What drug use could tell us about the rationalist triumphalism of Immanuel Kant
at least in a world in which academics were still free
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 22, 2025
PREFACE/DISCLAIMER
I am not a board-certified expert on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason1; indeed, I only began studying the book in detail a year ago. I preface thus much lest a recognized authority on the subject should find fault with the terminology that I employ below. Hopefully, that will not be an issue, however, since I have striven to avoid all statements that might imply a debatable interpretation and/or characterization of Kant's viewpoints. This has been easily done for the most part, since my insights, such as they are, concern potentially problematic presuppositions on the part of the Konigsberg sage rather than any supposed flaws in the detailed way in which he draws conclusions that are BASED on those presuppositions. Besides, the experts themselves are at each other's throats on questions of Kant's terminology. Nor is this surprising given the fact that the book was "hastily thrown together," according to no less an authority than Norman Kemp Smith, the Kantian scholar par excellence who provided the authoritative English language translation of Kant's Critique. Kant, wrote Smith, "flatly contradicts himself in almost every chapter; and there is hardly a technical term which is not employed by him in a variety of different and conflicting senses."2
For this reason, Smith urges the readers of his Commentary on the book to be patient with Kant, to look at his work as a kind of philosophical diary written over a 12-year period, during which time the philosopher's viewpoints were subject to modification and change. I have written this preface merely to ask for an analogous indulgence on the part of my own readers toward this essay of mine as I attempt to highlight connections between the Kantian viewpoint and the western world's fear of psychoactive substances -- aka "drugs." This attempt must begin with a bit of a philosophical backstory about Kant and his four antimonies, but rest assured that the drug-related upshots of my analysis will soon become clear.
TRUE AND FALSE
In his four antimonies, Kant attempts to prove that perfectly logical arguments can be devised to both prove and disprove metaphysical statements: i.e., statements that are made without reference to any perceived object. Thus in his first antimony, he begins by logically proving that the universe has a beginning and that time is limited, after which he logically demonstrates the exact opposite: namely, that the universe has no beginning and that space is infinite.3 Likewise in antimony two, he proves both that all composite substances are made up of simple parts and that no composite substances are made up of simple parts4. In antimony three, he proves that the motion of all natural beings is causally determined and also that human beings are free and self-moving. 5 And finally, in antimony four, he adduces logically consistent arguments both for and against the existence of an absolutely necessary being, or what Christians might refer to as God6.
The chief point of these antimonies is to show that human beings are inherently unqualified to opine on such metaphysical matters, that we should therefore limit our philosophical speculations to the world of objects that we actually perceive and experience, albeit through the prism of the categories of the understanding.
AN EPIPHANY
While reflecting on these antimonies last night, I was reminded of an epiphany that I had over 20 years ago. It occurred to me back then that words could never prove the existence of God (or of any absolutely necessary being or 'spirit') for the simple reason that anything we say on such a topic can be rationally gainsaid. I did not attempt to prove this explicitly, but I realized that I myself could adduce plausible counterarguments for every position that I took on the matter. My thinking thus far was in line with Kant's views about the shortcomings of ratiocination as demonstrated by the antimonies. I intuited the same shortcomings of human understanding before I had even heard the word "antimonies." However, I drew different conclusions from those shortcomings.
This difference resulted from the fact that Kant, unlike myself, was a hardcore rationalist. He assumed that truth was only to be discovered through ratiocination -- to the strictly limited extent that truth can be discovered at all -- a truth which, according to Kant, could never qualify as capital-T truth in any case. He clearly states in his Critique that future metaphysicians will be no-nonsense logicians who ruthlessly censor all talk about things like telepathy and spirit, phenomena which Kant seems to view through the disdainful lens of the colonialist arrogance of his age. Truth, in short, is to be established through the arrangement of logically chosen words. This is ironic: On the one hand, Kant is vastly decreasing the pretentions of ratiocination by pointing out its enormous limitations when it comes to opining advisedly on metaphysics; at the same time, however, he is aggrandizing ratiocination by insisting that it is the only way to learn any ultimate truths about the world whatsoever.
