he idea that "drug use" fries the brain became literally laughable to me during my recent "trip" on psilocybin mushrooms in Oaxaca, Mexico. Not only did the government-sponsored bromide appear to be false, it appeared to be the precise opposite of the truth.
In fact, the best way that I could describe my 12-hour experience would be to say that my brain (and/or mind, and/or consciousness) was working overtime. The feeling thus produced is impossible to describe objectively, but I had the very clear subjective conviction that psilocybin was some kind of harried and overambitious schoolmarm who had set herself the ridiculously unrealistic goal of turning me into a genius overnight. She was relentless in peddling her audiovisual hints about the interconnectivity of sense data in the everyday world. I could almost hear this schoolmarm gasping out phrases like: "Oh, and look at THIS connection between things - oh, and this one too!" as she placed intellectually provocative transparencies, one after the other, in split-second succession, on the overhead projector of my mind. At one point in the experience, this tutorial element became comically literal as, eyes closed, I beheld a rapidly scrolling string of white text that resembled nothing so much as blurred images of mathematical formulas. It was as if the schoolmarm were using a blackboard to give me a crash course on quantum physics in this overnight cram session. There was no time for me to grasp details, yet I felt that I was experiencing content that, if creatively considered, could lead to conceptual breakthroughs for solving real-life problems, or at least for better understanding them. To vary the metaphor, it was as if my 3-D world of things and ideas had ballooned outward to accommodate a fourth dimension, one in which every object of contemplation (both things and ideas) was now complemented by a world of corollary reflections, reflections which were manifested in a variety of suggestive visions. These reflections were always "feelingly relevant" to the mundane sense data under consideration and yet they were often connected thereto in such a subtle way that I would never have noticed a linkage in a "sober" state of mind.
Both of these metaphors point to the surprising takeaway message from my recent psilocybin experience: namely, that it was all about information retrieval: the retrieval on my part of information that demonstrated how the seemingly separate things and ideas of sober life are related: to themselves, to the world, and even to myself. I say to myself because the "suggestive visions" mentioned above were often accompanied by physical sensations in my own body, especially a proverbial tingling of my spine beginning from my lower back and ascending to my neck, giving me the sensation that I was somehow a participant in the vision-filled narrative and not a mere spectator, as if I were watching a highly disjointed movie featuring the 1970s fad technology known as "Sensurround." Of course, the origin of this "information" will be hotly debated. Does it come from the mind? The brain? Panpsychism? The world of cultural memories and archetypes? But that is a topic for future essays. My point here is that psilocybin does the opposite of frying the brain: it increases thought capacity by highlighting subtle connections between sense data. It gives the user new information about the world. This marvelous ability was brought home to me when I listened to Mahler's 3rd Symphony about halfway through my psilocybin journey. I initially feared that my musical selection would prove suboptimal given my extreme familiarity with the programmatic classic. Perhaps I would find it tiring. To my surprise and delight, however, the symphony sounded brand-new to me, almost as if I had never heard it before. This was clearly thanks to the fact that I was now "grokking" connections between leitmotifs that I had scarcely noticed before. I was sensing (or rather feeling) how the entire work was a meaningful whole, and not just a sum of delightful but separate parts.
Nor were the tangible benefits of my psilocybin experience limited to music appreciation. I also recognized new themes in the LibriVox recordings of 19th-century short stories to which I am in the habit of listening at bedtime. The listening experience ballooned to a sort of 4-D experience, conjuring dim back-lit visions that added plot-relevant ambience to the tales, as if I were physically inside the storyline and not merely listening to it. But the most unexpected gift from the psilocybin session (at least thus far, given that I still feel the need to unpack the information-rich experience) was the "aha" moment that occurred to me when I connected the cram session mentioned above with the famous Information Theory of Claude Shannon1, the mathematician and engineer credited with creating the conceptual foundation for the Information Age. Shannon's theory has to do with mathematics, probability and linguistics, but its fundamental assumption is nicely summarized by computer scientist Marianne Freiberg in the phrase "Information is surprise," the title of a 2015 article that she wrote on the subject for the "Plus" website published by the University of Cambridge2. "Whether or not we find a message informative," writes Freiberg, "depends on whether it's news to us and what this news means to us." If a text arrives saying that the Sun will rise tomorrow, it contains very little Shannon Information; whereas if it states that the world will end tomorrow, then it has a high volume of Shannon Information. To put this another way: if you want someone to give you Shannon Information, then you should address them with that old sarcastic trope: "Now tell me something I DON'T know!"
