Katherine Hendy's paper1 makes the important point that there is more than one way to evaluate the efficacy of psychoactive drugs such as MDMA and psilocybin. There is the chemical approach, which seeks to establish the efficacy of specific psychoactive substances in fighting officially recognized and discrete pathologies such as PTSD and so-called "treatment resistant depression." This approach uses clinical trials in which all participants have been scientifically identified as having one-and-the-same "illness" as defined by the DSM.
Then there is the efficacy as established by the positive transformation of the self, not by the alleviation of any one specific illness, but via an improvement in the individual's overall wellbeing and understanding of self. It is, of course, hoped that this understanding will resolve any specific psychological complaints (as for instance when one single afternoon of shroom use ended Paul Stamet's stuttering problem as a teenager2) -- but the treatment is considered to be efficacious provided only that it improves the self, and not merely if it manages to extirpate an isolated pathology belonging to that self. Participants in the latter therapy are all seen as people in need of a better understanding of self, rather than people who happen to all share a specific illness or psychological shortcoming that they wish to eliminate from their lives.
The author then explains why our choice of explanations matters when it comes to establishing drug efficacy. She makes the case that our government's reliance on chemical explanations of efficacy naturally leads to a kind of exception-riddled prohibition, one in which we outlaw all use of substances like MDMA and psilocybin except in cases where the "patient" or "user" has an officially recognized illness for which the drugs in question have been proven efficacious according to science's cramped definition of that term.
Why is science's definition of "efficacy" cramped? That is the question that Katherine does not ask in this paper but which, I believe, is at the very heart of the problem with modern substance prohibition.
In our purblind demand that a drug cure a specific illness, we are blind to the obvious general benefits of the drug that have been proven extant before our very eyes. The use of MDMA in the 1990s resulted in totally unprecedented peace and understanding between ethnic groups on the dance floors of London3. And yet this fact is never added to the plus side of any cost/benefit analyses about MDMA use that are undertaken by the scientists or their sometimes reluctant benefactors in government. Nor do they consider the costs of NOT legalizing the drug: the thousands of shock-rattled soldiers that will go without godsend treatments, the depressed who will suffer silently at home (perhaps while contemplating suicide), the anguished alcoholic who would gladly "switch vices" if only the FDA and the DEA would allow him or her to do so legally! And of course the use of psilocybin is seen in the same biased light. The time-honored positive use of psilocybin mushrooms by the Zapotec4 people of Oaxaca, Mexico, for instance, tells the government nothing, making it clear that the colonial viewpoint of Cortes himself is alive and well in 21st-century America, complete with its aggressive disdain for anti-scientific and/or anti-Christian healing practices.
In short, it is just a farce to say that the government even performs cost/benefit analyses when it comes to drug efficacy: they rather seek to find reasons to keep psychoactive substances as illegal as possible, only grudgingly approving them when scientists have jumped through all the necessary hoops - and jumped through them again and again - until some point at which the continued bullheadedness on the part of regulators becomes willful obstructionism even in the eyes of their own self-interested employees. This is why we have a National Institute for Drug Abuse rather than a National Institute for Drug Use. Our government is all about demonizing psychoactive substances.
This begs the question: Why are materialist scientists in charge of deciding what we should value in life? For that is exactly what they are doing when they sign off on the outlawing of prima facie godsends like MDMA and psilocybin. By ignoring all the huge and obvious benefits of such drugs, scientists are basically deciding for us that 100% safety is more important in life than universal brotherhood, and the prevention of school shootings, and the prevention of suicide, etc. - and surely such a conclusion is open to the liveliest of debates!
So until American scientists agree that "peace, love and understanding" is a good thing, they are obviously biased judges, determined to put today's "drugs" on show trials whose ultimate purpose is to prevent widespread use and to keep availability as problematic as possible for law-abiding Americans.
Conclusion: Scientists have no expertise in deciding what our priorities should be in life5. This is why mind-expanding drugs should be judged (if at all) by philosophers and humanists and empathic souls - not by materialists, for whom ecstatic visions of unity and love are considered mere "false creations proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain."
In some sense then, it does not matter whether we explain the efficacy of entheogens through chemical action alone or with regard to the ever-changing nature of the "self": as long as government officials follow the lead of science in refusing to recognize the glaringly obvious benefits of entheogens (and the equally obvious downsides of their prohibition - up to and including the creation of civil wars overseas), the attempted approval of godsends will always be met by bureaucratic foot dragging and specious complaints about obscure potential dangers, typically promoted by clinicians who are seeking to curry favor with the DEA, which needs drugs to be as illegal as possible in order for them to justify their multi-billion-dollar budget.
