My ideal readers will be aware of the fact that I have been struggling with the philosophy of Schopenhauer lately, attempting to discover how his apparent ignorance of psychoactive medicines may have limited his understanding of the world, especially by encouraging him to derive a universal truth from his own pessimistic outlook on life. Indeed, this is just part of a larger shortcoming of Schopenhauer, that he tends to make unqualified pronouncements in cases where a little reticence would have gone a long way. Humility was clearly not the philosopher's strong suit, but a little more agnosticism on his part from time to time might have served him well. It might have helped future-proof his philosophical project and deprive his critics of easy targets. A case in point is his famous (or infamous) claim that
"Life is a business which does not cover its expenses.1"
Is this really an undeniable fact with which all sane people must agree, or is it not rather the complaint of a man who, like most people even today, was blind to the vast psychoactive pharmacopoeia of mother nature and so unable to imagine, let alone profit from, the mood and mind improvement that she offers to human beings gratis? I am not just talking here about the handful of psychedelics and entheogens which are slowly beginning to gain a grudging acceptance in certain mainstream circles, but rather about the worldwide natural pharmacopoeia as a whole, including also the synthetic substances that it can help inspire us to create in a chemistry lab.
For the fact is that no society has yet deliberately sought to profit from this worldwide pharmacopoeia of psychoactive medicines, except in order to exploit it for commercial gain by transforming it into one-size-fits-all medicines, especially ones for which lifelong dependency is marketed as a feature rather than a bug, as in the case of modern antidepressants, whose widespread use today is normalized in the modern trope: "Don't forget to take your meds!" It has apparently never even occurred to governments that they should send out pharmacologically savvy empaths to find naturally occurring psychoactive medicines wherever they exist - in plants, trees or animals -- and invent common sense protocols for their actual use, for a wide variety of purposes, including increasing concentration, undertaking spiritual journeys, fighting depression -- and even replacing alcohol with safer, less socially costly drugs. Of course, tribal peoples have always used a locally available subset of such substances for human benefit, but no society has yet had both the ability and the inclination to scour the globe for such medicines. You might think this would be a top priority considering the fact that psychologically satisfied citizens do not generally shoot up grade schools and that entheogenic drugs in particular could bring the world back from the brink of nuclear Armageddon by helping to spread peace, love and understanding worldwide.
What's holding us back, then? Mainly, the fact that politicians today engage in strategic fearmongering about drug use, applying a safety standard to that activity that they set for no other risky behavior on the face of the earth: not for horseback riding, not for car driving, and certainly not for gun shooting, a sport for which most Drug Warriors despise any regulation whatsoever. Such fearmongering about the politically defined category called "drugs" not only helps politicians to win votes from the ignorant populations that they have never sought to educate, but it allows such demagogues to pass laws that have a disproportionate impact on minorities. Thus politicians practice unregenerate racism under the cover of a pretended concern for public health. America has the largest prison population in the world thanks to such tactics, 1.8 million people in 20232, with an incarceration rate for Black people that is six times that for whites3. And over a third of the federal prison population is incarcerated for drug dealing4: in other words, they are in jail for offenses that did not exist prior to 1914, when Congress first started crafting drug laws to punish minorities. This is injustice with a goal, of course, namely, to hand otherwise close elections to Drug Warriors by making it impossible and/or illegal for minorities to vote. Trump was right for the wrong reason: American elections are rigged, but by the War on Drugs, not by democrats.
But racism is not the only reason why America has no interest in making psychoactive medicines available to a suffering humanity. Americans have also made the devastating error of placing materialist researchers and doctors in charge of evaluating mind and mood medicine. This is a tragedy because the reigning ideology in science today is the obsolete theory of behaviorism, according to which the only facts that count when it comes to human behavior are those that can be quantified. This gives materialists the cover they need to collaborate with Drug Warriors in seconding their ridiculous claim that time-honored godsends actually have no proven beneficial uses whatsoever5. The benefits of psychoactive drug use are glaringly obvious and a matter of psychological common sense. But modern scientists ignore anything obvious when it comes to drugs, including anecdote and history. They do not care, for instance, that laughing gas makes a depressed person laugh, nor that they look forward to use and thereby profit from the therapeutic power of anticipation. They do not care that opium was considered a panacea by such ancient physicians as Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus. They do not care that psychedelics inspired the Hindu religion. Instead they ask a truly metaphysical question in considering such substances: "Yes, but do they REALLY work?", thereby demonstrating their complete lack of common sense about drug use. Their faithful commitment to behaviorism is not surprising, however, for it turns them into lucratively remunerated "experts" in matters for which they have no training whatsoever: namely, in those concerning the human heart.
