It finally occurred to me why performing research on drug attitudes is so irritating to me. It is because almost everything that has ever been written about drugs in the west is biased in favor of viewing drugs as a problem. Everyone seems to think that we would have been better off as Earthlings if psychoactive substances had never been placed on Planet Earth, with a few obvious exceptions, of course. We were doing fine with our good-old booze, after all, who needs anything else? It seemed to us that God must have made a mistake of some kind, as if we secretly expected him to return to the Earth one day and say: "Sorry about that, folks. I clearly made a mistake by surrounding you guys with all these psychoactive substances. I guess I got carried away, what with creating the universe and all. Here, let me take back everything that I gave you in that quarter, with the obvious exception of the grains, fruits and vegetables used in the production of liquor, of course." BLACK ADVOCATE: Why are you killing my people?
GOVERNMENT: We're fighting drugs!
BLACK ADVOCATE: Oh, okay. Just asking. In that case, how can I help you? I know. What if I start referring to our young Black drug dealers as vampires in public speeches? I could accuse them of sucking the lifeblood out of their communities. Then when you shoot them for committing a crime that was created out of whole cloth by racist politicians, nobody will waste a single tear on the bastards.
A good poster child for this lopsided reporting about drugs is Social Psychologist Henry Lennard, author of a 1972 New York Times article entitled Freud's Disaster With Cocaine.4 The op-ed piece contains the kind of argumentation that could only impress a child -- or else an adult who has been brainwashed since grade school in the substance-demonizing ideology of the Drug War. For one searches the article in vain for proof that Freud's interest in cocaine was a mistake, let alone a disaster. Lennard merely cites the fact that a patient of Freud's (one who was already addicted to morphine) used the drug irresponsibly and became psychologically dependent upon it.
That's it, that's the proof that Freud's advocacy of cocaine was a "disaster."
Now, I ask the reader, have you ever offered a drink to someone who eventually became an alcoholic? If so, did you commit a big mistake -- a disaster, even -- or did you merely provide a potentially beneficial substance to someone who turned out to be incapable of using it wisely, like the vast majority of OTHER drinkers?
And yet the intoxiphobic Lennard perversely tortures this one incident in Freud's life into a supposedly "knock-down" argument, not just against the use of cocaine, but against drug use in general for the treatment of conditions like depression. Not only should we not use cocaine, according to Lennard, but we should apparently not use psilocybin, nor opium, nor phenethylamines, nor beta-carbolines, nor even laughing gas -- no, not even if we're desperately depressed like some relatives of mine, on the verge of suicide, and visiting the ER at 3 in the morning in the naive hope of getting some unequivocal relief. As someone who is intimately acquainted with the downsides of neurotic sobriety, I find this drug-hating attitude of Lennard's to be condescending and naive in the extreme. Did Lennard not understand that in some people, the so-called "sober" state is counterproductive, that it works against our interests in life, and that it promotes personal failure through the subtle transmission of defeatist thoughts to the brain? It matters not whether such thoughts are a product of upbringing, genetics, society, or biochemistry, or -- which is much more likely -- a hopelessly entangled admixture of all four factors. The point is that there exist drugs like cocaine that can clearly help the afflicted to transcend such nefarious and ever-present influences, in light of which fact, Lennard is cruel to support drug prohibition. Cruel! Such a stance on his part amounts to his saying: "I can get along just fine without drugs, thank you very much. Everyone else should be able to do so as well."
But this is mere know-nothing solecism. There is, in fact, no logical reason for Lennard's belief. It is rather a conclusion based (consciously or otherwise) on the drug-hating ideology of Mary Baker Eddy. And it is an anti-indigenous viewpoint into the bargain. Had Lennard been conversant in the field of ethnobotany, he would have known that all indigenous societies have used drugs for the benefit of humanity. Being surrounded by untrammeled nature, they were well aware of the psychoactive potential of their environment and were determined to exploit it for the use of their people. Only in the long-since bulldozed world of the west do we deem such interest in psychoactive medicines to be pathological and even criminal. And so we pass laws that help to normalize the imperial intolerance of the Francisco Pizarros of the world with respect to native medicine, thereby giving the lie to our politically correct protestations against the colonialist practice of interfering in the affairs of sovereign countries.
Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.
The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.
Even the worst forms of "abuse" can be combatted with a wise use of a wide range of psychoactive drugs, to combat both physical and psychological cravings. But drug warriors NEED addiction to be a HUGE problem. That's their golden goose.
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.
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
Imagine a world in which we were told about both the potential benefits AND the potential harms of drugs like cocaine and opium.
It's no wonder that folks blame drugs. Carl Hart is the first American scientist to openly say in a published book that even the so-called "hard" drugs can be used wisely. That's info that the drug warriors have always tried to keep from us.
Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.
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."
When people tell us there's nothing to be gained from using mind-improving drugs, they are embarrassing themselves. Users benefit from such drugs precisely to the extent that they are educated and open-minded. Loudmouth abstainers are telling us that they lack these traits.
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