Blue Tide: The Search for Soma

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Blue Tide: The Search for Soma

a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 13, 2025

Philosophical notes on "Blue Tide: The Search for Soma," by Mike Jay.

Essay Menu:
A Drug-Free Eleusis
A Kantian Critique of Sobriety
In Search of the Real Reality
Obvious to Whom
Drugs and Religion
Conspiracy Theories
Biased language
The Perfect Storm
Opium addicts
Harmaline
What Was Soma?
Academics
The Blue Tide

A DRUG-FREE ELEUSIS

Jay makes the interesting point that the avowedly positive effects of the Eleusinian Mysteries may have been facilitated, as it were, by a drug-free ritual, with the help of a unique ancient mindset that we westerners cannot even fathom. According to this viewpoint, we moderns assume that our forebears used drugs to achieve enlightenment because we westerners cannot imagine any other way in which such ontological epiphanies could have been achieved. This sounds plausible enough. I would just observe, however, that there are psychological reasons for the idea that the Eleusinian Mysteries ¹ were fueled by the use of a psychedelic drug or of a drug concoction producing psychedelic states. We are dealing, after all, with a hush-hush tradition that lasted over 1,000 consecutive years and whose ecstatic participant reports are often impossible to distinguish from the modern reports of enraptured drug use as documented by such drug researchers as James Fadiman ², Stanislav Grof ³ and Alexander Shulgin ⁴. The staying power of the Eleusinian tradition - and its eventual outlawing by a Christian emperor ⁵ - only makes psychological sense (to me, at least) if the ingestion of a powerful psychoactive "draught" were part of the experience. Otherwise, I find myself asking the question: why would a who's-who of western luminaries like Cicero, Plato and Aristotle (three prominent beneficiaries of the rites) remain so proud of (and so secretive about) a mere verbal pep rally with mythological overtones?

Speaking of Cicero, consider how he himself characterized the Mysteries in 51 B.C. in his "Treatise on the Laws":

"For it seems to me that among the many admirable and divine things your Athenians have established to the advantage of human society, there is nothing better than the mysteries by which we are polished and softened into politeness, from the rude austerities of barbarism. Justly indeed are they called initiations, for by them we especially learn the grand principles of philosophic life, and gain, not only the art of living agreeably, but of dying with a better hope." - ⁶

Dying with a better hope?

Surely, such benefits were not provided merely by "words, words, words" of a spiritual leader. One might imagine a unique charismatic leader wowing an audience into whole new mindsets, into whole new ways of seeing the world, but who can imagine a succession of wordsmiths accomplishing such major transformations year after year, by words alone, for well over a thousand years? Such quotations clearly suggest that biochemical changes were being leveraged to achieve mind-altering results.

I agree that modern westerners are predisposed to fool themselves on this question, but not just in the way that Jay has chosen to highlight. In the age of the Drug War, we have come to think of self-help books (and their "words, words, words") as being an all-sufficient replacement for - nay, an improvement upon - the effects of performance-enhancing drugs, which, however, is really just wishful thinking based on the prejudices of a Christian Science metaphysic in which we consider drug use as an immoral copout. Again, there is no rational reason that a "sober" approach to achieving self-transcendence could not work wonders: it is just, however, a common psychological fact that such approaches rarely work - and almost never work "with flying colors," with an outcome that the individual human being would feel called upon "to write home about," let alone to coyly champion as one of the greatest experiences of their entire lifetime as did so many participants in the Eleusinian ritual. To the contrary, such "sober" progress is usually glacial and far from inspiring anything close to ecstatic self-fulfillment. Just ask a chronic depressive who has spent a lifetime treating their gloomy propensities with the help of self-help books and is still as depressed as ever - or who has used the ecstasy-shunning pills of modern materialists and is still as depressed as ever. When it came to his own treatment for mind and mood issues, Freud himself preferred the real politik of cocaine over the theoretical benefits of drug-free psychoanalysis ⁷.

Quanah Parker captured the shortcomings of the western world's rationalist infatuation with "sobriety" when he said:

"The White Man goes into his church house and talks about Jesus, but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus." ⁸

To which I might add:

"The materialist looks under a microscope to find the 'root cause' of depression: the sane person cheers themselves up in real-time with the wise use of a wide-variety of obvious godsends, like laughing gas , coca, opium, and phenethylamines."

Jay seems to fear that our view about drugs in the past will be unduly influenced by our favorable interest in them in the present. This is an understandable concern and may be true in certain cases. I think there is a bigger threat, however: namely, that our view about drugs in the past has been biased by our hatred of drugs in the present. Most modern books about opium focus almost exclusively on the theoretical downsides of use -- to the extent that we have rewritten history in an attempt to make the past conform with modern anti-opium prejudices ⁹. Who hears these days about the fact that Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin were opium fans? The Anti-Opium Society in Britain was originally inspired by a Big Lie from an American missionary claiming that opium killed millions of Chinese - whereas the drug, properly speaking, killed nobody at all. See "The Truth About Opium" for some rare pushback on the lies that modern authors take for granted about the evils of opium. As author William H. Brereton writes:

"All these anti-opium articles, speeches, and resolutions are based upon the same model. They assume certain statements as existing and acknowledged facts which have never been proved to be such, and then proceed to draw deductions from those alleged facts." --William H. Brereton, from The Truth About Opium, ¹⁰

One might say the same about anti-drug articles in general.

