What makes MDMA bad and Prozac okay? A well-known 1996 article in the Economist put the question as such:
“Every week, according to the most conservative estimates, half a million Britons take a pill to make them happy. This pill was originally developed as an appetite suppressor. Now it is an adjunct to partying. In America, some 5m people regularly take a different sort of pill. This one was developed as an anti-depressant….
The British users are breaking their country’s law. The Americans are not. Which raises an important question. If it is not acceptable to take [MDMA, or Ecstasy]…to make you feel happy when you just want to have fun, why is it acceptable to take [Prozac]…to make you feel happy if you are not actually clinically depressed?”
The article suggests that the answer is a “pharmacological Calvinism” that causes people to reject any drugs that are used by some people for fun.
Unfortunately that Calvinism is not just present “out there”, in Babylon, but found its way both to slightly more open psychotherapy branch of psychedelic revival but also to at least párts of alternative medicine circles. Few seem to notice the wonderful pun of re-creation , and recreational use is pictured as opposed to more lofty healing work, but what does that mean? What is sacred and what is profane, pious gestures vs dance, prayer vs a joke, contemplation vs euphoria ? Either all or nothing, or as the rapper raps : “if you don’t see God in All you don’t see God at all”.
Healing is not just work, you dont have to slave your way to paradise. You can dance into it.