I find it hard to read a drugs-related book like this one in peace and quiet. I keep running across philosophically problematic statements on the part of the contributing authors and I always feel the need to rebut them, loudly and clearly and in real-time. I have chosen therefore to write the following essay-cum-book-review in tandem with my reading of Mike Jay's 1999 drugs reader, as a list of publicly available notes on my reading, so that I can record my occasionally indignant insights in the order that they occur to me as I proceed through the button-pushing book. If this philosophical sensitivity on my part should strike a sanguine reader as neurotic, I remind them that I am unlike most other philosophers on this subject: as a chronic depressive, I have skin in this game. I have gone a lifetime now without medicines that could have clearly benefitted me in common-sense protocols, thereby making it totally unnecessary for me to publicly claim the status of "chronic depressive" in the first place. I am furious therefore whenever I read muddleheaded viewpoints about drugs, knowing as I do that such philosophically challenged notions help to "justify" the Drug Warrior in their pernicious attempts to keep me from treating my own healthcare without an expensive and humiliating "by your leave" from the materialist medical establishment.
Feel free then to look over my shoulder as I take some occasionally indignant notes on the 1999 drugs reader from Mike Jay entitled Artificial Paradises. My method in proceeding will be to comment on the individual sections of Jay's compendium as I encounter them in reading, though I invite the reader to use the links below to jump directly to comments about the highlighted individual of their choice.
"But the main distinction lies in this, that whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a proper manner), introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. Wine robs a man of his self-possession: opium greatly invigorates it."
--Mike Jay, from Artificial Paradises : a drugs reader, p. 12, quotation from Thomas De Quincey1
De Quincey claims to be the only member of the true church of opium, given that he has experience of the drug's effects whereas materialist scientists want nothing to do with actually USING the drug. In the same way, I claim to be the only member of the true church of laughing gas, for I know the effects of the drug and its obvious power to help the depressed -- whereas our materialist scientists (who have never used the substance, of course) claim to be unsure whether laughing gas could help depressives such as myself2. Laughing gas, for God's sake! A chronic depressive is tempted to respond: "Who asked you in the first place? Materialist scientists are not the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine. To say so is to commit a category error. The experts on mental states are precisely those who experience those states." But then to recognize that fact would be to put an end to the healthcare industry's highly lucrative role of running interference between Americans and godsend medicines.
Baudelaire makes the important point that it's "garbage in, garbage out" when it comes to drug experiences. An educated and intentional user has better odds of having a meaningful experience on a drug than does a dullard who uses a substance on a whim in the hopes of becoming a smarter and happier person. Baudelaire is writing specifically about hashish but with the implication that these rules apply to the use of most if not all intoxicants. For Baudelaire, a drug merely amplifies potentialities that already exist within the user. And yet this attitude is problematic, or at least incomplete, as I myself have learned from personal experience.
When I used peyote, more or less legally, in the high deserts of Arizona in 2018 at the Church of the Peyote Way, I was treated to a mental slideshow of neon-green icons nearly identical to the ornate and stylized icons found in a pre-Columbian codex. This informative cross-cultural slideshow came all unbidden to me, linking me with the psychoactive past in a way that seemed to verify the theory of panpsychism, that all the world is connected through a kind of background or meta consciousness. In other words, the peyote experience did not seem merely to amplify my existing propensities, but rather to teach me something about the interconnectedness of the world in which I find myself.
But then I can never be at peace while reading Baudelaire on the topic of drugs, knowing as I do that he ultimately came to prohibitionist conclusions on the subject. Fortunately, Gustave Flaubert recognized this anti-drug bias in the French poet (above all, his habit of "blaming drugs") and criticized him for this bias, thereby sparing me the trouble of doing so.
"You have insisted too much on the spirit of evil. One can sense a leavening of Catholicism here and there. I would have preferred that you not BLAME hashish, opium and excess."
--Mike Jay, from Artificial Paradises : a drugs reader, p. xx, Gustave Flaubert in letter to Baudelaire3
Thank you for that, Gustave! Somebody actually GETS it!
Even the focus on the user's intentions can be carried too far. We cannot know in advance whether a drug journey is going to be good or bad for a specific person, regardless of their level of preparation or even their failure to prepare in any way whatsoever. When Paul Stamets consumed a handful of psilocybin mushrooms as a teenager, he had no lofty goals in mind, and a puritan onlooker might have called his use irresponsible and problematic. And yet after consuming the shrooms, Stamets' childhood problem with stuttering simply disappeared. He received this blessing as an apparent grace, not in response to any apparent readiness on his part. We can say therefore that, in general, the wiser the user, the better the chances of a favorable outcome -- but we must always keep in mind that this is a general truth and tells us nothing about the prospects of any one particular user. We would, in fact, have to be God himself to have access to all the psychological, biochemical, social and genetic factors that will ultimately determine the outcome of any psychoactive drug experience.
This reminds us of what GK Chesterton made clear in "Eugenics and Other Evils,4" that health is determined by a balance of a wide array of factors and is not determined by any one input in the abstract, not even by the use of a socially demonized substance. This is why drug prohibition is so maddeningly wrong: it treats all human beings as identical vulnerable widgets when it comes to drugs, anti-scientifically denying all differences and thus childishly deciding in advance that substances can have no uses for anybody, in any context, ever. And so we deprive the world of drugs that could help end suicide and render brain damaging shock therapy unnecessary -- and this thanks to a drug policy that kills thousands of minorities and foreigners every year, has destroyed American freedoms, and has led to the election of a tyrant by throwing millions of minorities in jail -- and why? Because they dared to exercise sovereignty over their own mood and mental states.
Will the world ever wake up to this scam or will Christian Science Sharia conquer the very universe? Are Americans really that out of touch with common sense thanks to their blind faith in science and their blind hatred for drugs? One is reminded in this connection of the following profound insight from Allen Ginsberg, as quoted by editor Oliver Harris, in "The Yage Letters Redux":
"A materialist consciousness is attempting to preserve itself from dissolution by restriction and persecution of experience of the transcendental. One day perhaps the earth will be dominated by the illusion of separate consciousness, the bureaucrats having triumphed in seizing control of all roads of communication with the divine and restricting traffic. But sleep and death cannot evade the great dream of being and the victory of the bureaucrats of illusion is only an illusion of their separate world of consciousness."
