a philosophical review of Ten Trips by Andy Mitchell
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 19, 2025
I have read just ten pages of "Ten Trips1" so far and found at least ten drug-related biases that make me wince. And I am an expert on this subject -- at least if "patients" are allowed to be experts, for I have been on the receiving end of Big Pharma 23 's niggardly pharmacopoeia now for 40 years and yet know one has ever been interested in knowing how I feel about it.
Take the following sentence on page 1 of "Ten Trips" by Andy Mitchell:
"By the 2010s, a growing body of researchers were focusing their attention on mental health, a field many regarded as in desperate need of advances."
Advances? How about re-legalizing the vast pharmacopoeia that we have outlawed wholesale?!! How's that for an advance?
Authors like Mitchell give the Drug War a huge Mulligan for the way it deprives folks like myself of self-agency when it comes to our health care!!! They fail to notice that the primary advance that is needed when it comes to mental health care is the re-legalization 4 of our ability to take care of our own health!! First things first, Andy, please!
Mitchell continues on the same page:
"The year 2018 proved to be something of a psychedelic annus mirabilis with the publication of Michael Pollan's careful, compelling bestseller How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics.5"
2018 was NOT an annus mirabilis for those of us who have been turned into wards of the healthcare state by drug prohibition, which has shunted us off onto dependence-causing meds. In 2018, the powers-that-be merely tossed folks like myself a small bone -- a kind of promissory note suggesting that someday they might actually approve a time-honored drug or two -- one justified by REDUCTIVE MATERIALIST criteria -- but a drug which will be available to me (should I live so long!) only through the help of a highly paid psychiatrist, of course. In fact, the drugs may never be available for precisely those who might need them most: this is because modern antidepressants 6 muck about with serotonin levels in a way that can theoretically make psychedelic use problematic, a poorly studied problem referred to as "Serotonin Toxicity Syndrome.7" For this reason, liability-conscious drug researchers will seldom approve of psychedelic use by those who need such drugs the most: those whose depression has turned them into pill-popping wards of the healthcare state. In any case, Michael Pollan himself does not even believe in ending prohibition -- although he diplomatically postpones adding that caveat until page 405 of "How to Change Your Mind.8"
A few more words about Michael Pollan.
It is a sign of the bamboozled times when a conservative like Michael Pollan is considered to be on the cutting edge when it comes to drug law reform.
Michael is the Leona Helmsley of the psychedelic world. He makes a living by tantalizing us about the potential benefits of drugs which he feels that the rest of us are too immature to even use. Little people use antidepressants; our betters use psychedelics -- and any other drug that they can claim to be investigating on our benighted behalf. Of course, in championing prohibition, Pollan does not consider the 67,000 gun-related deaths brought about by prohibition in inner cities over the last ten years9 or the 60,000 disappeared in Mexico over the last two decades10, or the fact that the Drug War has destroyed the rule of law in Latin America and deprived Americans of all manner of constitutional protections, as Richard Lawrence Miller makes clear in "Drug Warriors and their Prey11" -- a world in which entire mansions can be confiscated thanks to the existence of a trace of "drug" on the property, even when the property owner had nothing to do with the presence of the drug in question. These are somehow never considered as downsides of drug prohibition in the purblind calculus of modern drug pundits. If Michael thinks that he can save one white American young person from misusing a mushroom, then all the drive-by shootings -- and indeed the end of democracy in America -- will apparently be well worth it as far as Michael is concerned.
Michael's conservative slant on these topics is clear from the fact that he emphasizes the supposed dangerous irresponsibility of LSD users in the 1960s, totally ignoring the fact that such drug use inspired a "Summer of Love," something which one might have thought was a GOOD thing in a world under the threat of nuclear annihilation thanks to the hate-filled propensities of Homo sapiens. Before judging the hippies, Michael should have compared their outlook on life to the mainstream outlook against which the hippies were rebelling: one that was championing war and nuclear proliferation. How safe does Michael consider it to be to be living under a nuclear sword of Damocles? Michael's warped and biased evaluation of safety reminds me of the fact that the FDA will approve drugs whose published side effects include death itself -- and yet they will not approve drugs that help bring humanity together in peace, love and understanding. In other words, the whole Drug War presupposes a hateful metaphysic, one that values cynicism, mistrust, and state control over the free action of individuals to control their mental states in ways that make common sense, psychologically speaking -- ways that do not require the intervention of lab-coated technicians to tell us if we are "really" seeing any benefits from our drugs of choice.
Speaking of which, why is neuroscientist Andy Mitchell an "expert" on these topics while those who have suffered a lifetime from prohibition have no voice in the matter whatsoever? Apparently, we are just to shut up and take our meds.
