7

The Pores of Deception

To my mum

My friend was waiting to die when she heard a knock on the door. A man had come to deliver a kitchen compost unit, and he was speaking on a mobile, which he passed to her. ‘If you want to drink Daime, you have to stop all chemical medicines for six weeks,’ said the phone. My friend said she knew nothing about Daime, but she was interested, because her chemotherapy had not stopped breast cancer progressing to her bones, and her antidepressants had not lightened the weight of having less than eighteen months to live. She stopped both, six weeks later she took her first dose of Daime, and four years later the cancer shows no signs of returning.

This kind of miracle cure is not uncommon with ayahuasca, and neither is the serendipitous coincidence. (In this case, the deliveryman had phoned a man who runs sessions in England, but he was not in, and his Japanese wife had answered. When another Japanese opened the door, the deliveryman handed over the phone without thinking.) I know another woman who turned a story of terminal lung cancer around with Daime, and it took care of my leishmaniasis. It is something of a panacea, used to cure everything from the common cold to malaria, the biggest killer on the planet. It is also used in Brazil with drug addicts and alcoholics.[1] The cure is not the medicine, it is a ritual involving the medicine, as well as song, prayer, and plenty more besides, and as such it is scientifically untestable. This is not an indictment of ayahuasca, but a limitation of the scientific method.

What is ayahuasca? Many of my friends in England, Japan, and Brazil, are at pains to explain that it is not a drug. The English often call it an entheogen, meaning something which brings about an experience of the god within. Brazilians usually explain that it is a sacrament, not a drug. The whole world is so scared of drugs, even the word is scary, especially in Portuguese; when an actor curses in a film, the subtitle reads ‘Droga!’ Ayahuasca is both entheogen and sacrament, and some call it a divine being, but it is also a drug, and it is uma droga as well.

Medically speaking, a drug is any substance that causes a change in physiology or perception, and there is no denying that ayahuasca does that. There are other definitions, perhaps the worst being the legal definition, where a very old word is redefined by a politician as ‘such a substance as recognized or defined by the U.S. Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.’[2] Definitions, by definition, push things under the knife of dualism. Our culture recognises ‘good’ drugs prescribed by family doctors and chemists to help bring down your temperature or your weight, to keep your children in line, and to keep you from worrying about it. There are approved recreational drugs, all of which are addictive, many of which are connected with insomnia, heart disease, and assault and battery. Then there are ‘hard’ drugs, many of which harm you to various degrees, and others such as ayahuasca, peyote, ganja, mushrooms and more, which have never been shown to damage the body at all. Let us leave this nonsense behind and go with the medical definition. A drug is anything from Neurofen to heroin, gin to ginseng, chamomile in my cup, ketamine in her cocktail, and fluoride in your water, whether you want it or not, whether it is good for you or not.

The drugs relevant to our story are psychedelics. The word means mind (psyche) manifesting (dēlos), and they have also been called ‘consciousness expanding’ drugs, ‘psycholytics’, and ‘psychotomimetics’, meaning that their effects resemble madness. Modern psychiatry, from which the words used to describe psychedelic states were taken, generally regards any non-normal state of consciousness as pathological. Drugs are therefore bad, by definition, regardless of what they actually do to you: serenity is catatonia, excitement is mania, inspiration is delusion, a sense of the infinite is a regression to primary narcissism. The language is carried though into our thoughts, our conversations, and our laws. Mind-bending is only kosher when caused by drugs, depression, or mental illness, so that is what we deal with, but if you dissolve into the Godhead you are unstable, if you converse with other life forms you are mad, and if you eat mushrooms and giggle all night, you are a criminal. Happily, and despite the prejudice, Samadhi Street is crowded with transgressives, hedonists, and intellectuals, snorting, swallowing, and smoking their way into other dimensions. The music is different, as is the intention usually, but these pilgrims are walking the same old poison path, and the result is often the same old ecstasy.

One of the things psychedelics do is make us more aware of imbalance. In a demonstration of this phenomenon in the visual sphere, subjects looking at parallel lines on a screen were asked at what moment the lines become skewed. They were more accurate after a small dose of psilocybin. Straight subjects make a mental note that the lines are parallel, and then defer to this decision even as the lines begin to diverge. Psychedelics, however, question our conceptions, and erase the notes we make, so when new information arrives the page is already blank. Dr. Fischer, who performed the experiment, calls this the ‘unlearning… of constancies’.[3]

This capacity to reveal imbalance makes them excellent tools for learning about ourselves. Whereas we often convince ourselves that we are neither addicted nor compulsive, and that our behaviour is perfectly rational, psychedelics question our assumptions. Because ayahuasca shows you every contour and blemish of your personality, it is sometimes described as a mirror held up close in your face. The magnificent iboga root is sometimes described as a waking nightmare, but after crawling through a hell of suppressed memories and mind-loops with a belly full of acrid sawdust, my 13-year daily ganja habit was no more. My memory and motivation came back, along with vivid technicolour dreams. I had absolutely no intention of stopping smoking when I went along. I was a perfectly happy, perfectly useless lump of flesh, but I emerged from my final go at drug tourism with the very real possibility that I might finish my book before the end of time. The guy next to me described having his innards torn out and returned to him, which brought an abrupt halt to 26 years of daily alcoholism. Incredibly, just one weekend working with iboga in a shamanic setting can reset the meter both physically and mentally, giving a crack addict or anorectic a window of opportunity to sort out their life, and the strength to resist falling back into old patterns. Bassi!

