The One Thing that Timothy Leary Got Wrong

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The One Thing that Timothy Leary Got Wrong

a philosophical review of The Politics of Ecstasy

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 3, 2025

Timothy Leary was ahead not only of his own times but of our times as well. His reflections in "The Politics of Ecstasy ¹" are so full of deep (and yet, in a way, common-sense) insights, that one is amazed that almost everybody in the materialist mainstream is lined up to denounce him. There is only one area in which Leary himself seems to have been bamboozled by western drug prejudices, and that is in his evaluation of opiate use. For all his philosophical subtlety, he fails to see that the downsides that we associate with opiate use today are a natural outcome of the prohibitionist mindset, which fails to teach safe use, fails to regulate drugs as to quantity and quality, and fails to re-legalize an ever-growing collection of opiate alternatives. Leary succumbs to the drug-war practice of blaming drugs, in this case heroin ², for the problems that prohibition causes for drug users.

"The appeal of heroin is the void. The warm, soft cocoon of nothingness. Surcease. Easeful death ³."
--Timothy Leary , The Politics of Ecstasy

Leary assumes here that there is only one way to use opiates. It never occurs to him that in a free world, opiate use could be engaged in sensibly for a wide variety of reasons. See The Truth about Opium for more.

Why this bias?

The idea that opiate use is "beyond the pale," at least for westerners, has roots in the xenophobic and unscrupulous determination of 19th-century protestant missionaries to get the Chinese people to put down their opium pipes and to pick up Christian Bibles instead. In fact, The Anti-Opium Society of 19th-century England was created in response to the lies of an American missionary who claimed that two million Chinese die every year from smoking opium, a ridiculous and blatant falsehood. William H. Brereton, author and long-time Hong Kong resident, quotes the attorney General of Hong Kong of that time to the following effect.

"No China resident believes in the terrible frequency of the dull, sodden-witted, debilitated opium smoker met with in print."

To which Brereton adds:

"I had daily intercourse with the people from whom the best and most trustworthy information on the subject of opium and opium smoking could be obtained, and my experience is that opium smoking, as practised by the Chinese, is perfectly innocuous.⁴"

And what about dependency?

Leary lived before modern antidepressants ⁵ had hit their stride as a financial game changer in the healthcare industry, but imagine the hypocrisy of wringing our hands over potential dependency in the case of opiate use while yet living in a world that encourages -- encourages -- actual dependency on Big Pharma ⁶ ⁷ drugs, to the point where it is a modern trope to ask a troublemaker: "Have you taken your meds today?" Incidentally, the fact that we ask this question only of troublemakers shows that such pills are prescribed more for the benefit of society than the user. Their goal is to make the user socially acceptable, not to help us to think outside the box, and least of all to help us to "live large."

To his credit, Leary did not want the police to arrest heroin users. In fact, he claimed that such users were, like alcoholics, on a sort of religious journey in search of self-transcendence, which is really a profound insight on Leary's part, albeit one sure to raise the hackles of the materialists in our modern drug laboratories, in which human beings are considered to be biochemical widgets and the very idea of transcendence is considered to be an anti-scientific illusion. Leary does, however, believe that such users have chosen the wrong substance for their journey and should switch to using psychedelics instead.

While psychedelics may indeed have transformative benefits, Leary betrays a cramped view of human psychology when he assumes that opiates could not be used wisely for lofty, and even religious, goals as well. In a sane world, one in which we were blinded neither by puritan fears nor materialist dogma, we would immediately discover endless potential positive uses for opiates. Let me just pick one random potential protocol out of an infinitude of common-sense possibilities: namely, the inspiration-seeking individual could use opiates once a month to experience the kind of surreal appreciation of Mother Nature that Poe describes as follows in his short story entitled "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains":

"In the meantime the morphine ⁸ had its customary effect- that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf- in the hue of a blade of grass- in the shape of a trefoil- in the humming of a bee- in the gleaming of a dew-drop- in the breathing of the wind- in the faint odors that came from the forest- there came a whole universe of suggestion- a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought.⁹"

Imagine the pretension and presumption of anyone -- even Timothy Leary -- telling me that such states of mind are not beneficial for me -- or are perhaps even pathological! That is not a scientific judgment, folks, that is a political judgment, and a tyrannical one at that.

