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Christian Science and Drugs

What Mary Baker-Eddy Got Right

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





April 6, 2025



Any faithful reader of my site will have noticed my penchant for denouncing drug prohibition as a stealth and subconscious move on the part of fearful conservative politicians to establish drug-hating Christian Science as the de facto state religion in America1. There are, of course, other more palpable motivations for the Drug War, above all the attempt to disempower minorities by creating laws specifically for that purpose2. But the fact that such laws appear reasonable to Americans across a wide political spectrum implies for me an implicit and widespread belief in the Christian Science metaphysic, the idea that drugs are both unnecessary and immoral, at least when it comes to improving the psychological condition of the human mind. So, while the Christian Science mentality may not have caused the Drug War, properly speaking, it yet gives the Drug War staying power by making its antiscientific tenets appear plausible to the American people, especially since, as westerners, we lack the universal indigenous habit of using psychoactive medicines for religious and divinatory purposes. (To the contrary, we look with suspicion on such drug use, as might be guessed from our persecution of the generally female witches of the past who begged to differ with the western mainstream on this subject.3)

Hello


And yet it occurred to me last night that Mary Baker-Eddy was "on to something," as we say, even if she herself did not realize what that "something" was. This is clear when we extract the sectarian religious element from Eddy's belief and recast her apparent hatred for drugs as a hatred for materialist cures that are uninformed by the powers of the human mind - by what we might call the powers and insights that come from "higher consciousness." Seen in this light, Eddy and I are on the same page, for we both attack the presumption inherent in placing materialist scientists in charge of mind and mood conditions4. We both believe that the human mind has powers that have never been properly leveraged and which we can use to fight so-called emotional disorders. The difference is that Eddy believed that the powers of the religious mind (of "higher consciousness") were up to the task of combatting ALL illness, and not just those metaphorical illnesses that are of a mental and emotional nature.

I can even agree with this latter extreme statement to a point. For the fact is that we do not yet know of what the human mind is capable for the simple reason that we have outlawed the quest to find out: we have outlawed all the drugs that show obvious potential in leveraging human consciousness for beneficial purposes. We have therefore outlawed the research that would be necessary to prove Eddy's thesis, or at least to tell us to what extent it is true and in what circumstances. Eddy's problem is that she declares her belief to be true in advance of performing the necessary research to prove that it is so. The mind (or consciousness) clearly has great power when it comes to treating psychological conditions, for the proof is extant, assuming that we do not make Eddy's mistake of ruling out the use of all drugs a priori based on metaphysical prejudices. The Hindu religion exists today thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated5. The use of coca inspired the Inca of Peru6. And the drug-user reports from Pihkal demonstrate that psychoactive drugs can produce extraordinary psychological improvements when used wisely and with intention by motivated individuals7. But the precise extent to which mental powers (drug-aided or otherwise) can alter so-called physical conditions remains unclear because untested - again, thanks to anti-scientific drug law.

It seems to me that our discussion of Eddy's thesis as westerners is rendered unnecessarily complicated, however, thanks to our Cartesian tendency to consider mind and matter as separate categories in the first place8. The truth seems to be that matter and mind are hopelessly entangled when it comes to cause and effect and that our attempts to deal with them as two ontologically separate categories can only lead to confusion. This is one of the many reasons why we need to re-legalize godsend medicines, by the way, for there can be no better way to investigate the distinctions and interactions between mind and body than by using psychoactive substances to leverage the power of mind, mood and imagination - to see both what can be accomplished thereby and what are the hard limits to such an approach. Far from being a niche issue, then, drug prohibition is nothing less than the outlawing of the most important philosophical research project imaginable, that of probing the true nature of our presupposed mind-body dualism. This is precisely the sort of research that William James himself conjured us to undertake as philosophers in "The Varieties of Religious Experience,9" but unfortunately this is a challenge that his alma mater, Harvard University, has censored from their online biography of the man, as they have his use of laughing gas and his ideas on what he called the "anesthetic revelation," which, in modern terms, is basically the topic of what drug use can tell us about the nature of reality10.

