Why Philosophers Need to Stop Dogmatically Ignoring Drugs
an open letter to Matthew D. Segall PhD
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 18, 2024
Matthew D. Segall seems to be one of those rare philosophers who at least senses that altered states have relevance when discussing Kant and Whitehead, though he never broached the subject on his discussion about Whitehead two years ago for the Darlington Trust. One can only assume that it's still verboten to discuss this subject in mixed company -- i.e., an audience that may contain as many materialists as panpsychics. This is a shame, however, since William James himself specifically tells us that altered states must be investigated in order to understand ultimate reality: it is a matter of our philosophical duty, in fact. As he writes in "The Varieties of Religious Experience" (which, in case you're keeping score at home, is actually a transcription from a series of lectures given by James):
No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question--for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness."
Yet disregard them we must because of Drug War ideology and the social and political pressure to confirm thereunto. It's not just that the field of philosophy has been censored. That would be bad enough. But the censors have instilled so much fear into the hearts of their victims that philosophers decline to even admit that they are censored, let alone to complain about the fact. It is more than their jobs are worth to even admit that demonized substances exist, let alone that they could tell us something about ultimate reality and the nature of human understanding. This is why I say that we live in a dark ages with respect to philosophical investigation, which, by the way, is something that only I am free to point out because of my lowly status as an academic outsider.
For here is the inconvenient truth:
Anyone who reads Whitehead or Kant must be immediately struck by the applicability of altered states to their discussion of epistemology (unless the only thing said reader knows about drugs is what the government has told them). Kant tells us, for instance, that we human beings have one way of learning about the sensible world, and that is through the conceptual categories that we all share collectively. Well, here is where a perky young freshman in the front of the classroom should raise his or her hand and shout: "But didn't William James say otherwise?" And then, after the gasps and sighs have finally subsided, the whippersnapper would quote the great psychologist to the effect that:
Rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different."
"How then," continues the upstart, "can we opine advisedly about epistemology without at least contemplating James's thesis about altered states?
And that know-it-all is onto something! Both Kant and Whitehead advance a kind of filter theory of reality, whereby we see only what our senses permit us to see, i.e. a practical reality. And yet when James at least partially demonstrates this theory in concreto with the help of "drugs," philosophers completely ignore the fact. Indeed, the Harvard bio of William James does not even mention his work with nitrous oxide, aka laughing gas .
Author's Follow-up: March 17, 2024
Well, I managed to alienate Dr. Segall. He took my posts as a criticism of his own presentations, whereas I was trying to point out that he was one of the few philosophers whom I have seen discussing the topic of drugs openly. But it is worth noting that even Matthew did not mention the word "drugs" in his YouTube address about Whitehead for the Darlington Trust in 2022.
So we got off to a bad start on Twitter -- and then I was told that Whitehead DOES talk about drugs. He is the Whitehead scholar so I will take his word for it. But Whitehead wrote before the Drug War had changed the word "drugs" into a catchall for all things disreputable. He did not talk about drugs as we understand them today -- indeed he could not because he did not live in our time with our understandings (or rather misunderstandings) of that concept. Whitehead's expositors certainly do not mention drugs. Even Segall did not mention the word "drugs" in his address -- that's forbidden because of that bad rep that the word has acquired. So I really felt like I was being gaslighted by being told that all is well, that drugs are being fully considered viz. Whitehead -- or -- when it comes to philosophical investigations.
This is surely not what Segall meant to say but it was what came across in his tweet -- which is why Twitter should not be used to discuss philosophical niceties. But in my defense, I tried to contact Matthew first by email, but his webpage, as far as I could see, provides no way to contact him except by social media.
I was left with the impression in our Twitter barrage that Segall does not believe that philosophers are censored in the age of the Drug War, which to me is just total gaslighting 3 . All academia is massively censored. It's not enough to say that they discuss things that could be interpreted as referring to drugs.
I would love to discuss these things in person, but until I get those letters behind my name, I remain a non-entity.
One of the biggest problems of the War on Drugs is that everyone underestimates the extent which it has censored academia. Indeed, in a forum for Bernardo Kastrup, I was told that I should reserve my talk about drugs for forums which focus on that subject, as if drug prohibition was an isolated issue without any impact in the real world.
Most Americans have thought for decades now that the Drug War is an issue only for evil "druggies" and "scumbag" dealers. They are now learning that they cannot have democracy AND a Drug War, that they have to choose. For the Drug War resulted in the election of Donald Trump by throwing millions of his minority opponents in jail -- which was one of the racist purposes of the Drug War from the very beginning. And so, as Julian Buchanan tells us, the Drug War has succeeded -- for its goals were always to destroy democracy and empower rich racists.
*william*
Notes:
1: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
2: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
3: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
Kids should be taught in grade school that prohibition is wrong.
Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."
"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.
Drugs like opium and psychedelics should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
Americans love to blame drugs for all their problems. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. The prohibition mindset is the problem, not drugs.
Morphine can provide a vivid appreciation of mother nature in properly disposed minds. That should be seen as a benefit. Instead, dogma tells us that we must hate morphine for any use.
America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."
If politicians wanted to outlaw coffee, a bunch of Kevin Sabets would come forward and start writing books designed to scare us off the drink by cherry-picking negative facts from scientific studies.
The idea that "drugs" have no medical benefits is not science, it is philosophy, and bad philosophy at that. It is based on the idea that benefits must be molecularly demonstratable and not created from mere knock-on psychological effects of drug use, time-honored tho' they be.
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Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass
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