an open letter to Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes at the University of Exeter
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 27, 2024
Dear Dr. Sjöstedt-Hughes
I wanted to write to say that I enjoyed your prerecorded comments on YouTube from the 50th Anniversary Conference of the Center for Process Studies1. I have been recently studying Whitehead and am also excited about the metaphysical implications of his ideas. In "The Concept of Nature," Whitehead himself alludes to some potential metaphysics that might be contemplated based on his views, especially when he quotes the Dean of St Paul's from a speech that he gave before the Aristotelian Society in May of 1919:
"The spiritual world is not a world of unrealised ideals, over against a real world of unspiritual fact. It is, on the contrary, the real world, of which we have a true though very incomplete knowledge, over against a world of common experience which, as a complete whole, is not real, since it is compacted out of miscellaneous data, not all on the same level, by the help of the imagination. There is no world corresponding to the world of our common experience. Nature makes abstractions for us, deciding what range of vibrations we are to see and hear, what things we are to notice and remember.2"
I take it that these are the kinds of insights to which you are referring when you suggest that Whiteheadian metaphysics could be of use in debriefing the psychedelic user after a therapeutic trip.
I find this all fascinating. However, I am deeply troubled by the ongoing quest (now both in the UK and the US) to outlaw even laughing gas 3, and frankly I am disappointed that the philosophical community has not stood up and complained in a loud voice, pointing out to politicians that William James himself said that we must study the effects of such substances in order to understand the world.
"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." -The Variety of Religious Experiences4
In fact, I wrote individual emails to every single philosopher at Oxford University on this topic (70-plus in number) and did not hear back from any of them5. Nor has James' alma mater, Harvard, complained about the ongoing attempts to outlaw laughing gas . In fact, their main page about James does not even mention nitrous oxide.
In my view, laughing gas should not only remain legal, but it should be packaged in kits for easy use by the suicidal, in the same way that we give epi pens to those with severe allergies6. But we still shock the brains of the severely depressed rather than give them medicines that could cheer them up in real time. We do this based on a metaphysical materialist claim that we have (or should have) a "real" cure for them in the form of a pill - combined with the mad idea that psychoactive drugs can be outlawed for everyone in the world, at every possible dose, for every possible indication, provided merely that white American young people can find a way to misuse the drugs in question.
You correctly point out that LSD was outlawed for political reasons, but I would contend that all drugs are ultimately outlawed for political reasons. If safety were the only issue, then prohibitionists would outlaw horseback riding and car driving as well. We would see documentaries about people whose lives were ruined by such activities. Survivors would traverse the high-school circuit, urging kids to forebear. The fact that they do not badmouth such activities - but only badmouth "drugs" -- can only mean that they deny, a priori, the utility of any psychoactive drug. And this, I believe, has had a disastrously stultifying effect on the field of psychology.
One merely has to look at any issue of Psychology Today to see articles in which the author reckons without the Drug War, in which they pretend that banned psychoactive substances do not exist and so fail to incorporate any topic-related insights that might otherwise have come from users of those substances. Take Science News, for instance, and their series by Laura Sanders on a new kind of shock therapy for the depressed7. Laura muses that depression has proved really hard to beat - but she can only say that by ignoring psychoactive medicine, for as a depressed person myself, I can tell you that depression would not be hard for me to beat in the least if I could occasionally use MDMA 8 , and/or laughing gas 9 , and/or coca, and/or opium 10 .
In short, depression is only hard to beat because politicians have decided that it should be.
In fact, I would suggest that we live in a psychological dark ages due to self-censorship about psychoactive substances. I take the liberty of mentioning this because I see that we have three areas of mutual interest: philosophy, psychology, and psychedelics.
Thanks again for the interesting chat. I wish they had given you longer to speak!
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
"The Legislature deliberately determines to distrust the very people who are legally responsible for the physical well-being of the nation, and puts them under the thumb of the police, as if they were potential criminals."
-- Aleister Crowley on drug laws
The Drug Warriors say: "Don't tread on me! (That said, please continue to tell me what plants I can use, how much pain relief I can get, and whether my religion is true or not.)"
The UN of today is in an odd position regarding drugs: they want to praise indigenous societies while yet outlawing the drugs that helped create them.
Timothy Leary's wife wrote: "We went to Puerto Rico and all we did was take cocaine and read Faust to one another." And there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with that!!! The drug war is all about scaring us and making illegal drug use as dangerous as possible.
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
What bothers me about AI is that everyone's so excited to see what computers can do, while no one's excited to see what the human mind can do, since we refuse to improve it with mind-enhancing drugs.
Pundits have been sniffing about the "smell" of Detroit lately. Sounds racist -- especially since such comments tend to come from drug warriors, the guys who ruined Detroit in the first place (you know, with drug laws that incentivized profit-seeking violence as a means of escaping poverty).
It's no wonder that folks blame drugs. Carl Hart is the first American scientist to openly say in a published book that even the so-called "hard" drugs can be used wisely. That's info that the drug warriors have always tried to keep from us.
Aleister Crowley actually TRIED to get addicted to drugs and found he could not. These things are not inevitable. The fact that there are town drunkards does not mean that we should outlaw alcohol.
Q: Where can you find almost-verbatim copies of the descriptions of religious experiences described by William James? A: In descriptions of user reports of "trips" on drugs ranging from coca to opium, from MDMA to laughing gas.
"The Legislature deliberately determines to distrust the very people who are legally responsible for the physical well-being of the nation, and puts them under the thumb of the police, as if they were potential criminals."
-- Aleister Crowley on drug laws