As a 64-year-old lifelong depressive, I would suggest that science is not free in the age of the Drug War and that it is therefore pseudoscience. The proof can be seen by looking at academic articles about drugs that elate and inspire. Almost all of the articles are about abuse and misuse. This is because organizations like NIDA 1 are all about abuse and do not generally fund articles about positive use. This again is in line with the ideology of the ONDCP which is to ignore positive talk about "drugs" for fear of encouraging use. This is politics, not science. Moreover, scientists know that their jobs are at stake if they adduce positive evidence about the use of the drugs that we have been taught to hate since childhood.
Scientists do not seem to realize the anti-science nature of the Drug War, which tells us falsely that drugs can be panned entirely based on their worst imaginable usage -- which, of course, is a standard whereby no drug in the world could ever pass muster.
I would further suggest that modern science IS pseudoscience when it comes to mental health. It is focused exclusively on reductive "evidence" for things like happiness, meanwhile ignoring obvious things like laughter, first-person user testimony, and the history of psychoactive substances through the ages, some of which have inspired entire religions, as coca inspired the Peruvian Indians, Soma inspired the Vedic-Hindu religion and the psychedelic kykeon inspired a who's-who of western elites for 2,000 consecutive years -- until the ritual was tellingly outlawed by Emperor Theodosius in 392ce as a threat to Christianity. Dr. Robert Glatter epitomizes this purblind reductionism in his 2021 article in Forbes magazine asking "Can laughing gas help those with treatment-resistant depression?" The answer is an obvious yes for the depressed like myself, but Glatter has to ask because mere laughter and user reports are not considered "scientific."
That is why, in order to save a few kids whom we refuse to educate about safe use, drugs like laughing gas can be made illegal for everybody in the world -- notwithstanding the fact that William James himself said we should study the effects of such substances to learn about the ultimate nature of reality. That's how depressed folk like myself are thrown under the bus by science. That's why I have had to go my entire lifetime now without godsend medicines that grow at my feet, because scientists are collaborating with the Drug War to normalize prohibition by ignoring all the many obvious benefits of illegal drugs. This is why I've been asking science magazines like SciAm and Science News to start adding disclaimers to their articles about subjects like consciousness and depression, to make it clear that the authors and researchers are taking Christian Science substance prohibition as a natural baseline from which to draw deductions and inferences about the topics in question. My many suggestions on this topic have never even been acknowledged, let alone acted upon.
Consider the state of affairs for the folks on the receiving end of science's current treatments: If I am depressed, the doctor can prescribe me Big Pharma 23 meds that will fog my brain and turn me into an eternal patient via chemical dependency -- but they cannot prescribe me the drugs that grow at my feet and which obviously inspire and elate. They tell me laughing gas 4 won't REALLY make me happy, that chewing the coca leaf won't REALLY make me happy, but that is all scientism and politics. God save me from drugs that "REALLY" make me happy, because they have turned me into a patient for life.
If, as a result of prohibition, I get really depressed, what is the scientific go-to treatment? Shock therapy! Talk about scientism and politics!
Currently we would rather damage the brain of the depressed with shock therapy than to let them use time-honored substances that obviously cheer one up and elate. My uncle was subjected to that treatment 40 years ago and if the treatment "worked," it was only in the sense that it made him more docile and easier to be around -- because he simply muttered rather than musing gloomily.
This is why I am somewhat taken aback by your fierce attacks on mental health pseudoscience on Twitter. Based on my 60+ years of experience, mental health treatment is and will continue to be pseudoscience until scientists stop collaborating with the Drug War while tacitly agreeing with them that drugs that elate and inspire do not "really" elate and inspire. Until they do so, they are not advancing the cause of science, but rather the cause of Christian Science, which tells us that drugs are immoral.
Not only is this Christian Science ideology, but it is fanatically so. Many states and countries now allow euthanasia. This means that the depressed can kill themselves with drugs, but they are not allowed to use drugs in order to make them want to live.
I also am unclear as to what you meant by your August 12th Tweet about "weaponizing kindness" (which is the vague but button-pushing post that inspired me to write to you in the first place). It did not seem to be in response to any other Tweet, so it's hard to agree or disagree with it. However, I would say that we SHOULD be weaponizing kindness when it comes to drugs like MDMA 5 . These drugs can inspire compassion in users and should therefore be "weaponized" -- that is, used therapeutically to stop haters from shooting up grade schools. Instead, drugs like ecstasy are pilloried for killing a handful of people, all of whom died because the prohibitionists failed to teach safe use. In short, if we fail to weaponize kindness with drugs like Ecstasy, then we are tacitly weaponizing real weapons in the hands of mass murderers.
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
Freud thought cocaine was a great antidepressant. His contemporaries demonized the drug by focusing only on the rare misusers. That's like judging alcohol by focusing on alcoholics.
We throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.
This is why we would rather have a depressed person commit suicide than to use "drugs" -- because drugs, after all, are not dealing with the "real" problem. The patient may SAY that drugs make them feel good, but we need microscopes to find out if they REALLY feel good.
The best long-term treatment for OUD would be to normalize the nightly smoking of opium at home, not to addict the user to government-supplied drugs that render them impervious to the benefits of the poppy plant.
Typical materialist protocol. Take all the "wonder" out of the drug and sell it as a one-size-fits all "reductionist" cure for anxiety. Notice that they refer to hallucinations and euphoria as "adverse effects." What next? Communion wine with the religion taken out of it?
I looked up the company: it's all about the damn stock market and money. The FDA outlaws LSD until we remove all the euphoria and the visions. That's ideology, not science. Just relegalize drugs and stop telling me how much ecstasy and insight I can have in my life!!
All drugs have positive uses. It's absurd to prohibit them because one demographic might misuse them.
The UN of today is in an odd position regarding drugs: they want to praise indigenous societies while yet outlawing the drugs that helped create them.
Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.
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