Yes, the subject of drugs is related to the current nightmare in Gaza. In fact, the connection is so obvious, that it almost seems like it's not worth mentioning: surely, everyone has thought of it by now, right? Wrong.
For therein lies the problem of the western world's dogmatic hatred of "drugs": it has blinded us to all of their potential godsend uses. For, as a matter of fact, no one but myself has thought of this relationship between Gaza and drugs: namely, the fact that psychoactive drugs could be used to bring parties together for the purpose of compromise and understanding1. In fact, there is an entire class of psychoactive substances that could help accomplish this goal, one which is actually referred to as "empathogens." (Empathogens: get it? As in empathy producing substances?) But somehow the penny never "drops" for us moderns. It's as if we've been brainwashed from childhood to believe that drugs are bad. (Oh, wait, a minute: we HAVE been brainwashed from childhood to believe that drugs are bad: by groups like DARE and the mendacious Partnership for a Drug Free America 2. In fact, some of us even received teddy bears as kids in return for just saying no to time-honored medicines!)
That's the Gaza bit, by the way. I'm not going to dip my toe any deeper into that stream. My goal is only to make one single solitary suggestion: namely, that such nightmares are NOT inevitable - not in a world that looks upon drugs as potential godsends rather than the spawn from hell.
The rest of the essay will attempt to establish that point, while revealing some of the absurd attempts on behalf of prohibitionists to make us both think and act otherwise.
Consider the following quotes about the E-fueled "Summer of Love" in 1989 England, spoken by DJs who were active at the time3:
"It was the first time that black-and-white people had integrated on a level... and everybody was one." -- DJ Ray Keith.
"It was black and white, Asian, Chinese, all up in one building," -- MC GQ.
"Everyone's loving each other, man, they're not hating." - DJ Mampi Swift.
And how did British politicians respond to this unprecedented triumph of peace, love and understanding? Did they give thanks to God and recommend the use of E and other empathogens to the world as a means for staving off nuclear annihilation?
Not quite.
In fact, in the decade that followed, they did everything they could to end the harmony by cracking down on Ecstasy and those who were using it.
And what was the result?
As a result of the crackdown, the dance floors in England became so violent that concert organizers had to hire special forces troops to keep the peace. Special forces! Why? Because the crackdown encouraged ravers to switch from the peace-inducing drug, E, to anger-facilitating drugs like alcohol.
Tribal peoples were never so dimwitted. Polynesian leaders have a history of drinking the psychoactive kava prior to meeting with potential enemies, the Mesoamerican tribes basically worshipped empathogenic mushrooms, and there is evidence that the ceremonial pipe of the North Americans was not always filled with plain tobacco - and even when it was, their go-to tobaccos (such as Nicotiana rustica4) were prepared in such a way (or used in such a dose) as to induce transcendent states of mind, what the ethnobotanists would glibly dismiss as "hallucinations." These tribal peoples, whom even William James, alas, referred to as "dark savages," clearly saw no prima facie reason why "drugs" could not be used to induce understanding, whether between human beings or between one human being and the world.
Yet in researching these topics, I get the distinct impression that almost everything that is written for established sources (such as magazines and museums) is designed to downplay (and often just ignore) the use of psychoactive drugs (or at least the utility of such use) by native peoples. But this is what one should expect from a world in which almost all the academic papers about psychoactive drugs concern misuse and abuse. During the Drug War, moreover, we take the anti-scientific attitude that drugs can be voted up or down - without regard for context of use or dosage, etc. Even Botox has good uses at a proper dose - but if we can even imagine one negative use of a psychoactive medicine, we westerners conclude that the drug has no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, ever.
To be honest, I even mistrust many official Native American sources on these topics, for the Native Americans are also Americans and as such have lived and breathed the same anti-drug culture of the mainstream, in which it is considered common sense to think "drugs are bad." Even when the author understands the spiritually profounder truth, I fear they might downplay the psychoactive aspect of bygone drug use simply because they know such a discussion would be a turnoff (or at least a distraction) to the western reader who has been taught to associate such substances with profligacy and hedonism. Rather than taking up the perilous struggle of convincing a brainwashed reader of the sincerity of ancient drug use, I fear such writers may avoid the subject entirely by downplaying the psychoactive angles for fear of raising the puritan hackles of their audience.
