Henri Bergson and Drugs

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Henri Bergson and Drugs

how drugs can set us free

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 19, 2025

In "A New Philosophy,¹" Edouard le Roy quotes his French colleague Henri Bergson as follows:

"We are free, when our acts proceed from our entire personality, when they express it, when they exhibit that indefinable resemblance to it which we find occasionally between the artist and his work."

This quotation has huge implications when we consider the fact that certain drug use results in a focused state of mind in which our acts do indeed seem to proceed "directly from our entire personality."

Drug war morality featuring depiction of pill floating in air in heavenly setting while showing nature's plant medicines beside grinning skull. — Americans have been taught to hate Mother Nature's plant medicines and to trust in Big Pharma 'meds' instead, many of which turn the depressed into patients for life with extreme chemical dependency.

This is the result of the wise use of cocaine ² ³ ⁴ , amphetamines, opiates and the hundreds of phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin ⁵ ⁶. This is, in fact, what drug use is all about, an attempt to improve the user's mental states. People use drugs because they want to FOCUS their minds, not because they want to scramble them. The use of such substances silences the inner voices of negativity that keep so many of us from single-mindedly "following through" on our goals in life without becoming distracted. They help make PTSD ⁷ irrelevant by biochemically getting us past our learned kneejerk responses to life and by helping us to focus on what is of most interest to "our entire personality."

In other words, when drugs are used wisely, they do not enslave us: they actually set us FREE!

I know this to be a fact from personal experience. I have FELT IT to be true. Unfortunately, behaviorist researchers will tell me that THEY are the judge about my mental states, thank me very much, not I myself! That is the whole problem, of course: it was always a category error to place passion-scorning materialists in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place.

Meanwhile, the brainwashed reader has been told only that drugs enslave -- but this is based on a lopsided focus on downsides of drug use that we have been taught to apply to all psychoactive substances with the exception of Big Pharma drugs and alcohol. This is why we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse in the United States and not a National Institute on Drug Use -- because our government wants us only to learn about the potential downsides of drug use, and never about their potential upsides.

Yet the common-sense benefits of such mind-focusing drugs are so obvious that it is amazing that I have to point them out. We are only allowed to think about how these drugs might be misused by a white American young person. We recognize no other stakeholders. There are endless cases in which the ability to focus could be a godsend -- to a writer, to a philosopher, to a poet, to the suicidal, indeed to a person evincing signs of dementia -- and yet we recognize only one class of stakeholder when we contemplate drug prohibition: namely, the white American young people whom we refuse on principle to educate about safe drug use. And so while common psychological sense tells us that informed use of these drugs could even prevent suicide and make shock therapy unnecessary, we completely ignore such facts as we worry instead about the fate of our educationally challenged children.

Consider how the use of morphine inspired the life of Poe's protagonist in "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains":

"In the meantime the morphine had its customary effect- that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. 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.⁸"

Hello?! This is a description of beneficial drug use -- and yet no one explicitly recognizes it as such. In this case, the botanically inclined protagonist, Augustus Bedloe, is empowered by morphine to be all that he can be in life given his own preexisting psychosocially determined predilections. These positive drug effects should be trumpeted from the rooftops -- "morphine ⁹ can drastically increase our love for Mother Nature!!! Read all about it!!!" -- and yet we are completely blind to all benefits of such drug use because we have been primed to consider "drugs" only in the context of misuse and abuse.

A Drug Warrior reads the Poe quotation and says: "These substances can never be used wisely and we must do everything we can to keep our young people from experimenting with them -- which is to say, we must outlaw them for everyone in the world for all psychosocial purposes whatsoever."

But a sane (i.e., non-brainwashed) person would read the Poe quotation and say: "My God! This drug has the power to make us alive to what matters most to us in life -- it has the power to render us 'free' in the Bergsonian sense of that word, to render us fully intentional in our every action! We must do everything we can to promote the wise use of such substances for the improvement of human beings and humanity!"

