How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors
a philosophical review of 'The Psychedelic Revolution Will Not be Standardized' by Sara Gael and Joseph McCowan
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 20, 2025
Dear Sara and Joseph:
I would like to congratulate you on your wonderful article in the 2025 MAPS12 Bulletin entitled "The Psychedelic Revolution Will Not be Standardized.3" I especially appreciate your refreshing acknowledgment that Western scientific reductionism is not the ideal lens for studying psychedelics. As a chronic depressive with "skin in this game," I could not agree with you more. The reductionist approach to drugs has kept me from using godsend medicines now for an entire lifetime. My only criticism with your paper is that this acknowledgement of yours does not go far enough. Reductionism is not simply the wrong lens for studying psychedelics, it is the wrong lens for studying ANY psychoactive drugs. This is so because reductive materialists are dogmatically blind to all obvious benefits of drug use, whether those benefits have been demonstrated by anecdote, history or psychological common sense. They wish instead to find out what is "really" going on with drugs by looking under a microscope. This is why Drug Warriors like Kevin Sabet want us to "follow the science4" about drugs, because they know that the scientist's job in the age of the Drug War is to identify potential physical problems with drug use, not to acknowledge any obvious benefits of such use.
The proof of this enormous bias is extant and clear for everyone to see. For just one example, consider the 2021 article in Forbes magazine in which materialist doctor Robert Glatter questioned whether laughing gas could help the depressed5. Laughing gas?! The fact that materialist scientists even have to ask such questions demonstrates that they have sacrificed common sense to the god of materialist orthodoxy, to the idea that truth -- even when it comes to human behavior -- must be found under a microscope. And yet even the publishers of the Readers Digest have known for over a century now that "laughter is the best medicine." In a sane world, we would give laughing gas kits to the chronically depressed just as we now give EpiPens to those with severe allergies6. We would thereby prevent many of the 49 million suicides that take place in America every year7. The fact that we fail to do so demonstrates that Cartesian biases are alive and well in the 21st century and that holism remains as unpopular in the West today as it was 500 years ago when the Spanish Conquistadors quashed the psychoactive religious and healing protocols of the Inca.
To place materialists in charge of mind and mood medicine is philosophically equivalent to placing Dr. Spock of the original Star Trek series in charge of a study on the potential benefits of hugging. As a confirmed materialist, Spock just would not "get it." His first step in pursuing such a study would be to dogmatically ignore all the obvious benefits of hugging that even a child recognizes -- in favor of looking at the effects of hugging under a microscope to see what that "illogical" activity "really" does, if anything, to the human mind and body. In other words, Spock would be undertaking a metaphysically inspired quest, not a scientific one. If the passion-scorning Vulcan can find no microscopic and quantifiable evidence that hugging works on a predictable biochemical basis, then he will gaslight8 the people of the Federation by concluding that hugging has no known benefits whatsoever (making him a hero among the "hug warriors" of Starfleet, those space-age prohibitionists who wish to outlaw the emotionally rich act of embracing as being potentially dangerous and perhaps even productive of addiction). In still other words, it was a category error to place materialists in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place. Materialists qua materialists are dogmatically blind to all common sense. The proof of that statement is extant.
This is why I was always skeptical of the MAPS approach of working with the FDA9. The FDA's job in the age of the Drug War is to give a veneer of "science" to the absurd notion that medicines that inspire and elate have no positive uses whatsoever. Their job is to justify the outrageously mendacious scheduling system of the DEA. How? By gaslighting 10 us, telling us that anecdote, history and common sense have nothing to tell us on these topics. And yet the fact is that drugs like laughing gas (and MDMA and coca, etc.) have glaringly obvious uses for human benefit, precisely because they inspire the actual human beings who use them. Glaringly obvious uses!
