At the risk of being charged as a heretic in the pro-legalization community, I have to engage in a little push-back against the scientific approach to drug-law reform being championed by Rick Doblin and Roland Griffiths. Of course, I cheer on their efforts to the extent that they succeed in bringing mental godsends to people in need (which is to say almost everybody in the world, whether in fighting depression or truly awakening their minds to the marvels of life), but I think we should stop for a moment and consider the downsides of the system that they are "playing ball with" in order to attain their goals.
First, the scientific method is not the appropriate way to study psychedelics as healing medicine. Sure, science can try to quantify what's going on in the brain of a "user" and identify brain receptors and electrical activity, but it can and should have nothing to say about the meaning and value of such experiences. Those are qualitative issues which science, by its very quantitative nature, is not qualified to assess. As philosophers would say, the scientist deals with the world of res extensa, things that can be measured, and typically denies the very existence of a separate world of thought, res cogitans, to the point that they even chided Roland for including the word "consciousness" in the name of his new center for the study of psychedelics. In other words, the scientist qua scientist looks at the epiphanies spawned by psychedelics and says, "Nothing to see here. It's all just the result of matter combining in various ways without any regard for the hopes and dreams of carbon-based computers like ourselves."
But that does not stop scientists from trying to snag qualitative data from study participants, while doing their best to shield the participants from the supposedly prejudicial influence of their environment. The usual scientific approach in this regard is to perform double-blind and even triple-blind experiments in the hope of receiving "unbiased" feedback from their psychedelic trial participants. In other words, the standard MO is to keep the test subject in the dark -- or even mislead them -- about the nature of the substance that they are about to ingest. But as Alexander Shulgin points out, such experiments are borderline immoral when the drug being tested is a psychedelic, a drug whose positive experiences are generally imparted only to those who approach those experiences with the right set of expectations. When we lie to such clients, or even just "keep them in the dark" about the nature of the substance that they are to receive, then we put them at risk of a bad trip -- yes, even in cases where we give them nothing but a placebo! In other words, when it comes to psychedelics, the scientific method has met its match. Psychedelics, by the subjective nature of their effects, starkly confront us with the unacknowledged limits of the scientific approach to life, which Americans naively believe can deal with any topic under the sun.
(Incidentally, I'm always surprised when I hear researchers breezily talking about how they lie to research study participants in order to avoid giving them "expectations." Even if we find those lies useful, they have surely reached their sell-by date now, since every decently educated drug study participant knows that it is, and has long been, common practice for researchers to lie to the participants of psychologically oriented research studies. So when modern studies employ such mendacity, the question needs to be asked in the nature of a game theory inquiry: how many study participants were expecting the researchers to lie to them and so discounted the pre-study information that they were given?)
Here's another problem with the scientific approach to drug research: it never puts the downsides of psychoactive substances in a proper context.
The scientific environment in which these guys work is astonishingly anti-use, as if drug evaluation guidelines had been written by Mary Baker Eddy herself. The algorithm for approving a psychoactive drug seems to be as follows: If the substance could (even theoretically) cause problems for a few uneducated white teenagers, then it must not be used anywhere, ever, for anybody. Thus millions -- perhaps billions -- of people go without godsend medicine. Yet Roland, by his silence on this topic, seems to think that this is a just and reasonable way to proceed. We want to be cautious after all. But it's that ENORMOUS caution that has kept me for a lifetime now from leaning down and using the plant medicine that grows at my feet.
It's as if the researchers think they can save EVERYBODY by keeping a substance illegal, whereas all they are really doing is shifting the downsides of their drug disapproval decisions to the quietest, least empowered communities, like the chronically depressed for instance, who are no political threat, as they generally sit at home leading what Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation." No politician is going to raise hell if the well-being of this taciturn demographic is not taken into consideration by drug researchers.
What will it take for scientists to wake up to the fact that the drug-approval process is incredibly anti-statistical? Why are the interests of juvenile delinquents always put ahead of the millions of needy depressed like myself? What we need is a new March on Washington, in which the depressed and those suffering pain demand their rights and demand to be considered as full stakeholders in the drug approval game, rather than as a group that can be safely thrown under the bus so that scientists can cater to the prejudices of the loudest-shouting Drug Warrior demagogue in Washington, DC.
To further illustrate the contextual blindness of modern drug researchers, consider the following questions that never occur to such researchers:
1) How many suicides could be prevented if we legalize this psychoactive medicine?
2) How many topers might give up alcohol if we legalize this psychoactive medicine?
3) How many lives will grind to a slow depressive halt if we do NOT legalize this psychoactive medicine?
4) How many inner-city youth will be killed by gun violence caused by prohibition if we do NOT legalize this psychoactive medicine?
5) How many users will die or be harmed by tainted product if we do NOT legalize this psychoactive medicine?
6) How many will use this substance unwisely if we do not legalize, normalize and fund research on this psychoactive medicine?
7) Should use of this psychoactive medicine lead to habituation, would that be any worse than the lifetime habituation that occurs for 1 in 4 American women on Big Pharma meds?
This is just another way of saying to safety-obsessed drug researchers: you can't save everybody!
