Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use
how the drug war blinds us to lifesaving medicine
A relative of mine recently visited an emergency room complaining of severe depression. Did they offer her something that would cheer her up right then and there? Did they offer her a free 'trip' on the kind of medicine that had inspired the Hindu religion or that was used in ancient Greek ritual? Did they offer her laughing gas that makes people experience heaven itself? Of course not. That would not be scientific. Instead, they started her on a long-term dependence-causing treatment on Big Pharma 1 2 anti-depressants - and crossed their fingers that she would not commit suicide while waiting for the drugs to begin altering her personality and numbing her pain. The working assumption here seems to be that suicide itself is better than 'drug use,' as that term is hypocritically and unscientifically defined by racist demagogue politicians.
I despair of convincing brainwashed Americans of the many ways that potentially addictive drugs could be used safely to end depression as part of a wide variety of psychologically common-sense protocols that smart people have not even dared to imagine yet. Drug war propaganda has too thoroughly frightened them into believing that human imagination can never find ways to use drugs safely, that we are eternally gullible children with respect to psychoactive medicine. But the pharmacological work of Alexander Shulgin reveals that there exists a potentially endless list of phenethylamines that could elate and inspire without even theoretically causing addiction in the user3. This should be good news to Americans, given that their safety standard for drug use is so much higher than that for any other risky activity on the face of the globe. In this essay, therefore, I will cite qualitative testimony from Shulgin about the mood-elevating benefits of phenethylamines, thereby tacitly demonstrating the inhumanity implicit in denying such medicines to the severely depressed, as we do today, apparently on the fanatical assumption that suicide itself is better than using drugs to elevate mood.
My goal is to wake the reader up to the obvious: namely, that suicide is a big problem today only because we have made it so as a society with the superstitious Drug War ideology of substance demonization.
Here is what Shulgin writes about his experience with Pikhal drug #2:
'I moved into the creative, free
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