive electrical therapy for the depressed while simultaneously ignoring the fact that we have outlawed hundreds of godsends that could treat depression without such risks.
Merely chewing the coca leaf daily could fend off the majority of depression in America, as the long-lived Inca could have told us. Laughing gas has obvious uses, though reductionist scientists refuse to see them. MDMA and its hundreds of cousins have the power to elate and inspire without addicting. Even addictive drugs can be used non-addictively to cheer and inspire, though modern Drug War ideology insists otherwise.
Yet Science News continues to publish articles like this that imply that the drugs that we have outlawed do not even exist! This is Christian Science, not science, and it lets the Drug War off the hook for the way it is clearly censoring science -- and causing scientists and authors (like Laura Sanders) to self-censor their work.
The Drug War DOES exist. Prohibition DOES exist. And it is having a profound effect on what Science News will even report or consider.
SN should begin adding a disclaimer to all articles on topics like depression, stating that many options for treatment have been ignored in conformance with Drug War prejudices. Until that happens, your articles on subjects like depression belong in a magazine about Christian Science, not science.
Euthanasia and Shock Therapy in the age of the Drug War
It is bizarre that we should have "the right to die" in a world that outlaws drugs. That means, in effect, that we have a right to die, but we do not have the right to use drugs that might make us want to live. Bad policy is indicated by absurd outcomes, and this is but one of many absurd outcomes that the policy of prohibition foists upon the world -- and yet which remain unaccountably invisible to almost everyone, including almost all proponents of the aforesaid euthanasia.
In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James demonstrated how materialists are blind to the depth and meaning of psychological states of ecstasy and transcendence -- or in other words the states that are peculiar to mystics like St. Teresa... and to those who use psychoactive substances like laughing gas. The medical materialist is dogmatically dismissive of such states, which explains why they can pretend that godsend medicines that elate and inspire have no positive uses whatsoever:
To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce.
And so materialist scientists collaborate with the drug war by refusing to see glaringly obvious drug benefits. They acknowledge only those benefits that they believe are visible under a microscope. The Hindu religion would not exist today had materialist scientists held soma to such a standard. But that's the absurd pass to which prohibition eventually brings us in a society wherein materialist science is the new god: scientists are put in charge of deciding whether we are allowed to imagine new religions or not.
This materialist bias is inspired in turn by behaviorism, the anti-indigenous doctrine of JB Watson that makes the following inhumane claim:
"Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic."
According to this view, the hopes and the dreams of a "patient" are to be ignored. Instead, we are to chart their physiology and brain chemistry.
JB Watson's Behaviorism is a sort of Dr. Spock with a vengeance. It is the perfect ideology for a curmudgeon, because it would seem to justify all their inability to deal with human emotions. Unfortunately, the attitude has knock-on effects because it teaches drug researchers to ignore common sense and to downplay or ignore all positive usage reports or historic lessons about positive drug use. The "patient" needs to just shut up and let the doctors decide how they are doing. It is a doctrine that dovetails nicely with drug war ideology, because it empowers the researcher to ignore the obvious: that all drugs that elate have potential uses as antidepressants.
That statement can only be denied when one assumes that "real" proof of efficacy of a psychoactive medicine must be determined by a doctor, and that the patient's only job is to shut up because their hopes and dreams and feelings cannot be accurately displayed and quantified on a graph or a bar chart.
Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice. The media has played its role with movies like "Running with the DEA," "The Crisis" and "The Runner." In the first of these three, the DEA are the "good guys" for murdering a suspect in cold blood. In the second, the DEA plants evidence to cover up the murder of a drug suspect by an indignant mother. And in the third, a white detective stages a raid that kills a young Black teenager that said detective refers to as "a waste of space."
The Drug War is all about making us hate -- making us hate anybody except for the folks that brought about the violence and drug problems in the first place: the damned prohibitionists who, having failed to outlaw liquor, turned their scapegoating on every less dangerous substance in the world.
Meanwhile, the media have done all they can to support this drug war by holding the use of outlawed substances to safety standards that are never applied to any other risky activity on earth, meanwhile ignoring the fact that prohibition encourages ignorance and leads to contaminated drug supply. Thousands of American young people die each month because of unregulated supply and ignorance, not from drugs themselves.
The media also supports the drug war by failing to hold it accountable for all the problems that it causes. Just read any article on inner-city shootings -- today's journalists will trace the problem to a lack of jobs or to global warming, to anything but the drug war which incentivized violence in the first place. As for violence overseas, we're told that it's caused by evil rotten drug cartels -- without any acknowledgement that it was American drug policy that created those cartels out of whole cloth, just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia here in the States.
Meanwhile, the media have a field day superstitiously blaming drugs. It used to be PCP, ICE, oxy, crack, and now it's fentanyl... It's all part of the DEA's tried-and-true formula to stay relevant, as academic Philip Jenkins clearly demonstrates in "Synthetic Panics": Take a local drug problem and publicize it so that it goes national. Then work with a film crew at "48 Hours" to show that the drug in question threatens the white American middle class. Then go to Congress, hat in hand, and accept billions to 'solve' the latest drug problem.
And Americans fall for it every time. In fact, their gullibility seems to be increasing over time. They love to hate drugs, so much so that drugs have become the new horror trope. Recent movies have taken to personifying "evil" drugs in the forms of Crack Raccoons and Meth Gators. It's sad that America has become so superstitious and childish about drugs -- and the media can take much of the blame.
Check out the 2021 article in Forbes in which a materialist doctor professes to doubt whether laughing gas could help the depressed. Materialists are committed to seeing the world from the POV of Spock from Star Trek.
I'd like to become a guinea pig for researchers to test the ability of psychoactive drugs to make aging as psychologically healthy as possible. If such drugs cannot completely ward off decrepitude, they can surely make it more palatable. The catch? Researchers have to be free.
This is the mentality for today's materialist researcher when it comes to "laughing gas." He does not care that it merely cheers folks up. He wants to see what is REALLY going on with the substance, using electrodes and brain scans.
Addiction was not a big thing until the drug war. It's now the boogie-man with which drug warriors scare us into giving up our freedoms. But getting obsessed on one single drug is natural in the age of choice-limiting prohibition.
Using the billions now spent on caging users, we could end the whole phenomena of both physical and psychological addiction by using "drugs to fight drugs." But drug warriors do not want to end addiction, they want to keep using it as an excuse to ban drugs.
My consciousness, my choice.
The MindMed company (makers of LSD Lite) tell us that euphoria and visions are "adverse effects": that's not science, that's an arid materialist philosophy that does not believe in spiritual transcendence.
In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.
In fact, we throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The words as used today are extremely judgmental. The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.
Prohibition is wrong root and branch. It seeks to justify the colonial disdain for indigenous healing practices through fearmongering.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Science News Unveils Shock Therapy II: just when you thought it was safe to go back into the insane asylum..., published on July 11, 2023 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, Science News Unveils Shock Therapy II: just when you thought it was safe to go back into the insane asylum..., published on July 11, 2023 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)