The sad thing is, these biases of ours inspire drug prohibitionists to outlaw both drugs and drug education - as a result of which, opiates in general are MADE dangerous. Young Americans were not dying in the streets from opiates when opiates were legal in America. It took prohibition to accomplish that, by refusing to teach safe use, refusing to regulate product as to quantity and quality, and by refusing to provide drug users with a wide variety of choices, hence making it unlikely that they would develop an unwanted dependency on any given drug or type of drug.

A KANTIAN CRITIQUE OF SOBRIETY

Here is a related observation, not just about Blue Tide, but about drug reportage in general.

In discussing these topics, drug pundits often write as if "drug-aided experiences" are to be contrasted with experiences produced by a "drug-free sobriety." But there is no such thing as a "drug-free sobriety." Human beings "come pre-loaded" with a unique and complex combination of chemicals - this is what we call their biochemistry - and so the notion that there is such a thing as drug-free sobriety has to be relinquished. The plot thickens when we consider the Kantian ¹¹ insight that our views of the world are determined by our perceptions and the sensations that spring therefrom, that we do not see "the world as it is" with our "sober" minds in any case, but rather we interpret the raw data of the dizzyingly busy external world in light of our pre-existing "mental" categories of time, space and causation. The use of drugs, therefore, does not necessarily present us with nonsensical hallucinations but rather with glimpses of "matter" (whatever that may be in the fundamental sense of the word) -- matter that has been interpreted and/or projected in a new way for us, without regard for our utilitarian ¹² ¹³ ¹⁴ interests.

It is wrong, therefore, to denounce drug use on the grounds that it inspires madness, for the "sober" life as we experience it is merely the result of a utilitarian and ultimately drug-aided interpretation of the raw data of the world "out there"; we are not seeing the supposedly external world as it "is" even when "sober," but rather as we have been created to see it given our unique perceptual equipment, our own unique "in-house" biochemistry, and our built-in penchant to see the raw data of the world through the pre-existing categories of space, time and causal relationships.

The saints and visionaries of history may have been "drug-free" in the conventional sense of that word, but their visions were yet drug-aided, thanks to their particular biochemistry (as combined interactively with a unique psychosocial upbringing) which predisposed them to see the world in less utilitarian - yet still very "real" - ways than did their fellows. The Kantian critique - combined with a knowledge of the biochemical bona fides of ALL human action -- destroys the illusion that there is an ontological Reality writ large to which only the "sober" individual has access. In light of these arguments, materialists and moralists should stop turning up their noses at so-called drug-inspired realities, for in doing so they are presupposing the existence of a non-entity: namely, an unbiased "sober" way of seeing the world around us.

We are born with perceptual biases (especially in the form of the pre-existing ideas of time, space and causal relationships) and the use of drugs serves only to highlight new aspects of the external world that are not readily available to most people given their default biochemistry. Yet there is no privileged "correct" reality insofar as Reality writ large is unknowable, although many indigenous societies believe they have found hints about the nature of that Reality (what Kant called the noumena) through the use of substances that override our default perceptual equipment, so that we can see the world outside of the utility-oriented lens of our unique individual biochemistries, which in turn are inextricably and complexly linked with our unique psychosocial identities in life.

IN SEARCH OF THE REAL REALITY

In Jay's book, his friend Charlie describes a trip "on" Harmaline, prefacing the report with the observation that:

"The stars were intense (in reality) and it was as though there were shooting stars everywhere."

In light of the Kantian critique, the parenthetical remark, "in reality," is a biased interpolation. To posit a "real" world in contradistinction to a drug-influenced world is meaningless, ontologically speaking. Human beings are biochemical creatures whose view is always drug-aided: "reality" is the term that we reserve for our privileged utilitarian world that we see thanks to our default biochemistry, a world that we assume is the touchstone of "reality" itself, which is a viewpoint that no longer makes sense, however, in light of the Kantian critique. This does not mean that the elves in our DMT experiences "really exist" - but it means something even more surprising: namely, that even tables and chairs do NOT really exist. They are entities that we have isolated and reified as discrete things from the raw data of "reality" given our utilitarian way of seeing the world, one which is facilitated by our default brain chemistry given the pre-existing "mental" categories of time, space and causation. This line of analysis does not tell us what those "elves" are that we encounter in drug-induced states, but it can help us ask the right questions about them, rather than dismissing them out of hand under the presupposition that there is a privileged reality up against which such outre visions can be smugly dismissed as absurd and false merely because of their apparent lack of utility for those who encounter them.

OBVIOUS TO WHOM?

In Chapter 4 on "Transcendental Medication," Jay writes:

"Since there were no obvious medical breakthroughs being offered by the 'endogenous schizotoxins', the presence of Harmaline and DMT in the brain became a mere curiosity."

