David Hume and Whitehead on Drugs

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

David Hume and Whitehead on Drugs

How philosophical misunderstandings disempower the depressed in Drug War America

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher (Substack version)

August 4, 2026

When I was studying philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University in the 1980s, I was quite impressed by David Hume's critique of causation.¹ I suddenly realized that we had no reason to believe that the sun would rise tomorrow or that it would set tonight, or indeed that anything would happen in this world as we might suppose that it would. Nothing can be said to be "causing" these events, after all. Our only justification in believing so is that we have observed certain stubbornly obtaining correlations in the world around us. Morning has always been correlated with sunrise in our experience, as has evening with sunset. We therefore seldom find ourselves going to bed, wondering if the sun will rise tomorrow.

Of course, it is not particularly surprising to say that we cannot cite a specific "cause" for a sunrise. We all agree that a sunrise is a complicated thing. But Hume's critique goes further than that. It tells us that, even when we hit a billiard ball with a cue stick, we have no fundamental reason to conclude that the shot will cause the balls to describe one particular path as opposed to another. We are not even philosophically justified in believing that the cue stick will cause the cue ball to move at all. To be sure, we have noticed clear correlations between certain shots and certain outcomes on the billiard table, correlations that seem to have no exceptions whatsoever, but those are still correlations and do not tell us anything about causation. Maybe the balls have moved as expected 1,000 times out of 1,000 tries, but that does not justify our insistence that the balls will move on the 1001st try. Philosophy students will recognize this issue as the case of the "black swan," aka the problem with induction. We can insist, with an overwhelming preponderance of evidence, that all swans are white, but that theory will be overthrown in an instant, the moment that a black swan decides to join the ballet.

And so when our scientists tell us that A causes B, all they are really telling us is that A is positively correlated with B. To put this another way: the statement that "correlation is not causation" does not go far enough. In a philosophical sense, correlations are all that we have and all that we can ever know, at least according to Hume. The world happens to behave predictably, says Hume, but it is under no philosophical compunction to do so. And this "understanding" of causation has effects in the real world, especially to the extent that it is embraced by scientists. As Alfred North Whitehead laments in "Nature and Life":

Science can find no individual enjoyment in Nature; science can find no aim in Nature; science can find no creativity in Nature; it finds mere rules of succession. ²

Alfred North Whitehead -- Nature and Life

We can express this truth in the fittingly gloomy poetry of the Wasteland, declaring with TS Eliot that the world of nature is "just a heap of broken images, where the sun beats."³

EPIPHANY!

Only this morning, 40 years after being introduced to the Humean conundrum, have I seen the greater truth that lies beyond Hume's discovery. The epiphany occurred to me while re-reading the short book of lectures by Whitehead referred to above.⁴ I now see that Hume was both right and wrong on this topic. He was right insofar as no one "event" (or "impulse to action," so to speak) can ever be said to constitute a cause of another event. But he seems to have overlooked (or at least paid short shrift to) another possibility, one suggested by the author of "Nature and Life": namely, that the "events" in the present are immanent in both the past and the present and that therefore the cause, properly speaking, of any one "event" must be referred to the entire makeup of the universe at the time when the event occurred.

In other words, the indigenous people have been right all along. Everything is related, both people and nature, in both the present and in the past. Nor is this merely some quaint "philosophical" observation. When scientists ignore this truth, human beings suffer.

This is especially clear in the realm of so-called "mental health," where scientists, disdainful of holism, have ossified various elements of human personality into supposedly ontologically existing "diseases" that they pride themselves on studying out of context, as if ADHD were a thing apart from Depression, which was a thing apart from Bipolar Disorder, which was a thing apart from Communication Disorder, which was a thing apart from Seasonal Affective Disorder, etc. One can see an obvious financial incentive for looking at the world in this way as a capitalist -- it turns the human being into a playground for endless well-financed research studies on discrete aspects of human behavior -- but this mindset ghettoizes sufferers into psychiatric subkingdoms for the benefit of profit-driven researchers and psychiatrists, insisting that the sufferers' pathologies are fundamentally different from those of their fellow "patients."