"I lost all connection with external things; trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through my mind and were connected with words in such a manner, as to produce perceptions perfectly novel."
--Mike Jay, from Artificial Paradises : a drugs reader, p. 37, quotation from Humphry Davy concerning his use of nitrous oxide5
I highlight this quotation to make an important point: namely, that in a sane world, such results would qualify nitrous oxide, on a prima facie basis, as a potential treatment for Alzheimer's patients. To use such a substance for such a purpose is common sense -- at least to those who are not blinded by the passion-free ideology of behaviorism. There is no better way to judge the bamboozlement of westerners when it comes to drugs than to point out that they would prefer that their loved ones suffer the full horrors of Alzheimer's rather than to let them use substances that so clearly increase neural activity. This is why I say that the Drug War prohibitionist mindset is true pathology. It is a blindness based on the following two enormous lies of the Drug Warrior: 1) that there are no upsides to drug use, and 2) that there are no downsides to substance prohibition.
Some critics of the nitrous oxide experience, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, made prohibitionist hay out of the fact that the revelations seemingly vouchsafed the inebriant on N20 were ultimately seen to be illusory and meaningless. But this misses the point. The fact that the user's brain is, at it were, growing and experimenting with new concepts is a good thing in and of itself. That is enormous good news! This propensity for neuronal growth should not be dismissed out of hand merely because it does not always hand the user a new Einsteinian equation on a silver platter during their inebriation. Increased neuronal activity is a good in and of itself, especially for those who suffer thanks to the neural deficits of their "sober" mind. It is the overall holistic effects of wise laughing gas use that we should be discussing, not the failure of any single "trip" to inspire a breakthrough cosmic truth -- especially as any wise person knows that such a truth would not be instantly communicable through the self-serving, conservative and prejudice-riddled medium known as human language, in any case.
Morel is a pure Drug Warrior. He judges "exotic" drugs based on worst-case scenarios, and purely imagined ones at that. He mendaciously asserts that responsible users of opium are in the minority. Any reader who has been infected by Morel's envenomed outlook can find the antidote in reading "The Truth About Opium" by William Brereton6.
Jay tells us how Freud underestimated the addictive potential of cocaine. I would add, however, that addiction is not the worst thing in the world. It can be better for some people than a lot of things: like suicide, like shock therapy, and like a life lived 24/7 WITHOUT HAPPINESS OR MEANING.
This is what almost no drug pundits fully understand: that addiction is not the worst thing in the world; that the worst thing -- at least for some of us -- is a life lacking fulfillment, a life in which drug law is prohibiting us from exploring and maximizing all inherent talents. Moreover, addiction is only a problem because we have outlawed all drug choices and so forced users to obsess on the few substances that are available via the black market. In a free world in which we learned about drugs rather than demonizing them, we could "use drugs to fight drugs" and so successfully "treat" most addictions or, more often, avoid them in the first place. (Even today, most drug users partake wisely, as Carl Hart reports in Drug Use for Grown-Ups7, this despite the fact that America's drug policy is all about making drug use as dangerous as possible.)
People do not typically try drugs with a desire to become addicted. They want self-transcendence. Our job should be to show them how to achieve that wisely -- by using specific substances at specific times as suggested by their own personality, biochemistry and our personal priorities in life.
This is why it bothers me when the word "addictive" is bandied about as a way to put down drugs. This is just more superstitious substance blaming. If a drug proves to be addictive in any given case, it is not the fault of the drug, it is rather a result of our own failure to educate and provide a wide world of regulated drug choices!
Another comment about Freud and cocaine:
It is amazing that the idea of cocaine therapy for the depressed should be completely vetoed merely because the first attempts miscarried. We would have no airplanes today had the Wright Brothers thrown in the towel after they crashed the first biplane into a sand dune in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Occasional cocaine use has glaringly obvious benefits for the depressed -- but merely mention the word "addictive," and Americans lose their senses. If the drug can be misused by a young white American for one reason at one dose, then it must not be used by anyone for any reason at any dose.
That is a conclusion Americans would never reach if THEY had skin in the game, if THEY were the ones who were being told thereby to live a second-rate life while being shunted off onto dependence-causing Big Pharma meds. Speaking of which, how ironic! Americans consider it enslavement for an American to be dependent on opiates or coca, and yet they are considered "good patients" when they are dependent on Big Pharma meds FOR LIFE! FOR LIFE!
Clearly, either the Drug Warriors are playing us for fools, or they themselves are fools, or both.
In short, almost all attitudes about cocaine are based on the absurd idea that most users are cokeheads. Even if this were true, the answer would be education and not criminalizing one of the few drugs that could end depression in a trice. And yet when my friends and loved ones come close to suicide and appeal to the materialist health establishment, do we give them something that will cheer them up and make them want to live? No, of course, not. That would not be scientific. We turn them into wards of the healthcare state with drugs that only "work" from the point of view of the pharmaceutical companies -- not from the point of view of the Jack Kerouacs of the world who wish to "live large." This is why drug prohibition is so evil: it effectively outlaws all sorts of ways of being in the world -- meanwhile refusing to consider the depressed and anxious as stakeholders in the drug approval process. I should, of course, say the drug RE-approval process, for it was a mistake to outlaw psychoactive substances in the first place: a self-interested mistake on the part of medical science to claim the lucrative field of mind and mood medicine as their own.
This is such an absurd status quo: that we judge drugs up or down, based on their worst possible effects when used by an uneducated white young person. Whatever happened to the rights of the endless other stakeholders with endless valid reasons for wanting to improve mental ability? Why are we banning human mental progress for the sake of the kids whom we refuse to educate about remaining safe in a world full of psychoactive substances?! Unlike most pundits, I cannot mention this situation dispassionately for I am the victim of this politically driven attempt to deny me of my rights to take care of my own **** health. Sadly, I seem to be hundreds of years ahead of my time -- assuming that superstitious and politically conniving politicians will ever renounce their attempts to control how and how much that the citizen is allowed to think and feel in this life.