But getting back to Schopenhauer.
Consider a world in which aspirin use is considered to be immoral and so it is outlawed as a matter of course, a world that is governed by the drug-hating religious principles of Mary Baker-Eddy. We already live in such a world, except that the drugs over which we moralize today are just a hypocritically chosen subset of the ones which we should be scorning if we wanted to be logically consistent in enforcing our metaphysical prejudices. Now, consider a pessimistic philosopher in that aspirin-hating world who tells us that the existence of headaches is proof that god does not exist. Why, after all, would a supreme being make us suffer like that? Well, the fact is that no deity actually made them suffer like that; they were suffering because they had scorned to use certain medicines based on superstitious beliefs about the impropriety of doing so. They had asked for pain and they got pain. If they wanted to see what was wrong with their world, they had only to look in a mirror.
This is just the kind of world we live in today when it comes to godsend mind and mood medicines, like opium, LSD, MDMA, coca and psilocybin - not to mention the hundreds of inspiring and non-addictive phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. We westerners have "just said no" to pain relief, mood elevation and religious insight. And yet western philosophers feel free to trash our existence as a world full of suffering, as a business that does not pay expenses? That claim becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in a world in which we outlaw mind and mood medicine and/or fail to do everything possible to benefit from them both personally and as a species. I recognize that Schopenhauer lived before the unprecedented wholesale prohibition of psychoactive substances that we call the War on Drugs, and yet he shared the western bias against mind and mood medicine that one sees developing in Europe as early as 392 AD, when Emperor Theodosius banned the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries as a threat to Christianity. Over a thousand years later, the Church supported the Bavarian Beer Act of 1516, which included a provision that outlawed the use of psychoactive mushrooms in beer6. These were the early days of the European witch hunts, when exotic herbal potations were associated with witchcraft and sorcery7.
The fact is that the European world has almost a 2,000-year history of mistrusting mind and mood medicine. This helps account for the disdain with which the Conquistadores of the 16th century greeted first the ritualistic use of mushrooms by the Mazatec Indians of Mexico and then the widespread chewing of the coca leaf by the Inca in Peru. Alcohol, in the form of beer, had already attained a kind of monopoly status in the European mindset when it came to substances that bring about self-transcendence. And so the ritual use of plant- and fungi-based alternatives to beer was regarded with suspicion. Such substances were considered a challenge to Christianity at best and the work of the devil at worst. The point here is that no one had to declare an official Drug War in 19th-century Germany in order to prejudice philosophers like Schopenhauer against the kinds of substances that we denigrate today as "drugs." He was already primed to pay such substances short shrift in his philosophy of reality, merely thanks to his status as a European.
So it's no surprise that Schopenhauer mentions such drugs only once in his chef d'oeuvre, "The World as Will and Idea," namely by referencing the erstwhile panacea known as opium. He does so in a passage describing the mental preparation necessary for perceiving the world objectively, that is, non-egotistically, by transcending self. Strangely, however, he likens the drug to "spiritous drinks" and claims that it constitutes a hindrance for those seeking to observe the world objectively. "What is rather required," writes the philosopher, "is a night of quiet sleep, a cold bath, and all that procures for the brain activity an unforced predominance by quieting the circulation and calming the passions." I will gladly take Schopenhauer's word for it that such a protocol would work for him personally, but it is surely psychologically naïve to suppose that a cold bath and a night of quiet sleep are going to help the average self-absorbed Jack or Jill to transcend self! It sounds like just the sort of milquetoast advice you'd see on the cover of a pop-psychology magazine in the check-out counter of a modern American food store, those mags that give us a set of ten-step instructions for solving every imaginable personal problem, without the use of naughty drugs, of course -- only in this case, their headlines would read:
"Ego Transcendence Made Easy: Bathe Your Way to Perfect Objectivity!"
