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The Lopsided Focus on the Misuse and Abuse of Drugs

Some thoughts on the Sam Harris podcast interview with Roland Griffiths

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

December 1, 2022



Sam Harris Making Sense Podcast interview with Roland Griffiths

The current scientific system which Roland represents is always worrying about potential abuse. But they are NEVER worrying about the millions who go without godsend medicines thanks to our purblind focus on abuse. Thanks to that Chicken Little mindset, I have now gone my ENTIRE 64-year LIFE without godsend medicines that grow at my feet. And Roland tells me that it could be 4 to 6 more years before the FDA grudgingly lets me use MDMA 1 in a lab setting! (Rick Doblin said five years ago that it would happen last year.) Meanwhile, Roland keeps talking about "drugs of abuse," as if to write off their usefulness entirely. But the drugs he mentions can be used non-addictively for GOOD REASONS. But we have such a purblind focus on "abuse," that we feel justified in keeping such substances from the millions who would use them safely. Moreover, millions have used opium and coca daily for entire long and full lifetimes. Our talk about addicts wreaks of a Christian Science aesthetic judgment.

Besides, if addiction and dependence are such horrible problems, why do these guys say nothing about the fact that 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life on Big Pharma 2 3 meds? I myself have to take Effexor 4 every day of my life, but nobody's worried on my account. And these addictions are the result of scientific hubris, which supposedly found a chemical imbalance to end human sorrow. Wrong. The meds cause the chemical imbalances that they purport to fix, and if they cure depression, my mind never got the memo.

Please, let's stop this lopsided focus on the needs of potential abusers. What about the needs of the depressed like myself who go without godsends -- even now Chicken Little scientists are finding reasons to keep me (and millions of other depressed) from using laughing gas 5 . They want to save a few hundreds from their own idiocy by letting millions go without desperately needed medicines.
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The legalization 6 of all substances would let us treat addictions -- and everything else -- with any and every substance in the world using a shamanic like approach of empathy. Roland sees a few drugs becoming legal and wants to use them to fight addiction -- but that's small potatoes. We need to relegalize all psychoactive substances. Then addiction would all but disappear -- which it should, since in practice addiction is really a pejorative term for habituation. Before 1914, there were opium 7 habitues in America; afterwards, they were "addicts."

The current viewpoint is insane: it's one that says we can shock a depressed person's brain but we cannot give them plant meds to cheer them up. We can euthanize the depressed with chemicals, but we cannot give them chemicals to cheer them up.

Also, the duo seems to think that psychedelic experiences happen in the brain only. Why then did my peyote trip show me imagery of MesoAmerican gods and goddesses? Consciousness appears to be all around us, not just in our brain. Is there no end to the astounding wonders that we will automatically attribute to the supposedly random process of mindless evolution?











Notes for essay entitled The Lopsided Focus on the Misuse and Abuse of Drugs: Some thoughts on the Sam Harris podcast interview with Roland Griffiths:

1: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
2: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
3: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
4: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
5: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
6: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
7: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)




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Self-medicating has always been the most basic of human rights, until the medical industry demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.

Drug prohibition is superstitious idiocy. It is based on the following crazy idea: that a substance that can be misused by a white young person at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.

The U.S. Congress considered the following to be a scientific fact back in 1924: "A person taking narcotics regularly impedes evolutionary progress and tends to degenerate backwards toward the brute." -- Richmond Hobson

Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.

Pundits have been sniffing about the "smell" of Detroit lately. Sounds racist -- especially since such comments tend to come from drug warriors, the guys who ruined Detroit in the first place (you know, with drug laws that incentivized profit-seeking violence as a means of escaping poverty).

Rick Strassman isn't sure that DMT should be legal. Really?! Does he not realize how dangerous it is to chemically extract DMT from plants? In the name of safety, prohibitionists have encouraged dangerous ignorance and turned local police into busybody Nazis.

Americans were always free to take care of their own health -- until drug warriors handed doctors a monopoly on providing mind and mood medicine.

Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.

Musk vies with his fellow materialists in his attempt to diss humans as insignificant. But we are not insignificant. The very term "insignificant" is a human creation. Consciousness rules. Indeed, consciousness makes the rules. Without us, there would only be inchoate particles.

In 1886, coca enthusiast JJ Tschudi referred to prohibitionists as 'kickers.' He wrote: "If we were to listen to these kickers, most of us would die of hunger, for the reason that nearly everything we eat or drink has fallen under their ban."


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