Stevenson's story about Jekyll & Hyde is odd. Its message is often taken to be that drug use is wrong -- and yet the story was purportedly written in one week under the influence of cocaine. That's a HUGE drug benefit, albeit one to which materialists and Drug Warriors are completely blind. Imagine a drug that helps one drastically increase work output without sacrificing quality. Stevenson seems to be channeling Leona Helmsley, however, implying that free drug use is fine for authors like himself, whereas the little people need drug prohibition to keep them safe. Cocaine's ability to facilitate mentation is an enormous "upside" of use, one that should be parlayed into therapeutic use informed by best practices; instead, Americans make the anti-scientific assumption that the drug can be judged "up" or "down," without regard to details of use -- which is the Big Lie of drug prohibition. Substance prohibition is thus anti-progress and inhumane, especially from the point of view of the hundreds of millions who go without godsend treatments merely because a drug could be misused in theory by a white young person whom we refuse to educate!
Again, so many drug pundits don't get it: The prohibition mindset is the problem, NOT DRUGS! When will we stop applying a safety standard to drug use that we apply to no other risky activity on earth? When will we recognize the hundreds of millions whom we are disempowering by designing drug policy with only our uneducated white suburban young people in mind? And please do not tell me this is about safety. First, no one's interested in the safety of the many who commit suicide because we have outlawed everything that would cheer them up. Besides, Drug Warriors believe in proliferation of guns, even in the very neighborhoods that drug prohibition has turned into no-go zones. Nor do these racist clowns have any problem with the Jim Beam bourbon ads that are targeted at young people on prime-time television. If they are interested in the health of young people, it is definitely only an interest in mainly white, suburban young people, and not the Blacks and other minorities who are sure to be killed in drive-by shootings thanks to drug prohibition.
Once again, depressing reading. Benzedrine has obvious uses for the depressed, and yet today the depressed must not use the drug merely because others may misuse it. WHAT?! This is a sick mentality -- that seeks to protect a handful of young white American stakeholders while throwing everybody else -- especially chronic depressives like myself -- under the bus.
The suppression of Benzedrine use for the depressed resulted from a typical pattern. The press publishes sensational stories about addiction and then self-interested politicians leverage these accounts into Draconic drug laws. No one ever thinks of education and choice and regulation -- there is always a kneejerk belief in the power of prohibition -- even today when we have ample proof that drug prohibition causes enormous violence -- 67,000 deaths in the last 10 years from inner-city gunfire in the U.S., 60,000 "disappearances" in Mexico over the last two decades, the erosion of American liberties and the election of America's first fascist president, brought about by the fact that the Drug War has thrown millions of minorities in jail and thereby removed them from the voting rolls, either officially or effectively.
This is why the end of the drug-war mindset requires the reform of the industry of journalism. Reporters need to learn how to cover drug-related deaths in context, just like they now cover car-related deaths. Instead, the press seems to believe that one drug-related death constitutes a knockdown argument in favor of drug prohibition. A case in point is the attempt on behalf of the news presenters at Channel 5 in the UK in 2023 to have the use of laughing gas criminalized in response to isolated cases of risky use of the substance by young people. See my essay entitled Keep Laughing Gas Legal. The presenters were acting as shameless cheerleaders in this case, egging on their guests to admit that laughing gas needed to be outlawed. The presenters had no clue that they were thereby working to outlaw a gas whose use could help the depressed to avoid suicide -- nor had the presenters seemingly heard of William James, who urged philosophers to study the states produced by such substances in order to investigate the nature of Reality writ large8.
A sane outlook on drugs cannot be maintained until we confront the fact that journalists have a vested interest in writing prohibitionist screeds and hatchet pieces about drug use. It is so easy to do. Just focus lopsidedly on the victims of apparent misuse -- while remaining 100% blind to all those who could benefit from drug use. In this way, the ambitious reporter can present the downsides of misuse as if they were knockdown arguments for substance prohibition -- ignoring the fact that alcohol kills 178,000 a year in the States alone and that even aspirin kills 3,000 a year in the UK alone.
It is the yellowest form of journalism, and yet ironically, it has very seldom been flagged as such by Drug War pundits -- and yet this journalistic mindset and propensity for drug demonization must change if we ever hope to claw back our right to mind and mood medicine from the self-interested healthcare industry. Until we reform journalism viz. their treatment of drug-related stories, all progress in drug re-legalization will be subject to a prompt veto by white American young people who find a way to use a drug ill-advisedly, mainly, of course, because we refuse "on principle" to teach safe use. Until then, we have to remember that journalists are collaborators in the War on Drugs thanks to their desire to profit from nuance-free stories on the subject, stories that imply that drug use can only end in despair and sorrow, failing to note, of course, that this is an outcome brought about by drug prohibition itself, thanks to its failure to educate, failure to ensure safe product, and failure to allow for true choice for would-be users, thereby decreasing the likelihood that they would become morbidly dependent upon any one substance.
Here is Albert's description of his mental state the day after using LSD.
"The world was as if newly created. All my senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity, which persisted for the entire day."
--Mike Jay, from Artificial Paradises : a drugs reader, p. 60-61, quotation from Albert Hofmann9
Imagine how such statements like this "read" to someone like myself who has gone a lifetime without being able to use such medicines. The drug cries out for use by the suicidal and the severely depressed -- and yet hateful racist Drug Warriors have so thoroughly demonized the drug that anti-scientific and inhumane America is not even TALKING about re-legalizing the substance anytime this century. Why not? Because American drug policy is dictated, not by reality and the needs of actual people, but rather by how white American racists "FEEL" about specific substances. LSD has been branded as evil because Americans have been taught to despise the drug.