I write this by way of supplementing Hendry's paper, not to criticize it. The government's refusal to recognize the positive sides of the substances that they dismiss as "drugs" has never been sufficiently emphasized by anyone, to my knowledge, so she is scarcely alone in giving it short shrift.
I do, however, have one other consideration to add to this informative and well-researched paper.
Hendry claims that there are two ways of establishing drug efficacy: 1) via a chemical explanation and 2) via an explanation related to the "self." I believe that there is a third way, however. Remember, the "doors of perception"6 open outward, not inward. In Aldous Huxley's view, the efficacy of mescaline consisted in its ability to draw back the veil that shielded him from full-on reality. It did not directly teach him about his "self," but rather hinted at the immense and interconnected nature of the world of which he was a part, how every inch of it was glowing and pulsating with life. Huxley's experience led him to expand on the ideas of Henri Bergson7, that the mind is a reducing valve; its job is to limit our daily perceptions to what is potentially useful to us as human beings in contradistinction to showing us reality with a capital R. One thinks in this connection of the science of optics which tells us how the brain "fills in the blanks" caused by our species' poor peripheral vision with what are essentially mockups of what we apparently "should" be seeing in those poorly covered areas. Even if our periphery contains an orangutan riding a unicycle, we may not notice anything out of the ordinary there8.
Huxley's way of understanding the psychedelic experience has similarities to the beliefs of a Mesoamerican shaman, insofar as both see their drug-induced visions as being more real, in a sort of metaphysical way, than their everyday perceptions9. But the shaman would surely find the American emphasis on "self" as unhelpful at best, and selfish at worst, given the holistic philosophy of Cosmovision that is still prevalent among the indigenous peoples of Latin America. As human rights advocate Llona Suran explains:
"The Andean sensibility understands that every constitutive element of the Cosmos is intertwined, that every being is endowed with a spirit, whether it is mountains, rivers, trees, plants, or even rocks. It understands the world as a natural community of diverse and variable living communities, all of which, because of the bond that unites them, represent both their intrinsic value and the Whole."
-- "The Andean cosmovision as a philosophical foundation of the rights of nature" by Llona Suran10
So while I reject the materialist attempts to extract humanity from the world and treat one single isolated illness in a repeatable fashion (a la the chemical establishment of efficacy), I see the emphasis on "self" as problematic as well. It seems, in fact, to be a denial of the interconnectedness of Cosmovision as described above, an expression of the utilitarian focus for which indigenous leaders all too justifiably reproach the West.
Personally, I do not need clinical trials to convince me that psilocybin is efficacious, however. The proof is extant after my first experience on the drug two weeks ago in Salem, Oregon. For despite materialist orthodoxy, the user is the expert when it comes to deciding the efficacy of psychoactive drugs, not some scientist working under the jaundiced eye of a cynical and skeptical DEA agent.
What was my experience?
The psilocybin "trip" vastly improved my mood and inspired me to take up entire new habits, including the writing of a daily diary for the first time in my life, and a handwritten diary at that! It motivated me to walk around Deerwood Mansion in Salem, Oregon, and create an introductory video for my Twitter followers, something that I would never have felt comfortable doing before psilocybin. In short, it worked, it worked, it worked!
But it also inspired frustration, because the idea that I cannot freely use mushrooms whenever I want for the purpose of improving my life like that is revolting to me. It represents the complete end of freedom - which I think is why so many people try not to even think about the War on Drugs. It's just asking for trouble. Who wants to realize that they are being stopped by their own government from living a full and productive life? It's America, after all. We're free, aren't we? No. It seems that "drugs" are so dangerous now that the government has a national security interest in thwarting our hopes and dreams. Who knew?
I remember feeling the same frustration when I was driving through the scrub grass in Arizona away from the Church of the Peyote Way six years ago after a peyote session that gave me bright-green visions of Mesoamerican imagery. Yes, the feeling was great, but I was pissed when I recalled that there were heartless people in Washington, D.C., who made a full-time job out of seeing to it that I experienced such eye-opening transcendence as little as possible in life, preferably zero times from their self-satisfied and undereducated point of view.
But back to that recent psilocybin journey of mine.
Though written for a very different purpose, the following lines from poet Percy Shelley capture the compelling spirit of my drug experience, one in which the world around me seemed immense and multiform and yet somehow inexorably one, a world of which I was but one small part -- indeed one almost unimaginably small part. And the vision was somehow therapeutic. For the time being at least, I felt like the world was my oyster, and I could not wait to get out in it and profit from that new understanding. But science, of course, is deaf to all anecdote. They need to see if taking psilocybin under controlled circumstances cures a specific condition, as in "hey, presto," as the Brits would say. If not, the materialist judges will simply shake their heads and cry: "Next!"... and thereby veto a world full of blatantly obvious benefits.
