Despite his admirable honesty about drugs, Andrew Weil, too, has succumbed to some Drug War propaganda himself, at least when it comes to opiates. He tells us that they should never be used for 'recreational' purposes, which to Weil apparently includes the use of the drug by artists to inspire creativity, tho' Andrew never tells us why such use is to be considered as 'recreational,' as opposed to, say, occupational. Is coffee used for 'recreational' purposes in the morning? Is it not rather used for the practical purpose of waking ourselves up?
He has apparently bought into the Drug Warrior lie that some demonized substances can have no good use, for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in any dose, for any reason -- except, in this case, for bona fide pain relief due to some physical injury or illness.
That is just plain wrong. Poets used to use opium in the 19th century in what author Richard Middleton called "a series of quarterly carouses," in order to improve their creativity and give themselves new ideas. In other words, they knew that there was the potential for addiction and they scheduled their use accordingly. That's what happens when folks are educated about drugs rather than made to fear them.
And yet Andrew would agree with the Drug Warriors that even such wise use is to be forbidden -- or at least to be emphatically discouraged. If he had had his way in the 19th and early 20th century, we would have a far less inspiring oeuvre of horror stories by Poe and Lovecraft, who devised entire literary landscapes out of their opium-inspired dreams.
Much of his worry is over addiction -- and yet Andrew Weil says nothing about the Psychiatric Pill Mill to which 1 in 4 American women are addicted for life.
The question that he fails to answer is: why is opiate addiction so much worse than a Big Pharma addiction, especially when we're talking about the time-honored smoking of opium? Once you factor out the problems that are caused by the Drug War itself, we see that the difference between our reactions to addiction is an esthetic one: We are not upset when an SSRI patient suddenly goes off their meds because their suffering will be internal and take place in their home, where they will merely wish that they were dead. We can go about our business as usual. The heroin addict, however, is more likely to show up on the street and rob banks and so forth because his unnecessarily expensive medicine is not regularly available. This impacts us personally and so we consider heroin addiction to be a huge problem.
When it comes to Big Pharma drugs, however, we are not troubled at all. To the contrary, if these people are off their meds, we simply tell them to get back on them. Sure, the SSRI user has been turned into a ward of the healthcare state by the psychiatric pill mill, but that's their problem. This is an odd reaction, by the way, given that Weil's main charge against heroin is that it leaves one in a constant state of dependence. At least the heroin addict is not forced to share his innermost thoughts every three months with a psychiatric intern who is 1/2 or even 1/3 his own age.
Thus Weil inexplicably ignores the great pharmacological dystopia of our time. But he did say at least one thing about antidepressants that really struck home for me:
"Some commentators complain that widespread prescription of SSRIs has made many Americans less interesting and less creative."
I hate to say this, but that is so true in my experience -- and that's a down side that no one has ever ascribed to opiates. Meanwhile, the researchers who blissfully ignore the endless downsides of SSRIs and SNRIs are training their microscopes on MDMA even as we speak in an effort to find even the tiniest possible danger in that drug, so that they can dramatically cry: "See? MDMA has to be kept illegal forever, for anyone, in any dose, at any time, ever!" Meanwhile, Big Pharma peddles drugs on prime-time television whose side effects include 'death' itself and no one bats an eyelash.
This is enormous hypocrisy to which Americans are blinded thanks to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.
Yes, we should teach folks to avoid opiate addiction -- and we can do that. The poets cited by Middleton managed to pull that off. But we should not so obsess over downsides as to pretend that upsides do not even exist. To the contrary, in a sane world we would be studying how opium achieves its amazing effect of giving us metaphorical dreams in which we can mentally separate ourselves from our pains and problems. We should be studying how the brain works in conjunction with opium to render such insightful reveries. But instead, Weil agrees with the Drug Warrior that we should deny, a priori, the psychological benefits of opium in preference for demonizing that drug.
Finally, Weil seems unaware of the fact that the Chinese were responsibly using opium as a culturally sanctioned practice centuries before the British started selling it to them. The downsides of opium use only came on the Western radar when the British Anti-Opium League came along in the 19th century and did for opium what the American Anti-Saloon League would eventually do for liquor, namely, painted its use in the darkest moralistic colors imaginable.
