What Can the Chemical Hold?

What Can the Chemical Hold?

a review of the paper by Katherine Hendy on Academia.edu

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 27, 2024

2025 update

Katherine Hendy's paper ¹ makes the important point that there is more than one way to evaluate the efficacy of psychoactive drugs such as MDMA and psilocybin. There is the chemical approach, which seeks to establish the efficacy of specific psychoactive substances in fighting officially recognized and discrete pathologies such as PTSD and so-called "treatment resistant depression." This approach uses clinical trials in which all participants have been scientifically identified as having one-and-the-same "illness" as defined by the DSM.

Then there is the efficacy as established by the positive transformation of the self, not by the alleviation of any one specific illness, but via an improvement in the individual's overall wellbeing and understanding of self. It is, of course, hoped that this understanding will resolve any specific psychological complaints (as for instance when one single afternoon of shroom use ended Paul Stamet's stuttering problem as a teenager ²) -- but the treatment is considered to be efficacious provided only that it improves the self, and not merely if it manages to extirpate an isolated pathology belonging to that self. Participants in the latter therapy are all seen as people in need of a better understanding of self, rather than people who happen to all share a specific illness or psychological shortcoming that they wish to eliminate from their lives.

The author then explains why our choice of explanations matters when it comes to establishing drug efficacy. She makes the case that our government's reliance on chemical explanations of efficacy naturally leads to a kind of exception-riddled prohibition, one in which we outlaw all use of substances like MDMA and psilocybin except in cases where the "patient" or "user" has an officially recognized illness for which the drugs in question have been proven efficacious according to science's cramped definition of that term.

Why is science's definition of "efficacy" cramped? That is the question that Katherine does not ask in this paper but which, I believe, is at the very heart of the problem with modern substance prohibition.

In our purblind demand that a drug cure a specific illness, we are blind to the obvious general benefits of the drug that have been proven extant before our very eyes. The use of MDMA in the 1990s resulted in totally unprecedented peace and understanding between ethnic groups on the dance floors of London ³. And yet this fact is never added to the plus side of any cost/benefit analyses about MDMA use that are undertaken by the scientists or their sometimes reluctant benefactors in government. Nor do they consider the costs of NOT legalizing the drug: the thousands of shock-rattled soldiers that will go without godsend treatments, the depressed who will suffer silently at home (perhaps while contemplating suicide), the anguished alcoholic who would gladly "switch vices" if only the FDA and the DEA would allow him or her to do so legally! And of course the use of psilocybin is seen in the same biased light. The time-honored positive use of psilocybin mushrooms by the Zapotec ⁴ people of Oaxaca, Mexico, for instance, tells the government nothing, making it clear that the colonial viewpoint of Cortes himself is alive and well in 21st-century America, complete with its aggressive disdain for anti-scientific and/or anti-Christian healing practices.

In short, it is just a farce to say that the government even performs cost/benefit analyses when it comes to drug efficacy: they rather seek to find reasons to keep psychoactive substances as illegal as possible, only grudgingly approving them when scientists have jumped through all the necessary hoops - and jumped through them again and again - until some point at which the continued bullheadedness on the part of regulators becomes willful obstructionism even in the eyes of their own self-interested employees. This is why we have a National Institute for Drug Abuse rather than a National Institute for Drug Use. Our government is all about demonizing psychoactive substances.

This begs the question: Why are materialist scientists in charge of deciding what we should value in life? For that is exactly what they are doing when they sign off on the outlawing of prima facie godsends like MDMA and psilocybin. By ignoring all the huge and obvious benefits of such drugs, scientists are basically deciding for us that 100% safety is more important in life than universal brotherhood, and the prevention of school shootings, and the prevention of suicide, etc. - and surely such a conclusion is open to the liveliest of debates!

So until American scientists agree that "peace, love and understanding" is a good thing, they are obviously biased judges, determined to put today's "drugs" on show trials whose ultimate purpose is to prevent widespread use and to keep availability as problematic as possible for law-abiding Americans.

Conclusion: Scientists have no expertise in deciding what our priorities should be in life ⁵. This is why mind-expanding drugs should be judged (if at all) by philosophers and humanists and empathic souls - not by materialists, for whom ecstatic visions of unity and love are considered mere "false creations proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain."

In some sense then, it does not matter whether we explain the efficacy of entheogens through chemical action alone or with regard to the ever-changing nature of the "self": as long as government officials follow the lead of science in refusing to recognize the glaringly obvious benefits of entheogens (and the equally obvious downsides of their prohibition - up to and including the creation of civil wars overseas), the attempted approval of godsends will always be met by bureaucratic foot dragging and specious complaints about obscure potential dangers, typically promoted by clinicians who are seeking to curry favor with the DEA, which needs drugs to be as illegal as possible in order for them to justify their multi-billion-dollar budget.