The holistic view would see things entirely differently. It would see the individual, first and foremost, as a human being suffering from what Buddhists would call "dukkha," the existential angst associated with the transience and uncertainty inherent in our life "here-below." This is simply to recognize the nature of the human condition, the uncontroversial fact that life is tough, without, however, following up that bromide with the hubristic claim that we have, nonetheless, found the answers to all our problems in the biochemistry lab. Of course, it is no wonder that this holistic point of view is a non-starter for the mainstream. It implies that it was a category error to place scientists in charge of mind and mood matters in the first place, that such jobs, as in the past, should belong to empathic individuals of all kinds, including priests, rabbis, and counselors with no ideological axes to grind. If it's any comfort to the mainstream, however, our scientists would still have at least two important roles to play under this new holistic paradigm. They would flag abstract drug dangers and they would synthesize new beneficial psychoactive substances based on the chemical makeup of the existing pharmacopoeia.

Lacking this holistic world view, biochemists create pills to treat a "disease" that has been created out of whole cloth for the profit of insurance companies, doctors, lawyers, and pharmacists -- pills whose effects have been tailored so as not to ruffle the feathers of drug-hating politicians who mistrust everything that really works from the patient's point of view. Meanwhile, said "patients" are at the mercy of the latest biochemical theories hypothesized by chemists who view the human being as a physical machine for which mentation is a mere epiphenomenon, in the derogatory sense of that word. Whitehead saw the origins of this mindset in the past: "The disastrous separation of body and mind which has been fixed on European thought by Descartes is responsible for this blindness of science."

The English philosopher made it clear that this mindset was great, indeed, for accelerating technological progress -- for building trains, planes and automobiles, etc. -- but he warned that the very success of the method has caused us to rashly assume that it can be applied to all aspects of life, including to human mentation. The result of this category error has been a reductio ad absurdum: the idea that depressed human beings are interchangeable widgets amenable to the self-same biochemical interventions. Unfortunately, this is a reductio ad absurdum in which the mainstream refuses so far to see any absurdity. I see it clearly myself, no doubt because this mindset is responsible for turning me into a ward of the healthcare state and for denying me holistic-working medicines that could have eased my supposedly pathological symptoms of depression in a trice.

AFTERWORD

I conclude with some pertinent quotations from "Nature and Life" that should help to illustrate the points that I have attempted to make in this essay. Regarding causation, Whitehead would have us bear in mind that...

The environment enters into the nature of each thing. ⁵

Alfred North Whitehead -- Nature and Life

...and that...

...neither physical Nature nor life can be understood unless we fuse them together as essential factors in the composition of “really real ’’ things whose interconnections and individual characters constitute the universe. ⁶

Alfred North Whitehead -- Nature and Life

I will also let Whitehead speak for himself as to his goal in writing the essays to which I have been referring above:

My aim in these lectures is briefly to point out how both Newton’s contribution and Hume’s contribution are, each in their way, gravely defective. They are right as far as they go. But they omit those aspects of the universe as experienced, and of our modes of experiencing, which jointly lead to the more penetrating ways of understanding. ⁷

Alfred North Whitehead -- Nature and Life

Whitehead tells us in these lectures that Kant was the first philosopher to combine Newton and Hume viz. their ideas about reality, but that this combination led to a muddle. "Combining Newton and Hume," he writes, "we obtain a barren concept, namely, a field of perception devoid of any data for its own interpretation, and a system of interpretation devoid of any reason for the concurrence of its factors." Whitehead has now helped us past this hurdle with the idea of immanence and the connectedness of all things. I would only add here that we now need a philosopher who will combine Kant and William James. Kant, after all, presupposed a one-size-fits-all human consciousness, whereas William James discovered all new forms of consciousness with the help of psychoactive substances, especially laughing gas. Unfortunately, any philosophers who take up this baton would be subject to arrest, precisely to the extent that they took their study seriously.

