Well... I would not say it's an absurd concept, personally, at least not in the present day - I could envision a time in which it might be considered an absurd concept.
Firstly, though - the primary "problem" that you highlight, the distinction between "psychiatric drug use" and "drug abuse" is not one that I recognise. In fact, the very concept of drug
abuse is, IMO, an absurd framing of the situations in which people are using more drugs than is good for them. Additionally - it is highly relative. For many people, drug abuse simply means using ANY drug that one is not prescribed by a medical professional. It can mean simply deviating slightly from the advice, or legally sanctioned dosage pattern, given by a medical professional. There might be a world in which the term could be used in a benign way, but in the world as it is, in the present day, such a powerfully negative term as
abuse only serves to reinforce the illusory lines drawn by advocates of prohibition. The fact is - IMHO - there is no clear line.
Psychoactive drugs are used to alter one's perception of consciousness - in some cases, one's default state of mind, no matter what the root cause may be, is not a desirable state to either the unfortunate individual experiencing it, or human society at large. In some cases, this can be corrected with an exogenous chemical agent. Not perfectly, of course - but nothing is perfect in this reality, and "good enough" is, in many cases, good.
In other cases, one's default state of mind is a perfectly adequate one - but the mind in question seeks to explore alternative modes of consciousness. Human minds are curious and novelty seeking by nature, and the very substrate of consciousness itself is not exempt from our desire to explore. Again - exogenous chemical agents are one of many routes to achieving this goal.
In both cases, administration of a drug is an attempt to achieve a given objective. Drug use is rarely framed in these terms because the idea that an individual could set a goal in their mind that can only be achieved by taking a certain drug implies an association between drug use and achievement, and the pervasive cultural stigma against the idea that taking any mind-altering substance could possibly be any kind of achievement forbids the association of drug use with fulfilment of an objective, for this could be read in a positive light, and drugs are bad, mmkay?
An individual who finds it hard to exist within their own mind, for whom life is an endless toil of suffering - and, I will stress, it matters not whether or not an external observer would look at their life and be able to tell that they were suffering - who has had no luck with doctors, new hobbies, lifestyle changes, and is endlessly pursued by a seemingly irrational, unjustifiable feeling of dread, sadness, fear... who takes an illicitly acquired benzodiazepine and feels some momentary relief, and can pick themselves up the next morning to live another day... well, they are an
abuser.
I will now try to dissect your thinking in more detail.
Just to drill the point home - this is not, in and of itself, an important problem. If you can't tell whether something is abuse, then I find it very hard to see why it is worth even paying attention to. This is a problem only for those who continue to cling to the complete mess of a legal framework by which drugs are controlled - or not, as the case may be - and whom are engaging in endless mental gymnastics to find a distinction that does not exist.
This is a purely subjective perception that you can only really be sure applies to you. Of course, many people for whom psychedelics are the most interesting class would agree with you, but the paranoid schizophrenic prone to violent psychoses when unmedicated, especially if they have committed a serious
moral crime during one of these psychoses, while unmedicated - or, even worse, while "medicated" with a low dose of a substance from any of the classes you mentioned - would strongly disagree.
There is no such thing as a linear amplification of perceived well-being, because well being is a multifaceted psychological phenomenon. That said - I'll agree it's wise to avoid drugs that, I guess, make you happy without actually having any reason to be happy except that you have just taken the drug in question - IF your life is satisfactory otherwise, and you are capable of experiencing happiness without this drug, and are not, for example, close to committing suicide because of overwhelming, inescapable sadness.
Hmm... while the pharmaceutical industry is not exactly a paragon of moral virtue... it is also not an entirely unscientific, arbitrary entity. The fact that such prescriptions exist is a consequence of positive results from a vast quantity of rigorous research to treat psychological maladies, and they
are effective. Are there problems with many of these approaches? Sure. Is the science entirely reliable, free of influence from capitalistic bias? Probably not. Nonetheless, there are a very large amount of individual substances in the classes you mentioned, each with their own nuanced differences, benefits, and negatives. You may be skeptical, many medical professionals who prescribe them, and scientists who've studied them at the behest of eye-bleedingly monied manufacturers may be skeptical - it doesn't mean they don't have any useful functions.
Frankly - and I do not mean this rudely, but this is a prolific bias that exists within communities who favour psychedelic and dissociative drugs - subjective experience with any given drug does not give you any real insight into what "brain medicine is actually about". I will say I think that psychedelic research specifically probably is one of the most promising avenues into expanding our understanding of the nature of consciousness - but not at the exclusion of, for example, even the most basic dopaminergic stimulant.
Many people who have had debilitatingly sub-optimal modes of consciousness but been essentially cured by one of the aforementioned basic stimulants, say, racemic amphetamine, or even an SSRI, or some dose of a benzodiazepine that they have taken successfully for years without significant decline and with sustained benefit - would strongly disagree with you. If you mean, it's a failure, as in, it's not a CURE, to the point that the individual in question would not need any substance anymore - well, maybe, but medical science is simply not at the point to achieve this yet. We are doing our best, as a species, with the tools available to us. Some of these tools are relatively "simple" drugs.
If there was a drug that could do this reliably, sure. Right now, there isn't one, although I can guess which class of substance you're thinking of. Psychedelic research is in it's infancy and the psychedelic experience is NOTORIOUSLY unreliable.
No, the main problem is that on the spectrum of possible conscious experiences, some people are unfortunately saddled with extremely difficult ones. Emotional hang-ups may be a component of some of these, sure, but this is a symptom, not a primary factor. Emotions are secondary phenomena within the space of consciousness, thus it cannot be said that emotions are the "main" problem in any context. This is my intuition, in any case, there may be some extreme outlier scenarios where this is not entirely correct, but, the secondary nature of emotional phenomena upon the primary phenomenon of consciousness itself is a given.
You sure about that? What about all the people who tried to do that and ended up with lasting psychological injuries? What about the ones who died? What about those who don't have access to ayahuasca? What about those who did everything right, were lucky enough to have a great experience... but it did not solve their psychological issues in the long term?
Ah yes, the irrefutably obvious solution to everything that, strangely, people just aren't doing. "Just work it out"... thanks man, I'll remember that next time I'm struggling with something.
