First America takes away the citizens' right to manage their own pain by rendering opium illegal. Then the American psychiatric field decides that it will treat the resultant epidemic of depression by damaging the patient's brain, i.e. by treating depressed patients using electroshock therapy.
Imagine what this says about our attitude toward drugs: It means literally that we would rather damage a depressed patient's brain than allow them to be made happy, damage-free, by the occasional use of naturally-occurring medications such as opium that are not under the control of psychiatrists.
This is insanity.
I shared these thoughts online on Reddit, assuming that the point I was making was self-evident. To my horror, I found many otherwise sane-sounding individuals indignantly protesting that ECT was a valuable tool in the psychiatric arsenal, even though the therapy's very proponents admit that it can cause brain damage. I was finally, in fact, banned from posting on the Reddit Psychedelic Studies group because I had outraged the many fans of traditional psychiatry by my heretical stand on ECT - as well as other dubious "cures," such as addictive modern anti-depressants, to which one in four women are now addicted in America and which conduce to anhedonia and a loss of creativity in long-term users.
Even if we grant that ECT is "better than nothing" (a lax standard, indeed, for efficacy!) surely it is unconscionable to use such damaging and addictive treatments when emphatically successful benign treatments are staring us in the face in the outdoor pharmacopeia provided by Mother Nature, in the form of opium 1 , mushrooms, ibogaine, etc.
Doctors claim that ECT is a last resort - but what they really mean is that all better options have been rendered illegal.
If ECT is really required these days, we should at least make it clear that we are forced to that expedient by inane drug laws - rather than pretending to ourselves that this is a inherently beneficial treatment choice that we have selected for its own peculiar merits.
In other words, the DEA and all who believe in it should be shamed every time we are forced to damage a patient's brain in order to relieve depression via ECT - since it is the Drug War's know-nothing mindset that has deprived the suffering of God-given natural medicine that could give them reason to live. So the next time we bemoan the newly vapid personality of a victim of ECT, let's remember to point fingers of blame at the self-righteous Drug Warriors.
The first step in combating the devastating Drug War is to acknowledge its inanity. This means that is the doctor's moral responsibility to turn every shock therapy session into a publicity stunt to shame the Drug Warriors who made the barbaric treatment necessary. If we fail to do that, then it is not just our drug policy that is crazy and immoral but Americans themselves, as witnessed by their patient acceptance of brain-damaging cures and their failure to recognize (let alone denounce) the fascist forces that have rendered such Pyrrhic treatments necessary.
{^Doctors say that "shock therapy is a last resort," but what they really mean is, "shock therapy is a last resort once we rule out all the hundreds of godsend psychoactive plants that the DEA does not allow us to use or even study." Not only are doctors in denial about the DEA's role in making shock therapy necessary, but authors are as well. Few authors (apart from genius Thomas Szasz) see the connection between hideous psychiatric treatment and America's anti-scientific Drug War.}{
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August 31, 2022
Was Brian groveling -- or at least kowtowing? This was before he (Brian) had shipped a copy of his (Brian's) book to Rick Doblin, who promptly began ignoring it. Which I completely understand, by the way, because Rick has enough on his hands without going after the addictive MO of modern psychiatry, which is chiefly what my book was about, or rather was attempting to illustrate with collage-like op-ed pics.
What concerns me is that Rick Doblin may truly believe in the modern religion of omnipresent psychiatry. I was rather disappointed to find that DJ Nutt was also a member of the psychiatric booster club, but then he's a psychiatrist after all, and it's no doubt hard for him to accept the fact that he's been doping up his patients to no purpose during the last decade or three. Not only do the pills in question not correct a chemical imbalance, they appear to actually cause one. That's why the SSRIs create chemical dependence, I figure, by establishing a new baseline for one's brain chemistry, which takes years (if ever) to correct.
Even if DJ and company deny the science, which shows that SSRIs fail, the psychological facts are that dependence makes me a ward of the health care state and an eternal patient, with all the emotional baggage that brings with it. Do you think I like regular 45-minute pilgrimages to the nearest city to watch kids 1/3 my age deciding whether I'm trustworthy enough to keep using their expensive substances upon which they have rendered me dependent. Also, if Big Pharma 23 wants to cure my depression, they have to know how I define a "cure" for depression: namely, in my case, living large would cure my depression. So don't think you are curing my depression by tranquilizing me and making me settle for second best in my life.
Today's drug laws tell us that we must respect the historical use of sacred medicines, while denying us our personal right to use them unless our ancestors did so. That's a meta-injustice! It negatively affects the way that we are allowed to experience our world!
All drugs have positive uses. It's absurd to prohibit them because one demographic might misuse them.
New article in Scientific American: "New hope for pain relief," that ignores the fact that we have outlawed the time-honored panacea. Scientists want a drug that won't run the risk of inspiring us.
Getting off antidepressants can make things worse for only one reason: because we have outlawed all the drugs that could help with the transition. Right now, getting off any drug basically means becoming a drug-free Christian Scientist. No wonder withdrawal is hard.
The term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they denote.
That's the problem with prohibition. It is not ultimately a health question but a question about priorities and sensibilities -- and those topics are open to lively debate and should not be the province of science, especially when natural law itself says mother nature is ours.
The Drug War has turned America into the world's first "Indignocracy," where our most basic rights can be vetoed by a misinformed public. That's how scheming racist politicians put an end to the 4th amendment to the US Constitution.
To oppose the Drug War philosophically, one has to highlight its connections to both materialism and the psychiatric pill mill. And that's a problem, because almost everyone is either a Drug Warrior or a materialist these days and has a vested interest in the continuation of the psychiatric pill mill.
My cousin says we should punish drug dealers. I say we should punish those politicians who created those drug dealers out of whole cloth by passing unprecedented laws against the use of Mother Nature's bounty.
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.
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
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