Good afternoon, Samuel.
I have just read your wonderful paper entitled "Entheogens and Sacred Psychology." It is one of the few papers about "drugs" in which I find nothing to gainsay. However, it has inspired me to make a series of observations based on my own experience with these topics. As I believe I have mentioned, I am a 65-year-old chronic depressive and I have just traveled to Peru in order to learn about psychedelic plant medicine, aka master plants or plant teachers, from a philosophical and psychological point of view. I had hoped to use some of those medicines as well (particularly the huachuma cactus) to gain some of the routinely acknowledged benefits of that drug (a feeling of love and oneness with humanity), thinking I could eventually find therein the motivational mindset needed to break my lifelong dependence on Big Pharma meds (the kind upon which one and four American women are dependent for life). But I have been forced to delay the experience until an upcoming trip to Peru in June.
I will not give you a blow-by-blow account of the obstacles that I encountered in my attempts to use huachuma on my first trip to South America, but those experiences, frustrating as they were, highlighted some interesting issues yet to be explored about the fusion of psychoactive drugs and the western mindset, such as: "Should I feel guilty about trying to 'score' huachuma powder in Cusco in order to create a drinkable concoction of the San Pedro cactus by myself and for my own psychological, religious, philosophical and spiritual purposes?" I certainly felt rather low as I was slinking around Cusco, in my unexpectedly difficult quest to find the drug (coca leaves, on the other hand, were prominently available in every other street stall) though maybe that's a good thing: maybe shaman should be the gatekeepers of substances like huachuma cactus. That said, I am not sure how that situation would jibe with the western ideal of free academic inquiry, to have all my psychedelic experiences mediated through the rites and ceremonies of a religious tradition of which I am largely ignorant, especially when that religion is itself being mediated in many cases merely through the informed imaginations of well-meaning outsiders with respect to those shamanic traditions of the Inca that were so ruthlessly suppressed by the Spanish in colonial times.
After all, William James himself exhorted us as philosophers to study altered states2. For me, that would mean systemically using the substance under various circumstances, at various doses, at various times, in various situations and environments, in order to see what can and perhaps cannot be learned and/or felt thanks to such use. So the idea that I must necessarily associate a drug and its effects with Andean rituals seems problematic to me, it seems to me a bit of a "science stopper," even though I personally love what I'm learning about the Andean Cosmovision and the religious culture of the Inca. It is true, as I think you say, that westerners really do not have a religious tradition that they can "bring" to such drugs, but I would also point out that the DEA is doing everything it can to keep this from happening. If one wants to have their religion outlawed in America, all they need do is announce that the use of a drug like huachuma is part of their religious rites. The DEA will hound that church to the Supreme Court if necessary to prevent sacred usage. Even if the DEA fails in court, they will subsequently bind the church in question with such bureaucratic red tape and expensive "safety" requirements as to effectively nullify the victory thus obtained.
Thanks again for the fascinating paper. If you find time, I invite you to read below some further thoughts that occurred to me while reading it.
Sincerely Yours
"The evolution of modern medicine gave us our current, bifurcated view of drugs: the good ones that treat illness and the bad ones that people use to change their minds and moods." --Jacob Sullum, from Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, p. 25117
Before anyone receives shock therapy -- or the right to assisted suicide -- they should have the option to start using opium or cocaine daily -- in fact, any drug that makes them feel that life is worth living again.
Any self-respecting mycologist should denounce the criminalization of mushrooms.
The prohibitionist motto: "Billions for arrest, not one cent for education."
If NIDA covered all drugs (not just politically ostracized drugs), they'd produce articles like this: "Aspirin continues to kill hundreds." "Penicillin misuse approaching crisis levels." "More bad news about Tylenol and liver damage." "Study revives cancer fears from caffeine."
All drugs have potential positive uses for somebody, at some dose, in some circumstance, alone or in combination. To decide in advance that a drug is completely useless is an offense to reason and to human liberty.
The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.
We know that anticipation and mental focus and relaxation have positive benefits -- but if these traits ae facilitated by "drugs," then we pretend that these same benefits somehow are no longer "real." This is a metaphysical bias, not a logical deduction.
The existence of a handful of bad outcomes of drug use does not justify substance prohibition... any more than the existence of drunkards justifies a call for liquor prohibition.
The drug war is a whole wrong way of looking at the world. It tells us that substances can be judged "up" or "down," which is anti-scientific and blinds us to endless beneficial uses.
This hysterical reaction to rare negative events actually creates more rare negative events. This is why the DEA publicizes "drug problems," because by making them well known, they make the problems more prevalent and can thereby justify their huge budget.
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