Pleasure is therapeutic
In Who Gets to Medicate Me?, Jesse Meadows (@sluggish) interrogates the cultural, puritanical idea that pleasure is destructive.
Psychoactive drugs have direct effects on us, and sometimes those effects feel good, which can be helpful in itself. Puritanical thought and anti-drug propaganda have led us to think of pleasure as destructive, but pleasure can be therapeutic, too. That should be reason enough to have safe access to a substance, but due to the past century of power struggles and profit motives, we’re no longer allowed to see it that way.
“Recovering” from a “legitimate illness” is not supposed to have anything to do with pleasure. It’s just about tuning the body like a machine, getting back to that mythical state of normal, productive, efficient worker — a standard both people with ADHD and people who use drugs fall short of. We are not so different, and we could demand so much more together.
A big reason why I have Pleasure Activism waiting to be read.