a philosophical review of Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, by Mike Jay
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 1, 2025
henever I read a book about drugs, I expect to be confronted with so many biases on the part of the author that I will be spoiled for choice in exposing and refuting them. Not so with Mike Jay, whose 2024 book "Psychonauts1" raised no philosophical hackles for me, except for those aroused by the movers and shakers whom Jay quotes, of course: the prototypical Drug Warriors of the 19th century whose addlebrained views on drugs helped land modern America and the west in the police state that it is in today thanks to drug prohibition. There were seemingly liberal voices on the topic back then like Humphry Davy, Freud, and the poet Robert Southey, but both drug use and drug legality were ultimately discouraged even by the very authors who first tantalized us with their inspirational potential, including Baudelaire and Coleridge (not unlike Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan of our times, both of whom earn a living from tantalizing us about drugs that they do not think should be re-legalized for ordinary persons like ourselves). The most damaging criticism of drugs in the long-term, however, probably came from Oliver Wendell Holmes in his flippant reference to his experiencing of "the anesthetic revelation" championed by William James2 and Benjamin Paul Blood3.
SMART-ALECK MATERIALISTS
Holmes writes that his own "trip" on anesthetic gas inspired him to write down a conclusion that he felt was profound at the time of his inebriation, but which appeared ridiculous after his return to sobriety: namely, that "a strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout." Ha ha! Holmes scoffs. How funny, right? Since Holmes was not inspired by the substance to write down some earthshaking new scientific formula, he tacitly tells us that the substance can be of no help for anybody in any circumstance, ever. The presumption and psychological naivete of such a verdict is breathtaking. Has Holmes never heard of the power of anticipation, the therapeutic benefit of simply feeling good, the blessed relief from the disheartening impact of those ingrained messages in the mind that tell some people, in effect, "You cannot do this, you do not DESERVE to succeed at this," etc.? Even if we discount or deny the ontological hints provided by the use of laughing gas, there are still obvious psychological benefits to use - unless by psychology we mean the passion-free tenets of behaviorism4.
Instead, Holmes believes with the Drug Warriors of our time that substances can be judged "up" or "down" and that one's own negative experiences "on" a substance can be extrapolated to the entire world, and that negative views of this kind can and should serve to make such substances unavailable, thereby ensuring that all latent positive uses unnoticed by Holmes will never be noticed by anyone.
This is a key feature of the Drug War to this very day: everybody and every country (and every American state or Canadian province) has its own ideas about what drugs are good or bad - all of them based on the anti-scientific idea that we can meaningfully judge drugs "up" or "down" based on our own prejudices and without regard to context of use, what psychonauts of today would call "set and setting." The fact is that no substances are bad in and of themselves, that a substance that can be misused by a white American young person at one dose in one circumstance when used for one reason, may yet be a godsend for another person at another dose when used for another reason. And yet Drug Warriors teach us to decide about the propriety of drug use in the abstract, based on our own prejudices, an approach that throws all potential drug beneficiaries (those alive today and those who have yet to be born) under the bus. In this way, drug laws outlaw human progress by deciding in advance that psychoactive drugs shall not be studied - that we will not even search for the benefits that we have decided in advance must not exist by legislative fiat.
DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT PHARMACOLOGY
Another takeaway from Jay's informative book is the fact that no one ever talked about educating the public as regards the wise and beneficial use of drugs. There seems to be a knee-jerk belief among the recognized cognoscenti of the 19th century that the only way to fight substance misuse is with criminal law. They apparently could not imagine any other response. It never occurs to these pundits that playing "whack-a-mole" with an ever-growing list of psychoactive drugs is tantamount to asking for a police state - one, moreover, in which the bad guys are subjectively selected by those who fear change and therefore have no interest in finding beneficial protocols for those substances in the first place. So we see that the absurd philosophical premises of the Drug War - in the form of colonialist and materialist presuppositions -- were already in place long before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, let alone the Drug War launched by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. We can see, moreover, that this default "philosophy of drug use" is clearly wrong. Why? Because as Whitehead told us in The Concept of Nature:
"The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us.5"
And what are the absurd outcomes of this mainstream "philosophy of drug use" that can be inferred from the history of drug use in the west?
1) We prefer that the severely depressed commit suicide rather than to use substances that inspire and elate6.
2) We prefer that the severely depressed undergo brain-damaging shock therapy than to use substances that inspire and elate7.
3) We consider a person evil for smoking opium daily and yet we consider them as good patients if they use Big Pharma drugs daily at the behest of a materialist doctor8.
4) We demonize the dependence-causing tendencies of opium and yet we have no problem with the fact that 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma meds for life9.
5) We travel to other countries to eradicate the poppy plant - by which logic, however, the worshippers of Islam should be able to come stateside and burn our wine vineyards to the ground10.
BEYOND THE PALE OF WESTERN UNDERSTANDING
Speaking of opium...
In reading the book, I also got the impression that almost everybody in the west in the 19th century agreed that opium smoking was "beyond the pale," even for freedom-loving drug users. But this assumption itself is based on a host of lies and western prejudices about the supposedly sinister influence of Asian peoples, a topic that Jay covers, albeit indirectly, in this work, pointing out that poppies were grown in England without fanfare before they became associated in the English mind with "the other," i.e., with the Chinese. In his lecture series entitled "The Truth about Opium11" published in 1822, William H. Brereton sets the record straight - or at least far straighter than the opium situation in China had been described hitherto by the Chicken Little leader of the Anti-Opium Society, the Rev. Mr. Storrs Turner. Turner's campaign against the drug was inspired by the Big Lie of an American missionary, who falsely claimed that two million Chinese had succumbed to opium smoking thanks to British imports from India. Two million! The truth, of course, was quite different, even in Hong Kong, the center of the opium trade.
