an open letter to Joshua Falcon, author of Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
January 5, 2025
Hi, Joshua.
I just read your 2020 paper entitled 'Designing Consciousness1' and found it quite thought-provoking. Given your academic interests, I thought you might not mind if I shared some thoughts that I had on some of the topics that you raised.
I think that the greatest indictment of the western mindset is the fact that we made a conscious decision to develop thermonuclear weapons in the 1950s, rather than recognizing the horrifying dangers inherent in that pursuit and so working relentlessly with friends and enemies alike to prevent such development2. We should have created a Department of Peace just as we had created a Department of War (eventually to be rebranded as the Defense Department). We should have begun working tirelessly to find ways to bring people together, in which case the strategic use of entheogens would have been an obvious tactic.
The second greatest indictment of the western mindset is the fact that those who still hold these irresponsibly hawkish views are now steadfastly opposed to the use of entheogenic medicines, substances that could help bring the world together and make us simply not want to use such weapons. They would rather risk nuclear annihilation than allow 'drug use,' such are the warped priorities of the Drug Warrior. Even those who consider themselves to have an anti-colonialist mindset have been taught (chiefly by the propaganda of censorship) to fear entheogens. These are the sorts of people who wring their hands over school shootings and youth suicide3 and yet are blind to the most obvious realistic answer to these problems: namely, the strategic use of empathogenic medicines to teach the hothead compassion and to convince the suicidal that life is worth living, not through words but by letting them experience feelings of acceptance and love and compassion.
Speaking of suicide, every suicidal individual should be equipped with a laughing gas kit, in the same way that we equip the allergy-prone individual with an epi pen. Instead, the FDA is now working to classify laughing gas as a 'drug,' a substance without positive uses, which is a double insult, insofar as laughing gas 4 was the substance that inspired the ontology of William James, by teaching him that what we experience is but a utilitarian 56 -biased fraction of any supposed ultimate reality7. This rating system is not science at work, it is politics and ideology.
Your paper also got me thinking about the western focus on utility. This puts evolution in a new and potentially colonial light. Evolution, after all, is all about finding utilitarian 8 reasons for everything in the animal kingdom. Does the peacock have a beautiful tail? 'Oh, that's just to attract a mate.' Does the dog have a cute expression? 'Oh, that's just to arouse our interest and make us feed it.' The theory seems custom-designed to legitimize the viewpoint of a cynic and to justify interventionism for financial and political purposes.
But the standard bearer of this utilitarian viewpoint was George Santayana. In his series of books on the 'Life of Reason,' he uses the term 'savage' no less than 21 times, in curt dismissal of non-western people. Santayana wants nothing to do with teleology or final causes: he simply wants to know the utility of the world as we experience it. 'What can the objective world do for Santayana?' that's what he wants to know. Whatever he himself may have thought about psychedelics, his philosophy remains a cover for the Francisco Pizarros of the world to oppress at will, as when they show disdain for the plant medicines of the Andes. Mystical states are nonsense, after all; they have nothing to do with the price of tea in China!
To combat that mindset, I recently published an essay on Santayana's 'Life of Reason' entitled: 'If this be reason, let us make the least of it!9'
Regarding the increasing acceptance of psychedelic drugs, I see this as a positive step. Unfortunately, the takeaway for many seems to be that 'psychedelics aren't evil 'drugs' after all,' whereas the greater lesson should be that there are no such things as evil 'drugs' and that all substances have potential positive uses at some dose, in some circumstance, for some reason10. To think otherwise is anti-scientific and even superstitious.
Nor is it just psychedelics whose use can conduce to a greater appreciation of Mother Nature. In the right person, at the right dose, in the right circumstance, many non-psychedelic drugs can have that effect. morphine can provide an almost surrealistically clear view of the natural world. In 'A Tale of the Ragged Mountains' by Poe, the protagonist has the following experience under an 'immoderate' dose of that drug:
'In the quivering of a leaf—in the hue of a blade of grass—in the shape of a trefoil—in the humming of a bee—in the gleaming of a dew-drop—in the breathing of the wind—in the faint odors that came from the forest—there came a whole universe of suggestion—a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought.11'
But the Drug War says we are not allowed to have that experience. This is why I say that, 'When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw far more than drugs.'
Unfortunately, strategic fearmongering tells us that we will never learn to use drugs like morphine wisely. But this is just a defeatist lie, spouted for the purpose of supporting a Drug War that locks up minorities by the millions, thereby handing elections to fascists. As Carl Hart reports in 'Drug Use for Grown-Ups', most people use drugs wisely, and this despite the fact that drug law does all it can to make drug use dangerous12.
When all drugs are re-legalized and we teach safe use (and use drugs to fight drugs, as in my essay on that topic13), we can benefit from a wide array of mental states, psychedelically provided and otherwise, without developing unwanted dependencies, or at least with a psychologically obvious way to combat them should they occur. We should remember, too, that all risky activities have victims -- whether we're talking about rock climbing, shooting a gun, or driving a car -- and that this reality should prompt us to teach, not to outlaw.
