justice – Page 88

Does Cannabis Prohibition Cause Schizophrenia?

In The Politics of Experience, the great Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing presents his own understanding on the ultimate causes of schizophrenia. He concludes that schizophrenia is not mainly caused by either genetic or environmental factors but rather “the experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.”

This is a position that many schizophrenics could themselves agree with. Common to the schizophrenic experience is a sense of having been “skewered” by the world, in that one is doomed if one chooses a certain option but also doomed if one does not choose it. This kind of Catch-22 situation is regularly accompanied by a level of anxiety that is impossible to live with, followed by the mind starting to disintegrate as a way of relieving unendurable levels of stress.

It’s not a position that receives much sympathy from the psychiatric establishment, who are almost all hard-core worshippers of the cult of materialism. Most Western psychiatrists cannot conceive of mental health in any other terms than brain chemistry, and they cannot conceive of treatment in any other fashion than dishing out pills. That someone has been driven insane by society is an unpalatable possibility.

Cannabis use is believed by many to be the cause of schizophrenia, because the association between cannabis use and getting such a mental health diagnosis has long been noted. In the mainstream Western model, it is assumed that the causal relationship of these two variables goes in the direction of cannabis use causing people to develop psychosis and schizophrenia.

This has led to many psychiatrists telling their patients that not only are the patients themselves to blame for their own mental illness (which leads to terrible feelings of guilt and self-recrimination) but that only by avoiding cannabis can they hope to make a recovery.

The problem with this approach is, obviously, that cannabis is medicinal, and the vast majority of cannabis users know this, and so being told such things by a mental health “professional” is confusing, frustrating and enraging.

Getting lectured about what one needs to do to stay mentally healthy by a person who has never had schizophrenia, who has never had any experience with psychosis and who has almost certainly never used cannabis, much less a major psychedelic, is a difficult thing for any person to put up with, let alone an experienced psychonaut. When that person doing the lecturing is actually ignoring one’s own lived experiences with the medicinal qualities of the substance, it’s mind-boggling.

Because of cannabis prohibition, mental health care workers are extremely reluctant to tell the truth about the medicinal qualities of the substance (if they’re even aware of them). After all, if they recommend medicinal cannabis to a patient in a place where it’s illegal, they’re effectively recommending that the patient commit a crime, which comes with various ethical issues.

The problem is that the patient is frequently aware that the mental health care workers are lying by omission, which puts them in an impossible situation – exactly the kind of situation described by Laing as schizophrenogenic. If you have problems knowing what’s real and what isn’t, talking to someone who you know is lying to you while that person is also claiming to be helping you is just too much for the human mind to cope with.

If doctors and psychiatrists are there to help us, why don’t they tell us the truth about the medicine that does so much to relieve abominable suffering? The fact that they refuse to do so only feeds into the perception often held by paranoid schizophrenics – that they really are out to get you. It also makes people wonder if they’ve fallen into a time warp of some kind.

Prohibition of cannabis medicine is so absurd, so ludicrous, that it actually causes mental illness in the people whose lives are affected by it.

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What Was Done To The Colonies Is Still Being Done – To Us

Nothing has really changed from 1860, except that the propagandising of the slave system has become more sophisticated

The herds of the West have been conditioned to react to the word “colonisation” with horror and guilt. From the late 1400s until the European empires were wound down after World War II, ghastly crimes were indeed committed by colonial invaders against the native peoples, all over the world. But what this focus on historical crimes overlooks is that these same crimes are still being committed, by the ruling classes against the middle and working ones, to this very day.

In 1860, shortly before the American Civil War, the total slave population in the United States stood at 3,953,761, or 12.6% of the total population. In the Gulag system at its height under Stalin, there were believed to have been up to 6 million people incarcerated.

Most people agree that slavery and Communism were two of history’s greatest evils. But in 2013, there were 6,899,000 Americans under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) – about 2.8% of the total population. Although smaller as a percentage of the national population, in absolute terms it still represents a greater number of unfree people than under either slavery or Communism.

In fact, it amounts to about 25% of the world’s population of prisoners, and not all of them are in there because of murders, rapes and armed robberies. Far from it. Because of the War on Drugs, the population of non-violent drug offenders in American state or federal prisons has increased twelvefold since 1980.

