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Pihkal 2.0

Finding drugs that work for users rather than for pharmaceutical companies

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 21, 2025



In the second half of the book "Pihkal," Alexander Shulgin presents us with a way of studying psychoactive drugs that acknowledges the user as the ultimate expert on what works and what does not work.

Discussion Questions

The subjective reports are the stars of the book, with the quantifiable technical information taking a bit part, albeit a crucial one. The glowing user reports are what capture our attention. These reports immediately cause the sufficiently imaginative reader to think of a host of beneficial potential uses for the substances in question, uses that suggest themselves from deductive inference alone and for which we need no microscopic evidence from a laboratory.


"I feel that it is one of the most profound and deep learning experiences I have had."

"This is total energy, and I am aware of my every membrane. This has been a marvelous experience, very beautiful, joyous, and sensuous."

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



In a sane world, everyone who reads such tantalizing results would come away asking:

Why are we not running such experiments all the time with a wide variety of users, not simply those who consider themselves to be psychologically 'normal' - but rather testing groups of depressives and alcoholics and 'truth seekers' and so forth on a variety of drugs and seeing which best conduce to the states of mind that they find beneficial given their own biochemical and psychological circumstances? Why are we not running these trials for months at a time, if necessary, to see which pharmacological strategies demonstrate the most promise for long-term success? Why, in short, are we not trusting various classes of users to decide what works for themselves - rather than deciding a priori what should work for them, based on materialist dogma?

Of course, the obvious answer to this question is that politicians have effectively outlawed the proposed research by outlawing the substances that it would involve. And yet there is another reason as well. That is because Shulgin himself does not take his own methodology seriously. His users report feeling "a real awakening," "great camaraderie," and even "a rapture in the very act of breathing," and yet Shulgin makes it clear that the drugs under study cannot be called antidepressants 1. This is because, as a chemist, Shulgin's job is not to find usage protocols that merely "work" in an holistic and obvious sense for many or even most people; his job is to create one-size-fits-all pills that can be taken by specific people for specific human conditions that have been reified as discrete pathologies in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders2. His job is not to pass along the glaringly obvious benefits of his drugs to the depressed, but rather to use his own common-sense research to inspire the creation of dependence-causing versions of the drugs whose effects will not be so obvious and helpful as to raise the eyebrows of our drug-demonizing culture.

This is why, as a chronic depressive myself, I find the second half of "Pihkal"3 to be insulting. Here I am reading reports of states of mind that are literally "to die for" - rapture and better self-understanding, for God's sake - and yet Shulgin is implicitly telling me that these drugs could not help the likes of me - that I need some specially rendered emasculated version of his drugs that would meet the approval of Big Pharma . To which I respond:

"What? Do you think I am from Planet Mars? Do you think that I would not respond well to rapture and better self-understanding? What makes you think that the 'normal' drug users in your book are normal anyway? Surely, we could imagine criteria by which their normality could be plausibly disputed."


The fact is that the depressed are not from Mars, Sasha. They are human beings amenable to the same psychological motivations as any other Homo sapiens. Trust me, they, too, will respond well to the increased energy and laughter and self-insight experienced by your phenethylamine users. Let us then at least be honest in saying that the modern search for antidepressants is all about enriching Big Pharma and has nothing to do with "curing" a patient. The modern search for antidepressants is all about denying the common-sense holistic approach to drugs, which tells us that laughter helps, that insight helps, that rapture helps.4 Euphoria is not an unwanted side effect; it is rather a reason for the therapeutic benefits of drugs. Freud5 recognized that the mind-focusing benefits of cocaine 6 use were inseparable from the euphoria that it provided, that the one depended on the other. And yet Shulgin wants to refashion his drugs to reduce euphoria to a level that will be acceptable to mainstream mores. If this were not so, then Shulgin would tell his Big Pharma clients to "get lost" and campaign instead for the common-sense use of his phenethylamines in a wide variety of therapeutic circumstances. Instead, Shulgin embraces the idea that "real" antidepressants cannot simply work - they must REALLY work, which, according to materialist metaphysics, means that they need to work according to known biochemical pathways and microscopically determined cause and effect.

This is the bamboozled mindset that we must expect of chemists when we combine drug prohibition in a capitalist society with a materialist understanding of human beings as interchangeable biochemical widgets. This whole approach to drug studies blinds us to common sense: the idea that feeling good is feeling good and that such a condition has endless knock-on benefits, yes, even for the depressed, if not especially for that demographic.

