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Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





May 7, 2025



The idea that "drug use" fries the brain 1 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.

Author's follow-up for October 17, 2025

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 Shannon2, 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 Cambridge3. "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.4) 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 behaviorists5 6 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.7"


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 lente8."
("Science is too slow!")


AFTERWORD

It is actually materialist science that fries the brain 9 . The FDA encourages the use of brain-damaging shock therapy for the depressed while refusing to call for the legalization 10 of the many drugs like psilocybin that could make shock therapy unnecessary11 12. In a world where we thought sanely about drugs (in which we understood them rather than demonized them), barbaric practices like ECT13 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, 14 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

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




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 15 . 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 Stamets16 and James Fadiman17.



Author's Follow-up:

May 12, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




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 empaths18") 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!



Author's Follow-up:

October 17, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up






Freud's real breakthrough was his discovery that cocaine is a great antidepressant19. It wasn't the millions of depressed who hated cocaine back in the early 1900s -- it was the self-interested doctors who saw their jobs at risk if a near-panacea for depression like cocaine were to be legal. And so they destroyed the reputation of a drug that could have saved hundreds of millions of people from depression, including myself and my family -- because they focused only on the rare misuse of the drug by the rare irresponsible users. This is exactly as if they were to have judged liquor by studying only drunkards. It was a power grab to demonize cocaine, and it has destroyed millions of lives and forced the depressed to undergo totally unnecessary shock therapy -- and caused countless totally unheralded suicides. But that's the Drug War for you: the depressed are never considered stakeholders. No one ever asks THEM how they feel about cocaine: their "betters" in the self-interested medical establishment make THAT call.

Freud used the drug successfully and found its use to be self-limiting, as he developed a feeling of repugnance toward overuse. And yet brainwashed and self-interested pundits in America treated the drug like hell spawn -- and wrote bleeding heart op-ed pieces about the rare abusers -- never thinking about the millions of depressed whom their drug laws have shunted off onto Big Pharma 20 21 meds for which dependency is a feature and not a bug -- drugs like Effexor 22 that is surely the hardest drug to kick in the world, with a 95% recidivism rate -- and the 5% who stay off it as long as three years find that they have severe cognitive impairment. I know this from experience and from the confessions of my former psychiatrist, who I fear was fired for being honest with me on the subject.

Must-reading: On Cocaine, by Sigmund Freud23.













Notes:

1: Meds fry the brain, not drugs (up)
2: Information is surprise (up)
3: Information is surprise (up)
4: Phaedo by Plato (up)
5: Behaviorism and the War on Drugs (up)
6: The purblind coldness of the Behaviorist doctrine is made clear in the following words of its founder, JB Watson, as quoted in the 2015 book "Paradox" by Margaret Cuonzo: "Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic." (Surely, Watson was proactively channeling Dr. Spock of the original Star Trek series.) (up)
7: Psychedelic spurs growth of neural connections lost in depression (up)
8: Une Saison en Enfer (up)
9: Meds fry the brain, not drugs (up)
10: National Coalition for Drug Legalization (up)
11: The FDA on ECT: Supporting a Vital Treatment (up)
12: The FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive drugs (up)
13: Electroshock Therapy and the Drug War (up)
14: How the Media Puts Drugs on Show Trials: an open letter to Bennett Haeberle of NBC 5 Chicago (up)
15: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton (up)
16: Nature Portfolio - Psilocybin Microdosing (up)
17: Microdosing 101 (up)
18: Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism (up)
19: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis (up)
20: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science (up)
21: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? (up)
22: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs (up)
23: On Cocaine (up)


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 their 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."

  • Addicted to Addiction
  • Addicted to Ignorance
  • Addiction
  • After the Drug War
  • After the Drug War part 2
  • Another Cry in the Wilderness
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant
  • Case Studies in Wise Drug Use
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Declaration of Independence from the War on Drugs
  • Drug Use as Self-Medication
  • Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy
  • Ego Transcendence Made Easy
  • Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client
  • Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War
  • Heroin versus Alcohol
  • How Cocaine could have helped me
  • How drug prohibition destroys the lives of the depressed
  • How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Blinds us to Godsend Medicine
  • How the Drug War is a War on Creativity
  • How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse
  • How The Drug War Killed Andy Gibb
  • How the Drug War Punishes the Elderly
  • How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs
  • How to Unite Drug War Opponents of all Ethnicities
  • Hypocritical America Embraces Drug War Fascism
  • In Praise of Doctor Feelgood
  • In Praise of Drug Dealers
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy
  • Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion
  • Notes about the Madness of Drug Prohibition
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart
  • Open Letter to Erowid
  • Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Pihkal 2.0
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism
  • Science is not free in the age of the drug war
  • Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms
  • Someone you love is suffering unnecessarily because of the war on drugs
  • Thank God for Erowid
  • Thank God for Soul Quest
  • THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG
  • The Drug War and Armageddon
  • The Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time
  • The Mother of all Western Biases
  • The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • The New Age of Pharmacological Serfdom
  • The Origins of Modern Psychiatry
  • The Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression
  • What Jim Hogshire Got Wrong about Drugs
  • Why America's Mental Healthcare System is Insane
  • Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    I passed a sign that says "Trust Trump." What does that mean? Trust him to crack down on his opposition using the U.S. Army? Or trust him not to do all the anti-American things that he's saying he's going to do.

    Who would have thought back in 1776 that Americans would eventually have to petition their government for the right to even possess a damn mushroom. The Drug War has destroyed America.

    We have to deny the FDA the right to judge psychoactive medicines in the first place. Their materialist outlook obliges them to ignore all obvious benefits. When they nix drugs like MDMA, they nix compassion and love.

    The whole drug war is based on the anti-American idea that the way to avoid problems is to lie and prevaricate and persuade people not to ask questions.

    Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!

    Let's arrest drug warriors, confiscate their houses, and deny them jobs in America -- until such time as they renounce their belief in the demonstrably ruinous policy of substance prohibition.

    Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.

    It's funny to hear fans of sacred plants indignantly insisting that their meds are not "drugs." They're right in a way, but actually NO substances are "drugs." Calling substances "drugs" is like referring to striking workers as "scabs." It's biased terminology.

    The most addictive drugs have a bunch of great uses, like treating pain and inspiring great literature. Prohibition causes addiction by making their use as problematic as possible and denying knowledge and choices. It's always wrong to blame drugs.

    Properly speaking, MDMA has killed no one at all. Prohibitionists were delighted when Leah Betts died because they were sure it was BECAUSE of MDMA/Ecstasy. Whereas it was because of the fact that prohibitionists refuse to teach safe use.


    Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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