Noam Chomsky has little to say about drugs in "What Kind of Creatures Are We?" In fact, the word "drugs" only appears once in the entire book. It's a reference to the Drug War, to be precise, which he describes as the latest attempt on the part of bigots to criminalize Black life. This statement is all too true, of course, and it clearly demonstrates that Chomsky is on the right side of the topic, politically speaking at least, in his 2015 title published by Columbia University. So far, so good. But when it comes to philosophy, Chomsky ignores drugs entirely. This is a problem, because one of the book's apparent purposes is to give us Chomsky's authoritative end-of-career view on the nature of human consciousness, and yet in doing so he is clearly ignoring everything that the actual use of psychoactive substances might have to tell us on that subject.
This is an especially glaring omission in an author who is wont to decry Eurocentrism, for tribal peoples have a long history of exploring and expanding consciousness, a phenomenon that they would be loath to limit to human beings alone. As ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes tells us, "Hallucinogens permeate nearly every aspect of life in primitive societies." And so when Chomsky ignores the long history of the strategically and religiously altered consciousness of tribal peoples, it cannot help but suggest that the nonagenarian firebrand shares Schultes' own dim view of such tribal usage and wishes to dissociate himself entirely from their supposedly superstitious practices in the eyes of his stuffed-shirt contemporaries in the ivory tower. Nor am I alone as a westerner in suggesting that such drug usage may be relevant to the discussion of human consciousness. William James himself insisted that we must study altered states if we were interested in learning about ultimate reality.
"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question--for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness." -- The Varieties of Religious Experience
Still, Chomsky has a lot of "drug-free things" to say on the subject of consciousness, with many a learned and well-documented allusion to Priestley, Descartes, Newton, Hume, Russell, etc... "Is consciousness ultimately physical, is it limited to human beings, is it really a 'hard problem' or is the topic misconstrued or based on an incorrect definition of language and/or communication?" etc. etc.
My first reaction to such a thoroughly annotated philosophical "throwdown" was, quite frankly, "I'm not worthy!" If only I could live so long as to be able to advisedly reference such a potpourri of philosophical luminaries in my work. But then my second reaction was, again quite frankly, "Words, words, words!" For I then asked myself the following heretical question: Would not Chomsky's logo-centric chatter look like insipient insanity in the eyes of a suppositious tribal people who regularly used psychoactive substances to communicate with plants and wildlife and, indeed, with the great spirit itself? "Why is this man talking about consciousness," such a native might ask, "without doing the proper research, namely, by actually using consciousness-expanding medicine?! Surely he would agree with our people that nature put the stuff here for a reason!"
Such native incredulity about the white man's obsession with words puts me in mind of the following telling observation by Quanah Parker of the Native American Church:
"The White Man goes into church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his tipi and talks with Jesus."
Chomsky's failure to discuss the altered states produced by "drugs" is particularly surprising since he tells us twice in this book (on both page 13 and 48 of the Scribd edition) that human language (that "great leap forward" in our geologically recent past) must have come about by a "slight rewiring of the brain," given that "there has been no detectable evolution since our ancestors left Africa, perhaps 50,000 to 80,000 years ago." Well now, where have I heard THAT phrase before: "rewiring of the brain"? To anyone who's been following the literature for the last 20 years, that phrase "rewiring of the brain" instantly brings to mind the effects of psychedelic drugs, both as described by the miraculously therapeutic accounts of freelance psychonauts (such as Paul Stamets, whose mushroom use as a teen "taught" him how to stop stuttering) and by a growing list of academic researchers (including William Richards, Roland Griffiths, Stanislav Grof, Charles Grob, Rick Strassman, Alice Feilding, David Nichols, DJ Nutt, and Michael and Annie Mithoefe). Rewiring human brains is what psychedelics seem to be all about. One can only conclude that Chomsky has lived and breathed so much naturalist dogma during his academic lifetime that he is not even aware of his want of due diligence on this topic, let alone the disturbing Eurocentric overtones of that omission.