Imagine if the culinary field worked like the mental health field when it comes to drug research. Chefs would present their best dishes to a host of 'normal' diners and then solicit their comments about the meals. Instead of placing the diners' favorite meals on subsequent menus, however, the chefs would submit the popular dinners to chemists and ask them if the meals were "REALLY" tasty or not.

"Our diners rave about this dish, doc, but is it REALLY delicious, I mean, according to medical science? After all, diners are merely subjective individuals, so what do THEY know?"


The users should have the final word on the efficacy of psychoactive drugs, just as diners should have the final word on the delectability of meals. In a sane and free world, therefore, we would undertake endless Pihkal studies using a wide variety of demographics, including chronic depressives, agoraphobics, the anxious, spiritual seekers, alcoholics and other addicts, those wishing to get off dependence-causing Big Pharma drugs, etc. We'd ask them, "Which of these drugs works best for you?" Imagine, actually asking the "patient" for a change! These groups might even be subdivided by age group and a variety of other potentially useful factors. The goal of the drug usage studies would be to discover protocols that work for real people with specific needs and interests in life. The outcomes of the usage reports thus generated would be compiled and summarized in a replacement for the DSM7, a replacement which would enable the average individual to locate proven and effective drug use protocols based on their own psychological, sociological, and religious and even philosophical requirements.

ANGELS ON A PINHEAD

I am not the first person to chastise the medical establishment for being out of touch with patient realities. Thomas Beddoes was calling for a patient-centric approach to medicine in the early 1800s, in the form of the so-called Brunoian System of the Scottish Doctor John Brown . As Mike Jay reports in "Emperors of Dreams"

"Eighteenth-century medicine had largely progressed by discovering, naming and classifying new diseases, leading to a profusion of different schools with competing nomenclatures, taxonomies and diagnoses. For Beddoes, most of these were as meaningful as medieval disputations about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. All they had succeeded in doing was to elevate the pretensions of the medical profession, and at the same time distance them from the proper focus of their enquiries: how to cure patients."8


Sound familiar? This is precisely the situation today when it comes to psychoactive medicine. Our chemists are isolated in their laboratories, studying reuptake inhibitors and biochemical pathways, completely oblivious to the common-sense fact that drugs do work and in psychologically obvious ways at that, regardless of whether materialist scientists can find a quantifiable justification for that efficacy or not. But then a common-sense approach to medicine would remove doctors from their omniscient and highly remunerative pedestals and deny them their role as experts in the realm of mind and mood. The medical system would be upended. As Jay explains:

"First, all its categories and theoretical structures would be torn down; second, and even more disastrously, it would put medical treatment back in the hands of the people. Diagnosis and prescription would become little more than common sense, and slim Brunonian manuals would take the place of the swelling ranks of doctors."9


In our modern case, these slim manuals would take the place of the disease-mongering DSM and serve as a kind of Yellow Pages with which literally anybody could discover potentially beneficial pharmacological "hacks" for what ails them, psychologically speaking, based on the actual lived experiences of others: not the self-interested and dogma-inspired guesses of chemists and their Big Pharma paymasters. We would not fire the lab coats, of course: there is a role for looking at pharmacological substances in a purely reductive fashion; but life should not have to stop for the rest of us while doctors seek to catch up with common sense when it comes to the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs for actual living human beings. Should the Vedic religion have been placed "on hold" until medical doctors could decide if Soma 10 "really" helped the Rishis feel religious inspiration?

Of course, attacks on the pretensions of the medical discipline predate even Beddoes and Brown. Moliere lampooned the field in "The Imaginary Invalid"11 in 1673 for its dogmatic and self-interested pretensions to omnipotence. In the French classic, the hypochondriacal protagonist, Argan, is being treated by the vainglorious Dr. Purgon, who dogmatically prescribes enemas for every nervous complaint of his gullible paymaster. When Argan's brother challenges these self-satisfied pretensions in the spirit of the Brunoian critique of medicine yet to come, the doctor responds indignantly:

"An outrage! An enormity to topple the sacred pillars of the profession! It's treason, pure and simple. Treason against the medical science that must be severely punished."12


One can imagine a modern remake of this satire in which the self-important doctor prescribes a variety of SSRI antidepressants instead of an enema for every one of the nervous complaints of his employer.