This is why I am flummoxed by all the Drug War pundits who tell me that LSD was outlawed because of the misuse of young people. Clearly, all psychedelics were outlawed by Nixon to punish his opponents, to charge them with felonies and so remove them from the voting rolls. And we should be leery, no pun intended, about all these reports of LSD abuse. LSD was certainly misused -- inevitably so because we refused to educate users and provide safe product -- but we must also remember that all safe and problem-free and insightful use is censored by Drug War media. So if and when safe and inspiring use takes place, we will not even know about it.
Anyone who thinks that America is scientific need only consider how superstitious fears guide our drug policies -- with the help of yellow journalism and politicians who ride the wave of drug hysteria into public office.
Yes, I understand that my experience on LSD may not mirror that of Hofmann's, that set and setting matter, that attitudes matter, etc. etc. And yet I will not be gaslit by Drug War society into ignoring or denying the prima facie potential of a drug like LSD for depressives like myself: it is common sense that such a drug should be trialed by those depressives who are inspired to do so by their reading on the topic. The Drug Warrior's prohibition simply denies me the right to healthcare under the sick belief that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to my own mind and mood.
Havelock Ellis makes a good case for the relative safety of mescaline use. The disturbing implication of his conclusion, however, seems to be that there are, indeed, drugs of misuse, drugs other than mescaline, and that those drugs at least should be banned. I do not claim that Ellis shared this view, only that it is both the mainstream view and a view compatible with the viewpoint implicit in the above quotation. This way of thinking is wrong on so many counts and yet it is the default mindset! It ignores all the stakeholders when it comes to drugs and focuses instead on one constituent: the white American young people whom we refuse to teach about safe use, for whom we refuse to regulate product, and for whom we outlaw all drug choice, thereby throwing them on the mercy of the limited offering that the self-interested Black Market can throw their way.
Again, again, again: It is the prohibitionist mindset that is wrong -- and yet so few drug pundits acknowledge this fact. Instead, authors like Weil, Pollan, McKenna, and Strassman each have their own list of substances that they frown upon as being pointless -- clearly proving that none of them have any skin in the game, and so cannot even imagine the needs of stakeholders with psychological needs and aspirations that are different than their own. They make this huge concession to the hateful Drug Warriors by pretending that the only stakeholders that count are the white young people who might be caught on camera "misusing" a drug. They have zero interest or concern for the depressed sitting quietly behind closed doors wishing they were dead because anti-scientific America has outlawed all drugs that inspire and elate -- out of a hypocritical, racist, xenophobic and ultimately counterproductive attempt to shield their white American young people from the fact that they live in a world filled with psychoactive medicines.
In short, such lukewarm Drug War opponents share the Drug Warrior belief that if a drug can cause addiction, it will do so -- and this coming from people who refuse to teach safe use -- and who think that they have more right to guns than they have to the plants that grow at their feet.
When one thinks of the politically driven hypocrisy of the Drug Warrior, one is furious that these clowns are even taken seriously. They have no interest in the health of the victims of drive-by shootings, or of Mexican "disappearances" -- the Drug War is clearly about something far different than safety. Indeed, Drug Warriors demand the right to funnel guns into those parts of the inner cities that drug policy has already turn into no-go zones. This is adding insult to injury. This is why I am frustrated by those pundits that try to treat this issue "fairly" -- failing to realize that prohibitionist mindset is inherently anti-scientific and anti-patient. It tells us the inhumane lie that a substance that can be misused by a white American young person must not be used by anyone, anywhere, ever.
What a screaming injustice -- one about which the vast majority of brainwashed Americans are ignorant at best and indifferent at worse. And so we continue to live in a world in which suicide, brain-damaging shock therapy, and school shootings are all considered preferable to the use of drugs that could help people live with themselves and others.
"The existential writer Jean-Paul Sartre's experiment with mescaline in 1935, described here by Simone de Beauvoir, coincided with the onset of an extended period of depression and psychosis." --Mike Jay, from Artificial Paradises : a drugs reader, p. 841011
As is often the case in drug literature, this quote is problematic, not because of its content but rather because of the presumptuous way that this content will necessarily be interpreted by members of a society who have been brainwashed from childhood in the drug-hating ideology of the west. For such readers, primed as they are to suspect drugs of all evil, the above quotation will read as a "knockdown" indictment of mescaline, suggesting that the drug was magically responsible, in and of itself, for Sartre's depression and psychosis. The Drug War encourages Americans to assign all sorts of malevolent agency to hated substances and so come up with easy answers to social and psychological problems. Such brainwashed readers fail to realize that human behavior is the result of a balance of a complex interaction of a vast number of inputs of all kinds -- from biochemistry, psychology, social life, genetics, etc. -- and that no one input -- no, not even the use of a controversial "drug" -- is decisive in causing a given behavioral outcome, least of all in the subjective world of psychoactive drug use. The brainwashed reader must be reminded here, therefore, that Sartre's depression coincided with a whole lot of other things than just his use of mescaline. This might "go without saying" in a free world, one which is determined to profit as fully as possible from psychoactive medicine, but in the age of the Drug War, we have to be explicit about such things. Some free-thinking individual has to keep pointing out the importance of context to the millions of minds that have been shackled by the uncritical acceptance of Drug Warrior prejudices.
Of course, the real take-home message that we should draw from the wide variety of reactions to mescaline use is that details matter -- that it is meaningless to talk about the "mescaline experience" per se -- or of the experience provided by any other psychoactive drug -- without at the same time discussing the specifics of use: the dosage, the set, the setting, the user's intention, the user's philosophy of life, their goals, their biochemistry, their genetics, etc. etc. In other words, we must reject the Drug Warrior's claim that we can judge drugs "up" or "down" without regard to context. This, of course, is why drug prohibition is wrong in the first place: a drug that may be problematic for one demographic at one dose can be a godsend for another demographic at another dose -- and yet our anti-scientific fearmongering leads us to outlaw a drug for EVERYBODY provided only that its use might conceivably prove problematic for a white American young person whom we have refused to educate about safe use, for whom we have refused to regulate product quality, and for whom we have outlawed almost all drug choice whatsoever. It is this prohibition mindset that must be rebutted at every turn, for until Americans drop this superstitious way of looking at the world, we will be no better than the caveman of yore who shouted "Fire bad!" -- for there is no philosophical difference between shouting "Fire bad!" and shouting "Fentanyl kills!" or "Crack kills!": all such statements are anti-scientific attempts to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.
