The Drug War Imperialism of Richard Evans Schultes
a philosophical review of Hallucinogenic Plants by the founder of the field of ethnobotany
just did a little back-pedaling on Twitter.
I had recommended the book "Hallucinogenic Plants" by the founder of ethnobotany, Richard Evans Schultes, failing to have first carefully read the work in question. All I knew was that the first few pages were full of fascinating and seemingly unbiased info about Old World Drugs, and I assumed that the book in its entirety would "follow suit." In fact, I had planned to spend the next several hours reading and taking notes from this short but fact-filled classic. My hopes were at their zenith on Page 8 as I encountered the following informative factoids under the heading of OTHER ABORIGINAL USES of hallucinogenic plants:
The Algonquin Indians gave their sons wysoccan as part of a coming-of-age ceremony
The Gabonese used iboga root and coapi for the same purpose
Many South American tribes ingest ayahuasca in order to foretell the future and settle disputes
Datura has been used in Mexico and the American Southwest (along with mushrooms, peyote and morning glories) for divination and ritualistic curing
The Mixtec ate "puffballs" to get answers from heaven
Amazingly, Schultes delivered all those intriguing nuggets without betraying any drug-hating biases whatsoever. (I say "amazingly" based on the Christian Science ideology that was soon to follow.) Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts. But then I turned to page 9 and the heading "USE IN THE MODERN WORLD," where Schultes began spouting the usual drug-warrior vitriol against evil awful drugs. Interestingly enough, he doesn't adduce any evidence whatsoever that such drug use is dangerous, but he implies as much when he muses that hallucinogenic substances "may have little or no value and may sometimes even be harmful or dangerous." They may, indeed, Schultes. Then again they may not. But thanks for that "insight." That's typical Drug Warrior practice, by the way: a psychoactive drug does not even have to be dangerous to be banned: it merely has to have the possibility of being dangerous in the pessimistic mind of a fretful Drug Warrior and then it can be banned at will.
While we're speaking of what "may" be, Schultesy, I would point out (in the spirit of William James, no less) that such drug use may tell us something about ultimate reality. It may also provide us with many far safer means of self-transcendence than that provided by the shabby western drug called alcohol.
"May be dangerous," indeed. Even with no evidence whatsoever, Schultes is ready to condemn a whole raft of drugs, presumably because their use is championed by ignorant savages.
Aaah! You just want to grab Schultes by the collar and shout: "You're a biologist, Schultesy, not a philosopher. Keep your disdain for the locals to yourself, along with your totally unsupported fearmongering about psychoactive substances!"
But Schultes was not yet done with his racist social criticism. He goes on to make the following observation, which is the one that made me shelve the book entirely for the nonce:
"Many people believe they can achieve 'mystic' or 'religious' experience by altering the chemistry of the body with hallucinogens, seldom realizing that they are merely reverting to the age-old practices of primitive societies."
Note, first of all, that "mystic" and "religious" are contained inside scare quotes, as if Schultes was rolling his materialist eyeballs when he penned his screed. And check out that bit about "reverting to the age-old practices of primitive societies." The implication is clear: primitive societies have exactly nothing to teach us about life, and we should be embarrassed to even consider using a practice that THOSE kind of people would find interesting and helpful."
This is philosophy, not science, and philosophy is a field in which Schultes has precisely no expertise whatsoever. And yet his racist musings about psychoactive medicines have informed Drug War policy ever since, giving a superficial veneer of legitimacy to the outrageous outlawing of drug use for religious purposes in the States, as if the DEA and the Supreme Court were qualified to tell us what constitutes a proper religious practice.
Schultes goes on to imply that the western champions of such drugs are generally either hedonists or tree-huggers, though he does go so far as to admit reluctantly that the ontological status of drug-inspired hallucinogens "is still controversial." Of course it is, Schultes. And it will always be controversial. Your materialist outlook on life can never be officially "proven" correct, even in theory, given the incompleteness theorems of Kurt Gödel. But meanwhile your stubborn insistence on your own ontological certainty about the use of hallucinogenic drugs (namely, that there is no "there" there ) can do great harm, by denying your philosophical opponents the right to live a life in conformance with their own beliefs: beliefs like the notion that mind matters, that we should seek to expand and improve our mentation, that we should welcome new sources of creativity, and that we should embrace the exciting and provocative worlds that hallucinogens provide, at least for their recreation value if not for the philosophical hints that they give us about ultimate realities.
