Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman

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Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 26, 2024

The following material is a condensed version of "What Rick Strassman Got Wrong.

PSYCHEDELIC CHEERLEADERS?

If organizations like MAPS ¹ are cheerleaders for psychedelics, as Strassman suggests, then organizations like the FDA are jeerleaders! They look only for downsides in drugs, and so ignore the millions worldwide who are suffering silently behind closed doors thanks to America's blanket dismissal of time-honored medicines. If a drug can be misused by a white American teenager at one dose, in one context, then it must not be used by anyone at any dose, in any context. It's hard to imagine a more anti-scientific premise than this, nor one more likely to lead to unnecessary suffering around the world: that anonymous suffering for which the FDA never takes responsibility. This, of course, is also an anti-democratic premise, as it turns local sheriff deputies into the morality police and convinces the public to sacrifice American freedoms on the altar of the Drug War. It also leads to the election of dictators insofar as it removes millions of minorities from the voting rolls, which one suspects is the true purpose of the Drug War in any case.

LSD?

Strassman implies that Richard Nixon was interested in public health when he outlawed psychedelics. Wrong. He was actually interested in removing radicals from the voting rolls by charging them with felonies. If he had been interested in public health, he could have recommended the use of niacin or Thorazine to quickly bring an end to those "bad trips" that Drug Warriors love to talk about. Besides, the TV networks never covered positive uses of drugs in the '60s, while yet doing their best to outdo each other in making a big thing out of an atypical drug overdose. And neither television nor magazines talked about positive uses of psychedelics. In short, the whole power of the mainstream worked to make sure that such drugs as LSD were always portrayed in a negative light.

DRUGS OF ABUSE?

Strassman keeps using the phrase "drugs of abuse" uncritically. But there are no drugs of abuse in the Drug Warrior's sense of that term. The problems of drug use are always caused by a lack of education, and corrupt drug supply, which are two conditions that are caused by prohibition, not by drugs. We did not have thousands of kids dying in the streets when opium ² was legal in America. Young people are dying of opiates because of a lack of education combined with a totally unregulated drug supply. We could wait for human psychology to change and for everyone to become a Christian Scientist... or we could recognize that the Drug War is murderous folly and must be ended at once. And yet Strassman tells us that he still is unsure about re-legalizing Mother Nature, i.e., ending substance prohibition? Please!

HOPE TRAUMA?

Strassman implies that "hope trauma" is a problem inherent in psychedelic use, whereas the failure to achieve transcendent psychedelic states is usually connected with the use of the antidepressant drugs that were created by reductive materialists. The other principal cause of "hope trauma," or failure to have breakthrough psychedelic journeys, is the materialist outlook of the user, who expects that psychedelics should work just like aspirin: one simply takes the drug and lets the substance do all the heavy lifting.

PSYCHEDELICS V. ENTHEOGENS?

Strassman prefers the term "psychedelics" over "entheogens," and this is understandable from a materialist point of view. He wants us to approach a marvelous world scientifically, that is to say with the mind set of Dr. Spock of Star Trek, constantly reminding oneself, as Richard Dawkins suggests when it comes to evolution, that there is "nothing to see here" except the inevitable dreary outcome of cause and effect. In this view, the psychedelic drug experience is merely a case of the mind observing its own inner workings, divorced from all connection with nature as a whole. It has nothing more important to tell us than that silly dream you had after eating too much ice cream. But that's a metaphysical conclusion about such "trips," not common sense or logic.

This is why I believe that we should NOT insist on any one word (neither psychedelic nor entheogen nor hallucinogen) but that everyone should use the word that accords with their own metaphysical understanding of the world. I prefer the word entheogen, because it highlights the godsend potentials that we are ignoring when we outlaw drugs like MDMA ³ and psilocybin. An atheist may take exception to the apparent etymological nod to a deity, but for me the word merely connotes the intimation of the existence of higher beneficent powers about which it is impossible to be specific. I do not feel that the term "entheogens" implies that I worship a Caucasian God with a long white beard ensconced upon a cumulus cloud alongside cherubim and angels. But at the same time, I feel a deep conviction that there is far more at play here, something "more deeply interfused," than simple neurological cause and effect, which seems to be the default outlook of those who plump for the term "psychedelic."

I also find it hard to care about the rights of atheists when the Drug War is outlawing my religion. Let them legalize my entheogenic religion first, and maybe THEN we can talk about your right not to believe in it!