Take drug withdrawal, for instance. In a free world, the intermittent use of drugs like laughing gas (and coca and opium and phenethylamines...) could prevent recidivism in our attempts to renounce the use of a given substance. What is recidivism after all but the outcome of a few hours of exquisite psychological angst on the part of a person attempting to renounce the use of a given drug? I myself "backslid" in my attempts to get off the dependence-causing "med" called Effexor11 last year12 -- and yet it was glaringly obvious to me, even at the time, that I could have avoided backsliding had I been able to use laughing gas or coca or opium 13 (etc.) on an as-needed basis to obfuscate and/or transcend the occasional psychological downsides of Effexor withdrawal. In fact, any drug that inspired and elated could have helped me through those few hours of existential angst that are the bane of the recidivist. Any drug. But this is an obvious fact that materialist America still seems light-years away from recognizing: the fact that strategic drug use can actually help prevent and/or end chemical dependency. Unfortunately, we are living in a country wherein we are brainwashed from grade school to believe that drugs are evil. In such a world, we will naturally recoil from the otherwise obvious idea of "fighting drugs with drugs."
The overarching problem here is the materialist bias of the West. This bias runs so deeply, that it is virtually omnipresent these days, even in the work of those who explicitly recognize many of the shortcomings of that doctrine. Take, for instance, the idea that MDMA must be approved for one "board-certified" condition at a time, which was the presupposition of the FDA in working with MAPS.
Philosophically speaking, PTSD is experienced by ALL neurotics. At its fundamental level, PTSD is the counterproductive autonomic response to stimulus that we connect with a traumatic experience in our past -- whether that negative experience was the lifelong ego-damping blather of a bad parent or the sudden one-off explosion of an IED. And yet our materialist scientists have "reified" a certain kind of PTSD into a discrete ontological "illness" in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, insisting that any neurosis whose etiology does not match the criteria that we have established for that pathology is somehow a completely unrelated phenomena. In this way, our terminology determines our reality in the West rather than the other way around. And so, even if the FDA agrees that MDMA might help one kind of neurotic, that logic-challenged agency would yet insist that we need another time-consuming drug trial in order to establish that MDMA could help anyone else. Returning to the Spock analogy supplied above, it is as if the Vulcan scientist were to determine that hugging could help a child who has been bullied in school but yet maintained that more study would be needed to determine if hugging could also help a teenager who had been jilted by a boyfriend or girlfriend. Thus we see that science is truly the slow kid in the class when it comes to drug benefits -- and this is why drug-hating politicians are more than happy to leave drug-approval decisions to science. They know that, even if a drug like MDMA were to successfully run the gauntlet of drug trials established by the FDA, it would still only be approved for use by a small subset of the people who could actually benefit from the drug.
In summary then, I applaud you both for recognizing the downsides of reductive materialist science when it comes to psychedelics. I would suggest, however, that the problem with materialism 14 may be bigger than even you may imagine. You are on the right track when you say that "psychedelics are recovering from trauma too — the trauma of being forced into a model that refuses to see their full complexity." And yet the real headline here is that ALL drugs are recovering from that trauma -- all holistic-acting psychoactive drugs are being held to materialist standards by the West. This is nothing less than a form of pharmacological colonialism. It is the attempt to give the veneer of "science" to the intolerance of the Francisco Pizarro's of the world with respect to psychoactive medicine.
Of course, materialism has its place in the inorganic world -- as is clear from the many technological advances that the reductionist mindset has inspired. But the idea that materialists are experts when it comes to human emotions is the mother of all category errors. My entire life is proof of that statement insofar as the reductionist mindset has helped ensure that I go a lifetime now without the use of godsend medicines that grow at my very feet.
Yours Truly,
Brian Quass
PS I would also like to share some observations with regard to two topics that were broached, or at least suggested, by your excellent article.
1) The belief that the FDA was ever going to "play fair" when it comes to investigating MDMA (or any other "drug" for that matter) seems to me to have been naive on the part of MAPS. The FDA reeks of political and ideological hypocrisy on multiple fronts15. This is an agency that is working to keep laughing gas 16 out of the hands of the suicidal. This is an agency that actively champions the use of brain-damaging shock therapy17 while outlawing all the substances whose use could make shock therapy unnecessary. This is an agency that approves of Big Pharma 1819 drugs whose side effects include death itself 20 and yet refuses to approve MDMA, a drug which has, strictly speaking, killed no one, and whose use over the last 50 years resulted in unprecedented peace on British dance floors21, an upside of use that Drug Warriors never even acknowledge, let alone look upon as a benefit. Meanwhile, even had MAPS succeeded in having MDMA approved for use, they would have succeeded on the FDA's own drug-hating terms: they would have succeeded, that is, by making the drug available (at a crazy price point) to but a small minority of those who could actually benefit from the drug.
