"The evolution of modern medicine gave us our current, bifurcated view of drugs: the good ones that treat illness and the bad ones that people use to change their minds and moods." --Jacob Sullum, from Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, p. 25119
America's religion is science -- that's why everyone from George Bush to Carl Hart thinks that I should keep taking my meds. WRONG! The only reason the pill mill 21 was created was because we outlawed endless uplifting godsends, like the hundreds created by Alex Shulgin.
Now, if the question is: would a woman be better off to stop taking an SSRI at this very moment, that's an entirely different question. The question is: should they have been started on them in the first place, or should we not rather have re-legalized MOTHER Nature? Psychiatrists try to shut down discussion on this topic by confusing the two questions. The question of whether SSRIs make sense is a completely different question from, 'Should I personally stop using them at this moment in time?'
Alex Shulgin synthesized chems that occur in the human brain. The outlawing of the godsends he created was absurd. The best we can say about SSRIs against the backdrop of this prohibition is that they are probably better than nothing in some cases -- but that's not saying much. Also, whatever benefits they create must be weighed against the fact that they turn the user into a patient for life by causing chemical dependency. This is a hugely demoralizing arrangement, or I think should be for a freedom-loving individual -- and it is expensive and time-consuming into the bargain.
It's our faith in this materialist science that makes us think it's okay to fry the brain of the depressed but it's not okay to give them medicines that elate and inspire. It's the same doctrine at work with SSRIs: Don't elate them -- try to 'cure' them -- a fool's errand.
This is why I tend to lose half the followers I get -- because science is America's religion and I am a heretic. Even Carl Hart tells me that I should take my pills, not use drugs. It's this warped belief that science has conquered depression. My entire 65 years of life says otherwise.
Let's give SSRIs real competition, then we can talk about popularity and efficacy. Let's see: 'I can take a drug that inspires me, puts me on seventh heaven, and is not addictive -- or I can take an SSRI that dulls my mind and which I have to take for an entire lifetime!'
I can't say that SSRIs destroy creativity, but it is a frequent complaint of pundits on this subject. So we should at least not recommend their use except for the suicidal -- and then ONLY BECAUSE we've outlawed everything that's much much better.
The problem is, almost EVERYONE ignores the Drug War when they write. For instance, they'll say, 'SSRIs are a godsend.' But what does that mean? That they're a godsend in and of themselves? Or they're a godsend because we have outlawed everything else? There's a huge difference.
Is depression an intractable problem per se, or is it intractable because we have outlawed almost every substance that could help the depressed?
'The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us.29'
Aleister Crowley actually TRIED to get addicted to drugs and found he could not. These things are not inevitable. The fact that there are town drunkards does not mean that we should outlaw alcohol.
The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that signs off on Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself.
Assisted suicide cannot be discussed meaningfully without discussing the drug prohibition that renders it necessary in the first place.
I'm going to get on the grade-school circuit, telling kids to say no to horses.
"You think you can handle horses, kids? That's what Christopher Reeves thought. The fact is, NOBODY can handle horses!!!"
Prohibitionists have the same M O they've had for the last 100+ years: blame drugs for everything. Being a drug warrior is never having the decency to say you're sorry -- not to Mexicans, not to inner-city crime victims, not to patients who go without adequate pain relief...
The confusion arises because materialists insist that every psychological problem is actually a physical problem, hence the disease-mongering of the DSM. This is antithetical to the shamanic approach, which sees people holistically, as people, not patients.
Drug warriors blame all of the problems that they cause on "drugs" and then insist that the entire WORLD accept their jaundiced view of the natural bounty that God himself told us was good.
Richard Evans Schultes seems to have originated the harebrained idea (since used by the US Supreme Court to suppress new religions) that you have no right to use drugs in a religious ritual if you did not grow up in a society that had such practices. What tyrannical idiocy!
Outlawing opium was the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief.
Materialists are always trying to outdo each other in describing the insignificance of humankind. Crick at least said we were "a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Musk downsizes us further to one single microbe. He wins!
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