My point here is that this is exactly what psilocybin does: It tells us things that we do not know - or at least that we do not KNOW that we know. (I add that latter qualification as a nod to Plato's notion that knowledge is recollection.3) It passes along Shannon Information, information of real importance in life. And this is a GOOD thing! This outcome of psilocybin use by human beings gives us sufficient prima facie reasons to use psilocybin and related substances for treating depression, PTSD, and Alzheimer's.
Unfortunately, materialist scientists are the slow kids in the class when it comes to recognizing drug benefits. They are passion-scorning behaviorists45 when it comes to mood medicine and so are dogmatically blind to anecdote, history and common sense, hence their glacial progress in signing off on obvious uses for godsend medicine. They have made some progress lately, however, at least on behalf of the notoriously underserved demographic of depressed lab mice. A Yale News report from 2021 trumpeted the following good news for rodents everywhere:
"A single dose of psilocybin, the active compound in 'magic mushrooms,' given to mice prompted a long-lasting increase in the connections between neurons.6"
But then materialist scientists have been getting lousy grades on their "mind and mood" report cards for well over a century now. The teenage poet Arthur Rimbaud called them on the carpet for their dogmatically inspired incompetence as early as 1876, when he complained as follows in his ground-breaking prose poem entitled "Un Saison en Enfer":
"La science est trop lente7."
("Science is too slow!")
AFTERWORD
It is actually materialist science that fries the brain. The FDA encourages the use of brain-damaging shock therapy for the depressed while refusing to call for the legalization of the many drugs like psilocybin that could make shock therapy unnecessary89. In a world where we thought sanely about drugs (in which we understood them rather than demonized them), barbaric practices like ECT10 would go the way of insulin coma therapy and lobotomy. But the prognosis is not good given the continual full-court press of drug-war propaganda in the media, chiefly in the form of the censorship of all reports of beneficial drug use. Sadly, even lobotomy has not really disappeared in America: it is just being performed these days with the help of Big Pharma drugs: you know, the kinds of drugs that do not inspire and elate, but simply render the "patient" tractable for caregivers.
Someday perhaps we will hold fearmongers responsible for supporting a drug policy that deprives human beings of godsend medicines. Someday we will understand what the world used to know: that no substance is bad in and of itself, that a drug that may cause problems for a white American young person when used at one dose for one reason may yet be a godsend for another person when used at another dose for another reason.
Author's Follow-up:
May 10, 2025
I do not wish to leave the impression that psilocybin mushrooms, in and of themselves, can be a substitute for shock therapy, at least not in any quick and obvious fashion. The effect of such mushroom use, at least at high doses, is far too influenced by the existing predisposition of the user. An individual in a deeply depressed state of mind is asking for trouble when they consume mushrooms in the naive hope of being bodily lifted out of their gloom. Severe depression must be treated instead with a substance or substances that unequivocally inspires and elates, in spite of the gloomy predisposition of the user. Happily such substances do exist, however. One thinks first and foremost of the time-honored panacea called opium. But unequivocal bliss can also be inspired by the advised use of anesthetics, such as nitrous oxide and ether, a fact of which William James was well aware. Indeed, his philosophical view of the nature of reality was based on his own use of such bliss-inspiring substances. And then there are a wide variety of phenethylamines, both potential and extant, which have glaringly obvious benefits for the depressed, as has been known since 1991 when chemist Alexander Shulgin published "Pihkal: Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved." Consider the following drug user reports from that ground-breaking book:
"At one point I went out back and strolled along to find a place to worship. I had a profound sense of the Presence and great love and gratitude for the place, the people, and the activities taking place."
"I experienced the desire to laugh hysterically at what I could only describe as the completely ridiculous state of the entire world."
"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."
There is, nevertheless, reason to believe that the low-dosing of psilocybin can help fight depression. To learn more, read about the crowd-sourced clinical studies of psychedelic micro-dosing being carried out by Paul Stamets11 and James Fadiman12.