We might wish to qualify Jay's statement here to say that there were no obvious medical breakthroughs FOR MATERIALISTS. A living, breathing human being -- especially a neurotic with a habit of being held back in life by negative inner voices-- can easily conceive common-sense therapeutic protocols for drugs like Harmaline. Such drugs could provide relief from negative voices of a pathological sobriety and give the user something to look forward to in life, give them increased creativity and appreciation of the world around them, etc. etc. etc. These are all glaringly obvious breakthrough benefits that drugs like Harmaline could supply for specific people in specific cases. The materialists are blind to such benefits because they cannot be leveraged biochemically into a one-size-fits-all Big Pharma med and prescribed by doctors -- or given pride of place on a display shelf in CVS Pharmacy beside the antacids, cough suppressants and sleeping tablets.

If drugs like Harmaline suggest no medical breakthroughs, then there is a shortcoming with our drug researcher's mindset, not with Harmaline. There is a lack of imagination. This is why it has always been a category error to place materialist scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place. The first thing they do in analyzing a drug is to ignore all positive effects of use and look instead under a microscope for answers. This is how the FDA gets away with refusing to approve Ecstasy and nitrous oxide ¹⁵. They ignore all the glaringly obvious benefits of drug use - the fact that Ecstasy brought unprecedented peace to British dance floors ¹⁶ and that the occasional use of laughing gas could prevent suicides and give mental vacations to the chronically depressed ¹⁷! They never do a cost/benefit analysis of such substances, they simply evaluate costs in the abstract (always refusing, as well, to take into account the enormous costs of prohibiting drugs -- including, ultimately, the end of democracy in the United States -- about which Drug Warriors are, in fact, in complete denial).

This is why America has a National Institute on Drug Abuse rather than a National Institute on Drug Use. The government's job is to scientifically establish the fact that drug use is dangerous - not to do a cost/benefit analysis of drug use. And so they avoid a host of safety-related considerations, like the fact that the use of the drug in question might reduce the use of far more dangerous drugs like alcohol or the fact that outlawing the drug will necessarily lead to more of the kind of violence that has already destroyed inner cities around the world and destroyed the rule of law in Latin America, the kind of violence which, to be specific, resulted in the death of 15-year-old Niomi Russell in a drive-by shooting in Washington, D.C. in 2024 ¹⁸.

I have skin in this game -- indeed, we all do, if we would only realize it. I have been denied godsend medicines for a lifetime now thanks to materialist blindness to the obvious efficacy of drugs. There are obvious psychological beneficial uses for Harmaline and DMT, some of them clearly documented in Jay's book: the problem is that these are obvious benefits for drug users, not for pharmaceutical companies. The materialist corporations see no way to make money off of those benefits, hence they tacitly claim that such benefits do not exist. Having thus ignored all benefits for such drugs, we feel free to judge them based on downsides alone, an approach which, if applied to aspirin, would keep that drug off the market for eternity, given that its use is linked to thousands of deaths a year in the UK alone ¹⁹. This hypocrisy about drugs -- and this determination to judge "drug" use by downsides only -- is insulting and angering for someone like myself who has gone a lifetime now without godsend medicine thanks to the materialist's inability to look at drug use from the user's point of view - but then if we had consistently done that in the past, thought about the drug users, we would never have rescinded the once-sacrosanct right of human beings to take care of their own unique mental and emotional states without a "by your leave" from racist politicians and the materialist doctors who help normalize prohibition by giving it the veneer of science.

DRUGS AND RELIGION

Jay writes:

"Both [drugs and religion] offer the possibility of connecting us in some way with the eternal and divine; but do they in fact take us to the same place?"²⁰

In my view, the fact that we ask this question shows that we have not taken into account three things:

1) The Kantian notion that there is no one privileged way of seeing the world, no way that shows us the world as it quote-unquote really is,

2) The fact that all behavior is facilitated by biochemistry, whether we consider it to be our default biochemistry or not.

And...

3) The fact that mental and physical states are created by the complex interaction of a wide variety of factors. The use of a specific substance is therefore but one input amongst many and so we should resist the politically encouraged temptation to assume that this input alone is causally definitive. This is why HG Wells came to question the wisdom of eugenics, for it occurred to him that health is the result of a balance of a wide array of complexly interacting factors (genetic factors, biochemical, psychosocial, cultural factors, etc.), and that it is absurd to assume that genetics plays the determining role in creating any given physical or psychological outcome. This is the same argument that GK Chesterton made against prohibition in his essay collection entitled "Eugenics and Other Evils": that it is absurd to assume that substances can be unhealthy in and of themselves, without regard for their context of use.

