a philosophical review of The Psychedelic Handbook
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 25, 2024
started listening to Rick Strassman's "Psychedelic Handbook"1 this weekend on a four-hour trip to Seaford, Virginia, to honor my recently deceased mother with a memorial service at her home church. My plan was to listen to the entire book en route and then report back with my philosophical critique of the same on Monday. But the book was so infuriating to me that I started grumbling and talking back to my car speakers before I had traveled 10 miles. By the 20th mile, I was so upset that I started behaving dangerously. I live in Trump territory, understand, and I suddenly started flipping the bird at the occasional Trump signs and banners unfurled along the country roads that I was following. Had my behavior been noted, I would surely have been aggressively tailgated, if not actually shot at. But my attitude at the time was "Bring it on!", so bothered had I become by Strassman's materialist2 take on the philosophical and ideological aspects of so-called "drug use."
Just before crossing Massanutten mountain toward Luray, I said to myself, "Enough!" I pulled into a rarely used side street and fumbled about on my cell phone until I heard the dulcet opening strains of Mahler's Second Symphony. It was being performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Simon Rattle, who once wrote of the work:
"You are clubbed to the ground and then lifted to the highest heights on angels' wings."
I thought to myself, I wonder if materialists would agree with that assessment. "Angel wings, indeed!" they would probably say. "Isn't the listener merely being subjected to a host of ordinary audio waves that impact the human ear in such a way as to arouse speculative mentation?"
The rest of this essay will be an attempt to explain in detail why I was vexed, both by what Strassman says in his book and by what he does not say regarding the meaning and implications of the psychedelic experience and of our country's Christian Science disdain for godsend medicines. (Hey, if you can call them "drugs" in the negative sense of that word, then I can call them "godsends.")
Psychedelic Cheerleaders
Strassman tells us that there are a few insightful reporters out there who recognize that many folks behind psychedelic research are behaving like cheerleaders for the use of these drugs. He no doubt is referring to freelance reporters like Katie MacBride3, who makes the rounds of trendy online publications like Slate, telling us that the MAPS organization might be a cult, and that the FDA was perfectly justified in its latest failure to approve MDMA for therapeutic purposes. But MacBride is not really insightful. Far from it. She is missing the 6,000-pound gorilla in the room: the fact that the FDA does not evaluate drugs fairly and is incapable of so doing thanks to its materialist biases.
The first step that the FDA takes in investigating such drugs is to dogmatically ignore all obvious benefits of use. To such pseudo-materialists, it is anti-scientific to take into account "mere" anecdote or even time-honored historical usage. They must determine what the molecules have to tell us. But that's not true science, that's just cowardly kowtowing to Drug Warrior sensibilities, according to which substances that we disdainfully call "drugs" must be thought to have no positive uses for anybody, anywhere, ever. The myopic focus of modern scientists gives them an excuse to agree with that absurd judgement, and their incentive to do so is obvious given the fact that pharmaceutical companies sponsor most clinical trials these days.
But Ecstasy/MDMA brought peace, love and understanding to the British dance floors in the 1990s4. Is that not a benefit of use? Such drugs help hotheads experience compassion and so have obvious potential in preventing school shootings. Is that not a benefit of use5? Such drugs could obviate the need for brain-damaging shock therapy by giving the deeply depressed an occasional vacation from self-defeating mental obsessions6. Is that not a benefit of use? Such drugs could be on hand as a form of EPI kit for the suicidal7: is THAT not a benefit of use?
The FDA says no.
I first held in my hand a tiny vial of whitish powder, extracted from the sacred cactus, which the ancestors of the Aztecs worshipped millennia ago, when men believed in the Mysteries of Existence, now laid open to the dead knife of scientific analysis.8
In short, the FDA conducts a cost/benefit analysis in which they ignore all benefits. Moreover, any TRUE cost/benefit analysis of drug approval would take into account the many other costs of NOT approving a popularly desired drug: the black market that one thereby creates, the creation of armed gangs and cartels, the discouragement of safe-use education that could prevent misuse, the contamination of drugs that inevitably occurs for unregulated products, the censorship of science and media on these topics, and even the abolishment of the fourth amendment in the name of "drug testing,9" not for impairment but to locate a substance of which politicians disapprove (with the tacit support of purblind materialists).
