The Altered States of America
Personal Perspective: Perhaps your brain on drugs has religious value.
Posted May 6, 2026 | Reviewed by Davia Sills
What used to be the United States of America might be more accurately called the Altered States of America. Perhaps what truly unites us is our collectively drugged state of mind.
The recent flurry of executive orders and rescheduling of psychedelics and cannabis not only signals a new wave of faith in mind-altering psychoactive substances for therapeutic and medicinal purposes. It also has more subversive religious potentiality as well, blowing the lid off what has been a long-standing governmental caution about, if not warfare against, your brain on drugs.
Americans have long been fine with certain consciousness-modifying drug agents. Coffee, tobacco, alcohol , and now pharmaceuticals have been ingrained elements of everyday life and economic drivers for consumers and corporations in the marketplace who value these existential coping mechanisms.
It looks like we are turning a page in the recent history of drugs in society and perhaps moving from a war on drugs to a drugged war against the challenges of existence. America's symptom-soaked culture, ruled over by the ever-evolving sacred text known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , is not unlike global cultures throughout history engaged in the same struggles with being human. Of course, ancient worlds are not the same as our contemporary realities. Social media , brutalizing capitalism, and scientific breakthroughs are just a few of the distinguishing features marking differences between our world and theirs.
And yet, whatever diverse forces are at work in societies, similarities remain at a fundamental human level. These are inescapable existential matters tied to our bodies and life circumstances, like the reality of death, suffering, aging, and violence, as well as efforts to ensure cosmic and mundane stability, seek healing and pleasure, and find a community and one's true identity .
What is clear and unequivocal throughout human history, and yes, even today, is that both mind-altering drugs and religious inspirations have a history of being used to cope with these basic human concerns and dilemmas. The religious qualities infusing the powers of pharmaceutical drugs like antidepressants are a potent but not so obvious example. Alcohol certainly has religious shadings here and there, whether you think of communion and wine, or devotions to craft beer. Or look at what is in the archeological record, with traces of cannabis in ancient Mediterranean temples or even farther back, to the not uncommon presence of psychedelic substances in prehistoric mortuary sites around the world.
The buzz about psychedelics today is that they are psychological game-changers for millions of people suffering from mental health problems, including such afflictions as trauma , anxiety , addiction , depression , and terminal illness. Medical science is now authorizing through clinical trials and scientific experimentation the rituals, myths, symbols, and meanings enshrouding the medicalization of these drugging, trippy substances.
The current psychedelic efflorescence, though, may have some religious ramifications across the American cultural landscape. Like the First Great Psychedelic Awakening, which began near the end of the 1950s and fizzled due to President Nixon's declaration of a "war on drugs," the present Second Great Psychedelic Awakening is fueling a spiritual ferment outside the boundaries of traditional and conventional conceptions of what constitutes religious life.
Regardless of the fragilities of science and the likely corporatization and commercialization of psychedelics for therapeutic purposes, the hallucinatory spillover effect from clinical trials and media exuberance is already increasing more popular demand outside of medicine to access the magic of microdosing, or the awesomeness of ayahuasca, or the cosmic dramas of DMT.
It would be one thing if psychedelics were the only drugs available to us. But their emergence and now growing popularity must be seen in the context of the wide diversity and uses of consciousness-altering substances throughout American society, as well as that deeper and longer history of intimacies between psychoactive substances and spiritual animation. The varieties of religious experiences and implications that can emerge from all this drug consumption are enormous, unfamiliar, and unstudied.
What remains clear is that the basics of human existence do not change. Grief , stress , desire, camaraderie, fear , comfort, and other integral aspects of social life can sometimes be addressed by the right combination of drug-induced consciousness alterations and religious-infused sensibilities about embodied existence.
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Gary Laderman, Ph.D. , is the Goodrich C. White Professor of American Religious History and Cultures at Emory University. His latest book is Sacred Drugs: How Psychoactive Substances Mix With Religious Life (Routledge, 2025).
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.