These kinds of experiences -- OF A NEW WAY OF SEEING TIME -- should not be reserved for British MPs!!! These are the kinds of effects that William James conjured us as philosophers to study. Why am I the only philosopher in the world, then, who is complaining about drug prohibition and the censorship of academia! Why are these experiences reserved for the Leona Helmsley's of the world: those authors who tell us that we are too immature to use drugs wisely while they themselves partake at will. The condescending hypocrites!
This is why I find books like this so irritating, because they remind me of all the potential knowledge that ignorant racist Drug Warriors are denying the world thanks to their paleolithic desire to scapegoat drugs in the abstract for all social problems. It would be bad enough if prohibitionists were simply denying me my right to take care of my own health -- which they most definitely are -- and yet they are doing far more than that: they are blocking human progress by refusing to let us study ultimate questions. The words "nauseating tyranny" would be a heavy-handed locution in almost every context -- but not in this one.
Nay, instead of complaining, most drug pundits agree with the Big Drug War Lie, that we can judge drugs up or down in advance of even trying to use them wisely for human benefit -- and to learn about the nature of ultimate reality, you know, little things like that.
Again, there is nothing obviously incorrect in the selection from and about Geza Csath in Mike Jay's drugs reader. My concern, as usual, is with how the highlighted facts about Geza will be interpreted in a world in which we demonize psychoactive substances as the root of all evil. If you tell us that morphine has become destructively addictive for a given person in a world in which we actually acknowledge the BENEFITS of wise morphine use, that is one thing. It is quite a different thing, however, to refer (without qualification or clarification) to an "opium addict" in a world in which the media never mentions ANY positive and safe uses of morphine whatsoever. In that latter "Drug War" world, even honest talk about morphine addiction represents a kind of propaganda, because it suggests falsely that such misuse and problematic use is all that can be expected from opiates, insofar as we have dogmatically hidden all beneficial use from the public.
One in four American women take a Big Pharma drug every day of their life. Suppose that the delivery of THOSE drugs was occasionally interrupted or contaminated and women were thereby sent through a kind of emotional hell for want of product. In such a case, we would never think to blame the Big Pharma drugs themselves for the women's plight; we would instead prosaically blame "the supply chain." But when a lack of education, a lack of choice, and a lack of research about wise drug use combines to ensure troubles for the Geza Csaths of the world, we implicitly blame that outcome on the drugs themselves and not on the many social factors that helped bring about their problematic use in the first place. In this sense, the term "addiction" is political. First the drug-hating government does everything it can to make drug use problematic and then it pathologizes as "addicts" those who are damaged by the government's own prohibitionist policies.
As Carl Hart reminds us, most people use drugs wisely, this despite the fact that the government does all it can to make drug use as dangerous as possible. Today's real problem is that we do not even consider safe use to be a good thing! Drug Czar William Bennett (that old chimney-pot toper) hated no one so much as those who used drugs wisely, thereby revealing the warped priorities of the modern Drug Warrior. They are interested in scapegoating and vengeance, not public health. When Americans awaken from their paleolithic slumbers and finally begin to value safe use and to actively teach wise drug-use protocols without prematurely outlawing vast swaths of the psychoactive pharmacopoeia, then and only then can we stop blaming substances for bad social policies.
Imagine a world in which ALL drugs could be used to fight drugs -- in which pharmacologically savvy empaths could be our guides as we use any drug(s) on the planet to meet our peculiar psychosocial goals in life, a world in which drugs are no longer sparingly prescribed by passion-scorning and self-interested materialist doctors under the watchful eye of drug-fearing bureaucrats, a world in which best practices for drug use are established based on actual sane and beneficial usage patterns of responsible individuals, those patterns that we have always dogmatically censored and ignored in the past. In such a free world, it would be blazingly clear to everyone that addiction (by which we mean here "unwanted and problematic dependency") is always a result of a failure to educate and to follow best use practices in a given unique detail-rich situation and not a result of the supposed inherent malignity of any given "drug."
These things would go without saying in a free society, one in which we considered drug-related deaths to be no different in nature than deaths from parachuting or rock climbing or car driving -- a world in which we realized that we can only attain Pyrrhic victories in our attempts to eliminate such risk altogether. But in the age of the Drug War, a philosophical gadfly has to be on hand to keep reminding bamboozled readers of these inconvenient truths, lest they should otherwise attempt to parlay such unqualified factoids (as, for instance, the fact that Geza Csath was an opiate addict) into a supposed knockdown argument for drug prohibition -- when, in reality, it can be clearly shown that prohibition itself inevitably leads to the pharmaceutical dystopias over which we do so much hypocritical and lopsided handwringing.
The fact is that prohibition created addiction as we know it today, as a multi-billion-dollar business for Drug Warriors and moral reformers. In a world in which all drugs were available and we learned how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity, addiction would be rare indeed and always traceable to unique downsides of a personal life situation and not to any drug or substance in and of itself. If, for instance, an individual becomes an alcoholic despite the fact that they could have used phenethylamines that would have provided them transcendence-- nay, a transcendence far superior to that provided by alcohol -- then we must find the cause of such "alcohol abuse" in masochism and a lack of education. To scapegoat alcohol as the causative factor in such a case is to blind ourselves to the real and actionable causes about which we might otherwise actually DO something.
The key, as ever, is to recognize this simple fact: that the prohibitionist mindset is the problem, not "drugs."
In the Wells story about the new accelerator -- which is clearly a drug like cocaine or amphetamine -- the protagonist writes:
"The convenience of securing a long, uninterrupted spell of work in the midst of a day full of engagements cannot be exaggerated."