A true analysis of such drugs would also involve interviewing the vast majority of users who, as Carl Hart10 reminds us, use such substances safely and find benefits in that use. But a researcher would have to make an effort, because the media has always supported the Drug War by refusing to publish any stories about positive drug use. Even Mad in America, a group founded by reporter Robert Whitaker to combat the false claims about antidepressants, would not publish my story about my own depression because I cited my own beneficial uses of psilocybin11. The Drug Warrior myth is that such beneficial use is impossible, and the media is happy to play along. If it publishes a story about "drugs," it is almost always a modern morality play in which an irresponsible user finds God - or a higher power - and then learns to embrace the drug-hating principles of Mary Baker Eddy.
Some will no doubt tell me that the FDA DOES consider drug benefits. If that is true, then their whole value system is crazy: they would then be telling us that 100% safety is more important than world peace, than stopping school shootings, than preventing suicides, and that religious liberty can indeed be denied to folks who consider that MDMA helps them live according to the dictates of Christ. And that employers can indeed deny one the ability to work in America if they can even find traces of these substances in one's digestive system. For the FDA, perfect safety is more important than any benefit. In short, they have the value system of a cloistered hypochondriac, not of a freedom-loving American. In any case, it's totally unclear why a government bureaucrat should be deciding these questions in the first place, but that is what they are doing when they veto a drug: they are deciding that America (and, indeed, the entire world!) can easily do without all the benefits that are obvious to the non-materialists who have actually USED the substances in question.
This is what Rick Strassman does not understand: When the FDA denies the approval of a drug like MDMA, they are not just deciding about a drug: they are implicitly ranking American freedoms against the need for safety, telling us in effect that absolute safety is more important than the freedom of religion or our own ability to control our own minds and mentation. These are judgment calls that bureaucrats are not qualified to make. If there are any experts on these matters, they are philosophers and ethicists, not materialistic scientists. The fact is, everything can be dangerous. The question is, when is risk worth it? And that is a question that the FDA ignores because it ignores all glaringly obvious benefits of the psychoactive drugs that it fails to approve. But then that's one of the two major problems with the Drug War: 1) It pretends that prohibition has no downsides, and 2) It pretends that drug use has no upsides. It's big lies and censorship all down the line.
It is at this point that the materialist will triumphantly trot out a handful of folks who had trouble with a maligned substance (as does Rick in his attempts to raise doubts about LSD legalization) as if this were some knockout argument against drug approval. What? If that were so, then alcohol would not be legal today, nor would aspirin12, nor would the antidepressants upon which one in four American women are dependent for life, something that I consider to be the greatest mass pharmacological dystopia in human history. But this dystopia is invisible to materialists, or else they consider it to be a materialist blessing and have thus created a new political category of substances called "meds" to shield these latter substances from the disdain that we have been taught to heap on "drugs," i.e. on psychoactive substances in general.
Rick also writes as if the crackdown on LSD in the 1960s made perfect sense for health reasons - as if Nixon was really interested in the health of young people. He did not want to educate them; he wanted to charge them with felonies and thus prevent them from voting in the next election! Why does prison even come to mind for people as a normal response for dealing with a public health crisis, assuming one existed back then, given the fact that no one was ever going to keep us up to date on any positive uses of LSD, whereas the media companies tried to outdo each other in producing lurid stories about LSD trips gone bad? There are substances like niacin and Thorazine that can end trips quickly. If bad trips were a concern, why were these substances never touted on primetime news? Answer: safety was never the real concern back then, just as it is of no concern today as tens of thousands die unnecessarily from opiates thanks to contaminated product from unregulated street drugs and our refusal to teach safe use.
I know people who are dying because they have allowed themselves to gain excessive weight. Should we be throwing these people in jail and/or removing them from the workforce through some form of "weight testing"? Come on, Rick!
In conclusion: If organizations like MAPS13 are cheerleaders, then organizations like the FDA are jeerleaders!
Hope trauma
Rick writes about a phenomenon that he calls "hope trauma," in which people learn of fantastic experiences from using a drug like psilocybin only to be deeply disappointed at their own failure to experience almost anything on the drug. He implies that this is somehow a downside of a drug itself, that psilocybin, for example, could get one's hopes up prematurely. What he does not point out is that almost all of this "failure to experience" is caused by the use of antidepressants, those drugs created by materialists who sought to fix some chemical imbalance in order to create a one-size-fits-all cure for the multi-faceted condition of human sadness. Not only have these pills turned 1 in 4 American women into patients for life while failing to "cure" their depression14, they have made it impossible for these same people to benefit from any of the holistic pharmaceutical treatments that are now starting to come online thanks to the psychedelic renaissance. For those of us who believe in such a thing as "sacred medicine," these antidepressants are literally hellish: they make about as much sense as a pill to render one emotionally impervious to the beauty of a rainbow or the smile of a child.
