hen I was a teenager, I was always begging the field of psychiatry to do more. It seemed to me that there must be so many medicines out there, surely something would set my mind straight.
The result of my naivete? I was promptly pronounced 'an addictive personality.'
I've now had 40 years to think about that diagnosis and I call bull crap.
Imagine a field like psychiatry, that limits itself to prescribing a handful of addictive medicines, suspicious of anyone who dares hanker for more. That hankering is, in reality, utterly sensible.
Suppose you walk into a jewelry store and they have only one kind of diamond. You ask for other kinds of diamonds and they label you ungrateful and greedy. That's what psychiatry does when someone dares to allude to a larger pharmacopeia that psychiatry has dogmatically forsworn, whether in conformance with drug law, scientism, and/or the interests of the pharmaceutical companies that crank out the starkly limited formulary of politically acceptable mood medicines.
How dare I want to pick and choose from among the thousands of rain forest godsends. Why can't I just go along with the modest medicine cabinet of addictive substances that chemists have created to narrow down our choices to a nice politically acceptable roster?
Of course, the true irony of this state of affairs becomes plain when we consider that well over 1 in 8 Americans are addicted to modern-day antidepressants, one out of four when it comes to women, and that many of these drugs are harder to kick than heroin. So psychiatry may have a problem with SOMETHING, but it's clearly not with addiction. My own doctor told me not even to bother trying to 'get off of' Effexor, given its 95% recidivism rate. And so I become an eternal patient, with all the demoralizing emotional baggage that comes with that condition. It's pretty much the exact opposite of empowering a patient, to make them a ward of the state, forever to be defined by their so-called illness.
The so-called addictive personality is actually 'on to something.' They realize that there's a vast pharmacopeia out there and they want psychiatry to use it. Psychiatry, for its part, must label such individuals as pathological, lest their craving for more should serve to illuminate the niggardliness of psychiatric offerings and demonstrate all too clearly that the entire field operates in crass subservience to anti-patient Drug War law and ideology.
I think what Brian's saying here is that it's meaningless to talk about addictive personalities in a society in which we criminalize most psychoactive medicines and teach people to fear and loathe them rather than to understand them. In a society wherein all pharmacological dangers were clear and folks knew how to get the kind of transcendence they were looking for in the safest possible way, no one would knowingly opt for the deadliest possible medicine. The problem is that Drug Warriors completely ignore this motivation for substance use -- namely the search for some kind of self-transcendence in life: for religious purposes, for on-demand motivation, to find some new spiritual truth, or to just take a break from a negative inner voice that is keeping one from achieving one's goals in life and/or performing a particular activity without self-destructing.
The Drug War brings about addiction by limiting the would-be user's knowledge of and access to all but a handful of drugs that the dealer is incentivized to sell. But in a world where mind medicines were legal and available, those who seek pharmacologically aided transcendence could do so non-addictively, either by using non-addictive substances like shrooms and MDMA or else by creating a drug use schedule which strategically alters the substances taken on a weekly basis in such a way that addiction to any given substance will never occur.
There was a documentary about PJ Brewster a few years ago in which we learned that PJ's friends did just that. They used a variety of 'hard' drugs -- including crack cocaine -- but never became addicted because they were careful to never use the same drug twice in a row. Of course, the guy who volunteered this information has learned Drug War etiquette so he immediately added a non-sequitur apology saying, 'Of course that was wrong.'
Really? Why is it wrong to use psychoactive substances in a non-addictive way? It's wrong because the know-nothing Drug Warriors do not want Americans to know that such a thing is even possible! But the fact is, it is possible and it is the wise thing to do. In fact, this is what we should be teaching folks who seek pharmacological transcendence: how to use drugs (aka godsend mind medicines) in such a way that they will not get hooked -- unless they want to, of course: Unless they hit on the perfect drug (out of a freely available pharmacopoeia of thousands of such legalized medicines) that they don't mind taking for life, in the same way that 1 in 4 depressed women take a Big Pharma drug for depression every day of THEIR life.
