a new shamanic approach to drug use and mental healing
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 19, 2025
One of the strangest and most anti-scientific conceptions of the Drug Warrior is the idea that the word "drugs" constitutes a meaningful category of substances. The fact is that substances that fall under this politically defined rubric have an extraordinarily wide range of effects.
Some increase blood pressure, some lower it. Some increase libido, some lower it. Some increase attention to detail, some lower it. Some increase volubility, some lower it. Some can vary widely in these effects based on other factors of usage: such as the personality of the user, the setting for use, the goal (if any) of use, etc. And so the question, "Do people need drugs?" is ambiguous in the age of the Drug War. The answer depends on whether one is responding with common sense or in light of the dogmatic and puritanical presuppositions of our times. The materialist will tell you that people only need meds - by which they mean psychoactive substances that have been proven to work via known chemical pathways. Drug warriors will tell you the same thing, although they will support their answer by alluding to the vast literature of misuse and abuse of drugs that the government has one-sidedly compiled in their puritanical effort to convince Americans that drug use - as opposed to the use of "meds" - is wrong and bound to end in tragedy (even if it takes a little help from law enforcement to vindicate that latter prophecy).
Such a wholesale denial of the beneficial nature of psychoactive drugs, however, can only be "justified" by metaphysical principles, since there is nothing logically obvious about it, neither when considered in the light of world history nor when subjected to our psychological common sense. Such conclusions therefore can only be thought of as a matter of faith. In the case of Mary Baker-Eddy, her faith taught her that only Jesus Christ could heal us, from which it followed (at least in her mind) that drug use was a sort of insult to the deity, a sign that the user lacked faith in the healing powers of the Lord. The Drug Warrior seldom mentions Jesus Christ, which makes their position less philosophically defensible than Mary's, or at least less intelligible. But we can imagine a secular metaphysic by which the wholesale negation of "drugs" might be suggested. We MUST imagine it, for the Drug Warriors are never honest enough to elucidate the "first principles" upon which they base their historically unprecedented view that psychoactive drugs have no positive uses whatsoever. Presumably the Drug Warrior means to say that human beings are so created (apparently by evolution) that we are "good to go" when it comes to psychological matters, though apparently this is not the case when it comes to "purely physical complaints," as if there really were such a beast as "purely physical complaints," except in the dogmatically passion-free mind of the materialist.
I can personally attest to the variability of psychoactive drug effects, by the way. After my first use of ayahuasca in a group organized by Pachamama Sanctuary, the 30 or so participants were asked to describe their experiences. To my surprise, almost everyone reported something quite different from that of their fellows. Many were greatly inspired. A few were "bummed out." One claimed to have spoken with her deceased grandmother. Another cried throughout the experience, though she claimed that her tears were tears of joy. Another shrieked and screamed throughout his entire journey (until I feared that the group session was going to be raided by the materialist police). For my part, my mental screen was full of what I can only describe as an inner-lit rainbow-colored circus, one that morphed and moved, as it seemed to me, in response to my consciously willed commands. In other words, the psychology of the user seemed to play a crucial role in defining the ayahuasca experience. This is really good news, in a way, because it suggests that the therapeutic use of the medicine could be guided by a psychologically savvy empath such that specific desired goals and outcomes are most likely to be brought about.
I have also personally noticed a wide range of reactions to psilocybin mushrooms. The outcome of use for myself seems to be determined by my own mood and circumstances at the time of consumption. I have had very poor results on very high doses and amazing results on modest doses. And surely every veteran marijuana user is aware of the role that one's pre-existing mood plays in determining the nature of one's experience on that drug. This, of course, is why such drugs are seldom of interest, in and of themselves, to pharmaceutical companies. They want to take them apart and repackage them in such a way that they can promise a one-size-fits-all result for the end user. In short, they want to take the unpredictable magic out of the drugs and present consumers with the predictable dross: something that intoxiphobic westerners can pop like aspirin without fear of inadvertently "letting their hair down" while "under the influence," without fear of unintentionally learning something unflattering about themselves from what indigenous people might call a "teacher medicine."
