Husserl and Drugs

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Husserl and Drugs

how materialist psychology blinds us to common sense about godsend medicine

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 6, 2025

This morning, I spent a couple of hours browsing Volume I of "The Collected Works of Husserl, on Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences," as translated by Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl, courtesy of an online version of the text made available by Archive.org ¹. Below are some of the takeaway messages that I extracted therefrom in connection with our modern views about psychoactive drug use.

Let me make it clear at once that I am not yet qualified to opine on the details of Husserl's claims, regarding phenomenology or anything else for that matter. I have not yet done the study and reading which might (God willing) make me capable someday of doing so advisedly. Yet one does not have to fully grasp the minutiae of Husserl's work to recognize that his approach to human psychology sheds light on the great absurdity of our times: namely, the fact that today's scientists implicitly claim to find no benefits in the use of substances that inspire and elate. For, whether they accept the title or not, modern drug researchers are passion-scorning behaviorists when it comes to mind and mood medicine. Otherwise, it would be blazingly clear to them that drugs like opium , coca, and phenethylamines have obvious uses in what Husserl calls the "Lifeworld," the world as actually experienced by interconnected human beings. Instead, modern drug researchers have reified "mental illness ² " as a thing apart, as a collection of unique, disconnected pathologies to be treated by targeted biochemical interventions that bypass all psychological complexities and attempt instead to solve life's problems with a one-size-fits-all adjustment of brain chemistry. It is modern science's faith in the ontological validity of this approach to mind and mood that prompts scientists to remain silent about the great lie of the Drug War: namely, the idea that drugs that can inspire and elate have, nonetheless, no positive uses for suffering humanity.

If the reader should consider this conclusion to be an exaggeration on my part, I ask them to consider the fact that Carl Hart himself signs off on this doctrine. He makes it clear in his introduction to "Drug Use for Grown-Ups ³" that "drugs" are only for recreational purposes - by which he implies his belief in the validity of the imaginary distinction between "meds" and "drugs" - which is, however, a distinction created by public relations firms and fearmongering politicians, not by common sense or logic. If Carl really thinks that "meds" are different, that they are more therapeutic than the many holistic medicines that we have outlawed as "drugs," it can only be because he is presupposing the ontological validity of the reductionist approach to matters of mind and mood. But that is the approach that has, over the last half-century now, brought about the greatest mass dystopia of all time: namely, the fact that 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma drugs for life, this despite the fact that we have outlawed an entire pharmacopoeia of holistic drugs that could be of glaringly obvious benefit to these women, and without turning them into wards of the healthcare state. Nor is Carl alone. His view is the mainstream view in America, where materialist Science is the modern god. In fact, if you try to champion the therapeutic use of the substances that we have demonized as "drugs," you will be censored. This is because it is presupposed - even by the enemies of Big Pharma ⁴ ⁵ , like the folks at Mad in America ⁶ and the Surviving Antidepressants ⁷ website - that we should listen to our materialist doctors when it comes to psychoactive substances - that we should listen to the very people who have created the psychiatric pill mill ⁸ in the first place against which these organizations are supposedly fighting!

And who are these materialists to whom we should be listening? They are the "geniuses" who are telling us that there are no positive uses for drugs that have inspired entire religions, as the Soma ⁹ juice inspired the rishis of the Punjab in 1500 BCE ¹⁰. To grasp the extent of this purblind and "know-nothing" inanity, read the following drug user reports from "Pihkal" by Alexander Shulgin ¹¹, remembering as you do so that materialists can find no positive benefits from the use of the drugs under discussion:

"Excellent feelings, tremendous opening of insight and understanding, a real awakening."

"It was a glorious feeling, and beauty was everywhere enhanced. With eyes closed it felt marvelous, and it was appealing to pursue the inner experience."

"Intense euphoria that I call a feeling of grace, soft skin, voices, youthful appearance, animated discussions, feelings of great closeness to others."

"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."

CONCLUSION

What? No therapeutic uses for drugs that bring about rapture? Clearly, modern materialists are gaslighting ¹² us ¹³ when it comes to psychoactive drug benefits, by pretending that they do not exist. Fortunately, philosophers like Husserl can help disabuse us of this materialist blindness to common sense. This is clear from his refreshing recognition of the importance of psychic realities in the field of psychology. "Our investigation," writes Husserl, "has now progressed to the point where the idea of a psychology emerges as a science which is directed toward the psychic reality and which must be differentiated from somatology.¹⁴" In other words, the view of human beings as interchangeable biochemical widgets has got to go -- the view that is responsible for the psychiatric pill mill and which blinds us to the obvious benefits of time-honored medicines.

As Alfred North Whitehead wrote in "The Concept of Nature ¹⁵":

"The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us."

And what could be more absurd than the implicit claim by the modern materialist that even rapture itself can be of no benefit to the depressed - or to anybody else, for that matter! It follows that we must reject the whole idea of approaching human psychology from the vantage point of materialist science.