While the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.
Author's Follow-up: February 2, 2025
In the above essay, I criticize the materialist approach to drug research. I failed to point out, however, that this approach is based on a specific philosophy or ideology, namely, that of behaviorism. In an attempt to turn psychology into a "real" science, the behaviorist holds that talk of human feelings and experience means nothing: that psychologists must devote their attention to quantifiable data alone. It is this inhumane ideology that permits materialists to ignore the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs and to claim that they have no recognized uses. In this way, behaviorism gives a veneer of "science" to the DEA's absurd claim that drugs have no known benefits. The fact is that all mood-elevating drugs are potential antidepressants -- the moment that we give empathic individuals the right to use them in a creative protocol. This is just psychological common sense and can only be denied by those who contend that anecdote does not matter, that history does not matter, and that psychological common sense does not matter.
Finally, a note about the Shelley poem, and specifically the opening line:
"While the one Spirit's plastic stress"...
The idea of a single pervasive "spirit" is not just poetry. The Kantian viewpoint, especially as interpreted by Schopenhauer, points to the existence of a timeless all-encompassing reality. This in turn comports with the experience of many users of psychedelics and phenethylamines. It is so common as to be a modern cliche that users of such substances report a sense of ontological oneness, a sense that reality is ultimately one, is ultimately interconnected.
Materialist scientists rule this possibility out a priori when they set to work studying such substances outside of all context and with regard only to the chemical effects of such drugs, as opposed to the reported experiences of the users -- which are all that matter in the real world, always assuming that the drugs in question are not biochemically toxic. The latter, by the way, is so rarely the case that it makes one wonder why the presumption is always that they are.
Immanuel Kant
Anyone familiar with the philosophies of both Immanuel Kant and William James should understand that philosophers have a duty to investigate what we westerners call 'altered states' and hence have a duty to disdainfully deride and denounce the outlawing of psychoactive substances. Kant's basic message, as inspired by Hume, is that we cannot understand ultimate realities in words, but as James insists in "The Varieties of Religious Experience," it is our duty as philosophers to try to understand such realities EXPERIENTIALLY, i.e., with the help of psychoactive substances such as nitrous oxide.
"No account of the universe in its totality," wrote James, "can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."
This is why it is a shame that I am the only philosopher in the world who contacted the FDA to protest their recent plans to begin treating nitrous oxide as a "drug" and so further discourage its use in metaphysical research. Alas, such goal-driven substance use is already considered unthinkable by most academics thanks to their brainwashed fealty to the drug war ideology of substance demonization. Thus I was the only philosopher in the world who spoke up on behalf of the legacy of William James and on behalf of academic freedom, for that matter, by pleading with the FDA to refrain from further marginalizing an already vastly underused substance. (In a sane world, the suicidal would be given laughing gas kits in the same way that we provide epi pens for those with severe allergies.)
But then this is the point of my entire website and the hundreds of essays that it contains: to demonstrate to the world that the drug war and prohibition are a cancer on the body politic and not just a matter of a few laws set up to discourage hedonists. For the idea that we should hate psychoactive substances is itself a metaphysical notion peculiar to the western mindset and not some logical truth that any unbiased mind must accept. Unfortunately, scientists seem to know, as it were subconsciously, that the drug war is a good thing, for it is clearly biased in the name of the materialism which they themselves profess. In the wake of the technological revolution, science is feeling omniscient, and so it naturally wants to avoid dealing with drug effects and the variability of human emotions. They cannot be quantified, as behaviorist materialism requires. So philosophers and scientists alike see a benefit in drug laws that outlaw substances that facilitate mystical feelings and ontological intimations: "Good riddance to such namby-pamby data," says the materialist in their "heart of hearts."
And so the drug war outlaws precisely those substances whose use conduces to a non-materialist view of the world, one in which we have intimations about the supposedly "unknowable" world of the noumena. And why is the noumena unknowable to us? First, thanks to the merely pragmatic nature of our perceptions as explained by Kant. But also thanks to the inherent limitations of that incomplete and fallible communication system that we call human language, whose inevitable shortcomings and vagaries seem to bar us from definitively saying anything that could not, at least in theory, be plausibly gainsaid in that same inherently malleable language.