But there is an alternative approach to leveraging such drugs for human benefit, a way that maximizes their magic rather than minimizing it. I am alluding to the concept, already mentioned above, of the psychologically savvy empath, a new class of American professional who would combine the best human qualities of an empathic psychiatrist with a thorough knowledge of psychoactive drugs, with a special emphasis on discovering the best practices for beneficial use as suggested by anecdote, history and common sense - the three things which today's psychiatrists ignore, at least insofar as they are faithful to the materialist understanding of "mental illness" in which they were instructed (or rather "proselytized") for a minimum of eight years in academia.
This new paradigm for treating mental health would get rid of the whole disempowering concept of the "patient," since such empaths could be visited by anyone seeking to improve their mind or mood for any reason - whether they suffer from what the materialist-oriented DSM describes as a discrete and unique "illness," such as clinical depression, or whether they merely want to "see a world in a grain of sand" with the help of drugs. In all cases, this pharmacologically savvy empath would be the go-to source when it comes to the wise use of drugs for beneficial purposes. He or she would not take the place of private drug use, they would not be the mandatory new gatekeepers for drug use, but they would rather always be there to help and advise. Imagine that: a world wherein we taught safe use rather than superstitiously demonizing drugs as bad in and of themselves: a world in which we frowned only upon uninformed drug use, rather than upon drug use in general.
It will be argued, of course, that psychiatrists are required by law to ignore such factors as anecdote, history and common sense when it comes to positive drug use, or at least that they cannot prescribe anything based merely upon such considerations. That is the result of drug prohibition, after all. And this is certainly true. But this neither explains nor justifies the silence of psychiatrists on this topic. If government policy is a roadblock to the interests of their patients, psychiatrists should be saying so loudly and clearly, at least in the official organs of their trade. Yet the American Psychiatric Association continues to support the pill-mill. Their website never once mentions phenethylamines nor the glaringly obvious ways in which they could be put to work on behalf of improving mental health. Their website never mentions Alexander Shulgin, whose usage reports on such substances suggest whole worlds of potential psychological protocols limited only by the creativity of the human mind.
Instead, the APA digs in its dogmatic heels and lives in the past. They feel no compulsion to denounce the Drug War since they are happy with the Big Pharma-oriented monopoly that drug prohibition has put in place. This is just another example of the oft-observed fact that Americans refuse to hold the Drug War responsible for the evils that it creates, often because they (or their employers) have some vested interest in the corrupt status quo. Psychiatrists ignore the effects of the War on Drugs in their field just as reporters ignore the effects of the War on Drugs in theirs. This is why modern news stories about inner-city gun violence never mention the fact that it was the Drug War which loaded the 'hood with firearms in the first place. Indeed, Lisa Ling produced a CNN documentary about gun violence in Chicago in which she never even mentioned the War on Drugs. Americans are so brainwashed by Drug War ideology that these negative effects of prohibition are simply invisible to them.
Nevertheless, I repeat that the beneficial usage reports of the phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin suggest a whole new approach to psychological healing, one in which we retire the disempowering epithet of "patient" altogether and replace it with positive words like "seeker" or "searcher" - or at least with the neutral term of "client."
Strangely enough, however, Shulgin himself seemed to be unaware of the potential that I am discussing here. I base this assessment on certain comments that I found in the sections of "Pikhal" entitled "extension and commentary," comments in which he made it clear that the stunning qualitative results of the drug use that he was reporting had no necessary connection with any actual treatments for the depressed. He seemed rather to think that depressed people are aliens from Mars and that they are not therapeutically susceptible to rapture and insight and other such benefits of using phenethylamines. Apparently those benefits were to be expected only by "normal" human beings, not the depressed.