I drew a different conclusion from my own antimonies. I figured that if words could always be gainsaid and if logic leads us in self-contradictory circles, then Truth writ large must be something that can only be conveyed experientially, by the sorts of ineluctable influences that are said to be imparted to the saints. And here is where the subject of psychoactive substances enters the picture. For one of the main themes of user reports -- not just of psychedelics but also of laughing gas, phenethylamines and even cocaine in certain cases -- is the feeling that the user is learning -- or at least becoming aware of the existence of -- truths that are too wonderful and transcendent to ever be captured in words. Indeed, one of the main complaints of the conscientious psychonaut is the inability of words to capture the meaning and importance of their drug experiences. For Kant, on the other hand, words are more than sufficient to describe ultimate truth -- at least in the hands of a hardnosed rationalist, one who is determined to ignore all mere feelings. And how does the rationalist proceed? First and foremost by ignoring all but one kind of perception, the perception of a supposedly "sober" mind as that word is strategically defined by the rationalists themselves.
ENTER WILLIAM JAMES
William James insisted on the philosophical relevance of altered states of consciousness and insisted that we must study them in order to opine advisedly on the nature of ultimate reality7. And yet I seem to be the only philosopher in the world who has connected the dots between Kant and James on this subject. That is hardly surprising, however, since the Drug War has basically outlawed James's approach to studying reality, and tenured philosophers keep their heads low in the age of the Drug War: it is "more than their jobs are worth" to protest drug prohibition. And yet I suspect that there is an additional reason (besides cowardice, I mean) for the roaring silence on this topic in academia. Most academics these days are materialists, and materialists are rationalists, just like Kant. As such, they see no need to complain about a drugs policy that basically outlaws the research of their philosophical opposition, those who think that ultimate truths can only be conveyed experientially and not through the fallible and often misleading vehicle of human language.
But then this is the standard M.O. of academia in the age of the Drug War. Academics refuse to acknowledge the obvious if in so doing they would cast drugs in a good light, and therefore violate the Drug War orthodoxy in which they have been indoctrinated since childhood, chiefly in the form of the media's ruthless censorship of all positive reports of drug use. Cocaine, for instance, could cure most depression in a trice -- in a trice -- and yet academics pretend that Freud's chief accomplishment was psychoanalysis as opposed to his identification of cocaine as a godsend for the depressed89. Why? Because psychoanalysis provides fodder for endless impressive-sounding research papers -- whereas cocaine use would merely keep hundreds of millions of people from living lives of quiet desperation. The needs of the depressed must come in a distant second to the needs of academics to boost their egos and earn a buck. It is important to remember in this connection that the depressed were never asked what they thought about cocaine: it was financially motivated doctors who demonized the drug by holding it to hypocritical safety standards, for they knew full well that the availability of such an obvious panacea for depression would put them out of a job.
THE RATIONALIST BODY COUNT
This fetish for rationalism in academia today has a body count when it comes to drug prohibition. It causes our scientists to completely dismiss the importance of feelings as experienced by actual human beings and to focus instead on what can be rationally proven through quantifiable experiments. And so rationalists gaslight us by telling us that even laughing gas cannot help the depressed10. Laughing gas, for God's sake. And why not? Because, like Kant himself, they believe that answers must be found through dispassionate analysis -- and without any reference to the uncertain world of human emotions and passion. And so they are completely deaf to the laughter of the user on nitrous oxide. They see no benefit in happiness nor the power of anticipation. They tell us, in fact, that such treatments are not "REAL" cures -- failing to realize that such a claim is a mere metaphysical assertion on their part. What they really mean to say is that "real" cures -- just like Kant's "truth" -- must be found through dispassionate analysis and should have nothing to do with what a "patient" claims to feel. This, however, is not a self-evident truth; it rather implies a philosophical position that is highly debatable. And so several of my close relatives -- like hundreds of millions of other depressed people around the globe -- sit behind close doors, wasting their life in gloom so that our scientists can revel in their role as experts on human behavior! What a tragic joke!