The same strategies that the colonial powers used to subjugate their client populations are being used today to subjugate the peoples who are still their client populations – only instead of being done to dark-skinned races by lighter-skinned ones, it’s done to the working and middle classes by the ruling ones.

Today’s system of convict labour achieves almost everything that was seen as desirable in a slavery system anyway. Some refer to this as the ‘prison-industrial complex‘, because the profit incentive seems to have led to people being imprisoned for the benefit of shareholders in private prisons. These prisoners are often paid less than 20c an hour for their labour, despite that their productivity is dozens of times higher.

So the mentality behind the great colonial enterprises of enslaving millions and extracting resources from them in the form of labour not only still exists but it still manages to enforce its will in the 21st century West. The only difference is that, this time, the people are enslaved through the prison-industrial complex, and mostly for arbitrary drug offences.

Some groups are hit harder than others by this approach. Black people are imprisoned at the rate of 2,306 per 100,000 people, which means almost 1 in every 40 American blacks are in prison at any one point in time, and for black males the rate is an incredible 4,347 per 100,000 people, about 1 in 21.

The mentally ill also suffer atrociously in American prisons, regularly being subjected to corporal punishment for reasons related to their condition, such as becoming confused or anxious or having difficulty following instructions.

The truth is this: the ruling classes only recognise each other as true human beings, and all lower classes are considered some kind of animal to be exploited. Emphasising the racial aspect of the crimes of colonialism, as is common today, only serves to shift the blame from the ruling classes who planned and designed it to the middle and working classes who were forced to help carry it out lest they become the next group of victims.

Colonisation was never a matter of race, and it didn’t stop happening after the European empires fell. It was always a matter of class, and it simply shifted from being done to them over there to being done to us over here.

The Distinction Between Real Medicine and Corporate Medicine

Medicine is a highly profitable industry

Most people visit their doctor under the impression that medicine is a singular, monolithic discipline and that all doctors learn and practice the same things at medical school. This is a similar level of trust to what was once given to priests, who doctors have now replaced. As with priests, this is a level of trust that is no longer justified, because an ever-increasing number of doctors have rejected real medicine in favour of a corporate imitation of it.

The purpose of real medicine is described in the Hippocratic Oath. In this oath the physician vows that “I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm.”

Corporate medicine is different. The purpose of corporate medicine is to make money, usually as a direct consequence of the fact that sick people are also very anxious and anxious people can be easily parted with their money, as long as you can convincingly reassure them.

The logic of profit maximisation leads to a number of negative outcomes for the patient.

For example, consider the following moral dilemma. A doctor is treating a patient who is suffering from a disease that can be easily cured by two medicines. Medicine A has a 95% efficacy and generates $100 in profit. Medicine B has a 90% efficacy but generates $200 in profit. Which is prescribed?

In real medicine, Medicine A would be prescribed all the time, but this is not always the case in our societies, and sometimes it is never the case. If Medicine B generates more profits, then there is always an incentive for the doctor writing the prescription to let the balance of their judgement fall in favour of Medicine B.

Sound implausible? A 2016 study by ProPublica showed that pharmaceutical companies only have to buy American doctors a few meals to have a significantly higher chance of getting their brand of pharmaceutical prescribed, and those doctors being paid $5,000 or more are the most likely of all to do so.

In real medicine, a substance is medicinal if it alleviates the suffering of the patient. In corporate medicine, a substance is medicinal if it creates a profit for the shareholders of the manufacturer of that medicine.

So in the case of cannabis, because no profit can be made from the substance there are no pharmaceutical company representatives who are telling doctors about how useful cannabis products are, and so these doctors (who show little interest in keeping up with new research after they have graduated) don’t know anything about them, and engage in no mechanism that might inform them.

Doctors who practice corporate medicine are never pleased to hear that their patients have given up drinking alcohol or smoking tobacco for the sake of using cannabis. Alcohol and tobacco not only produce massive profits for corporations and therefore the potential for kickbacks to doctors (unlike cannabis) but they also make people sick, which means that they can be sold other medicines. Cannabis, by contrast, cannot be profited from.

