A sure sign that one is dealing with the emotional plague is that you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. How this relates to the drug problem is that you are wrong if you legalize drugs and worse if you don’t. In the past authoritarian era, children and adolescents were more likely than not to listen to authority figures. Their rebelliousness was restrained by their muscular and character armor. Because of the destruction of the authoritarian family, children and adolescents in today’s society are often likely to act out their rebelliousness in a subversive manner with no regard to the destructive consequences on their lives, convinced they “know it all.” With no respected authority figure to listen to, they are in constant danger of becoming attracted to the drug culture.
Those in the drug culture, users and traffickers alike, are infected with an emotional disease, a socio-economically based medical condition that is in no way different from any other highly infectious and communicable disease. The drug problem cannot be viewed simply as a war against an external enemy. The tendency to use and profit from drugs, the “enemy,” resides and can erupt from within anyone, particularly young people. They are at risk because of their strong tendency to be rebellious, their need to “fit in” and for financial gain. Therefore, their problems must be addressed non-judgementally from the perspective of the medical epidemiologist as an endemic, emotionally based medical disease of sick human beings.
The drug problem is as much a problem of the families of addicts and the social institutions that are dealing with it as it is of the users and the traffickers. The first step in addressing the drug problem is to educate the public. The reason that people use street drugs, including marijuana, is to help stop experiencing their painful emotions and feelings and/or to replace them with pleasurable (euphoric) ones. Users must be treated with the knowledge that they are emotionally sick people that must rely on drugs for relief. Those who genuinely want help to face their painful feelings must be treated with this knowledge by skilled mental health professionals who are emotionally healthy themselves so that they do not fall into the trap of being judgmental. The public must be able to think functionally, not moralistically.
Hardened drug traffickers are highly destructive sick people who profit criminally from the emotional sickness of other sick humans. They must be sequestered in prison. From a functional perspective, prisons exist to sequester individuals from society who are unable to contain the expression of their secondary destructive drives from within. They therefore require external restraint (armor) in the form of incarceration.
Seeing the drug user as suffering from a medically based social illness not from a moral perspective as someone that requires to be punished, will help to remove its stigma. This view places the magnitude of the drug problem in proper perspective. It will be a long drawn out process of education and application of new knowledge on all social levels before this destructive manifestation of the emotional plague is reversed. (See “The War on Drugs: America’s Second Civil War” in my book, The Emotional Plague.)
12 Comments
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Neither Left Nor Right
The Emotional Plague
Charles Konia, M.D. 
There are some legal elements of society that use both the prevalence of drugs and the War On Drugs as mechanisms of profit and social control. Drugs are provided in poor neighborhoods by government agents to destabilize them and prevent community organizing, which some consider a threat to the status quo. Some dealer organizations are protected from the police because they are controlled by police who need a drug epidemic as an excuse to demand more power, more authority, and higher pay. The privatized prison industry spends millions each year on lobbying for harsher sentences and more actions to be declared illegal because they are paid per capita by the state according to how many prisoners they hold.
The irrational War On Drugs will continue as long as there are legal businesses, including the police and commercial prison companies, that profit from it.
While there are certainly substances that can be physically adictive, people who do become adicted are almost always adiction-prone personalities who would have become adicted to alcohol or something else if drugs were not available. The only practical way to end adiction is to stop making people adiction-prone. But there are so many elements of modern life in an industrial society that push people into needing something to reduce the distress that that solution would require drastic changes in life-style that nobody is contemplating. In fact, living in a modern industrial culture and living without drugs may be incompatible goals. Many modern jobs, for example, simply could not be tolerated by healthy, unarmored people. If society was mostly unarmored, many products would no longer be available because they require armored workers to produce them. No healthy individual would volunteer to spend his working life in a coal mine or on an assembly line, for example. Industrialism depends on a certain amount of armoring, and the tensions that cause drug use may be a part of the inevitable price of modern urban life.
Most people living in our highly industrialized society do not take drugs. It is patently untrue that people working stressful jobs whether it is an assembly line worker, heart surgeon, computer programmer or whatever necessarily requires drugs to function. To say that is a cop out.
