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The FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive drugs
The FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive drugs
Here's why.
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 14, 2024
The FDA sets a ridiculous standard of safety for drugs like MDMA 1 . This is because they focus only on the downsides of use. They do not care in the least about the millions who suffer in silence thanks to the outlawing of such drugs. This is why the approval of psychoactive drugs is always based on philosophical assumptions. For the question is not just, "How dangerous is a drug?" but rather "How important are freedom of thought and the power to control one's own mind?" And the FDA has no expertise in deciding such philosophical matters!
By ignoring the needs of such would-be beneficiaries of the drug, the FDA is essentially telling us that freedom of the mind is not important and that the prime imperative in life is to avoid risk at all costs, even if it means the silent suffering of vast swaths of humanity. Of course, this default philosophical premise is a mistake, even on its own terms, for it fails to calculate, or to even consider, the risk of leaving the world full of dissatisfied people, who may take out that dissatisfaction on themselves or others.
Author's Follow-up:
April 05, 2025
This is the same FDA that approves of Big Pharma 23 drugs whose side effects as advertised on prime-time television include death itself 4 . This is the same FDA that thinks that brain-damaging shock therapy is a valuable treatment. They will not let you improve your mood with phenomenally safe drugs, many of which grow at our very feet, but not to worry: if you get TOO depressed, the FDA is ready to help you damage your brain. It may not make you thrive in life, but it will take your mind off of your problems -- and everything else for that matter.
The important thing is, you will no longer be a problem for the nursing staff that you will henceforth require. You will be all compliance and not put up a fight.
This is proof that the materialist approach to mind and mood medicine is perverted and sick. It causes the behaviorist to ignore all obvious benefits to drugs and to prefer suicide 5 to drug use. When is America going to wake up?
The Partnership for a Drug Free America should be put on trial for having blatantly lied to Americans in the 1980s about drugs, while using our taxpayer money to do so!
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.
David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.
We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?
America legalizes alcohol and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.
To treat opioid use disorder, we should re-normalize the peaceable smoking of opium at home as an alternative to drinking alcohol.
If there is an epidemic of "self-harm," prohibitionists never think of outlawing razor blades. They ask: "Why the self-harm?" But if there is an epidemic of drug use which they CLAIM is self-harm, they never ask "Why the self-harm?" They say: "Let's prohibit and punish!"
America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is a drug war collaborator. They helped the DEA confiscate Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in 1987.
Outlawing opium was the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief.
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