I write this by way of supplementing Hendry's paper, not to criticize it. The government's refusal to recognize the positive sides of the substances that they dismiss as "drugs" has never been sufficiently emphasized by anyone, to my knowledge, so she is scarcely alone in giving it short shrift.

I do, however, have one other consideration to add to this informative and well-researched paper.

Hendry claims that there are two ways of establishing drug efficacy: 1) via a chemical explanation and 2) via an explanation related to the "self." I believe that there is a third way, however. Remember, the "doors of perception"⁶ open outward, not inward. In Aldous Huxley's view, the efficacy of mescaline consisted in its ability to draw back the veil that shielded him from full-on reality. It did not directly teach him about his "self," but rather hinted at the immense and interconnected nature of the world of which he was a part, how every inch of it was glowing and pulsating with life. Huxley's experience led him to expand on the ideas of Henri Bergson ⁷, that the mind is a reducing valve; its job is to limit our daily perceptions to what is potentially useful to us as human beings in contradistinction to showing us reality with a capital R. One thinks in this connection of the science of optics which tells us how the brain "fills in the blanks" caused by our species' poor peripheral vision with what are essentially mockups of what we apparently "should" be seeing in those poorly covered areas. Even if our periphery contains an orangutan riding a unicycle, we may not notice anything out of the ordinary there ⁸.

Huxley's way of understanding the psychedelic experience has similarities to the beliefs of a Mesoamerican shaman, insofar as both see their drug-induced visions as being more real, in a sort of metaphysical way, than their everyday perceptions ⁹. But the shaman would surely find the American emphasis on "self" as unhelpful at best, and selfish at worst, given the holistic philosophy of Cosmovision that is still prevalent among the indigenous peoples of Latin America. As human rights advocate Llona Suran explains:

"The Andean sensibility understands that every constitutive element of the Cosmos is intertwined, that every being is endowed with a spirit, whether it is mountains, rivers, trees, plants, or even rocks. It understands the world as a natural community of diverse and variable living communities, all of which, because of the bond that unites them, represent both their intrinsic value and the Whole."

-- "The Andean cosmovision as a philosophical foundation of the rights of nature" by Llona Suran ¹⁰

So while I reject the materialist attempts to extract humanity from the world and treat one single isolated illness in a repeatable fashion (a la the chemical establishment of efficacy), I see the emphasis on "self" as problematic as well. It seems, in fact, to be a denial of the interconnectedness of Cosmovision as described above, an expression of the utilitarian focus for which indigenous leaders all too justifiably reproach the West.

Personally, I do not need clinical trials to convince me that psilocybin is efficacious, however. The proof is extant after my first experience on the drug two weeks ago in Salem, Oregon. For despite materialist orthodoxy, the user is the expert when it comes to deciding the efficacy of psychoactive drugs, not some scientist working under the jaundiced eye of a cynical and skeptical DEA agent.

What was my experience?

The psilocybin "trip" vastly improved my mood and inspired me to take up entire new habits, including the writing of a daily diary for the first time in my life, and a handwritten diary at that! It motivated me to walk around Deerwood Mansion in Salem, Oregon, and create an introductory video for my Twitter followers, something that I would never have felt comfortable doing before psilocybin. In short, it worked, it worked, it worked!

But it also inspired frustration, because the idea that I cannot freely use mushrooms whenever I want for the purpose of improving my life like that is revolting to me. It represents the complete end of freedom - which I think is why so many people try not to even think about the War on Drugs. It's just asking for trouble. Who wants to realize that they are being stopped by their own government from living a full and productive life? It's America, after all. We're free, aren't we? No. It seems that "drugs" are so dangerous now that the government has a national security interest in thwarting our hopes and dreams. Who knew?

I remember feeling the same frustration when I was driving through the scrub grass in Arizona away from the Church of the Peyote Way six years ago after a peyote session that gave me bright-green visions of Mesoamerican imagery. Yes, the feeling was great, but I was pissed when I recalled that there were heartless people in Washington, D.C., who made a full-time job out of seeing to it that I experienced such eye-opening transcendence as little as possible in life, preferably zero times from their self-satisfied and undereducated point of view.

But back to that recent psilocybin journey of mine.

Though written for a very different purpose, the following lines from poet Percy Shelley capture the compelling spirit of my drug experience, one in which the world around me seemed immense and multiform and yet somehow inexorably one, a world of which I was but one small part -- indeed one almost unimaginably small part. And the vision was somehow therapeutic. For the time being at least, I felt like the world was my oyster, and I could not wait to get out in it and profit from that new understanding. But science, of course, is deaf to all anecdote. They need to see if taking psilocybin under controlled circumstances cures a specific condition, as in "hey, presto," as the Brits would say. If not, the materialist judges will simply shake their heads and cry: "Next!"... and thereby veto a world full of blatantly obvious benefits.