To which I would respond, "Perhaps not, but that enormous drug benefit can and will be COMPLETELY IGNORED by drug-hating westerners in the age of the Drug War."
This is the remarkable and largely unrecognized fact of the Drug War: that almost all glaringly obvious benefits of drug use, like that of Wells' pharmaceutical accelerator, are, indeed, completely ignored by the materialist mainstream! We never look at these upsides to drug use and ask the question: "How can we gain these glaringly obvious and wonderful benefits as safely as possible?" Instead, we make the truly metaphysical claim that such benefits are not "real" benefits, whatever that means. Like the behaviorists that we are, we insist that "real" cures be found under a microscope.
This is why materialist doctors today cannot even figure out if laughing gas could help the depressed! This is because such researchers are not really out to help the depressed -- they are out instead to prove the relevance and sufficiency of passion-scorning materialism to all areas of human endeavor, even to the quest for self-fulfillment and self-transcendence. They fail to see that it was always a category error to place materialist doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place. The proof is the absurdity to which we have been thereby reduced as a drug-hating society, for we are living in a world in which the FDA approves of brain-damaging shock therapy while refusing to approve any drugs whose use could make shock therapy unnecessary.
Indeed, when it comes to mental health, there is a new Hippocratic Oath at work in the age of the Drug War, one which tells materialist practitioners, in effect, to: "First, do no good." After all, doing good in the age of the Drug War could result in lawsuits and/or arrest by DEA agents who are forever second-guessing a doctor's prescriptions back in Washington, D.C. This, of course, is why we have to claw back our once-sacred right to care for our own mental and emotional states from the self-interested materialist doctors. For the heart has its own reasons that materialist science cannot understand. As long as we accept materialists as the masters of mind and mood, then we will be subject to gaslighting about drugs, like Wells' new accelerator.
"Benefits? What benefits?" asks the materialist doctor, as they approach all drugs from the politically correct viewpoint of a dyspeptic Christian Scientist. But what do we expect? The Drug War weltanschauung obliges scientists to look at psychoactive drugs only through the lurid lenses of misuse and abuse.
"It is utter folly for scientists to attempt to analyze this medicine. Can science analyze God's body?" --Mike Jay, from Artificial Paradises : a drugs reader, p. 109, quotation from Albert Hensley, Native American activist, on the subject of peyote.12
Albert Hensley thus put America's imperialist, parochial and prohibitionist government on notice that peyote use was considered to be religious in nature by the Native American community.
There is a larger issue here that almost no one recognizes, however: and that is the fact that any psychoactive drug has potential religious uses for somebody in some circumstance at some dosage, alone or in combination. ANY PSYCHOACTIVE DRUG. The Hindu religion exists today thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated -- from which it follows that it is the height of religious intolerance to outlaw substances that inspire and elate. To do so is worse than outlawing a particular religion, it is outlawing the religious impulse itself -- except for those rare cases in which a "saintly" individual's default brain chemistry vouchsafes them the cosmic realities that are hidden to the supposed "sober" mind of the hoi polloi.
This is why I am so often at odds with otherwise sensible opponents of the Drug War. They fail to recognize prohibition as the problem and instead play into the Drug Warrior's hands by engaging in special pleading on behalf of specific substances that they wish to have treated as "meds" instead of as "drugs." In a scientific and free world, there would, however, be no such things as "drugs" in the pejorative sense of that term. There would be no substances that are dogmatically supposed to have no beneficial uses, either extant or potential. Instead, most peyote champions deny this fact. They say in effect: "Yes, you Drug Warriors are right, there are many evil substances out there that are completely beyond the pale -- it's just that peyote should not be considered to be one of them!"
Wrong, wrong, wrong. How many times will I have to speak this silenced home truth to deaf ears: drug prohibition is the problem, not "drugs"!
We see the same attitude from psychedelic boosters and marijuana boosters. More special pleading. The average booster tacitly agrees that drugs can be evil: they simply want us to consider psychedelics and/or marijuana and/or peyote as an exception to this rule. So instead of going for the jugular and attacking the insane Manichean philosophy of the Drug War, a world made up of uniquely good and uniquely evil drugs, they play the Drug Warrior's own game of substance branding, trying to make their own drugs of choice into "good guys" in the public eye -- whereas there should be neither good guys nor bad guys when it comes to drugs: merely inanimate substances, all of which have potential uses in a wide variety of imaginable situations -- none of which substances are evil in and of themselves.
Until we recognize this fact, even re-legalization of certain well-branded substances will be subject to overnight re-criminalization. Living as we do in a world in which drugs are considered the root of all evil, it will take only one sensational news story about drug misuse by white American young people to persuade the government to return a psychoactive substance from the "med" category to the "drug" category and so outlaw its use for any purposes whatsoever, religious or otherwise. If we want lasting change, we need to abolish those categories altogether and admit that drugs are drugs are drugs, or rather that psychoactive substances are all psychoactive substances, whether we call them "crack" or "antidepressants."
Under such a new and refreshing dispensation, we would seek to use drugs as wisely as possible for the benefit of individuals -- imagine that! -- ever conscious of the fact that prohibition will always kill far more people than it will ever save, meanwhile working to roll back civil liberties, above all that of religious freedom, and to hand otherwise close elections to tyrants. How? By throwing millions of minorities in jail using drug laws that were originally written for that very purpose, this despite the hilarious gloss about public safety applied to such racist efforts by conservatives who bridle at the least restriction on the use of guns or alcohol, which combine to kill well over 200,000 a year in America alone. Those latter deaths are acceptable, somehow, whereas one single death from MDMA -- even one caused by our failure to educate -- is considered a knockdown argument against drug relegalization? Please!
Stewart does a real public service in this section by comparing the Inquisition's views of peyote to those held by American prohibitionists. The two, of course, are identical in spirit and substance. Yes, the outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of religion, and these shameless imperialist westerners, in both cases, admit it. As God-fearing Christians, they can see no benefits in peyote use: why should anyone else?
