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Drug Prohibition and the Metaphysical Search for 'Real' Religious Inspiration

a review of essay number 6 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 26, 2025



The following remarks are part of a series of responses to the essays contained in the 2001 book "Hallucinogens: A Reader," edited by Charles Grob1. The comments below are in response to essay number 6: "Chemical and Contemplative Ecstasy: Similarities and Differences" by Roger Walsh, M.D., Ph.D.


Walsh confronts the metaphysical question of whether drugs "really" increase religiosity, but I contend that this is an ill-conceived question. It is based on the presumption that there is an identifiable one-size-fits-all "sober" state against which we are to judge the effects of psychedelics. There is no such paradigmatic ideal and baseline state however. Each individual has a unique biochemistry and psychology and life story that renders their reactions to life very different from those of their fellows. They already have drugs in their "systems," even if we consider them to be stone sober. Everybody has drugs in their system. That is their biochemistry. To ask about the role that chemicals play in producing a specific behavior or impulse is therefore misconceived -- for behavior is produced by the totality of inputs -- chemical and otherwise -- and the unique way that they interact in an individual at a certain time and in a certain environment and so on. The very term "biochemistry" reminds us that we are all on drugs all the time. The question is therefore NOT: how do those drugs effect us -- but rather how does the wide array of chemical and non-chemical incentives combine (with our upbringing, our psychology, our default biochemistry, etc.) to influence behavior?

Does mescaline increase religiosity? That is a meaningless question. The drug experience is dependent on a vast array of factors besides the use of mescaline by itself. This is why Sartre2 experienced hell on mescaline while many others (most notably Aldous Huxley) experienced pure joy. The outcome of drug use always depends on the unique combination of a vast array of inputs. We should therefore resist the temptation to reify psychoactive drugs as all-powerful causative agents that have one specific outcome of use.

Meanwhile, the idea that drug-aided religiosity is not "real" is highly problematic. It begs endless philosophical questions, such as:

1) If I sharpen my mind with the use of cocaine 3 4 5 and feel closer to nature for having done so (and therefore feel more "religious" according to my definition of that term), is that somehow not a "valid" religious benefit? Why not, exactly?

2) If morphine 6 gives me a deep appreciation of the intricacies of Mother Nature and I view this as a religious advancement on my part, in what sense am I "wrong"?

The moralist's attempt to say that drug-aided religiosity is not "real" reminds me of the materialist's attempt to tell us that drugs like laughing gas 7 and morphine 8 and coca and phenethylamines cannot "really" help the depressed. Both moralist and materialist are blinded to the obvious. The moralists are blinded by their preconceived ideas about what constitutes a "real" religion. In the case of the materialist, they are biased by the Behaviorist doctrine that real benefits must be discovered under a microscope and can never be seen by the naked eye -- or divined easily by common sense. Common sense tells me that laughter would help the depressed and that states of extreme concentration would help a writer -- and yet Drug War morality and materialist ideology both teach us to pretend that no such help is available, that such help is somehow illusory.

Of course, exceptions are made when money is at stake. Thus speed is rebranded as Ritalin so that we can give it to grade schoolers to improve their concentration levels -- but if we tried to improve the concentration levels of adults with speed, it is considered wrong and demonized as the use of "meth." It makes you wonder how stupid Drug Warriors think we are... and if they might be right about that, at least when it comes to substances that we demonize as "drugs."











Notes for essay entitled Drug Prohibition and the Metaphysical Search for 'Real' Religious Inspiration: a review of essay number 6 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob:

1: Hallucinogens: a reader Grob, M.D., editor, Charles, Penguin Putnam, 2002 (up)
2: Sartre and Speed: a review of essay number 4 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob DWP (up)
3: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
4: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
5: “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)
6: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
7: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
8: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)




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This is the mentality for today's materialist researcher when it comes to "laughing gas." He does not care that it merely cheers folks up. He wants to see what is REALLY going on with the substance, using electrodes and brain scans.

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

If I should die of some unusual concatenation of circumstances, I want my survivors to pass "Brian's Law," a law stating that we will no longer pass laws based on hard cases and so needlessly fill our prisons by taking common-sense discretion out of the hands of judges.

Americans believe scientists when they say that drugs like MDMA are not proven effective. That's false. They are super effective and obviously so. It's just that science holds entheogenic medicines to the standards of reductive materialism. That's unfair and inappropriate.

Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.

Many psychonauts (like Terence McKenna) praise psychedelics while demonizing other psychoactive substances. No substance is bad in itself. All substances have some use at some dose for some reason for some people in some circumstance.

We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.

We've got to take the fight TO the drug warriors by starting to hold them legally responsible for having spread "Big Lies" about "drugs." Anyone involved in producing the "brain frying" PSA of the 1980s should be put on trial for willfully spreading a toxic lie.

The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.

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.


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