Normally, I would consider it bad form for essayists to tell you that they are "feeling down today." It would be a case of what we used to call TMI as kids: "too much information." But this admission by a drug-war philosopher is highly relevant to his essays given that the lack of motivation referred to has been brought about by drug policy, which outlaws all substances that could help one to transcend this feeling and so be productive in life. This is why I call drug prohibition a meta injustice, because it does far worse than censor you as to what you can talk about: it seeks to limit the amount of passion and zeal that you can devote to your cause as a naysayer against the status quo.
Take me, for instance. There are numerous "behind-the-scenes" steps that I could take to improve the potential indexability of each of my essays. These steps would not take long and I have custom forms that I can, in theory, easily fill out for this purpose. And yet I find it quite hard to follow through. It's kind of like that broken yellow water dish that sits out on my porch under the table on which I place peanuts for my blue jays and cardinals. The plate has been sitting there for months now, and I never think much about it; but when I analyze my failure to act (to pick up the two large ceramic pieces and throw them in a trash bag at long last), I realize that I'm always basically thinking to myself: "Why bother?" I actually like neatness and attention to detail, and yet I have difficulty cleaning up "in real time."
Fortunately, I have long since learned to compensate for this shortcoming by conducting condo clean-up operations on a semi-regular basis on my "good days" while listening to a variety of provocative philosophical screeds on my Bose headset, thereby keeping the morbid reflections at bay. And so, as I tote the garbage bag to the door, I'm no longer thinking, "What's the point of doing this, the bag's just going to fill up again after all!"; instead, I'm thinking to myself: "Where does this so-called philosopher 'get off' concluding that the sober mindset is the nonpareil of unbiased baselines, emotionally speaking!? I'll show him: I'll write an essay about this claptrap this very minute -- or at least after the one-hour timer has sounded, announcing the end of this particular battle in my ongoing war against entropy."
Thanks to these compensatory skills that I have acquired over the years, my place is quite attractive, if I do say so myself. And yet there are so many broken yellow water dishes sitting on the metaphorical porch of my life -- so many steps that could in theory be taken to advance my goals -- were I only allowed the same freedom that everyone had just over 100 years ago, the freedom to control how I take care of my own mind and mood.
Of course, if a psychiatrist were to read these thoughts, they would conclude that I have an addictive personality. From their point of view, I don't need any symptomatic incentives (except maybe for coffee and beer, of course): I need to have my brain chemistry changed once and for all with a one-size-fits-all pill that I will have to take for the rest of my life. Speaking of which, this is one of the most surprising realizations that I have come to over my last seven years of studying American drug attitudes, the fact that healthcare pundits never seem to see any downsides in turning their clientele into patients for life. This is odd, because so many of these pundits preach sermons about the horrors of dependency when it comes to illegal medicines, yet they tout dependency as a positive patient attribute when it comes to Big Pharma meds. They have become so blasé on the subject that the Mayo Clinic does not even mention "dependence" in their write-up of Effexor1, which is surely one of the most dependence-causing drugs in the world2 -- a fact that will never be "scientifically" established, however, in a world in which biopharma pays 75% of The FDA’s drug division budget3.
Key Takeaways:
Drug prohibition outlaws motivation and incentive.
We all have -- or had -- the freedom to take care of our own mind and mood.
Healthcare pundits see no downsides in dependency on Big Pharma meds.
The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!
"The Legislature deliberately determines to distrust the very people who are legally responsible for the physical well-being of the nation, and puts them under the thumb of the police, as if they were potential criminals."
-- Aleister Crowley on drug laws
In the Atomic Age Declassified, they tell us that we needed hundreds of thermonuclear tests so that scientists could understand the effects. That's science gone mad. Just like today's scientists who need more tests before they can say that laughing gas will help the depressed. Science today is all about ignoring the obvious.
Immanuel Kant wrote that scientists are scornful about metaphysics yet they rely on it themselves without realizing it. This is a case in point, for the idea that euphoria and visions are unhelpful in life is a metaphysical viewpoint, not a scientific one.
Trump supports the drug war and Big Pharma: the two forces that have turned me into a patient for life with dependence-causing antidepressants. Big Pharma makes the pills, and the drug war outlaws all viable alternatives.
UNESCO celebrates the healing practices of the Kallawaya people of South America. What hypocrisy! UNESCO supports a drug war that makes some of those practices illegal!
My consciousness, my choice.
It's just plain totalitarian nonsense to outlaw mother nature and to outlaw moods and mental states thru drug law. These truths can't be said enough by us "little people" because the people in power are simply not saying them.
It's disgusting that folks like Paul Stamets need a DEA license to work with mushrooms.
Normally, I would consider it bad form for essayists to tell you that they are "feeling down today." It would be a case of what we used to call TMI as kids: "too much information." But this admission by a drug-war philosopher is highly relevant to his essays given that the lack of motivation referred to has been brought about by drug policy, which outlaws all substances that could help one to transcend this feeling and so be productive in life. This is why I call drug prohibition a meta injustice, because it does far worse than censor you as to what you can talk about: it seeks to limit the amount of passion and zeal that you can devote to your cause as a naysayer against the status quo. 
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