"It is said that the Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things. And there is no escape for the hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all. If he is to control the health of the community, he must necessarily control all the habits of all the citizens."
--GK Chesterton, from Eugenics and Other Evils, ²¹

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

I agree with Jay's notion that the demonization and outlawing of drugs is not the result of a single-minded conspiracy. Or rather, if it is a conspiracy, it is a conspiracy by default, a sort of "conspiracy malgre lui," since it is impossible to imagine the wildly diverse demographics represented in the Drug War as coming together behind closed doors in a sinister attempt "to put one over" on the hoi polloi. I would describe the Drug War rather as a perfect storm raised on purpose by politicians, in many cases for obvious racist reasons. The Drug War has destroyed inner cities and handed the American presidency to a fascist by throwing millions of minorities in jail with the help of drug laws written for that very purpose. The racist politicians did not work alone, however. This injustice has been aided and abetted by leaders of minority communities who have been duped into the drug-war religion of drug hating by the one-sided portrayal of drugs in the media as being dead-ends without any rational uses - an idea that would have come as a surprise to the indigenous people worldwide, those whom the west has marginalized and upon whom they have imposed liquor as the default drug of choice. Given these basic facts, there is no mystery about why the Drug War is popular - even if it is not, technically speaking, a conspiracy.

One could, however, make the case that it is a conspiracy on behalf of materialist doctors and researchers (at least on the part of the majority of such professionals who tacitly support drug prohibition by refusing to criticize it as an infringement on their patient's rights to health care), for the Drug War gives materialist doctors a hugely remunerative monopoly on treating mind and mood matters. To put this another way, the field of materialist medicine profits precisely to the extent that westerners are disempowered when it comes to caring for their own health. This may not be a conscious conspiracy for most psychiatrists and other doctors, but then the wiser among them surely know on what side their bread is buttered and will act accordingly, first and foremost by demonizing self-medication ²² as the ultimate unforgivable sin against the medical establishment. Of course, as Thomas Szasz reminds us, the right to self-medication was always the norm in the past, being, as it was, a right that followed naturally from our erstwhile sovereignty over our own bodies.

As Szasz pointed out in "Our Right to Drugs," our right to consume plant medicines is anterior to and presupposed by all of the other rights that we have as free citizens. This is why the right to substance use was not explicitly enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, because it was assumed to be implicit in the freedoms enumerated therein -- it was the kind of freedom that the Founding Fathers literally assumed would go without saying. Little did they realize that racist politicians would one day practice fearmongering in order to blame all of America's problems on the exercise of time-honored freedoms, in willful blindness to the following inconvenient truth: namely, that by attempting to save white young people from themselves, as opposed to educating them, America was placing minorities and the poor in harm's way, thanks to a Drug War that creates violence out of whole cloth, an approach that has been responsible for 67,000 minority deaths in inner cities in America alone over the last decade ²³.

BIASED LANGUAGE

Jay tells us that the practitioners of Daime do not consider ayahuasca to be a drug. Others make that claim about iboga, others about San Pedro cactus, still others about marijuana. But these are all cases of special pleading, as who should say, "Yes, there are evil substances in the world, but Daime (that is to say Brazilian ayahuasca) is not one of them!" But this misses the point. The real headline is the fact that there are no such things as "drugs" at all -- there are no substances that are useless. There are no drugs that have no positive uses for anyone, in any dose, at any time. And yet the Drug War is based on the following hateful and anti-scientific algorithm: that a substance that can be misused, even in theory, by a white American young person when used at one dose for one reason, must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason. It is hard to imagine a dictum that is more anti-scientific and anti-progress. It tells us in advance that we are not allowed to find any benefits for drugs that racist politicians have ignorantly, cynically, but strategically demonized as "junk" and "dope."

THE PERFECT STORM

Instead of seeing drug prohibition as a top-down, coordinated conspiracy against self-transcendence by the hoi polloi, it makes more sense to see drug prohibition as the perfect storm (the perfect anti-democratic storm), one that was initially motivated by racism ²⁴ and xenophobia, but which soon gained allies among seemingly non-racist demographics. This accounts for the fact that some of the fiercest Drug Warriors eventually came from the minority communities whose inner cities were being destroyed by prohibition-created violence, as, for instance, when Jesse Jackson denounced drug dealers as vampires. This in turn came about because liberals were hoodwinked by Drug War propaganda into thinking of drugs as evil, thanks largely to censorship by our conglomerate media which (working with the White House itself) kept them from seeing, hearing or reading about anything positive about drugs. And this propaganda worked all too well. Indeed, I sometimes think that the main message of the Drug War is precisely this, that propaganda works -- from which it follows that future freedom will depend on controlling that beast, which, let us remember, was first unleashed -- or at least first supercharged -- by the Nazi regime in World War II.

Speaking of which, William Shirer wrote the following on the topic in his book about Nazi Germany:

"No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda."²⁵

In other words, propaganda works, and the proof of the fact is that minority leaders have, for over half a century now, championed a policy that results in drive-by shootings, civil wars overseas - and which locked up so many of "their own people," thereby handing otherwise close presidential elections to racists.

But it takes more than two demographics to make a "perfect storm." The Drug War "works" because it is a joint project of racist Drug Warriors, minority activists, and materialist scientists.