The sad thing is, even progressives don't "get it." Instead of promoting empathogenic drug use to end worldwide hostility, their focus seems to be on denouncing the cultural appropriation of shamanic practices. I dislike that term "cultural appropriation" by the way, because cultural appropriation is how the world has always worked since the day of the Neanderthal. Cultures appropriate the best practices that they can find in other cultures. We all learn from each other, or at least "we should do," as the Brits would phrase it. What we need to be decrying is "capitalistic appropriation" and "materialist appropriation" and/or "hedonistic appropriation" of shamanic practices, whereby we may be seen to be cheapening and even ridiculing the original practices that we are engaging in, as for instance when one employs ayahuasca to fuel a sex orgy. That said, I would recommend adopting a sense of humor toward those who are sincerely attempting to emulate past practices but who (as we see it) are making a complete hash of the job. Their heart is in the right place and that should be enough for us. Moreover, what seems silly to us may blossom into a new helpful paradigm. We should not nip new experimentation in the bud by charging well-intentioned people with the supposed crime of "cultural appropriation."
Those progressives who dogmatically invoke the charge should remember that conservative courts would be happy to agree with them.
In 1972, the Church of the Awakening established by John and Louisa Aiken was forced to go underground because the federal government affirmed that you have to be a Native American, genetically speaking, in order to legally use peyote in America. They thereby outlawed a religion by outlawing its central sacrament5. Thus a seeming victory against "cultural appropriation" was also a clear and obvious defeat for religious liberty. Progressives should denounce this as an outrage, but the dogmatic among them actually agree with the court!
Still, you'd think that this case would be a rallying cry for freedom lovers everywhere. But nothing of the sort. Today, the phrase "Church of the Awakening" does not even bring up any case-related links in a Google Search, at least not in the first 50+ results. But this is to be expected in a society where we have been taught from childhood to look at all psychoactive drugs through the puritanical lens of misuse and abuse. Otherwise such a case would have long since become a cause célèbre for fans of religious liberty everywhere. Instead, law-and-order judges have committed the perfect crime by robbing us of religious liberty under the cover of the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.
In a related 1984 case brought by the Peyote Way Church of God, the court found that the use of peyote was not central to the religion in question6. What the justices meant, of course, was that the use of a psychoactive substance was not central to their (the justices') religion and that as abstainers themselves, they literally could not fathom why it should be central to anyone else's religion. It's as if I had never prayed before in my life and yet I ruled in court that prayer was not central to Christianity, simply because from my parochial point of view, nothing would change about Christianity were prayer to be forbidden.
This is such prima facie religious intolerance that one does not know where to begin in arguing against it. What do you do when all the common sense you could adduce has been determined to be invalid? There can be no peyote church without the use of peyote. To argue otherwise is to render words meaningless.
But then federal courts will go to any extreme of choplogic in their laughable attempts to "justify" Draconian drug law. And since the doctrine of "garbage in, garbage out" applies even in America's courtrooms, we end up with wacky rulings. In 1991, for instance, the Supreme Court "ruled that ordinary acts such as traveling on a Greyhound bus are reasonable cause for a drug squad search of all passengers and luggage.7" Who knew? If you're wondering why it's not okay for drug squads to harass opera goers in the same way, it's because, as GK Chesterton pointed out long ago, prohibition is a law made by the rich, who know perfectly well that it does not apply to themselves. That's why Trump wants to execute drug dealers, but is happy to make exceptions when his friends intercede. That's another of the endless downsides of drug laws: they naturally lead to nepotism and corruption in government: witness the destruction of the rule of law in Mexico thanks to the US style Drug War that they have undertaken with the all-too-eager assistance of the US government.
As noted above, I'm not concerned here with the details of the current nightmare in Gaza. I am not a specialist on Middle Eastern affairs. Nor am I trying to promote a specific fix for the current situation "on the ground. But nightmares of this kind are not inevitable, if and when we decide to start profiting from so-called drugs rather than demonizing them. My conclusion may be stated in the following simple syllogism.