These limitations of human language contrast tellingly, however, with the vivid experiential convictions about reality that are communicated by substance use according to the trip reports of the psychonauts of all ages. We can debate the ontological significance of such experiences, of course, but let us remember that it was precisely such "use" that opened James' mind to a world of potential realities of whose existence he had previously been blissfully unaware. Why? Because of his previous self-satisfied acceptance of materialist principles.
Unfortunately, modern philosophers have ceded their job of metaphysical investigation to psychonauts like James Fadiman, Alex Gibbons and Jim Hogshire. Not that there is anything wrong with the research of these latter truth seekers, but it is a shame that philosophers are not working with them to promote human progress and philosophical understanding. And so if metaphysics is dead in the 21st century, it is because today's philosophers have abandoned the pursuit of truth in the name of supporting America's hateful and superstitious war on psychoactive substances.
According to Kant, we can know nothing about the noumenal world, or ultimate reality, but this claim is not true*. In making that claim, Kant was unaware of the metaphysical insights provided by psychoactive drug use. There is such a thing as "experiential proof" inspired by such use -- an absolute conviction that is felt "in every fiber of one's being," as opposed to having been "proven" for one syllogistically in the fallible and eternally insufficient communication method that we call human language.
This is Kant's Holy Grail, had he only realized it, a way to move forward with metaphysical research: by looking for experiential proof of ultimate realities rather than merely logical ones.
A critic might say, yes, but metaphysics cannot be based on experience. But by that word, one has always meant sober experience. That implicit qualification was itself established before we understood the fallibility of the senses. The transcendent experience I reference here is of another kind, being contemplated in the mind and not processed through the sense organs typically associated with experience.
*Kant's claim could be salvaged, perhaps, by specifying the type of "knowledge" that we're talking about here. My point is simply that Kant seemed unaware of the power of psychoactive drugs to inspire states that provide us with convictions with respect to the noumenal world. Whether the source of those convictions is "knowledge" properly so-called is an interesting question, but one well beyond the scope of these comments and unnecessary for their rational evaluation.
In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James demonstrated how materialists are blind to the depth and meaning of psychological states of ecstasy and transcendence -- or in other words the states that are peculiar to mystics like St. Teresa... and to those who use psychoactive substances like laughing gas. The medical materialist is dogmatically dismissive of such states, which explains why they can pretend that godsend medicines that elate and inspire have no positive uses whatsoever:
To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce.
And so materialist scientists collaborate with the drug war by refusing to see glaringly obvious drug benefits. They acknowledge only those benefits that they believe are visible under a microscope. The Hindu religion would not exist today had materialist scientists held soma to such a standard. But that's the absurd pass to which prohibition eventually brings us in a society wherein materialist science is the new god: scientists are put in charge of deciding whether we are allowed to imagine new religions or not.
This materialist bias is inspired in turn by behaviorism, the anti-indigenous doctrine of JB Watson that makes the following inhumane claim:
"Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic."
According to this view, the hopes and the dreams of a "patient" are to be ignored. Instead, we are to chart their physiology and brain chemistry.
JB Watson's Behaviorism is a sort of Dr. Spock with a vengeance. It is the perfect ideology for a curmudgeon, because it would seem to justify all their inability to deal with human emotions. Unfortunately, the attitude has knock-on effects because it teaches drug researchers to ignore common sense and to downplay or ignore all positive usage reports or historic lessons about positive drug use. The "patient" needs to just shut up and let the doctors decide how they are doing. It is a doctrine that dovetails nicely with drug war ideology, because it empowers the researcher to ignore the obvious: that all drugs that elate have potential uses as antidepressants.
That statement can only be denied when one assumes that "real" proof of efficacy of a psychoactive medicine must be determined by a doctor, and that the patient's only job is to shut up because their hopes and dreams and feelings cannot be accurately displayed and quantified on a graph or a bar chart.
Schopenhauer synthesizes the ideas of Immanuel Kant and Plato with the philosophy of eastern religions, according to which we human beings are unable to perceive Reality writ large. This limitation, however, which both Schopenhauer and Kant suggest applies to all human beings as such, may actually only apply to "sober" individuals, as William James was to point out a decade after Schopenhauer's death. James realized that the strategic use of drugs that provide self-transcendence can help one see past the so-called Veil of Maya. He went so far as to insist that philosophers must use such substances in an effort to understand ultimate realities -- advice that, alas, most modern philosophers seem committed to ignoring.
"No account of the universe in its totality," wrote James, "can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."
