The Philosopher on Drugs

psychedeliaecstatic techniquesciencebibliography

Oct 11

On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality (2025)

The philosopher Justin Smith-Ruiu prefaces his new book on drugs by claiming that, even though the book is called On Drugs, he was not currently on drugs when writing the book, but, like a 17th century philosopher, had been the epitome of sober, clear-minded rationality; or something approximating that state, for he goes on to confess to have been on a variety of no less than four prescribed psychotropic medications—SSRI, Anti-anxiety, Xanax, together with daily coffee and the occasional hit of weed—and then writes a book that wonders in effect: is there anyone not on drugs in today’s world?

With this opening, Smith-Ruiu, who himself drinks no alcohol, takes aim at the idea of sobriety itself. In a culture where the number one sanctioned drug is the drink, where the two principle mental states have been either sober or drunk, it stands to reason that sobriety would take on a rather biased ideality, producing an illiteracy of mental states, where anything outside of one’s “right-mind” is assumed to be mere gross inebriation. Obviously there exists a preferred state for operating heavy machinery, but beyond this norm, the many varieties of altered states remain underexamined, particularly by philosophy. Lo and behold, the philosopher has arrived to make experiments on this own limbic system. In his view we have ignored psychedelics to our folly. The psychedelic substance, and even marijuana, offer unlimited potential for thought, quite beyond any clear-minded sobriety—heavy machinery be damned.

A mishmash of history, philosophical speculation, and science fact, this book has a memoirish narrative-arc in which the arch-rationalist Justin Smith-Ruiu gets turnt on psychedelic drugs and becomes an “auto-experimental analytic phenomenologist” before ultimately returning to the lapsed Catholic faith of his childhood. Despite the high-weirdness of his drug experiences, he cannot just leave his rationalist training by the wayside—or can he?

The science of mind, with its insistence upon reductionist behavioral psychology—reducing the human to a system of inputs and outputs—has traditionally disparaged auto-experimentation. The lone scientist, dosing themselves on baroque substances, alone, in their hotel room, is held in disdain as being too subjective, a data set of one—if not delusional (never mind that the history of science is full of all manner of such auto-experiments, like, for example, when Sir Isaac Newton stuck a needle in his eye). Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology—that philosophy concerned with subjective experience—described his new research program as the basis of science. For this reason Smith-Ruiu claims that Husserl goes deeper than Freud (uh…?), arguing that subjectivity is integral, if not necessary, in observing any “mental” objectivity whatsoever. Even still, the psychonauts of the late 19th century—William James, Freud included—have gone a very long way to providing a scientific topography of the mind, in part by auto-experimenting with drugs in particular, and altered states more generally—namely, dreams. Smith-Ruiu adds himself to this illustrious tradition.

And yet it is peculiar that, in a book that patently ignores psychoanalysis, Smith-Ruiu can seem, at times, as if he were sleepwalking into, for lack of a better word, psychoanalysis; or at least a position in which the unconscious is near at hand, even while going unnamed—much like the inferred presence of dark matter in contemporary physics. This is due, in part, to his insistence upon the prevalence of the waking dream state. The psychedelic experience reveals the imagination as real. The drugs do not so much show the “nature of reality” but rather expose just how inadequate our conventional notions of reality are. The sober, non-hallucinating, mental-state is not as non-hallucinatory as we like to assume. Psychedelics highlight the ways in which normative sobriety/sanity, is made out of a complex tapestry of hallucinations—whether personal or cultural; the mushroom-induced limit experience may be terrifying and profound to the degree to which those fantasies are momentarily displaced, or totally destroyed. When the auto-experimenting analytic phenomenologist begins to wonder why the landscapes and scenes of his central California childhood are charged with so much feeling, then we know that we are not too far off from the oceanic—only a step further and he may begin performing an auto-analysis of his own fantasy life.

Because psychedelics can tend to reveal the all-too gauzy nature of our consensual reality, the experience itself can likewise elude easy categories, or any categories at all, and to this end there is a limit to what philosophy can say about it—a limit that Smith-Ruiu, to his credit, is well aware of; he remains hesitant to make a philosophical decision about what exactly is going on out there, but claims rather that the philosophical decision is precisely what psychedelics make suspect. His position is basically like those medieval maps of unknown territory with the label of warning here be dragons. There is no guarantee just what one will encounter out there in the psychedelic cosmos. One must, like Kierkegaard, take a leap of faith. It is peculiar then that, after all his philosophical restraint, his ultimate conclusion is something of a pie-in-the-sky and nothing-burger; he claims that, while he cannot fully endorse the psychedelic experience, he can offer something better: the catholic church! His drug experiences have awakened him to the divine and the sacred and he finds no better route to that numinous stuff than that offered by Catholicism.

In a book that is fairly far reaching in the exploration of its subject matter, Smith-Ruiu does not, as far as I can tell, take up the idea that the psychedelic substance is a super-placebo. Had he done so, he may have speculated, along his path of auto-experimentation, that he has very likely dosed himself into a regression to the institutional superstitions of his childhood.