Good afternoon, Samuel.
I have just read your wonderful paper entitled "Entheogens and Sacred Psychology." It is one of the few papers about "drugs" in which I find nothing to gainsay. However, it has inspired me to make a series of observations based on my own experience with these topics. As I believe I have mentioned, I am a 65-year-old chronic depressive and I have just traveled to Peru in order to learn about psychedelic plant medicine, aka master plants or plant teachers, from a philosophical and psychological point of view. I had hoped to use some of those medicines as well (particularly the huachuma cactus) to gain some of the routinely acknowledged benefits of that drug (a feeling of love and oneness with humanity), thinking I could eventually find therein the motivational mindset needed to break my lifelong dependence on Big Pharma meds (the kind upon which one and four American women are dependent for life). But I have been forced to delay the experience until an upcoming trip to Peru in June.
I will not give you a blow-by-blow account of the obstacles that I encountered in my attempts to use huachuma on my first trip to South America, but those experiences, frustrating as they were, highlighted some interesting issues yet to be explored about the fusion of psychoactive drugs and the western mindset, such as: "Should I feel guilty about trying to 'score' huachuma powder in Cusco in order to create a drinkable concoction of the San Pedro cactus by myself and for my own psychological, religious, philosophical and spiritual purposes?" I certainly felt rather low as I was slinking around Cusco, in my unexpectedly difficult quest to find the drug (coca leaves, on the other hand, were prominently available in every other street stall) though maybe that's a good thing: maybe shaman should be the gatekeepers of substances like huachuma cactus. That said, I am not sure how that situation would jibe with the western ideal of free academic inquiry, to have all my psychedelic experiences mediated through the rites and ceremonies of a religious tradition of which I am largely ignorant, especially when that religion is itself being mediated in many cases merely through the informed imaginations of well-meaning outsiders with respect to those shamanic traditions of the Inca that were so ruthlessly suppressed by the Spanish in colonial times.
After all, William James himself exhorted us as philosophers to study altered states2. For me, that would mean systemically using the substance under various circumstances, at various doses, at various times, in various situations and environments, in order to see what can and perhaps cannot be learned and/or felt thanks to such use. So the idea that I must necessarily associate a drug and its effects with Andean rituals seems problematic to me, it seems to me a bit of a "science stopper," even though I personally love what I'm learning about the Andean Cosmovision and the religious culture of the Inca. It is true, as I think you say, that westerners really do not have a religious tradition that they can "bring" to such drugs, but I would also point out that the DEA is doing everything it can to keep this from happening. If one wants to have their religion outlawed in America, all they need do is announce that the use of a drug like huachuma is part of their religious rites. The DEA will hound that church to the Supreme Court if necessary to prevent sacred usage. Even if the DEA fails in court, they will subsequently bind the church in question with such bureaucratic red tape and expensive "safety" requirements as to effectively nullify the victory thus obtained.
Thanks again for the fascinating paper. If you find time, I invite you to read below some further thoughts that occurred to me while reading it.
Sincerely Yours
"The evolution of modern medicine gave us our current, bifurcated view of drugs: the good ones that treat illness and the bad ones that people use to change their minds and moods." --Jacob Sullum, from Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, p. 25117
To understand why the western world is blind to the benefits of "drugs," read "The Concept of Nature" by Whitehead. He unveils the scientific schizophrenia of the west, according to which the "real" world is invisible to us while our perceptions are mere "secondary" qualities.
Drug prohibition has resulted in hundreds of thousands of completely unnecessary deaths thanks to totally preventable drug overdoses!
The drug war is a whole wrong way of looking at the world. It tells us that substances can be judged "up" or "down," which is anti-scientific and blinds us to endless beneficial uses.
What is the end game of the drug warrior? A world in which no one wants drugs? That's not science. It's the drug-hating religion of Christian Science. You know, the American religion that outsources its Inquisition to drug-testing labs.
The "acceptable risk" for psychoactive drugs can only be decided by the user, based on what they prioritize in life. Science just assumes that all users should want to live forever, self-fulfilled or not.
It is consciousness which, via perception, shapes the universe into palpable forms. Otherwise it's just a chaos of particles. The very fact that you can refer to "the sun" shows that your senses have parsed the raw data into a specific meaning. "We" make this universe.
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.
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."
When Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan call for continued prohibition to protect young people, they ignore the ENORMOUS fact that prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world. Wake up, guys! Prohibition is evil, not drugs! Ignorance is evil, not education!
It is a truism to say that we cannot change the world and that therefore we have to change ourselves -- but the drug war outlaws even this latter option.
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