
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.
Cocaine use is a blessing for some, just a little fun for most, and a curse for a few. Just like any other risky activity. We need to educate people about drugs rather than endlessly arresting them for attempting to improve their mental power!
If I smoke opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag. If I use Big Pharma "meds" every day of my life, I am a good patient.
The best step we could take in harm reduction is re-legalizing everything and starting to teach safe use. Spend the DEA's billions on "go" teams that would descend on locations where drugs are being used stupidly -- not to arrest, but to educate.
Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.
America won't be grown up until we start blaming drug misuse on people and/or policies rather than on drugs.
The problem for alcoholics is that alcohol decreases rationality in proportion as it provides the desired self-transcendence. Outlawed drugs can provide self-transcendence with INCREASED rationality and be far more likely to keep the problem drinker off booze than abstinence.
Almost all of today's magazine articles about human psychology should come with the following disclaimer:
"This article was written from the standpoint of Drug War ideology, which holds that outlawed substances can have no beneficial uses whatsoever."
Psychiatrists refuse to acknowledge that it is hugely disempowering to turn patients into wards of the healthcare state with dependence-causing "meds." End drug prohibition and end the psychiatric pill mill.
We give kids drugs to improve their concentration -- but if adults use drugs to concentrate, we call them names and throw them in jail.

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