The aesthetic difference between addiction and chemical dependency
by Brian 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
"The irreducible core of the disease theory of addiction is still as strong as ever -- the significant distinction between good and bad opiate use is whether it's medically supervised." --Emperors of Dreams by Mike Jay
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.
Attempts to improve one's mind and mood are not crimes. The attempt to stop people from doing so is the crime.
That's my real problem with SSRIs: If daily drug use and dependency are okay, then there's no logical or truly scientific reason why I can't smoke a nightly opium pipe.
The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.
"Abuse" is a funny term because it implies that there's a right way to use "drugs," which is something that the drug warriors deny. To the contrary, they make the anti-scientific claim that "drugs" are not good for anybody for any reason at any dose.
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.
As great as it is, "Synthetic Panics" by Philip Jenkins was only tolerated by academia because it did not mention drugs in the title and it contains no explicit opinions about drugs. As a result, many drug law reformers still don't know the book exists.
When people tell us there's nothing to be gained from using mind-improving drugs, they are embarrassing themselves. Users benefit from such drugs precisely to the extent that they are educated and open-minded. Loudmouth abstainers are telling us that they lack these traits.
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."
The "acceptable risk" for psychoactive drugs can only be decided by the user, based on what they prioritize in life. Science just assumes that all users should want to live forever, self-fulfilled or not.
When it comes to "drugs," the government plays Polonius to our Ophelia:
OPHELIA: I do not know, my lord, what I should think.
POLONIUS: Marry, I'll teach you; think yourself a baby!
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)