Other psychedelics can also break addictions and redirect lives. The co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous lost his compulsion to drink after a spiritual experience with belladonna.[4] Combined with psychotherapy, various drugs including the dreaded ketamine have been proven effective against heroin and alcohol dependence,[5] [6] and in early studies, an average of 45 percent of alcoholics improved with LSD.[7] The most infamous researcher was Timothy Leary, a once respected psychologist whose pioneering doctoral thesis earned him a teaching post at Harvard, and whose personality test is still used today. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) initially commended his work with psilocybin and psychotherapy in prisons, because only 25 percent of his subjects were readmitted after release, compared with the usual 80 percent.[8] Preliminary research by dozens of psychoanalysts, biochemists, and psychiatrists in various institutions throughout Europe and the States indicated that LSD could also help schizophrenics, alcoholics, neurotics, and the severely depressed, as well as autistic children.[i] In the mid-sixties, as Leary’s trip went beyond the lab into outer space, there were sensationalist headlines in the popular press and dishonest accounts in the scientific press. Despite over ten years of impressive results and international conferences, and thousands of case studies, one highly respected American journal opined that LSD was ‘a dangerous drug’, and that ‘there is no published evidence that further experimentation is likely to yield invaluable data.’[9] The research was stopped when LSD was outlawed in 1968.[10] Dr. Leary was imprisoned, given the highest bail ever, and described as ‘the most dangerous man in America’ by Richard Nixon, a man far more deserving of such a title.

The CIA, however, continued to experiment, mostly on unsuspecting subjects. Nearly 1,500 American soldiers and Viet Cong prisoners of war were dosed,[ii] citizens were lured to safehouses by prostitutes to be fed drugs and observed through one-way glass mirrors, and psychiatric patients were given LSD, sometimes in combination with hypnosis, extended sensory depression, electrode implants, or lobotomies.[11] The quiet, well-adjusted Dr. Olsen threw himself out of a tenth story window days after his unwitting exposure at the hands of the CIA.[12] Psychedelics are extremely powerful substances, and their misuse can have serious consequences, whether the denizen is Charlie Manson or a government agent. Though an uninformed victim might understandably spin out when the walls begin to melt, psychedelics need not be the ambition destroying menace they are often thought to be. LSD hampered neither Richard Branson nor Bill Gates,[13] and the founder of Apple Computers described it as ‘one of the two or three most important things’ he did in his life.[14] Neither did the brain of Nobel laureate Richard Feynman seem to suffer from the ketamine he took in John Lilly’s isolation tank.[15]

Bad trips usually occur when the mindset of the tripper is negative, beset with concerns which may include legal issues or the purity of a drug bought on the black market. The setting of the journey should be relaxing, as scary pictures on the walls or unresolved issues between trippers might trigger problems. Dr. Leary, who coined the term ‘set and setting’, suggested that someone experienced should stay straight to guide the others, and if the guide knows what they are doing, danger is minimal. Whilst a trip might be terrifying, a citrus fruit and some calm words can usually put it right. There is no lethal dose of LSD, and even if it goes terribly wrong, it is almost never dangerous to others, and rarely lasts longer than the effect of the drug, unless, of course, the psychonaut is unlucky enough to be sectioned whilst tripping.[16]

Non-psychedelic reality can be far more dangerous. The Manson family killed nine innocent people, but the lamentably straight state of Texas may well have killed more; since 1973, new evidence has allowed 43 innocent men to walk free from death row,[17] and one can only guess at how many were not so lucky. Our civilisation keeps polluting, confusing, and destroying, and unlike a bad trip, there is no end in sight, except for the apocalyptically minded. Whilst some power plants make you vomit, (or ‘make you well’, as the peyote eaters say), they do not kill you, or even damage you when used sensibly. I know of one tragic case when a French junky ignored the shaman’s advice and injected heroin during his iboga session. Whilst the combination can be lethal, iboga alone is not. The government responded by outlawing the most powerful addiction cure on the planet.

Iboga, ayahuasca, São Pedro, salvia divinorum, peyote, coca leaves, Hawaiian woodrose, datura, ganja, henbane, yopo seeds, and the various mushrooms have long histories of ceremonial use, and the initiates know something of the layout of other worlds, some of which are not playgrounds. LSD, by contrast, was explored underground in a few decades, often by hippies who rejected anything as straight as an organised ceremony. This leaves some space for losing the plot, and though acid casualties may be no worse off than consensus reality casualties, neither are they the sky-walkers they could be. Ritual protects the participant. Whilst criminalisation is an ineffective deterrent for those who want to get mashed, it does put those who organise rituals at considerable risk.

