What Terence McKenna Got Wrong About Drugs

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What Terence McKenna Got Wrong About Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

January 2, 2023

2025 update

If anyone on the planet might be imagined to "get it" with regards to drugs in the modern world, you'd think it would be Terence McKenna ¹ , and yet he too was bamboozled by Drug War ideology. In specific, Terence swallowed the drug-war lie that a psychoactive drug with addictive potential can have no beneficial uses whatsoever. And so, in his lectures in "History Ends in Green," he speaks with disdain about drugs like cocaine and opium. With regard to the latter drug, he alludes only to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas DeQuincy, as if to suggest that opium, the world's time-honored panacea, can only be used addictively and destructively. The fact is, however, that laudanum (a form of opium) was to be found in the majority of British medicine cabinets in the 19th century and addicts were the exception to the rule (although prototypical Drug Warriors like Coleridge preferred to blame their problems on the opium itself rather than on their uninformed use of the drug). As author Richard Middleton wrote, the drug in that era was used by poets of the time in "a series of quarterly carouses ²" in order to glean inspiration, in part through the synesthetic properties of the drug. In other words, the poets used the drug wisely, being aware of the potential for addiction.

Even many of the Chinese whom today's Drug Warrior would retrospectively label as addicts were more fairly characterized as "habitues," those for whom the daily use of opium was a cultural norm and did not cause a problem in their life. (See "The Truth About Opium" by William Brereton.³) This is especially clear when one compares that lifetime use to the lifetime use of mind-numbing Big Pharma meds upon which 1 in 4 American women are addicted for life, drugs that are known for such side effects as brain zaps, weight gain and anhedonia (See William Brereton's "The Truth About Opium," written to refute the fearmongering lies and mischaracterizations of the Anti-Opium Society, the moral equivalent of America's Anti-Saloon League in 19th-century Britain.)

It's simple to prove that drugs like coca and opium have value. Just consider the case of a chronically depressed individual who has been scheduled for a lobotomy or shock therapy. Do we really think that it's better to physically injure that patient's brain with ECT rather than to give them some joy in life with coca and opium?

Of course not. It is clearly better to give the patient plant medicine than to injure their brain. In fact, it is the moral thing to do. Even a die-hard Drug Warrior would have to admit that, at least if the ECT or lobotomy candidate was a member of their own family.

The sad truth, however, is that we moderns would actually prefer to injure the patient's brain, judging by Drug War legislation which outlaws "drug use" even in this dramatic case. But surely this preference to injure the brain smacks of the most fanatical Christian Science zealotry imaginable, Christian Science being the religion of Mary Baker Eddy who told 19th-century Americans that drug use was immoral. And why did she think drug use was immoral? Because she believed that we should seek all help, whether mental or medical, from Jesus Christ. The modern Drug Warriors adopt the same notion with regard to psychoactive medicine, except that they replace our need for Jesus Christ with our need for "a higher power." The courts have long recognized the invalidity of Eddy's claim when it comes to physical medicine, yet have signed off on laws that mandate a Christian Science approach to psychoactive medicines, thereby establishing Christian Science as the law of the land when it comes to mind- and mood-affecting drugs.

Like all Drug Warriors, Terence implicitly ignores the power of anticipation to boost mood. This power exists, however, as a matter of plain common sense. Take me, for instance. If I knew I could intermittently use drugs like coca and opium, the mere knowledge of that upcoming use would be therapeutic: for anticipation of happiness leads to happiness itself. This is an obvious psychological truth, but one which the Drug Warrior completely ignores.

Why do Drug Warriors ignore the obvious, like the therapeutic power of anticipation?

1) Because of Freudian psychology, which keeps us from looking at obvious cures, forcing us to doubt anything but subconscious and hidden motivations.
2) Because of reductive materialism ⁴, which tells us that the "real" source of one's problems is biochemical and hidden to the naked eye or to the untrained individual (those untrained in reductive materialism).
3) Because of professionalism: the desire to appear to know things that a civilian does not know (because they're hidden, don't you see?).