Author's Follow-up:
May 12, 2025
As a chronic depressive myself, I limit the high-dose use of psychedelics (that I employ in relatively "free" places in the world like Salem, Oregon and Oaxaca, Mexico) to those times in which I am upbeat and prepared for the experience. Thankfully, such times are frequent enough in my life (every few months or so), even for a gloomy Gus like myself. Besides, tolerance causes efficacy to decrease dramatically in the absence of sensible breaks between usage. Then too, a decent experience leaves the user with some "unpacking" to do with respect to the variety of cosmic and practical hints vouchsafed by the mushroom, for which reason daily use would make little sense. It would be like asking to be overwhelmed.
Now I must add a disclaimer that would be unnecessary in a sane world: namely, that everyone is different and that "results will vary." This is true of the use of almost all psychoactive drugs, and should be understood by everyone from childhood on. Substance use has to be entered into advisedly, with an understanding of how wise people have actually used various substances as beneficially as possible for maximum benefit in various situations. Instead, Drug Warriors take advantage of this inherent variability in the functioning of holistic drugs to claim that all honest talk about them is dangerous drug advocacy. This is just their way of censoring free speech about the substances that they hate and thus safeguarding drug prohibition from the implicit criticism that would naturally result from honesty on the topic -- and they get away with this because we refuse to establish authorities (such as what I call "psychologically savvy empaths13") who would discuss the safest and wisest use patterns for various substances based on actually lived experience, rather than on theoretical guesses inspired by a look under a microscope.
This is the shortcoming of the Erowid approach, by the way. It is fine to have a bunch of raw data in the form of user reports, but we need to establish a field of pharmacologically savvy experts who can parse and summarize such usage reports into an actionable format for folks in a variety of life situations. Unfortunately, it will be impossible to have recognized experts in this line without first re-legalizing drugs. Right now, we are told that materialist doctors are the experts about drugs, but that is an obvious lie. These doctors are blind to all the obvious benefits of drug use because they are wearing the twin blinders of behaviorism and the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. The real experts will eventually be actual drug users: empathic individuals who know the upsides and downsides of a wide variety of drugs and can tell us which make sense given our own particular goals of usage. They will be able to tell us how the chosen substances have been used effectively and the ways in which use has backfired. Moreover, they will be there at the first sign of things going wrong so that they can get us back on course, by fighting drugs with other drugs when necessary and appropriate.
Today, we urge folks to report certain minor physical problems to a doctor in order to be sure that these problems do not betoken something more serious, such as cancer. In the future, responsible Drug Warriors will go to experts to report usage problems so that timely drug-aided interventions can be undertaken to keep the user from unwanted addictions and dependencies.
In other words, a future world will use common sense when it comes to drugs. Imagine that!
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."
Suicidal people should be given drugs that cheer them up immediately and whose use they can look forward to. The truth is, we would rather such people die than to give them such drugs, that's just how bamboozled we are by the war against drugs.
Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The media called out Trump for fearmongering about immigrants, but the media engages in fearmongering when it comes to drugs. The latest TV plot line: "white teenage girl forced to use fentanyl!" America loves to feel morally superior about "drugs."
There are no recreational drugs. Even laughing gas has rational uses because it gives us a break from morbid introspection. There are recreational USES of drugs, but the term "recreational" is often used to express our disdain for users who go outside the healthcare system.
A law proposed in Colorado in February 2024 would have criminalized positive talk about drugs online. What? The world is on the brink of nuclear war because of hate-driven politics, and I can be arrested for singing the praises of empathogens?
Today's drug laws tell us that we must respect the historical use of sacred medicines, while denying us our personal right to use them unless our ancestors did so. That's a meta-injustice! It negatively affects the way that we are allowed to experience our world!
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.
I looked up the company: it's all about the damn stock market and money. The FDA outlaws LSD until we remove all the euphoria and the visions. That's ideology, not science. Just relegalize drugs and stop telling me how much ecstasy and insight I can have in my life!!
I think many scientists are so used to ignoring "drugs" that they don't even realize they're doing it. Yet almost all books about consciousness and depression (etc.) are nonsense these days because they ignore what drugs could tell us about those topics.
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.
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, Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms published on May 7, 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)
he idea that "drug use" fries the brain became literally laughable to me during my recent "trip" on psilocybin mushrooms in Oaxaca, Mexico. Not only did the government-sponsored bromide appear to be false, it appeared to be the precise opposite of the truth. 
You have been reading an article entitled, Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms published on May 7, 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)