Alcohol should be included as a drug. There is no medical reason to treat alcoholism any differently than heroin or cocaine use. The only difference is that thanks to long tradition, alcohol use is tolerated by the legal system while some other adictive drugs are not.
Dionysian religions should also be classed as a drug, since the expansive effect on the autonomic nervous system is the same as that of many drugs.
Tobacco should also be classed as an adictive drug. From an orgonomic viewpoint, the reason for nicotine adiction is that it reduces the level of sexual excitation to what the armored organism can tolerate. Smokers who quit usually gain weight because fat is the means by which the body binds energy and so added fat reduces the level of sexual excitation which is felt as anxiety when they stop using nicotine and their energy level increases beyond what they can bind in their armor.
If those ways of enabling people to endure the misery of daily living are included in the general rubric of self-destructive behavior used to reduce tensions caused by the irrational demands of their culture, a sizeable majority of the population are unable to get through the day without some form of relief from chronic tensions cause by their culture and lifestyles. The only solution is to change the culture to conform to the biological needs of the human animal, not to ban specific substances by threats of punishment.
Strange, actually meaningless ideas. Take Yemen, a country without any industry: it’s a nation of drugs (like most of the hell holes down there):
And the community organizer in chief certainly will put an end to the druging of poor neighborhoods by government agents 🙂
In the late 60s the FBI began running drugs into black neighborhoods to destabilize them and preven political organizing by the Black Panther Party. They got the drugs from the Army, which at the time had connections with Southeast Asian warlords who could supply unlimited amounts of pure heroin at very low prices. The Army could bring it into the country on military flights that landed at military bases and did not have to go through customs instection. The FBI would then turn it over to their network of informers in black communities who thus became a distribution network. The Army needed the money to fund biological weapons research which Congress would no longer fund because the US had sugned a treaty against it. The plan worked. The Black Panthers mostly killed each other off in fighting over drug dealing turf. The FBI has kept up this program to keep the black community destabilized and weakened economically and politically.
In the early 70s the CIA muscled in on the drug smuggling racket to fund protestant evangelical churches throughout Latin America to undermine the standing of Roman Catholic clergy, who were helping leftist revolutionaries via a movement known as “Liberation Theology”, or the “Worker Priests”. THey ended that program in the late 80s when the military dictatorships they were supporting ended, but they still smuggle drugs to find right-wing political parties in Europe.
Both want to keep drugs illegal to keep out free-lance competitors. most of the biggest drug gangs are protected from aqrrest by one federal agency or another.
The DEA exists to parcel out drug-dealing territory to different federal agencies. Many local police departments have become so addicted to federal DEA funding for the war on drugs that they could not meet their payrolls without it, so they have no interest in a solution, only in ramping up the hysteria over drugs.
In the last 30 years the prison system has been largely privatized and big companies traded on the stock exchange own and operate most state and Federal prisons, paid per capita according to the number of prisoners they hold, so they spend a fortune each year on lobbying and campaign contributions to get ever-harsher laws passed against drugs to keep as many prisoners as possible comming in.
With all these powerful vested interests, it is not likely there will be any real changes anytime soon.
I know little of Yemen, but I assume they have their own problems. As for the current administration, or any other, for that matter, the permanent heads of the various bureaucracies are more powerful in determining what happens than the elected officials who nominally hold the reins of power. Nothing of importance can be changed by elections.
You are missing the point of the blog. As a result of the anti-authoritarian transformation of our society and the destruction of the authoritarian family many children are left without the necessary guidance to prevent them from being attracted to the prevalent drug culture that is endemic today.
As to the Panthers read Horowitz:
http://www.salon.com/1999/12/13/betty/
Anyway, the whole concept of “community organizing” blacks is so counter productive, self-destructive, and even racist (even if everything is under black control) because it is self-evidently not the way to become successful as a community. It’s like: “Hi, I am a victim!” It’s a tragedy. It’s a tragedy how the Left exploited the black community.