The materialist mindset can also lead to blunted results of drug use, as Eugene Seaich explains below:
Significantly enough, the materialist habitué of the present employs his intoxicant or euphoriant as an escape from pragmatic commonplace, rather than as a means to positive experience. Lacking the faith that naive imagination possesses, the exclusively practical mind is aware only of the empirical facts that it sees in a situation. Nothing of the inner meaning that poetic belief creates can be revealed to it. Such a mind is forever denied the experience of "otherness"—hence cannot appreciate the deeper dimensions of man's spiritual life. The human content of experience is subsequently reduced to the level of commonness, and the religious sense, to dreary causality.
Conclusion: Hope trauma is not a problem with drugs like psilocybin, as Rick implies, it's a problem with mindset and the fact that modern anti-depressants have made millions of Americans biochemically insensitive to breakthrough drug treatment.
Drugs of abuse
Rick opens the book by citing his preference for the term "psychedelic" in describing drugs like psilocybin and LSD. Although I disagree with this preference for reasons given below, I still thought to myself: "Great, at least he recognizes the need to speak as precisely as possible on these topics." But he then goes on to repeatedly use the term "drugs of abuse" totally uncritically.
There are no such things as "drugs of abuse" - not in the sense that the Drug War maintains. If a drug is used unwisely by Americans, it tells us something about Americans and their society, not about the drug itself. Materialists want to say "Drug X is a drug of abuse" - but this fails to take into account that the drug in question might be considered very differently in another culture. It is easy to imagine any drug being used wisely, any drug at all - we should not blame a drug simply because Americans cannot manage to do that, especially when our demand for safety is so much higher for drug use than it is for any other risky activity on the face of the earth.
Sure, someone might misuse opium; then again someone might write engaging and extravagant literature with its help, just as poets did for a time in 19th century Britain. When we outlaw the drug, we are saying that the health of these potential abusers whom we have refused to educate (who are typically envisioned as white suburban Americans) is more important than the rights of those who would use the drug wisely for all sorts of positive reasons around the world, like for writing otherworldly poetry, or to become compassionate, or to get one's mind off suicide, etc. etc. etc. .. for when the FDA makes a decision about a drug these days, they are making a decision for almost the entire world, as a practical matter. And they do this by COMPLETELY IGNORING all the glaringly obvious benefits of these so-called "drugs of abuse."
If we are going to blame drugs rather than sociopolitical systems and laws, then the first step would be to recognize that alcohol is by far the main "drug of abuse" in America; but with alcohol, we recognize the inevitability of misuse by a certain proportion of the world and the sight of a drunkard never starts us thinking about new legislation to punish drinkers. When it comes to "drugs," however, we claim that the existence of even one apparent "victim" should mean that said drug is not available for anyone, ever, not at any dose, for any reason. If you're in a hospice dying, tough luck. If it could help you succeed as a writer, tough luck. If it could get you past your anxiety long enough to succeed in your field of choice, tough luck. Even if you claim that it brings you closer to God himself, tough luck. (What do YOU know, after all? Only our scientists can tell us whether we're REALLY getting close to God, didn't you know that?!)
Of course, the inherent cruelty of this attitude occasionally becomes undeniably clear. Something's got to give, and so a demonized drug finally gets provisional approval. But even then, the government limits the damage to the remunerative status quo by insisting that we can only approve each substance for the treatment of one single board-certified illness at a time - and then only under excruciatingly censored conditions that send the cost of treatment for the same skyrocketing with the effectiveness decreasing in proportion as the drug-taking experience is accommodated in a cold office visit, with a nurse standing by with a clipboard, ready to make a note at the first sign of her patient's discomfiture. It is for these reasons that I recently had to shell out $4,000 to use a mushroom that grows at my very feet: and yet in his book's opening, Rick says he is still uncertain on which side he comes down when it comes to drug re-legalization. I guess Rick does not have to personally pay $4,000 for the drugs that actually work for HIM. Nor does his religion, or lack thereof, rely on insights obtained by these kinds of substances that human beings have used for ages to deal with the ultimate questions of life. Good for Rick, tough luck for the rest of us, apparently.
