The metaphysics of drug use and how the drug war outlaws religious liberty
a review of essay number 10 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 27, 2025
The following remarks are part of a series of responses to the essays contained in the 2001 book "Hallucinogens: A Reader," edited by Charles Grob1. The comments below are in response to essay number 10: "Sitting for Sessions: Dharma & DMT Research," by Rick J. Strassman, MD
Rick Strassman says his views about the transformative benefits of DMT were "radically changed" after follow-up studies showed that "a small number of volunteers... required some care afterward." But it is unclear what Strassman means by "afterward." He says that the follow-up studies continued for years. Were these negative symptoms encountered the day after treatment, or were they reported months or years after treatment? In any case, it is not clear why Strassman is convinced that they were caused by the use of DMT. Did the participants believe that? If so, on what did they base that belief?
Human behavior is caused by a vast number of inputs and it is not clear why Strassman or his volunteers believe that DMT is the smoking gun here when it comes to negative results that merely followed at some point after the use of DMT. Even if all downsides were somehow caused exclusively by DMT (as if we could ever know or prove that to be the case), in a free world, we would study ways to minimize such downsides of use rather than throwing in the towel at the least sign of trouble and saying: "Oops! There is a negative effect! Let us put an end to all study of this drug!" If we approached other risky activities with such sensibilities, there would be no mountain climbing or free diving or drinking of alcohol for that matter -- because "a small number" of practitioners would be liable to injure themselves in such pursuits.
And so Strassman advocates prohibition (implicitly in this article and explicitly in his "Psychedelic Handbook2") -- prohibition which kills tens of thousands of Black Americans yearly and has destroyed the rule of law in Latin America345. Prohibition has actually ended democracy in America by jailing over a million minorities and so handed elections to racists and fascists -- and yet apparently anything is better than the possibility that a white American might misuse a drug -- never mind that we refuse to educate them about safe use!!!
Please, Rick!
Why would we want to push for a drug prohibition that will force determined users to synthesize DMT for themselves using highly dangerous chemicals? Is that safe??? Why are we not talking about education instead and a controlled drug supply?
One is reminded of the prohibitionists of the 1920s who promoted laws to add methanol to alcohol, which resulted in 50,000 deaths from rotgut6. They were never really interested in health -- to the contrary, they were interested in punishing users, yes, even in murdering them, in anticipation of the day when William Bennett would call for the beheading of drug dealers. Such prohibitionists never take responsibility for the deaths that they cause by the drug policies that they promote. They point instead to the white American young people whom they have supposedly saved from themselves. How? By throwing all other stakeholders under the bus of course, starting with depressives like myself whose right to effective medicine is always completely ignored. Out of sight, out of mind. Who cares if I sit on the side of my bed at 2 in the morning and want to die? Who cares that I could have been cheered up in real-time by the drugs that our prohibitionists demonize a priori? See more on this topic in my essay entitled The Bill Clinton Fallacy7. Sadly, Strassman himself does not see that drug prohibition is the problem here, as he makes depressingly clear in his "Psychedelic Handbook.8"
DMT AND RELIGION
Strassman also explains how the Buddhist community reacted negatively to his experiments. He fails to recognize (or at least to point out) that this negative attitude is a natural result of our repressive drug laws and the prohibitionist mentality by which we denigrate the users of drugs that have inspired entire religions. The Vedic religion was inspired by the use of a drug that inspired and elated9 -- and yet in Drug War parlance, the Vedic people were mere druggie scumbags -- or would be so labeled were their present-day proponents naive enough to emphasize the importance of their ancestors' use of the psychoactive substance known as Soma juice. This is why the Buddhist community wants no mention of drugs in connection with their practice -- because the drug prohibition mindset has completely biased the western world to the sorts of godsend medicines that have been used by indigenous people for millennia. Neither Strassman nor these image-conscious Buddhists sufficiently appreciate that the drug-war mindset is the problem here, not drugs. It is an anti-indigenous mindset that strategically libels all drugs as junk should they have the effect of inspiring religious states.
Instead, Strassman frames the problem as a metaphysical reluctance on the part of mainstream Buddhists to acknowledge the power of drugs. But Buddhists would not be making a fuss about metaphysics had the Drug War not threatened to demonize them as "junkies" were they to adopt a politically incorrect view of psychoactive substances. It is the Drug War that is calling the shots here, not conservative Buddhists. It is the Drug War that is anti-religion (or rather anti-new religions). This is the takeaway message. Sure, the mainstream Buddhists have prejudices against drugs, but let us remember why they have those prejudices in the first place: because racist American politicians have successfully demonized all drugs that are used for the purposes of inspiring religious states.
