by privileging materialists with unearned victories
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 20, 2025
I have been striving over the last few years to wrap my mind around the insights of Kant1, especially as filtered through the persnickety criticisms of the infamous pessimist, Arthur Schopenhauer2. While I am not yet qualified to either gainsay or approve the specifics of their various approaches to epistemology, I believe that I can safely offer some constructive criticism about their attempts to speak ex-cathedra concerning what we can know and how we can know it as Homo sapiens. Let us take for starters the generalized premise upon which the duo seem to be in agreement: namely, that we are not fitted out as a species with the perceptual tools necessary to see Reality writ large. To the contrary, our perceptual equipment forces us to see the world in a specific way and so we are biased from the get-go when it comes to formulating ideas about such a suppositious ultimate reality. Schopenhauer lauds this as an earthshaking achievement, and in some ways it surely is so. And yet it bears mentioning that this is a fact that indigenous people have always "known" experientially, through the use of the kinds of godsend medicines that the west abhors: the fact that words and concepts created by "sober" human beings are not up to the task of describing ultimate realities, no, not even in theory.
Indigenous people have been strides ahead of us in this area. Indigenous people have always known , moreover, that there is no single way to experience the world. Each psychoactive "drug" (or drug combination) provides users with a different experience of the world, some of which come with their own feeling of fundamental and seemingly undeniable veracity, as if the drug users were trespassing during their "inebriation" on the tantalizing outskirts of a great universal truth and/or power and/or cause. (I say nothing here of the contextual changes -- the various sets and settings -- that can be consciously manipulated by an indigenous society to render the use of the self-same drug productive of a wide range of specific outcomes in its users. During my ayahuasca session last year, the Spanish-language vocals of curandero Taita Jhon put me in mind of the Andes jungle, but I assume that the use of another musical style might have centered the experience in a maritime or desert environment, etc.3)
Now, of course we could argue about the precise meaning of such substance-inspired experiences. In fact, that is what William James counseled us to do: to use substances like laughing gas 4 and then to discuss what their use might tell us about the nature of reality and human consciousness. But the point here is that the Drug War forbids such investigations.
Do you see the problem here? The intoxiphobia of the west first causes our philosophers to privilege a supposed "sober perception" as the only type of perception available to human beings - and then the Drug War forbids us from even investigating alternative ways of perceiving the world. In other words, there is a bias at work here that neither Kant nor Schopenhauer noticed: the bias against perception as mediated through the use of psychoactive medicine. Their approach seems to be rather to assume in advance of all investigation that non-sober states are productive of nonsense feedback, as it were, via definition. And yet this is not a logical proof at all, but rather a sentiment based on the intoxiphobic predilections of the west. Certainly indigenous communities have never started from the assumption that drug-inspired visions were necessarily false and nonsensical. They rather believed that a variety of advisedly leveraged drug use could bring about a wide range of beneficial visions in a user - everything from insights about cosmic truth to the location of a lost set of car keys.
Even my own drug experiences have conformed with that understanding. During my "trip" on peyote some years ago, I "saw" (in my mind's eye, Horatio) a bright neon-green slideshow of Mesoamerican imagery, containing potentates and snakes and symbolic icons stylized in the manner of a Mayan codex. This was clearly not a nonsensical outcome of drug use. It was a series of highly significant visions, fraught with potential meaning about the nature of consciousness and the cultural archetypes of Joseph Campbell. Of course, a materialist might still try to dismiss the visions as meaningless, but that is the point: they would have to try to do so, there would have to be a discussion. Whereas, right now the materialist view of such visions is privileged by American drug law, which refuses to allow us to even have the sort of visions that violate behaviorist orthodoxy.
We see then that the Drug War outlaws research into the nature of perception and reality. And yet when I try to point these things out in various philosophy forums, I am told to go elsewhere. Why? Because philosophers are like everybody else in America: they think that the battle for re-legalizing drugs is a niche concern, of interest only to hedonists and Libertarians. They fail to see that the Drug War outlaws philosophical research. Or perhaps they just do not care. Most philosophers are materialists, after all, and so they are happy to live in a world wherein drug law privileges their naïve realism by effectively outlawing other ways of seeing the world.
Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.
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 U.S. Congress considered the following to be a scientific fact back in 1924:
"A person taking narcotics regularly impedes evolutionary progress and tends to degenerate backwards toward the brute." -- Richmond Hobson
To understand why the western world is blind to the benefits of "drugs," read "The Concept of Nature" by Whitehead. He unveils the scientific schizophrenia of the west, according to which the "real" world is invisible to us while our perceptions are mere "secondary" qualities.
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.
Almost all of today's magazine articles about human psychology should come with the following disclaimer:
"This article was written from the standpoint of Drug War ideology, which holds that outlawed substances can have no beneficial uses whatsoever."
Mad in America solicits personal stories about people trying to get off of antidepressants, but they will not publish your story if you want to use entheogenic medicines to help you. They're afraid their readers can't handle the truth.
Kids should be taught in grade school that prohibition is wrong.
Being a lifetime patient is not the issue: that could make perfect sense in certain cases. But if I am to be "using" for life, I demand the drug of MY CHOICE, not that of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry, who are dogmatically deaf to the benefits of hated substances.
That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.
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