This is why I believe that, in a sane world, no one should be allowed to pronounce authoritatively about the ultimate nature of consciousness without having first passed a drug test: not one of those "gotcha" drug tests in which the beer--swilling boss cravenly searches your wee for substances of which racist politicians disapprove, but a drug test in which one's urine is searched for godsend entheogens instead. The failure to find any such consciousness-expanding wonder drugs will disqualify you from holding forth about the nature of human consciousness.
Author's Follow-up: September 24, 2023
Here's one example of what drug use might tell us about consciousness. About four years ago, I experienced a peyote "trip" in Arizona, in which I clearly saw (in my mind's eye, Horatio) a bright-neon-green slide show of Mesoamerican imagery. Mesoamerican imagery. Now, I grew up in Virginia and have had no particular experiences with such cultures, though I am fascinated by the pre-Columbian world. Imagine: such imagery, provided by a cactus in "Indian country"??? This incident clearly gives us hints about the possible existence of an overarching consciousness containing archetypes... Combine this with the increasingly known fact that plants can communicate in ways that, until a few years ago, we never dreamed of (see the 2023 documentary "The Secret Life of Plants" on Curiosity Stream) and the conceptual suggestions are tantalizing!
And yet the modern talk about the nature of consciousness seems to be limited to drug-free armchair philosophers and materialist neurosurgeons.
Book Reviews
Most authors today reckon without the Drug War -- unless they are writing specifically about "drugs" -- and even then they tend to approach the subject in a way that clearly demonstrates that they have been brainwashed by Drug War orthodoxy, even if they do not realize it themselves. That's why I write my philosophical book reviews, to point out this hypocrisy which no other philosopher in the world is pointing out.
Many of my essays are about and/or directed to specific individuals, some well-known, others not so well known, and some flat-out nobodies like myself. Here is a growing list of names of people with links to my essays that in some way concern them.
The Drug War is the legally enforced triumph of human idiocy. We have rigged the deck so that our dunces can be right. The Drug War is a superstition. Indeed, it is THE modern superstition.
The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."
Before anyone receives shock therapy, they should have the option to start using opium daily instead and/or any other natural drug that makes them feel good and keeps them calm. Any natural drug is better than knowingly damaging the brain!!!
In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.
I knew all along that Measure 110 in Oregon was going to be blamed for the problems that the drug war causes. Drug warriors never take responsibility, despite all the blood that they have on their hands.
Drug War propaganda is all about convincing us that we will never be able to use drugs wisely. But the drug warriors are not taking any chances: they're doing all they can to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Drug-designing chemists have no expertise in deciding what constitutes a cure for depression. As Schopenhauer wrote:
"The mere study of chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher."
The drug war is is a multi-billion-dollar campaign to enforce the attitude of the Francisco Pizarro's of the world when it comes to non-western medicine. It is the apotheosis of the colonialism that most Americans claim to hate.
Here's one example of what drug use might tell us about consciousness. About four years ago, I experienced a peyote "trip" in Arizona, in which I clearly saw (in my mind's eye, Horatio) a bright-neon-green slide show of Mesoamerican imagery. Mesoamerican imagery. Now, I grew up in Virginia and have had no particular experiences with such cultures, though I am fascinated by the pre-Columbian world. Imagine: such imagery, provided by a cactus in "Indian country"??? This incident clearly gives us hints about the possible existence of an overarching consciousness containing archetypes... Combine this with the increasingly known fact that plants can communicate in ways that, until a few years ago, we never dreamed of (see the 2023 documentary "The Secret Life of Plants" on Curiosity Stream) and the conceptual suggestions are tantalizing! 
The Drug War is the legally enforced triumph of human idiocy. We have rigged the deck so that our dunces can be right. The Drug War is a superstition. Indeed, it is THE modern superstition.