How the Drug War limits our understanding of Immanuel Kant

How the Drug War limits our understanding of Immanuel Kant

an open letter to Dr. V.A. Gijsbers of Leiden University

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 6, 2024

Hello, Doctor Gijsbers and greetings from Virginia, USA.

Thanks for the excellent videos on Immanuel Kant ¹ and his Critique of Pure Reason ². They are helping me finally begin to understand this book, which I only dimly comprehended (if at all) in university. What follows are some no doubt controversial thoughts about Kant and his discussion of the noumenal world. I am hoping that you will find time to read them. If so, I would be delighted to hear your thoughts. Please understand, however, that any criticisms below are directed toward philosophy as a field and not by any means toward yourself in particular.

Thanks again!

I am a 65-year-old philosophy buff from the states who has written hundreds of essays regarding the philosophy of the War on Drugs and the attitudes that it represents. I believe that the Drug War has censored academia and in ways that most academics neither acknowledge or see. I think that the study of Kant is a case in point. For I would claim that the subject of metaphysics cannot be exhaustively discussed (especially post-Kant) without a discussion of the effects of drugs on the human understanding, especially psychedelics and the various phenethylamines synthesized by chemists like Alexander Shulgin ³. These substances, after all, provide many with what they believe to be a firsthand experience of the noumenal world, a belief maintained both by tribal peoples and the majority of psychedelic users in the modern west. Nor is the interest in such brave new worlds of experience limited to tribal peoples and hippies. William James himself believed that we should study such worlds when he wrote the following in "The Varieties of Religious Experience":

"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded"⁴.

Unfortunately, the Drug War forces us to disregard such forms of consciousness by outlawing the very substances that cause them. But that need not keep us from at least talking about such seemingly noumenal states.

What might the accounts of drug use tell us about the noumenal world? Permit me to give one example from personal experience.

In 2017, I traveled to Arizona to take a "spirit walk" inspired by the consumption of a peyote cactus button. During the "trip," I beheld (with my eyes shut) a neon-green slideshow of Mesoamerican imagery, with stylized depictions of warriors and animals, closely resembling the imagery found on Mayan sculpture, murals, and calendars.

Now, I am not a Mesoamerican scholar, nor was I consciously thinking of Mesoamerican history during this time in my life. So the fact that I should have such an experience should provide fodder for a wide variety of informed speculation about the nature of the noumenal world, especially as this experience occurred in an historically tribal region and using a substance that had a long history of tribal use. At very least, the experience casts doubt on any materialist account of consciousness and suggests (though certainly does not prove) the existence of a sort of panpsychic world in which the natural world participates with human consciousness in passing along culturally specific thoughts, feelings and ideas about the phenomenal world around us.

Unfortunately, the academic world pretends that drugs do not exist, and in this way, they give a monopoly to materialist explanations for experiences of this kind (when they do not ignore such experiences altogether, which is, indeed, the standard materialist MO in these cases). I await the day when academics will realize that educators are not free in the age of a Drug War and that all our supposed knowledge is based on an unacknowledged acceptance of the drug-hating ideas of Mary Baker Eddy: namely, that outlawed drugs can have no positive uses whatsoever and that therefore the effects that they have on the minds of human beings need not be taken into account when considering the truths of philosophy, or of psychology for that matter. Indeed, psychology not only ignores the Drug War but it embraces it every time that it refers to demonized substances for depression as "crutches" and plumps rather for the use of pharmaceuticals that purport to work in a "scientific" (i.e. materialist) fashion, notwithstanding the fact that the latter create lifelong dependency in 1 in 4 American women.

The idea that psychedelic drug users are seeing the noumenal world is supported by the filter theory of consciousness championed by Aldous Huxley, which states that the categories through which we observe phenomena in our sober lives constitute but one of many prisms through which we can see the world, and that psychoactive drugs have the power to open the "doors of perception" to many other aspects of reality ⁵. These other realities are necessarily noumenal insofar as there is no consistency between "trippers" when it comes to the nature of these other worlds, notwithstanding the fact that drug users obtain different experiences from the same substance at the same dose in the same setting, etc., although the Drug Warrior might join the materialist in claiming that such experiences are merely pathological.

I will spare you any further attempts at elucidating my thesis. I hope in this short space, however, I have at least given you some reason to believe that the Drug War is, indeed, censoring academia, and that in so doing, it is limiting the extent to which we can profit from, and perhaps even improve upon, the insights of Kant with respect to our understanding of metaphysics and the perhaps "not so unknowable" nature of the noumenal world.

Author's Follow-up:

November 01, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

For more on this topic, please see my essay entitled What drug use could tell us about the rationalist triumphalism of Immanuel Kant.

Notes:

1: What drug use could tell us about the rationalist triumphalism of Immanuel Kant DWP (up)
2: The Critique of Pure Reason Kant, Immanuel, Project Gutenberg, 1781 (up)
3: Scribd.com: The Nature of Drugs Vol 1 Shulgin, Alexander, Transform Press, Santa Fe, 2021 (up)
4: Scribd.com: The Varieties of Religious Experience James, William, Philosophical Library, New York, 1902 (up)
5: The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell Huxley, Aldous, Penguin Books, New York, 1970 (up)

Immanuel Kant

To see how the drug war censors Academia, merely consider the fact that philosophers refuse to connect the dots between Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and the anesthetic revelations of William James. Kant's philosophy privileges one kind of consciousness -- what he calls "rational" consciousness -- whereas James maintains that there are many types of consciousness and that we must study them to see what they tell us about reality writ large, or the Kantian noumena. To see just how censored academia is, consider the following sad fact: that the online biography of William James at his alma mater, Harvard University, does not even mention James' work with laughing gas nor the fact that it changed his whole view of the world.

The result? The rationalists have earned an unearned victory. They have gotten away with their claim that they are the only ones who can discover the truth about the world, to the extent that such truth can be known. All evidence of experiential truth from other venues has been conveniently outlawed for them.

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

When is the Holocaust Museum going to recognize that the Drug War has Nazified American life? Probably, on the same day that the Jefferson Foundation finally admits to having sold out Jefferson by inviting the DEA onto his estate in 1987 to confiscate his poppy plants.

Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It forces us to use shock therapy on the severely depressed since we've outlawed all viable alternatives. It denies medicines that could combat Alzheimer's and/or render it psychologically bearable.

Like when Laura Sanders tells us in Science News that depression is an intractable problem, she should rather tell us: "Depression is an intractable problem... that is, in a world wherein we refuse to consider the benefits of 'drugs,' let alone to fight for their beneficial use."

There's a run of addiction movies out there, like "Craving!" wherein they actually personify addiction as a screaming skeleton. Funny, drug warriors never call for a Manhattan Project to end addiction. Addiction is their golden goose.

The best harm reduction strategy would be to re-legalize opium and cocaine. We would thereby end depression in America and free Americans from their abject reliance on the healthcare industry.

We should place prohibitionists on trial for destroying inner cities.

I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.

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.

If America cannot exist without outlawing drugs, then there is something wrong with America, not with drugs.

Uruguay wants to re-legalize psilocybin mushrooms -- but only for use in a psychiatrist's office. So let me get this straight: psychiatrists are the new privileged shaman? It's a mushroom, for God's sake. Just re-legalize the damn thing and stop treating us like children.

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

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Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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