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
The FDA should have no role in approving psychoactive medicine. They evaluate them based on materialist standards rather than holistic ones. In practice, this means the FDA ignores all glaringly obvious benefits.
The drug war normalizes the disdainful and self-righteous attitude that Columbus and Pizarro had about drug use in the New World.
The main form of drug war propaganda is censorship. That's why most Americans cannot imagine any positive uses for psychoactive substances, because the media and the government won't allow that.
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.
There's a run of addiction movies out there, like "Craving!" wherein they actually personify addiction as a screaming skeleton. Funny, drug warriors never call for a Manhattan Project to end addiction. Addiction is their golden goose.
We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.
I know. I'm on SNRIs. But SSRIs and SNRIs are both made with materialist presumptions in mind: that the best way to change people is with a surgical strike at one-size-fits-all chemistry. That's the opposite of the shamanic holism that I favor.
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!
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.
Some outlawed drugs grow new neurons in the brain. To refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!
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