Ketamine-producing fungi and consciousness without brains

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Ketamine-producing fungi and consciousness without brains

drug-related Substack notes for the week of September 14-18

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher (Substack version)

September 14, 2026

First, I'd like to welcome all you readers who have come here from the future. Howdy. I hope the future is treating you well. You will no doubt notice that I am writing this just a couple of months before the regime in Washington, D.C., is slated to install a one-party system in America by accusing the opposition of a bunch of literally "Trumped-up" charges. ("Not good," as a notoriously laconic friend of mine would say.) As if that weren't enough to dissuade me from my purpose of evaluating drug attitudes from a philosophical point of view, there is yet a second sword of Damocles dangling over my head this morning. The guys at Anthropic AI are telling us that humanity has a 10% chance of being annihilated completely in the next ten years. Ten percent. Ten years. As the housewife asked the viewers in the sixties television commercial for Total breakfast cereal: "What's a mother to do?" -- or a philosopher for that matter?

What should we do, indeed! Well, I don't have my Debrett's Handbook ready, but if memory serves, we're meant to stoically carry on in such cases, secure in the knowledge that good will ultimately triumph. I'm paraphrasing of course, but that was surely the gist of the advice for confronting existential threats such as ours in a manner that becomes a gentleman or a lady. (I'm thinking of the 2023 Coronation Edition, by the way. I can't answer for previous editions.) Fortunately for me, it is Notes Wednesday today, and that gives me just the excuse that I need to ignore current events for the nonce, at least long enough to reply to a handful of substack posts that caught my attention today, for better or for worse. And speaking of worse, we begin with a substack note that almost broke the needle on my irritation meter, so aggressively did it slam that indicator to the right.

FROM: Neşe Devenot

NOTE:

“Even if psychedelics did ‘dissolve the ego,’ a trope that has outlived its truthfulness and usefulness, it isn’t the same as a constant, sober, painful surrender of one’s own power to serve others.”

COMMENT:

This quotation presupposes a false dichotomy: either you use drugs or you get out in the world and serve others. The fact is that many drugs, including ones that we call psychedelics, can help people to get out in the world and feel more compassionate. A psychedelic concoction inspired the creation of the Vedic, and hence the Hindu, religion. Besides, in the age of drug prohibition, only a relative handful of people are going to dare to talk favorably about drugs; we should not draw conclusions about the morality of drug users based on such a small sample size. We should not charge them with selfishness merely because we believe the drug-war party line that drug use is always a copout. That is a lie: the very lie that turned a chronic depressive like myself into a ward of the healthcare state, someone who was "saved" from drugs by being shunted off onto "meds" that turned out to be harder to kick than heroin.

FROM: Sammy Stoltz

NOTE:

The brain may work less like a generator of consciousness and more like a receiver of it.

COMMENT:

This was, in broad strokes, the position of Henri Bergson and William James. It has been championed recently in a physics paper by Maria Somme, published by the American Institute of Physics. The paper was retracted after complaints that her thesis could not be proved. The problem is that modern physics is predicated on the view that consciousness does not work that way. God could come down and tell physicists that Somme’s thesis is true, and they would still be dogmatically required to disbelieve it. They would tell God: "You have not yet provided 'proof' as we physicists define that term."

FROM: Andrew Weisse

NOTE:

Comments refer to Weisse's post entitled "It's Time to 'Redefine' Sober."

COMMENT:

Thanks for the common sense. I am a 67-year-old who was "saved" from drugs by being shunted off onto a "med" that turned out to be far harder to kick than heroin. I have just three points I'd like to add from my own perspective. I apologize for the length of this comment, but this stuff is basically my life story so I find it hard to stop myself.

1) I think one issue is that all drug terminology is essentially political in the age of drug prohibition. The term "drugs" itself is pejorative these days when used in contradistinction to the word "meds." This is why Americans can live with the fact that 1 in 4 American women are dependent on psychiatric meds for life (source: Julie Holland). Drug-hating Americans console themselves with the fact that these women are using "meds," not "drugs."

2) I agree with everything you say about abstinence. But in my view, the total abstinence from "all drugs" can only be defended on religious or metaphysical grounds. The west has only begun to learn of the extraordinary potential of psychoactive medicines; to renounce all potential benefits of such drugs now seems premature, to put it mildly. We already know that, when strategically used, certain drug use can greatly improve one's capacity to appreciate music and to appreciate nature and to focus the mind. At some point, when our kneejerk fears about drugs have subsided in the west, maybe 100 years from now, the mainstream will ask the total abstainers: "Why would you NOT want to improve your mind on occasion and open it up to new powers of appreciation and concentration?"

3) Finally, regarding fighting drugs with drugs. Good for you for mentioning this obvious protocol. I have been advocating this for years, but I find that common sense is in short supply in the behavioral health field these days. I believe, in fact, that the only hope I would have of getting off of Effexor, after the utter failure of a year-long tapering routine, would be to use a variety of drugs on a strategic basis to get me through the one or two hours of hell that was afflicting me off and on after I had reduced my daily intake of Effexor to 0mgs. When that mind-blackening hell hit unexpectedly at 2 in the morning, I felt I had just two options thanks to drug prohibition: suicide or a return to Effexor at high doses. It is just common sense (to me, at any rate) that the strategic use of some psychoactive substance(s) at such times, alone or in combination -- be it laughing gas and/or phenethylamines and/or tryptamines, and/or opiates, and/or cocaine -- could have gotten me through these stretches and given me a chance to renounce Effexor for life. I think one big problem here is that the depressed have never been considered stakeholders in the drugs debate.