For as Carl Hart reminds us, even crack cocaine can be used wisely. The downsides of use are always traceable to social problems, like a refusal to educate, a refusal to regulate safe product, etc. But America demonizes substances, and so we have a Crack scare, a PCP scare, an Oxy scare, a Fentanyl scare - and the DEA works with shows like "48 Hours" to show that these drugs are now a threat to "YOU TOO" - (which basically means white parents in well-to-do suburbia are now suffering the downsides that we thought were reserved for inner city youths and foreigners from South of the Border)15. "Drugs" are simply the whipping boy for all of America's social problems. They give skinflint politicians an excuse for refusing to spend money on anything but police forces and the military.
Again, Rick, there ARE no drugs of abuse. By saying so, you are embracing the big Drug War lie, which tells us the following: that a drug which can be potentially misused by a white American young person at a certain dosage and in a certain situation must not be use anywhere, for anybody, at any dosage, in any situation. That is a crazy conclusion, even by scientific standards, but unfortunately reductive materialism has divorced modern science from common sense.
Psychedelics versus entheogens
Rick prefers the term "psychedelics" over "entheogens," and this is understandable from a materialist point of view. He wants us to approach a marvelous world scientifically, that is to say with the mind set of Dr. Spock of Star Trek, constantly reminding oneself, as Richard Dawkins suggests when it comes to evolution, that there is "nothing to see here" except the inevitable dreary outcome of cause and effect. In this view, the drug experience is merely a case of the mind observing its own inner workings, divorced from all connection with nature as a whole. It has nothing more important to tell us than that silly dream you had after eating too much ice cream. But that's a metaphysical conclusion about such "trips," not common sense or logic. Philosophers and humanists have more expertise in these matters than do scientists, especially when those scientists disdain on principle to even use the drugs in question. For most people don't even have arguments to make on these topics. They were never educated about drugs; they were simply taught to fear them - and to believe moreover that it was actually wrong to be honest on such topics lest one encourage drug use. No wonder the Drug Warrior does not want to educate users about safe use: education is the enemy in the war on drugs.
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This is why I believe that we should NOT insist on any one word, but that everyone should use the word that accords with their own metaphysical understanding of the world. I prefer the word entheogen, because it highlights the godsend potentials that we are ignoring when we outlaw drugs like MDMA and psilocybin. An atheist may take exception to the apparent etymological nod to a deity, but for me the word merely connotes the intimation of the existence of higher beneficent powers about which it is impossible to be specific. I do not feel that the term "entheogens" implies that I worship a Caucasian God with a long white beard ensconced upon a cumulus cloud alongside cherubim and angels. I also find it hard to care about the rights of atheists when the Drug War is outlawing my religion. Let them legalize my entheogenic religion first, and maybe THEN we can talk about your right not to believe in it!
Besides, the motivation behind Strassman's preference for the term "psychedelic" resembles for me the motivation behind the modern scientist's willful blindness about the benefits of drugs: they refuse to recognize the obvious, like even the most overwhelming feeling of sudden enlightenment. They don't want to be biased, so they try to abstract themselves and their feelings out of the equation. So they shout in effect "I'm not listening" as the voice of ancient truths bellow, determined to believe only what they see under a microscope, determined that feelings do not matter in the scientific world. And thus the term "psychedelic" becomes problematic: it enthrones this myopic and passion-free materialism as the baseline for further studies of psychedelics, with the working assumption being that there is "no there there" in the psychedelic experience, no greater truths to learn, no understanding of the human condition or of universal connectedness, no understanding of a greater reality of any kind.
Yet for all his apparent certainty on this matter, neither Rick nor anyone else knows the true ontological status of entheogenic (er, excuse me, psychedelic) visions and states of mind. Perhaps I can never rule out the possibility that drug-induced epiphanies are meaningless. But when I saw mesa-American imagery five years ago after consuming peyote in a southern American desert with links to that ancestral past, I got the deep sense of a world "far more deeply interfused" than the materialist's world of biochemical predestination would admit, and unlike materialists, I do not feel doctrinally obliged to dismiss those sensations as irrelevant. That kind of assumed ignorance is resulting in endless suffering around the world even as I write thanks to the outlawing of drugs whose entire benefits are found precisely in those positive feelings that materialists either downplay or ignore.
