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Noam Chomsky on Drugs

a review of 'What Kind of Creatures Are We?'

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 24, 2023



Noam Chomsky has little to say about drugs in "What Kind of Creatures Are We?" In fact, the word "drugs" only appears once in the entire book. It's a reference to the Drug War, to be precise, which he describes as the latest attempt on the part of bigots to criminalize Black life. This statement is all too true, of course, and it clearly demonstrates that Chomsky is on the right side of the topic, politically speaking at least, in his 2015 title published by Columbia University. So far, so good. But when it comes to philosophy, Chomsky ignores drugs entirely. This is a problem, because one of the book's apparent purposes is to give us Chomsky's authoritative end-of-career view on the nature of human consciousness, and yet in doing so he is clearly ignoring everything that the actual use of psychoactive substances might have to tell us on that subject.


This is an especially glaring omission in an author who is wont to decry Eurocentrism, for tribal peoples have a long history of exploring and expanding consciousness, a phenomenon that they would be loath to limit to human beings alone. As ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes tells us, "Hallucinogens permeate nearly every aspect of life in primitive societies." And so when Chomsky ignores the long history of the strategically and religiously altered consciousness of tribal peoples, it cannot help but suggest that the nonagenarian firebrand shares Schultes' own dim view of such tribal usage and wishes to dissociate himself entirely from their supposedly superstitious practices in the eyes of his stuffed-shirt contemporaries in the ivory tower. Nor am I alone as a westerner in suggesting that such drug usage may be relevant to the discussion of human consciousness. William James himself insisted that we must study altered states if we were interested in learning about ultimate reality.


"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



Still, Chomsky has a lot of "drug-free things" to say on the subject of consciousness, with many a learned and well-documented allusion to Priestley, Descartes, Newton, Hume, Russell, etc... "Is consciousness ultimately physical, is it limited to human beings, is it really a 'hard problem' or is the topic misconstrued or based on an incorrect definition of language and/or communication?" etc. etc.


My first reaction to such a thoroughly annotated philosophical "throwdown" was, quite frankly, "I'm not worthy!" If only I could live so long as to be able to advisedly reference such a potpourri of philosophical luminaries in my work. But then my second reaction was, again quite frankly, "Words, words, words!" For I then asked myself the following heretical question: Would not Chomsky's logo-centric chatter look like insipient insanity in the eyes of a suppositious tribal people who regularly used psychoactive substances to communicate with plants and wildlife and, indeed, with the great spirit itself? "Why is this man talking about consciousness," such a native might ask, "without doing the proper research, namely, by actually using consciousness-expanding medicine?! Surely he would agree with our people that nature put the stuff here for a reason!"


Such native incredulity about the white man's obsession with words puts me in mind of the following telling observation by Quanah Parker of the Native American Church:


"The White Man goes into church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his tipi and talks with Jesus."


Chomsky's failure to discuss the altered states produced by "drugs" is particularly surprising since he tells us twice in this book (on both page 13 and 48 of the Scribd edition) that human language (that "great leap forward" in our geologically recent past) must have come about by a "slight rewiring of the brain," given that "there has been no detectable evolution since our ancestors left Africa, perhaps 50,000 to 80,000 years ago." Well now, where have I heard THAT phrase before: "rewiring of the brain"? To anyone who's been following the literature for the last 20 years, that phrase "rewiring of the brain" instantly brings to mind the effects of psychedelic drugs, both as described by the miraculously therapeutic accounts of freelance psychonauts (such as Paul Stamets1, whose mushroom use as a teen "taught" him how to stop stuttering) and by a growing list of academic researchers (including William Richards, Roland Griffiths, Stanislav Grof, Charles Grob, Rick Strassman, Alice Feilding, David Nichols, DJ Nutt, and Michael and Annie Mithoefe). Rewiring human brains is what psychedelics seem to be all about. One can only conclude that Chomsky has lived and breathed so much naturalist dogma during his academic lifetime that he is not even aware of his want of due diligence on this topic, let alone the disturbing Eurocentric overtones of that omission.


This is why I believe that, in a sane world, no one should be allowed to pronounce authoritatively about the ultimate nature of consciousness without having first passed a drug test: not one of those "gotcha" drug tests in which the beer--swilling boss cravenly searches your wee for substances of which racist politicians disapprove, but a drug test in which one's urine is searched for godsend entheogens instead. The failure to find any such consciousness-expanding wonder drugs will disqualify you from holding forth about the nature of human consciousness.


Author's Follow-up: September 24, 2023

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!

And yet the modern talk about the nature of consciousness seems to be limited to drug-free armchair philosophers and materialist neurosurgeons.












Notes for essay entitled Noam Chomsky on Drugs: a review of 'What Kind of Creatures Are We?':

1: Paul Stamets The Joe Rogan Experience (podcast), 2017 (up)




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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?

It's almost impossible not to have a problem with drugs in a world in which the government is spending over $50 billion a year to render drug use problematic.

Saying "Fentanyl kills" is philosophically equivalent to saying "Fire bad!" Both statements are attempts to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as safely as possible for human benefit.

Researchers say that the New York Times has been flooding the world with Drug War agitprop.

And we should not insist it's a problem if someone decides to use opium, for instance, daily. We certainly don't blame "patients" for using antidepressants daily. And getting off opium is easier than getting off many antidepressants -- see Julia Holland.

When Americans "obtain their majority" and wish to partake of drugs safely, they should be paired with older adults who have done just that. Instead, we introduce them to "drug abusers" in prerecorded morality plays to reinforce our biased notions that drug use is wrong.

Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.

The New York Times gets it wrong again. Yes, kratom, like all drugs, has downsides. The problem is not kratom, it's drug prohibition which limits choice. Nor are young people the only stakeholders in the debate, as the Times always assumes.

Big Pharma drugs have wrought disaster when used in psychotherapy, but it does not follow that the depressed should become Christian Scientists. The use of outlawed drugs can obviate the need for shock therapy.

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.


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