Leary was well aware that the details matter when it comes to using psychedelics. What he failed to fully appreciate was that the details matter when it comes to ALL kinds of drug use, and that no drug is good or bad in and of itself. This is a crucial oversight on Leary's part because the only way to end drug prohibition is to drive a stake through the heart of the prohibitionist mindset, by pointing out its philosophical absurdity. And what is the prohibitionist mindset? It is the superstitious idea that drugs can be good or bad in themselves without regard for the details of use. It is the crazy idea that a substance that has potential negative uses for a young white American must not be used by anybody, anywhere, ever, and that it is even wrong to educate people about them. This attitude is not just anti-scientific, it is anti-human progress. It results in a safety standard for drug use that we apply to no other risky activity on earth: not to mountain climbing, not to parachuting, and certainly not to gun firing or alcohol consumption.

Instead of carving out exceptions to this absurd prohibition based on special pleading -- whether that of Timothy Leary ¹⁰ or of the modern white boosters of psilocybin -- we need to finally renounce the prohibitionist mindset itself. Until then, America will continue to practice pharmacological colonialism with the entire world, foisting its own cramped and fear-driven views of psychoactive substances on indigenous people worldwide, thereby turning drug-hating into a kind of new world religion, a religion that turns materialist scientists into the self-interested gatekeepers when it comes to self-transcendent experiences. In such a world, the only drug users who will be treated fairly are those white protestants who can make rhetorical cases on behalf of their own use that will resonate with and evoke compassion from the sort of Christian protestants who promoted this ill-conceived and inherently racist Drug War in the first place ¹¹. And so if a white mother uses oxy for anxiety (because it was the only truly effective medicine that her GP could give her for the condition), she will receive compassion; whereas a Black mother who uses the drug without medical blessing will be kicked out of her public housing unit ¹².

This is what happens when we base drug policy on how we feel about drug users -- rather than on common sense and a belief in the rights of all people to psychological and religious liberty.

AFTERWORD

I have criticized psychiatrists like Gabriel Mate for moralizing drug use. It may therefore seem odd that I would praise Leary for saying that heroin users were searching for something -- namely self-transcendence. My criticism of Mate, however, is that he tends to pathologize the user when what we should be pathologizing is the society that made their use problematic. For Mate, the user has a problem that the rest of us do not have -- whereas Leary seems to understand that we all have a problem and that heroin users at least decided to do something about that problem, even if their choice was doomed to failure. But let us remember why such attempts usually fail: it is because the Drug War is all about seeing to it that they do fail. It should be remembered in this context that Drug Czar William Bennett always reserved his deepest hate-filled intolerance for people who used drugs wisely and without problem. He thought that they should have their names printed in the newspaper and shamed, yes, shamed for using wisely. This is an absurd outcome of prohibition, but it is one that we should have expected. An absurd philosophy leads to absurd outcomes, so it should be no surprise when the prohibitionist philosophy of the Drug Warrior leads us to hate seemingly good things like drug education and safe drug use.

Notes for essay entitled The One Thing that Timothy Leary Got Wrong: a philosophical review of The Politics of Ecstasy:

1: “Full Text of ‘the Politics of Ecstasy.’” 2026. Archive.org. 2026. https://archive.org/stream/ecstaspoliticsof00learrich/ecstaspoliticsof00learrich_djvu.txt. (up)
2: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
3: "Easeful death" is nothing to be scorned. We would not need to fight for the "right to die" if opium were re-legalized. This is another reason why prohibition is tyrannical madness: it puts the government in charge of deciding not only how we can live -- but how -- and even when -- we can die. It is amazing that this enormous power grab is not seen as such, even by most Libertarians. (up)
4: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
5: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
6: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
7: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
8: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
9: “Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (Text-02A).” 2026. Eapoe.Org. 2026. https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/raggeda.htm. (up)
10: Timothy Leary was Right DWP (up)
11: Monteith, Andrew. 2023. Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs. New York University Press EBooks. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479817993.001.0001. (up)
12: Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America Hansen, Helena, 2023 (up)

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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.

We throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.

If there was free speech in America, we would see billboards demanding freedom to use psychoactive substances for religious purposes, or to heal, or to follow-up on the research of William James regarding the nature of human consciousness.

We won't know how hard it is to get off drugs until we legalize all drugs that could help with the change. With knowledge and safety, there will be less unwanted use. And unwanted use can be combatted creatively with a wide variety of drugs.

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.

Westerners have "just said no" to pain relief, mood elevation and religious insight.

If we let "science" decide about drugs, i.e. base freedom on health concerns, then tea can be as easily outlawed as beer. The fact that horses are not illegal shows that prohibition is not about health. It's about the power to outlaw certain "ways of being in the world."

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.

His answer to political opposition is: "Lock them up!" That's Nazi speak, not American democracy.

Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."

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The One Thing that Timothy Leary Got Wrong

a philosophical review of The Politics of Ecstasy

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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