I'm not saying to ignore safety concerns, merely to place them in some context. Roland, for instance, cites some anecdotal studies that some MDMA users have long-term problems that they attribute to the drug, although he admits that these rare cases seem to involve unusually heavy use and that the MDMA may have been mixed with other drugs (not to mention the fact that purity of the drug is always rendered in doubt thanks to substance prohibition). But this is a concern that merits a warning label and public education, surely, not an across-the-board ban on a time-honored empathogen that could be used therapeutically to end school shootings and to dissuade world leaders from green-lighting the use of nuclear weapons! (Ketamine treatment should come with a warning about potential urinary problems for excessive use, but because science today is politicized, such well-documented potential downsides are hushed up with impunity by Ketamine providers. So much for America's supposedly "scientific" process of drug approval.)
Yet another related problem with the scientific method: its number-one consideration (at least as a matter of official policy) is user safety. But the number-one consideration of drug users is self-actualization and self-transcendence, with safety coming in second. My personal goal in life, for instance, is to know myself and the world I live in, and psychoactive drugs help me when they show me that there is so much more to reality than the world as perceived by my socially trained five senses. I would far prefer to live a full drug-empowered life for 60 years than a dull drug-free life for 80. Like the opium-loving physician Avicenna, 'I prefer a short life with width to a narrow one with length.' So when scientists tell me of a drug's danger, as if that's the last and final word on the subject, I say, "Thanks, but now let me make up my mind for myself whether to use it or not," because the decision to use is always a personal one, based on one's own philosophy of what constitutes the good life -- and science, for all its powers, is not able to tell me what sort of life I should lead. Science values longevity and safety in the abstract. Fine. But for me, self-actualization comes first.
But to repeat, more power to these guys if they can make headway against this "scientific" system for drug approval. That said, Rick has been busting his proverbial for 30 years now and the legalization date for MDMA just keeps getting pushed back further and further by the bureaucratic system that he's partnered with. If Trump "comes to power" again, all bets are off on the turnaround time on the long-overdue approval this one solitary and much-maligned substance.
To be honest, I'm hoping that such frustratingly incremental efforts ("incremental" being a generous word here) will eventually be rendered moot by the initiatives of states like Colorado and Oregon, where substance legalization continues apace and where the therapeutic value of at least some psychoactive meds is now acknowledged. The time is ripe, at least in such enlightened outposts, for the creation of a replacement for pill-mill psychiatry, whereby the depressed will no longer be looked upon as replaceable widgets amenable to one-size-fits-all cures that enrich the 1%. In this new paradigm, the very concept of a psychiatric "patient" will disappear, as the depressed and the carefree visit the same psychologically savvy empath to learn about themselves and the world around them through a new kind of drug-assisted therapy, whose goal is neither to turn them into good consumers nor flower children, but simply to help them live the "good life" according to their own definition of that term.
Author's Follow-up:
May 20, 2025
It's touching to see how naive I was back in December of 2022. I actually thought that Oregon and Colorado drug law reforms were part of an inevitable march in the direction of a sensible non-medicalized view of psychoactive medicines. Drug warriors have since infiltrated the state of Oregon and overturned their decision to decriminalize drug possession. There was even an attempt last year to outlaw free speech about drugs in the state. These Drug Warriors want to return ASAP to America's time-honored practice of sweeping social problems under the rug of drug laws, the practice of redefining social problems as drug problems. Just give the police the power to arrest the homeless and you no longer have to deal with the lack of affordable housing. As for those whom we have poisoned by refusing to teach about and regulate drugs, we merely have to arrest those people to make that government-created health problem disappear from the American mind. This attitude is so wrong and so evil that one scarcely knows where to begin in attacking it. That is why I have written hundreds of essays on the topic of imbecilic drug prohibition, to come at the problem from every possible angle and so attempt to cause complacent America to renounce at long last its many prohibitionist pieties. Especially those right-wingers who insist on no government interference with guns. Do they not see that drug prohibition puts the government in charge of pain relief and of deciding how and how much you can think and feel in life? Do you really think that a government that claims such power will stint at outlawing guns the moment they think they have the power to do so?
Principles, guys! Principles! That's what America was founded upon and that's what the Drug War is all about completely ignoring!
Open Letters
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
To oppose the Drug War philosophically, one has to highlight its connections to both materialism and the psychiatric pill mill. And that's a problem, because almost everyone is either a Drug Warrior or a materialist these days and has a vested interest in the continuation of the psychiatric pill mill.
The best harm-reduction strategy is to re-legalize drugs.
Drug Warriors rail against drugs as if they were one specific thing. They may as well rail against penicillin because cyanide can kill.
"When two men who have been in an aggressive mood toward each other take part in the ritual, one is able to say to the other, 'Come, let us drink, for there is something between us.' " re: the Mayan use of the balche drink in Encyc of Psych Plants, by Ratsch & Hofmann
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???
Americans think that fighting drugs is more important than freedom. We have already given up on the fourth amendment. Nor is the right to religion honored for those who believe in indigenous medicines. Pols are now trying to end free speech about drugs as well.
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"