Because, in short, they believe in the inhumane ideology of behaviorism, which says that we can safely ignore human feelings and subjective testimony -- that all that matters is quantifiable data.

So, for the prestige of their job and to give their jobs a veneer of being "scientific," psychiatrists ignore the obvious and look for "real" answers either in dreams or under the microscope. In other words, they are on a metaphysical quest to vindicate materialism in the realm of mind and mood, not an attempt to improve lives. And so I could be laughing my ass off in front of Dr. Robert Glatter while inhaling N2O, but the doctor would tell me that laughing gas is not helping my depression. For Glatter has to find body chemistry that tells him that I'm being helped -- the mere fact that I'm happy means nothing to him.

Thus the Drug War turns today's doctor into Mr. Magoo, to the detriment of the patient.

This is why we need a philosophy of the Drug War, because Drug War assumptions skew our thinking in entire fields of human endeavor, thereby blinding us to the glaringly obvious. In psychology, they keep us grasping about for "cures" for depression, when obvious cures are staring us in the face. The legalization and aggressive promotion of laughing gas ⁵ could put an enormous dent in America's depression epidemic. So could the chewing of the invigorating coca leaf. The properly scheduled use of opium and psychedelics, etc. -- scheduled in the calendar, I mean -- could give the depressed hope (not to mention esthetic insights) through anticipation and even help, under the right set and setting, to open their mind's to therapeutic self-criticism.

But Drug War ideology has blinded us to all of these obvious approaches to mood and mind "problems."

The fact that even Terence McKenna was blinded by Drug War lies shows how insidious the problem has become. Even he was duped by the Drug War propaganda of omission, thanks to which Americans never learn about the positive uses of the substances that we've been told to hate in grade school -- with television, films and academic articles being devoted entirely to misuse and abuse and never to positive and beneficial use.

Of course, it's being generous to say that doctors ignore the benefits of drugs for only the reasons enumerated above. A more cynical mind would point to their financial reasons for doing so, namely the fact that the Drug War gives them a hugely remunerative monopoly in prescribing the addictive meds of Big Pharma ⁶ ⁷ -- drugs for which addiction is not merely a bug, as it is with cocaine ⁸ ⁹ and opium, but rather a feature -- as is clear from the popular injunction to "take your meds," as if addiction in these cases was a public duty, whereas a similar use of opium or coca is considered a crime and a sin.

Author's Follow-up: January 3, 2023

follow-up on essay by the Drug War Philosopher

Let me confirm again that I believe McKenna's speculations and insights are of great value in generating important discussions on the subject of drugs. That said, I have another qualm upon listening to his lectures featured in "History Ends in Green." McKenna keeps repeating the phrase that "ontology recapitulates phylogeny," which means basically that human beings rapidly morph through a variety of related evolutionary stages in the womb before becoming full-blown human beings at birth. This idea has been discredited in recent decades. It is now known, in fact, that the chief champion of the concept, Ernst Haeckel, drew misleading sketches of the development of the human embryo in order to advance this idea.

Also, Terence pays short shrift -- indeed he pays no shrift at all -- to the power of drugs like opium and coca to inspire great writers and intellects. He is just like the Drug Warrior in that he judges drugs based upon the apparent value systems of those whom he sees using them -- and in his social milieu, that would have been mostly party people. Meanwhile the Drug War culture is silent about all positive uses of drugs like coca and opium. The result? Terence talks as if the only possible use for such drugs is to get "stoned" by them. What then are we to say about HP Lovecraft and Poe, who were inspired by their opiate experience to create fantastic literature? What are we to say about HG Wells and Jules Verne who used coca wine to give them the focus and follow-through they needed to write great stories? To paraphrase Shakespeare, does Terence think, because he is virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale -- i.e., no more great story writing or outlandishly creative painting, etc.?

What are we to say about ancient Greek rites inspired by opium?

The Drug War is all about attitudes toward drugs -- not drugs themselves.