Finally, speaking of William James16, it was laughing gas that first tipped him off to the limitations of our "sober" perceptions and to the vast unexplored world of ultimate reality from which we are normally biochemically shielded for obvious practical reasons. And that laughing gas is now in the crosshairs of the FDA, after one specific incident of misuse in England. They now want to treat it as a drug, in the evil acceptation of that word. As a practical matter, laughing gas is already incredibly hard to source on any safe basis, whereas in a sane world, we would distribute it in an easy-to-use format to the depressed for suicide prevention, just as we already find ways to put EPI pens in the hands of those with extreme allergies.
I wrote over a hundred letters to Philosophy Departments in the US and England, urging them to protest this new regulation in the name of William James and on behalf of academic freedom, not to mention suicide prevention and the rights of the depressed17. But there were no responses, so indoctrinated have we become after 100-plus years of substance prohibition, which starts in grade school and is promoted by censorship about all positive uses of drugs in movies, newspapers, magazines and on television. But at least I did my part. Uncredentialed as I am, I was the only philosopher who officially petitioned the FDA to leave laughing gas alone on the grounds of academic freedom and the freedom of mind, mentation, and religion. For as James himself wrote:
"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."18
This is why we should never follow the science when it comes to drugs: Science is agenda-driven in the age of the Drug War, and that agenda is to outlaw any substance which helps the user to envision worlds above and beyond the commonplace world that has been accepted by passion-scorning materialists as the one and only true "reality" for human beings.
Materialist scientists cannot triumph over addiction because their reductive focus blinds them to the obvious: namely, that drugs which cheer us up ACTUALLY DO cheer us up. Hence they keep looking for REAL cures while folks kill themselves for want of laughing gas and MDMA.
Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.
Two weeks ago, a guy told me that most psychiatrists believe ECT is great. I thought he was joking! I've since come to realize that he was telling the truth: that is just how screwed up the healthcare system is today thanks to drug war ideology and purblind materialism.
ME: "What are you gonna give me for my depression, doc? MDMA? Laughing gas? Occasional opium smoking? Chewing of the coca leaf?" DOC: "No, I thought we'd fry your brain with shock therapy instead."
Just saw a People's magazine article with the headline: "JUSTICE FOR MATTHEW PERRY."
If there was true justice, their editorial staff would be in jail for promoting user ignorance and a contaminated drug supply.
It's the prohibition, stupid!!!
For those who want to understand what's going on with the drug war from a philosophical point of view, I recommend chapter six of "Eugenics and Other Evils" by GK Chesterton.
The DEA should be tried for crimes against humanity. They have been lying about drugs for 50 years and running interference between human beings and Mother Nature in violation of natural law, depriving us of countless potential and known godsends in order to create more DEA jobs.
The front page of every mycology club page should feature a protest of drug laws that make the study of mycology illegal in the case of certain shrooms. But no one protests. Their silence makes them drug war collaborators because it serves to normalize prohibition.
Getting off antidepressants can make things worse for only one reason: because we have outlawed all the drugs that could help with the transition. Right now, getting off any drug basically means becoming a drug-free Christian Scientist. No wonder withdrawal is hard.
Americans believe scientists when they say that drugs like MDMA are not proven effective. That's false. They are super effective and obviously so. It's just that science holds entheogenic medicines to the standards of reductive materialism. That's unfair and inappropriate.
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 Rick Strassman Got Wrong: a philosophical review of The Psychedelic Handbook, published on August 25, 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)
started listening to Rick Strassman's "Psychedelic Handbook"1 this weekend on a four-hour trip to Seaford, Virginia, to honor my recently deceased mother with a memorial service at her home church. My plan was to listen to the entire book en route and then report back with my philosophical critique of the same on Monday. But the book was so infuriating to me that I started grumbling and talking back to my car speakers before I had traveled 10 miles. By the 20th mile, I was so upset that I started behaving dangerously. I live in Trump territory, understand, and I suddenly started flipping the bird at the occasional Trump signs and banners unfurled along the country roads that I was following. Had my behavior been noted, I would surely have been aggressively tailgated, if not actually shot at. But my attitude at the time was "Bring it on!", so bothered had I become by Strassman's materialist2 take on the philosophical and ideological aspects of so-called "drug use."
You have been reading an article entitled, What Rick Strassman Got Wrong: a philosophical review of The Psychedelic Handbook, published on August 25, 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)