In 1992, the ethnobotanist and lecturer Terence McKenna published Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, a book that argued something most of his contemporaries were not prepared to say out loud. The book's thesis was that human beings are, in a biological and cultural sense, the species that ate the mushroom — that psychoactive plants had been the catalyst for symbolic cognition, religious imagination, and the very invention of meaning. But nested inside that larger argument was a smaller, more political claim. Somewhere between the late Roman Empire and the reign of Harry Anslinger, McKenna wrote, Western civilization had conducted a thousand-year war against the plants that had made it possible. It had called the war many things — heresy, witchcraft, addiction, degeneracy, public health — but it was, at every stage, the same war. Those who held political power understood that a population which could alter its own Consciousness at will was a population that could not be fully controlled. So the keys were taken away, and the rooms they opened were declared not to exist.
McKenna did not coin the phrase "pharmacratic inquisition." That term was introduced by the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, whose 1974 book Ceremonial Chemistry named the phenomenon "pharmacracy" — rule by means of drug regulation. Szasz argued that the modern state's relationship to chemicals was functionally identical to the medieval church's relationship to rituals: a ruling authority designating certain compounds sacramental and certain compounds diabolical, enforcing the distinction with prisons instead of pyres, and claiming medical authority where the Inquisition had claimed divine. Filmmakers Jan Irvin and Andrew Rutajit later fused the two framings in their 2006 documentary The Pharmacratic Inquisition, and the phrase stuck. What they named was older than any of them. It was the shape of the thing itself.
For nearly two thousand years, initiates walked the Sacred Way from Athens to the temple complex at Eleusis, where they drank the kykeon — a barley-based beverage that, as R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck argued in The Road to Eleusis (1978), was almost certainly psychoactive through ergot contamination. The rites were the spiritual center of classical civilization. Plato was an initiate. Sophocles, Aristotle, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius. The Altered States induced at Eleusis were not marginal to Greek culture. They were its hidden heart.
In 392 CE, the Christian emperor Theodosius I issued an edict banning all pagan rites across the empire. In 396, Alaric the Visigoth, guided by Arian monks, sacked and destroyed the Telesterion at Eleusis. The Mysteries were over. The line of transmission that had produced Plato's philosophy and Aeschylus's tragedies was severed — not because the rites had failed but because a new political theology required them to stop. This is the first recognizable act of the inquisition McKenna described: the deliberate erasure, by state-backed religious authority, of a legitimate practice for altering consciousness. Not because the practice was ineffective. Precisely because it was effective, and it was not under control.
The pattern repeated itself, with greater ferocity, during the European witch trials of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Between 40,000 and 60,000 people — overwhelmingly women, overwhelmingly peasants, overwhelmingly keepers of village herbal knowledge — were executed across Europe during the peak of the persecution. The official reason was pact with the devil. The anthropologist Michael Harner, in his 1973 essay "The Role of Hallucinogenic Plants in European Witchcraft" (collected in Hallucinogens and Shamanism), proposed a considerably more material explanation.
The flying ointments described in Inquisitorial records — greases applied to the body, particularly to mucous membranes, reported to induce sensations of flight, animal transformation, and encounters with spirit-beings — contained alkaloids from the Solanaceae family: belladonna, henbane, mandrake, datura. These are powerful deliriants. The ethnobotanical case, which Carlo Ginzburg extended in Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath (1989), is that a real substratum of pagan-shamanic plant practice persisted in rural Europe long after the official Christianization of the continent, and that the witch hunts were, in significant part, the forcible suppression of that underground pharmacology. The women burned at the stake were, many of them, the last inheritors of an unbroken tradition of European plant medicine. When they were killed, the tradition was killed with them. The church confiscated the keys and declared the rooms haunted.
When Spanish missionaries arrived in Mesoamerica, they encountered cultures whose ceremonial life was built around psychoactive plants to a degree they had never imagined. The Aztecs used psilocybin mushrooms, which they called teonanácatl — "flesh of the gods." They used the morning-glory seeds ololiuqui, which contain LSD-related alkaloids. They used peyote. The Maya used Bufo alvarius toad venom. The sacramental pharmacopeia of the Americas was immense, ancient, and central to religious practice.