Besides, the motivation behind Strassman's preference for the term "psychedelic" resembles for me the motivation behind the modern scientist's willful blindness about the benefits of drugs: they refuse to recognize the obvious, like even the most overwhelming feeling of sudden enlightenment. They don't want to be biased, so they try to abstract themselves and their feelings out of the equation. So they shout in effect "I'm not listening" as the voice of ancient truths bellow, determined to believe only what they see under a microscope, determined that feelings do not matter in the scientific world. And thus the term "psychedelic" becomes problematic: it enthrones this myopic and passion-free materialism ⁴ as the baseline for further studies of psychedelics, with the working assumption being that there is "no there there" in the psychedelic experience, no greater truths to learn, no understanding of the human condition or of universal connectedness, no understanding of a greater reality of any kind.

It seems, however, that psychedelic drugs have to be believed in in order to work, or to work properly. If that's true, then approaching them dispassionately in the name of science is a huge mistake -- or is it a strategy on behalf of atheist materialists to exonerate their own existential pessimism about life with the help of a self-fulfilling prophecy: i.e., by making such drugs fail by failing to believe in them?

Author's Follow-up: October 11, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

With all due respect, if Rick really feels that "drugs" like DMT are just too dangerous for people, he should really stop writing books. Instead, he emulates Michael Pollan in trying to have it both ways. He wants to make money by exciting people about these substances while at the same time encouraging the police to continue cracking heads. Strange! America puts alcohol on a golden pedestal and then outlaws all possible competition. It's a faux morality. They turned simple prohibition into Prohibition writ large and now the prisons are overflowing. And Drug Warriors want it that way. Because the people jailed by this idiotic and unprecedented prohibition are "others" -- that one seldom meets -- and the fact that their inner-city landscapes have been turned into no-go zones by Drug War incentives seems to leave Rick and Michael cold.

Michael, for his part, freely uses the substances of his choice, while yet insisting that the average American is not capable of doing that safely (which will certainly be true if we follow the Drug Warrior's advice of failing to speak honestly about psychoactive substances). Michael is, in fact, the Leona Helmsley of the Psychedelic Renaissance. Drug laws are for the little people -- and that has, indeed, always been the case. Drug laws are designed to push around a certain kind of person -- and Michael can rest easily, knowing that he's not that kind of person -- especially since he has hedged his bets by signaling (albeit deep into his "Change Your Mind" book at page 405) that he does not believe that even Mother Nature's medicines should be freely available -- as they have always been until American politicians saw that they can destroy unwanted aspects of democracy (starting with the fourth amendment) by fearmongering about the kind of substances that we refuse to understand.

As for Rick, he reminds me of those police officers in the Leslie Nielsen movies who force a crowd to "move back" in order to protect them, thereby causing them to fall off of a cliff. Does he not realize that outlawing DMT is leading determined users to manufacture the drug themselves using highly toxic and dangerous chemicals? How safe is THAT, exactly?

Book Reviews

Fearmongering

Materialism

Notes:

1: Three Problems With Rick Doblin's MAPS DWP (up)
2: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
3: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
4: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)

read more essays here

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

There will always be people who don't use drugs wisely, just as there are car drivers who don't drive wisely, and rock climbers who fall to their death. America needs to grow up and accept this, while ending prohibition and teaching safe use.

Yeah. That's why it's so pretentious and presumptuous of People magazine to "fight for justice" on behalf of Matthew Perry, as if Perry would have wanted that.

In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort shows how science damns (i.e. excludes) facts that it cannot assimilate into a system of knowledge. Fort could never have guessed, however, how thoroughly science would eventually "damn" all positive facts about "drugs."

Materialist scientists cannot triumph over addiction because their reductive focus blinds them to the obvious: namely, that drugs which cheer us up ACTUALLY DO cheer us up. Hence they keep looking for REAL cures while folks kill themselves for want of laughing gas and MDMA.

What is the end game of the drug warrior? A world in which no one wants drugs? That's not science. It's the drug-hating religion of Christian Science. You know, the American religion that outsources its Inquisition to drug-testing labs.

Drug prohibition fails even on its own terms. Instead of protecting white American young people, it has exiled them to the city streets where they are sacrificed on the altar of the American religion of substance demonization.

The press is having a field day with the Matthew Perry story. They love to have a nice occasion to demonize drugs. I wonder how many decades must pass before they realize that people are killed by ignorance and a corrupted drug supply, not by the drugs themselves.

This pretend concern for the safety of young drug users is bizarre in a country that does not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.

What attracts me about "drug dealers" is that they are NOT interested in prying into my private life. What a relief! With psychiatry, you are probed for pathological behavior on every office visit. You are a child. To the "drug dealer," I am an adult at least.

Someone tweeted that fears about a Christian Science theocracy are "baseless." Tell that to my uncle who was lobotomized because they outlawed meds that could cheer him up -- tell that to myself, a chronic depressive who could be cheered up in an instant with outlawed meds.

Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us

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