In other words, the drugs debate is really a proxy for a debate about what matters most in life. Sadly, the curmudgeons, the materialists, the racists, and the religious intolerant have so far called the shots in this debate because those of us who know better refuse to challenge the Drug War on philosophical grounds. Instead, we marshal statistics to "prove" that the Drug War is ineffective -- and that is a useless approach for at least two reasons. First, it yields enormous ground to the Drug Warrior by tacitly agreeing that racist Drug War tyranny would be worth it if it succeeded in keeping us from taking care of our own health... and second, its statistics will always be gainsaid, if only disingenuously, by still other statistics wielded by politically motivated Drug Warriors.

For this is not a scientific debate that we are involved in here, or even a philosophical one, for that matter: it is a political battle between two completely different visions of what life should be all about. Should we live life to the full, should we leverage all of our talents to the max, should we prioritize love over mistrust, or should we demonize substances a priori, especially those that inspire love, and legally privilege the lifestyle of racist and booze-swilling Christians while arresting all their opponents ¹⁰? That's what the Drug War is fundamentally about: not about outlawing drugs, but about outlawing all humanistic and optimistic "ways of being in the world.¹¹" It is no coincidence that the Summers of Love on both sides of the Atlantic were shut down by the authorities on the grounds of fighting drug abuse: that is, the use of drugs that were bringing people together, regardless of race or color, in unprecedented harmony. There is nothing that a Drug Warrior hates so much as peace, love and understanding. Amazingly, most Drug War pundits will tell us that these drug-hating politicians were worried about public safety, but that it is a laughable lie! Technically speaking, MDMA has never killed anybody. After the drug was demonized in 1990s Britain and dancers switched to alcohol, the formerly peaceful dance floors erupted into such violence that concert organizers had to hire special forces troops to keep the peace. Special forces ¹²!

Homo sapiens is an incredibly young species. We have only begun talking about these kinds of things in language a few thousand years ago. During that time, the indigenous world has sanctioned such drugs in shaman-led ritual and healing practices, while the west has pathologized almost all holistic psychoactive drug use. Those are two ways of dealing with the fact that the world is full of psychoactive medicines. There is a third way, however, that has never been tried: that is to deliberately learn about all psychoactive substances in the world -- both "natural" and synthesized -- and to actually use them for the benefit of humanity based on best-use practices in the real drug-using world! -- recognizing as we do so that users are the experts when it comes to deciding what works for them biochemically speaking, since the very definition of "works" in this connection depends on the user's idea of what constitutes a fulfilled life given their own unique attributes as a person. This is why we have to claw back our right to treat our own mental and emotional health from self-interested materialist doctors ¹³ ¹⁴.

And yet I alone am pointing out the philosophical presumption of the Drug War -- which has decided for us a priori that the only stakeholders in the drug debate are impressionable and uneducated young people, the young people whom we refuse to educate about safe drug use. This is the vicious circle of superstitious drug prohibition empowered by willful ignorance -- so unbecoming of a purportedly free and scientific society.

Thus philosophy is under the thumb of the Drug Warriors today, not least because Drug Warriors have contaminated all the words that we use to discuss such topics. The very word "drugs ¹⁵ ¹⁶" as used today connotes a purely fictional category of substances that are supposed to have no positive uses whatsoever. Meanwhile, the word "addiction" conjures a supposedly horrible phenomenon, the worst possible evil, in fact, this despite the fact that most so-called addiction could be overcome in a trice if we ever were adult enough to begin using drugs to fight drugs. But then "addiction ¹⁷" is the golden goose of the Drug Warriors. They do not want to end addiction, they want to leverage it as a "boogieman" to keep America's minds off of social problems (like the violence caused by the Drug War itself) and to focus on supposedly evil "drugs" instead. They use the specter of "addiction" to convince gullible parents of the need to end traditional American freedoms in the name of protecting young white Americans from the fact that they live in a psychoactive world. Needless to say, these Drug Warriors have never heard of the word "teach." To the contrary, they distrust education, telling us that the best way to keep kids safe is to keep them ignorant -- a hateful mindset that has directly resulted in thousands of opiate deaths around the country.

