This essay has little to do with the Urantia Book. But it does have to do with our world and our Western culture. It was inspired by my concern about my sister, Deb's pain management; that her doctors skimped on how much medication they gave her after surgery. I think that the following will show that something so common (inadaquate pain management) actually has much deeper roots. And these roots are watered by the lack of our human government to provide its citizens with Cognitive Liberty.
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Regarding what I consider to be the extreme negligence of certain individuals in the medical community in the area of pain management and how that is tied into some basic things that are going wrong with our culture...
The proof is in the pudding:
Another DEA mistake
DEA as overseer of Doctors...
Pain and the Law
News of the Day
Many other instances of DEA interference in pain management
The DEA acknowledges yet denies the conflict between drug control and pain control
The DEA’s bad-faith war on pain doctors
Continuing Concerns About DEA’s 'Prescription Series' Proposal [PDF]
The War on Pain Medicine
Why do physicians fear prescribing adequate levels of opiates?
Thirty Attorneys General Speak Out On Pain Management
Undertreatment of chronic pain
Keep a close eye on your baby
My point here is that the reason there even IS a DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency, established in 1973) is because there is an official "War on Drugs" (actually, a civil war prosecuted by a government against its own people) initiated by a criminal, Richard Nixon, in the year Deb was born, 1969.
If you have a chance, download and/or listen to Jonathan Ott's extremely concise lecture on this topic [thanks to Lorenzo Hagerty for this audio file].
Using logic, one can then state that it is the War on Drugs that frightens and ties the hands of physicians. If this "WAR" were ended, not only would physicians have the liberty to actually practice compassionate medicine by playing with a full deck, but, in most cases, "alternative" medicines (like very safe Cannabis) would finally be able to be used instead of, or in combination with, LESS opiates.
Unfortunately, even where Medical Marijuana is legal, finding a doctor who will write a note for you can be a dignity-destroying experience. Also, it can not be done for *temporary* pain.
More audio presentations [thanks again to Lorenzo Hagerty for the following audio files]:
Ethan Nadelmann - Time to End the War on Drugs
Andrew Weil - Psychoactive Drugs Through Human History
Claudia Little - The Truth About Cannabis
The reason why I am so tempted to lash out at the medical community is because of the lack of courage I find there. But they don't deserve as much blame as I occassionally feel like placing on them. It is actually the scientific community - upon which both the DEA and the medical community depend for validation of their policies - that keeps dropping the research ball.
Scientists can perform the most abominable experiments on animals, they can probe the outer reaches of the universe, they can build multi-billion dollar supercolliders... Their knowledge is tested and verified by scholarly review with an unquestionable scrutiny that is unparalleled in the history of humanity. Science is touted as the greatest arbiter of secular and objective truth in this world. But when it comes to research on the value of Cannabis and the other psychedelic substances to medical science and the profoundly positive social policy changes that research could engender, many scientists are cowards of the first order. Forget grants and funding, the subject isn't even mentionable.
Every researcher in psychopharmacology should be standing up to the government in this respect, and so should every concerned citizen. As things are today, the government is not controlled by a democratic system. As we have seen above (and most of us have seen in our personal lives), pure military-industrial, power-based politics and fundamentalist religion RULE everyone on earth; most, with the barrel of a gun. If you think that you have REAL freedom, you are self-deluded in the extreme - no kinder way to say it.
As Terence McKenna might have explained the situation: The fact is that no one is handing out rights. They must be TAKEN. Cannabis and other psychedelic substances expand consciousness and cause people to question the hyper-conventionalism and unthinking habit of the broken-down and anitquated social and economic systems of every-day life that we seem to be enshrining and approving of (through our NON-action). Governments become very afraid when their citizens begin asking such inconvenient questions.
These substances bring about a realization in the people who know how to use them properly. It is a realization that it is the barriers we build between each other, and the groups that do the same thing, that are the biggest stumbling blocks to human PROGRESS. And here, in the 21st Century, these barriers are leading to a world-wide cultural REGRESS. If people began to make it a priority to tear down these barriers--starting with the liberty to think what we want and explore our own minds--control over our personal lives and inner thoughts would then fall back to WE, THE PEOPLE, where it belongs.
Thankfully, for the first time in history, due to the Internet and free speech forums like Facebook, people now have access to immense amounts of exponentially growing information (both objective study and subjective personal opinions, like mine) and they can make their OWN decisions about what is right and wrong. No longer can these concepts (right and wrong) be dictated to us from on high...
And no longer can uncomfortable truths be kept in the closet. We have to USE this new and unprecedented tool to free ourselves from unnecessary physical pain and suffering, unfair searches and seizures, moralistic oppression of sexual preference, institutionalized sexism (starting with pay equality) and the subsidized, debt-based, rampant consumerism of Western-style capitalism. The last and the greatest of all human rights issues is now upon us as a global civilization: The struggle for Cognitive Liberty.
When this struggle is (hopefully) won, a truly ethical age will dawn on this planet. Of course, I say that optimistically. The alternative is what we are heading toward now: hurting each other, dangerous religious fundamentalism, thing-fetishism and mall-worship, international mistrust, environmental destruction, biased scientific research, poverty, and perpetual war. If we continue on the path we have chosen so far, we WILL destroy ourselves, possibly along with all other higher-life, and the human race will have proved itself to be nature's biggest mistake.
Where are all other people who believe these things? Are these issues SO radical and embarrassing that it is thought best to leave them undiscussed? People are afraid to rock the boat. But, if they only would, they would tip that sucker over and find that the water was only 12 inches deep all along! It seems to me that the more "radical" thing would be to just leave these issues undiscussed; whistle past the graveyard until we are all buried there, in dark and everlastingly-cold silence.
We need to CHOOSE what we are here on earth for, as individuals and collectively, and we need to do it NOW. Is it to foul our own nest to the point of our own obliteration? Or, is it to become closer to each other than we ever imagined we could be and to march together - as a species - toward a future life of light-filled happiness and peace?
Time to decide.
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