Comments on: Why don’t conservative Christians protest the use of legal mind-altering drugs?

By: Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 05:05:42 +0000

Sometime in the 1990s, the concept of better living through chemistry turned a corner, thanks to drug companies’ efforts to synthesize antidotes for every possible mood swing. So writes Yale lecturer Charles Barber in his new book, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation. An OCD sufferer himself, Barber spent a decade working in places like New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. He knew something was wrong when he discovered that his colleagues’ perfectly functional, $300-an-hour Upper West Side clients were taking the same potent pills as his own schizoid, homeless, crackhead patients. “I would spend part of the day in shelters dealing with seriously ill people,” Barber says. “Then I’d go to cocktail parties and find out that the people there were on the same medications.” He proposes that we just say no to multinational drug peddlers and heal ourselves with cognitive and dialectical behavioral therapies — “talk therapy” techniques that minimize pill pushing, dispense with Freudian dream analysis, and engage patients in actively reprogramming their own brains. It’s like “a highly selective carpentry of the soul,” Barber writes — therapy as self-engineering.

From Wired: http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-02/pl_print

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:04:36 +0000

“the person is aware of it then there is a chance that that person will go to hell”

Okay Mr. X, so are there drugs allowed in hell? Or is hell drug-free? Or is it just that really crappy homegrown left over from your cousin’s stash?

What about in Heaven… surely there is chronic weed in heaven? I mean just look at the Devil’s eyes… so bloodshot…

By: xiaogou

xiaogou — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 06:31:15 +0000

Actually, going to jail and taking illegal drugs does not mean that you will go to hell. And if one is consciously taking drugs for no medical reasons other than to get high and the person is aware of it then there is a chance that that person will go to hell.
But I digress from the original question “Why don’t conservative Christians protest the use of legal mind-altering drugs?”
1) They don’t know the difference.
2) If they speak up they are labeled heretics and the others of the church often shove their noses in the scripture that states “Obey your leaders.”
3) Yes, they may be employed by the pharmaceutical company; they may be a doctor or a psychiatrist.
4) They are junkies and don’t want to admit it.
5) If they speak up they fear they will be labeled a trouble maker, geek or too conservative by their junkie friends.
There are many more reasons, but I can’t think of them all.

There is one troubling fact that some of these conservative churches are worse than the Gestapo. They try to control their following by using thug leaders and they use the Bible as a weapon to keep people in line. They thumb through a Bible Concordance to pick out the scriptures to beat down dissidents. And if all else fails there is that pesky “Obey your leaders” passage. It is strange that they almost never point out the “Obey your spiritual leaders.” Spiritual in this case is opposite of worldly, power-hungry, materialistic, un-God, and un-Jesus like. If the church takes the stand that the authority of the government is wrong it opens the door that the authority of the Church can be questioned as well.

By: Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 04:51:24 +0000

Here’s an interesting twist to the “war on drugs” (which is really, as I suggest, essentially a class war):

London, United Kingdom: Self-reported cannabis use among Britons has declined sharply in the three years following the government’s decision to downgrade pot possession to a non-arrestable offense, according to figures compiled last week by the Home Office’s annual Crime Survey.

The Home Office statistics show that marijuana use by young people age 16 to 24 has fallen approximately 20 percent since 2004.

http://norml.com/index.cfm?Group_ID=7410

By: Dan Klarmann

Dan Klarmann — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 16:45:32 +0000

This is a telling comment on the essentially political presence of Church in our State.
But don’t most Churches dun one for alcohol as strongly as for unlicensed mind-altering substances? Or is it only for the abuse of booze, as opposed to sacramental use? After all, Jesus himself livened up a party by turning (presumably un-potable) water into (supposedly sanctified) wine.