some thoughts on Andy Mitchell's book on psychedelics
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 19, 2025
Author's note: The following is not so much a review of Mitchell's book as it is a philosophical "riff" on the ideas that it contains.
In the introduction to "Ten Trips 1," Andy Mitchell tells us that:
"The year 2018 proved to be something of a psychedelic annus mirabilis with the publication of Michael Pollan's careful, compelling bestseller How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics. 2"
The year may have been miraculous for psychedelic advocates, but for folks who might profit from such drugs, it was the same old story: more glacial progress as westerners try to wrap their minds around facts that indigenous people have known for millennia.
2018 was NOT an annus mirabilis for the depressed, for instance. They knew that endless controversial studies still lay ahead for the approval of a promising substance or two, which would probably even then be available only in a clinical setting under the hawk-eyed supervision of an extremely expensive medical doctor.
In 2018, the powers-that-be merely tossed a bone to chronically depressed people like myself -- a kind of promissory note suggesting that someday the government might actually approve of a time-honored godsend medicine -- one that was to be justified, however, by the western world's REDUCTIVE MATERIALIST standards, which is a kind of pharmacological colonialism on our part, but let that pass. Nevertheless, the drug might possibly be grudgingly approved for the likes of me... eventually. (I should live so long!) These promising drug therapies, however, supposing that they are finally legalized, are far more likely to be used by well-heeled NFL players and Wall Street sharks rather than the people who need them the most.
Nor is it just financial considerations that bar most depressed people from such therapies. It has been found (or rather it has been theorized) that modern antidepressants 3 muck about with serotonin levels in a way that can theoretically make psychedelic use problematic. This is a real possibility, given the fact that even healthcare professionals no longer claim to even know how such drugs work (assuming that they "work" at all, at least as the user might define that term) 4. It's a poorly studied problem referred to in the literature as "Serotonin Toxicity Syndrome.5." My initial research suggests that this apparently very rare condition is chiefly an issue only with poly-drug users (those who freely use a wide variety of drugs in combination), but that does not really matter. Liability-conscious drug researchers and entrepreneurs are not taking chances. The leader of that ayahuasca session in Peru is going to turn you down if you fill out their application form honestly, as are the lab coats who are seeking volunteers to study psilocybin. In other words, 2018 was a miraculous year -- for everybody except those who could most benefit from psychedelics: namely, the depressed. This is ironic since the new mainstream palatability of psychedelics is all predicated on the belief that such substances can help that very demographic.
I'M ALLERGIC TO POLLAN
Michael may be careful and compelling, but he is not a drug re-legalization advocate as you might suppose in reading his books -- or the many books that characterize him as a drug-law reformer. Michael is still a fan of drug prohibition, notwithstanding the 60,000 that were disappeared in Mexico over the last 20 years6, notwithstanding the 67,000 American deaths in inner cities in the last ten years alone due to gun violence brought about by drug prohibition7, notwithstanding the deaths on city streets due to the lack of education and drug regulation, notwithstanding the fact that drug prohibition has handed America its first fascist president by using drug laws to throw hundreds of thousands of minority voters in jail.
To which Michael would seem to reply: "No price is too high, provided only that we can protect America's young people from the drug kingpin known as Mother Nature."
A few more words about Michael Pollan.
It is a sign of the bamboozled times when a conservative like Michael Pollan is considered to be on the cutting edge when it comes to drug law reform.
THE LEONA HELMSLEY OF THE DRUGS DEBATE
Michael is the Leona Helmsley of the psychedelic world. He makes a living by tantalizing us about the potential benefits of drugs which he feels that the rest of us are too immature to even use. Little people use antidepressants; our betters use psychedelics -- and any other drug that they can claim to be investigating on our benighted behalf.
Michael's conservative slant on these topics is clear from the fact that he emphasizes the supposed dangerous irresponsibility of LSD users in the 1960s, totally ignoring the fact that such drug use inspired a "Summer of Love," something which one might have thought was a GOOD thing in a world under the threat of nuclear annihilation thanks to the hate-filled propensities of Homo sapiens. Before judging the hippies, Michael should have compared their outlook on life to the mainstream outlook against which the hippies were rebelling: one that was championing war and nuclear proliferation. How safe does Michael consider it to be to be living under a nuclear sword of Damocles? America came close to nuclear annihilation at least twice during the 1960s, once thanks to the Russians and once thanks to our own Air Force. It was not the hippie mindset that promoted the creation of thermonuclear weapons, it was the establishment mindset.
HOW SAFE IS SAFE?
So, Michael is interested in safety? Let's see, now: which is the biggest safety concern: the fact that a few young people in California might misuse a drug about which we refuse to educate them "on principle"... or the fact that a thermonuclear weapon could detonate on the East Coast, ending American life as we know it, and probably ending America itself. Wow! It's a real poser, huh? Tough call... but I'm guessing that the threat of nuclear annihilation is the bigger problem here and that we should therefore promote the hippies' efforts to inspire peace, love and understanding, rather than working to make their utopia fail through the strategic use of racist-inspired drug laws and arrests. But that's just me.