Τo compare (and find similar) alcohol or tobacco and marijuana regarding the health (or social) consequences of these addictive substances I think it’s clueless and wrong not only from a prospective of orgonomic science http://www.drugfree.org.au/fileadmin/Media/Reference/AdolescentMarijuanaUse_Apple.pdf but also from a mechanistic point of view (especially when we study the long-term and moderate consumption). As an excellent article put it, “to equate marijuana use with alcohol consumption is, at best, uninformed and, at worst, actively misleading. Only in the most superficial ways are the two substances alike, and they differ in every way that counts: addictiveness, toxicity, health effects, and risk of intoxication.” http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/09/legalizing-marijuana-why-citizens-should-just-say-no
For example, a light and sporadic use of alcohol may have a benefit for the organism http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/alcohol/SC00024 and it’s actually normalized in societies for a hundrend years but this is not the case for marijuana. For me, it’s not by accident that although the discovery and start of farming of wine (alcohol) and coca (from ancient Incas) or cannabis are very old chronologically only alcohol could become assimilated into societies and could have a some balancing effect until now.
Also, the effects of regular marijuana consumption are quite different from the effects of regular but light consumption of alcohol. Marijuana use can not also be compared to tobacco use regarding the health/psychological/social effects. As Dr De Apple wrote: “It is clear that marijuana smoke has long-term adverse effects on the lungs and throat. Marijuana smokers have a higher prevalence of abnormal airways than non-smokers, even when they do not also smoke tobacco (10). Daily Smoking of even small amounts of marijuana without tobacco has been associated with chronic respiratory symptoms and tracheobronchial epithelial histopathology of frequency and extent similar to that noted in daily smokers of more than twenty tobacco cigarettes without marijuana. Marijuana has twice as much “tar” as cigarette smoke. The respiratory retention of particulates (a burden on respiration) inhaled from marijuana smoke is actually 40% greater than from the smoke of tobacco (11). Marijuana smoking with and without cigarette smoking significantly reduces gas (Including carbon properties), and has been linked to increased risk of lung cancer, bronchitis, and emphysema (12,13,14). Marijuana use also increases heart rate by up to 50% during acute intoxication, presenting a risk for anyone with heart disease.”
For me again, it’s not by accident again that sexually repressive and very harsh cultures (Yemen, Afganistan etc) forbit alcohol but the use of khat (Yemen) or cultivation of opium (Afganistan) is socially or even legally accepted.
From a functional point of view http://www.albertofoglia.ch/wp-content/uploads/The-War-on-Drugs.pdf, the growing incidence of drug use in the recent decades caused from the breakdown of authoritarian societies and the subsequent “rise of sexual longing that clashed head-on with” adolescent’s armor and intensifying of ocular armor. The secondary aspects (economic profit etc) of this widespread plague are serving I think for the evasiveness of essential and as a tool in freedom peddler characters.
And it’s somehow astonishing that conservative thinkers who are lacking orgonomic knowledge are sometimes more accurate in describing the facing of drug (and not only) problem in society http://townhall.com/columnists/rachelalexander/2013/01/16/a-thoughtful-look-at-the-marijuana-legalization-trend-n1490208/page/full/ than others who are familiar with orgonomy.
Τo compare (and find similar) alcohol or tobacco and marijuana regarding the health (or social) consequences of these addictive substances I think it’s clueless and wrong not only from a prospective of orgonomic science http://www.drugfree.org.au/fileadmin/Media/Reference/AdolescentMarijuanaUse_Apple.pdf but also from a mechanistic point of view (especially when we study the long-term and moderate consumption). As an excellent article put it, “to equate marijuana use with alcohol consumption is, at best, uninformed and, at worst, actively misleading. Only in the most superficial ways are the two substances alike, and they differ in every way that counts: addictiveness, toxicity, health effects, and risk of intoxication.” http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/09/legalizing-marijuana-why-citizens-should-just-say-no
For example, a light and sporadic use of alcohol may have a benefit for the organism http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/alcohol/SC00024 and it’s actually normalized in societies for a hundrend years but this is not the case for marijuana. For me, it’s not by accident that although the discovery and start of farming of wine (alcohol) and coca (from ancient Incas) or cannabis are very old chronologically only alcohol could become assimilated into societies and could have a some balancing effect until now.
