a philosophical review of 'Start Your Own Religion: New York State's Acid Churches' by Devin R. Lander
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
January 13, 2024
As someone who is convinced that the Drug War is a war on religious liberty, I was attracted at once to the paper on Academia.edu entitled "Start Your Own Religion" by Devin R. Lander1. It tells the story of Timothy Leary's attempts to justify the use of psychoactive medicines on religious grounds along with what he took to be our obvious right to internal freedom. Of course, any time I read anything about "drugs" today, I am on the qui vive for prejudices (subtle and otherwise) on the part of the author since every American - and I dare say most westerners - have been raised in a censored world in which they have been carefully and indeed strategically shielded from talk of positive use of drugs, down to the very TV shows they've watched whose plots have been tweaked by various White Houses to conform with the party line that drugs are bad. The good news is, the article seems free of most of the usual anti-drug assumptions, but I do have a few comments to make, not so much to criticize the paper as to expand upon it.
First, a general statement. It is commonplace these days to speak of Leary's excesses and to suggest that he was his own worst enemy when it came to proselytizing on behalf of his beliefs, but we should remember that he had nothing less than the entire establishment against him, including the news media and politicians, and that his enemy's goal was to portray him as a crackpot. If Madison Avenue can make us buy $40,000 cars and drink unnecessarily expensive coffee on a daily basis - meanwhile selling us drugs like Rinvoq whose side effects include cancer and death -- surely it can make us laugh at guys like Leary and consider them to be "beyond the pale." So it's no coincidence that what most Americans feel about Timothy Leary these days just happens to be exactly what Richard Nixon and co. wanted us to feel about him: namely, that he was nuts.
Leary's real problem, however, was that he was way ahead of his time. Imagine loudly and defiantly claiming a right to freedom of thought at a time when drugs were considered evil incarnate and it was de facto illegal to even mention them by name in pop music. In fact, Leary is way ahead of OUR time, for despite some glacial progress, Americans still hold the superstitious belief that drugs can be voted up or down and that such substances, once criminalized, can have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, ever. Moreover, he recognized over 50 years ago what only a handful of Americans are beginning to dimly realize today, that the War on Drugs is truly a war against religion, insofar as its practical result is to keep the individual from having transcendent experiences that many believe to be both holy and informative of a deep but normally unseen reality, what Wordsworth called "a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused."
Not only was Leary right on this topic, but he did not go far enough, for the outlawing of psychoactive substances is not merely the outlawing of a form of religion - it is also the outlawing of academic freedom. William James himself urged his students to study altered states of consciousness in order to better understand ultimate reality. "No account of the universe in its totality," wrote James," can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." Yet disregard them we must in the name of the anti-scientific War on Drugs2. In fact, even as I write, both the UK and US are making a hypocritical and anti-scientific fuss about outlawing laughing gas, William James's go-to-drug - at a time when they should be making it readily available for potential suicides, just as we make epi pens available for those with severe allergies3.
Now to a slightly more specific issue: The author criticizes Leary crony Art Kelps for drawing exaggerated and "highly dubious" comparisons between the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany and the treatment of members of the psychedelic churches of the sixties. Now, I agree that this is ground upon which one must tread carefully as an author and as an activist, lest one unintentionally be seen to downplay the evils of the past, and I'll take Levin's word for it that Kelps overstepped the bounds of good taste and plausive analysis in this regard. I would point out, however, that we should not be so fearful of drawing analogies that we fail to recognize an evil when it exists, an evil which, left unchecked, could lead at least in the general direction of Nazism4.
Consider the situation from a drug user's point of view: the drug user is actually not allowed to work in the USA, at least if the Drug Warriors have anything to say about it. For users can be removed from the workforce without trial and without charge, merely because their digestive systems contain a substance of which politicians disapprove. In fact, the Fourth Amendment has been suspended in America for the purpose of "outing" such users. Meanwhile, minority drug users can be removed from public housing. They can lose benefits for their child care, their social security, they can even lose their children. Entire estates may be confiscated by police if even a small amount of "drugs" are found on the premises, even if said drugs do not belong to the property owner. Consider, moreover, that American public officials like Police Chief Daryl Gates and Drug Czar William Bennett are on record as saying that drug users should be shot and beheaded respectively. Bennett also wanted the names of users to be listed in local newspapers, though it's not clear whether this would happen before or after they had been beheaded. Should we wait for guys like Bennett to start calling for drug users to be "rounded up" before we begin raising the alarm?
Okay, we're not yet at the level of Nazi injustice, but anyone who truly believes in the doctrine of "never again" should be sitting up and taking notice of these trends, especially since Donald Trump, should he "take over" in 2024, has told us he will be executing the poor minorities that prohibitionists have thus far been content merely to imprison for life. But few national groups are standing up and saying that this is wrong: certainly not the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., to which I wrote three years ago on this topic and never even received a response. And let's not forget how the Drug War has Nazified the English language, encouraging us to dehumanize dealers and users as "scumbags" and "wastes of space." Surely the doctrine "never again" should mean nipping trends like this in the bud rather than remaining hands-off on the grounds that Nazi Germany was worse. Why was Nazi Germany worse, after all? In part because folks sat back, secure in the thought that it could surely never become as bad as it actually did.
Finally, whenever we criticize the seemingly lovey-dovey and carefree lifestyle advocated by Leary and other "drug" enthusiasts, we should be honest about the nature of the lifestyle against which they were rebelling. It's fine to say that Leary was a lunatic, but how sane were his critics at this time? It turns out that such a comparison makes Leary look very good indeed: for in 1960's America, the powers-that-be (i.e. the military industrial complex against which Eisenhower had so futilely warned us in the 1950s) was pressing forward with the wholesale production of thermonuclear weapons on the insane advice of Edmund Teller, who insisted that we had to be one step ahead of our enemies, apparently never considering that our enemies would one day be able to hoist us by our own atomic petard.
Rather than spending their time prosecuting a peace-loving Timothy, state officials should have been down on their knees praising God that New York state still existed in the sixties (and was radiation free into the bargain), for that decade nearly began with the nuclear annihilation of America's East Coast, not once but twice, first thanks to a ginormous Air Force blunder and then to the Cuban Missile Crisis, from which we were saved only by the brave dissenting vote of one of three Soviet submarine captains5.
Author's Follow-up: January 14, 2024
The War on Drugs is itself a religion: it is the religion of the drug-hating Christian Science of Mary Baker-Eddy. Prohibition is thus the unlawful enforcement of a state religion.
Let's arrest drug warriors, confiscate their houses, and deny them jobs in America -- until such time as they renounce their belief in the demonstrably ruinous policy of substance prohibition.
The prohibitionist motto is: "Billions for arrest, not one cent for education."
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.
I wish someone would tell Getty Images to start earning an honest living. I bought AI credits only to find that words like "mushrooms" and "drugs" could not be used. Nor "blood," nor "violence." And they refuse to refund my $14,99. Who is their service for, Ozzie Harriet?
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort shows how science damns (i.e. excludes) facts that it cannot assimilate into a system of knowledge. Fort could never have guessed, however, how thoroughly science would eventually "damn" all positive facts about "drugs."
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
Peyote advocates should be drug legalization advocates. Otherwise, they're involved in special pleading which is bound to result in absurd laws, such as "Plant A can be used in a religion but not plant B," or "Person A can belong to such a religion but person B cannot."
In Mexico, the same substance can be considered a "drug" or a "med," depending on where you are in the country. It's just another absurd result of the absurd policy of drug prohibition.
In a free world, almost all depressed individuals could do WITHOUT doctors: these adult human beings could handle their own depression with the informed intermittent use of a wide variety of psychoactive substances.
Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.
Let's arrest drug warriors, confiscate their houses, and deny them jobs in America -- until such time as they renounce their belief in the demonstrably ruinous policy of substance prohibition.