How the Drug War limits our understanding of Immanuel Kant

How the Drug War limits our understanding of Immanuel Kant

an open letter to Dr. V.A. Gijsbers of Leiden University

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 6, 2024

Hello, Doctor Gijsbers and greetings from Virginia, USA.

Thanks for the excellent videos on Immanuel Kant ¹ and his Critique of Pure Reason ². They are helping me finally begin to understand this book, which I only dimly comprehended (if at all) in university. What follows are some no doubt controversial thoughts about Kant and his discussion of the noumenal world. I am hoping that you will find time to read them. If so, I would be delighted to hear your thoughts. Please understand, however, that any criticisms below are directed toward philosophy as a field and not by any means toward yourself in particular.

Thanks again!

I am a 65-year-old philosophy buff from the states who has written hundreds of essays regarding the philosophy of the War on Drugs and the attitudes that it represents. I believe that the Drug War has censored academia and in ways that most academics neither acknowledge or see. I think that the study of Kant is a case in point. For I would claim that the subject of metaphysics cannot be exhaustively discussed (especially post-Kant) without a discussion of the effects of drugs on the human understanding, especially psychedelics and the various phenethylamines synthesized by chemists like Alexander Shulgin ³. These substances, after all, provide many with what they believe to be a firsthand experience of the noumenal world, a belief maintained both by tribal peoples and the majority of psychedelic users in the modern west. Nor is the interest in such brave new worlds of experience limited to tribal peoples and hippies. William James himself believed that we should study such worlds when he wrote the following in "The Varieties of Religious Experience":

"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded"⁴.

Unfortunately, the Drug War forces us to disregard such forms of consciousness by outlawing the very substances that cause them. But that need not keep us from at least talking about such seemingly noumenal states.

What might the accounts of drug use tell us about the noumenal world? Permit me to give one example from personal experience.

In 2017, I traveled to Arizona to take a "spirit walk" inspired by the consumption of a peyote cactus button. During the "trip," I beheld (with my eyes shut) a neon-green slideshow of Mesoamerican imagery, with stylized depictions of warriors and animals, closely resembling the imagery found on Mayan sculpture, murals, and calendars.

Now, I am not a Mesoamerican scholar, nor was I consciously thinking of Mesoamerican history during this time in my life. So the fact that I should have such an experience should provide fodder for a wide variety of informed speculation about the nature of the noumenal world, especially as this experience occurred in an historically tribal region and using a substance that had a long history of tribal use. At very least, the experience casts doubt on any materialist account of consciousness and suggests (though certainly does not prove) the existence of a sort of panpsychic world in which the natural world participates with human consciousness in passing along culturally specific thoughts, feelings and ideas about the phenomenal world around us.

Unfortunately, the academic world pretends that drugs do not exist, and in this way, they give a monopoly to materialist explanations for experiences of this kind (when they do not ignore such experiences altogether, which is, indeed, the standard materialist MO in these cases). I await the day when academics will realize that educators are not free in the age of a Drug War and that all our supposed knowledge is based on an unacknowledged acceptance of the drug-hating ideas of Mary Baker Eddy: namely, that outlawed drugs can have no positive uses whatsoever and that therefore the effects that they have on the minds of human beings need not be taken into account when considering the truths of philosophy, or of psychology for that matter. Indeed, psychology not only ignores the Drug War but it embraces it every time that it refers to demonized substances for depression as "crutches" and plumps rather for the use of pharmaceuticals that purport to work in a "scientific" (i.e. materialist) fashion, notwithstanding the fact that the latter create lifelong dependency in 1 in 4 American women.

The idea that psychedelic drug users are seeing the noumenal world is supported by the filter theory of consciousness championed by Aldous Huxley, which states that the categories through which we observe phenomena in our sober lives constitute but one of many prisms through which we can see the world, and that psychoactive drugs have the power to open the "doors of perception" to many other aspects of reality ⁵. These other realities are necessarily noumenal insofar as there is no consistency between "trippers" when it comes to the nature of these other worlds, notwithstanding the fact that drug users obtain different experiences from the same substance at the same dose in the same setting, etc., although the Drug Warrior might join the materialist in claiming that such experiences are merely pathological.

I will spare you any further attempts at elucidating my thesis. I hope in this short space, however, I have at least given you some reason to believe that the Drug War is, indeed, censoring academia, and that in so doing, it is limiting the extent to which we can profit from, and perhaps even improve upon, the insights of Kant with respect to our understanding of metaphysics and the perhaps "not so unknowable" nature of the noumenal world.

Author's Follow-up:

November 01, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

For more on this topic, please see my essay entitled What drug use could tell us about the rationalist triumphalism of Immanuel Kant.

Notes:

1: What drug use could tell us about the rationalist triumphalism of Immanuel Kant DWP (up)
2: The Critique of Pure Reason Kant, Immanuel, Project Gutenberg, 1781 (up)
3: Scribd.com: The Nature of Drugs Vol 1 Shulgin, Alexander, Transform Press, Santa Fe, 2021 (up)
4: Scribd.com: The Varieties of Religious Experience James, William, Philosophical Library, New York, 1902 (up)
5: The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell Huxley, Aldous, Penguin Books, New York, 1970 (up)

Immanuel Kant

To see how the drug war censors Academia, merely consider the fact that philosophers refuse to connect the dots between Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and the anesthetic revelations of William James. Kant's philosophy privileges one kind of consciousness -- what he calls "rational" consciousness -- whereas James maintains that there are many types of consciousness and that we must study them to see what they tell us about reality writ large, or the Kantian noumena. To see just how censored academia is, consider the following sad fact: that the online biography of William James at his alma mater, Harvard University, does not even mention James' work with laughing gas nor the fact that it changed his whole view of the world.

The result? The rationalists have earned an unearned victory. They have gotten away with their claim that they are the only ones who can discover the truth about the world, to the extent that such truth can be known. All evidence of experiential truth from other venues has been conveniently outlawed for them.

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Politicians protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment and encourage drug testing to ensure that drug war heretics starve.

Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.

The drug war is a big scare campaign to teach us to distrust mother nature and to rely on pharmaceuticals instead.

The Drug War is based on a huge number of misconceptions and prejudices. Obviously it's about power and racism too. It's all of the above. But every time I don't mention one specifically, someone makes out that I'm a moron. Gotta love Twitter.

Mayo Clinic is peddling junk. They are still promoting Venlafaxine, a drug that is harder to kick than heroin. The drug is only a problem, though, because of prohibition. It would be easy to get off of with the help of other drugs!!! WAKE UP, MAYO!

We won't know how hard it is to get off drugs until we legalize all drugs that could help with the change. With knowledge and safety, there will be less unwanted use. And unwanted use can be combatted creatively with a wide variety of drugs.

I'm told that science is completely unbiased today. I guess I'll have to go back and reassess my doubts about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could disbelieve it.

The line drawn between recreational and medical use is wishful thinking on the part of drug warriors. Recreation, according to Webster's, is "refreshment or diversion," and both have positive knock-on effects in the lives of real people.

My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine, 1884

Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us

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Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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