One wonders if Schopenhauer ever used opium. It certainly does not sound like it. I myself have not done so - the American government has seen to that - but the accounts I have read of such use suggests that the drug is all about empowering the user to transcend self, at least when administered to one who is mentally prepared for such an outcome. HP Lovecraft wrote of such opium-inspired transcendence in a fictional format in "The Crawling Chaos," a horror story cowritten with Winifred V. Jackson. The story is set rather vaguely "in the year of the plague, when doctors sought to deaden the agonies they could not cure.8" The protagonist tells us that he has been given an overdose of opium by an overworked physician. The nature of the condition being treated is not clear, however the sufferer describes his main symptoms as an unendurable "pain and pounding in my head." The opium soon alleviates that pain, but in a very interesting way, indeed. It does not get rid of the pounding; instead it causes the protagonist to regard the pounding as an external phenomenon, one which has nothing to do with himself personally. It lets him literally get outside of his own situation.
"Suddenly my pain ceased, and I began to associate the pounding with an external rather than internal force... I fancied the pounding was that of the vast, inscrutable sea as its sinister, colossal breakers lacerated some desolate shore after a storm of titanic magnitude."
This is self-transcendence on demand. It is the rapid attainment of the kind of detached mental state that eastern yogis spend a lifetime trying to achieve. It is just the kind of self-detachment that Schopenhauer himself tells us is a necessary condition for perceiving the world objectively.
Cold baths, indeed! A quiet night's sleep! He might as well have counseled us to drink chicken soup and jog around the block -- or treated us to any of the other thousand-and-one vacuous bromides that pass for mental health advice in the age of the Drug War.
Schopenhauer makes it clear throughout his oeuvre that it is very rare to find a person who can transcend self and so deny the imperious will. But he never appears to have asked himself why such transcendence is so rare. It surely has something to do with a lack of common sense, combined with the fact that western philosophers are almost totally ignorant about the psychoactive pharmacopoeia that exists all around them, in plants, fungi, and animal life. The list of such substances is already long in our own time, especially considering how few resources have thus far gone into lengthening it. It would certainly become far longer in a world in which we prioritized the self-transcendence that Schopenhauer advocates, rather than superstitiously demonizing the very substances that help bring it about.
But I intend to practice here the reticence and agnosticism that I preached above. I will not conclude this essay by declaring that Schopenhauer was wrong to tell us that "life is a business that does not pay expenses." I will merely suggest that he had no right to say that given the fact that he was reckoning without drugs. Nay, I will even add the exculpatory observation that Schopenhauer is in good company, insofar as almost every philosopher of our time reckons without drugs as well. They write as if psychoactive substances do not exist, and are therefore blind to what the use of such substances can implicitly tell us concerning a wide variety of psychosocial topics, including brain function, consciousness, depression, anxiety, religion, and even the ultimate nature of reality writ large. For as William James said of drug-altered states in his classic tome, "The Variety of Religious Experience":
"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.9"
Author's Follow-up: February 12, 2025
The more I criticize Schopenhauer, the more I feel the need to remind any eventual reader that I value the German philosopher's work for the hints that it contains about the nature of reality. I am simply trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, the insights from the pretended knowledge, the facts from the bluster, in the work of this occasionally ornery pessimist. In the plus column, I like his recognition that the forms of creatures has a timelessness to it, that each new chick, young puppy, or human child is just as brand-new and "hot off the presses" as were similar chicks, puppies and children thousands of years ago, that the individual is subject to time but that the will, or the platonic form, appears to be immortal. In the debit column, however, he insists that this state of affairs represents teleology without design, that the will has no goal aside from the practical one of manifesting itself in the real world as a particular thing, animal or person. I do not say that this is impossible, merely that I am not convinced by the arguments that he posits in favor of such claims.
I particularly mistrust his tendency to argue from the basis of the kind of world that a god would presumably create, as if he knew -- or could know -- anything about such topics. This is self-contradictory on his part, for the key Kantian lesson that he himself puts forth in other contexts is that we can know nothing about ultimate realities. Schopenhauer admits this when he criticizes those who pretend to know that there is a God. "How can you claim there is a God," Schopenhauer essentially asks, "when we can know nothing about such things?" And yet he himself claims to know what a god would have desired and hence created had such an entity actually existed, as, for instance, a God would have composed the oceans of fresh water that we could have drank therefrom. Such a claim assumes a raft of unknowable information: beginning with an understanding of the nature of the human self and where that self fits in in the totality of nature. Is our existence analogous to that of a fish in a goldfish tank, a creature that lives in but a small and highly unrepresentative slice of the world at large and so can never draw reasonable conclusions about that world; or are we sitting in the front rows of the drama of life and so capable of adequately conceiving the limitations with which the supposed playwright must have been working or that goal that he, she or it might have had in mind?