Also, the effects of regular marijuana consumption are quite different from the effects of regular but light consumption of alcohol. Marijuana use can not also be compared to tobacco use regarding the health/psychological/social effects. As Dr De Apple wrote: “It is clear that marijuana smoke has long-term adverse effects on the lungs and throat. Marijuana smokers have a higher prevalence of abnormal airways than non-smokers, even when they do not also smoke tobacco (10). Daily Smoking of even small amounts of marijuana without tobacco has been associated with chronic respiratory symptoms and tracheobronchial epithelial histopathology of frequency and extent similar to that noted in daily smokers of more than twenty tobacco cigarettes without marijuana. Marijuana has twice as much “tar” as cigarette smoke. The respiratory retention of particulates (a burden on respiration) inhaled from marijuana smoke is actually 40% greater than from the smoke of tobacco (11). Marijuana smoking with and without cigarette smoking significantly reduces gas (Including carbon properties), and has been linked to increased risk of lung cancer, bronchitis, and emphysema (12,13,14). Marijuana use also increases heart rate by up to 50% during acute intoxication, presenting a risk for anyone with heart disease.”
For me again, it’s not by accident again that sexually repressive and very harsh cultures (Yemen, Afganistan etc) forbit alcohol but the use of khat (Yemen) or cultivation of opium (Afganistan) is socially or even legally accepted.
From a functional point of view http://www.albertofoglia.ch/wp-content/uploads/The-War-on-Drugs.pdf, the growing incidence of drug use in the recent decades caused from the breakdown of authoritarian societies and the subsequent “rise of sexual longing that clashed head-on with” adolescent’s armor and intensifying of ocular armor. The secondary aspects (economic profit etc) of this widespread plague are serving I think for the evasiveness of essential and as a tool in freedom peddler characters.
And it’s somehow astonishing that conservative thinkers who are lacking orgonomic knowledge are sometimes more accurate in describing the facing of drug (and not only) problem in society http://townhall.com/columnists/rachelalexander/2013/01/16/a-thoughtful-look-at-the-marijuana-legalization-trend-n1490208/page/full/ than others who are familiar with orgonomy.
A tactic of the emotional plague is to confuse the public with half-truths so as to immobilize them with guilt. To equate the” War on Drugs” as an out-of control-police activity in order to suppress a “minority” yearning for freedom is an example of the above. There is as much proof of the military dealing drugs to de-stabilize the Blacks as there is that the CIA planned 9/11. Both avoid the fact that the Black underclass and Islamofascists do not need any “help” from the police force to carry out their social destruction. This is always putting the blame on the outside/society instead of looking at their own behavior, which is ingrained from birth on.
As Chris has pointed out, alcohol use cannot be fairly compared to marijuana, etc, since the latter have a much more destructive affect on the bio-psychological life of man than alcohol. Of course when used excessively, alcohol is dangerous to the individual and society, but this is where the half-truth is used for purposes of guilt, implying that anything a human uses to relieve emotional and social pressure is negative and hypocritical. Is mutual masturbation “equal” to sadomasochistic sex? Is a scowl the same as physically hitting someone? Most people would say no, they are related on a continuum, but worlds apart. To equate clearly unhealthy and destructive acts with ones that are at the more benign side is flattening out real differences, the philosophy of the pseudo-liberal who minimizes individuality in favor of collectivism.
Hey there, my name’s Roslyn and I sometimes blog about this subject too. I actually do have a few questions for you if you do not mind. Could it just be me or does it seem like a bunch of the responses seem like they are coming from a bunch of idiots? 😛 Also, if you happen to be on any other social network sites such as web 2.0 site list, I’d like to stay
in touch. Could you put up a list of all of your shared sites like your Twitter, Facebook page or
linkedin profile?
check out www. orgonomy.org