Despite such valiant attempts on the part of playwrights and reformers to rid medical science of its pretension, our mental health researchers are still counting angels on the head of a pin, looking for their biochemical pathways and their reuptake inhibitors. What else CAN they do, given the fact that we have outlawed almost all the substances that could help people improve mental health? Yes, we need to have drug re-legalization 13 to rectify this situation, but we also must admit that there are problems with the medical status quo as such, which is something that most scientists are not interested in doing. And who can blame them? We have dubbed them experts on the mind and mood of their fellow human beings, after all, and that is a remunerative and ego-stroking title they are not going to give up without a fight.

WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY

I am well-qualified to opine on this topic after 50 years of being denied godsend medicine thanks to drug prohibitionists and their collaborators in the field of materialist medicine. Of course, the medical doctor would claim that I have no expertise, but then that is the whole problem with the status quo: the fact that the medical scientists reckon without the patient. The long-term answer to this dogmatic neglect involves the replacement of psychiatrists with what I call " pharmacologically savvy empaths," a change that will get rid of the very concept of "patient,"14 insofar as the drug-use experts whom I envision will be on hand to help human beings achieve a wide range of psychological goals with the wise use of psychoactive medicines: goals ranging from overcoming mild depression to searching for an existential meaning for life. The depressed, the anxious, the searcher -- even those who merely wish to 'live large' -- will all visit the same empath to facilitate the drug-aided learning experience that makes sense for them given their unique life circumstances.

My only hope in this lifetime is that some 21st-century chemists will find themselves in the privileged position of Alexander Shulgin and begin investigating a wide variety of inspiring drugs a la "Pihkal" for their common-sense ability to improve lives. Should such improbable chemists exist, I hereby nominate myself as a study participant who will be more than happy to tell them which of their nostrums work for me personally. This should be all that science is about, after all, when it comes to studying psychoactive substances: determining what works for the drug users themselves, as opposed to determining what works for the pharmaceutical companies who have a vested interest in turning those drug users into patients for life.



Discussion Topics

May 23, 2025

cartoon figures conversing

Attention Teachers and Professors: Brian is not writing these essays for his health. (Well, in a way he is, actually, but that's not important now.) His goal is to get the world thinking about the anti-democratic and anti-scientific idiocy of the War on Drugs. You can stimulate your students' brainwashed grey matter on this topic by having them read the above essay and then discuss the following questions as a group!


  1. Why does Brian say that Shulgin does not take his own studies seriously?

  2. How are Big Pharma 15 's goals at odds with the goals of their customers?

  3. What does Brian mean by telling 'Sasha' (i.e., Alexander Shulgin) that depressed people are not from Mars?

  4. Explain how the fight for patient-friendly approaches to medicine has been going on for centuries.

  5. Brian claims that modern medical doctors are still 'counting angels on a pin head,' just like they were in the times of Scottish physician John Brown 16 17 and his Brunoian System. Explain.













Notes:

1: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
2: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR) (up)
3: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
4: Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas DWP (up)
5: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
6: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
7: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR) (up)
8: End Drug Prohibition Now: an open letter to Mike Jay, author of Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century DWP (up)
9: End Drug Prohibition Now: an open letter to Mike Jay, author of Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century DWP (up)
10: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)
11: The Imaginary Invalid Moliere, Downpour.com (up)
12: The Imaginary Invalid Moliere, Downpour.com (up)
13: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
14: Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism DWP (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: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
17: PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could believe it.

"All these anti-opium articles... are based upon the same model. They assume certain statements as existing and acknowledged facts which have never been proved to be such, and then proceed to draw deductions from those alleged facts." --William Brereton

What I want to know is, who sold Christopher Reeves that horse that he fell off of? Who was peddling that junk?!

In "How to Change Your Mind," Michael Pollan says psychedelic legalization would endanger young people. What? Prohibition forces users to decide for themselves which mushrooms are toxic, or to risk buying contaminated product. And that's safe, Michael?

Americans heap hypocritical praise on Walt Whitman. What they don't realize is that many of us could be "Walt Whitman for a Day" with the wise use of psychoactive drugs. To the properly predisposed, morphine gives a DEEP appreciation of Mother Nature.

Scientists are making entire livings from trying to figure out what's best for ME as a chronic depressive. They owe their jobs to drug prohibition.

Imagine educational documentaries showing how folks manage to safely incorporate today's hated substances into their life and lifestyle.

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.

It is far better to "treat the symptoms" than to irreversibly modify brain chemistry in one particular way based on the theories of a financially-motivated biochemical determinist working for a pharmaceutical company.

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.


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