This metaphysical disdain for drug use -- generated as it was by the Drug War mentality of substance demonization -- begs a legion of telling metaphysical questions:
1) Are the results of meditation invalid if one has ingested coffee in the name of focusing more powerfully on one's transcendental goals?
2) Are the results of meditation invalid if one has used cocaine to increase one's mental focus?
3) Are the results of meditation invalid if one is "on" one of the Big Pharma drugs upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life?
4) Are the results of meditation invalid if I have had one beer? What about two beers or three?
People are always on drugs of some sort. Our bodies are full of drugs. That's why we speak of our species' biochemistry. The human body is never drug free. A metaphysical judgment is therefore always implicit in our attempts to deem some drugs fine while we say that others are necessarily evil.
In a world wherein drugs were seen as a tool, without any emotional value invested in their mere names, then no one would ask metaphysical questions like "Was my transcendence 'real' given that I used LSD to attain it?" This is philosophically equivalent to asking, "Is my happiness 'real' since it comes both from using laughing gas and from looking forward to using it?" Absurd question, right? Even the Reader's Digest knows that laughter is the best medicine. And yet doctors like Robert Glatter cannot even figure out if laughing gas can help the depressed, as is clear from the title of his 2021 article in Forbes magazine: "Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment Resistant Depression"?! (Glatter cannot figure out what a five-year-old can clearly see. Why? Because he is blinded by the ideologies of behaviorism and reductive materialism.)
According to the materialist metaphysic of the Drug Warrior, it is better for a depressed person like myself to commit suicide or to undergo brain-damaging shock therapy than for me to use such "drugs"! This is the implicit message and inevitable result of such biochemical navel-gazing as materialists undertake in the age of the Drug War. This is why it is always a struggle for me to write dispassionately about these topics, because I have skin in this game. I suffer from the results of the bamboozled mindsets that other drug pundits either take in stride or else ignore entirely. I am the one who goes without godsend medicines thanks to their racist and xenophobic prejudices; I am the one who is shunted off onto Big Pharma drugs upon which I am made a patient for life.
CONCLUSION
This Drug War metaphysics is our problem today, based as it is on the medicalization and moralization of drug use. Were Buddhists and Hindus to act with courage and principle rather than mere prudence, they would push back against the Drug War ideology of substance demonization which has inspired this racist and xenophobic metaphysics of drug use in the first place. Instead, they accept the false and imported Drug War notion that some drugs are indeed evil and they go from there. This is why I say that the Drug War is the philosophical problem par excellence of our time. It warps our judgments in all areas of life, blinding us to the obvious and making us recoil in horror from drugs merely because they have been successfully branded as demonic by racist and xenophobic demagogues.
Hallucinogens: A Reader
In 2001, Charles Grob published 'Hallucinogens: A Reader," containing interviews and essays on the subject of drugs. Watch this space for philosophical essays on each essay in the book.
The government causes problems for those who are habituated to certain drugs. Then they claim that these problems are symptoms of an illness. Then folks like Gabriel Mate come forth to find the "hidden pain" in "addicts." It's one big morality play created by drug laws.
I have dissed MindMed's new LSD "breakthrough drug" for philosophical reasons. But we can at least hope that the approval of such a "de-fanged" LSD will prove to be a step in the slow, zigzag path toward re-legalization.
Prohibition is wrong root and branch. It seeks to justify the colonial disdain for indigenous healing practices through fearmongering.
Americans heap hypocritical praise on Walt Whitman. What they don't realize is that many of us could be "Walt Whitman for a Day" with the wise use of psychoactive drugs. To the properly predisposed, morphine gives a DEEP appreciation of Mother Nature.
The proof that psychedelics work has always been extant. We are hoodwinked by scientists who convince us that efficacy has not been "proven." This is materialist denial of the obvious.
According to Donald Trump's view of life, Jesus Christ was a chump. We should hate our enemies, not love them.
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.
Two weeks ago, a guy told me that most psychiatrists believe ECT is great. I thought he was joking! I've since come to realize that he was telling the truth: that is just how screwed up the healthcare system is today thanks to drug war ideology and purblind materialism.
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.
It's always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract. That's anti-scientific. It begs so many questions and leaves suffering pain patients (and others) high and dry. No substance is bad in and of itself.
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You have been reading an article entitled, The metaphysics of drug use and how the drug war outlaws religious liberty: a review of essay number 10 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob, published on June 27, 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, The metaphysics of drug use and how the drug war outlaws religious liberty: a review of essay number 10 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob, published on June 27, 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)