Brereton quotes the attorney General of Hong Kong of that time to the following effect.
"No China resident believes in the terrible frequency of the dull, sodden-witted, debilitated opium smoker met with in print."
To which Brereton, a long-time island resident, adds the following:
"I had daily intercourse with the people from whom the best and most trustworthy information on the subject of opium and opium smoking could be obtained, and my experience is that opium smoking, as practised by the Chinese, is perfectly innocuous. This is a fact so patent that it forces itself upon the attention of every intelligent resident in China who has given ordinary attention to the subject."
Brereton goes on to address what he calls "the misnamed Opium Wars," claiming that the Chinese had no interest in the health of their subjects but that the Mandarins resented seeing Chinese money going to foreigners, whom the Chinese people designated as Fan Qui, or "Outer Barbarians."
Brereton was no longer involved in the opium trade when he gave these lectures and disavows any alleged mercantile biases on his part. He quotes numerous doctors and officials who actually lived in China and got their information firsthand - rather than relying for information on the long-distance worrywarts of the Anti-Opium society in London, who dealt in scare quotes lifted from uncredited sources -- with an obvious self-interested motivation: that of getting the Chinese to put down their opium pipes and pick up a Bible. In light of this exculpatory evidence about the effects of opium use, how then do we account for the fact that opium smoking was considered increasingly "beyond the pale" in the west in the 19th century?
It is clearly down to xenophobia. Brereton himself repeatedly tries to reassure his readers that Englishmen are not attracted to opium and that it is simply an "Asian thing." This is odd because the author also favorably quotes De Quincey on the subject of opium. One can only assume that Brereton wished to reassure his English readers that any liberalism on the part of drug laws in China was not going to boomerang and cause this mysterious Asian indulgence in opium to become a way of life in Pall Mall or the East End.
And so Brereton makes the following improbable statement:
"During my long residence in Hong Kong, I have never known a single instance of an Englishman, or any other foreigner, being an opium smoker, although I have met with many who had smoked a few pipes by way of experiment. All have assured me that the vapour was nauseous, and produced no pleasurable sensations whatever.12"
Moreover, if the statement is true -- if the Chinese really are a breed apart in how they experience drugs -- then that only renders the western fear of opium use more unaccountable. Why criminalize a substance that nobody is going to want to use anyway? One can only conclude that westerners of the time had taken the Big Lie of the protestant missionaries to heart and decided that opium use must henceforth represent the ne plus ultra of vice. Given this prejudice, any cases of problematic opiate use among irresponsible and uninformed westerners was bound to qualify as supposed "proof" of the evil nature of opium as garishly depicted by the libelous propaganda campaign of anonymous and self-interested missionaries.
"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.
The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?
Drug prohibition represents the biggest power grab by government in human history. It is the state control of pain relief and mental states.
The Holy Trinity of the Drug War religion is Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and John Belushi. "They died so that you might fear psychoactive substances with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."
I have nothing against science, BTW (altho' I might feel differently after a nuclear war!) I just want scientists to "stay in their lane" and stop pretending to be experts on my own personal mood and consciousness.
Meanwhile, no imaginable downside could persuade westerners that guns and alcohol were too dangerous. Yet the DEA lies about almost all psychoactive drugs, saying there are no good uses. That's a lie! Then they pass laws that keep us from disproving their puritanical conclusion.
There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.
First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws.
3:51 PM ยท Jul 15, 2024
The search for SSRIs has always been based on a flawed materialist premise that human consciousness is nothing but a mix of brain chemicals and so depression can be treated medically like any other physical condition.
If the depressed patient laughs, that means nothing. Materialists have to see results under a microscopic or they will never sign off on a therapy.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, How the West turned the world into a police state: a philosophical review of Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, by Mike Jay, published on June 1, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
henever I read a book about drugs, I expect to be confronted with so many biases on the part of the author that I will be spoiled for choice in exposing and refuting them. Not so with Mike Jay, whose 2024 book "Psychonauts1" raised no philosophical hackles for me, except for those aroused by the movers and shakers whom Jay quotes, of course: the prototypical Drug Warriors of the 19th century whose addlebrained views on drugs helped land modern America and the west in the police state that it is in today thanks to drug prohibition. There were seemingly liberal voices on the topic back then like Humphry Davy, Freud, and the poet Robert Southey, but both drug use and drug legality were ultimately discouraged even by the very authors who first tantalized us with their inspirational potential, including Baudelaire and Coleridge (not unlike Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan of our times, both of whom earn a living from tantalizing us about drugs that they do not think should be re-legalized for ordinary persons like ourselves). The most damaging criticism of drugs in the long-term, however, probably came from Oliver Wendell Holmes in his flippant reference to his experiencing of "the anesthetic revelation" championed by William James2 and Benjamin Paul Blood3.
You have been reading an article entitled, How the West turned the world into a police state: a philosophical review of Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, by Mike Jay, published on June 1, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
