On On Drugs (I)
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Dear
Thank you again for sending me an advanced reading copy of your forthcoming book On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality (out in September 2025). I’ve admired your work since long before Substack and I appreciate what you are doing at The Hinternet, even if I don’t always have the mental bandwidth to engage with it.
Owing to personal experience with the subject matter, On Drugs struck several chords with me — and several nerves as well. I hope you will forgive me for not writing a review (at least not yet), but rather sharing my reflections in a series of open letters.1 Although On Drugs is written in an engaging, personal style and you are commendably candid about your own struggles with what is euphemistically termed “mental health”, the book is presented as not just a memoir of psychedelic experience, but as a work of philosophy. It is in this spirit that I’d like to offer some challenges and complications to think through what I consider the psychedelic paradox.
I’ve previously explored “why the widespread use of psychedelics, which certainly make a lot of people feel more creative, has coincided with decades of cultural stagnation.”2 But the psychedelic paradox runs deeper still: many intelligent, sensible people describe the experiences they’ve had on psychedelics as some of the most meaningful experiences of their lives, allowing them to make peace with the past, to feel a deep connection towards all of humanity and to get in touch with nature in ways that they had never thought possible. And yet, does our world not feel more bereft of meaning, deep connection and empathy than ever before?3
I got the impression that On Drugs is primarily aimed at philosophers who are sceptical about the benefits of psychedelic drugs, rather than at users of psychedelic drugs who are sceptical about the benefits of philosophy. I was left more sceptical about both, which may or may not have been the intention (how many levels of Socratic irony are you on, bro?)
Let’s get philosophical
In Chapter 2 “Articulate Guinea Pigs”, you defend your method of “auto-experimental analytic phenomenology” (i.e. getting high and later reflecting soberly on the experience) against the long-standing scientific taboo on self-experimentation. You report that this methodology resulted in “four distinct philosophical arguments” [emphasis in the original] to emerge under the influence of these substances:
We should not think of our perceptions as true or false guides to reality, but rather conceive of reality as “something more like a quality of the perception itself”.
Psychedelic experience “has the power to invert our ordinary hierarchy of reality […] by causing us to see imagination itself as fundamentally real”.
The “most significant feature of a psychedelic experience is often that it is not characterized by hallucinations at all but by the suspension of hallucinations.”
Psychedelic experience offers “an analogy of enlightenment” which can be “useful to anyone who is keen on pushing past the limits of ordinary perception”.
What even is reality?
I have to admit that speculations about the nature of being, like attempts to explain consciousness, mostly leave me cold. I’ve never felt drawn to the work of Martin Heidegger or Edmund Husserl.4 So maybe you are making a more subtle argument than I am able to grasp, but to me the notion of true hallucinations that you get from mushroom guy Terrence McKenna (and elaborate on with more authoritative backing from J.R. Smythies) sounds a lot like saying that if something feels real, it is real.
This reconceptualisation of reality as residing within perception reminds me of the notion of pure experience (“the undifferentiated state in which subject and object are not yet separated”) articulated by Kitaro Nishida, who founded the Kyoto School of Philosophy in an attempt to synthesise Eastern and Western intellectual traditions. Crucial to my own intellectual (de?)formation was listening (often while on cannabis or on acid or on both) to recordings of Alan Watts (who aimed at a similar synthesis from the other direction). Watts took plenty of epistemological shortcuts of his own, but unlike McKenna, he showed a genuine appreciation for the Hindu, Buddhist and Daoist traditions that had inspired both Japanese Zen and his own brand of stoner Buddhism. Watts taught me the significance of koans such as What is the sound of one hand clapping? Through drugs I have been able to experientially verify his statement: “I am the universe experiencing itself”.5
The cumulative effect of my own experience, psychedelic and otherwise, has been a deepening sense of agnosticism. I conceive of reality as a multi-faceted phenomenon that we as limited human beings can never hope to fully comprehend.6 Let me attempt to explain my own partial understanding of the interaction between psychedelics and our perceptions of reality with reference to different orders of reality. The only reality that I know first-hand is my own subjective experience, but through reason and imagination I can conceive of other realities:
First-order reality is my own direct experience, either in what we call the physical world, or in one of the many mental worlds that I inhabit. Solipsists are trapped in this level of reality.
Second-order reality is social reality: an awareness of what is first-order reality from someone else’s perspective. Psychedelics are often said to enhance our ability to empathise with other people.
Third-order reality is the realisation that other earthly beings, from elephants to bats, each experience their own type of first-order reality. A common psychedelic experience is feeling what it is like to be a bat, or a sequoia tree, or a raindrop, or whatever.