These opening shots across the bowsprit of today's vulnerable materialism could serve as the beginning of a lengthy essay, but my main goal today is merely to establish that Christian Science is not simply the bad guy when it comes to today's hateful drug prohibition, that the founder of that religion entertained some valid scruples with respect to the mind-body problem and that drug laws prevent us from following up on those leads. We come then to the ironic conclusion that the metaphysics of Christian Science would seem to philosophically support the War on Drugs on a superficial level while yet questioning it profoundly on a still deeper level. These issues are deeply fraught with philosophical considerations which can no doubt be hotly debated. But I hope we can all agree on at least one thing: that the Drug War has outlawed the research required to answer the mind-body questions at issue here and that drug prohibition is therefore an outrageous violation of academic freedom. Should a materialist say otherwise, they are clearly declaring premature victory for their own behaviorist mindset under the cover of a legal system that privileges their own beliefs.

Christian Science




On a superficial level, Christian Science may be seen as a drug-hating religion and so its very existence tends to support the effort of Drug Warriors to outlaw godsend psychoactive medicines. On a deeper level, however, the religion's founder Mary Baker-Eddy was fighting not so much against drugs as against the failure of modern science to acknowledge the power of the human mind. In Mary's case, of course, this was the mind as influenced by Jesus Christ, but yet she recognized a principle with which even a non-believer can agree and which, moreover, is clearly true in light of drug user reports from the Vedic days to the present: namely, that the human mind has a great as-yet untapped power to control one's outlook on life and to therefore positively affect overall human health to some as-yet undetermined degree. Mary does seem to have overestimated the mind's ability to cure the body, of course, but it is worth noting in her defense that the government has outlawed the very research that would be required to determine exactly where the line should be drawn between the mind-curable condition and that which is beyond the help of this sort of holistic healing.

We would need to be able to use psychoactive medicines freely in order to generate the sort of user reports that could help us answer such questions adequately. And this would be research of the greatest philosophical importance, because it would essentially be a search into the true nature of mind-body dualism.

Mind-body dualism is like the weather when it comes to the field of philosophy: everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. Well, here is a chance for philosophers to launch a first-hand investigation of the interaction between mind and body and to thereby determine the nature of each -- as well as the nature of the interactive whole which they in some sense comprise. Philosophers just have to decide: Do they want to perform the kind of hands-on philosophic research that William James advocated viz. altered states, or do they want to keep pretending that the Drug War does not exist and that it has no downsides for philosophical research. For the opposite is so obviously true: namely, that drug prohibition forbids us from performing the kind of research that could blow the whole "mind-body" problem wide open from the western point of view and so inspire whole new fields of research.

For more on this subject, please see my essay entitled "Christian Science and Drugs: what Mary Baker-Eddy Got Right.



  • America's Imperialist Christian Science War on Drugs
  • American Sharia
  • Boycott Singapore
  • Christian Science and Drugs
  • Christian Science Rehab
  • Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition
  • Drug War Uber Alles
  • Even Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug War
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client
  • Our Short-Sighted Fears about Long-Term Drug Use
  • PROTEST DRUG TESTING NOW!
  • The Christian Science SWAT Teams of the Drug War
  • The Drug War = Christian Science
  • What You Can Do
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
  • Why the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia

    • *william*

    Notes:

    1: The Drug War = Christian Science (up)
    2: Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America (up)
    3: The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present (up)
    4: The Poorly Hidden Materialist Agenda at Scientific American (up)
    5: A Hindu View on Drug Use and Abuse (up)
    6: Coca and its Therapeutic Application, Third Edition (up)
    7: Scribd.com: PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (up)
    8: Wholeness and the Implicate Order (up)
    9: The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature (up)
    10: How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James (up)







    Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    If daily drug use and dependency are okay, then there's no logical or scientific reason why I can't smoke a nightly opium pipe.

    The FDA uses reductive materialism to justify and normalize the views of Cortes and Pizarro with respect to entheogenic medicine.

    It's really an insurance concern, however, disguised as a concern for public health. Because of America's distrust of "drugs," a company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.

    The Drug War brought guns to the "hoods," thereby incentivizing violence in the name of enormous profits. Any site featuring victims of gun violence should therefore be rebranded as a site featuring victims of the drug war.

    I passed a sign that says "Trust Trump." What does that mean? Trust him to crack down on his opposition using the U.S. Army? Or trust him not to do all the anti-American things that he's saying he's going to do.

    The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.

    What I want to know is, who sold Christopher Reeves that horse that he fell off of? Who was peddling that junk?!

    We should be encouraging certain drug use by the elderly. Many Indigenous drugs have been shown to grow new neurons and increase neural connectivity -- to refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!

    Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war: "clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."

    The sick thing is that the DEA is still saying that psilocybin has no medical uses and is addictive. They should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for using such lies to keep people from using the gifts of Mother Nature.


    Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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