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The metaphysics of drug use and how the drug war outlaws religious liberty

a review of essay number 10 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





June 27, 2025



The following remarks are part of a series of responses to the essays contained in the 2001 book "Hallucinogens: A Reader," edited by Charles Grob1. The comments below are in response to essay number 10: "Sitting for Sessions: Dharma & DMT Research," by Rick J. Strassman, MD


Rick Strassman says his views about the transformative benefits of DMT were "radically changed" after follow-up studies showed that "a small number of volunteers... required some care afterward." But it is unclear what Strassman means by "afterward." He says that the follow-up studies continued for years. Were these negative symptoms encountered the day after treatment, or were they reported months or years after treatment? In any case, it is not clear why Strassman is convinced that they were caused by the use of DMT. Did the participants believe that? If so, on what did they base that belief?

Human behavior is caused by a vast number of inputs and it is not clear why Strassman or his volunteers believe that DMT is the smoking gun here when it comes to negative results that merely followed at some point after the use of DMT. Even if all downsides were somehow caused exclusively by DMT (as if we could ever know or prove that to be the case), in a free world, we would study ways to minimize such downsides of use rather than throwing in the towel at the least sign of trouble and saying: "Oops! There is a negative effect! Let us put an end to all study of this drug!" If we approached other risky activities with such sensibilities, there would be no mountain climbing or free diving or drinking of alcohol for that matter -- because "a small number" of practitioners would be liable to injure themselves in such pursuits.

And so Strassman advocates prohibition (implicitly in this article and explicitly in his "Psychedelic Handbook2") -- prohibition which kills tens of thousands of Black Americans yearly and has destroyed the rule of law in Latin America3 4 5. Prohibition has actually ended democracy in America by jailing over a million minorities and so handed elections to racists and fascists -- and yet apparently anything is better than the possibility that a white American might misuse a drug -- never mind that we refuse to educate them about safe use!!!

Please, Rick!

Why would we want to push for a drug prohibition that will force determined users to synthesize DMT for themselves using highly dangerous chemicals? Is that safe??? Why are we not talking about education instead and a controlled drug supply?

One is reminded of the prohibitionists of the 1920s who promoted laws to add methanol to alcohol, which resulted in 50,000 deaths from rotgut6 7. They were never really interested in health -- to the contrary, they were interested in punishing users, yes, even in murdering them, in anticipation of the day when William Bennett would call for the beheading of drug dealers. Such prohibitionists never take responsibility for the deaths that they cause by the drug policies that they promote. They point instead to the white American young people whom they have supposedly saved from themselves. How? By throwing all other stakeholders under the bus of course, starting with depressives like myself whose right to effective medicine is always completely ignored. Out of sight, out of mind. Who cares if I sit on the side of my bed at 2 in the morning and want to die? Who cares that I could have been cheered up in real-time by the drugs that our prohibitionists demonize a priori? See more on this topic in my essay entitled The Bill Clinton Fallacy8. Sadly, Strassman himself does not see that drug prohibition is the problem 9 here, as he makes depressingly clear in his "Psychedelic Handbook.10"

DMT AND RELIGION

Strassman also explains how the Buddhist community reacted negatively to his experiments. He fails to recognize (or at least to point out) that this negative attitude is a natural result of our repressive drug laws and the prohibitionist mentality by which we denigrate the users of drugs that have inspired entire religions. The Vedic religion was inspired by the use of a drug that inspired and elated11 -- and yet in Drug War parlance, the Vedic people were mere druggie scumbags -- or would be so labeled were their present-day proponents naive enough to emphasize the importance of their ancestors' use of the psychoactive substance known as Soma 12 juice. This is why the Buddhist community wants no mention of drugs in connection with their practice -- because the drug prohibition mindset has completely biased the western world to the sorts of godsend medicines that have been used by indigenous people for millennia. Neither Strassman nor these image-conscious Buddhists sufficiently appreciate that the drug-war mindset is the problem here, not drugs. It is an anti-indigenous mindset that strategically libels all drugs as junk should they have the effect of inspiring religious states.

Instead, Strassman frames the problem as a metaphysical reluctance on the part of mainstream Buddhists to acknowledge the power of drugs. But Buddhists would not be making a fuss about metaphysics had the Drug War not threatened to demonize them as "junkies" were they to adopt a politically incorrect view of psychoactive substances. It is the Drug War that is calling the shots here, not conservative Buddhists. It is the Drug War that is anti-religion (or rather anti-new religions). This is the takeaway message. Sure, the mainstream Buddhists have prejudices against drugs, but let us remember why they have those prejudices in the first place: because racist American politicians have successfully demonized all drugs that are used for the purposes of inspiring religious states.

This metaphysical disdain for drug use -- generated as it was by the Drug War mentality of substance demonization -- begs a legion of telling metaphysical questions:

1) Are the results of meditation invalid if one has ingested coffee in the name of focusing more powerfully on one's transcendental goals?

2) Are the results of meditation invalid if one has used cocaine 13 14 to increase one's mental focus?

3) Are the results of meditation invalid if one is "on" one of the Big Pharma drugs upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life?

4) Are the results of meditation invalid if I have had one beer? What about two beers or three?

People are always on drugs of some sort. Our bodies are full of drugs. That's why we speak of our species' biochemistry. The human body is never drug free. A metaphysical judgment is therefore always implicit in our attempts to deem some drugs fine while we say that others are necessarily evil.

