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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

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 1, 2025



Whenever 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.2 3 There were seemingly liberal voices on the topic back then like Humphry Davy, Freud4, 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 5 6 " championed by William James7 and Benjamin Paul Blood8.

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 9 , there are still obvious psychological benefits to use - unless by psychology we mean the passion-free tenets of behaviorism10.

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.11"


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 elate12.
2) We prefer that the severely depressed undergo brain-damaging shock therapy than to use substances that inspire and elate13.
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 doctor.
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 14 15 meds for life16.
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 ground17.

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 Opium18" 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.19"


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.









Notes for essay 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:

1: “Psychonauts - Mike Jay.” 2026. Mike Jay. March 26, 2026. https://mikejay.net/books/psychonauts/. (up)
2: 15 Infuriating Quotations from Drug Warriors and Their Prey by Richard Lawrence Miller DWP (up)
3: Miller, Richard L. 1996. Drug Warriors and Their Prey. Praeger. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/594749.Drug_Warriors_and_Their_Prey. (up)
4: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
5: The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy DWP (up)
6: anesthetic revelation (up)
7: “The Varieties of Religious Experience : William James : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2021. Internet Archive. 2021. https://archive.org/details/the-varieties-of-religious-experience_202109. (up)
8: The anaesthetic revelation and the gist of philosophy Blood, Benjamin (up)
9: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
10: Behaviorism and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
11: Alfred North, Whitehead. 1920. Review of The Concept of Nature. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg. 1920. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18835. (up)
12: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
13: Electroshock Therapy and the Drug War DWP (up)
14: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
15: 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)
16: How materialists turned me into a patient for life DWP (up)
17: Let's burn some plants! DWP (up)
18: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
19: “The Truth about Opium, by William H. Brereton—a Project Gutenberg EBook.” 2024. Gutenberg.org. 2024. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44043/44043-h/44043-h.htm. (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Properly speaking, MDMA has killed no one at all. Prohibitionists were delighted when Leah Betts died because they were sure it was BECAUSE of MDMA/Ecstasy. Whereas it was because of the fact that prohibitionists refuse to teach safe use.

Trump is the prototypical drug warrior. He knows that he can destroy American freedoms by fearmongering.

Here's one problem that supporters of the psychiatric pill mill never address: the fact that Big Pharma antidepressants demoralize users by turning them into patients for life.

The problem for alcoholics is that alcohol decreases rationality in proportion as it provides the desired self-transcendence. Outlawed drugs can provide self-transcendence with INCREASED rationality and be far more likely to keep the problem drinker off booze than abstinence.

The addiction gene should be called the prohibition gene: it renders one vulnerable to prohibition lies and limitations: like the lack of safe supply, the lack of choices, and the lack of information. We should pathologize the prohibitionists, not their victims.

All uplifting drugs are potential antidepressants. Science denies that fact by claiming that drug efficacy must be proven quantitatively. And so they ignore anecdote, history and psychological common sense.

Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.

ECT is like euthanasia. Neither make sense in the age of prohibition.

Today's Washington Post reports that "opioid pills shipped" DROPPED 45% between 2011 and 2019..... while fatal overdoses ROSE TO RECORD LEVELS! Prohibition is PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE.

Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.


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






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