Worried about addiction? Once we legalize all mind medicine, a pharmacologically savvy shaman/empath could imagine thousands of ways to slowly move the user who is unhappy with one med to another less troublesome med. We call such changes impossible today for two reasons: first because we outlaw almost all the medicine in question here, and second because the Drug War's goal is to get the user 'sober' according to America's hypocritical definition of that term, not to get them happy according to their own definition of that term, not to bring them self-transcendence. Once we jettison the drug-war's Christian Science requirement for drug-free sobriety, the world's our oyster in terms of pharmacological treatments for the unhappy, the unsuccessful -- or simply for those who want to see beyond the veil, beyond the practical but starkly limited perceptual world served up to us daily by our five meager senses.
Were drugs legal and understood -- rather than illegal and feared -- Amy Winehouse might still be alive today (see How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse: How the drug war both created Amy's problems and kept us from solving them.), for instead of just 'tut-tutting' at her drug use (or recommending Christian Science rehab and a grim future of teeth-clenching 'sobriety'), her friends would have shown her safe ways to gain the transcendence that she was after, not by 'saying no to drugs,' but by saying yes to the right drugs, used in the right way.
Author's Follow-up: March 21, 2025
I should refute here a couple of predictable comebacks to the ideas suggested above. First, it will be said that there is scientific evidence of a correlation between addictive drug use and brain chemistry and/or genetics. This is no doubt true in many cases. But the question is, how influential would those correlations be in a world in which we did not starkly limit the human being's choice of drugs via prohibition and in which we educated users instead of attempting to frighten them? Until we have allowed for free choice and education, we have no business pathologizing the addict for the bad choices that we have all but forced them to make. Until we have regained our right to drugs and hence our control of our own thoughts and feelings, it is impossible to discern the extent to which addiction is fundamentally caused by biochemical factors and how much addiction is merely an inevitable artefact of Drug War laws and policies.
Second, I have used the term "addiction" above in cases where the materialist and psychiatrist would no doubt use the term "dependency." The latter term may be correct according to the strictest definition of those terms. But I use the terms interchangeably for a reason: that is, to linguistically protest the modern notion that dependency is somehow better than addiction. This may be true in some sense, but then the question becomes, "for WHOM is dependency better?" It is clearly better for society because the sufferer of drug dependency merely suffers in silence when he or she goes without product -- they do not make any fuss, they merely wish that they were dead -- whereas the addicted individual pesters us for needed medicine and may even resort to antisocial behavior when they run short. My point here is that there is no huge difference between dependency and addiction from the user's point of view, insofar as they both end up feeling like hell by their respective conditions. And so I am suspicious of psychiatrists who make much of the distinction, since it seems to me that they are thereby falsely suggesting that antidepressants are morally superior to other drugs, whereas hell is hell from the psychological point of view of the problematic user.
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.
In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.
This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just there way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.
This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.
How do I know this?
Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.
More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?
This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
When folks die in horse-related accidents, we need to be asking: who sold the victim the horse? We've got to crack down on folks who peddle this junk -- and ban books like Black Beauty that glamorize horse use.
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.
Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.
Many articles in science mags need this disclaimer: "Author has declined to consider the insights gained from drug-induced states on this topic out of fealty to Christian Science orthodoxy." They don't do this because they know readers already assume that drugs will be ignored.
Prohibition turned habituation into addiction by creating a wide variety of problems for users, including potential arrest, tainted or absent drug supply, and extreme stigmatization.
Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.
There are no recreational drugs. Even laughing gas has rational uses because it gives us a break from morbid introspection. There are recreational USES of drugs, but the term "recreational" is often used to express our disdain for users who go outside the healthcare system.
The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
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 Myth of the Addictive Personality published on March 2, 2020 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)
hen I was a teenager, I was always begging the field of psychiatry to do more. It seemed to me that there must be so many medicines out there, surely something would set my mind straight.
Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, because the Drug War gives me the right to be a noxious busybody. That, and I also wanted to suggest a few related essays, namely: Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism: The Drug War renders us impotent in treating alcoholism because it outlaws all the psychoactive medicine that might inspire the alcoholic to change., Addicted to Addiction: How the drug war leads to a morbid and hypocritical focus on addiction, Addicted to Ignorance: How the drug war prevents the effective treatment of addiction and withdrawal, forcing patients onto addictive Big Pharma meds while ignoring the godsend mind-changing medicines of Big Pharma, which are crying out to be used in psychiatric settings., How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse: How the drug war both created Amy's problems and kept us from solving them. and Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate: a new way of fighting addiction, using entheogenic plants, ending the needless torture of addicts.
You have been reading an article entitled, The Myth of the Addictive Personality published on March 2, 2020 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)
