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The Placebo Effect and Drugs

How materialist doctors screw their patients in the age of the drug war

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





June 10, 2023

n "The Holographic Universe," Michael Talbot tells us how the placebo effect can do everything from excising cancer to removing warts. "Simple everyday belief can also have a powerful effect on the body," writes Talbot. "People with cancer live longer if they maintain a fighting spirit.... A slight change in attitude can mean the difference between life and death." In other words, attitude counts. The happy and optimistic individual lives longer.

Most doctors now accept this premise.

Unfortunately, most doctors fail to accept the logical corollary to this premise, namely, that the use of any substance that makes a person feel good can protect that person from disease and help them to heal easily. Any substance. That's why opium smokers seldom get colds. They don't think the cold into existence in the first place, and if they're overcome in spite of this fact, they are enabled to think the cold out of existence, thanks to the mental agility and creativity inspired by the poppy plant. Other drugs that could help one stay healthy for the same reasons run the gamut from MDMA to psilocybin, from methamphetamine to mescaline, from coca to ayahuasca. The mere fact that these drugs can make a person feel good - and, most importantly, look forward to feeling good - is health-making in and of itself.

How many millions have gone without godsend medicine over the last few centuries because western materialist doctors fail to recognize this fact? And yet, to repeat, this fact is but a natural corollary of the postulate that these same doctors readily accept, namely that positive attitudes can improve a person's health and cure or prevent disease.

Instead, most doctors toe the Christian Science Drug War line, which piously tells the patient that "drugs" do not "really" fix anything. For such doctors, cures have to come either from Jesus - or from reductive science, for which only the molecules under a microscope are real. Folks with chronic depression can tell such doctors that the above-mentioned drugs make them happy and optimistic till they're blue in the face, but the doctors will shake their heads and tell them to wait for a "real" cure - like the mind-numbing Big Pharma meds upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life.

Nothing will change until materialists recognize the obvious - that happiness is happiness, even if it is inspired or facilitated by the use of the drugs that we've been taught to hate since we were grade schoolers, since we were first fed the lie that so-called "hard drugs" can only be used irresponsibly and that psychoactive substances have no good uses for anyone, anywhere, ever.



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Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.
The addiction gene should be called the prohibition gene: it renders one vulnerable to prohibition lies and limitations: like the lack of safe supply, the lack of choices, and the lack of information. We should pathologize the prohibitionists, not their victims.
Alcohol makes me sleepy. But NOT coca wine. The wine gives you an upbeat feeling of controlled energy, without the jitters of coffee and without the fury of steroids. It increases rather than dulls mental focus.
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.
Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful. Wrong. Substance demonization is wrong, root and branch. It always causes more suffering than freedom.
Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.
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!"
The Partnership for a Drug Free America should be put on trial for having blatantly lied to Americans in the 1980s about drugs, using our taxpayer money to do it!
Many in the psychedelic renaissance fail to recognize that prohibition is the problem. They praise psychedelics but want to demonize others substances. That's ignorant however. No substance is bad in itself. All substances have some use at some dose for some reason.
That's why I created the satirical Partnership for a Death Free America. It demonstrates clearly that drug warriors aren't worried about our health, otherwise they'd outlaw shopping carts, etc. The question then becomes: what are they REALLY afraid of? Answer: Free thinkers.
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You have been reading an article entitled, The Placebo Effect and Drugs: How materialist doctors screw their patients in the age of the drug war, published on June 10, 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)