AFTERWORD

Unfortunately, neither Whitehead, nor Husserl, nor Heidegger ¹⁶, nor William James ¹⁷, nor Kant ¹⁸, nor Berkeley, nor any western philosopher to my knowledge, has yet understood the full implications of psychoactive drug use viz perception, sensation and the mind-body problem - not to mention academic freedom (as, for instance, the outlawing of laughing gas ¹⁹ is the outlawing of James' suggested methodology for studying ultimate Reality ²⁰). But that is a subject for another essay. Suffice it to say here that this oversight is not surprising. Unlike indigenous peoples worldwide, western Homo sapiens do not have a history of looking to drug-induced states for insight and inspiration. In our "tradition," we tend to associate the use of psychoactive substances with madness. LSD is a case in point. It was first admired, not for its power to inspire creativity and new ways of looking at the world, but rather for its supposed power to mimic schizophrenia, as a so-called psychomimetic. The idea was that by ingesting the drug, psychiatric interns could get a sense of what their psychiatric patients were experiencing and so respond to them in a more empathic and therapeutically appropriate way. The kinds of beneficial drug use reports quoted above are just starting to come to the awareness of materialist scientists. Whether the penny will ever drop in the minds of the materialists is questionable, however, because our conglomerate-owned media refuses to publish any reports of positive drug use. This censorship has been so thorough that it has convinced Americans that a drug like opium , considered by the doctors of yore to be the one true panacea, has no valid uses whatsoever. Indeed, every time I think about how thoroughly Americans have been brainwashed into blindness about the benefits of drug use, I think of the following line from historian William Shirer in his biography of Adolf Hitler:

"No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda.²¹"

If anyone doubts the "calculated and incessant" nature of Drug War propaganda, they have merely to ask themselves the following question: "How many movies ²² , TV shows ²³ , and articles have I seen in my lifetime that depicted opium use in a positive light?"

It will soon be apparent that the Drug War establishment has seen to it that you associate opium ²⁴ only with misuse and abuse. This is the same attitude that we are taught to associate with all "drugs" -- thanks mainly to the aggressive censorship of all positive reports of drug use, including those quoted above.

Notes for essay entitled Husserl and Drugs: how materialist psychology blinds us to common sense about godsend medicine:

1: Collected Works: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences Husserl, Edmund, Kluwer Academic Publishers Group , 1971 (up)
2: How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs DWP (up)
3: Drug Use for Grownups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear Hart, Carl (up)
4: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
5: 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)
6: Mad at Mad in America DWP (up)
7: Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website DWP (up)
8: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
9: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)
10: How the Drug War Outlaws Religion DWP (up)
11: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
12: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)
13: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
14: Collected Works: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences Husserl, Edmund, Kluwer Academic Publishers Group , 1971 (up)
15: Alfred North, Whitehead. 1920. Review of The Concept of Nature. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg. 1920. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18835. (up)
16: Heidegger on Drugs DWP (up)
17: James, William. 2016. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28820.The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience. (up)
18: The Critique of Pure Reason Kant, Immanuel, Project Gutenberg, 1781 (up)
19: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
20: Will to Believe James, William (up)
21: The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler Shirer, William, RosettaBooks, New York, 2011 (up)
22: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
23: The Dead Man DWP (up)
24: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)

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against the hateful war on US

Americans believe scientists when they say that drugs like MDMA are not proven effective. That's false. They are super effective and obviously so. It's just that science holds entheogenic medicines to the standards of reductive materialism. That's unfair and inappropriate.

To say that taking SSRIs daily is better than using opium daily is a value judgement, not a scientific one.

No substance is bad in and of itself. Fentanyl has positive uses, at specific doses, for specific people, in specific situations. But the drug war votes substance up or down. That is hugely anti-scientific and it blocks human progress.

Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war: "clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."

In Mexico, the same substance can be considered a "drug" or a "med," depending on where you are in the country. It's just another absurd result of the absurd policy of drug prohibition.

If there was free speech in America, we would see billboards demanding freedom to use psychoactive substances for religious purposes, or to heal, or to follow-up on the research of William James regarding the nature of human consciousness.

Mariani Wine is the real McCoy, with Bolivian coca leaves (tho' not with cocaine, as Wikipedia says). I'll be writing more about my experience with it soon. I was impressed. It's the same drink "on which" HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their stories.

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

If anyone manages to die during an ayahuasca ceremony, it is considered a knockdown argument against "drugs." If anyone dies during a hunting club get-together, it is considered the victim's own damn fault.

The most addictive drugs have a bunch of great uses, like treating pain and inspiring great literature. Prohibition causes addiction by making their use as problematic as possible and denying knowledge and choices. It's always wrong to blame drugs.

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Husserl and Drugs

how materialist psychology blinds us to common sense about godsend medicine

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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