It is a sign of the backward times that we are forced to point out enormous injustices like this which would be so obvious in the absence of drug-war brainwashing and censorship.
"Artificial interference with consciousness is, except for valid medical reasons, wrong." --Mike Jay, from Artificial Paradises : a drugs reader, p. 134, quoting religious professor R.C. Zaehner13
This is exactly the kind of quotation that drives me up the wall. Zaehner is so wrong and presumptuous on so many scores -- unless, of course, we take his position as a position of faith: namely, in the tenets of the drug-scorning religion of Christian Science. RC can believe anything he wants. Beliefs are beliefs, after all. He can believe in the evil of "drugs" in the same way that some people believe in fairies. But let us not try to pass off our own intoxiphobic beliefs as facts upon which oppressive drug laws can then be grafted at will.
Let me answer Zaehner's prejudices by catechizing him with some inconvenient questions.
What is "artificial" about chemical use, RC? All human beings are "on drugs" all the time thanks to their body chemistry. We are full of drugs, by default. Everything we do adjusts that brain chemistry in some way and to some extent. At what point does this adjustment of body chemistry suddenly become morally wrong, RC? Is it at the point at which such manipulation influences us to create new religions, as the Vedic religion was inspired by the drinking of the psychoactive Soma in the Indus Valley in 1500 BCE?
Zaehner is infuriating here because he is totally in favor of the status quo that keeps chronic depressives like myself from using godsends that could inspire them in a trice, thus saving them from suicide and shock therapy. RC feels no need for such drugs, so why should anybody else? How damnably presumptuous of him!
How blind Zaehner is to all the obvious common sense uses for drugs.
I will give RC this credit, however: he has the chutzpah to state openly what more cowardly Drug Warriors merely believe in silence: namely, that altering brain chemistry is wrong -- when not done in the socially approved of ways championed by financially interested, hypocritical and racist politicians.
Let's continue the catechism for this modern Torquemada.
1) Is it more moral of me to commit suicide than to use substances that even you yourself can see would cheer me up?
2) Is it more moral of me to have my brain damaged by shock therapy than to adjust my brain chemistry with "drugs"?
I am tempted to ask about Zaehner the question that Shakepeare's Lord asked about Parolles in "All's Well That Ends Well":
"Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?14"
Is it possible that someone can unilaterally damn all religious- and mirth-provoking substances like this and not realize that he is thereby outlawing human transcendence, outlawing human possibility, outlawing the religious impulse, and meanwhile damning all sorts of common-sense therapies that could cheer the depressed up in a trice?!
What intolerant self-satisfied complacence on Zaehner's part. He is the embodiment of the closed-minded Drug Warrior -- and this guy is a religious professor, to boot?
Let me make one last attempt in this section to explain why a guy like this pisses me off so: He clearly knows nothing about the massive downsides of sobriety that constitute the neurotic state, nor is he versed on modern philosophy, which has finally revealed the way that "sober" perception is created biochemically -- for utilitarian purposes only. Instead, Zaehner posits some universal healthy state called "sobriety," a sort of one-size-fits-all way of perceiving the world. Of course he is not unlike Kant and Schopenhauer in this regard. They tacitly posit a one-size-fits-all sober perception as contrasted with the scrambled brain of an inebriant -- failing to realize that biochemistries differ from person to person. There is no one privileged sober perception with which everybody is endowed by default and whose supposedly pristine visions we must guard against contamination from all psychoactive comers.
"The mind of man does not exist in a vacuum. It is associated with the chemistry of the brain and this chemistry underlies all our manifestations." --Artificial Paradises : a drugs reader --p. 27, quote from Robert S. De Ropp15
But then Drug Warriors never have to take responsibility for their naive glorification of "sobriety." They are never held to account for all the suicides that occur because of the Drug Warrior's attempts to demonize supposed "altered states," and yet nothing is clearer than that we promote suicide whenever we purposefully outlaw all substances that inspire and elate.
In short, thanks for nothing, Zaehner. Attitudes like yours have forced chronic depressives like myself to go without glaringly obvious medicines, including the inspiring phenethylamines described in the following user reports in the book "Pihkal" by Alexander Shulgin.
"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place."
"A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like... A true healing potential."
"It had the most profound impact on me... it is certainly an experience one should have once a year, if not oftener."
Just how are these experiences morally wrong, RC, especially when they inspire a religious mindset and help people like me refrain from committing suicide! Think, R.C. think -- or better yet, feel, R.C., feel!
I warned you, readers: I have skin in this game, so please do not be surprised when I lash out at Drug Warriors like this. They have done everything they can to destroy my ability to control my own mind and mood over the last 60 years now, and so I refuse to write in the detached and purportedly objective style of most modern drug pundits. For Milton Friedman was wrong when he told us in 1972 that there would good guys on both sides of the drug legalization debate -- which he should have called the drug re-legalization debate. There are the Drug Warriors who want to shunt me off onto dependence-causing "meds" for life and deny me drugs that could prevent suicide and inspire religion... and there are the champions of Jeffersonian freedoms, who wish to put me back in charge of my own healthcare! This is not some objective battle between two rational mindsets: it is a war between philosophically challenged tyrants and those of us who believe in the individual's right to sovereignty over their own mental and emotional states.
"Similarly incomplete, as could be expected, are the webs of spiders that have been induced to take the urine of schizophrenics, another proof that the disease is first of all physical, first of all a toxicosis." --Mike Jay, from Artificial Paradises : a drugs reader, p. 149, Henri Michaux16
I have just a couple of quick comments to make on this brief section.
1) Michaux here is basically "pooh-poohing" drug-inspired art by claiming that the mindset that produces it also yields impractical and non-utilitarian outcomes in the everyday world, as for instance the shoddy workmanship of webs in the case of intoxicated spiders. But what did Michaux expect? The whole point about psychedelic drug use is that it produces results which are NOT biochemically parsed in favor of individual survival needs, for the spider or for any other creature, but which rather reveal, at least to a curious humanity, a world of metaphysical suggestions about the nature of reality writ large, the nature of what is presumably "really" out there as opposed to that subset of stimuli that our utilitarian-oriented brain parlays into our own particular view of the world. Whether Michaux himself is able to capture that metaphysical world in an art form of which he himself approves is an interesting question, but somewhat beside the point. Suffice it to say, Michaux will never achieve that goal as long as he holds utility to be the standard by which psychedelic experiences are to be judged.