The Drug Warrior's moral disdain for "drugs" dovetails with the materialist disdain for holistic healing and for consciousness in general. According to the materialists, we have to look under a microscope to decide if a drug "really" works - and this belief lets them ignore anecdote, history and common sense about drugs. Thus materialists gaslight the public about drugs ²⁶, effectively agreeing with the enormous Drug Warrior lie that there are no known benefits for the kinds of drugs that inspire and elate. The Vedic religion, however, owed its existence to the use of such a drug (or drugs), a drug that inspired and elated, from which it follows that drug prohibition is the outlawing of religion - nay, the outlawing of the religious impulse itself. And so we see that materialists have a vested interest in the Drug War too; at very least they have no vested interest in pushing back against drug laws that prohibit the use of holistic-acting drugs. Thus materialists help to normalize drug prohibition by insisting that, from their dogmatically myopic point of view, the drugs that we outlaw have no positive uses in any case. Why push back against drug prohibition when the drugs being outlawed are regarded as pointless?

In this way, modern materialists are signing off on the hugely anti-scientific lie of the Drug War: namely, that we can judge drugs up or down, outside of all context, based on how they might be misused by a white American young person, one whom we refuse to educate about safe use. It is impossible to imagine a more anti-scientific viewpoint: a world wherein politicians pretend to tell us in advance whether a drug will ever be found to have any benefits. Instead of pushing back against this drug prohibition and the censorship of academia ²⁷ which it entails, scientists today merely take drug prohibition as a natural baseline - and so we see endless "scientific" articles that draw conclusions in willful ignoration of the powers of outlawed substances. This is why science magazines keep plugging depression as a tough nut to crack. My depression could be "cured" in a trice were I free to follow a varied regimen of informed and wise use of phenethylamines and nitrous oxide and coca and opium and an ever-growing list of plant medicines of whose very existence the intoxiphobic ²⁸ west is only now becoming grudgingly aware. And yet science magazines write as if depression can only be "cured" by the massive funding of reductionist studies based on non-holistic assumptions, performed in dogmatic blindness to all "merely obvious" benefits of drug use.

OPIUM ADDICTS

I am sure that a thorough and conscientious author such as Jay uses the term "opium addict" advisedly, but I always am worried when I encounter this term in writing of any kind. The term "addict" is open to enormous abuse in the hands of indoctrinated drug haters. There is always a subjective aspect to that term since one hallmark of addiction is the fact the drug use in question is "problematic." This, of course, raises the question: for whom is the use problematic, and why? Is it problematic for the user because drug law has made it so? or is the use problematic in and of itself, without regard for the fact that the Drug War has refused to teach safe use, refused to regulate product as to quality and quantity, and refused to offer a wide variety of alternative drug choices, thanks to which one need not rely on any given drug? Or is the use problematic for Big Liquor, or for racist politicians, or for politicians who are cynically suspicious of the peace, love and understanding that such use might be bringing about? Or is it problematic for the Christian drug-war pundit who has been taught from grade school to fear psychoactive drugs and knows almost nothing about them from an experiential point of view? In other words, the so-called addiction problem is a prohibition problem instead, at least in the age of the Drug War. We will never know the extent to which addiction is a problem in and of itself until we end all the laws and social policies that help bring addiction about and render it almost impossible to treat.

Again, the term "addict" involves a subjective judgment. Was Benjamin Franklin an opium addict (in the disreputable sense of that word) because he used the drug on a regular basis? His contemporaries did not seem to think so, but he surely would have been turned into an addict by drug laws had he lived in modern-day America! The Drug War creates addicts via legal edict and then trots out these addicts as supposed examples of why drug use is bad ²⁹.

This discussion is highly fraught, however, because "addict" is a term whose very meaning has been tainted by Drug War propaganda. Just as the term "drugs" is political in the age of the Drug War, so too is the term "addict." To suggest that a drug creates "addicts" is to pan the drug for all times, at least in the age of the Drug War when we see no benefits to true drug education. And this is the way Drug Warriors want it. Addiction is, in fact, the golden goose of the Drug Warrior. They use the threat of addiction to convince parents to support the repeal of time-honored democratic freedoms in the name of "fighting drugs." Racist Drug warriors need drug use to remain a problem so that they can continue destroying inner cities, limiting worker rights, and winning elections. In a free world, however, we would conquer most addiction - and/or nip it in the bud - by using drugs to fight drugs, by using a wide variety of drugs based on actual reports of "best practices" by real drug users, those who have used drugs wisely to achieve desired mental states. Instead, we have created an addiction industry today by outlawing all drug choice, refusing to teach safe use, and refusing to regulate the drug supply as to quality and quantity.