It is bad enough when passion-scorning rationalists claim to be the experts on what other human beings are feeling -- but it is going too far when they claim to be the experts on ultimate reality itself. And yet this is the lofty role that Kant claims for rationalists thanks to his disdainful disregard for the mere possibility of experiential truth. Unfortunately, rationalists will retain that unearned distinction until we restore academic freedom by ending drug prohibition. Only then will we be able to methodically investigate the potential epistemic implications of other states of consciousness, in contradistinction to the one-size-fits-all sober consciousness presupposed by Kant. In the meantime, however, I would point out that Kant's rationalist world view has received a rebuke from science itself. Smith quotes Kant as saying that assumed powers such as telepathic communication are "altogether groundless, as they cannot be based on experience and its known law..." Nearly three decades' worth of well-documented studies at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab have proven otherwise11. It turns out that human beings can influence the throw of dice (or of a digital proxy for dice) to a statistically relevant degree. In other words, telepathy of a sort is possible. This effect is tiny in absolute terms, and yet its philosophical significance is enormous -- or at least it would be in a world in which academic research was not outlawed by the demonstrably murderous policy of drug prohibition.
GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS
Ironically, Kant thought that he was restraining rationalism by pointing out its limitations in the metaphysical realm. "I had to remove knowledge," quoth Kant, "in order to make room for belief." This sounds open-minded enough. But then he goes on to insist that our knowledge of truth must be rational a priori. To adopt any other approach, says Kant, is “to shake off the fetters of science altogether, and thus to change work into play, certainty into opinion, philosophy into philodoxy.”12 Kant, in short, thinks that the sober rationalist is the only one who can answer the ultimate questions of life -- at least to the limited extent to which such questions can be answered by Homo sapiens. (Here I cannot help but think of the consequence-riddled corollary that only rationalists are qualified to tell us what "really" works for the depressed.) Kant makes this claim, however, in total ignorance of the power of psychoactive substances to produce compelling states of consciousness that hint at the existence of entire new worlds, thereby implying 1) that the Kantian categories can be transcended by the species known as Homo sapiens and 2) that truth may be something that must be experienced rather than recorded using the inadequate and often misleading tool of human language. This is extremely fraught stuff, central to the issues under discussion here. It demonstrates that the votes are not yet "in" when it comes to the supposed all-sufficiency of rationalism, and that to claim so before investigating the topic a la William James is to beg the point, i.e. to be guilty of the logical fallacy of petitio principii.
Here is what William James had to say about his experience after inhaling nitrous oxide.
"One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different."13
Nor did James consider the study of such states to be optional for philosophers.
"No account of the universe in its totality," he warned, "can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."14
Of course, Kant himself disregarded them, but then he had an excuse. He lived long before ethnobotanists had discovered that all indigenous people use psychoactive substances for both practical and spiritual reasons and that intoxication and madness were not necessarily the same thing. Unfortunately, modern philosophers can no longer claim ignorance as an excuse. Their obtuseness on these topics must therefore be attributed to one of three things -- or more likely still, to some combination of the following three:
1) their fear of running afoul of Drug War orthodoxy
2) the fact that they have come to believe in the drug-hating ideology that has been instilled into them since childhood
3) the fact that they are rationalists themselves and are therefore happy to let drug prohibition quash the investigations of their philosophical opponents
CONCLUSION
The question comes down to this, assuming that philosophers eventually decide to address it:
How are ultimate truths to be discovered? Is it by the internally consistent arrangement of words using the fallible medium of human language, or is it by transcending everyday consciousness and thereby obtaining potential glimpses of other worlds in which the limitations of the Kantian categories do not necessarily apply? Do we rely on the word-obsessed formulations of the westerner or on the experience-based learning associated with the indigenous, many of whom those westerners have persecuted for centuries, partly by forcing them to foreswear the very medicines that we are talking about here. This is a philosophic discussion that should be vigorously pursued in light of all the relevant evidence. Instead, drug prohibition has handed a premature victory to the rationalist mindset by outlawing all drugs whose use might conduce to an alternative way of seeing the world.
Author's Follow-up:
October 23, 2025
My intention in writing the above was by no means to trash Immanuel Kant wholesale as regards the endless tantalizing details of his work. I am fascinated by his accounts of the fallibility of human reason. I know moreover that I will never be qualified (in this lifetime, at least) to opine authoritatively on the details of his philosophy. But that does not mean that I am unable to flag a glaring oversight when I see one. I do not know how to build a gothic church, but I am still qualified to alert the nearby community if one of the building's main buttresses is about to collapse. And so I wrote the above essay as a wake-up call for my betters: those brilliant, if somewhat myopic, philosophers of our time who have mastered Kantian terminology and can use it advisedly. I did so to warn them of a shortcoming in Kant's work, namely, the fact that he wrote under the false assumption that there was only one kind of human consciousness, whereas William James has since "discovered" that there are many kinds of consciousness -- though, of course, this is something that the shamans and curanderos of indigenous tribes could have told us long ago, if we weren't so busy wiping them out and forcing them to replace consciousness-expanding medicines with alcohol.