Schopenhauer claims that every change in nature is a causally necessary change that furthers the goals of the selfish will of a particular organism (or at least seeks to further them to the extent possible given the pushback that it encounters from the actions of other wills of other organisms). This is a plausible hypothesis, but his way of supporting it is completely invalid. Schopenhauer does so by pointing out the supposed mundane reasons behind the often marvelous adaptations that we see in nature in specific cases. He tells us, for instance, that tropical birds have yellow feathers so that they can recognize each other amid the plethora of other birds and animals in their environment. But surely there are many other reasons why their feathers might have been yellow, else the entire bird population would be yellow -- or at least the coloration of bird feathers would be evenly apportioned among the possible colors of the spectrum for the purposes of interspecies identification. He himself has the honesty to admit from time to time that such judgments may have an element of subjectivity to them (and I'm thinking, "May?"), yet that does not stop him from using such arguments to make a case for the practical no-nonsense nature of reality. He says in effect, we may not know why the peacocks feathers are so alluring, but we can be sure that aesthetics had nothing to do with it. The peacock ultimately has fancy feathers instead of plain ones for the same reason that plumbers use Teflon tape instead of putty to prevent pipe joints from leaking. "Nothing to see here," cries Schopenhauer. "Those beautiful feathers could not have been otherwise!"
Again, I do not say that Schopenhauer is wrong, merely that he has not made his case, at least when it comes to the ultimate meaninglessness of beauty and love. Of course, part of his problem was that he was born prior to the existence of both quantum physics and relativity theory. As David Bohm points out, both theories have at least one thing in common: they can only be understood by viewing the world holistically10. This is why the physicist praises meditation as a way to see the world more accurately, that is, as a oneness. One has to resist our tendency to abstract ourselves from nature and to parcel out reality in conformance with our own feelings of separateness, which are really just an artifact of our inability to transcend self. Schopenhauer might have appreciated Bohm given the former's interest in Asian metaphysic, but he might also have failed to grasp the implications of Bohm's message. For the principles of holism tell us that it is not enough to view the world as the interaction of separate parts, of discrete wills in Schopenhauer's case. The big picture matters and cannot be dismissed a priori as an an inevitable but meaningless outcome of ultimately meaningless causal processes. The world is not just a metaphysical "survival of the fittest," in which separate wills compete ruthlessly for the privilege of manifesting themselves unhindered and completely.
Perhaps we Homo sapiens were wrong to assume that the human-creation known as metaphorical language could ever be successfully used to prove -- or to disprove -- anything about such ultimates as God and the meaning of love and life. But there does seem to be a kind of experiential proof available to human beings, a proof that is communicated in feelings and intuitions rather than words. This would seem to be almost true of necessity, given that our language, being a human creation, is not nor never can be consistent and comprehensive enough to permit of a precise statement about universal verities, one that could never be plausibly gainsaid in that same human language. The only absolute truths therefore seem to be ones that can be communicated wordlessly, as for instance the messages contained in great music -- especially when heard under the influence of certain psychoactive substances, which help us transcend the ego and listen objectively. True, Bohm only speaks of "meditation" for this purpose, but "meditation" is often a code word for psychoactive drug use in polite society these days. In the age of the Drug War, merely to use the word "drugs" in an ostensibly scientific context would be to lose one's respectability among the thoroughly brainwashed drug-haters of academia.
Immanuel Kant
Anyone familiar with the philosophies of both Immanuel Kant and William James should understand that philosophers have a duty to investigate what we westerners call 'altered states' and hence have a duty to disdainfully deride and denounce the outlawing of psychoactive substances. Kant's basic message, as inspired by Hume, is that we cannot understand ultimate realities in words, but as James insists in "The Varieties of Religious Experience," it is our duty as philosophers to try to understand such realities EXPERIENTIALLY, i.e., with the help of psychoactive substances such as nitrous oxide.
"No account of the universe in its totality," wrote James, "can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."
This is why it is a shame that I am the only philosopher in the world who contacted the FDA to protest their recent plans to begin treating nitrous oxide as a "drug" and so further discourage its use in metaphysical research. Alas, such goal-driven substance use is already considered unthinkable by most academics thanks to their brainwashed fealty to the drug war ideology of substance demonization. Thus I was the only philosopher in the world who spoke up on behalf of the legacy of William James and on behalf of academic freedom, for that matter, by pleading with the FDA to refrain from further marginalizing an already vastly underused substance. (In a sane world, the suicidal would be given laughing gas kits in the same way that we provide epi pens for those with severe allergies.)
