Just Say Yes To Drugs (Unless A Shrink Gives Them To You)

The world of psychiatry is dedicated to continuously refining the requirements for being ‘normal’.  As the requirements are refined, it becomes more difficult to think and behave in the officially 'normal' way, so that the number of people diagnosed with 'mental disorders' continues to increase.  Further, because 'mental disorders' are regarded as brain malfunctions, they are treated like other bodily malfunctions: With drugs.  

Of course, psyciatrists make these determinations based on the self-reported behavior of their patients and not, like other doctors, on real medical tests (brain scans, blood tests, etc.).  So, not only do psychiatrists get to decide whether you are 'normal', they can do so without any empirical evidence of any kind.  

There are two frightening consequences of this system:

1. The psychiatric community is given the power to make detailed determinations about the patterns of thought and behavior that qualify us as 'sane', 

2.  and they are given coercive power to force people into conformity to these definition, whether by drugging them, incarcerating them (in mental institutions) or publicly villifying them (with various labels for insanity).  

As the definitions for normalcy become more finely tuned, the drugs to 'treat' people become more powerful in their capacity to control specific areas of thought and behavior.  It follows, then, that whoever controls the distribution, legalization and prohibition of drugs can, in an indirect way, control the thinking and behavior of populations.  And we have handed these powers over to the state, allowing them to determine what, why and when we put drugs into our bodies.  In turn, as psychiatric definitions and their attendant 'treatments' become more refined and expansive, there is a corresponding increase the capacity of the state to control the thinking and behavior of the populace.  By way of the FDA, DEA and other state-controlled enforcement instutions (police, courts, prisons, mental hospitals, etc.), the government has been handed the authority not only to tell us how to think and behave, but also the authority to drug us and incarcerate us when we don't comply.

In other words, the advancement of the psychiatric establishment has provided the state with the most despotic and powerful machine for social control that could be imagined: The power to coerce the population into thinking and behaving in whatever way they see fit.

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 Anti-drug campaigns and ‘mental health’ advocacy are especially powerful when children are involved.  The ostensible reason for this emphasis is that children are especially vulnerable to 'disorders' and 'illicit drugs'.  However, if my argument above is correct, the real reason likely to be that the state needs to prepare people for control at their most formative and impressionable stages.  Children are taught to say "no" to a certain list of drugs and to say "yes" to another.  The "no" list tends to include drugs that open the mind to ways of thinking that are subversive to the interests of the state.  The "yes" list tends to include drugs that inhibit creative thinking and allow authorities to more effectively control behavior.

For example:

 

“You must consume this medicine called Ritalin because your doctor and school nurse have diagnosed you with a disorder.  You are disordered because you do not behave and think in a way that we deem useful to the social order we are commissioned to enforce.” 

 “In spite of its proven safety and non-toxicity, you may not consume psilocybin because it will cause you to become disordered" (i.e., open your mind to new ways of thinking that don't support the interests of the state).

 “What you do in your own home is your business. Well, unless it involves the consumption of certain species of plants or fungi.  This is because they might make you think or act abnormally, as determined by our definitions of normality."

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Call me crazy (and many do!), but I say that both children and adults be given the freedom todo  whatever the fuck they want with their own minds and bodies, especially when it helps you to think in ways that run contrary to the social norms and government propaganda.  Just say YES to magic mushrooms, weed, LSD or whatever else you freely choose to put into your own body, and say NO to the control-pills given to you by your shrink.  It's YOUR mind and YOUR life: Never give up that fact (even when commanded at gunpoint to do so).