Customer Reviews

Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers

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An excellent analysis of the institutionalized and state-sponsored persecution of certain rule-breaking behaviour (illicit drug use)and the similarities between cultural and religious demands for specific mood-altering ceremonies and substances. This was the first book by Szasz that I read and I was impressed by depth of his philosophical and medical understanding of human behaviour. After reading this book I purchased, read and re-read the Myth of Mental Illness within 24 hours. Although Cermonial Chemistry was a delight to read, I think the Myth of Mental Illness is a timeless read and a comprehensive, logical and linguistic torpedo aimed squarley at an institutionalized war against human responsibility and the deep suspicion of the state against those who question through behaviour or language the role of the state in prescribing the rules of human conduct. Ceremonial Chemistry is an important book and a cornerstone in the debate on the inevitable de-criminalization of illicit drugs or the continued illegalization of certain foods and plants.

Explains what the war on drugs is really about - and it's not drugs. Highly educational, trancends our brainwashing.

Thomas Szasz (born 1920) is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center. He is a well-known critic of psychiatry, of the social role of medicine in modern society, and is a social libertarian.

Szasz states in the Preface to this 1974 book, "My aim in this book is at once simple and sweeping. First, I wish to identify the actual occurrences that constitute our so-called drug problem. I shall show that these phenomena in fact consist of the passionate promotion and panicky prohibition of various substances; the habitual use and the dreaded avoidance of certain drugs; and, most generally, the regulation---by language, law, custom, religion, and every other conceivable means of social and symbolic control---of certain kinds of ceremonial and sumptory behaviors."

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"(W)e had no problem with drugs until we quite literally talked ourselves into having one: we declared first this and than that drug 'bad' and 'dangerous'; gave them nasty names like 'dope' and 'narcotic'; and passed laws prohibiting their use. The result: our present 'problems of drug abuse and drug addiction.'"
"(W)e oppose illicit drugs not because they are the wrong chemicals but because they are the wrong ceremonials."
"(A)lthough the physician OFTEN fails to help his obese patients, he NEVER fails to help himself---to the patient's (or insurance company's, or some other third party's) money."
"The Harrison Act, passed in 1914, aimed ostensibly at controlling addicts, was actually used to control physicians. This act ... made these drugs legally available only through a physician's prescription for the treatment of disease."
"I have tried to show that the view which a society and the individuals in it hold concerning the use and avoidance of drugs depends, in very large part, on whether people regard their reasons for doing what they want to do as temptations or as impulses."

Ceremonial Uses of the drugs is maybe what the addict is doing; instead of analysing the pharmacological effects of the drugs, the author describes in the pages of this book how were labeled certain kind of drugs as "dangerous" by politicians and physicians around the times, and how they use these labels for discourage the use of "certain ones" and encourage the use of "another ones" under medical treatment.



As water that can " healing " powers and water that does not have " healing " powers, Psychiatric drugs and alcohol can be quit off by the user according with the relationship he or she has with these drugs.



Drugs can be addictive or non addictive as water is, as the user believes how difficult or easy is to break with the habit in regard of his-her ritual use rather than in the chemical properties of drugs.



Dr. Szasz writes about the ways physicians and politicians use to threat the persons around the times for to promote, encourage the use of, and forbidden drugs in order to maintain the concept of addiction and psychiatric (drug ) slavery.

great oppinions. easy to read. very inciteful. must have!...