The Entity Contact Problem and Legal Philosophy

“If many DMT users report similar entity encounters, what does drug law mean when it classifies the compound providing access as having 'no accepted use'?”

The Controlled Substances Act's Schedule I criteria require a substance have 'no currently accepted medical use' and 'a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.'

The entity contact problem raises a different philosophical question about what drug law is governing. In a 2020 Johns Hopkins survey (Davis et al., J. Psychopharmacol. 34(9):1008-1020) of 2,561 people who had already had a DMT entity encounter, the majority described entities as conscious, intelligent and benevolent, the encounters as meaningful, and the experiences as among the most significant of their lives. It documents the phenomenology in detail but sets no prevalence rate, because every respondent was recruited for having had an encounter; the 97% figure often attached to it appears in no published paper. Many reported persistent changes in beliefs about death, meaning, and the nature of reality.

If these reports are accurate phenomenological descriptions, not of hallucination in the dismissive sense but of genuine encounters with something, then the Schedule I classification addresses a pharmacological action but not the nature of the experience the pharmacological action occasions. A drug providing access to a consistent perceptual territory that thousands of independent observers have mapped and found valuable is not obviously without accepted use.

The religious exemption cases have addressed the legal dimension through the religious freedom framework. McKenna made the argument more directly: the right to explore one's own consciousness is the most basic civil liberty, and a law prohibiting access to a consistent perceptual territory that humans have been accessing for tens of thousands of years is philosophically absurd. The courts have not agreed. The philosophical argument remains open.

Sources

• McKenna True Hallucinations (1993)
• Sexton et al., J. Psychopharmacol. 33(9) (2019) [Source not found; under review]
• Controlled Substances Act (1970)
• Davis et al., J. Psychopharmacol. 34(9):1008-1020 (2020)