a review of the paper by Katherine Hendy on Academia.edu
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
July 27, 2024
atherine Hendy's paper1 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 teenager2) -- 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 London3. 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 Zapotec4 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 life5. 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 Bergson7, 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 there8.
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 perceptions9. 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 Suran10
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.
Pull over to the side of the website!
I guess you're wondering why I stopped you. It's because you failed to stop for these related essays by the Drug War Philosopher:
The media called out Trump for fearmongering about immigrants, but the media engages in fearmongering when it comes to drugs. The latest TV plot line: "white teenage girl forced to use fentanyl!" America loves to feel morally superior about "drugs."
Drugs like opium and psychedelics should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
A pharmacologically savvy drug dealer would have no problem getting someone off one drug because they would use the common sense practice of fighting drugs with drugs. But materialist doctors would rather that the patient suffer than to use such psychologically obvious methods.
In a sane world, we'd package laughing gas for safe use and give it to the suicidal -- saying, "Use before attempting to kill yourself." But drug warriors would rather have suicide than drug use.
Scientists are not the experts on psychoactive medicines. The experts are painters and artists and spiritualists -- and anyone else who simply wants to be all they can be in life. Scientists understand nothing of such goals and aspirations.
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.
Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.
Democratic societies need to outlaw prohibition for many reasons, the first being the fact that prohibition removes millions of minorities from the voting rolls, thereby handing elections to fascists and insurrectionists.
Rick Strassman reportedly stopped his DMT trials because some folks had bad experiences at high doses. That is like giving up on aspirin because high doses of NSAIDs can kill.
In the board game "Sky Team," you collect "coffees" to improve your flying skills. Funny how the use of any other brain-focusing "drug" in real life is considered to be an obvious sign of impairment.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, What Can the Chemical Hold?: a review of the paper by Katherine Hendy on Academia.edu, published on July 27, 2024 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
atherine Hendy's paper1 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. 
You have been reading an article entitled, What Can the Chemical Hold?: a review of the paper by Katherine Hendy on Academia.edu, published on July 27, 2024 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)