Finding drugs that work for users rather than for pharmaceutical companies
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
May 21, 2025
n the second half of the book "Pihkal,"1 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.
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. 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. Freud recognized that the mind-focusing benefits of cocaine 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 DSM5, 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."6
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."7
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 "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"8 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."9
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 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 "psychologically savvy empaths," a change that will get rid of the very concept of "patient,"10 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
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!
Why does Brian say that Shulgin does not take his own studies seriously?
How are Big Pharma's goals at odds with the goals of their customers?
What does Brian mean by telling 'Sasha' (i.e., Alexander Shulgin) that depressed people are not from Mars?
Explain how the fight for patient-friendly approaches to medicine has been going on for centuries.
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 and his Brunoian System. Explain.
Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths
In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.
This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just there way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.
This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.
How do I know this?
Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.
More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?
This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."
Someday, the First Lady or Man will tell kids to "just say no to prohibition." Kids who refuse will be required to watch hours' worth of films depicting gun violence, banned religions, civil wars, and adults committing suicide for want of medicine that grows at their very feet.
We should be encouraging certain drug use by the elderly. Many Indigenous drugs have been shown to grow new neurons and increase neural connectivity -- to refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!
If we cared about the elderly in 'homes', we would be bringing in shamanic empaths and curanderos from Latin America to help cheer them up and expand their mental abilities. We would also immediately decriminalize the many drugs that could help safely when used wisely.
Musk vies with his fellow materialists in his attempt to diss humans as insignificant. But we are not insignificant. The very term "insignificant" is a human creation. Consciousness rules. Indeed, consciousness makes the rules. Without us, there would only be inchoate particles.
It's disgusting that folks like Paul Stamets need a DEA license to work with mushrooms.
"Users" can be kept out of the workforce by the extrajudicial process of drug testing; they can have their baby taken from them, their house, their property -- all because they do not share the intoxiphobic attitude of America.
America never ended prohibition. It just redirected prohibition from alcohol to all of alcohol's competitors.
Drug Warriors rail against drugs as if they were one specific thing. They may as well rail against penicillin because cyanide can kill.
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.
What I want to know is, who sold Christopher Reeves that horse that he fell off of? Who was peddling that junk?!
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Pihkal 2.0: Finding drugs that work for users rather than for pharmaceutical companies, published on May 21, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
n the second half of the book "Pihkal,"1 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. 
You have been reading an article entitled, Pihkal 2.0: Finding drugs that work for users rather than for pharmaceutical companies, published on May 21, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