Of course, one could invoke the pedantic distinction between addiction and dependence. They could say that high levels of opium use can result in cravings after a certain period of abstention, whereas abstaining from Big Pharma meds, and antidepressants ³⁰ in particular, generally just leaves the user feeling like hell. Opium, they will say, is addictive while the latter "meds" merely cause dependence. The implication of introducing this nicety seems to be that Big Pharma ³¹ ³² meds are okay because they only make one feel like hell after stopping them - whereas opium is evil because it makes me crave more opium. It is not clear to me, however, why one outcome is any better than the other, at least from the user's point of view. In any case, such analysis of outcomes is always based on the drug-warrior assumption that we cannot use drugs to fight drugs and that addiction is an inevitable and necessarily intransigent eventuality - which, if true, however, is only so because we have outlawed all drugs whose common sense use could obfuscate the downsides of other drugs and render their continued usage unnecessary and even irrelevant.

It is worth noting in this connection that the physical aspect of opiate dependency can be overcome in a week (even relatively painlessly with the use of drugs)³³ - whereas the physical aspect of antidepressant dependency (the altered brain chemistry) can last for months or years - hence the 95% recidivism rate ³⁴ for long-term users of drugs like Effexor ³⁵ after three years of abstinence ³⁶. Ironically, this huge recidivism rate is itself a result of drug prohibition, since it is psychological common sense that one could obfuscate the downsides of antidepressant withdrawal with the intermittent as-needed use of a wide variety of substances, including laughing gas , phenethylamines, opium, coca, and a wide variety of psychoactive plants, fungi and even psychoactive animals about whose very existence we intoxiphobic westerners have been completely ignorant until the ethnobotanical studies of the last hundred years or so. I would have been off mind-numbing Effexor years ago had I been able to indulge in the intermittent use of the medicines that prohibitionists have outlawed and demonized as "drugs" -- when they were not damning them more explicitly as "junk" and "dope."

HARMALINE

"Blue Tide" contains good news and bad news for me. The glaringly obvious ability of Harmaline to inspire creativity is the good news - the drug has obvious potential benefits for writers, poets, the depressed, and even dementia patients; the drug facilitates creative thinking and even seems to allow the user to guide the direction of that thought. The bad news is that Drug Warriors and materialists do not recognize these kinds of holistically-provided drug benefits as benefits; instead they focus the narrative on the potential downsides of use. This is because, as mentioned above, the Drug War is the perfect storm. It makes bedfellows of racists, minority activists and materialists, by convincing them that drug use is the root of all evil - and this in a world where alcohol, the most dangerous drug of all, is constitutionally protected, this despite the fact that its use is connected with 178,000 deaths a year in America alone ³⁷. This united attack on basic freedom from such diverse demographics reminds me of the following quote from Thomas Szasz's 1992 book, "Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market":

"Lacking the usual grounds on which people congregate as a nation, we [Americans] habitually fall back on the most primitive yet most enduring basis for group cohesion, namely, scapegoating." --Thomas Szasz, from Our Right to Drugs, p 32 ³⁸

WHAT WAS SOMA?

Jay does not pretend to have discovered the identity of Soma; however, he is alive to the idea that the drug or drugs employed must have functioned in a way to produce similar results in a variety of disparate users - which suggests in turn that Soma was NOT a psychedelic - or at least not a psychedelic by itself. A drug like Harmaline, especially in some combination with other drugs (like opium and/or cannabis sativa and/or ephedra) could be imagined to create psychologically empowered states without isolating the user in a subjective world peculiar to themselves, a state which would be at odds with the democratic applicability of the Soma benefits repeatedly described in the Rig Veda.

ACADEMICS

Jay refutes the notion that academics are engaged in a cover-up about drug benefits. He cites the fact that he personally has had success in talking with academics, that they were more than willing to discuss the subject. This fact, however, may have a lot to do with Jay's personality. He is apparently able to discuss the subject diplomatically, without using terms like "getting high" and by replacing politically charged words like "drugs" with neutral or positive terms like "plant medicines." But even if our academics are not involved in an "official" organized coverup about drugs, we should never forget the main point here: namely, that almost everyone in academia practices self-censorship when it comes to the subject of drugs -- and those who don't, like DJ Nutt of England ³⁹, are given the chop ⁴⁰. For proof of this self-censorship, just check out your local library while researching "drugs." You will find endless books about misuse, abuse, and addiction -- and almost no books about positive uses for drugs -- and literally zero books about the positive uses of opium or cocaine ⁴¹ . You will never see headlines like: "Wow! This drug can drastically increase concentration! Let's use it wisely for human benefit!!!" Or check out the academic papers on drugs at Academia.edu -- and prepare to learn all about the downsides of drugs and almost nothing about their positive uses.

This is a massive coverup in the general sense of that word even if it is not an organized or conscious coverup. Even researchers who dare write books against the Drug War have to be coy: When Philip Jenkins published his academic work about the Drug Warrior's MO of substance demonization, he called it "Synthetic Panics."⁴² He avoided the term "drugs" because he knew that one could pay a price for explicitly attacking the War on Drugs. This is why Alexander Shulgin published his book about phenethylamines under the odd title of "Pihkal"⁴³, because he knew that he could not even sell the book in certain conservative U.S. states if the title made it clear that the book was about "drugs."

