Christian Science and Drugs

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Christian Science and Drugs

What Mary Baker-Eddy Got Right

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 6, 2025

Any faithful reader of my site will have noticed my penchant for denouncing drug prohibition as a stealth and subconscious move on the part of fearful conservative politicians to establish drug-hating Christian Science as the de facto state religion in America ¹. There are, of course, other more palpable motivations for the Drug War, above all the attempt to disempower minorities by creating laws specifically for that purpose ². But the fact that such laws appear reasonable to Americans across a wide political spectrum implies for me an implicit and widespread belief in the Christian Science metaphysic, the idea that drugs are both unnecessary and immoral, at least when it comes to improving the psychological condition of the human mind. So, while the Christian Science mentality may not have caused the Drug War, properly speaking, it yet gives the Drug War staying power by making its antiscientific tenets appear plausible to the American people, especially since, as westerners, we lack the universal indigenous habit of using psychoactive medicines for religious and divinatory purposes. (To the contrary, we look with suspicion on such drug use, as might be guessed from our persecution of the generally female witches of the past who begged to differ with the western mainstream on this subject.³)

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And yet it occurred to me last night that Mary Baker-Eddy was "on to something," as we say, even if she herself did not realize what that "something" was. This is clear when we extract the sectarian religious element from Eddy's belief and recast her apparent hatred for drugs as a hatred for materialist cures that are uninformed by the powers of the human mind - by what we might call the powers and insights that come from "higher consciousness." Seen in this light, Eddy and I are on the same page, for we both attack the presumption inherent in placing materialist scientists in charge of mind and mood conditions ⁴. We both believe that the human mind has powers that have never been properly leveraged and which we can use to fight so-called emotional disorders. The difference is that Eddy believed that the powers of the religious mind (of "higher consciousness") were up to the task of combatting ALL illness, and not just those metaphorical illnesses that are of a mental and emotional nature.

I can even agree with this latter extreme statement to a point. For the fact is that we do not yet know of what the human mind is capable for the simple reason that we have outlawed the quest to find out: we have outlawed all the drugs that show obvious potential in leveraging human consciousness for beneficial purposes. We have therefore outlawed the research that would be necessary to prove Eddy's thesis, or at least to tell us to what extent it is true and in what circumstances. Eddy's problem is that she declares her belief to be true in advance of performing the necessary research to prove that it is so. The mind (or consciousness) clearly has great power when it comes to treating psychological conditions, for the proof is extant, assuming that we do not make Eddy's mistake of ruling out the use of all drugs a priori based on metaphysical prejudices. The Hindu religion exists today thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated ⁵. The use of coca inspired the Inca of Peru ⁶. And the drug-user reports from Pihkal demonstrate that psychoactive drugs can produce extraordinary psychological improvements when used wisely and with intention by motivated individuals ⁷. But the precise extent to which mental powers (drug-aided or otherwise) can alter so-called physical conditions remains unclear because untested - again, thanks to anti-scientific drug law.

It seems to me that our discussion of Eddy's thesis as westerners is rendered unnecessarily complicated, however, thanks to our Cartesian tendency to consider mind and matter as separate categories in the first place ⁸. The truth seems to be that matter and mind are hopelessly entangled when it comes to cause and effect and that our attempts to deal with them as two ontologically separate categories can only lead to confusion. This is one of the many reasons why we need to re-legalize godsend medicines, by the way, for there can be no better way to investigate the distinctions and interactions between mind and body than by using psychoactive substances to leverage the power of mind, mood and imagination - to see both what can be accomplished thereby and what are the hard limits to such an approach. Far from being a niche issue, then, drug prohibition is nothing less than the outlawing of the most important philosophical research project imaginable, that of probing the true nature of our presupposed mind-body dualism. This is precisely the sort of research that William James himself conjured us to undertake as philosophers in "The Varieties of Religious Experience,⁹" but unfortunately this is a challenge that his alma mater, Harvard University, has censored from their online biography of the man, as they have his use of laughing gas ¹⁰ and his ideas on what he called the "anesthetic revelation ¹¹ ¹² ," which, in modern terms, is basically the topic of what drug use can tell us about the nature of reality ¹³.

These opening shots across the bowsprit of today's vulnerable materialism ¹⁴ could serve as the beginning of a lengthy essay, but my main goal today is merely to establish that Christian Science is not simply the bad guy when it comes to today's hateful drug prohibition, that the founder of that religion entertained some valid scruples with respect to the mind-body problem and that drug laws prevent us from following up on those leads. We come then to the ironic conclusion that the metaphysics of Christian Science would seem to philosophically support the War on Drugs on a superficial level while yet questioning it profoundly on a still deeper level. These issues are deeply fraught with philosophical considerations which can no doubt be hotly debated. But I hope we can all agree on at least one thing: that the Drug War has outlawed the research required to answer the mind-body questions at issue here and that drug prohibition is therefore an outrageous violation of academic freedom. Should a materialist say otherwise, they are clearly declaring premature victory for their own behaviorist mindset under the cover of a legal system that privileges their own beliefs.

Christian Science

Notes:

1: The Drug War = Christian Science DWP (up)
2: Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America Hansen, Helena, 2023 (up)
3: The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present Hutton, Ronald, Yale Press, 2017 (up)
4: The Poorly Hidden Materialist Agenda at Scientific American DWP (up)
5: A Hindu View on Drug Use and Abuse Frawley, David, Vedanet.com, 2012 (up)
6: Coca and its Therapeutic Application, Third Edition Mariani, Angelo, Gutenberg.org, 1896 (up)
7: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
8: Wholeness and the Implicate Order Bohm, David, 1980 (up)
9: “The Varieties of Religious Experience : William James : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2021. Internet Archive. 2021. https://archive.org/details/the-varieties-of-religious-experience_202109. (up)
10: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
11: The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy DWP (up)
12: anesthetic revelation (up)
13: How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James DWP (up)
14: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)

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against the hateful war on US

The best long-term treatment for OUD would be to normalize the nightly smoking of opium at home, not to addict the user to government-supplied drugs that render them impervious to the benefits of the poppy plant.

Uruguay wants to re-legalize psilocybin mushrooms -- but only for use in a psychiatrist's office. So let me get this straight: psychiatrists are the new privileged shaman? It's a mushroom, for God's sake. Just re-legalize the damn thing and stop treating us like children.

According to Donald Trump's view of life, Jesus Christ was a chump. We should hate our enemies, not love them.

"There has been so much delirious nonsense written about drugs that sane men may well despair of seeing the light." -- Aleister Crowley, from "Essays on Intoxication"

@HKSExecEd The use of Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace and love to the British dance floors in the 1990s. When are political scientists going to acknowledge the potential for such substances to pull our species back from the brink of nuclear annihilation?

In "How to Change Your Mind," Michael Pollan says psychedelic legalization would endanger young people. What? Prohibition forces users to decide for themselves which mushrooms are toxic, or to risk buying contaminated product. And that's safe, Michael?

I could tell my psychiatrist EXACTLY what would "cure" my depression, even without getting addicted, but everything involved is illegal. It has to be. Otherwise I would have no need of the psychiatrist.

Even fans of sacred medicine have been brainwashed to believe that we do not know if such drugs "really" work: they want microscopic proof. But that's a western bias, used strategically by drug warriors to make the psychotropic drug approval process as glacial as possible.

Drugs are not the enemy, ignorance is -- the ignorance that the Drug War encourages by teaching us to fear drugs rather than to understand them.

ECT is like euthanasia. Neither make sense in the age of prohibition.

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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.

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