I would have been off of the Big Pharma drug known as Effexor ¹⁸ long ago had I been given the "privilege" of using laughing gas and coca and opium to counteract the depressing effects of withdrawing from the drug. But Drug Warriors are never interested in the downsides of drug prohibition that destroy lives like mine. They ignore my fate just as they ignore the fate of the 67,000 killed by drug prohibition in America's inner-cities in the last 10 years ¹⁹, just as they ignore the fate of the 60,000 disappeared by the Drug War in Mexico over the last two decades ²⁰, just as they ignore the fate of the millions of minorities that America has thrown in jail thanks to drug laws, thereby handing once-close presidential elections to fascists ²¹.

Yet the fact remains: drugs can set us free in the Bergsonian meaning of that word. Of course, no particular drug will work in this way for everybody -- no medicines are right for everybody. But we should not allow Drug Warriors and their materialist collaborators to gaslight us ²² into believing that obvious drug benefits are NOT obvious drug benefits.

AFTERTHOUGHTS

Here are just a few of the absurd things that Drug Warriors are tacitly telling us when they outlaw drugs:

1) That suicide is better than drug use.
2) That a wasted life is better than one in which we use drugs.
3) That drugs that inspire and elate have no worthwhile uses -- no, not even if their use would keep millions from committing suicide.

These are just a few of the hateful corollaries of the prohibitionist mindset. They remind us that Drug Warriors are doing more than opining about the value of drugs when they engage in substance demonization: they are also implicitly opining about the value of whole lifestyles, about the value of appreciating Mother Nature, about the value of mental focus, about the value of new religions, about the value of life itself! You say that the wise use of drugs gives you an up-close view of Mother Nature and sidelines all those negative voices that might otherwise push you to suicide? "So what?" replies the Drug Warrior. In the view of the prohibitionist, suicide is preferable to using drugs. They say this loudly and clearly in their actions, even if they avoid owning up to their inhumane and inverted priorities in honest prose.

I was immediately captivated by Bergson's quotation above because his definition of "freedom" describes precisely the state of mind that I experienced when I first used an empathogenic drug as a young person. I felt like I was suddenly comfortable in my own skin. There was no more nervous and indecisive foot dragging on my part, no more shuffling about in befuddled uncertainty. My every move was purposeful and directed toward important goals. Nothing was haphazard. I was no longer wishy-washy. My every act, as Bergson might have said, was proceeding from my entire personality. In fact, to the extent that psychoactive drugs work, they do so in this way: by freeing us to pursue our most important goals, in part by silencing the voices of doubt that serve to subconsciously hold us back in life.

Even marijuana and psilocybin can act in this way. I am not referring here to the dissociative states facilitated by the inebriation itself, but rather to the holistic effect of their use over time, which lessens the user's overall anxiety level and helps them focus on what matters in their life.

Wise drug use can set us free, and without creating unwanted dependency, at least in a world in which we learned from those who used drugs wisely. This kind of sane use happens every day without fanfare, for, as Carl Hart reminds us, most people use drugs wisely, this despite the fact that the government is spending billions of dollars a year in an effort to ensure that drug use ends in sorrow. And don't just take my word for it, or the words of August Bedloe in Poe's short story. 19th-century author Richard Middleton discusses safe and beneficial drug use in his short story entitled "The Last Adventure," in which he describes how poets of his time used opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses.²³" In other words, they used opium WISELY! Imagine that! And yet instead of letting us be all that we can be, instead of letting us be free a la Henri Bergson, the Drug Warrior believes that we should incarcerate those who attempt to live large with the help of psychoactive medicine.

Drug warriors act as if the faintest chance of dependency on "drugs" is evil -- and yet we live in a world in which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma meds for life!²⁴ What racist and politically inspired hypocrisy on their part!