Philosophers, for their part, completely ignore the fact that the FDA is now working to criminalize laughing gas , the substance that inspired the ontology of William James. In fact, I am the only philosopher who has formally complained about this fact in the name of academic freedom ⁴⁴ -- which is not surprising, given that the online biography for James at his alma mater, Harvard University, does not even mention the great psychologist's use of laughing gas ⁴⁵ for the purposes of studying human perception and ultimate reality ⁴⁶. This is a conspiracy of sorts, albeit one motivated by cowardice, materialist biases, and a metaphysical belief in the Christian Science ideology of drug demonization.

Before publishing Coca: Divine Plant of the Inca, author W. Golden Mortimer solicited input from his fellow scientists -- and was almost completely ignored. The few who replied to Mortimer told him that it was immoral for him to even write such a book. We are talking about the late 19th century and the first few years of the 20th, before drug prohibition was even legally in force. Already, the idea was entrenched in academia that it was wrong to be honest about drugs, that we should simply pretend that psychoactive substances do not exist, at least when those substances have been identified (or rather disparaged) as "drugs" by racist demagogue politicians. I myself have gotten the "Mortimer treatment" insofar as I have written to hundreds of authors and philosophers on these topics over the years and have been ignored by almost every one of them. I have concluded, in fact, that it is considered bad manners to talk honestly about drugs in academia. If my results differ from Jay's, it is probably because Jay is discussing matters on the periphery of the drug debate -- like the identity and potential uses of a given drug -- whereas I am rather going for the jugular by making deductive arguments about the evils of drug prohibition based on accepted facts and then essentially asking the academics to agree with me or else tell me wherein I err. It is not surprising then that academics respond to me like Mistress Quickly in "Merry Wives of Windsor," saying in effect:

"I'll ne'er put my finger in the fire, and need not."

Are academics engaged in a conscious conspiracy? Probably not. Yet they may as well be, given their aversion to speaking the truth about drugs. Just because we can "draw some of them out" on this topic when talking to them in person using diplomatic language does not mean that these academics are going to commit themselves in public to any but the most qualified statements on the subject. This explains why I have received almost no responses from academics to whom I have written over the years when I try to alert them to the fact that their books reckon without the Drug War. They clearly feel that they have to take the Drug War as a natural baseline if they are to survive in academia in the age of the Drug War. For just one example of this self-censorship in academy, consider the academic book "The Witch" by Ronald Hutton. The author mentions "drugs" only once, and then in a pejorative connotation, likening them to the poisons sold by so-called "service magicians." And yet the book is full of the author's references to "herbs." Apparently, Hutton did not realize that the herbs that he was citing WERE drugs -- in the exact same way that "meds" are drugs. Hutton's blindness on this topic is an illustration of the fact that the Drug War is a massive branding operation, designed to demonize specific substances. For more on this topic, including an account of my diplomatic attempts to educate Hutton on this matter, please see my essay entitled Drug Dealers as Modern Witches.

This is self-censorship for which drug prohibition is to blame. Whether this self-censorship constitutes a conspiracy is not particularly relevant: the real headline here is that the ideology of drug demonization has put an end to academic freedom.

THE BLUE TIDE

The reference to the "blue tide" in connection with Soma is introduced with the following quotation from William Burroughs cited by Jay on page 27 of the paperback edition of his book:

"I have heard that there was once a beneficent, non-habitforming junk in India. It was called Soma and is pictured as a beautiful blue tide. If Soma ever existed the Pusher was there to monopolise it and bottle it and sell it and it turned into plain oldtime JUNK."

I have pointed out above that drug prohibition is a branding operation used to demonize all psychoactive competitors to alcohol. In light of that observation, I trust it is clear why I consider Burroughs' use of the term "junk" to be problematic, to put it mildly. Burroughs is making an important point, however, with such language, namely, that a selfish and profit-driven attitude toward drugs can itself cause drug problems. This hints at what I have tried to suggest in other essays: namely, that the failure of the western world to live at peace with drugs tells us far more about the western world than it does about drugs. And yet the west is in aggressive denial on this score. We insist that the entire world share our biases about drugs, including the plant-friendly indigenous people whom we have isolated and disempowered after insisting that they adopt the western drug of choice called alcohol.

Follow-up letter to Mike from author

I wish there was a modern Alexander Shulgin out there, free to study the real-world effects of beta-carbolines on a wide variety of user demographics -- as opposed to studying such substances under a microscope.

The good news is that the academic community is interested in psychedelics. Unfortunately, the majority of them are not speaking out against drug prohibition: they merely want to treat psychedelics as an exception to the supposed rule that drugs are bad. So few seem to understand that the prohibition mindset itself is the problem, relying as it does on public ignorance and the absurd idea that a drug with potential downsides must not be used by anyone, for any reason, ever. It is a mindset that puts politicians in charge of deciding how much progress can be made in the world, pharmaceutically speaking.

This, in turn, shows how propaganda and censorship combine to create a narrative: a narrative that has blinded almost everyone to the enormous downsides of prohibition -- downsides which one might have thought had been obvious ever since liquor prohibition first brought machine-gun-fire to the streets!

