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Even Terence McKenna Was Wrong About MDMA

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 29, 2024



Terence McKenna 1 hails Alexander Shulgin as a great chemist while implying, somewhat perplexingly, that synthesized medicines can only be used recreationally, and then only at the user's extreme risk. But why does my use of MDMA have to be dismissed as recreational? Am I not allowed to have a spiritual experience unless it conforms to preset western notions about how such experiences should be facilitated? Who is Terence, or anyone else, to dismiss my use of a drug as recreational? Have they drilled into the center of my heart and noticed bad faith on my part? Or are they not rather presumptuous in the extreme, vaunting the purity of their own criteria for enlightenment while denying the positive intentions of others, and all based on abstract and theoretical considerations?


Man ask police officer: 'What's in there, plutonium?' The officer responds: 'Worse yet, MDMA!'
The DEA requires drug researchers to handle drugs like MDMA as if they were fissionable material.




Besides, MDMA may eventually tick all three of the theoretical boxes proposed by Terence, and why should I have to wait for science to catch up to common sense! As Rimbaud presciently wrote: "Science is too slow for us!" We all KNEW that pets had feelings, but science is the dumb kid in the school when it comes to psychology, and Descartes himself doubted the ability of the "mere brute" to "feel." The rest of us, of course, always knew that pets could experience pain and happiness. We only forgot it when seeking to meet the expectations of our materialist mentors. And so the scientific "slow kid" has to be coaxed into believing the obvious with the help of the only thing that he understands: namely, charts and data from reductionist experiments, experiments that always seek to abstract data from the context that makes that data meaningful in the first place.

What Terence did not recognize is that the whole standard for judging psychoactive drugs has been hopelessly skewed by materialism 2, puritanism, corporate greed, and scientists who have been mistakenly placed in the position of approving (or nixing) psychoactive drugs, a role for which materialist scientists are totally unfit. Why? Because a true cost/benefit analysis of drugs like MDMA would involve assessing the relative importance of compassion in daily life, and that is an assessment for which materialist scientists are unqualified - indeed, they are positively biased against a fair analysis insofar as their evaluation of drugs like MDMA typically begins with a willful disregard for all their obvious psychological benefits. "Those benefits are just anecdotal, don't you see? What counts is what can be seen under a microscope!"

Is potential world peace worth a few speculative materialist concerns about a drug? If such determinations must be made once and for all, then surely they should be made by philosophers and political scientists and ethicists and empaths and theologians and comparative ethnographers, not by a modern materialist who feels that he or she is only being professional to the extent that they are faithfully channeling the passion-free Dr. Spock of Star Trek.

It cannot be said enough: Materialists are not qualified to opine on the approval (or disapproval) of psychoactive drugs, for such evaluations are based on implicit notions about what constitutes "the good life" - and materialist scientists have no expertise in telling us of what the good life consists, neither for human beings individually nor for the world as a whole. Moreover, psychoactive drugs work holistically - that is, they work by creating overall attitude changes, not by specifically attacking conditions that western society has abstracted and reified in the insurer-friendly Diagnostic Statistics Manual. When we judge holistic drugs by western reductionist standards, we are practicing pharmacological colonialism. It's just the modern way of advancing the xenophobic pharmacological agenda of Francisco Pizarro by disguising it under a veneer of "science."

Take MDMA , for example. Terence grudgingly accepts that it has some great uses for specific psychiatric cases, but he fails to see the grander picture: namely, the fact that the world is on the brink of nuclear war 3 4 5 and catastrophic climate change, and that empathogens like MDMA have the potential to bring us together as a people and a world in order to avoid Armageddon. This is a huge potential benefit to drugs like MDMA and yet it is completely off the radar of even the enemies of prohibition. (This is very strange in Terence's case, since he himself lays such emphasis on the unsustainability of modern sociopolitical attitudes in the west.)

If Terence had been awake to this (let's face it) obvious situation, he never would have portrayed the back-and-forth debate about MDMA safety as a spirited exchange of two reasonable viewpoints. To the contrary, he would have seen that the potential for world peace was being consistently vetoed by fearmongers who apparently think that 100% safety is better than avoiding Armageddon itself, is better than stopping school shootings, is better than preventing suicides - all goals for which MDMA has enormous prima facie potential. Moreover, he would have noticed that the same FDA that is frightened of MDMA has no problems with brain-damaging shock therapy and the use of synthetic antidepressants 6 that render users dependent for life. Had Terence lived long enough to see prime-time pharmacological ads, he would have even noticed that some of the FDA-approved drugs on offer actually include death as a side effect. Apparently ANYTHING is okay provided only that it is quantifiable and provable according to the reductionist standards of modern science. The only thing the FDA hates are drugs that "merely" work (in other words, drugs that work holistically).

And yet Terence advances the absurd notion that there is much to be said on both sides of the MDMA argument.

Nonsense! There is common sense, which screams out:


"USE THIS DRUG AS NEEDED TO STOP SCHOOL SHOOTINGS AND TO HELP ERADICATE HATE FROM OUR NUCLEAR-ARMED WORLD."