But then this is the point of my entire website and the hundreds of essays that it contains: to demonstrate to the world that the drug war and prohibition are a cancer on the body politic and not just a matter of a few laws set up to discourage hedonists. For the idea that we should hate psychoactive substances is itself a metaphysical notion peculiar to the western mindset and not some logical truth that any unbiased mind must accept. Unfortunately, scientists seem to know, as it were subconsciously, that the drug war is a good thing, for it is clearly biased in the name of the materialism which they themselves profess. In the wake of the technological revolution, science is feeling omniscient, and so it naturally wants to avoid dealing with drug effects and the variability of human emotions. They cannot be quantified, as behaviorist materialism requires. So philosophers and scientists alike see a benefit in drug laws that outlaw substances that facilitate mystical feelings and ontological intimations: "Good riddance to such namby-pamby data," says the materialist in their "heart of hearts."
And so the drug war outlaws precisely those substances whose use conduces to a non-materialist view of the world, one in which we have intimations about the supposedly "unknowable" world of the noumena. And why is the noumena unknowable to us? First, thanks to the merely pragmatic nature of our perceptions as explained by Kant. But also thanks to the inherent limitations of that incomplete and fallible communication system that we call human language, whose inevitable shortcomings and vagaries seem to bar us from definitively saying anything that could not, at least in theory, be plausibly gainsaid in that same inherently malleable language.
These limitations of human language contrast tellingly, however, with the vivid experiential convictions about reality that are communicated by substance use according to the trip reports of the psychonauts of all ages. We can debate the ontological significance of such experiences, of course, but let us remember that it was precisely such "use" that opened James' mind to a world of potential realities of whose existence he had previously been blissfully unaware. Why? Because of his previous self-satisfied acceptance of materialist principles.
Unfortunately, modern philosophers have ceded their job of metaphysical investigation to psychonauts like James Fadiman, Alex Gibbons and Jim Hogshire. Not that there is anything wrong with the research of these latter truth seekers, but it is a shame that philosophers are not working with them to promote human progress and philosophical understanding. And so if metaphysics is dead in the 21st century, it is because today's philosophers have abandoned the pursuit of truth in the name of supporting America's hateful and superstitious war on psychoactive substances.
According to Kant, we can know nothing about the noumenal world, or ultimate reality, but this claim is not true*. In making that claim, Kant was unaware of the metaphysical insights provided by psychoactive drug use. There is such a thing as "experiential proof" inspired by such use -- an absolute conviction that is felt "in every fiber of one's being," as opposed to having been "proven" for one syllogistically in the fallible and eternally insufficient communication method that we call human language.
This is Kant's Holy Grail, had he only realized it, a way to move forward with metaphysical research: by looking for experiential proof of ultimate realities rather than merely logical ones.
A critic might say, yes, but metaphysics cannot be based on experience. But by that word, one has always meant sober experience. That implicit qualification was itself established before we understood the fallibility of the senses. The transcendent experience I reference here is of another kind, being contemplated in the mind and not processed through the sense organs typically associated with experience.
*Kant's claim could be salvaged, perhaps, by specifying the type of "knowledge" that we're talking about here. My point is simply that Kant seemed unaware of the power of psychoactive drugs to inspire states that provide us with convictions with respect to the noumenal world. Whether the source of those convictions is "knowledge" properly so-called is an interesting question, but one well beyond the scope of these comments and unnecessary for their rational evaluation.
Schopenhauer synthesizes the ideas of Immanuel Kant and Plato with the philosophy of eastern religions, according to which we human beings are unable to perceive Reality writ large. This limitation, however, which both Schopenhauer and Kant suggest applies to all human beings as such, may actually only apply to "sober" individuals, as William James was to point out a decade after Schopenhauer's death. James realized that the strategic use of drugs that provide self-transcendence can help one see past the so-called Veil of Maya. He went so far as to insist that philosophers must use such substances in an effort to understand ultimate realities -- advice that, alas, most modern philosophers seem committed to ignoring.
"No account of the universe in its totality," wrote James, "can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."