Even by Schultes' own materialist standards, hallucinogens should be seen as prima facie good, as per the following syllogism:
A person's health is improved by both being happy and looking forward to happiness
Many westerners are made happy by hallucinogens and therefore look forward to their use
ERGO... Many westerners can improve their health by using hallucinogens
This is not to say that anticipation and elation are the only active mechanisms of hallucinogens, merely that these two elements of their perceived efficacy cannot be dismissed out of hand by naturalists as somehow flaky or inspired by illusory sources.
I'm still going to try to muddle through the book and ignore all the social criticism and philosophical presumption. The illustrations by themselves make the book a must read: that's why I peppered this essay with the same.
I still find it interesting that this book found a mainstream publisher, but back in the day, talk about drug use was still fine, as long as the speaker made it absolutely clearer that he pooh-poohed the practice. Nowadays, mere factual reporting is deemed to be counterrevolutionary, which is why the office of the ONDCP was founded on a policy of never discussing drug use in a positive context. Do drugs help native tribes bond, settle disputes and raise their young people successfully? Tough luck. Today we can only publish negative news about "drugs."
I was so irritated at Schultes' "nothing-to-see-here" attitude that I was tempted to publish this essay without reading his entire book. It's grating to hear a westerner dismissing native practices out of hand with such smug assurance. He uses the term "nightmarish" for visions that one suspects were more "awesome" or "holy" in the eyes of tribal users and the term "toxic" to describe (or rather to libel) substances whose use results in visions. But Schultes is forced to find those visions pathological, as symptoms of poisoning, since he's assumed a priori that such sensual experiences are meaningless phenomena. He does at least mention the widespread tribal belief in the telepathic powers of ayahuasca, but he is quick to reassure the reader that these are "properties for which, of course, there is no scientific basis." I guess not, since science wants to measure these things and therefore must denigrate any mere experiences, the more so in that, strictly speaking, consciousness itself is a mere epiphenomenon according to the materialist scientist of today. The only things that are real are molecules and genes. Everything else is unscientific. (That's why modern doctors can't figure out if substances like laughing gas can help the depressed: they're dutybound by materialism to ignore the obvious and to look through their microscopes instead for proof of efficacy.)
But since the work in question was short and appeared to be rich in factual details, I persevered -- which is great, because the book is richly detailed and fantastically illustrated by freelance artist Elmer W. Smith. Moreover, the author ignores his own biases long enough to give us factual accounts of the tribal use of a wide variety of "hallucinogenic" substances that I had never heard of before, or about whose entheogenic properties I had been hitherto ignorant. Of course, the term "hallucinogenic" itself is a pejorative term for naturally occurring medicines, since it presupposes Schultes' own western belief that the visions they produce are mere "false creations, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain."
I was particularly fascinated by his description of the leaves and flowers of the Methysticodendron amesianum, which he tells us are used by "witch doctors" among the Sibundoy Indians. The Sibundoy live in an eponymous Colombian valley that the author tells us has been characterized as "the most narcoticconscious area of the New World." Sounds like a people after my own heart! I'm tempted to load up the moving van even as I type! Incidentally, I wonder who first came up with the term "witch doctor"? Surely, it was some European like Schultes who wished to slander the plant-friendly doctors of the New World with the pejorative epitaphs that had been lavished on the unruly plant-compounding females of the Old World.
Hallucinogenic Plants
reviewed on Archive.org
I was the first person to review "Hallucinogenic Plants" on Archive.org (see below). Looks like a review was necessary. 67 users have deemed this book a "favorite," after all, and that probably means that they are unaware (or at least insufficiently aware) of the drawbacks that I have cited above.