While the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.

Author's Follow-up: February 2, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

In the above essay, I criticize the materialist approach to drug research. I failed to point out, however, that this approach is based on a specific philosophy or ideology, namely, that of behaviorism. In an attempt to turn psychology into a "real" science, the behaviorist holds that talk of human feelings and experience means nothing: that psychologists must devote their attention to quantifiable data alone ¹¹. It is this inhumane ideology that permits materialists to ignore the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs and to claim that they have no recognized uses. In this way, behaviorism gives a veneer of "science" to the DEA's absurd claim that drugs have no known benefits. The fact is that all mood-elevating drugs are potential antidepressants ¹² -- the moment that we give empathic individuals the right to use them in a creative protocol. This is just psychological common sense and can only be denied by those who contend that anecdote does not matter, that history does not matter, and that psychological common sense does not matter.

Finally, a note about the Shelley poem, and specifically the opening line:

"While the one Spirit's plastic stress"...

The idea of a single pervasive "spirit" is not just poetry. The Kantian viewpoint, especially as interpreted by Schopenhauer, points to the existence of a timeless all-encompassing reality. This in turn comports with the experience of many users of psychedelics and phenethylamines. It is so common as to be a modern cliche that users of such substances report a sense of ontological oneness, a sense that reality is ultimately one, is ultimately interconnected.

Materialist scientists rule this possibility out a priori when they set to work studying such substances outside of all context and with regard only to the chemical effects of such drugs, as opposed to the reported experiences of the users -- which are all that matter in the real world, always assuming that the drugs in question are not biochemically toxic. The latter, by the way, is so rarely the case that it makes one wonder why the presumption is always that they are.

*materialism ¹³*

Notes:

1: What Can the Chemical Hold?: The Politics of Efficacy in the Psychedelic Renaissance Hendy, Katherine, Academia.edu, 2021 (up)
2: Fantastic Fungi: The Big-Screen Revival Tour Stamets, Paul (up)
3: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
4: Peaceful Societies: Hallucinogens for the Zapotec Bonta, Bruce, UNC Greensboro, 2016 (up)
5: Why science is a joke in the age of the drug war DWP (up)
6: The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell Huxley, Aldous, Penguin Books, New York, 1970 (up)
7: Henri Bergson: French philosopher Britannica (up)
8: How the Brain Fills in the Blanks Gärdenfors Ph.D., Peter, Psychology Today, 2023 (up)
9: Andean cosmovision of the Kallawaya UNESCO (up)
10: The Andean cosmovision as a philosophical foundation of the rights of nature Suran, Ilona , Notre Affaire a Tous, 2021 (up)
11: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
12: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
13: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (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.

Drug War Propaganda from Hollywood

Ego Transcendence Made Easy

If this be reason, let us make the least of it!

Psilocybin Breakthrough

Schopenhauer and Drugs

Too Honest to Be Popular?

What Can the Chemical Hold?

What if Arthur Schopenhauer Had Used DMT?

What's Drugs Got to Do With It?

Ego Transcendence Made Easy

How the Drug War limits our understanding of Immanuel Kant

How the Drug War Outlaws Criticism of Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant on Drugs

Psilocybin Breakthrough

Schopenhauer and Drugs

Too Honest to Be Popular?

What Can the Chemical Hold?

What's Drugs Got to Do With It?

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

If NIDA covered all drugs (not just politically ostracized drugs), they'd produce articles like this: "Aspirin continues to kill hundreds." "Penicillin misuse approaching crisis levels." "More bad news about Tylenol and liver damage." "Study revives cancer fears from caffeine."

The term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they connote.

Guess who's in charge of protecting us from AI? Chuck Schumer! The same guy who protected us from drugs -- by turning America into a prison camp full of minorities and so handing two presidential elections to Donald Trump.

Anytime you hear that a psychoactive drug has not been proven to be effective, it's a lie. People can make such claims only by dogmatically ignoring all the glaringly obvious signs of efficacy.

In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort shows how science damns (i.e. excludes) facts that it cannot assimilate into a system of knowledge. Fort could never have guessed, however, how thoroughly science would eventually "damn" all positive facts about "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.

High suicide rates? What a poser! Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the US has outlawed all substances that elate and inspire???

The 2024 Colorado bill was withdrawn -- but only when pols realized that they had been caught in the act of outlawing free speech. They did not let opponents speak, however, because they knew the speeches would make the pols look like the anti-democratic jerks that they were.

This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.

It's interesting that Jamaicans call the police 'Babylon,' given that Babylon denotes a society seeking materialist pleasures. Drug use is about transcending the material world and seeking spiritual states: states that the materialist derides as meaningless.

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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