Let me end this essay with an inconvenient question: Suppose that I did become dependent on a drug that inspired and elated? Why is that considered to be the end of the world -- whereas I am considered to be "a good patient" if I become dependent on a Big Pharma ²⁵ ²⁶ drug for life?

Sigh! There is seemingly no end to the philosophical ignorance and hypocrisy of the hateful and superstitious Drug Warrior!

I apologize for my verbosity here, but I find it difficult to write briefly on the topic of drugs -- because I know that the reader will be biased by so many prejudices that have been instilled in him or her by the full-court press of drug propaganda to which they have been subjected since grade school, especially in the form of the almost total censorship of all positive reports about drug use in our conglomerate-owned media.

As Whitehead observed in The Concept of Nature:

"In the presentation of a novel outlook with wide ramifications, a single line of communications from premises to conclusions is not sufficient for intelligibility. Your audience will construe whatever you say into conformity with their pre-existing outlook." --Alfred North Whitehead, from The Concept of Nature, ²⁷

Let me end by adding a few more obvious statements therefore for the sake of the brainwashed among us.

I advocate the return to a free world -- one in which we teach safest possible use and re-legalize all psychoactive medicines. In such a world, we would fight drugs with drugs in cases of unwanted dependency, keeping in mind that being chemically dependent is always better than living a meaningless life. This is something that Americans already tacitly recognize given their complacency about the psychiatric pill mill ²⁸ , which has turned 1 in 4 American women into wards of the healthcare state. Even if I stubbornly smoked opium ²⁹ nightly -- and ignored less potentially addictive inspiration from the phenethylamines of Alexander Shulgin -- my drug-aided life would still be infinitely preferable to a life which I experienced as meaningless. And yet the Drug War is such a fanatical Christian Scientist that he or she would prefer that I commit suicide ³⁰ -- or feel horrible -- than to live fully in life, like that artist of whom Bergson writes.

Again, the Drug War is all about preventing certain ways of being in the world, hence its evil. It is a war on human transcendence, justified by a fearmongering campaign being waged by racist politicians for obvious strategic reasons. The mass incarceration ³¹ of minorities and the destruction of inner cities is not an unintentional side effect of the Drug War, it is what the Drug War is all about. As Julian Buchanan reminds us, the Drug War has not failed, it is succeeding with flying colors insofar as its goal is to oppress minorities and to keep the world's eyes off the prize when it comes to social problems by blaming everything on the politically created boogieman called "drugs."

Finally, let us once again consider that Bergson quote:

"We are free, when our acts proceed from our entire personality, when they express it, when they exhibit that indefinable resemblance to it which we find occasionally between the artist and his work." ³²

There is a corollary to this insight that brainwashed Americans will never notice on their own, and that is the fact that wise drug use can help us turn our lives into a work of art.

But then I suppose that materialist scientists will tell me that it's not a "real" work of art unless it is a drug-free work of art. That, however, is not a scientific statement but a theological one, based as it is on the drug-hating metaphysics of the Christian Science religion. I guess they have forgotten that human beings are biochemical entities whose every move is, in some sense, determined by a mishmash of drugs in our guts -- and that we each have unique biochemistries of our own thanks to which ALL behavior can ultimately said to be drug-inspired. The question then becomes, which drug use seems to conduce to the lifestyle that we personally champion. And that, of course, is a question of personal tastes and should not be decided once and for all by Drug Warriors, least of all through the wholesale outlawing of the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions.