We should also be honest with ourselves about dependency. Currently, we believe it is highly immoral to be dependent on morphine , but we consider it a medical duty for the depressed to 'keep taking their meds.' The difference between the two is neither logical nor scientific, but merely based on the attitudes that we have been taught to associate with each usage pattern. One of the founders of Johns Hopkins University was a regular morphine user and was just as vocationally able as he would have been had he been taking Prozac - probably far more so in that morphine conduces to great concentration, especially in well-educated people who seek to leverage its power in this regard. morphine 's biggest downside compared to antidepressants 14 was simply that the morphine 15 user had to hide his drug and was taught by society to feel guilty about using it. In reality however, drugs are drugs, no matter how they're whitewashed by social narratives.
Finally, nothing could be more colonial than the DEA's scheduling system. It tells us that the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions have no positive uses. This is only plausible to Americans because we see drugs through the lens of reductive materialism 16 and behaviorism, thanks to which drug efficacy is established by looking under a microscope. And so the fact that a depressed person laughs while using a drug means nothing to western researchers. The fact that they may have spiritual revelations means nothing.
This illustrates a huge but seldom recognized problem with the western mindset: that it is obliged by reductive materialism to ignore psychological common sense, like the fact that feeling good helps, that looking FORWARD to feeling good helps, and that laughter is laughter17. This dogmatic blindness is, in turn, the result of a category error. Materialists are not the experts when it comes to drug use. The real experts are those pharmacologically savvy empaths who know what safe use looks like and can imagine creative protocols to put drugs to work on behalf of real people, based on their own psychosocial goals in life, not based on what hubristic materialist science believes should work for them according to theory.
But science magazines do not acknowledge this category error. In their articles on subjects like consciousness, fear and depression, the authors never contemplate the role that 'drug' use can play in enlightening us on these topics. Instead, they pretend that substance prohibition is a natural baseline and so discuss only legal substances18. This is false science, however. It purports to be giving us the latest state of knowledge, but it is really giving us a partial viewpoint based on what the government will allow it to contemplate. All such articles should come with a disclaimer, stating that the authors are ignoring the insights that might come from the consideration of illegal drugs and their current and historical use. But no such disclaimers are ever published - and so the Drug War gets off 'scot-free' for its censorship of academia19.
And much of today's censorship is self-censorship, which should not be surprising considering that we all were subject to Drug War indoctrination starting in grade school20.
I just read a book by historian Ronald Hutton entitled: 'Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present.21' Like all academics on this topic, he points out the obvious fearmongering of the witch hunters of eld and of those who, to this very day, believe in witches and magic.
But these academics never look in the mirror.
The Drug War is the greatest example of strategic fearmongering in world history. And yet academics do not see this, even those who specialize in writing about the strategic fearmongering of witch hunters. And so these academics write of the 'herbs' used by witches, failing to realize that these 'herbs' were nothing but drugs, in the exact same way that 'meds' are drugs. They do not bring this connection to the fore, of course, because they simply 'do not want to go there,' as it is impolite these days (not to say dangerous to one's career prospects) to talk honestly about drugs.
I wrote to Ronald, suggesting to him that the impulse and motivations of the witch finder have never disappeared from society22. The witch hunter is today's Drug Warrior and the new witches are drug dealers. They are hated for strategic reasons: namely, because they pose a threat to the medical industry (as being a common sense alternative to the myopic behaviorism of modern doctors) and for helping to facilitate mental states that are mistrusted and feared by the powers that be.
My conclusion is that colonialism is alive and well. It is hiding behind the twofold veneer of 'materialist science' and the Drug War. Both work to make us dismissive of the holistic mind and mood medicines of indigenous peoples, the former via pseudoscience and the latter via fearmongering. The sad irony is that such non-materialistic drug use is the human species' last best hope for eradicating the hatred and suspicion that has our species on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
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.
The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
I passed a sign that says "Trust Trump." What does that mean? Trust him to crack down on his opposition using the U.S. Army? Or trust him not to do all the anti-American things that he's saying he's going to do.
Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.
My consciousness, my choice.
The proof that psychedelics work has always been extant. We are hoodwinked by scientists who convince us that efficacy has not been "proven." This is materialist denial of the obvious.
The massive use of plea deals lets prosecutors threaten drug suspects into giving up their rights to a fair trial.
It is folly to put bureaucrats in charge of second-guessing drug prescriptions: what such bureaucrats are really doing is second-guessing the various philosophies of life which are presupposed by the way we use psychoactive drugs.
The Shipiba have learned to heal human beings physically, psychologically and spiritually with what they call "onanyati," plant allies and guides, such as Bobinsana, which "envelops seekers in a cocoon of love." You know: what the DEA would call "junk."
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