Author's Follow-up: May 11, 2023

Even if opium use is for the mere purpose of getting "stoned" in the most prejudicial acceptation of that word, it does not follow that the poppy should be criminalized. The whole idea of outlawing Mother Nature should be anathema to Terence McKenna of all people -- but then he is in good company. Even Michael Pollan believes that it makes sense to criminalize Mother Nature ¹⁰. How else can we explain his lukewarm support for legalization . He still advocates a "watch and see" approach -- although that approach has already denied me godsend medicines for a lifetime. It is a testament to the success of Drug War indoctrination that even American botanists agree that Mother Nature can be rightfully outlawed. It's as if the government outlawed Moon dust and NASA shrugged.

Whatever these brainiacs know, they are unaware of one thing at least: the fact that this nation was founded upon Natural Law, and that nothing is more antithetical to that law than the interdiction of freely given godsend medicine. God himself said it was good -- proving that the Drug War ideology is a religion -- or an anti-religion if you please. It is based on the metaphysical assumption that plant medicines are bad, not good, and the anti-scientific idea that they can have no beneficial uses -- which is anti-scientific for the simple reason that there are no such substances on planet earth. Even cyanide has beneficial uses. When we rule out such uses a priori, we deny ourselves medical godsends and possible treatments for Alzheimer's ¹¹ and autism, etc. -- insofar as psychedelics grow new neurons in the brain.

Author's Follow-up: February 3, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

McKenna falls into the trap set by the Drug Warriors. They have taught us to judge drugs based on our feeling toward the people whom we see using them -- or toward the sort of people whom we assume are using them. This is why there are such a variety of drug laws around the world. Brazil outlaws the use of marijuana but allows the use of ayahuasca. The U.S. outlaws the use of ayahuasca but allows the use of marijuana. Mexico outlaws the use of marijuana and ayahuasca but allows the use of psychedelic mushrooms. Each country associates various "drugs" with a different social group and so there is no worldwide consensus on which should be outlawed -- although the U.S. has done everything it can to bring about such a consensus via economic blackmail. Opium-smoking used to be a time-honored practice in Iran - until the U.S. insisted that the Shah outlaw the custom. When facts do not accord with America's prejudices about drugs, then we travel abroad to change the facts. Talk about being in denial: simplistic America is in aggressive denial when it comes to the complicated truth about drug use.

Crazy outcomes like this are a sign of a crazy policy. It shows us that our whole attitude toward drugs is wrong. It is wrong to base our view of drugs on our feelings about the particular people whom we assume are using them at any given time inside the boundaries of any given country.

When we outlaw drugs based on such subjective associations, we veto human progress. We declare such drugs to have no positive uses whatsoever, which is always a self-fulfilling prophecy when we have also outlawed the drugs in question. It is only a massive lack of imagination that can lead us to believe that we are thereby only punishing the people against whom we are personally biased. Even if that were the case, it would be wrong to use drugs in this way, to use drug policy as social punishment. But when we rely on such associations, we are also outlawing in advance all sorts of potential creative protocols that could benefit millions, many of whom are not members of the group against which we are personally biased. In outlawing drugs based on our personal prejudices, we are essentially telling all potential innovators the following:

"Don't even bother looking for wise uses of these drugs: we have decided that we must hate and fear them instead based on their use by our enemies." We may as well judge antibiotics based on our attitude toward the people whom we see using them thanks to existing social and financial conditions in our country.

In a sane world, it would be illegal to demonize drugs in this way, based on our feelings about the sort of people whom we assume are using them.

Until such demonization is outlawed, racist politicians are going to continue to use the topic of drugs to crack down on minorities and the poor. And in so doing, they are going to deprive the world of all sorts of common sense godsends. Such Drug Warriors are directly responsible for the millions who sit at home and wish they were dead. But then being a Drug Warrior means never having to say you're sorry. Instead, Drug Warriors remain eternally guiltless in their own eyes thanks to their tactic of blaming drugs for all the downsides caused by drug prohibition: downsides like uncertain drug quality, a lack of education about safe use, and the incentivizing of violence and torture.