Fourth-order reality refers to beings we can’t see but can believe in, such as angels and demons. Under the influence of psychedelics, these beings are often experienced as real.
Fifth-order reality refers to beings that exist but that we cannot even imagine (when not on drugs). The most controversial claim made on behalf of psychedelic drugs is that they can put us in contact with such beings, like McKenna’s machine elves.7
To ask whether an experience is or is not real is to ask for that experience to be coded in a manner that is legible to a data processing device [0,1]. For human beings, I don’t believe that is the question.
Any dream will do
In defending the fundamental reality of the imagination, you observe:
Many human cultures take dreams and visions as the most real thing of all in human existence and as a guide to navigating our way through the lesser and relatively more illusory world of natural forces and social obligations. These cultures put considerably more stock in the truth-revealing power of their inner representations. Many of them take for granted that the world experienced in dreams is the real world, while empirical reality is in some way a derivative or a reflection of that world. And such cultures tend to do just fine, practically speaking.
I admire the multicultural sentiment, but I think it is a tad misleading to say “such cultures tend to do just fine, practically speaking” when as a matter of historical record, most of the actually existing dream-dominant cultures were all but destroyed by the guns, germs and steel spread by staunchly materialist (?) Europeans to every corner of the globe. In his review of McKenna’s most illustrious acolyte Tao Lin’s Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change (2018), John Pistelli notes how psychedelic proselytisers such as McKenna, Daniel Pinchbeck and Jeremy Narby often fall prey to “Noble Savage mythology and white liberal guilt and projection”. I don’t want to imply that the author of works such as Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (2015) would ever share such fantasies. But we should all be wary of giving the (foreign) witch/doctor the benefit of the doubt.
Mood shifts
I resonated deeply with what you wrote about the truly uncanny ability of psychedelic drugs to bring us in contact with something that can sure feel like an aspect of the truth:
Psychedelic drugs reveal the world in a different mood, and the experience of this mood shift is often one that appears to us to be disclosing some deep truth about the world and our place in it. It is deeply inadequate to characterize such a mood shift as hallucination.
But I’m not convinced that such experiences prove the superiority of Heidegger’s view of the world as being made out of moods over the conventional scientific understanding that the world is made out of atoms. The atomic view of the world may be reductive, but it is foundational to the physics and chemistry that put a man on the moon. Where has Heidegger’s mood boards got us? Nazi Germany was of course a whole mood: Leni Riefenstahl, Hugo Boss and that classic combination of black and white and red. I’m being unfair: you explicitly denounce Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies. Nevertheless, if the world is au fond nothing but a mood, can we really fault those attempting to always be in a good one, consequences be damned?
I’ve been to paradise and out the other side
At times On Drugs reads as if it was just the other day, rather than eight decades ago, that Albert Hoffmann discovered the powerful effects of lysergic acid, purportedly by accident. You speculate that “the overwhelming dominance of alcohol as the drug of choice in the modern West has abetted one of the central projects of modern philosophy: to keep us focused on the sober self as the only true self”. You ascribe the lack of philosophical interest in altered states to the fact that the West’s favourite form of intoxication “does not do anything interesting to our consciousness”.
It is true that when the average Westerner picks their poison, it is likely to be ethanol-based (although even this truth may no longer hold for younger generations), but “the overwhelming dominance of alcohol” has hardly prevented more Romantic souls from seeking out more exotic toxins. Sadie Plant kicks off her careful study Writing on Drugs (1999) with what Jean Cocteau called the drug. Known since antiquity, opium keeps finding new ways to seduce the Western mind. In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) Thomas De Quincey shares your dismissive view of garden-variety drunkenness:
Whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a proper manner), introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. Wine robs a man of his self-possession: opium greatly invigorates it. Wine unsettles and clouds the judgement, and gives a preternatural brightness... opium, on the contrary, communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties.
Plant spots the tell-tale influence of opium’s distinctive character in the work of Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Lord Byron and John Keats. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan’s Xanadu and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s monster both emerge out of this opiated dream world. In our own would-be Romantic era, the dark romance of opioid dependency is a daily reality for millions (in the US, annual opioid-related deaths recently peaked at more than twice those from AIDS in the 1990s), but writers no longer seem that interested in romanticising these particular chemical compounds. And who can blame them? It gets rather monotonous and depressing after a while. In his aptly named Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic (2015), Sam Quinones compiled an indictment not only against the Big Pharma salesmen who promoted Oxycontin as an effective, non-addictive form of pain relief and against the Mexican cartels who flooded the newly created markets with cheap heroine and fentanyl, but against a system that leaves entire communities stranded in economic wastelands, forced to either move away or to drift off to sleep, without making too much of a fuss about it.
Fortunately, we can always turn our focus to more cheerful substances. In a later chapter, you refer to Mike Jay’s Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, in which he carefully documents the influence of, inter alia, hashish on Charles Baudelaire, nitrous oxide on William James and cocaine on Sigmund Freud. We all remain under the influence of these powerful thinkers and hence under the influence of these drugs, even if we have never personally taken any of them.8
Since Aldous Huxley wrote about his experience on mescaline in The Doors of Perception (1954), millions of people have taken psychedelic and other drugs and quite a few of them have written about the experience. Stanislav Grof, the Czech pioneer of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy,9 published dozens of books full of loopy post-Jungian theories involving the individual and collective unconscious to explain his hundreds of patients’ weird psychedelic experiences, including reliving their own births, witnessing their own births from a distance, or giving birth to themselves. It’s very of its time, like the antics of McKenna, Philip K Dick and Robert Anton Wilson that Erik Davis analyses in High Weirdness – Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019).10 But I can’t be the only one who sometimes gets the feeling that we have never really left the 70s at all.
At one point you refer to the so-called psychedelic renaissance without apparent irony. But what exactly is it that was reborn: a cultural environment in which government agents, Harvard professors and Californian visionaries can all trip together?11 Despite the terrible War on Drugs, the drugs never went away, not really, they just went out of fashion. An upstanding member of society willing to bend the rules a little could still trip on the weekends, he just couldn’t write an academic paper or a TV series about it. What changed recently was that taking certain kinds of drugs became more respectable — too respectable, some might say. It’s no longer only Joe Rogan and Andrew Sullivan who are willing to talk freely in public about their experiences on mushrooms: Ezra Klein now does it under the aegis of the New York Times. Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics (2018) was turned into a four-part Netflix series in 2022, the same year in which the very psychedelic-coded Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) won seven Academy Awards, including for best picture.
On Gag order (2023), the artist formerly known as Ke$ha sings about a multi-generational practise of “eating acid”:
Been dodgin' gods I didn't want
I'd gotten used to bein' lost
I never felt like I belonged
Turns out my mama wasn't wrong
You said, "Don't ever eat the acid
if you don't wanna be changed like it changed me"
You said, "All the edges got so jagged”
Now everything you saw then can't be unseen
Last night, I saw it all
Last night, I talked to God
The use of psychedelics can no longer be considered a barely explored frontier of human experience. In less than a century, it went from avant-garde to counterculture to subculture to just another consumer demographic: are you a coke girlie or a 420 slut, an Acid Betty or a Tina Burner?12 On her new album . (2025), Kesha has set the transformational potential of acid aside in favour of simpler pleasures, like those she enumerates in the song “BOY CRAZY.”:
Berlin to Bombay, New York to LA
Tokyo to Tahoe, boys are my cocaine
Bikers and the dumb bros, daddies and the gym hoes
Prowling like a kitty cat, I want to get you all alone
[…]
I've been a good girl, now I'm a connoisseur
Many men are on the menu (Eat 'em up like amuse-bouche)
Boys better beware, I'm on a man tear
Driving ninety, they been tryna get me in my underwear
Get me in my underwear
Motherfucker, pull my hair
I do not mean to imply that anywhere in the book you advocate for anything other than strictly responsible drug use. To the extent the book offers any policy proposals, they are moderate in the extreme: properly evaluated patients should have access to the appropriate dosage of the appropriate drugs under well-regulated and well-supervised conditions (perhaps it can be offered as an auxiliary service at the local government-run grocery store and gender clinic). But if we take seriously the power of these substances to enable the human mind to transcend boundaries, including pretty fundamental ones like space/time, self/other and good/evil, how sure can we be that everyone will come to your eminently sensible conclusion that about half a dozen psychedelic trips in a lifetime is just about the right number. Because why stop at half a dozen? Why not 73 high dose trips spaced out over decades? Christopher M. Bache, Ph.D, did just that and writes remarkably lucidly about each trip in LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven (2020). Why not drop acid 100 times in a single year (while camgirling) like Aella?13 What is the worst that could happen?
That question is not exactly rhetorical. You cite an X.com user called “Landshark” on the ironies of white liberals atoning for systemic racism by paying thousands of dollars to fry their brains on ayahuasca. We might have already gone full circle with drugs being cringe again: Elon Musk wetting himself in public is not a good look. Here on Substack, some of the brightest young minds (by gerontocratic standards) like Pistelli and Sam Kriss have been against drugs longer than they’ve been against truth. (Philip Traylen, to steal a phrase from his mother, is drugs.) I’ve already written that your frank talk of shame in On Drugs prompted me share my own feelings of shame for being such a damn cliché (if gay autistic slut on drugs is not a Jungian archetype, it should be). But I also have a sense of survivor’s guilt. I never got too involved with the heavy stuff, for which I can only thank my guardian angel (or my residual Calvinism). Not all queens have been so fortunate. The winner of the second season of Ru Paul’s Drag Race UK, The Vivienne, passed away at the beginning of this year at the age of 32. She had been open about her struggles with drugs.
If professional philosophers have found none of the aforementioned sufficient reason to abandon their fixation on the sober self, it is because of much deeper problems in Western philosophy than a prejudice against dreams and drugs.14
At the end of everything
From bittersweet experience I know that it is a risky business to alter one’s consciousness in the absence of a solid ethical framework.15 A similar intuition on your part may account for the plot twist towards the end of On Drugs. (The arch-rationalist Eliezer Yudkowsky would surely object to such bait-and-switch tactics in a work that doesn’t explicitly market itself as autofiction).
But let me return to questions of enlightenment and analogies of enlightenment next time. In the spirit of moderation, I think I’ve said enough for now.
Sincerely,
Mary Jane Eyre
Please let me know if you would prefer not to be addressed directly in future instalments and I can pivot to writing Letters to a Young Psychonaut or something.
That post was part two of my response to what I considered to be a rather lazy article called The Pseudo-Religion of Psychedelics by Travis Kitchens, published in Compact magazine in December 2023.
It is of course entirely possible that we would have been even worse off without recourse to these substances, but that does not make me feel any better about the situation.
When it comes to philosophy, I take Simone Weil’s approach: “je ne lis autant que possible que ce dont j’ai faim au moment ou je’en ai faim. et alors ne lis pas, je mange.”
I have previously suggested that the main strains of (pseudo-)philosophical thinking emerging from mid 20th century psychedelic experiences could be categorised under the materialist attitude of Timothy Leary (whom you denounce), the spiritual attitude of his former colleague at Harvard Richard Alpert (better known as Ram Dass), or the non-dual attitude of Watts, whose The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (1962) is unfairly neglected compared to Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, given Watts’s more direct influence on the Californian minds who then proceeded to psychedelicise the globe via the Internet. I have also unfavourably compared Watts’s moral philosophy to that of Simone Weil, although I sometimes waver in this assessment.
I agree with St. Paul that “now we see through a glass, darkly”, although I have my doubts about the “then face to face”.
Personally, I remain sceptical of such claims, but it may be because I’ve never done DMT, which appears to be the compound most likely to facilitate such encounters. I’ve also not read DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences (2000) by Risk Strassman or Tao Lin’s more recent compilation of paranormal phenomena. I have, however, seen Gasper Noé’s terrifying ENTER THE VOID (2009), which follows Leary and Albert’s lead in treating the psychedelic experience as an analogy for the soul’s journey after death, as revealed in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
For the record, I’ve taken all three (but not at once).
Grof also invented the holotropic breathing technique to achieve similarly altered states of consciousness without the use of drugs.
Davis’s Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (2015) is also apropos.
I won’t get conspiratorial here, but I can recommend the lucid Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (1985) by Martin A. Lee & Bruce Slain.
TINA is how crystal methamphetamine is affectionately known within the gay community.
I’ll come back to the following statement from the mother of three of Elon Musk’s children (X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl, and Tau Techno Mechanicus):
[I must have missed the part where Diogenes uses a data visualisation tool to report on the exact number of participants in his barrel orgy who came in fluffer.]
I’m not just talking about drugs. One can alter one’s consciousness by memorising a single line of poetry or by focusing on a single image.
I’ve returned to this a lot today in stolen moments. I have so many ways I’d love to respond, but am thinking I should read Smith-Ruiu’s book first lest I be too solipsistic here … nevertheless, wow, do I agree with/have experienced this: “From bittersweet experience I know that it is a risky business to alter one’s consciousness in the absence of a solid ethical framework.” This is why corporate/mass exhortations to mindfulness have seemed so crazy to me, because the risk of opening up one’s mind is not even acknowledged …
Anyways, thanks for writing this, there’s so much here. I love it and have so many questions and thoughts, and not enough time to flesh them out (yet) bc (lollll) have to go meditate …
Hey wow cool, this looks very thoughtful indeed -- and that includes the more critical and skeptical parts. Thank you immensely! I'll write something more thoughtful myself, in response, in due time.