why Americans have such diverse reactions to the use of psychedelics like Ayahuasca
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 4, 2025
When I first partook of ayahuasca last year in Maine, I was surprised by the wide range of experiences reported by my 30 or so fellow participants1. The results were all over the map. I personally encountered a fascinating and colorful array of images that put me in mind of a carnival midway. And yet a former alcoholic, who started out sitting next to me, ended up on the back porch of the facility's premises, screaming incoherently for over an hour -- and this at the very time that participants like myself were struggling to remain relaxed and calm in the face of what for most of us was a brand-new experience! (I was even afraid that the Christian Science police would show up and arrest us as so many irreclaimable heretics.) The dozens of user reports from the subsequent debriefing session held on the following day occupied the vast middle ground between such extremely different outcomes as ours. One young woman reported having a conversation with her recently deceased grandmother, another reported a sense of bliss, a young man reported a sense of power, yet another reported a sense of restlessness, and at least one participant claimed to have experienced nothing at all.
These diverse outcomes have convinced me of a truth that I had already surmised based on other non-experiential considerations: namely, that there is no such thing as "the psychedelic experience" -- that the outcomes of such drug use are, in a very meaningful sense, a product of a variety of psychosocial factors, of which the consumption of the medicine is but one element, and not necessarily the decisive one at that. Of course, this is not an original statement on my part. Everyone has been talking about the importance of set and setting since the days when the government was harassing Timothy Leary in upstate New York over his attempts to open a church based on the use of a sacrament other than alcohol2. And yet this ayahuasca experience demonstrated for me how the mindset that we take to such events can be overwhelming and decisive. We talk about the power of psychedelics to help one view the world productively -- but we need to remember that such medicines are not one-size-fits-all western nostrums, that we ourselves have to prepare our minds for these experiences to the extent possible -- if not to guarantee a therapeutic outcome of use, then at least to render such an outcome more probable than it might otherwise have been.
I have suggested that the drug employed is only one element responsible for the drug experience. This fact was brought home to me during the ayahuasca experience in Maine. In the latter half of that ritual, I started thinking of the music of curandero Taita Jhon as the drug itself, for it seemed to me that every time Jhon started singing or playing the drums, the ayahuasca effects would become pronounced, whereas the effects would seem to vanish altogether during the intermittent silences. As a westerner, I have always thought that you controlled the dosage of a drug by changing the quantity of the substance that you were consuming: and yet with ayahuasca, the "dosage" of the drug -- or at least its potency -- seemed to change as a result of the music, of how and how loudly it was played. Imagine that you had consumed a couple of beers at a dance hall -- and then found yourself getting more inebriated every time the band struck up a new tune, this despite the fact that you had ceased consuming alcohol altogether. That was how I felt in Maine. If someone had asked me at the time, "Have you consumed the right amount of ayahuasca?", I would have answered: "That depends. When the music stops, I think I might have consumed too little, whereas when the music rises again, I find myself speculating that I may have overdone it!"
This, of course, is why quantity-obsessed materialists are so incapable of judging holistic medicines of any kind. The materialist wants to limit variables so that they can pretend to omniscience on these topics, and yet it is precisely the complex interaction of a wide array of variables that accounts for the effects of such drugs. In other words, holism matters. The best that the materialist can do, therefore, is to tell us how these drugs affect lab rats -- not how they affect actual human beings whose very attitudes and upbringings contribute so fundamentally to the nature of the "drug experience" that our materialist scientists are purporting to study.
And so we can say of ayahuasca what Native American activist Albert Hensley once said of peyote:
"It is utter folly for scientists to attempt to analyze this medicine. Can science analyze God's body?"3
SHARED EXPERIENCE?
How then do we account for the fact that ayahuasca use in South America is said to create a shared experience among participants4? I think the answer is clear: the South American worshippers approach the drug with a shared understanding -- not just about the drug and its use but about the nature of the world in which they themselves live. The indigenous people of South America ascribe to a world view they call Cosmovision, according to which the world is deeply interconnected5. Cynicism and self-interested exploitation have no place in such a weltanschauung. When a group of people come together under such an unspoken understanding, it is easy to imagine them sharing the same experience when using ayahuasca. In fact, this very thought occurred to me in Maine during the height of my ayahuasca visions. It was clear to me that the whole group could rise as one, perhaps chanting and dancing as we did so, in such a way as to transform all the individual visions into a collective vision, one in which personal idiosyncrasies had been transcended by dint of the conscious energy fields awakened by drums and voices and environment -- and the fact that we had all been placed on the same philosophical page to begin with.
Most enemies of inner-city gun violence refuse to protest against the drug prohibition which caused the violence in the first place.
America is insane: it makes liquor officially legal and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.
Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.
Attempts to improve one's mind and mood are not crimes. The attempt to stop people from doing so is the crime.
Over 45% of traumatic brain injuries are caused by horseback riding (ABC News). Tell your representatives to outlaw horseback riding and make it a federal offence to teach a child how to ride! Brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
Drug testing labs should give high marks for those who manage to use drugs responsibly, notwithstanding the efforts of law enforcement to ruin their lives. The lab guy would be like: "Wow, you are using opium wisely, my friend! Congratulations! Your boss is lucky to have you!"
Researchers insult our intelligence when they tell us that drugs like MDMA and opium and laughing gas have not been proven to work. Everyone knows they work. That's precisely why drug warriors hate them.
One merely has to look at any issue of Psychology Today to see articles in which the author reckons without the Drug War, in which they pretend that banned substances do not exist and so fail to incorporate any topic-related insights that might otherwise come from user reports.
Folks like Sabet accuse folks like myself of ignoring the "facts." No, it is Sabet who is ignoring the facts -- facts about dangerous horses and free climbing. He's also ignoring all the downsides of prohibition, whose laws lead to the election of tyrants.
If you're looking for an anti-Christ, just look for an American presidential politician who has taught us to hate our enemies. Gee, now, who could that be, huh? According to Trump, Jesus was just a chump. Winning comes before anything at all in his sick view of life.
Most enemies of inner-city gun violence refuse to protest against the drug prohibition which caused the violence in the first place.