MAJOR PREMISE
Peaceful compromise succeeds when two adversaries are favorably disposed towards each other AS human beings.
MINOR PREMISE
The world is full of substances called empathogens that can inspire compassion and fellow feeling between human beings.
CONCLUSION
We should harness the power of empathogens to bring adversaries together.
Author's Follow-up:
April 30, 2025
In a sane world, political scientists would be studying empathogens and entheogens for their ability to bring human beings together and so stave off nuclear annihilation. Yet this idea seems to be absolutely foreign to our modern pundits on world affairs. I certainly heard no discussion of such topics in the 2023 Harvard workshop on nuclear dangers by Political Scientist Matthew Bunn: "A Darkening Horizon: Nuclear Dangers Around the World.8" But then I have often said that Americans have perverted values thanks to the War on Drugs. Their actions show that they would prefer that severely depressed people should kill themselves rather than use "drugs."9 Their actions show that they would rather that a severely depressed person fry their brains with shock therapy than to use "drugs."10 They would even rather have police brutality and police killings than to re-legalize drugs11. It should come as no surprise then that Americans would rather undergo nuclear annihilation than to even suggest the use of "drugs."
But our Drug War mentality does more than discourage us from using drugs that can conquer hate -- the Drug War mentality actually encourages us to hate. I was reminded of this recently when I visited a cousin of mine who is a preacher, for God's sake, and a progressive one at that. I had been operating for decades under the assumption that he was surely more prone to compassion toward his fellows than I would ever be. And yet in the course of a casual conversation, he let slip a comment to the effect that he thought drug dealers deserved death for peddling "junk" like Fentanyl12. I was absolutely stunned. I tried to convince myself that he was being ironic, but the context suggested otherwise. I began canvassing my brain for a comeback that would tersely unpack the series of drug-war inspired assumptions upon which such a hateful opinion was necessarily based. But how can one be concise in arguing against a viewpoint that is propped up by so many knee-jerk assumptions that have been ingrained in my cousin from childhood by dint of relentless propaganda, especially in the form of the total censorship of all reports of positive drug use?
I politely suggested that if we were going to demonize anybody, we should be demonizing the racist politicians who had outlawed opiates in the first place. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal in America. It took prohibition to accomplish that. Moreover, Nancy Reagan (God love her) was right about one thing: if drug use really WERE wrong, then drug users would be every bit as morally culpable as are drug dealers. What she failed to understand is that government never had the right to outlaw Mother Nature in the first place, or to determine how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life by exercising control over our very digestive systems. Nevertheless, Drug users are moral agents just like drug dealers. This does not mean that we need to blame them for the scrapes that they get into, but we should not be so hypocritical and racist as to respond to the generally white opiate users with pity whilst we create a monster and a boogieman out of the generally poor minority dealers who sought to profit from the huge economic incentives that the prohibitionists had created for them, like so many fishing lures, for the purpose of catching them and throwing them in jail. Our politicians set all these people up to fail, both users and dealers, and our anger should be directed towards the Drug Warriors, not toward the scapegoats that they have set up in their efforts to divide Americans and so conquer them. Drugs do not kill, prohibition kills13. This has been clear since liquor prohibition first brought machine-gun-fire to America's erstwhile tranquil main streets.
I am seldom loquacious with my cuz, but he had unwittingly pressed my one and only button, and so I continued.
I suggested (ever so gently) that drug dealers could even be seen as HEROES from one point of view. What are they doing after all but selling medicines that the government never had the right to outlaw in the first place? I pointed out (with utmost tact) that the Hindu religion owes its very existence to the frequent use of a drug that inspired and elated, from which it clearly follows that it is the outlawing of religion when we outlaw drugs that inspire and elate14. I then adverted (with admirable diplomacy) to the endless downsides of prohibition, which has turned inner cities into shooting galleries and destroyed the rule of law in Latin America, meanwhile depriving the world of godsend medicines based on the following absurd and anti-scientific dictum: namely, that a drug that can be misused by young white Americans at one dose for one reason in one circumstance must not be used by anyone at any dose in any circumstance.
