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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 Reason2. 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 Shulgin3. 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 reality5. 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.



Notes:

1: What drug use could tell us about the rationalist triumphalism of Immanuel Kant (up)
2: The Critique of Pure Reason (up)
3: Scribd.com: The Nature of Drugs Vol 1 (up)
4: Scribd.com: The Varieties of Religious Experience (up)
5: The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell (up)


Immanuel Kant




Anyone familiar with the philosophies of both Immanuel Kant and William James should understand that philosophers have a duty to investigate what we westerners call 'altered states' and hence have a duty to disdainfully deride and denounce the outlawing of psychoactive substances. Kant's basic message, as inspired by Hume, is that we cannot understand ultimate realities in words, but as James insists in "The Varieties of Religious Experience," it is our duty as philosophers to try to understand such realities EXPERIENTIALLY, i.e., with the help of psychoactive substances such as nitrous oxide.

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


This is why it is a shame that I am the only philosopher in the world who contacted the FDA to protest their recent plans to begin treating nitrous oxide as a "drug" and so further discourage its use in metaphysical research. Alas, such goal-driven substance use is already considered unthinkable by most academics thanks to their brainwashed fealty to the drug war ideology of substance demonization. Thus I was the only philosopher in the world who spoke up on behalf of the legacy of William James and on behalf of academic freedom, for that matter, by pleading with the FDA to refrain from further marginalizing an already vastly underused substance. (In a sane world, the suicidal would be given laughing gas kits in the same way that we provide epi pens for those with severe allergies.)

But then this is the point of my entire website and the hundreds of essays that it contains: to demonstrate to the world that the drug war and prohibition are a cancer on the body politic and not just a matter of a few laws set up to discourage hedonists. For the idea that we should hate psychoactive substances is itself a metaphysical notion peculiar to the western mindset and not some logical truth that any unbiased mind must accept. Unfortunately, scientists seem to know, as it were subconsciously, that the drug war is a good thing, for it is clearly biased in the name of the materialism which they themselves profess. In the wake of the technological revolution, science is feeling omniscient, and so it naturally wants to avoid dealing with drug effects and the variability of human emotions. They cannot be quantified, as behaviorist materialism requires. So philosophers and scientists alike see a benefit in drug laws that outlaw substances that facilitate mystical feelings and ontological intimations: "Good riddance to such namby-pamby data," says the materialist in their "heart of hearts."

And so the drug war outlaws precisely those substances whose use conduces to a non-materialist view of the world, one in which we have intimations about the supposedly "unknowable" world of the noumena. And why is the noumena unknowable to us? First, thanks to the merely pragmatic nature of our perceptions as explained by Kant. But also thanks to the inherent limitations of that incomplete and fallible communication system that we call human language, whose inevitable shortcomings and vagaries seem to bar us from definitively saying anything that could not, at least in theory, be plausibly gainsaid in that same inherently malleable language.

These limitations of human language contrast tellingly, however, with the vivid experiential convictions about reality that are communicated by substance use according to the trip reports of the psychonauts of all ages. We can debate the ontological significance of such experiences, of course, but let us remember that it was precisely such "use" that opened James' mind to a world of potential realities of whose existence he had previously been blissfully unaware. Why? Because of his previous self-satisfied acceptance of materialist principles.

Unfortunately, modern philosophers have ceded their job of metaphysical investigation to psychonauts like James Fadiman, Alex Gibbons and Jim Hogshire. Not that there is anything wrong with the research of these latter truth seekers, but it is a shame that philosophers are not working with them to promote human progress and philosophical understanding. And so if metaphysics is dead in the 21st century, it is because today's philosophers have abandoned the pursuit of truth in the name of supporting America's hateful and superstitious war on psychoactive substances.

According to Kant, we can know nothing about the noumenal world, or ultimate reality, but this claim is not true*. In making that claim, Kant was unaware of the metaphysical insights provided by psychoactive drug use. There is such a thing as "experiential proof" inspired by such use -- an absolute conviction that is felt "in every fiber of one's being," as opposed to having been "proven" for one syllogistically in the fallible and eternally insufficient communication method that we call human language.

This is Kant's Holy Grail, had he only realized it, a way to move forward with metaphysical research: by looking for experiential proof of ultimate realities rather than merely logical ones.

A critic might say, yes, but metaphysics cannot be based on experience. But by that word, one has always meant sober experience. That implicit qualification was itself established before we understood the fallibility of the senses. The transcendent experience I reference here is of another kind, being contemplated in the mind and not processed through the sense organs typically associated with experience.

*Kant's claim could be salvaged, perhaps, by specifying the type of "knowledge" that we're talking about here. My point is simply that Kant seemed unaware of the power of psychoactive drugs to inspire states that provide us with convictions with respect to the noumenal world. Whether the source of those convictions is "knowledge" properly so-called is an interesting question, but one well beyond the scope of these comments and unnecessary for their rational evaluation.

  • Ego Transcendence Made Easy
  • How the Drug War limits our understanding of Immanuel Kant
  • How the Drug War Outlaws Criticism of Immanuel Kant
  • Immanuel Kant on Drugs
  • Psilocybin Breakthrough
  • Schopenhauer and Drugs
  • Too Honest to Be Popular?
  • What Can the Chemical Hold?
  • What's Drugs Got to Do With It?





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    I wish someone would tell Getty Images to start earning an honest living. I bought AI credits only to find that words like "mushrooms" and "drugs" could not be used. Nor "blood," nor "violence." And they refuse to refund my $14,99. Who is their service for, Ozzie Harriet?

    There are a potentially vast number of non-addictive drugs that could be used strategically in therapy. They elate and "free the tongue" to help talk therapy really work. Even "addictive" drugs can be used non-addictively, prohibitionist propaganda notwithstanding.

    I'm looking for a United Healthcare doctor now that I'm 66 years old. When I searched my zip code and typed "alternative medicine," I got one single solitary return... for a chiropractor, no less. Some choice. Guess everyone else wants me to "keep taking my meds."

    This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.

    The confusion arises because materialists insist that every psychological problem is actually a physical problem, hence the disease-mongering of the DSM. This is antithetical to the shamanic approach, which sees people holistically, as people, not patients.

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

    The Hindu religion was inspired by drug use.

    No substance is bad in and of itself. Fentanyl has positive uses, at specific doses, for specific people, in specific situations. But the drug war votes substance up or down. That is hugely anti-scientific and it blocks human progress.

    Psychiatrists keep flipping the script. When it became clear that SSRIs caused dependence, instead of apologizing, they told us we need to keep taking our meds. Now they even claim that criticizing SSRIs is wrong. This is anti-intellectual madness.

    The drug war is being used as a wrecking ball to destroy democratic freedoms. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and freedom of religion and given the police the right to confiscate the property of peaceful and productive citizens.


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