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How the Drug War limits our understanding of Immanuel Kant

an open letter to Dr. V.A. Gijsbers of Leiden University

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 6, 2024



Hello, Doctor Gijsbers and greetings from Virginia, USA.

Thanks for the excellent videos on Immanuel Kant 1 and his Critique of Pure Reason2. They are helping me finally begin to understand this book, which I only dimly comprehended (if at all) in university. What follows are some no doubt controversial thoughts about Kant and his discussion of the noumenal world. I am hoping that you will find time to read them. If so, I would be delighted to hear your thoughts. Please understand, however, that any criticisms below are directed toward philosophy as a field and not by any means toward yourself in particular.

Thanks again!

I am a 65-year-old philosophy buff from the states who has written hundreds of essays regarding the philosophy of the War on Drugs and the attitudes that it represents. I believe that the Drug War has censored academia and in ways that most academics neither acknowledge or see. I think that the study of Kant is a case in point. For I would claim that the subject of metaphysics cannot be exhaustively discussed (especially post-Kant) without a discussion of the effects of drugs on the human understanding, especially psychedelics and the various phenethylamines synthesized by chemists like Alexander Shulgin3. These substances, after all, provide many with what they believe to be a firsthand experience of the noumenal world, a belief maintained both by tribal peoples and the majority of psychedelic users in the modern west. Nor is the interest in such brave new worlds of experience limited to tribal peoples and hippies. William James himself believed that we should study such worlds when he wrote the following in "The Varieties of Religious Experience":

"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded"4.


Unfortunately, the Drug War forces us to disregard such forms of consciousness by outlawing the very substances that cause them. But that need not keep us from at least talking about such seemingly noumenal states.

What might the accounts of drug use tell us about the noumenal world? Permit me to give one example from personal experience.

In 2017, I traveled to Arizona to take a "spirit walk" inspired by the consumption of a peyote cactus button. During the "trip," I beheld (with my eyes shut) a neon-green slideshow of Mesoamerican imagery, with stylized depictions of warriors and animals, closely resembling the imagery found on Mayan sculpture, murals, and calendars.

Now, I am not a Mesoamerican scholar, nor was I consciously thinking of Mesoamerican history during this time in my life. So the fact that I should have such an experience should provide fodder for a wide variety of informed speculation about the nature of the noumenal world, especially as this experience occurred in an historically tribal region and using a substance that had a long history of tribal use. At very least, the experience casts doubt on any materialist account of consciousness and suggests (though certainly does not prove) the existence of a sort of panpsychic world in which the natural world participates with human consciousness in passing along culturally specific thoughts, feelings and ideas about the phenomenal world around us.

Unfortunately, the academic world pretends that drugs do not exist, and in this way, they give a monopoly to materialist explanations for experiences of this kind (when they do not ignore such experiences altogether, which is, indeed, the standard materialist MO in these cases). I await the day when academics will realize that educators are not free in the age of a Drug War and that all our supposed knowledge is based on an unacknowledged acceptance of the drug-hating ideas of Mary Baker Eddy: namely, that outlawed drugs can have no positive uses whatsoever and that therefore the effects that they have on the minds of human beings need not be taken into account when considering the truths of philosophy, or of psychology for that matter. Indeed, psychology not only ignores the Drug War but it embraces it every time that it refers to demonized substances for depression as "crutches" and plumps rather for the use of pharmaceuticals that purport to work in a "scientific" (i.e. materialist) fashion, notwithstanding the fact that the latter create lifelong dependency in 1 in 4 American women.

The idea that psychedelic drug users are seeing the noumenal world is supported by the filter theory of consciousness championed by Aldous Huxley, which states that the categories through which we observe phenomena in our sober lives constitute but one of many prisms through which we can see the world, and that psychoactive drugs have the power to open the "doors of perception" to many other aspects of reality5. These other realities are necessarily noumenal insofar as there is no consistency between "trippers" when it comes to the nature of these other worlds, notwithstanding the fact that drug users obtain different experiences from the same substance at the same dose in the same setting, etc., although the Drug Warrior might join the materialist in claiming that such experiences are merely pathological.

I will spare you any further attempts at elucidating my thesis. I hope in this short space, however, I have at least given you some reason to believe that the Drug War is, indeed, censoring academia, and that in so doing, it is limiting the extent to which we can profit from, and perhaps even improve upon, the insights of Kant with respect to our understanding of metaphysics and the perhaps "not so unknowable" nature of the noumenal world.



Author's Follow-up:

November 01, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


For more on this topic, please see my essay entitled What drug use could tell us about the rationalist triumphalism of Immanuel Kant.











Notes for essay entitled How the Drug War limits our understanding of Immanuel Kant: an open letter to Dr. V.A. Gijsbers of Leiden University:

1: What drug use could tell us about the rationalist triumphalism of Immanuel Kant DWP (up)
2: The Critique of Pure Reason Kant, Immanuel, Project Gutenberg, 1781 (up)
3: Scribd.com: The Nature of Drugs Vol 1 Shulgin, Alexander, Transform Press, Santa Fe, 2021 (up)
4: James, William. 2016. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28820.The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience. (up)
5: “The Doors of Perception.” n.d. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3188964-the-doors-of-perception. (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Question: Why do doctors judge cocaine by its worst possible use? Answer: Follow the money.

I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.

Like when Laura Sanders tells us in Science News that depression is an intractable problem, she should rather tell us: "Depression is an intractable problem... that is, in a world wherein we refuse to consider the benefits of 'drugs,' let alone to fight for their beneficial use."

People talk about how dangerous Jamaica is -- but no one reminds us that it is all due to America's Drug War. Yes, cannabis and psilocybin are legal there, but plenty of drugs are not, and even if they were, their illegality elsewhere would lead to fierce dealer rivalry.

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."

"When two men who have been in an aggressive mood toward each other take part in the ritual, one is able to say to the other, 'Come, let us drink, for there is something between us.' " re: the Mayan use of the balche drink in Encyc of Psych Plants, by Ratsch & Hofmann

After a long life, I have come to the conclusion that when all the establishment is united, it is always wrong. (Harold MacMillan)

Immanuel Kant wrote that scientists are scornful about metaphysics yet they rely on it themselves without realizing it. This is a case in point, for the idea that euphoria and visions are unhelpful in life is a metaphysical viewpoint, not a scientific one.

There are a potentially vast number of non-addictive drugs that could be used strategically in therapy. They elate and "free the tongue" to help talk therapy really work. Even "addictive" drugs can be used non-addictively, prohibitionist propaganda notwithstanding.

Even prohibition haters have their own list of drugs that they feel should be outlawed. They're missing the point. We should not drugs "up or down" any more than we should judge penicillin or aspirin in that way.


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






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