For more problematic content, consider this line from page 5:
"I'd been clean and sober for a couple of decades now -- no drugs, no booze, just kombucha.12"
Does Mitchell not realize the value-laden nature of the term "clean" here? What if I told him I think he is "dirty" for using that kombucha tea? I have just as much right to draw that conclusion as he has to imply that I am dirty for using MDMA or psilocybin or opium 13 or coca. This is the whole problem with drug prohibition. It makes everyone an expert on what is wise use and what constitutes a cheap and dangerous thrill. It invites everyone to make up their own list as to what is good and what is bad, under the warped assumption that drugs can be judged "up" or "down" without regard to context of use. For as GK Chesterton wrote in "Eugenics and Other Evils":
"It is said that the Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea..." Or between MDMA 14 and kombucha, for that matter. "People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things," continues Chesterton. "And there is no escape for the hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all. If he is to control the health of the community, he must necessarily control all the habits of all the citizens.15"
Another quotation from Andy Mitchell: from page 7:
"I told her how these days depression kills more people than heart disease and cancer.16"
Again, this statement is hugely misleading when we fail to mention the existence of drug prohibition. Mitchell pretends that the growth in depression stats has nothing to do with the fact that we have outlawed everything that could cheer us up in a trice! This is brainwashed blindness on Mitchell's part to the downsides of drug prohibition. We outlaw everything that can cheer us up -- and then are shocked to see that depression stats rise. This is extremely disingenuous of us, especially when the PR branch of profit-driven medical science is doing everything it can to convince drug-deprived Americans that they have conditions like "depression" that require the use of medicines for which members of the materialist establishment are the monopoly holding gatekeepers. The problem from the point of view of the healthcare industry is that not enough people are getting health care, but the problem from the point of view of actual 'patients' like myself is that we are not ALLOWED to care for our own health!!! When is someone going to speak up for OUR interests -- or even take us seriously as stakeholders in the drug debate? When are they going to stop telling us (implicitly and explicitly) to just keep taking our meds?
These quotes all come from the first ten pages of Mitchell's book, and it is possible that the author will clarify and narrow his meaning in the pages that come. But as a chronic depressive who has gone a lifetime now without godsend medicines, it is impossible to read these kinds of opening comments without becoming indignant at the author's silence about the gorilla in the room: the fact that drug prohibition has outlawed my ability to care for my own mental and emotional health. It is as if the government had outlawed all food except for gruel and Mitchell were to publish a book suggesting that eating filet mignon may have dietary benefits, at least when the dish is cooked and served by a five-star chef. Yes, that's an important finding, no doubt, but it begs the question: what about all the other food that we have outlawed and thereby denied the diner all choice when it comes to nutrition?
AFTERWORD
I still hope to read Andy Mitchell's book "Ten Trips17" in its entirety... as soon as my moody nature permits of me doing so without throwing the book at the wall in a fit of pique!
AFTER AFTERWORD
Mitchell also favorably references Rick Strassman18, another pundit who is afraid of re-legalizing Mother Nature. Like Pollan, Strassman is worried about the poor little Americans who might misuse DMT, but has no concern about the victims of drive-by shootings and the mass incarceration 19 and the end of the rule of law that is brought about by prohibition. He also seems unaware of the fact that drug prohibition forces DMT fans to use highly dangerous chemicals to synthesize the drug for themselves. But then prohibitionists never seem to recognize such downsides -- or maybe they consider such drug experimenters to be getting their "just deserts." During liquor prohibition, the Anti-Saloon League insisted that industrial alcohol be made deadly with the addition of methanol, under the theory that this would either cut down on alcohol use... or at least teach drinkers a lesson -- a lesson, by the way, that sent 50,000 to their graves in the 1950s after they unwittingly drank such deadly "rotgut."20
The best step we could take in harm reduction is re-legalizing everything and starting to teach safe use. Spend the DEA's billions on "go" teams that would descend on locations where drugs are being used stupidly -- not to arrest, but to educate.
"Just ONE HORSE took the life of my daughter." This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
Question: What's the difference between Big Pharma antidepressants and other drugs?
Answer: For other drugs, dependency is a bug; for antidepressants, dependency is a feature.
"Chemical means of peering into the contents of the inner mind have been universally prized as divine exordia in man’s quest for the beyond... before the coarseness of utilitarian minds reduced them to the status of 'dope'." -- Eric Hendrickson
In a sane world, we'd package laughing gas for safe use and give it to the suicidal -- saying, "Use before attempting to kill yourself." But drug warriors would rather have suicide than drug use.
I'm told that science is completely unbiased today. I guess I'll have to go back and reassess my doubts about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
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.
Americans were always free to take care of their own health -- until drug warriors handed doctors a monopoly on providing mind and mood medicine. Instead of denouncing this attack on our healthcare autonomy, doctors began demonizing self-care as a mortal sin.
Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.
The best step we could take in harm reduction is re-legalizing everything and starting to teach safe use. Spend the DEA's billions on "go" teams that would descend on locations where drugs are being used stupidly -- not to arrest, but to educate.