The Spanish response was systematic. The First Mexican Provincial Council (1555) formally condemned the use of peyote. The Inquisition's 1620 edict in New Spain declared the consumption of peyote an act of heresy, explicitly linking it to communion with the devil — a framing that placed the plant directly in competition with the Catholic Eucharist. The sixteenth-century missionary Bernardino de Sahagún, in his Florentine Codex, documented the mushroom rites in ethnographic detail precisely in order to stamp them out. For four hundred years after contact, the indigenous use of teonanácatl was conducted in secret. It was not rediscovered by outsiders until 1955, when R. Gordon Wasson, accompanied by the Mazatec curandera María Sabina, participated in a mushroom ceremony in Huautla de Jiménez and published a photo-essay about it in Life magazine — an event that seeded the Western psychedelic counterculture of the following decade, and that cost María Sabina her home and livelihood when her community turned on her for revealing the sacrament.
This is the inquisition in its most naked form: a colonizing power arriving in the Americas, identifying the indigenous sacraments, and criminalizing them on explicitly theological grounds. The Inquisition's seventeenth-century edicts did not pretend to be about public health. They were about jurisdiction over the sacred. The plants granted access to gods the church did not authorize. Therefore the plants were the devil's.
The modern American drug regime was not the accidental accumulation of reasonable public-health decisions. It was, to a degree that is no longer seriously contested, the product of one man's career. Harry Jacob Anslinger became the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930, and he held the position for thirty-two years. Johann Hari's 2015 book Chasing the Scream documents in exhaustive archival detail what Anslinger actually did with that time.
Anslinger inherited a tiny agency with an uncertain mandate. To make it indispensable, he needed enemies. He constructed them. Marijuana, a substance most Americans had never heard of in 1930, was transformed in his public testimony and press campaigns into a demonic scourge that drove Black men to rape white women and Mexican men to commit unspeakable violence. His own files, preserved at Penn State University and catalogued by Hari, contain the racial coding in explicit terms. Anslinger personally maintained a surveillance file on Billie Holiday, targeted her for arrest for her performance of "Strange Fruit," and harassed her on her deathbed. The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 — the foundational statute of American cannabis prohibition — was passed on the basis of congressional testimony that was, even by the standards of the era, transparent fabrication. The American Medical Association opposed the bill. It was passed anyway.
The inquisition had not disappeared. It had been secularized, bureaucratized, and given a federal budget. The theological framing was replaced by a medicalized one, but the underlying operation was the same: a ruling authority designating certain substances sacramental (alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, eventually the pharmaceutical industry's own serotonergic compounds) and certain substances diabolical (cannabis, cocaine, opium, and eventually the psychedelics), and enforcing the distinction with state violence.
The full architecture of the modern inquisition was assembled in 1970. That year, President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act, which established the federal scheduling system that remains in force today. Schedule I — the most restrictive classification, reserved for substances with "no currently accepted medical use" and "high potential for abuse" — included LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, cannabis, and MDMA (added in 1985). It did not include cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl, or oxycodone. The scheduling was not built on evidence. It was built on a political map.
In 1994, the journalist Dan Baum interviewed John Ehrlichman, Nixon's former domestic policy chief, for his book Smoke and Mirrors. Ehrlichman, by then a Watergate convict and late-life truth-teller, said the following on the record — a quote Baum published in Harper's Magazine in April 2016:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Members of Ehrlichman's family have contested the quote's full accuracy. Baum stood by it. Whether or not it is verbatim, the policy record is unambiguous. Nixon convened the Shafer Commission in 1971 to study marijuana. The commission, stacked with Nixon's own appointees, returned a 1972 report recommending decriminalization. Nixon rejected it on the spot and buried it. The scheduling of psychedelics likewise overrode the recommendations of the agency scientists then studying them. The system was political from the founding. The public-health rationale was, and remains, costume.