And then there is the hypocritical and self-interested voice of materialist science which says:

"NOT SO FAST. WE MUST SEE IF THIS DRUG IS TRULY SAFE, AND THEN ONLY FOR ONE BOARD CERTIFIED CONDITION AT A TIME."

Thanks to that time-buying ruse, the FDA has managed to keep me from using godsends for my entire lifetime now, to the obvious relief of Big Pharma 7 8 and Big Liquor. Well, what about Big Depression? When are the depressed going to appear on the radar of the business-friendly FDA!

These are philosophical and political considerations, not scientific ones, and yet Terence, amazingly, just doesn't get it. It shows how the drug-war ideology of substance demonization has destroyed the objectivity of even our most perceptive minds when it comes to the discussion of psychoactive drugs.


TRACK RECORDS



The sign of a good psychoactive drug according to Terence is that it has a track record. Terence was apparently thinking of natural and time-honored meds like psilocybin and ayahuasca whenever he promoted this dictum, but had Terence lived until 2024, he would have noticed that MDMA now has a track record of use of over half a century and its use has not been associated with any downsides, except purely speculative downsides based on microscopic dendritic anomalies in long-term users, which, as Terence himself points out, appears to be a downside "without sequela," in other words, former users show no adverse consequences in everyday life.

As Terence himself admits, those dendritic anomalies can be overcome by administering Prozac with MDMA . And yet in true materialist fashion, Terence recoils from using drugs to improve drugs. But this is a materialist sensibility and bias on his part. Materialists hate to get more than one drug involved at a time because they look for "certain" knowledge - and certainty decreases in proportion as experimental variables proliferate. This is why materialist doctors are so bad in "helping" their patients get off an unwanted antidepressant - because their dogmatic desire to decrease variables makes them ignore a host of common sense drug treatments that could make it easier (or even easy) to get off an unwanted substance.

Does Terence think that tribal shamans have always feared using more than one drug at a time? Ayahuasca itself is created by the mixture of two different psychoactive substances. And the tribal use of drugs like huachuma cactus and psilocybin mushroom has often been in conjunction with other drugs, like psychoactive snuffs and tree bark containing DMT. It is merely a materialist bias on the part of Terence to think that drug combination is wrong. To the contrary, combining drugs is the answer to many problems. Unfortunately, this is mere common sense, and materialist science, as noted above, puts no stock in mere common sense. Any addicted person knows that they could forget their drug nemesis and their addiction for whole swaths of time with the help of drugs with a differing method of action, and that such breaks would be a great relief and inspire them to continue weaning themselves from an unwanted drug. But science ignores all such obvious effects, sniffing that they are "mere anecdote." Besides, "feelings" do not count according to materialist science, only quantifiable evidence.

Imagine how puny the tribal pharmacopoeia of today would have been had it always been subjected to the fearmongering standards of our FDA. All experiments to find useful drugs from the Amazon, for instance, would have been slow-tracked, and any attempts to prove the efficacy of multiple drug use would have been a non-starter - and so the world would never have been blessed with ayahuasca.


DRUG-FREE ARMAGEDDON!



Even if a psychoactive drug DID show some small adverse effect in the long run, that would not be, as Terence seems to believe (in fealty to drug-war ideology) a knock-down argument against the use of the drug. To the contrary, the question would become: "Are such small potential downsides WORTH IT given the potential benefits that one could obtain from the widespread use of this drug?"

Now, let's see: What's better? A world that avoids Armageddon? Or one in which we march blithely toward nuclear annihilation while yet doing everything we can to save our people from theoretical and microscopic side effects from psychoactive drugs?

One pictures an op-ed cartoon in which the last two survivors of nuclear armageddon 9 10 11 console each other: "Well, at least we did all we could to keep people from using drugs!"


THE MODERN EPIDEMIC OF HATRED



MDMA is on my mind today, and not just because of the recent enormously hypocritical ruling of the FDA which has slowed down the already glacial progress in the RE-approval process for that drug (which was outlawed by the self-interested DEA in 1985 against the advice of its own legal counsel). I am also thinking of the latest email I received from Public Citizen, a group which is fighting against the recent Supreme Court ruling that turns the U.S. president into a king, unaccountable for the laws he breaks while in office.

Here are excerpts from some of the hate mail that the Public Citizen organization has received lately:


See, now, when Terence thinks of MDMA , he thinks of dendrites and drug combinations and the need for endless more studies. When I think of MDMA , I think of the threat of nuclear annihilation in a world full of the kind of visceral hatred indicated above.

In my view, we do not have the luxury to hate empathogens like MDMA and we should not be looking for theoretical reasons to prevent their widespread use. To the contrary, we should be requiring all haters to use such drugs and demand that all politicians use them - in the same way that Polynesian leaders have historically consulted with each other while under the influence of the psychoactive kava.

PUSHBACK?

Here's an exchange on X that the reader might find enlightening, especially if they are a disciple of Terence McKenna. Don't get me wrong: Terence is wonderful in exciting important discussions about drugs, but I fear that his scientific education has biased him in favor of embracing highly debatable materialist presumptions as facts.