This really puzzled me. I could only think of one explanation for his obtuseness on this subject: namely, the fact that he knew that such common-sense results would be a non-starter with the pharmaceutical companies for which he worked. To gain contracts with those entities, Shulgin knew that he had to turn such drugs into one-size-fits-all medicine, at least in so far as "all" in this case means "all people that fit the DSM's specifications for a specific 'mental illness.'" The medicine, moreover, had to produce one specific result in a way that would please a behaviorist, namely by working via an identified chemical pathway and not merely by working per se. Any drug could "work," after all - hell, laughing gas could "work" (were it not made as unavailable as possible for therapeutic purposes by Drug Warrior legislators and the FDA). Drugs for depression had to "REALLY" work, according to materialist principles. The rapture and insight and compassion felt by users meant nothing to the behaviorist version of Shulgin's personality. Actual patients had to reap their benefits scientifically or not at all!
But Shulgin seems to have played both Jekyll and Hyde on this subject. He seemed to be a shaman by nature, one convinced of the power of phenethylamines to inspire via holistic processes, and yet whenever he considered drugs from a vocational viewpoint, he became a behaviorist, apparently because he understood what his Big Pharma clients were looking for. Their main goal was to sell predictable one-size-fits-all medicine, after all, not to facilitate breakthrough treatments. It was never enough that a drug merely worked - it had to work according to a biological pathway that could be identified on a flow chart. It did not matter that the depressed individual experienced rapture and insight if that rapture and insight could not be quantified in numbers that could be presented as "hard data" in a slick magazine for shareholders of the big pharmaceutical companies. Fortunately, however, the common sense that Shulgin sometimes ignores in his chemically oriented comments yet shines through in the qualitative reports that he published in "Pihkal" about the actual effects of various phenethylamines:
"It could be best described as an 'insight-enhancer'," wrote a user of one such drug, "and obviously of potential value in psychotherapy (if one would wish to spend 30 hours in a therapy session!). I suppose it would be best to simply stick with the insight-enhancing and skip the psychotherapy."
This user points out the obvious: that for some of us, at least, drugs of this sort could replace the need for psychotherapy altogether. The Drug Warrior has a coronary when reading such lines, but that is only because they never consider the actual circumstances of drug use and therefore they assume that everyone else ignores them as well. So when I say that SOME people might be able to replace psychotherapy with drugs, they hear me saying that ALL people could do so, which is nonsense. The whole point of my new approach to drug use is that we (i.e., my pharmacologically savvy empaths) would take patient-specific factors into account and devise drug-aided protocols based on those peculiarities. Say for instance that I entered their premises and told them that I wanted to learn to be more forgiving and less angry. They would work with me on creating a facilitated drug-use protocol which used drugs that were shown historically to conduce to such mental states as I desire. In so doing, they would take into account my risk tolerance and the extent to which I was familiar with the types of drugs that were indicated as being potentially beneficial in my case. I should add that my risk tolerance would be derived not simply from the consideration of the potential downsides of use but it would also take into account the potential downsides of NOT using the drugs, i.e., of continuing with the status quo, a course which at least in some individuals may entail the possibility of their committing suicide.
I should also point out here that suicide is, indeed, a "downside," by the way, since the FDA and our Drug Warriors pretend that it is not. This can be seen by the fact that they never consider the downsides of failing to approve godsend medicines, even though in so doing, they may be denying the suicide of their last best hope for considering life to be worthwhile. The suicidal are not stakeholders when it comes to American drug policy, after all.
Of course, when the Drug Warrior says that people do not need "drugs," they are always using that term in the political sense of the word, namely, as a contrast to the word "meds," which apparently people DO need. To put this another way, Drug Warriors have no problem with drug use - as long as it is blessed and facilitated by materialists according to behaviorist principles. In still other words, the Drug Warrior and the modern psychiatrist are both "on the same page" when it comes to mental health protocols. They both agree that "healing" must only take place according to the materialist's understanding of that word, through some clearly identifiable biochemical process in the human being - and that merely cheering a patient up can never be considered a treatment for depression. This is why we outlaw all drugs with any obvious power to elate and inspire: including opium, the original panacea par excellence, and coca, and psilocybin - and, of course, the hundreds of phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. This is why materialist Dr. Robert Glatter expresses doubt in Forbes magazine about the ability of laughing gas to help the depressed. Laughing gas, for God's sake! This is why the FDA continues to drag its feet when it comes to approving glaringly obvious godsends, like MDMA and psychedelics.