James told us that we had a philosophical duty to study these alternative mental states. "No account of the universe in its totality," wrote James, "can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." Hence the above essay. It is my attempt to lure the detail-savvy philosophers away from their heavily dog-eared copies of the Critique just long enough for them to notice the sad truth, the fact that drug prohibition is incompatible with academic freedom. Until they do so, all their work, however internally consistent it may be, must be viewed as biased in favor of an outdated view of the nature of human consciousness.
NOTE: This is a field ripe for investigation, by the way. The problem is even bigger than it might appear at first glance. Kant does not merely ignore other states of mind-expanded consciousness such as those alluded to by James, but he assumes that human consciousness is fundamentally identical from person to person. And yet human consciousness must vary from person to person since none of us have identical biochemistries and genetics, etc. There are no doubt general rules that can be formed about the nature of human consciousness, but we must be careful in deriving universally applicable proscriptions (or limits on human understanding) based on the observation of general tendencies. The outliers may tell us far more about human abilities viz perception and understanding than does the average Joe, especially when the average Joe has been taught since childhood to feel nothing but disdain for so-called "altered states." We must study the way that specific individuals perceive the world, and not just the way in which a supposedly representative Everyman with a presupposed default biochemistry might seem forced to perceive it. The default biochemistries of visionaries such as William Blake, Meister Eckhart, or Saint Teresa of Avila were surely productive of unique consciousnesses of their own. These other worlds of consciousness, drug-influenced or otherwise, must be studied by any philosopher who is worthy of the name, especially when it comes to the noumena of Immanuel Kant. By failing to do so, Kantian scholars hand naive rationalism an unearned victory by ignoring all contrary evidence.
The DEA stomped onto Thomas Jefferson's estate in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. And the TJ Foundation helped them! They sold out Jefferson.
Drug warriors have harnessed the perfect storm. Prohibition caters to the interests of law enforcement, psychotherapy, Big Pharma, demagogues, puritans, and materialist scientists, who believe that consciousness is no big "whoop" and that spiritual states are just flukes.
I should have added to that last post: "I in no way want to glorify or condone drug demonization."
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."
It's no wonder that folks blame drugs. Carl Hart is the first American scientist to openly say in a published book that even the so-called "hard" drugs can be used wisely. That's info that the drug warriors have always tried to keep from us.
That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.
UNESCO celebrates the healing practices of the Kallawaya people of South America. What hypocrisy! UNESCO supports a drug war that makes some of those practices illegal!
Drug prohibition is superstitious idiocy.
It is based on the following crazy idea:
that a substance that can be misused by a white young person at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."
Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.
But then this is the standard M.O. of academia in the age of the Drug War. Academics refuse to acknowledge the obvious if in so doing they would cast drugs in a good light, and therefore violate the Drug War orthodoxy in which they have been indoctrinated since childhood, chiefly in the form of the media's ruthless censorship of all positive reports of drug use. Cocaine, for instance, could cure most depression in a trice -- in a trice -- and yet academics pretend that Freud's chief accomplishment was psychoanalysis as opposed to his identification of cocaine as a godsend for the depressed8 9. Why? Because psychoanalysis provides fodder for endless impressive-sounding research papers -- whereas cocaine use would merely keep hundreds of millions of people from living lives of quiet desperation. The needs of the depressed must come in a distant second to the needs of academics to boost their egos and earn a buck. It is important to remember in this connection that the depressed were never asked what they thought about cocaine: it was financially motivated doctors who demonized the drug by holding it to hypocritical safety standards, for they knew full well that the availability of such an obvious panacea for depression would put them out of a job.
Here is what William James had to say about his experience after inhaling nitrous oxide.
The DEA stomped onto Thomas Jefferson's estate in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. And the TJ Foundation helped them! They sold out Jefferson.