In a world wherein drugs were seen as a tool, without any emotional value invested in their mere names, then no one would ask metaphysical questions like "Was my transcendence 'real' given that I used LSD to attain it?" This is philosophically equivalent to asking, "Is my happiness 'real' since it comes both from using laughing gas and from looking forward to using it?" Absurd question, right? Even the Reader's Digest knows that laughter is the best medicine. And yet doctors like Robert Glatter cannot even figure out if laughing gas 15 can help the depressed, as is clear from the title of his 2021 article in Forbes magazine: "Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment Resistant Depression"?! (Glatter cannot figure out what a five-year-old can clearly see. Why? Because he is blinded by the ideologies of behaviorism and reductive materialism 16.)

According to the materialist metaphysic of the Drug Warrior, it is better for a depressed person like myself to commit suicide 17 or to undergo brain-damaging shock therapy than for me to use such "drugs"! This is the implicit message and inevitable result of such biochemical navel-gazing as materialists undertake in the age of the Drug War. This is why it is always a struggle for me to write dispassionately about these topics, because I have skin in this game. I suffer from the results of the bamboozled mindsets that other drug pundits either take in stride or else ignore entirely. I am the one who goes without godsend medicines thanks to their racist and xenophobic prejudices; I am the one who is shunted off onto Big Pharma 18 19 drugs upon which I am made a patient for life.

CONCLUSION

This Drug War metaphysics is our problem today, based as it is on the medicalization and moralization of drug use. Were Buddhists and Hindus to act with courage and principle rather than mere prudence, they would push back against the Drug War ideology of substance demonization which has inspired this racist and xenophobic metaphysics of drug use in the first place. Instead, they accept the false and imported Drug War notion that some drugs are indeed evil and they go from there. This is why I say that the Drug War is the philosophical problem par excellence of our time. It warps our judgments in all areas of life, blinding us to the obvious and making us recoil in horror from drugs merely because they have been successfully branded as demonic by racist and xenophobic demagogues.



Notes:

1: Hallucinogens: a reader (up)
2: The Psychedelic Handbook: A Practical Guide to Psilocybin, LSD, Ketamine, MDMA, and Ayahuasca (up)
3: Gun Deaths in Big Cities (up)
4: Mexico’s president accuses press and volunteer searchers for missing people of ‘necrophilia’ (up)
5: Mexico's war on drugs: More than 60,000 people 'disappeared' (up)
6: Bootleggers and Bathtub Gin (up)
7: Prohibition's Death Toll: Alcohol's Deadly Legacy (up)
8: The Bill Clinton Fallacy (up)
9: Drug Prohibition is the Problem, not Drugs: what the movers and shakers get wrong in the drug re-legalization debate (up)
10: Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman (up)
11: The Rig Veda (up)
12: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay (up)
13: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis (up)
14: On Cocaine (up)
15: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide (up)
16: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors (up)
17: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use (up)
18: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science (up)
19: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? (up)


Hallucinogens: a Reader, edited by Charles Grob




Essays about the opinions expressed in Hallucinogens by Charles Grob.

  • Cocaine and Ecstasy are not evil
  • Drug Prohibition and the Metaphysical Search for 'Real' Religious Inspiration
  • How Ralph Metzner was bamboozled by the Drug War ideology of substance demonization
  • Sartre and Speed
  • The Drug War is One Big Branding Operation to Demonize Mind and Mood Medicine
  • The metaphysics of drug use and how the drug war outlaws religious liberty
  • The thin line between honesty and fearmongering in the age of the War on Drugs
  • Want to end freedom in America? Just terrify philosophically clueless parents about the boogieman called drugs
  • Why America cracked down on LSD





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    Freud's real discovery was that drugs like cocaine could make psychiatry UNNECESSARY for the vast majority of people. The medical establishment hated the idea -- so they judged the drug based on its worst possible use!

    Most psychoactive substance use can be judged as recreational OR medicinal OR both. The judgements are not just determined by the circumstances of use, either, but also by the biases of those doing the judging.

    The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.

    In "How to Change Your Mind," Michael Pollan says psychedelic legalization would endanger young people. What? Prohibition forces users to decide for themselves which mushrooms are toxic, or to risk buying contaminated product. And that's safe, Michael?

    The FDA should have no role in approving psychoactive medicine. They evaluate them based on materialist standards rather than holistic ones. In practice, this means the FDA ignores all glaringly obvious benefits.

    "Chemical means of peering into the contents of the inner mind have been universally prized as divine exordia in man’s quest for the beyond... before the coarseness of utilitarian minds reduced them to the status of 'dope'." -- Eric Hendrickson

    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.

    Q: Where can you find almost-verbatim copies of the descriptions of religious experiences described by William James? A: In descriptions of user reports of "trips" on drugs ranging from coca to opium, from MDMA to laughing gas.

    Drug-designing chemists have no expertise in deciding what constitutes a cure for depression. As Schopenhauer wrote: "The mere study of chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher."

    Someone tweeted that fears about a Christian Science theocracy are "baseless." Tell that to my uncle who was lobotomized because they outlawed meds that could cheer him up -- tell that to myself, a chronic depressive who could be cheered up in an instant with outlawed meds.


    Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






    The thin line between honesty and fearmongering in the age of the War on Drugs
    The New York Times is at it again, bashing drugs out of context


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