Schultes is a Drug War imperialist
In 1976, the US Supreme Court ruled that white Americans had no right to use psychoactive plants in religious rituals because Caucasians had no history of that practice. That was a lie in light of the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries, but even if it were true, it would be an absurd reason to ban a religion. And where did the court get this idea? From researchers like Schultes who wrote: "The widespread and expanding use of hallucinogens in our society may have little or no value and may sometimes even be harmful or dangerous. In any case, it is a newly imported and superimposed cultural trait without natural roots in modern western tradition." To which I answer: SO WHAT? William James said we must study altered states. The Aztec gods celebrated psychoactive plants. Surely Schultes is outside of his area of expertise when he tells us that such plants probably have no use for westerners -- as if we westerners should be happy with our drug called alcohol, which kills 95,000 Americans every year. Schultes is a cultural imperialist who helped lay the ground for the religious intolerance of the Drug War.
It will be objected that Schultes carried out much of his research prior to 1973 and the Drug War of Richard Nixon. I believe, however, that there was a "Drug War" ideology or mentality in America long before Nixon showed up to use drugs as a way of arresting and sidelining his political opponents. That mentality is the imperialist notion that materialism rules, that drugs should work in such a way as to be easily marketable, that a pill should work WITHOUT regard for set and setting, that improving one's mood through medicine is wrong, unless one does that in a very low-key way using Big Pharma meds, etc. That those who infringe upon these rules can morally and legally be removed from the workforce and have their property taken from them, etc. You know, the kind of laws that our forefathers fought for.
Author's Follow-up: September 24, 2023
I was just watching a new series on Curiosity Stream called "The Secret Life of Plants." Scientists have now finally caught up with tribal peoples by finding that plants can "hear" and see and communicate with insects and fellow plants. This is just more evidence that nature does not do things by accident, and that the preponderance of chemicals there that influence human beings is no accident, despite the scoffing of materialist scientists.
Related tweet: September 24, 2023
A new documentary series on "The Secret Life of Plants" shows how these seemingly lifeless objects can use a chemical language to call insects to its defense (egging on ladybugs to eat leaf-chewing larvae) and instruct seeds to germinate ASAP (when a fire devastates a forest).
In other words, nature does things for a purpose. The fact, therefore, that nature contains a seemingly endless supply of chemicals that inspire psychoactive states in humans is no accident. It is anti-human progress and anti-nature to outlaw the use of such substances.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
DRUG LAWS
If I want to use the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions, fight depression, or follow up on the research of William James into altered states, I should not have to live in fear of the DEA crashing down my door and shouting: "GO! GO! GO!"
Richard Evans Schultes seems to have originated the harebrained idea (since used by the US Supreme Court to suppress new religions) that you have no right to use drugs in a religious ritual if you did not grow up in a society that had such practices. What tyrannical idiocy!
LA Police Chief Daryl Gates said drug users should be summarily executed. William Bennett said drug dealers should be beheaded. These are the attitudes that the drug war inculcates. This racist and brutal ideology must be wiped out.
Sana Collective Group committed to making psychedelic therapy available to all regardless of income.
You have been reading essays by the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass, at abolishthedea.com. Brian is the founder of The Drug War Gift Shop, where artists can feature and sell their protest artwork online. He has also written for Sociodelic and is the author of The Drug War Comic Book, which contains 150 political cartoons illustrating some of the seemingly endless problems with the war on drugs -- many of which only Brian seems to have noticed, by the way, judging by the recycled pieties that pass for analysis these days when it comes to "drugs." That's not surprising, considering the fact that the category of "drugs" is a political category, not a medical or scientific one.
A "drug," as the world defines the term today, is "a substance that has no good uses for anyone, ever, at any time, under any circumstances" -- and, of course, there are no substances of that kind: even cyanide and the deadly botox toxin have positive uses: a war on drugs is therefore unscientific at heart, to the point that it truly qualifies as a superstition, one in which we turn inanimate substances into boogie-men and scapegoats for all our social problems.