Oh, sorry, there is one more thing that Andrew Weil got wrong in his book. He keeps implying that heroin users have an underlying problem that needs to be addressed. But this is just a drug-war canard. Sure, we all have problems, but why do we pathologize the desire to be perky and alive and vibrant and bursting with energy? Surely, that's an understandable desire, the desire to feel euphoric and "good to go." That desire is not something that we have to refer to some Freudian trauma or other. If anyone has an underlying problem, it's those of us who (like myself) naively put their emotional lives in the hands of a psychiatric establishment that is going to addict them for life to ineffective meds that not only fail to make them euphoric, but which actually rob them of their creativity as well! When are the Gabriel Mate's of the world going to look into the underlying pathologies that turned folks like myself into custom-made patsies for the psychiatric pill mill?
But Weil is only human. We've all been told that the political category of "drugs" is junk for the last 100+ years and both academics and screenwriters have written accordingly. That's why I'm constantly reading on this topic, to uncover the false beliefs that I myself hold as a result of my life long indoctrination with Drug War ideology. So far in my reading, Weil seems to be one of the least brainwashed authors on Planet Earth, but even he could benefit from living by the following maxim which I have created for my own use: question everything you have ever been told or thought about so-called "drugs"? And after you've done so, question yourself again. For to paraphrase a line from William Shirer's classic book on Hitler: "No one who has not lived for years in a DRUG WAR SOCIETY can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda."
The term "recreational" is very problematic when it comes to psychoactive drug use, since recreation itself can be therapeutic. The term seems to be a puritanical put-down of certain kinds of use, as who should say, "Use opiates for pain, but for God's sake, don't enjoy it!"
Author's Follow-up: September 7, 2023
This sounds like humor, but this is in fact the ideology that the DEA follows: folks are to use opiates for pain and if they enjoy that, then the prescribing doctor must be penalized. This is puritanism run amok. If you want to know if a newly discovered drug is going to be "scheduled," just ask yourself, does it bring about unseemly laughter or mirth? Then the answer will be yes. This is not science, of course, but Christian Science.
Author's Follow-up: January 31, 2025
This is why the drug-war is so insipid. Even the most progressive writers on this topic are brainwashed. When we contrast a dependence on heroin with a dependence on big pharma meds, heroin comes out looking very good, with all its shortcomings being traceable to its illegality. Why do people use heroin in the first place? Because opium was outlawed, and then morphine was seen as problematic. Drug war prohibition started the entire problem by outlawing opium. Young people were not dying in the streets from opiates when opium was legal. It took drug prohibition to accomplish that.
Even Weil does not understand: prohibition is the problem, not drugs!
Moreover, Weil knows little about the downsides of being an eternal patient. It is humiliating and extremely expensive and time-consuming to be a ward of the healthcare state -- whereas illegal drug users only have to deal with a businessperson to get THEIR medications. They do not have to discuss their personal life. All the dangers of illegal drug use are clearly traceable to prohibition -- the uncertainty of product and the lack of education, for instance.
But Weil is not alone. I have yet to read any pundit who acknowledges the economic and personal disempowerment inherent in turning a depressed or anxious person into a patient for life. And yet these same pundits feel free to trash heroin for causing dependency.
They fail to see that drug prohibition causes that dependency by ruling out all alternatives. The user has to buy what's available, not what makes sense. When we outlaw all psychoactive godsends and refuse to educate, we should not be surprised when people make problematic choices. Meanwhile, we should have the honesty to recognize that the healthcare option is just as problematic, if not more so: it is not an ideal choice either insofar as it turns users into patients for life.
And what about this much-ballyhooed dependency? Does no one but myself recognize that there are common-sense ways to fight dependency by using drugs to fight drugs? This is just psychological common sense. Sadly, behaviorism is the ruling paradigm in modern psychology today, and so common sense is in short supply among so-called drug use "experts." For more on this topic, read my essay entitled Fighting Drugs with Drugs.
One despairs of making folks understand: our whole attitude toward drugs is wrong. Prohibition causes all of the problems it purports to solve AND THEN SOME!
And yet Weil is about as enlightened as they come with respect to drugs. The problem is that we need to become far more enlightened than that. His views are still informed by Drug War hysteria for all his honesty.