Notes for essay entitled Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay:

1: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
2: Fadiman, James. Psychedelicexplorersguide.com. 2011. https://www.psychedelicexplorersguide.com/. (up)
3: “The Transpersonal Vision : The Healing Potential of Nonordinary States of Consciousness : Grof, Stanislav, 1931- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2022. Internet Archive. 2022. https://archive.org/details/transpersonalvis0000gro (up)
4: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
5: Eleusis: Myth and Mysteries The Fitzwilliam Museum (up)
6: On the Laws Cicero, The Online Library of Liberty (up)
7: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
8: Quanah Parker: The Last Chief of the Comanche The Cowboy Accountant (up)
9: Opium: How an Ancient Flower Shaped and Poisoned Our World Halpern, John, Grand Central Publishing, 2019 (up)
10: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
11: The Critique of Pure Reason Kant, Immanuel, Project Gutenberg, 1781 (up)
12: We have an absolute right to use drugs DWP (up)
13: Why John Stuart Mill is irrelevant to the drug debate DWP (up)
14: Drug Prohibition should be protested on principle, not on utilitarian grounds DWP (up)
15: Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine DWP (up)
16: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
17: William James rolls over in his grave as England bans Laughing Gas DWP (up)
18: Niomi Russell Killed By Drive-By Shooters In Southeast DC Failla, Zak, Daily Voice, 2024 (up)
19: Daily Aspirin Linked To More Than 3,000 Deaths Per Year, Scientists Warn Huffington Post (up)
20: “Blue Tide - Mike Jay.” 2025. Mike Jay. May 18, 2025. https://mikejay.net/books/blue-tide/. (up)
21: “The Project Gutenberg eBook of Eugenics and Other Evils, by G.K. Chesterton..” 2019. Gutenberg.Org. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25308/25308-h/25308-h.htm. (up)
22: Restoring our Right to Self-Medication: how drug warriors work together with the medical establishment to prevent us from taking care of our own health DWP (up)
23: Gun Deaths in Big Cities Big Cities Health (up)
24: US Sentencing Commission: Over 65% of Federal Prisoners are Black or Hispanic Defender Services Office Training Division (up)
25: The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler Shirer, William, RosettaBooks, New York, 2011 (up)
26: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
27: Coverup on Campus DWP (up)
28: Intoxiphobia DWP (up)
29: “Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic Politics of Designer Drugs | Office of Justice Programs.” 2024. Ojp.Gov. 2024. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/synthetic-panics-symbolic-politics-designer-drugs. (up)
30: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
31: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
32: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
33: Opium for the Masses by Jim Hogshire DWP (up)
34: I have been unable to confirm this stat. But the WHO notes clinical recidivism rates for depression ranging from 50% to 85%. Do we count that as a recidivism rate of Effexor? Not when Biopharma is paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget, as reported by John LaMattina in the Sep 22, 2022 edition of Forbes magazine. (up)
35: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
36: Richard Louis Miller. 2017. Psychedelic Medicine : The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca. Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press. (up)
37: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (up)
38: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)
39: Drug Science Nutt, DJ (up)
40: Drug Science Nutt, DJ (up)
41: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
42: “Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic Politics of Designer Drugs | Office of Justice Programs.” 2024. Ojp.Gov. 2024. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/synthetic-panics-symbolic-politics-designer-drugs. (up)
43: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
44: Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine DWP (up)
45: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
46: How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James DWP (up)

read more essays here

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

The Drug War treats doctors like potential criminals and it treats the rest of us like children. Prohibition does not end drug risks: it just outsources them to minorities and other vulnerable populations.

"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."

Timothy Leary's wife wrote: "We went to Puerto Rico and all we did was take cocaine and read Faust to one another." And there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with that!!! The drug war is all about scaring us and making illegal drug use as dangerous as possible.

All uplifting drugs are potential antidepressants. Science denies that fact by claiming that drug efficacy must be proven quantitatively. And so they ignore anecdote, history and psychological common sense.

It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.

I can think of no greater intrusion than to deny a person autonomy over how they think and feel in life. It is sort of a meta-intrusion, the mother of all anti-democratic intrusions.

I'm interested in CBD myself, because I want to gain benefits at times without experiencing intoxication. So I think it's great. But I like it as part of an overall strategy toward mental health. I do not think of CBD, as some do, as a way to avoid using naughty drugs.

Americans heap hypocritical praise on Walt Whitman. What they don't realize is that many of us could be "Walt Whitman for a Day" with the wise use of psychoactive drugs. To the properly predisposed, morphine gives a DEEP appreciation of Mother Nature.

It is evil to give the depressed drugs to help them die while barring them from using drugs that could make them wish to live.

The depressed Canadian Claire Brosseau wants the state to kill her. This is the same state that refuses to let her use drugs that could make her want to live. https://abolishthedea.com/drug_use_is_not_worse_than_death

Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us

No cookies, no ads paid for by amoral and immoral billionaires (or trillionaires).

Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is a proud sponsor of The Drug War Philosopher website @ abolishthedea.com.

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP

(up)

Blue Tide: The Search for Soma

a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend