What Psychedelics Can Teach Us About Our Culture
Legal drugs, illegal drugs, and the creative individual
Welcome back to What then? and the epic beginning of 2026.
This piece digs into one aspect of the human situation I find fascinating. It lends truth to the words of Chesterton, “There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.”
Thank you Adam PT for giving some perspective on this essay.
Pre-state peoples use drugs to commune with nature, talk to their ancestors, and see God. On the other hand, State peoples use drugs to escape from the burden of living.
Leaving aside the matter of health, let us look at drugs from an existential perspective.
My hunch is the drugs that define a culture serve as a diagnostic indicator of that cultures vitality and the well-being of its members.
The Mbuti of the Congo used a root bark called iboga that contains the psychedelic alkaloid ibogaine. The Yanomami of Venezuela used epená, a hallucinogenic snuff containing DMT. The Mazatec tribes of Mexico used Salvia divinorum, a leaf that can be smoked, chewed, or made into tea.
I have done all three. Ibogaine launched me into the ancestral past: I sprinted through valleys with a spear and a band of hunter-gatherers, danced and circled breathlessly around a fire beneath the raw moon and stars, and communed with my ancestors—both living and dead—in a warm cave painted with red deer and rhinoceros. When I smoked salvia, I watched my torso turn into the trunk of a mahogany tree hundreds of feet tall in a matter of seconds. My arms and legs extended into thick green boughs above the canopy of the rainforest and my fingers and toes burst into thousands of leaves and vines, until ruinous old age knocked me down and I collapsed into the black soil, disintegrated, and was reborn as tiny green shoots hungrily seeking the nutrients of the sun.
Many of the drugs of the pre-state are called entheogens. In the original Greek, the meaning of the word says it all: ἐν means in or within, θεός means God, and γενέσθαι means to generate. So entheogen means something like “generating the god within.” These are not so much drugs as they medicines, intended for contemplation, introspection, and a means to investigate our role in the cosmos.
And we find a certain environment gives rise to this mode of being. Nature is a brutal mother. A mudslide can wipe out an entire tribe in minutes. A monsoon can blow away huts of leaf and branch. A jaguar can turn a walk for berries into a war of blade and fang.
Theirs was a culture of survival. Intense engagement with the hunt, song, loss, ritual, pain, awe, and death. It is a culture of wanting to live against all odds, and then wanting to understand the unlikely miracle of their existence.
Now let us turn to the State.
I have no experience with modern drugs except alcohol, and avoid just about anything that numbs either my body or my mind. I refused to take lidocaine, for example, when I needed to get a filling at the dentist. My skin burst into little beads of sweat. To my everlasting regret, I let out a groan of pain as the drill scraped its way to the root of my molar. My dentist heard this groan, and for the rest of the filling she said over and over again “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” We had a good laugh when she was done and the pain was worth that alone.
Lidocaine is one thing, but the drugs that truly define the State are another thing entirely. These are SSRIs, alcohol, and opioids, all too many of which are prescribed. What, then, are these drugs designed to do? SSRIs reduce sadness, blunt emotions, and help the user cope with feelings of alienation. Alcohol blurs the mind, dulls the senses, and convinces us our circumstances are actually epic, at least until the next morning. Opioids numb the body and the mind—they sedate.
The fact these outcomes are intentional says it all.
In the State, nature has been defanged for the most part. Few of us will feel the teeth of a shark or the blackened toes of frostbite. But the State is a confusing father: bureaucracy, courts, laws, jobs, salaries, rules, chemical smelling school rooms, bills, televisions, social media, smart phones, plastic chairs built for sitting at 90º, outsourced security, a lack of muscular labor with escalators, elevators, cars, trains, planes, and subways. Are these things good? Are they bad? My sense is they are neither good nor bad—they merely elicit a certain response.
They unfailingly lead to a culture of drift, a sense of being unanchored: of merely existing. When measured against our ancestral backdrop, the unspoken purpose of modern drugs, whether intentional or not, is to be rid of the weight of existence. Though those in the State are free from the burden of nature, they suffer a far greater burden—the burden of freedom from nature. Who would have thought that trading the acute and extreme levels of danger and stress of our past for the moderate and yet chronic stress of the present would cause so much misery?
The fascinating fact is that so many in the State think this is normal. They believe our ancient cerebral matter, nervous systems, and souls are malfunctioning. They do not ask why we are molding humans to the State and not molding the State to humans.
Bitter is the irony. Ancestral medicines are illegal in the State. But entheogens not only show us God and tighten our bond with our ancestors, many also end addiction to the deadly and numbing drugs of the State—which are legal.
Now the State either did this out of ignorance or on purpose. If out of ignorance, the State is inept. If on purpose, a dark possibility presents itself: maybe the State realized the individual who is no longer defined by their grind against nature is faced with an anchorless self in an environment of drift—and therefore must be made numb.
It is worth asking what would happen if we brought SSRIs to the Mbuti or the Yanomami. They would probably be rendered inert in a deadly environment and their doom decided: death by teeth, water, spear, or mud. But what if we brought Salvia divinorum to the State? Those who feel alienation and a blind desire to numb themselves might actually discover a sense of awe for their ancestors, nature, and existence itself.
A culture divorced from nature is explosive. It might slip into the drug induced stupor of Huxley’s Brave New World, erupt into Orwell’s Communist utopia in 1984, or vanish into something even worse: some transhumanistic merging of the mind with the internet to finally be rid of the burden of flesh and blood and brains and souls and the responsibility to make something of ourselves.
I am not saying all pills and liquor bottles should be replaced by ayahuasca ceremonies. Far from it. Entheogens are powerful tools, but from what I have seen, they show us nothing that cannot be seen through our own efforts. Even more crucially, the ends derived from discipline are often longer lasting and more profound than those gotten from smoking a bit of toad venom or swallowing powdered bark.
More to the point, drugs are merely the reflection of a culture. The cure is not to do drugs—it is to fix the culture.
The State stripped away ancestral stressors and left open a gaping void all too many seek an escape from. Why not fill this void?
Creativity is a path. To create is to re-imagine our immediate present; it is a refusal to wait for nature or the State to give orders. Creativity is a No to the thought-killing phrase “This is just the way it is.” The creative mind was the mind that broke a blind obedience to what lay right in front of it, grabbed a bit of charcoal, and started scraping it on a cave wall. This is the sort of mind that cultivates its own talents and defines a singular purpose worth living for. Little more is needed than ink and paper and an unquenchable curiosity. Little more than reading deep rich literature and thick old books with that musky paper smell, and then looking up at the world with a childlike wonder for the novelty of existence.
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Early drug delivery devices (chewing, smoking) of largely plant materials ensured low dosages of psychoactive ingredients. Modern chemistry methods allow for hyper-concentration and innovation of active ingredients, guaranteeing addiction and overdosing instead of old-school good trips. New tech is not always better for us humans.
Sam, you are onto to something here that folds nicely into your book. I had some revelatory, but unguided experiences with entheogens c1983. Me and my wingman got a too cavalier, took too many, scared ourselves senseless. I’m still not convinced that what I saw was not real. Changed my life, months later I moved from LA to Australia and never returned to LA.