From David Pearce: "Many constitutionally unhappy people refuse to have anything to do with orthodox western medicine. They won't take "unnatural" pharmaceutical products at all. In consequence, they spend much of their lives trapped in a squalid psychochemical ghetto of chronic low spirits. The only sort of remedy that they'll conceivably contemplate taking must carry a "natural" label and soothingly "herbal" description. Unfortunately, most folk remedies are only marginally effective. Our drug-metabolising enzymes are the product of an evolutionary arms race to counteract plant toxins. For plants tend to manufacture psychotropics because they poison or debilitate creatures tempted to eat them - not to heal our psychic woes. The Wisdom Of Nature is a quaint piece of make-believe… Suppose, for a moment, that the reproductive success of our DNA had been best served by coding for ecstatically happy vehicles rather than malaise-haunted emotional slum-dwellers. If this had been the case, then none of the pharmacological interventions discussed in The Good Drug Guide would be necessary. Life-long well-being would seem only "natural". We would all enjoy gloriously fulfilled lives. Each day would be animated by gradients of bliss. Unpleasant states of mind would be viewed as a tragic aberration. They'd be diagnosed as a freakish but clinically treatable type of psychopathology. Of course, it didn't work out that way. Instead, the inclusive fitness of our genes has been promoted by the "natural" manufacture of some of the most vicious psychological adaptations imaginable. The rot goes deeper. Selfish DNA can count on innumerable dupes to act as its distal representatives even today. The need for "character-building" emotional pain gets justified with all manner of sophistries, both religious and profane. Suffering is good for you, one may be told. It's all part of life's rich tapestry. It exists because it was good for our genes. Apologists for mental pain are serving as the innocent mouthpieces of the nasty bits of code which spawned them. If pressed, DNA's unwitting spokesmen would presumably disavow the connection. Yet if one were purposely building an intelligent robotic survival-machine, then endowing it with the illusion of free-will would prove a highly fitness-enhancing adaptation. It's a trick which our genes merely stumbled upon; and then blindly exploited. Fortunately, within the next few centuries humanity will be able to outwit its ancient genetic masters. Our present status as throwaway genetic vehicles will finally be subverted. When heavenly well-being becomes the genetically predestined norm of mental health, then the very notion of tampering with our new-won "natural" condition and feeling "drugged" will come to seem immoral. It will also seem perverse. Why should anyone want to contaminate the divine ecstasy of their spirituo-biological soul-stuff with chemical pollutants? No thanks. Today's twisted victims of the primordial genetic code, on the other hand, view the notion of sullying their natural state of being through drugs with a much more deep-seated ambivalence. They adopt it as a near-universal practice. Given the inadequacy of the third-rate stopgaps on offer, and the lack of serious drug-education, it's scarcely surprising we're so poor at using them. Thus concerned parents are surely right to worry about the trashy street drugs taken by their kids. Yet with the right new genes and designer-drugs, there's no reason why mature Post-Darwinian life shouldn't just get better and better."