The exciting thing now is to consider Schopenhauer's philosophy in light of the revelations provided by certain drug use and to assess how such epiphanies tend to confirm, qualify or perhaps even refute the German pessimist's ideas about an eternal and unchangeable will, a will which the philosopher tells us is manifested in (or rather manifested AS) objects, animals, plants and persons. Schopenhauer tells us that the will corresponding to these entities is purposeful, for it seeks to create a specific kind of object or individual, but that the will is also meaningless, in the sense that the fact that it IS a specific kind of will is an arbitrary given, to which we need not ascribe any purpose, let alone a creator.
I am still trying to wrap my head around that latter claim, by the way, the idea that there can be teleology without design. I think I am slowly beginning to understand what Schopenhauer means by that claim in light of Kantian distinctions, but I am by no means sure that I agree with him. Yet I am not qualified to push back at this time. Further reading is required on my part before I can either refute him advisedly, or else concede his point. I do find, however, that Schopenhauer occasionally makes definitive-sounding claims that are actually quite open to obvious refutations.
In "The World as Will and Idea," for instance, he states that tropical birds have brilliant feathers "so that each male may find his female." Really? Then why are penguins not decked out with technicolor plumage? To assign "final causes" like this to nature is to turn animals into the inkblots of a biological Rorschach test. Not only is Schopenhauer being subjective here, but he has an agenda in making this particular kind of claim: he wants to underscore his belief that there is a logical causative explanation behind the fact that "wills" of the tropical birds would manifest in this colorful way, that it was not some act of extravagance on the part of a whimsical creator. But this kind of explanation is not the least bit compelling since one can imagine dozens of equally plausible "final causes" for the feature in question: the birds want to attract mates, the birds want to warn off predators, the birds want to mimic other yellow birds, the birds want to collectively camouflage themselves while roosting as one big yellow object (or more accurately, the birds' wills want to do these things).
One senses that Schopenhauer would respond as follows: "Fine. Give any reason you like, Ballard. But whatever you do, do not tell me that some suppositious God likes variety!"
And what about this famous pessimism? It's so typical of curmudgeons to try to make a universal law out of their own psychological issues. Schopenhauer does not seem to understand that attitude matters. As Hamlet said, "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." It is neither the shortness of life nor the inhumanity of our fellows that ruins life for most people -- but rather their attitude TOWARD such circumstances. Every manic-depressive knows that a blue sky and party cake does not make a person happy, nor living amid postcard scenery. One can commit suicide in Disneyland just as well as Skid Row. It is attitude, attitude, attitude that matters -- from which it follows that it is a sin to outlaw substances that can help us adopt a positive attitude toward life. That's why it's so frustrating that philosophers like Schopenhauer pretend that life can be judged by circumstances alone. Only once we acknowledge that attitude matters can we clearly see the importance of the many mind-improving medicines of which Mother Nature is full, the meds that we slander today by classing them under the pejorative label of "drugs."
That's so "drug war" of Rick: If a psychoactive substance has a bad use at some dose, for somebody, then it must not be used at any dose by anybody. It's hard to imagine a less scientific proposition, or one more likely to lead to unnecessary suffering.
We have a low tolerance for the downsides of drug use only. We are fine with high risk levels for any other activity on earth. If drug warriors were serious about saving lives, they'd outlaw guns, free flying, free diving, and all pleasure trips to Mars.
We should hold the DEA criminally responsible for withholding spirit-lifting drugs from the depressed. Responsible for what, you ask? For suicides and lobotomies, for starters.
Imagine if we held sports to the same safety standard as drugs. There would be no sports at all. And yet even free climbing is legal. Why? Because with sports, we recognize the benefits and not just the downsides.
I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.
I think we should start taking names. All politicians and government officials who work to keep godsends like psilocybin from the public should be held to account for crimes against humanity when the drug war finally ends.
When people tell us there's nothing to be gained from using mind-improving drugs, they are embarrassing themselves. Users benefit from such drugs precisely to the extent that they are educated and open-minded. Loudmouth abstainers are telling us that they lack these traits.
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.
I could tell my psychiatrist EXACTLY what would "cure" my depression, even without getting addicted, but everything involved is illegal. It has to be. Otherwise I would have no need of the psychiatrist.
I'd like to become a guinea pig for researchers to test the ability of psychoactive drugs to make aging as psychologically healthy as possible. If such drugs cannot completely ward off decrepitude, they can surely make it more palatable. The catch? Researchers have to be free.
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, What Can the Chemical Hold?: a review of the paper by Katherine Hendy on Academia.edu, published on July 27, 2024 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, What Can the Chemical Hold?: a review of the paper by Katherine Hendy on Academia.edu, published on July 27, 2024 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)