And this, in turn, is why I write: because such politically-inspired cluelessness is so damnably productive of bad and inhumane laws - laws that keep me from being all that I can be in life by denying me a whole pharmacopoeia's worth of psychoactive medicine - medicine that has the glaringly obvious potential to elate and inspire, at least for those who have removed the dual blinders of behaviorism and Christian Science.
So, I ask again: do people need drugs? It's a leading question insofar as it falsely implies the existence of the Drug War apartheid of Julian Buchanan1, according to which some substances are "drugs" (bad) and some substances are "meds" (good). But the short and obvious answer to the question is an appropriately qualified yes, people do need drugs.
What people could do without is the gaslighting of politicians and psychiatrists (and chemists) who are forever trying to convince us that obvious drug benefits are not REALLY obvious drug benefits.
Author's Follow-up:
May 13, 2025
The Drug War is all about gaslighting us when it comes to drug benefits. Amazingly, it has succeeded in making many of us close our eyes to the obvious. "What's that?" Americans ask. "You say that the time-honored panacea called opium actually has no benefits whatsoever? Who knew? Well, okay, then. Whatever you say, boss!"
The success of the Drug War in making us believe nonsense demonstrates the terrible power of propaganda.
It forces one to ask a terrible question:
Does the Drug War prove that the type of government called democracy is bound to fail insofar as its most cherished freedoms (including freedom of thought itself) will eventually be sacrificed by a mob inspired by self-interested fearmongers?
Author's Follow-up:
October 03, 2025
The vast majority of people do not need psychiatry or psychoanalysis. Cocaine is a cure for depression. Freud knew this.
"My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine2
He was gaslighted on this subject by his fellow physicians, however, who saw cocaine (quite rightly) as a drug that would deprive them of a living! And so they ignored ALL the stakeholders in discussing cocaine -- except for the rare individuals who proved unable to use the drug wisely -- you know, the ones whom we refuse to educate about safe drug use.
And so the depressed were never considered stakeholders when considering the pros and cons of cocaine use. By lopsidedly demonizing cocaine, the medical industry threw all the depressed in the world under the bus -- out of a pretended concern for the vast MINORITY of irresponsible users: those users whom we refuse to educate about drug use; those users whom we refuse to provide with the readily available legion of cocaine alternatives which would be easily found in a world wherein we actively sought to use drugs for human benefit rather than ignorantly demonizing them a la the "Fire bad!" mindset of the caveman.
Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths
In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.
This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just their way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.
This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.
How do I know this?
Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.
More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of Drug War propaganda to the true evil that it causes?
This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."
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.
All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.
It's a category error to say that scientists can tell us if psychoactive drugs "really work." It's like asking Dr. Spock of Star Trek if hugging "really works." ("Hugging is highly illogical, Captain.")
There are endless drugs that could help with depression. Any drug that inspires and elates is an antidepressant, partly by the effect itself and partly by the mood-elevation caused by anticipation of use (facts which are far too obvious for drug warriors to understand).
I have yet to find one psychiatrist who acknowledges the demoralizing power of being turned into a patient for life. They never list that as a potential downside of antidepressant use.
SSRIs are created based on the materialist notion that cures should be found under a microscope. That's why science is so slow in acknowledging the benefit of plant medicines. Anyone who chooses SSRIs over drugs like San Pedro cactus is simply uninformed.
This hysterical reaction to rare negative events actually creates more rare negative events. This is why the DEA publicizes "drug problems," because by making them well known, they make the problems more prevalent and can thereby justify their huge budget.
Attempts to improve one's mind and mood are not crimes. The attempt to stop people from doing so is the crime.
Musk and co. want to make us more robot-like with AI, when they should be trying to make us more human-like with sacred medicine. Only humans can gain creativity from plant medicine. All AI can do is harvest the knowledge that eventually results from that creativity.
Drug Warriors should be legally banned from watching or reading Sherlock Holmes stories, since in their world, it is a crime for such people as Sherlock Holmes to exist, i.e., people who use medicines to improve their mind and mood.
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?
All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.