Question: What's the difference between Big Pharma antidepressants 1 and other drugs?
Answer: For other drugs, dependency is a bug; for antidepressants, dependency is a feature.
"By the time I was put on Prozac, they'd tried everything else possible, I'd had my brain fried and blunted with so many other drugs."
1) He believes that Big Pharma drugs are "scientific" and so must obviously make sense and be appropriate (a bias that he shares not simply with most science-worshipping Americans, but even with such otherwise sane anti-prohibitionists as DJ Nutt, Carl Hart, and Rick Doblin).
2) He is receiving money from Eli Lilly, makers of Prozac, and/or has some unmentioned connection with that company.
3) He is so focused on making a pill-friendly point that he pays drastically short shrift to the philosophical problems posed by pills like Prozac; he therefore sets up a straw man representing only the shallow anti-pill thinking of "medical Calvinists," ignoring the deeper philosophical problems with such drugs, the sort that would never occur to the average morality-obsessed prohibitionist.
"The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn burn like fabulous yellow roman candles." -Jack Kerouac from "On the Road"
"The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us."
"A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like..."
"A wonderful feeling of converting energy into action."
"This is total energy, and I am aware of my every membrane. This has been a marvelous experience, very beautiful, joyous, and sensuous."
Here's the first step in the FDA process for evaluating a psychoactive drug:
Ignore all glaringly obvious benefits.
The drug war tells us that certain drugs have no potential uses and then turns that into a self-fulfilling prophecy by outlawing these drugs. This is insanely anti-scientific and anti-progress. We should never give up on looking for positive uses for ANY substance.
You can get a Ph.D. in healthcare, and not learn a thing about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs, as demonstrated by history, anecdote and common sense.
Almost every mainstream article about psychology and consciousness is nonsense these days because it ignores the way that drug prohibition has stymied our investigation of such subjects.
So much harm could be reduced by shunting people off onto safer alternative drugs -- but they're all outlawed! Reducing harm should ultimately mean ending this prohibition that denies us endless godsends, like the phenethylamines of Alexander Shulgin.
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.
Why don't those politicians understand what hateful colonialism they are practicing? Psychedelics have been used for millennia by the tribes that the west has conquered -- now we won't even let folks talk honestly about such indigenous medicines.
This is why the foes of suicide are doing absolutely nothing to get laughing gas into the hands of those who could benefit from it. Laughing is subjective after all. In the western tradition, we need a "REAL" cure to depression.
Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but drugs have never been evil. The evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about drugs.
Being a lifetime patient is not the issue: that could make perfect sense in certain cases. But if I am to be "using" for life, I demand the drug of MY CHOICE, not that of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry, who are dogmatically deaf to the benefits of hated substances.
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