The easiest way to tell if your doctor is acting to alleviate your suffering or simply to make money off it is to ask them about the medicinal value of cannabis. Because cannabis can easily be grown at home, there is no real way for doctors to make money off it. Therefore, a doctor practicing corporate medicine will play down the positive effects of cannabis, even going as far as to deny that there are any, and they will play up the negative sides.

Of course, cannabis might not be any good for your condition but from listening to the doctor’s answer to your question you will be able to determine if they have kept up with new information in the medicinal field.

Could Psilocybin Therapy Become Mainstream Within A Decade?

The path blazed by Western psychonauts over the past 60 years may soon lead to mainstream psilocybin therapy

The media appears to be taking tentative steps to recondition a herd that has been brainwashed to fear alternative states of consciousness and to despise those who explore them. Some months ago, an article about a psychiatrist’s efforts to optimise a playlist for a magic mushroom trip was doing the rounds, and other pieces since then have seemed to normalise them. Could psilocybin become a mainstream therapy within a decade?

For half a century, the conventional psychiatric wisdom was that psychedelic drugs do nothing but cause psychosis. They have no therapeutic benefit, and nor do they have any spiritual benefit. This is why psilocybin, like cannabis and LSD, was made a Schedule I drug in America, meaning that it was officially considered to have no medicinal value.

Despite this, a number of studies have hinted at the medicinal benefit that would explain why psilocybin has been used medicinally and sacramentally for thousands of years. An April 2016 paper in Pharmacological Reviews accounts for a modern understanding of psychedelics, abandoning the perspective that they are tools of the devil. This paper lists in detail the extant research on psychedelic drugs in therapy.

The effect that is foremost in attracting the interest of researchers at the moment is the ability of psilocybin to reconcile a dying person with the inevitability and inescapability of their own death. The end-of-life experience is often characterised by extreme anxiety, particularly in Western culture, with its near-total absence of any genuine spirituality and with the corresponding belief that the death of the physical body is the end of consciousness. This anxiety is associated with intense suffering, hence the call for research in this area.

Many of the psychonauts reading this will know that psilocybin is excellent for assuaging end-of-life anxiety, which, let’s not forget, can strike a person at any age. One does not have to be dying to suffer from death anxiety – one only needs a moment to contemplate the fact that one’s body is inevitably going to expire, as does everyone’s.

An intense psychedelic experience often has the effect of separating the consciousness of the user from the sensory input of the physical body entirely, and sometimes, when this occurs, the user realises that their consciousness could have dreamed up the illusion of being born into a physical body and that this is in fact a much more logical and likely explanation for everything than the idea that our brain somehow magically generates consciousness.

This line of thinking is characteristic of the psychedelic experience, and commonly leads to the conclusion that the true essence of a person is in fact consciousness, not the body, and that this consciousness is the prime material of reality and survives physical death. Once this conclusion has been reached, a person is liberated from death anxiety, and consequently from the suffering associated with it.

This doesn’t mean that bringing in psychedelic therapy will be straightforward.

The main difficulty is that the spiritual enlightenment associated with psilocybin drug use leads naturally to the realisation that the integrity of one’s physical body is not the most important thing in life, as it is temporary by its very nature, and this leads to one losing one’s fear of death.

This is great for the psychedelic user, as it liberates them from a terrible source of suffering, but it’s terrible for the politicians and the control system, who rely on that fear of death and physical pain to manipulate the cattle into doing their bidding.

After all, a fully psychedelicised population is not going to obey an order to invade an innocent country, destroy the local government and install a central bank, and nor will they willingly obey orders to put peaceful people in cages for actions that harm no-one else. They will be much more resistant to bullshit and to lies from authority figures, which, to those authority figures, represents a loss of control and this is to be avoided at all costs.

This is, indeed, why psychedelics have been opposed by both religious and secular authorities almost as soon as they were discovered.

It’s possible that some limited inroads into our collective ignorance around psychedelics might be made with a liberalisation of the laws around psilocybin, but for it to become a mainstream therapy a lot of ignorant, brainwashed idiots have to lose influence in the discussion. This will take a long time.