The exciting thing now is to consider Schopenhauer's philosophy in light of the revelations provided by certain drug use and to assess how such epiphanies tend to confirm, qualify or perhaps even refute the German pessimist's ideas about an eternal and unchangeable will, a will which the philosopher tells us is manifested in (or rather manifested AS) objects, animals, plants and persons. Schopenhauer tells us that the will corresponding to these entities is purposeful, for it seeks to create a specific kind of object or individual, but that the will is also meaningless, in the sense that the fact that it IS a specific kind of will is an arbitrary given, to which we need not ascribe any purpose, let alone a creator.
I am still trying to wrap my head around that latter claim, by the way, the idea that there can be teleology without design. I think I am slowly beginning to understand what Schopenhauer means by that claim in light of Kantian distinctions, but I am by no means sure that I agree with him. Yet I am not qualified to push back at this time. Further reading is required on my part before I can either refute him advisedly, or else concede his point. I do find, however, that Schopenhauer occasionally makes definitive-sounding claims that are actually quite open to obvious refutations.
In "The World as Will and Idea," for instance, he states that tropical birds have brilliant feathers "so that each male may find his female." Really? Then why are penguins not decked out with technicolor plumage? To assign "final causes" like this to nature is to turn animals into the inkblots of a biological Rorschach test. Not only is Schopenhauer being subjective here, but he has an agenda in making this particular kind of claim: he wants to underscore his belief that there is a logical causative explanation behind the fact that "wills" of the tropical birds would manifest in this colorful way, that it was not some act of extravagance on the part of a whimsical creator. But this kind of explanation is not the least bit compelling since one can imagine dozens of equally plausible "final causes" for the feature in question: the birds want to attract mates, the birds want to warn off predators, the birds want to mimic other yellow birds, the birds want to collectively camouflage themselves while roosting as one big yellow object (or more accurately, the birds' wills want to do these things).
One senses that Schopenhauer would respond as follows: "Fine. Give any reason you like, Ballard. But whatever you do, do not tell me that some suppositious God likes variety!"
And what about this famous pessimism? It's so typical of curmudgeons to try to make a universal law out of their own psychological issues. Schopenhauer does not seem to understand that attitude matters. As Hamlet said, "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." It is neither the shortness of life nor the inhumanity of our fellows that ruins life for most people -- but rather their attitude TOWARD such circumstances. Every manic-depressive knows that a blue sky and party cake does not make a person happy, nor living amid postcard scenery. One can commit suicide in Disneyland just as well as Skid Row. It is attitude, attitude, attitude that matters -- from which it follows that it is a sin to outlaw substances that can help us adopt a positive attitude toward life. That's why it's so frustrating that philosophers like Schopenhauer pretend that life can be judged by circumstances alone. Only once we acknowledge that attitude matters can we clearly see the importance of the many mind-improving medicines of which Mother Nature is full, the meds that we slander today by classing them under the pejorative label of "drugs."
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.
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.
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."
Typical materialist protocol. Take all the "wonder" out of the drug and sell it as a one-size-fits all "reductionist" cure for anxiety. Notice that they refer to hallucinations and euphoria as "adverse effects." What next? Communion wine with the religion taken out of it?
Philip Jenkins reports that Rophynol had positive uses for treating mental disorders until the media called it the "date rape drug." We thus punished those who were benefitting from the drug, tho' the biggest drug culprit in date rape is alcohol. Oprah spread the fear virally.
"When two men who have been in an aggressive mood toward each other take part in the ritual, one is able to say to the other, 'Come, let us drink, for there is something between us.' " re: the Mayan use of the balche drink in Encyc of Psych Plants, by Ratsch & Hofmann
So much harm could be reduced by shunting people off onto safer alternative drugs -- but they're all outlawed! Reducing harm should ultimately mean ending this prohibition that denies us endless godsends, like the phenethylamines of Alexander Shulgin.
In "Four Good Days" the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.
If we encourage folks to use antidepressants daily, there is nothing wrong with them using heroin daily. A founder of Johns Hopkins used morphine daily and he not only survived, but he thrived.
The UN of today is in an odd position regarding drugs: they want to praise indigenous societies while yet outlawing the drugs that helped create them.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Ego Transcendence Made Easy: or how Schopenhauer was reckoning without drugs before it was cool to do so, published on February 11, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
You have been reading an article entitled, Ego Transcendence Made Easy: or how Schopenhauer was reckoning without drugs before it was cool to do so, published on February 11, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