But if you want to see how much more ignorant Americans can be, consider the Florida state legislature, which worked to get Weil's book "From Chocolate to Morphine" out of school libraries. There is nothing that Drug Warriors hate so much as honesty and education about drugs. Ignorance was good enough for their prehistoric counterparts, and they demand ignorance for their kids!
As such, these modern Neanderthals are murderers, if we are honest. They are responsible for the fact that young people are dying on the street from opiates. Opium was used responsibly at home before their kind started screaming about Chinese influence and so decided to start calling opium users junkies and addicts, meanwhile supporting a psychiatric pill mill that made 1 in 4 Americans reliant on Big Pharma for life. They were the ones who created a whole new occupational field full of "addiction" experts. What we need, however, are prohibition "experts": philosophers who point out how the outlawing of psychoactive drugs and a lack of choice and information is causing all of these problems that are social workers and scientists are now making a career out of "solving" -- always with Drug War precepts in mind about the infantile nature of human beings with respect to drugs.
Book Reviews
Most authors today reckon without the drug war -- unless they are writing specifically about "drugs" -- and even then they tend to approach the subject in a way that clearly demonstrates that they have been brainwashed by drug war orthodoxy, even if they do not realize it themselves. That's why I write my philosophical book reviews, to point out this hypocrisy that no other philosopher in the world is pointing out.
Hey, if I thought I would ever be recognized in this lifetime, I would be humble and patient -- but it's clear to me that I'm to be largely ignored here-below until such time as I bite some serious dust, so you'll just have to put up with my horn-blowing, fair enough? I have precedents for this arrogance, by the way. In late life, when Schopenhauer wished to refer readers to his previous essays, he would usually refer them to his "prize" essays, as in the following cases drawn from "The World as Will and Idea."
"... as I have shown in my prize essay upon freedom."
"In my prize essay on the freedom of the will..."
"...given in my prize essay on the foundation of morals..."
He clearly understood that praise was too important a task to be left to amateurs.
Drug Warriors rail against drugs as if they were one specific thing. They may as well rail against penicillin because cyanide can kill.
Yeah. That's why it's so pretentious and presumptuous of People magazine to "fight for justice" on behalf of Matthew Perry, as if Perry would have wanted that.
Was looking for natural sleeping aids online. Everyone ignores the fact that all the stuff that REALLY works has been outlawed! We live in a pretend world wherein the outlawed stuff no longer even exists in our minds! We are blind to our lost legacy regarding plant medicines!
John Halpern wrote a book about opium, subtitled "the ancient flower that poisoned our world." What nonsense! Bad laws and ignorance poison our world, NOT FLOWERS!
NOW is the time for entheogens -- not (as Strassman and Pollan seem to think) at some future date when materialists have finally wrapped their minds around the potential usefulness of drugs that experientially teach compassion.
"Chemical means of peering into the contents of the inner mind have been universally prized as divine exordia in man’s quest for the beyond... before the coarseness of utilitarian minds reduced them to the status of 'dope'." -- Eric Hendrickson
In the board game "Sky Team," you collect "coffees" to improve your flying skills. Funny how the use of any other brain-focusing "drug" in real life is considered to be an obvious sign of impairment.
"Arrest made in Matthew Perry death." Oh, yeah? Did they arrest the drug warriors who prioritized propaganda over education?
"Users" can be kept out of the workforce by the extrajudicial process of drug testing; they can have their baby taken from them, their house, their property -- all because they do not share the intoxiphobic attitude of America.
Properly speaking, MDMA has killed no one at all. Prohibitionists were delighted when Leah Betts died because they were sure it was BECAUSE of MDMA/Ecstasy. Whereas it was because of the fact that prohibitionists refuse to teach safe use.
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, What Andrew Weil Got Wrong: a philosophical review of 'From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know about Mind-Altering Drugs', published on December 28, 2022 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)
The term "recreational" is very problematic when it comes to psychoactive drug use, since recreation itself can be therapeutic. The term seems to be a puritanical put-down of certain kinds of use, as who should say, "Use opiates for pain, but for God's sake, don't enjoy it!" 
You have been reading an article entitled, What Andrew Weil Got Wrong: a philosophical review of 'From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know about Mind-Altering Drugs', published on December 28, 2022 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)