Despite his perspicacity, Terence McKenna hated the idea of using drugs WITH drugs. Yet ayahuasca IS the combination of multiple drugs. And drugs like psilocybin have historically been used in combination with psychoactive snuffs and psychoactive tree bark.

"NOT THE SHAMAN": Technically one is an "inhibiter" allowing the actual drug to have more effect, but ok.

Yeah, that's very technical indeed and depends on how we define "drugs." If accepted as a defense of McKenna, it would amount to saying that: "Go ahead and combine substances, but not if both have a psychoactive effect by themselves."

The irony is, shamanic peoples never thought like that. The jungle was their oyster, and they never thought they had to use one drug at a time, and then only for one board-certified "condition" at a time. They were holists, not materialists. (Experimentation was a big part of their pharmacological life, otherwise they could never have discovered/created ayahuasca. Just think how many ayahuasca-like godsends that we are going without because we dogmatically refuse to even look for them, out of our materialist disdain for mixing drugs with drugs.)

McKenna is not the only progressive who had materialist-inspired qualms about MDMA 12 . Carl Hart is a materialist by vocation and says in the preface to his book about adult drug use that "drugs" are not for anyone with problems -- those folks should see materialist doctors.

This is an elitist view about drugs, saying in effect: "Science is doing a fine job at treating emotional problems and depression, etc. Use holistic psychoactive drugs only for recreational purposes." That's madness in my view.

I think, in fact, that this is why Carl was allowed to publish his book without more pushback. He reassured all those doctors who got us hooked on antidepressants and diazepam: "You're still in charge, guys. I'm just talking about RECREATIONAL drug use! "

It gets worse: Rick Strassman himself says he's not sure about ending prohibition -- and Michael Pollan does not think that Americans can be trusted to use drugs wisely -- tho he seems by implication to think we're wise enough to risk our lives free climbing and sky diving -- and hundreds of other activities that are statistically far more dangerous than drug use has proven to be -- despite the fact that we are doing everything we can to keep drug use dangerous by refusing to teach safe use and refusing to ensure uncontaminated product.

And I don't mean to irritate anyone, but most inhibitors ARE considered drugs -- and even if they are not, there is no scientific proof that, even in theory, could prove that they are NOT drugs. That kind of certainty exists only in the dreams of triumphal materialists.











Notes for essay entitled Even Terence McKenna Was Wrong About MDMA:

1: McKenna, Terence. 2026. “History Ends in Green.” The Library. 2026. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/history-ends-in-green. (up)
2: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
3: 8 Nuclear Close Calls that Nearly Spelled Disaster Davidson, Lucy, History Hit, 2022 (up)
4: Global Nuclear Warhead Stockpiles (1945-2024) Voronoi, 2023 (up)
5: Nuclear Near-Misses: The Close Calls That Almost Changed the World Atomic Toasters, 2024 (up)
6: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
7: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
8: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
9: 35 Facts About Goldsboro Accident Hartwell, Therese, Facts.Net, 2025 (up)
10: A Darkening Horizon: Nuclear Dangers Around the World with Matthew Bunn Bunn, Matthew, Harvard Kennedy School, 2023 (up)
11: “Google Books.” 2019. Google.com. 2019. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Command_and_Control/H0-CJckES44C?hl=en. (up)
12: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The fact that some drugs can be addictive is no reason to outlaw drugs. It is a reason to teach safe use and to publicize all the ways that smart people have found to avoid unwanted pharmacological dependency -- and a reason to use drugs to fight drugs.

Now the US is bashing the Honduran president for working with "drug cartels." Why don't we just be honest and say why we're REALLY upset with the guy? Drugs is just the excuse, as always, now what's the real reason? Stop using the drug war to disguise American foreign policy.

Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but drugs have never been evil. The evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about drugs.

Even if the FDA approved MDMA today, it would only be available for folks specifically pronounced to have PTSD by materialist doctors, as if all other emotional issues are different problems and have to be studied separately. That's just ideological foot-dragging.

Brits have a right to die, but they do not have the right to use drugs that might make them want to live. Bad policy is indicated by absurd outcomes, and this is but one of the many absurd outcomes that the policy of prohibition foists upon the world.

A pharmacologically savvy drug dealer would have no problem getting someone off one drug because they would use the common sense practice of fighting drugs with drugs. But materialist doctors would rather that the patient suffer than to use such psychologically obvious methods.

The main form of drug war propaganda is censorship. That's why most Americans cannot imagine any positive uses for psychoactive substances, because the media and the government won't allow that.

The first step in harm reduction is to re-legalize mother nature's medicines. Then hundreds of millions of people will no longer suffer in silence for want of godsend medicines... for depression, for pain, for anxiety, for religious doubts... you name it.

And where did politicians get the idea that irresponsible white American young people are the only stakeholders when it comes to the question of re-legalizing drugs??? There are hundreds of millions of other stakeholders: philosophers, pain patients, the depressed.

When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.


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