And let me update my criticism of Michael Pollan. He is just like the FDA. He claims to be interested in safety, and yet he completely ignores all the ways in which prohibition leads to a blatantly unsafe world. Prohibition results in inner city shootings in poor neighborhoods, not just in the U.S. but around the globe. Prohibition results in civil wars overseas and the creation of violent cartels out of whole cloth. Prohibition militarizes local police forces and destroys American freedoms, like the freedom from unreasonable search and the freedom of religion ¹².

And so we see that Michael Pollan is a full-blooded conservative, one who makes a living by hypocritically tantalizing his readers about the potential benefits of substances that he feels they are not smart enough to use wisely. If Pollan does believe in safety, it is only the safety of white suburban young people, though it's not clear to me why he thinks that it's safe to promote laws that result in an unregulated drug market, one in which supplies of LSD and psilocybin could contain rat poison for aught the user knows.

Pollan is just like Rick Strassman ¹³: a conservative at heart -- and we know just how much conservatives of our time are interested in democracy and freedom. Both of them pretend that Nixon outlawed psychedelics for health reasons, which is absurd. He outlawed psychedelics in order to be able to charge users with felonies and remove them from the voting rolls.

Of course, in reality, prohibition does not even keep white American young people safe. When folks like Rick Strassman balk at the legalization ¹⁴ of DMT, a chemical found in our own bodies, he is encouraging the dangerous illegal use of DMT, which involves extracting the substance from living matter via an extremely dangerous procedure using highly flammable chemicals. Where is his concern for safety here? Where is his concern over the drug gangs that his laws create, for the erosion of civil liberties, etc.?

The fact is, Pollan and Strassman are trying to have it both ways: they want to profit from America's interest in drugs while insisting that Americans can never be trusted to actually use such substances -- which in Pollan's case is particularly hypocritical since he uses the drugs himself. Of course, we certainly will never learn to use drugs wisely as long as American drug policy insists that ignorance about drugs is the best policy, a position that the American government and popular media ruthlessly support by refusing to publicize any positive uses of outlawed substances, to the point where the White House even helps write politically correct plots for sitcoms that spread fear and doubt about drugs, rather than honest information.

Notes for essay entitled What Terence McKenna Got Wrong About Drugs:

1: McKenna, Terence. 2026. “History Ends in Green.” The Library. 2026. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/history-ends-in-green. (up)
2: "He took life as young poets take opium: in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses." --'The Last Adventure' by Richard Middleton (up)
3: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
4: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
5: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide 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: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
9: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
10: The Michael Pollan Fallacy DWP (up)
11: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
12: Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
13: Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman DWP (up)
14: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)

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All drugs have positive uses. It's absurd to prohibit them because one demographic might misuse them.

The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.

There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.

There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.

Oregon's drug policy is incoherent and cruel. The rich and healthy spend $4,000 a week on psilocybin. The poor and chemically dependent are thrown in jail, unless they're on SSRIs, in which case they're congratulated for "taking their meds."

Uruguay wants to re-legalize psilocybin mushrooms -- but only for use in a psychiatrist's office. So let me get this straight: psychiatrists are the new privileged shaman? It's a mushroom, for God's sake. Just re-legalize the damn thing and stop treating us like children.

Trump supports the drug war and Big Pharma: the two forces that have turned me into a patient for life with dependence-causing antidepressants. Big Pharma makes the pills, and the drug war outlaws all viable alternatives.

The war on drugs has destroyed America's faith in the power of education. In fact, it has made us think of education as WRONG in and of itself. It has made us prefer censorship and fear-filled ignorance to education!

There are no recreational drugs. Even laughing gas has rational uses because it gives us a break from morbid introspection. There are recreational USES of drugs, but the term "recreational" is often used to express our disdain for users who go outside the healthcare system.

Another problem with MindMed's LSD: every time I look it up on Google, I get a mess of links about the stock market. The drug is apparently a godsend for investors. They want to profit from LSD by neutering it and making it politically correct: no inspiration, no euphoria.

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What Terence McKenna Got Wrong About Drugs

Author's Follow-up: January 3, 2023

Author's Follow-up: May 11, 2023

Author's Follow-up: February 3, 2025

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