That said, the failed attempt of the MAPS organization to collaborate with the FDA will have at least one beneficial effect in the long run: it will demonstrate to the open-minded observer (should any such exist) that the whole system of drug approval is enormously biased against psychoactive medicines. At least, I hope that this is the take-home message that will eventually be gleaned by the insightful public. But then we should never underestimate the power of indoctrinated Americans (and of Westerners in general) to get ahold of the wrong end of the stick when it comes to the subject of drugs. They have all been taught since grade school that "drugs" are evil. After the FDA's failure to approve MDMA, the media began characterizing the MAPS organization as the home of psychedelic cheerleaders, as if the FDA were an objective and responsible partner being hurried along by impulsive hippies. In his Psychedelic Handbook22, Rick Strassman even praised reporters for recognizing the existence of such so-called "cheerleading." In my philosophical critique of his book23, I reminded Strassman that such critics were actually blind as bats. Even if we agree that the MAPS people are cheerleaders for psychedelics, the real headline here is that the scientists and administrators at the FDA are JEER LEADERS, dedicated to the one-and-only task of finding downsides to drug use. This is why we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse in America and not a National Institute on Drug Use.
2) You speak of new ways of studying drugs going forward. I have a suggestion. How about asking various demographics what actually works for THEM based on their goals of use, their circumstances in life, etc. -- rather than asking materialist chemists what SHOULD work for them based on materialist theories? We should study drugs in the same manner undertaken by Alexander Shulgin24 in the 1990s: by asking actual users what they experience while on a given drug25. Right now, our scientists basically decide in advance what single drug SHOULD work for people and then conduct a "scientific" trial to see if they were right in their conjectures. In other words, the chemist is considered the expert on what the mere human being should need, emotionally speaking. Why not consider the users to be the experts as to how drugs effect them personally? Why not trial a wide variety of potentially inspiring substances on a wide variety of users and decide what works for them and in what circumstances -- without pretending with the materialist that we must study such drugs for one board-certified condition at a time -- which, as mentioned above, is the default protocol of the pharmacological imperialism of the West.
Of course, the answer to the question "Why not?" tells us all that we need to know about the hateful nature of drug prohibition. Why not? Because America has a mendacious political approach to drug research, an approach to which reductive materialists lend a veneer of scientific legitimacy thanks to their dogmatic blindness to common sense.
Psychedelic retreats tell us how scientific they are. But science is the problem. Science today insists that we ignore all obvious benefits of drugs. It's even illegal to suggest that psilocybin has health benefits: that's "unproven" according to the Dr. Spocks of science.
Many prohibition haters have their own list of drugs that they feel should be outlawed. They're missing the point. Drugs cannot be judged up or down. Prohibition is the problem. Say otherwise and you open the door to endless substance demonization by politicians.
Properly speaking, MDMA has killed no one at all. Prohibitionists were delighted when Leah Betts died because they were sure it was BECAUSE of MDMA/Ecstasy. Whereas it was because of the fact that prohibitionists refuse to teach safe use.
There would be almost no recidivism for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.
There are hundreds of things that we should outlaw before drugs (like horseback riding) if, as claimed, we are targeting dangerous activities. Besides, drugs are only dangerous BECAUSE of prohibition, which compromises product purity and refuses to teach safe use.
Another problem with MindMed's LSD: every time I look it up on Google, I get a mess of links about the stock market. The drug is apparently a godsend for investors. They want to profit from LSD by neutering it and making it politically correct: no inspiration, no euphoria.
My consciousness, my choice.
Besides, why should I listen to the views of a microbe?
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."
In the age of the Drug War, the Hippocratic Oath has become "First, do no good."
Psychedelic retreats tell us how scientific they are. But science is the problem. Science today insists that we ignore all obvious benefits of drugs. It's even illegal to suggest that psilocybin has health benefits: that's "unproven" according to the Dr. Spocks of science.