FURTHERMORE

Even DMT could help me live artistically, albeit in a way that materialist scientists will not understand. It would do so indirectly by giving me something to look forward to -- namley, the use of DMT itself -- and then the use itself would give me refreshing distraction and mini vacation from my censorious and discouraging sober mindset, thereby experientially proving to me that my silent negative inner voices are not the only reality in life, that there are other ways of thinking about the world, that there is hope and happiness out there. The materialist will complain by saying something childish like this: "DMT cannot help your depression because we see no chemical pathways that suggest such capabilities." But these materialists are blind to common-sense psychology, caught up as they are in the dogma of behaviorism. It is just plain common sense that the use of DMT could serve as a mood-lifting mental vacation for the neurotic -- not for every neurotic, of course (that is the Drug Warrior's sin, to try to make universal rules about drug use), but for the properly disposed user, a vaction with DMT would be a godsend. I say this is common sense, but unfortunately common sense is at a premium in the age of the Drug War. This is clear from the fact that modern materialist scientists do not even believe in the power of laughing gas to help the depressed -- laughing gas ³³ , for God's sake! Even Reader's Digest magazine knows that "laughter is the best medicine"!

Notes for essay entitled Henri Bergson and Drugs: how drugs can set us free:

1: Bergson, Henri. 2026. Gutenberg.org. 2026. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1347/pg1347.txt. (up)
2: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
3: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
4: “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)
5: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
6: Pihkal 2.0: Finding drugs that work for users rather than for pharmaceutical companies DWP (up)
7: Materialists reify certain forms of neurosis into official PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, as listed in the DSM, failing to realize the holistic truth that all neurosis is PTSD. It is the experiencing of negative psychological effects thanks to a counterproductive learned response to certain stimuli. This is why drug re-legalization is so glacial: because materialist researchers pretend that they need to expensively verify the effectiveness of any particular nostrum over and over again, with respect to our human-made categories of illness, without regard for the holistic principle by which such substances work. (up)
8: “Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (Text-02A).” 2026. Eapoe.Org. 2026. https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/raggeda.htm. (up)
9: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
10: Blast-off for Planet Hypocrisy! DWP (up)
11: “Being-In-The-World.” n.d. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262540568/being-in-the-world/. (up)
12: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
13: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)
14: “The Project Gutenberg eBook of Eugenics and Other Evils, by G.K. Chesterton..” 2019. Gutenberg.Org. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25308/25308-h/25308-h.htm. (up)
15: There are no such things as drugs DWP (up)
16: There are no such things as 'killer drugs' DWP (up)
17: Addiction DWP (up)
18: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
19: Gun Deaths in Big Cities Big Cities Health (up)
20: Mexico's war on drugs: More than 60,000 people 'disappeared' 2020 (up)
21: How the Drug War gave the 2016 election to Donald Trump DWP (up)
22: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
23: “The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Richard Middleton by Richard Middleton.” 2026. SciFier.com. 2026. https://scifier.com/the-collected-supernatural-and-weird-fiction-of-richard-middleton-forty-one-short-stories-of-the-strange-and-unusual-inc (up)
24: Richard Louis Miller. 2017. Psychedelic Medicine : The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca. Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press. (up)
25: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
26: 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)
27: Alfred North, Whitehead. 1920. Review of The Concept of Nature. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg. 1920. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18835. (up)
28: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
29: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
30: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
31: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
32: Bergson, Henri. 2026. Gutenberg.org. 2026. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1347/pg1347.txt. (up)
33: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)

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It's just plain totalitarian nonsense to outlaw mother nature and to outlaw moods and mental states thru drug law. These truths can't be said enough by us "little people" because the people in power are simply not saying them.

The FDA is not qualified to tell us whether holistic medicines work. They hold such drugs to materialist standards and that's pharmacological colonialism.

Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.

When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.

I can think of no greater intrusion than to deny a person autonomy over how they think and feel in life. It is sort of a meta-intrusion, the mother of all anti-democratic intrusions.

We should place prohibitionists on trial for destroying inner cities.

I just asked New York Attorney General Letitia James how much she was getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out that the drug war created the gangs just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.

The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.

Think you can handle a horse? So did Christopher Reeves. The fact is, NOBODY can handle a horse. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.

Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.

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Henri Bergson and Drugs

how drugs can set us free

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