The Drug War is, in fact, the philosophical problem par excellence of our time, premised as it is on a raft of faulty assumptions (notwithstanding the fact that most philosophers today pretend as if the drug war does not exist). It is a war against the poor, against minorities, against religion, against science, against the elderly, against the depressed, against those in pain, against children in hospice care, and against philosophy itself. (For proof of that latter charge, check out how the US and UK have criminalized the substances that William James himself told us to study in order to understand reality.) It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions (like the Vedic), Nazifies the English language (referring to folks who emulate drug-loving Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin as "scumbags") and militarizes police forces nationwide (resulting in gestapo SWAT teams breaking into houses of peaceable Americans and shouting "GO GO GO!").
(Speaking of Nazification, L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates thought that drug users should be shot. What a softie! The real hardliners are the William Bennetts of the world who want drug users to be beheaded instead. That will teach them to use time-honored plant medicine of which politicians disapprove! Mary Baker Eddy must be ecstatic in her drug-free heaven, as she looks down and sees this modern inquisition on behalf of the drug-hating principles that she herself maintained. I bet she never dared hope that her religion would become the viciously enforced religion of America, let alone of the entire freakin' world!)
In short, the drug war causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, meanwhile violating the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. (Surely, Jefferson was rolling over in his grave when Ronald Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants.)
If you believe in freedom and democracy, in America and around the world, please stay tuned for more philosophically oriented broadsides against the outrageous war on godsend medicines, AKA the war on drugs.
PS The drug war has not failed: to the contrary, it has succeeded, insofar as its ultimate goal was to militarize police forces around the world and help authorities to ruthlessly eliminate those who stand in the way of global capitalism. For more, see Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley. Oh, and did I mention that most Drug Warriors these days would never get elected were it not for the Drug War itself, which threw hundreds of thousands of their political opposition in jail? Trump was right for the wrong reasons: elections are being stolen in America, but the number-one example of that fact is his own narrow victory in 2016, which could never have happened without the existence of laws that were specifically written to keep Blacks and minorities from voting. The Drug War, in short, is a cancer on the body politic.
PPS Drugs like opium and psychedelics should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
Rather than apologetically decriminalizing selected plants, we should be demanding the immediate restoration of Natural Law, according to which "The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." (John Locke)
Selected Bibliography
Andrew, Christopher "The Secret World: A History of Intelligence" 2019 Yale University Press
Aurelius, Marcus "Meditations" 2021 East India Publishing Company
Bache, Christopher "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven" 2019 Park Street Press
Mate, Gabriel "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" 2009 Vintage Canada
Maupassant, Guy de "Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques - Guy de Maupassant: Les classiques du fantastique " 2019
McKenna, Terence "Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution " 1992 Bantam
Pinchbeck, Daniel "When Plants Dream" 2019 Watkins Publishing
Poe, Edgar Allan "The Essential Poe" 2020 Warbler Classics
Pollan, Michael "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence " 2018 Penguin Books
Reynolds, David S. "Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville " 1988 Oxford University Press
Richards, William "Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences Hardcover" 2015 Columbia University Press
Straussman, Rick "DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences " 2001 Park Street Press
Streatfield, Dominic "Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography" 2003 Picador USA
Swartzwelder, Scott "Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy" 1998 W.W. Norton
Szasz, Thomas "Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers" 1974 Anchor Press/Doubleday
Whitaker, Robert "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America " 2010 Crown
Whitaker, Robert "Mad in America"2002 Perseus Publishing
Zinn, Howard "A People's History of the United States: 1492 - present" 2009
Zuboff , Shoshana "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" 2019 Public Affairs
Site and its contents copyright 2023, by Brian B. Quass, the drug war philosopher at abolishthedea.com. For more information, contact Brian at quass@quass.com.
just did a little back-pedaling on Twitter. 
I was just watching a new series on Curiosity Stream called "The Secret Life of Plants." Scientists have now finally caught up with tribal peoples by finding that plants can "hear" and see and communicate with insects and fellow plants. This is just more evidence that nature does not do things by accident, and that the preponderance of chemicals there that influence human beings is no accident, despite the scoffing of materialist scientists. 