It makes you wonder who the real dreamers are: the peace-niks who think that love and peace is the answer, or the mainstream pundits who believe that America can play with dynamite forever and never be blown up.
I'M CLEANER THAN YOU!
I got a little grumpy when Mitchell used the word "clean" to describe himself in his autobiographical introduction. It may seem like I am quibbling here, but that is only because in a drug-war society, one becomes used to using the word "clean" in this puritanical way. It's hard to imagine Galen or Avicenna thinking of themselves (or their patients) as "clean" merely because they did without psychoactive nostrums. To the contrary, they would surely think that they were masochists for not availing themselves of beneficial medicines. There is also something vaguely anti-indigenous about assuming that we are "clean" when we go without Mother Nature's medicines. Andean tribespeople do not primp themselves on being "clean" whenever they ignore the medicinal bounty that surrounds them in the rain forest. This boast of being "clean" becomes even stranger when you consider all the medicines that we have never even bothered to learn about thanks to our drug-hating propensities in the west. How do we know that we do not need a drug when we have yet to even learn of its existence and the benefits that it could offer, psychologically, spiritually, etc., either alone or in combination with other drugs, et c.
Our ideas on this topic seem very close to the Christian Science theology of Mary Baker Eddy, to claim that we are "clean" when we do not use drugs. I may as well say that I am "clean" because I refuse to use penicillin. The truth is, however, that I do not acquire any brownie points from heaven no matter how piously and publicly I might go about the business of renouncing a drug. This idea of being "clean" is also odd because all of us are on drugs all the time. That's why they call it our biochemistry. Why did William Blake or Master Eckhart or Teresa of Avila have ecstatic visions? Surely their biochemistry helped facilitate such epiphanies.
Here is the offending passage.
"I'd been clean and sober for a couple of decades now -- no drugs, no booze, just kombucha.8"
Does Mitchell not realize the value-laden nature of the term "clean" here? What if I told him that I think he is "dirty" for using that kombucha tea? I have just as much right to draw that conclusion as he has to imply that I am dirty for using psilocybin or opium or coca.
As GK Chesterton wrote:
"It is said that the Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things."
--GK Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils 9
This is the whole problem with drug prohibition. It makes everyone an expert on what is wise use and what constitutes a cheap and dangerous thrill. It invites everyone to make up their own list as to what is good and what is bad, under the warped assumption that drugs can be judged "up" or "down" without regard to context of use.
SHUT UP AND TAKE YOUR MEDS
In the introduction, Mitchell takes the party line when it comes to antidepressants: the idea that antidepressants are fine, but that there is room for improvement, etc. etc.
This is the viewpoint that the medical establishment promotes whenever they talk about "treatment-resistant depression." That term implies that we have a good answer for depression already, thank you very much, but that some people have finicky biochemistries that fail to respond to the one-size-fits-all interventions of modern science. (Shame on them! Don't they know that they are being unscientific by refusing to respond properly to our rationally-devised cures?!) This kind of uncritical confidence in antidepressants is bizarre to me, given both the facts of the case and my own experience on such drugs. But pill-pushing pundits in the medical community never ask the depressed what they think -- least of all someone with 30+ years of experience on the receiving end of their nostrums. We are patients, after all. What do we know? Our job is to shut up and take our meds.
And yet at the risk of appearing insolent, I will proceed.
Antidepressants are notoriously difficult to "kick," and some of them, like Venlafaxine/Effexor, are effectively IMPOSSIBLE to kick 10. My own psychiatrist told me that Effexor has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users. 95%! And there is reason to believe that the 5% who stay off the drug encounter cognitive impairment. That is why I myself am back on Effexor after quitting the drug for several months. I noticed that I was simply no longer able to think straight! When I went back on the drug, my mental capacity returned to normal. Clearly, the drug had mucked about with my brain chemistry in an irreversible way. And yet these are the kinds of drugs that our materialist medical establishment (and their credulous mouthpieces in the media) still tell us are working just fine, thank us very much! In fact, we're told that MORE people should be using them, including kids! There is an epidemic of depression, after all, isn't there?
In the book's intro, Mitchell transcribes his conversation with a friend Aurora, a self-proclaimed 'ayahuascara', during which he tells her that more people die from depression than from heart disease and cancer combined. This statement is wrong by an order of magnitude. Actually the combined mortalities of heart disease and cancer are more like 1,500,000 a year in the States, whereas the total suicides in 2023 were just over 49,000 111213. I assume, however, that this was a casual conversation that Andy was having, so it is probably wrong to hold him accountable for such inaccuracies. We must assume that he was either doing some serious "rounding up" in order to make a point, or that he simply misspoke. My point is only that doctors have a vested interest in exaggerating on this score. If more people do not take depression seriously, they might not be able to buy a new car next year.
I question, however, how seriously people really want to take things like suicide 14. In my view, all anti-suicide groups should be focused on ending the War on Drugs, which outlaws all substances that, like an epi pen for allergies, could save the life of a depressed person in an emergency situation. All groups that protest shock therapy should be focused on ending drug prohibition, which outlaws precisely those drugs which could elate the depressed and so make shock therapy unnecessary. But most such groups have no interest in pushing back against the War on Drugs. Like most Americans, they want to have their cake and eat it too: they want to have drug prohibition and they want to end suicide. They want to have drug prohibition and they want to end gunfire in city streets. They want to have drug prohibition and they want to end academic censorship. They want to have drug prohibition and they want to have fair elections (ones in which the winner is not simply the one who has sent the most political opponents to jail with the help of drug laws written for that very purpose).
