"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question--for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness."
-- The Varieties of Religious Experience
"The White Man goes into church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his tipi and talks with Jesus."
Here's one example of what drug use might tell us about consciousness. About four years ago, I experienced a peyote "trip" in Arizona, in which I clearly saw (in my mind's eye, Horatio) a bright-neon-green slide show of Mesoamerican imagery. Mesoamerican imagery. Now, I grew up in Virginia and have had no particular experiences with such cultures, though I am fascinated by the pre-Columbian world. Imagine: such imagery, provided by a cactus in "Indian country"??? This incident clearly gives us hints about the possible existence of an overarching consciousness containing archetypes... Combine this with the increasingly known fact that plants can communicate in ways that, until a few years ago, we never dreamed of (see the 2023 documentary "The Secret Life of Plants" on Curiosity Stream) and the conceptual suggestions are tantalizing!
I've always wondered why we don't just let heroin users be -- or better yet, re-legalize drugs and give them choices. Why are they punished for using heroin daily while we praise 1 in 4 women for taking an even more dependence-causing drug every day of their life?
That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.
The DEA stomped onto Thomas Jefferson's estate in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. And the TJ Foundation helped them! They sold out Jefferson.
Richard Evans Schultes seems to have originated the harebrained idea (since used by the US Supreme Court to suppress new religions) that you have no right to use drugs in a religious ritual if you did not grow up in a society that had such practices. What tyrannical idiocy!
Wade Davis wrote in Rolling Stone that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. SO WHAT?! 178,000 people die from alcohol every year in America alone.
Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.
All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.
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.
Now drug warriors have nitrous oxide in their sights, the substance that inspired the philosophy of William James. They're using the same tired MO: focusing exclusively on potential downsides and never mentioning the benefits of use, and/or denying that any exist.
No drug causes addiction after one use. From this fact alone, it follows that even drugs like meth and crack and Fentanyl can be used wisely -- on an intermittent basis.
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