The ugliest feature of the American inquisition is that, while it was suppressing public access to psychedelics, the same state was funding the most aggressive psychedelic research program in history. MKUltra ran from 1953 to 1973 — almost perfectly overlapping the period in which LSD was moving from an obscure laboratory compound to a scheduled drug. The CIA bought, by some accounts, the entire world supply of Sandoz LSD in the early 1950s. Sidney Gottlieb's chemists and contractors administered it to thousands of subjects, most of them unwitting. The agency that criminalized the drug in public was, in its classified budget, the single largest consumer of it.
Stephen Kinzer's Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (2019) makes the point in its title. This was not an accident. It was not a coordination failure between agencies. It was the logic of the inquisition in its purest form: a ruling apparatus reserving for itself a technology that it was actively denying to its subjects. The medieval church did the same thing when it declared the Eucharist sacred, prosecuted lay mystics who claimed direct access, and then consumed the sacrament itself every Sunday. What is suppressed for the public is cultivated for the priesthood. The pharmacratic form of this arrangement is merely its modern dress.
The overlap is structural in the institutional sense as well. The DEA was created in 1973 — the same year MKUltra was officially terminated and its files destroyed. The personnel, the legal infrastructure, and the political will flowed from the same sources. The The Deep State component of this is not conspiratorial; it is administrative. Scheduling decisions, international treaty obligations (the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances), DEA enforcement priorities, and NIDA research funding are set by a permanent bureaucracy that has survived every president since Nixon without substantial change. The inquisition does not depend on any single administration. It is the machine.
The empirical case against the current scheduling regime is now overwhelming. The Johns Hopkins studies under Roland Griffiths, the Imperial College work under Robin Carhart-Harris, the MAPS Phase 3 trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, the Usona Institute's psilocybin-for-depression protocols — the literature is no longer marginal. Substances classified as having "no currently accepted medical use" are producing remission rates in treatment-resistant depression, end-of-life anxiety, addiction, and PTSD that exceed every existing pharmaceutical intervention by clinically significant margins. The criteria for Schedule I, on the substances' own merits, collapse.
And yet the scheduling has not changed. Psilocybin remains Schedule I. DMT remains Schedule I. LSD remains Schedule I. Cannabis, as of this writing, remains Schedule I at the federal level — though the 2024 proposal to move it to Schedule III indicates the machine is capable of movement when the political cost of inertia becomes large enough. The delay between scientific consensus and legal reclassification is not, McKenna's argument holds, a bureaucratic lag. It is the system functioning as designed. The inquisition does not reclassify its heretics on the basis of evidence. It reclassifies them when the cost of continuing to burn them exceeds the cost of admitting it was wrong.
The pharmacratic inquisition, in McKenna's framing and in the material that Szasz, Harner, Hari, and Kinzer have subsequently documented, is not a series of unfortunate policy choices. It is a single, coherent, multi-century operation — carried out by different institutions under different ideological pretexts, but serving a consistent function. Human beings are the animals that can modify their own Consciousness. The cultures that preserve, ritualize, and transmit the techniques for doing so produce populations that ruling powers find difficult to manage. Populations that experience, even once, the dissolution of the narrative self — the collapse of the boundaries that separate them from other beings, from the natural world, from what some of them will subsequently call God — are populations that are harder to mobilize for war, harder to organize into consumption, harder to police into political quiescence. The keys to those states are the plants. The plants, accordingly, must be taken away.
What connects Eleusis to the Marihuana Tax Act, the Inquisition's peyote edicts to Schedule I, the burning of village herbalists to the War on Drugs, is not that the same men ran them. It is that the same function was served. A ruling order, whatever its theology, reserves for itself the right to determine what minds are permitted to do. The sacraments of the new order are issued by pharmaceutical corporations and prescribed by licensed physicians. The sacraments of every older order — the mushroom, the vine, the cactus, the seed — are designated diabolical, medicalized as addiction, and enforced against by armed men.
MKUltra is the proof that the ruling order does not disbelieve the plants' power. It knows what they can do. That is precisely why the public is not permitted to have them. The inquisition, in McKenna's hands, is not a metaphor. It is the operating principle of every civilization that has survived for very long by convincing the governed that the doors are walls.