America can't have it both ways. Drug prohibition is the problem, not drugs. How many more downsides do we need to ignore before the penny drops? And more importantly, what freedoms will remain for us by the time that we finally come to our senses?
GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT
The idea that materialists should be in charge of mind and mood medicine is really a philosophical idea, based on a belief in the limitless powers of rationalism to solve modern problems. But does that philosophy make sense? There is an easy way to find out. As philosopher Alfred North Whitehead reminds us:
"The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us." --The Concept of Nature15
And does the above-mentioned philosophy lead to absurd results? You bet it does!
What could be more absurd than the medical establishment of today that claims to find no positive uses for laughing gas, or MDMA, or cocaine, or even for opium, a drug that was considered to be a panacea by such medical luminaries as Galen, Paracelsus and Avicenna? What could be more absurd than a world in which doctors tell us that laughing gas cannot help the depressed? What could be more absurd than an FDA that approves of (and even promotes) electroshock therapy for the severely depressed and yet outlaws the inspirational medicines whose use could make that shock therapy unnecessary 16 ?
QED
The philosophy behind the materialist approach to psychological healthcare must be rejected. It must be finally recognized that it was a category error to place materialist doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place. And yet the medical establishment cannot simply hand its job back to the public from which they helped to snatch it thanks to their strategic and hypocritical demonization of drugs like cocaine and opium. Such a gift to the public would be a sort of white elephant in the age of drug prohibition. After all, the public is forbidden by law from taking care of their own health. This, of course, is just one of the endless reasons why drug prohibition should come to an end at long last, after a deadly and racist-fueled reign of over 100 years now. For this to happen, the narrative about drug legalization has to change: we must stop focusing on a perceived threat to white American young people and start focusing on the fact that drug prohibition denies us the most fundamental right of all: the right to heal.
LET THEM DRINK ROTGUT
Mitchell favorably references Rick Strassman17, another pundit who is afraid of re-legalizing Mother Nature. Like Pollan, Strassman is worried about the poor little Americans who might misuse DMT, but has no concern about the victims of drive-by shootings and the mass incarceration of minorities 18 and the end of the rule of law that is brought about by prohibition. He also seems unaware of the fact that drug prohibition forces DMT fans to use highly dangerous chemicals to synthesize the drug for themselves. But then prohibitionists never seem to recognize such downsides -- or maybe they consider such drug experimenters to be getting their "just deserts." During liquor prohibition, the Anti-Saloon League insisted that industrial alcohol be made deadly with the addition of methanol, under the theory that this would either cut down on alcohol use... or else teach drinkers a lesson -- a lesson, by the way, that sent 50,000 to their graves in the 1920s after they unwittingly drank the aptly named "rotgut."1920.
CONCLUSION/REMINDER
Again, not a review of Mitchell's books, just a riff on some themes.
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
Just think how many ayahuasca-like godsends that we are going without because we dogmatically refuse to even look for them, out of our materialist disdain for mixing drugs with drugs.
Drug warriors are full of hate for "users." Many of them make it clear that they want users to die (like Gates and Bennett...). The drug war has weaponized humanity's worst instincts.
All drugs have positive uses at some dose, for some reason, at some time -- but prohibitionists have the absurd idea that drugs can be voted up or down. This anti-scientific notion deprives the modern world of countless godsends.
We throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.
We don't need people to get "clean." We need people to start living a fulfilling life. The two things are different.
It's really an insurance concern, however, disguised as a concern for public health. Because of America's distrust of "drugs," a company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.
The best long-term treatment for OUD would be to normalize the nightly smoking of opium at home, not to addict the user to government-supplied drugs that render them impervious to the benefits of the poppy plant.
The drug war is the defeatist doctrine that we will never be able to use psychoactive drugs wisely. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the government does everything it can to make drug use dangerous.
This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.
I got a little grumpy when Mitchell used the word "clean" to describe himself in his autobiographical introduction. It may seem like I am quibbling here, but that is only because in a drug-war society, one becomes used to using the word "clean" in this puritanical way. It's hard to imagine Galen or Avicenna thinking of themselves (or their patients) as "clean" merely because they did without psychoactive nostrums. To the contrary, they would surely think that they were masochists for not availing themselves of beneficial medicines. There is also something vaguely anti-indigenous about assuming that we are "clean" when we go without Mother Nature's medicines. Andean tribespeople do not primp themselves on being "clean" whenever they ignore the medicinal bounty that surrounds them in the rain forest. This boast of being "clean" becomes even stranger when you consider all the medicines that we have never even bothered to learn about thanks to our drug-hating propensities in the west. How do we know that we do not need a drug when we have yet to even learn of its existence and the benefits that it could offer, psychologically, spiritually, etc., either alone or in combination with other drugs, et c.
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