2) Michaux argues that schizophrenia is a physical illness because the urine of some diagnosed schizophrenics will result in incomplete and distorted web designs when consumed by spiders. I would merely point out, however, that all emotional and mental states can be said to have chemical correlates, from which fact, however, it does not follow that such chemical conditions CAUSED anything at all. Those chemical outcomes (such as the impairment of a spider's ability to weave a practical web) may, for aught we know, have themselves been brought about by a wide variety of psycho-social and biochemical factors. The chemical anomalies that Michaux cites as proof of a physical illness could be merely the biochemical markers of a psychosocially created pathology. If we think otherwise, we risk heading down a slippery slope on which all action is eventually going to be referred to chemical states, a world, that is, of chemical determinism, a philosophically challenged shortcut that is all too tempting to take for the materialist who sees the world as a result of an endless stream of ultimately physically based causes and effects.
"Nothing to see here," shouts these materialist scientists. "Everything could not have been otherwise than how it is!"
This blind focus on chemical determinism is responsible for America's psychiatric pill mill, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent upon Big Pharma meds for life. Why? Because neither Drug Warriors nor materialists want us to use psychoactive drugs for common sense reasons. They prefer that we use psychoactive drugs for biochemical reasons, to treat a supposed "one-size-fits-all" problem that is supposed to cause all mental and emotional pathology, again ignoring the difference between correlation and causation. And this approach has been an unmitigated disaster. It has resulted in the greatest mass pharmacological dependency of all time, albeit one about which science-loving and profit-driven America is in complete denial. Let me state for the record here that I am not an enemy of science as such; I am an enemy of the pseudoscience implicit in the modern category error: that of placing materialist scientists in charge of mental and emotional states.
Of course, the search for a biochemical "cause" for depression has failed, even on its own terms. As Noam Shpancer admitted in Psychology Today in 2022, "We don't know how antidepressants work." To which I would add, we don't know that they work at all. They certainly do not work if one's goal is to live large a la Jack Kerouac and not simply to avoid committing suicide! Indeed, Robert Whitaker describes how antidepressants help to cause the very chemical imbalances that they once purported to fix! And yet American remain stubbornly convinced that antidepressants are a "scientific" way to deal with depression -- completely ignoring the fact that the vast pharmacopoeia of outlawed drugs could cheer up a depressive like myself IN A TRICE -- and without any expensive and humiliating "by your leave" by the modern healthcare establishment!
In this 1946 passage, Mezz attempts to explain how marijuana smoking informed and inspired jazz musicians:
"With my loaded horn I could take all the fist-swinging, evil things in the world and bring them together in perfect harmony, spreading peace and joy and relaxation to all the keyed-up and punchy people everywhere. I began to preach my millenniums on my horn, leading all the sinners on to glory." --Mike Jay, from Artificial Paradises : a drugs reader, p. 151, from Mezz Mezzrow, 'Really the Blues'17
It is interesting that cannabis bashers never consider the creation of the jazz genre to be a positive outcome of drug use. This merely reminds us that the selective demonizing of drugs is all about personal tastes and prejudices, it has nothing to do with public health. In any case, health, as GK Chesterton understood, is constituted by a balance of those factors -- and so the question of whether marijuana use is "healthy" or not is absurd in itself. All such questions are meaningful only with respect to given cases -- the question is: is it healthful for whom, in which situation, with which biochemistry, with which social goals and at which dosage and in which drug strains and in which forms of administration, etc. etc. etc.
And this, of course, is why drug prohibition is wrong in the first place. It ignores all the factors that make drug use good or bad and attempts to impose, a priori, a ham-fisted, one-size-fits-all judgement about drugs as the law of the land -- thereby making it illegal for everybody to use a given drug merely because its use could be considered to be problematic according to racist politicians in particular cherry-picked circumstances. As a practical matter, this attitude results in the following absurd drug-approval (or rather drug-disapproval) algorithm: namely, that if a drug can be misused, even in theory, by a white American young person (one whom we refuse to educate about safe use), then it must not be used by anybody ever.
I would also add an anecdotal observation here. I was a piano accompanist in my youth, and shortly after using Prozac for a few years, I began to have difficulties remaining in synch with fellow musicians. My point is not that the antidepressant brought this problem about -- there could have been other causes. My point here is that such reports would be consider extremely worrisome and requiring full-scale investigation were they associated with an illegal drug -- whereas Big Pharma drugs are never freely investigated for such downsides -- if only because most drug studies are ultimately funded by Big Pharma or by government or by institutions that rely on the financial beneficence of those self-interested research funders.
For additional philosophical critiques of Mike Jay's drugs reader entitled Artificial Paradise,
please visit Part 2 here.
Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.
Attempts to improve one's mind and mood are not crimes. The attempt to stop people from doing so is the crime.
I'll never understand Americans. Most of them HATE big government -- and yet they have no problem with government using drug prohibition to control how and how much they can think and feel in this life. Talk about warped priorities.
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.
The scheduling system is a huge lie designed to give an aura of "science" to America's colonialist disdain for indigenous medicines, from opium, to coca, to shrooms.
I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.
Rick Strassman reportedly stopped his DMT trials because some folks had bad experiences at high doses. That is like giving up on aspirin because high doses of NSAIDs can kill.
All uplifting drugs are potential antidepressants. Science denies that fact by claiming that drug efficacy must be proven quantitatively. And so they ignore anecdote, history and psychological common sense.
Scientists are censored as to what they can study thanks to drug law. Instead of protesting that outrage, they lend a false scientific veneer to those laws via their materialist obsession with reductionism, which blinds them to the obvious godsend effects of outlawed substances.
There are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???
Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.