Thanks again.

While I've been typing this, Andrew responded appreciatively to my comment above. He did, however, seem to express doubts about my ideas about getting off of Effexor, wherefore I responded as follows.

Agreed. Until drug prohibition is ended and we value fact over propaganda, it will be hard to know just how safe a given protocol would be for such a purpose. But the basic principle is sound: invoking ecstatic states has the potential to lift one out of one's gloom. I would also add that the abstract safety of the protocol is not the only consideration; if I feel "drugged" by Effexor and I want to be free of having to see a doctor 1/3rd my age every three months of my life for a refill on an underperforming and expensive "med," then my tolerance for risk will be relatively high. A calculated risk would be well worth it for me if the goal was to end my status as an eternal patient. Unfortunately, the behavioral healthcare field does not even see a problem with my lifetime dependency; they see nothing demoralizing about it. They call it 'taking care of my health.'

Well, guess what? Andrew has responded again, and in such a way as to silence my concerns.

Thanks for the intelligent feedback, Andrew. It's a nice change for me. My thoughts on these topics are usually ghosted or gaslighted.

FROM: Inoculate the World

NOTE:

A soil fungus naturally produces the world’s favorite dissociative in an effort to kill worms. The science behind its mechanism of action is nothing short of astonishing.

COMMENT:

Fascinating. And another reason why drug prohibition is insane. As our knowledge of the natural world increases, more and more of that world will be placed off-limits to us with the help of law enforcement, all because we have decided to arrest rather than to educate.

FROM: Spirit Residue

NOTE:

Turning Off the Filter: A Deep Dive into DMT Entities DMT's recurring cast of characters and the unsettling possibility that the molecule isn't generating them, but letting us see what was already there...

COMMENT:

I have two questions for researchers (the lucky stiffs!)

Under the influence of peyote, I saw a sort of neon-green slide show of imagery seemingly copied from a Mesoamerican codex. What is the connection (if any) with the obviously more exotic visuals from a DMT experience?. Are these substance-aided experiences all part of a continuum, somehow related to each other, or are they different in kind?

We conclude with a comment in search of a post. To be honest, this comment of mine was originally written for a bona fide post: a post concerning the dangers of a drug called kambo, a psychoactive substance secreted by a toad. But I chickened out about sending my comment. The original post had been written by a substacker with whom I am in agreement on many subjects and I did not want to create any hard feelings by appearing to scruple at some of his conclusions. On the other hand, I had spent a good half-hour concocting that comment, and I fancied that it did make an interesting point or two. So I compromised. I decided not to post this comment in response to any identifiable party but rather to merely lay it out on the table for all to see, nothing up my sleeves, connected with nobody, after providing a quick introduction to the issues of which it treats. Having now provided that introduction, I invite the reader to decide for themselves if the comment in question is worth the time that I have spent fussing over it.

Now, I have no horse in the race as far as the salubrity of kambo is concerned. Yet in all such debates, we tend to lose track of the fact that drugs that may be problematic in the current drug-use environment (given the current generation of young people, their mindset, their usage practices) could still have benefits in other environments, at some dose, in some context, perhaps in combination with other drugs, etc. The link makes me fear that this otherwise drug-friendly author has fallen for the idea that drugs can be "bad" per se, rather than simply being ill-advised in certain usage situations. It makes me wonder if the author is not leaning over the DEA's shoulders as they look at kambo and saying, "You're right about this one, boys; you'd better outlaw it BUT GOOD!"

Even if kambo managed somehow to be "unsafe at any speed," a drug that was somehow bad regardless of details, a story about that supposed fact would still be off-topic as far as my own interests are concerned. The real story for me is that we will not know the whole necessarily nuanced story about kambo and its uses until we stop yielding to the Drug Warrior's strategy of divide-and-conquer. Their strategy is to sow confusion about drugs, to have us all debating futilely between ourselves as to what is a good drug and what is a bad drug. This is why every state and every country has its own drug laws: each political entity has looked at the pharmacopoeia, as if it were a Rorschach test, and seen their own set of villains and heroes in it.

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Here is a sample drug-use report from the book "Pihkal": "More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place." Prohibition is a crime against humanity for withholding such drug experiences from the depressed (and from everybody else).

Addiction was not a big thing until the drug war. It's now the boogie-man with which drug warriors scare us into giving up our freedoms. But getting obsessed on one single drug is natural in the age of choice-limiting prohibition.

In a sane world, we would learn to strategically fight drugs with drugs.

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."

The December Scientific American features a story called "The New Nuclear Age," about a trillion-dollar plan to add 100s of ICBM's to 5 states, which an SA editorial calls "kick me" signs. This Neanderthal plan comes from pols who think that compassion-boosting drugs are evil!

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.

In "Four Good Days" the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.

Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity.

America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own depression by making opium and cocaine illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.

Over 45% of traumatic brain injuries are caused by horseback riding (ABC News). Tell your representatives to outlaw horseback riding and make it a federal offence to teach a child how to ride! Brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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Ketamine-producing fungi and consciousness without brains

drug-related Substack notes for the week of September 14-18

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend