an open letter to Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes at the University of Exeter
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 27, 2024
Dear Dr. Sjöstedt-Hughes
I wanted to write to say that I enjoyed your prerecorded comments on YouTube from the 50th Anniversary Conference of the Center for Process Studies1. I have been recently studying Whitehead and am also excited about the metaphysical implications of his ideas. In "The Concept of Nature," Whitehead himself alludes to some potential metaphysics that might be contemplated based on his views, especially when he quotes the Dean of St Paul's from a speech that he gave before the Aristotelian Society in May of 1919:
"The spiritual world is not a world of unrealised ideals, over against a real world of unspiritual fact. It is, on the contrary, the real world, of which we have a true though very incomplete knowledge, over against a world of common experience which, as a complete whole, is not real, since it is compacted out of miscellaneous data, not all on the same level, by the help of the imagination. There is no world corresponding to the world of our common experience. Nature makes abstractions for us, deciding what range of vibrations we are to see and hear, what things we are to notice and remember.2"
I take it that these are the kinds of insights to which you are referring when you suggest that Whiteheadian metaphysics could be of use in debriefing the psychedelic user after a therapeutic trip.
I find this all fascinating. However, I am deeply troubled by the ongoing quest (now both in the UK and the US) to outlaw even laughing gas 3, and frankly I am disappointed that the philosophical community has not stood up and complained in a loud voice, pointing out to politicians that William James himself said that we must study the effects of such substances in order to understand the world.
"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." -The Variety of Religious Experiences4
In fact, I wrote individual emails to every single philosopher at Oxford University on this topic (70-plus in number) and did not hear back from any of them5. Nor has James' alma mater, Harvard, complained about the ongoing attempts to outlaw laughing gas . In fact, their main page about James does not even mention nitrous oxide.
In my view, laughing gas should not only remain legal, but it should be packaged in kits for easy use by the suicidal, in the same way that we give epi pens to those with severe allergies6. But we still shock the brains of the severely depressed rather than give them medicines that could cheer them up in real time. We do this based on a metaphysical materialist claim that we have (or should have) a "real" cure for them in the form of a pill - combined with the mad idea that psychoactive drugs can be outlawed for everyone in the world, at every possible dose, for every possible indication, provided merely that white American young people can find a way to misuse the drugs in question.
You correctly point out that LSD was outlawed for political reasons, but I would contend that all drugs are ultimately outlawed for political reasons. If safety were the only issue, then prohibitionists would outlaw horseback riding and car driving as well. We would see documentaries about people whose lives were ruined by such activities. Survivors would traverse the high-school circuit, urging kids to forebear. The fact that they do not badmouth such activities - but only badmouth "drugs" -- can only mean that they deny, a priori, the utility of any psychoactive drug. And this, I believe, has had a disastrously stultifying effect on the field of psychology.
One merely has to look at any issue of Psychology Today to see articles in which the author reckons without the Drug War, in which they pretend that banned psychoactive substances do not exist and so fail to incorporate any topic-related insights that might otherwise have come from users of those substances. Take Science News, for instance, and their series by Laura Sanders on a new kind of shock therapy for the depressed7. Laura muses that depression has proved really hard to beat - but she can only say that by ignoring psychoactive medicine, for as a depressed person myself, I can tell you that depression would not be hard for me to beat in the least if I could occasionally use MDMA 8 , and/or laughing gas 9 , and/or coca, and/or opium 10 .
In short, depression is only hard to beat because politicians have decided that it should be.
In fact, I would suggest that we live in a psychological dark ages due to self-censorship about psychoactive substances. I take the liberty of mentioning this because I see that we have three areas of mutual interest: philosophy, psychology, and psychedelics.
Thanks again for the interesting chat. I wish they had given you longer to speak!
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.
The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.
Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.
I just asked New York Attorney General Letitia James how much she was getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out that the drug war created the gangs just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.
The benefits of outlawed drugs read like the ultimate wish-list for psychiatrists. It's a shame that so many of them are still mounting a rear guard action to defend their psychiatric pill mill -- which demoralizes clients by turning them into lifetime patients.
"Users" can be kept out of the workforce by the extrajudicial process of drug testing; they can have their baby taken from them, their house, their property -- all because they do not share the intoxiphobic attitude of America.
All drugs have potential positive uses for somebody, at some dose, in some circumstance, alone or in combination. To decide in advance that a drug is completely useless is an offense to reason and to human liberty.
Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful. Wrong. Substance demonization is wrong, root and branch. It always causes more suffering than freedom.
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.
Antidepressants might be fine in a world where drugs were legal. Then it would actually be possible to get off them by using drugs that have inspired entire religions. In the age of prohibition, however, an antidepressant prescription is usually a life sentence.
In an article about Mazatec mushroom use, the author says: "Mushrooms should not be considered a drug." True. But then NOTHING should be considered a drug: every substance has potential good uses.
The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.