My cousin was diplomatic as well. Indeed, confusingly so. He responded to each of my vehement scruples with a mere nod and a smile, as who should say, "Well, of course, that is right TOO," and yet he offered no further discussion on the topic, leaving me doubtful as to whether I was getting through to him or whether he was disguising intense irritation with a cheery countenance.
But this incident -- what a charitable Dr. Watson might have diplomatically entitled "The Case of the Brainwashed Cousin" -- demonstrates the hate-inspired world that Drug War ideology has brought about. And this is unfortunate, because absent our political indoctrination about evil drugs, it would be blazingly clear to us that we could start bringing the world together with the use of entheogenic drugs. Although I scorned Gaza-related specifics in the globally stormy times of my initial essay, I cannot help but point out that the hate-filled terrorist event would have been unimaginable in a world wherein we stigmatized hate instead of drugs. Nor would such a world countenance evil on the part of a state power. Rather, the whole mindset of the world would be changed for the better if each individual therein considered it to be a first principle to recognize the humanity of their fellows, and this is clearly a desideratum that the informed use of drugs -- especially phenethylamines -- can help bring about. Consider the following drug user reports from "Pihkal."15
"I am experiencing more deeply than ever before the importance of acknowledging and deeply honoring each human being. And I was able to go through and resolve some judgments with particular persons."
"I believe that it would be impossible to harm anything. To commit an overt harmful or painful act on anyone or anything is beyond one's capabilities."
"I felt like 'a citizen of the universe' rather than a citizen of the planet."
"No more axes to grind. I can be free."
Drugs are obviously not the entire answer, but they are one important tool that the west has been dogmatically ignoring for centuries. In fact, no one has ever had the time, the interest, the money, and the freedom to search all psychoactive substances in the world -- synthetic and otherwise -- to find usage patterns that conduce to creating satisfied, happy, and fulfilled individuals who are prone to get along well with their fellows. We have just a handful of common sense studies of such drugs, like the LSD studies of the '60s and the study of phenethylamines by Alexander Shulgin in the last half of the 20th century. In a sane world -- a world that valued personal liberty, not to mention world peace -- common-sense drug studies like those described in "Pikhal"16 would take place involving a wide variety of substances, synthesized and natural, alone and in combination, with our goal being to find substances that can help individuals live peaceably with themselves and with others. This in itself would not solve political problems, but when rival parties meet under the influence of good vibes toward humanity, then they have a chance of reaching understanding.
It cannot be said enough that substance prohibition is the problem 17 , not drugs. To which we must add, however, that hate is a problem as well. The good news is that we have tools to deal with that problem. The bad news is that racist politicians have demonized those tools so thoroughly over the last century that no one sees the obvious ways in which they can help hate-filled humanity survive on planet Earth.
AFTERWORD
Whenever I take on the Herculean task of deprogramming an American who has been brainwashed by Drug War propaganda, I think of the dilemma that Alfred North Whitehead faced when trying to disabuse philosophers of their time-honored but problematic beliefs about mind and matter. He summed up his problem as follows in his preface to "The Concept of Nature":
"In the presentation of a novel outlook with wide ramifications, a single line of communications from premises to conclusions is not sufficient for intelligibility. Your audience will construe whatever you say into conformity with their pre-existing outlook."
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.
Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.
So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.
In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.
At best, antidepressants make depression bearable. We need not settle for such drugs, especially when they are notorious for causing dependence. There are many drugs that elate and inspire. It is both cruel and criminal to outlaw them.
How would we even KNOW that outlawed drugs have no positive uses? We first have to incorporate them in a sane, empathic and creative way to find that out, and the drug war makes such a sensible approach absolutely impossible.
This is why the foes of suicide are doing absolutely nothing to get laughing gas into the hands of those who could benefit from it. Laughing is subjective after all. In the western tradition, we need a "REAL" cure to depression.
Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.
But that's the whole problem with Robert Whitaker's otherwise wonderful critique of Big Pharma. Like almost all non-fiction authors today, he reckons without the drug war, which gave Big Pharma a monopoly in the first place.
Doc to Franklin: "I'm sorry, Ben, but I see no benefits of opium use under my microscope. The idea that you are living a fulfilled life is clearly a mistake on your part. If you want to be scientific, stop using opium and be scientifically depressed like the rest of us."
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.