FINALLY

I end with a quotation whose relevance to my essay is perhaps less clear, but which nevertheless will be found to have connections by those with both the time and the interest to think deeply about these matters. It is what I consider to be the definitive critique of the philosophy of positivism, the idea that scientists should focus on "just the facts, ma'am," and ignore everything else. Whitehead here illustrates how that ideology is inherently antagonistic to the advancement of human knowledge. Again, these beliefs have real-world consequences. It is scientific positivism that helps blind scientists to obvious drug benefits, causing them to arrive at laughable conclusions, such as the idea that laughing gas can have no positive uses for the depressed.

The observation of insects on flowers dimly suggests some congruity between the natures of insects and of flowers, and thus leads to a wealth of observation from which whole branches of science have developed. But a consistent positivist should be content with the observed facts — namely, insects visiting flowers. It is a fact of charming simplicity. ⁸

Alfred North Whitehead -- Nature and Life

Notes for essay entitled David Hume and Whitehead on Drugs: How philosophical misunderstandings disempower the depressed in Drug War America :

1: Millican, Peter, and Hertford College. n.d. “Notes on Hume on Causation.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://davidhume.org/teaching/documents/Hume_Notes_Causation.pdf. (up)
2: Calvi Rollino, Alessandro. 2020. “The Place of Processes: Nature and Life.” Rethinking Space and Place. June 16, 2020. https://rethinkingspaceandplace.com/2020/06/16/the-place-of-processes-nature-and-life/. (up)
3: “The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot with Annotations.” n.d. Wasteland.Windingway.Org. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://wasteland.windingway.org/poem. (up)
4: Calvi Rollino, Alessandro. 2020. “The Place of Processes: Nature and Life.” Rethinking Space and Place. June 16, 2020. https://rethinkingspaceandplace.com/2020/06/16/the-place-of-processes-nature-and-life/. (up)
5: Calvi Rollino, Alessandro. 2020. “The Place of Processes: Nature and Life.” Rethinking Space and Place. June 16, 2020. https://rethinkingspaceandplace.com/2020/06/16/the-place-of-processes-nature-and-life/. (up)
6: Calvi Rollino, Alessandro. 2020. “The Place of Processes: Nature and Life.” Rethinking Space and Place. June 16, 2020. https://rethinkingspaceandplace.com/2020/06/16/the-place-of-processes-nature-and-life/. (up)
7: Calvi Rollino, Alessandro. 2020. “The Place of Processes: Nature and Life.” Rethinking Space and Place. June 16, 2020. https://rethinkingspaceandplace.com/2020/06/16/the-place-of-processes-nature-and-life/. (up)
8: Calvi Rollino, Alessandro. 2020. “The Place of Processes: Nature and Life.” Rethinking Space and Place. June 16, 2020. https://rethinkingspaceandplace.com/2020/06/16/the-place-of-processes-nature-and-life/. (up)

read more essays here

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

National Geo published an article entitled "Coca: a Blessing and a Curse." Coca was never a curse. Most people used it wisely, just as most people drink wisely. Doctors demonized it because it really worked and it could put them out of business. https://abolishthedea.com/sigmund_freuds_real_breakthrough_was_not_psychoanalysis.php

The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?

The U.S. Congress considered the following to be a scientific fact back in 1924: "A person taking narcotics regularly impedes evolutionary progress and tends to degenerate backwards toward the brute." -- Richmond Hobson

America's "health" system was always screaming at me about the threat of drug dependency. Then what did it do? It put me on the most dependence-causing drugs of all time: SSRIs and SNRIs.

We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.

Drug warriors have taught us that honesty about drugs encourages drug use. Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.

This is why "rock stars" use drugs: not just for performance anxiety (which, BTW, is a completely UNDERSTANDABLE reason for drug use), but because they want to fully experience the music, even tho' they may be currently short on money and being hassled by creditors, etc.

"All these anti-opium articles... 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 Brereton

So much harm could be reduced by shunting people off onto safer alternative drugs -- but they're all outlawed! Reducing harm should ultimately mean ending this prohibition that denies us endless godsends, like the phenethylamines of Alexander Shulgin.

@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?

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)

David Hume and Whitehead on Drugs

How philosophical misunderstandings disempower the depressed in Drug War America

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