The aesthetic difference between addiction and chemical dependency
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 19, 2023
here is a pedantic difference between addiction and dependency, but the power of these words to conjure bugbears is based on aesthetic judgements. We recoil from seeing an addict "craving" a drug -- but we have no problem with a chemically dependent person who merely feels like hell because their supply has been interrupted. Let them suffer in silence, it's no skin off our backs. Addicts, on the other hand, are a bother to us. They are eyesores. They may even try to rob us. But the chemically dependent user keeps their hell to themselves. We wouldn't know one if we saw one. Besides, if they're chemically dependent on Big Pharma meds, the powers-that-be are more than happy to furnish the goods that the user requires, for a price, of course, of time, money, and the user's own self-esteem and sense of empowerment in life. For who wants to be turned into an eternal patient of psychiatry? That's why we seldom see a "ragged out" Big Pharma patient -- because their medicines are eternally forthcoming from the doctor's office and CVS Pharmacy.
In fact, the very idea of an addict is a Drug War creation -- or at least a creation of a parochial view of drugs. If we truly welcomed mother nature's pharmacy and were allowed -- and even encouraged -- to find the best medicines for ourselves, there would be no addiction. There would be conditions that a puritan outsider would be eager to call "addiction," but the user would be able to employ a wide variety of drugs to obfuscate the negative effects of such a pharmacological situation and to thereby move on -- if he of she so desired, of course, for addiction is objectively wrong only to the extent that one's poison of choice is no longer, in fact, one's poison of choice. In our world, that catastrophe is treated with Naloxone and cold turkey. In a truly free world, one in which nature is considered a benefactor rather than a kingpin, we would be constantly working to give the supposed 'addict' new ways to switch courses with the help of a vast pharmacopoeia of psychoactive substances (some "natural," some not), without the gnashing of teeth that we require in today's materialist and Christian Science "addiction protocols."
Author's Follow-up: April 19, 2023
This, incidentally, is why the Drug War imposes a religion: it is based on the anti-Christian idea that God's creation was not good. The Catholic position has always been that things are not bad. Only people are good or bad based on the way they use things. Why? Because God himself told us that his creation was "good." The Drug War denies that position and is therefore a religion.
Addiction
Addiction is a hugely fraught subject in the age of the drug war. This is because the Drug War does everything it can to make drug use dangerous. It encourages addiction by limiting our access to all but the handful of drugs that dealers find it practical and lucrative to supply. It fails to regulate product so that drug users cannot know the dose or even the quality of what they are ingesting. Meanwhile, the drug war censors honest talk about drug use.
In short, until we end the drug war, we will not know how much addiction is a true problem and how much it is an artifact of drug-war policy. And yet materialist researchers tell us that addiction is a "disease"? Why is it a disease to want to improve one's life with drugs? One could just as easily say that people are diseased, or at least masochistic, if they accept their limitations in life without doing everything they can to transcend them.
Indeed, the very idea that materialists are experts on psychoactive drug use is wrong. It is a category error. The proof is extant. Materialist researchers today are in total denial about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs. They maintain the lie that psychoactive drugs can only be proven effective by looking under a microscope, whereas the proof of such efficacy is right in front of them: in endless anecdotes, in human history, and even in psychological common sense, the kind of common sense that scientists ignore in the name of both drug war ideology and the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism.
This is why "rock stars" use drugs: not just for performance anxiety (which, BTW, is a completely UNDERSTANDABLE reason for drug use), but because they want to fully experience the music, even tho' they may be currently short on money and being hassled by creditors, etc.
In "Four Good Days" the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.
"In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us where to find it." --Antonin Arnaud
Imagine if there were drugs for which dependency was a feature, not a bug. People would stop peddling that junk, right? Wrong. Just ask your psychiatrist.
Mad in America solicits personal stories about people trying to get off of antidepressants, but they will not publish your story if you want to use entheogenic medicines to help you. They're afraid their readers can't handle the truth.
I can't believe people. Somebody's telling me that "drugs" is not used problematically. It is CONSTANTLY used with a sneer in the voice when politicians want to diss somebody, as in, "Oh, they're in favor of DRUGS!!!" It's a political term as used today!
Americans believe scientists when they say that drugs like MDMA are not proven effective. That's false. They are super effective and obviously so. It's just that science holds entheogenic medicines to the standards of reductive materialism. That's unfair and inappropriate.
Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.
We have a low tolerance for the downsides of drug use only. We are fine with high risk levels for any other activity on earth. If drug warriors were serious about saving lives, they'd outlaw guns, free flying, free diving, and all pleasure trips to Mars.
In the board game "Sky Team," you collect "coffees" to improve your flying skills. Funny how the use of any other brain-focusing "drug" in real life is considered to be an obvious sign of impairment.
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, The aesthetic difference between addiction and chemical dependency published on April 19, 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)
here is a pedantic difference between addiction and dependency, but the power of these words to conjure bugbears is based on aesthetic judgements. We recoil from seeing an addict "craving" a drug -- but we have no problem with a chemically dependent person who merely feels like hell because their supply has been interrupted. Let them suffer in silence, it's no skin off our backs. Addicts, on the other hand, are a bother to us. They are eyesores. They may even try to rob us. But the chemically dependent user keeps their hell to themselves. We wouldn't know one if we saw one. Besides, if they're chemically dependent on Big Pharma meds, the powers-that-be are more than happy to furnish the goods that the user requires, for a price, of course, of time, money, and the user's own self-esteem and sense of empowerment in life. For who wants to be turned into an eternal patient of psychiatry? That's why we seldom see a "ragged out" Big Pharma patient -- because their medicines are eternally forthcoming from the doctor's office and CVS Pharmacy.
You have been reading an article entitled, The aesthetic difference between addiction and chemical dependency published on April 19, 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)