In a Daime work, wandering around, eating, chatting, and the whole social game is forbidden. With the ego temporarily obliterated and nothing to do but sing, shake a maraca, and dance in formation with everyone else, you can safely follow your journey where it takes you. It was banned for a short time in Brazil, but the ban was revoked after a commission of social scientists found that the religion promotes community cohesion, and that ayahuasca is safe in a ritual setting. More recently, Daime won legal protection in the US and in most of Europe, along with another ayahuasca church, the União de Vegetal.

For a reason that becomes obvious after a few doses, one of the two principle alkaloids from the ayahuasca vine was named telepathine when first isolated in 1927. It was later discovered to be harmine, which had already been isolated from Syrian Rue.[18] Ayahuasca’s effect is indescribable, but words like illuminating, exhilarating, and awe-inspiring are not misleading. Is it addictive? Animals don’t think so. Rats self-administer heroin, cocaine, alcohol, amphetamine, and nicotine, often until death, but they have a strong aversion to psychedelics after one dose. Ayahuasca is habit-forming in the way that other Amazonian treats such as mangos and Brazilian women are habit-forming, but not all habits are bad habits, and ayahuasca is a very good habit indeed.[19] It alkalises the blood, kills parasites, cleans the mind, and leaves you with the exact opposite of a comedown. There has never been an overdose, and if the session is run properly, no one gets hurt or goes crazy.[iii] You might spend a session puking your lungs out, but for the rest of the week you are focussed, happy, healthy, and full of good ideas.

Ayahuasca is a black hole of philosophy, swallowing dogmas whole and leaving nothing but nothingness. The temporary suspension of the rational mind can be fun, or it might be terrifying, but the difficult sessions can be the most transformative. One guy in our group was born into a family of miserable Evangelical Christians who moaned about Satan whenever anyone had any fun. He became a boy racer, driving cars and motorbikes at ludicrous speeds, and at his first sessions he drank ludicrous quantities. I had to scrape him off the floor and take him home after his first session, and at another he spent six hours rolling around, his eyes rolling around in their sockets. I was on guardian duty that day, looking after gibbering heaps like him, so I had my hands full keeping him tidy and making sure no one stepped on his wandering limbs. He later described it as an eternity in hell, utterly separated from warmth and life, lonely, miserable, lost, and without hope of return. The change in him, however, was extremely positive. He emerged warm, friendly, relaxed, and confident. This kind of experience puts everyday worries and obsessions into perspective, leaving you better connected to the vital current of the universe. He takes more sensible doses now, and his driving has improved so much that he drives the mini-bus whenever we have a psychedelic weekend away in the countryside.

Ayahuasca is effective against depression and anxiety,[20] but it does not treat psychological problems in the same way as Prozac, nor does it attack cancer cells in the manner of chemotherapy. It is a spiritual emetic, dissolving clots in the mind, clawing down into the depths of your hang-ups and ejecting them in incredible quantities of vomit. It frees the spirit so the body can heal. In the magickal universe, the mind goes first and the physical follows.[iv] Disease and misfortune teach us to pay attention, to return to balance, and to take control of the mind. Ayahuasca comes at you like a silent demolition ball striking your blindside, unseen and devastating. If you are brittle, it shatters your personality and leaves you to pick up the pieces. If you are following delusions in the wrong direction, it knocks you back towards the centre. If you are a spinning dummy, you will get whacked for six every time, but if you are calm and alert you can detect the blow as it lands, work with it in Aikido curves rather than Euclidian lines, direct it towards creative expression or ride the ball into other dimensions. The skill is in taking the force with grace. Keep dancing, keep your focus, keep the smile on your lips and the groove in your hips, regardless of what is going on in your head or in your belly.

Ayahuasca is a hard teacher, but not a cruel teacher. It pushes you only as far as you can go, and destroys only what needs rebuilding. The puffed up are punctured, the dozy are shaken awake, and the careless are rapped soundly across the knuckles. As a formidable adversary, it sends saboteurs into your mind, striking wherever opinions overlap, smashing your rusty lance and bludgeoning your stupid helmet. She is also a mother and nurse, who forgives your faults and soothes your wounds. It can return the mind to the primordial chaos we are born into, so the order we lay over this, the categories and causal connections, stand out in ridiculous aspect like the suspiciously straight lines on maps of Africa. With ayahuasca, you can redraw the lines. You can move the goalposts. By Jove, you can even pick up the ball! The ayahuasquero learns to be comfortable with chaos, and to constantly reorder his world. When we recognise our imbalances and consciously apply the mind, we need suffer no more. Diseases fall away, the lights turn green in the physical world, and the mundane springs into life. Daime is the entire Christian and Buddhist cosmology in a glass, birth, life, death, and resurrection condensed into an afternoon, massive beyond anything you can imagine getting your head round.

My favourite Brazilian’s agonising headaches stopped after a spectacular puke-fest. Another friend was a very reluctant Daimista, who only went along because she was worried about the wacky cult her daughter had joined. Once she felt a migraine coming on before a session and decided to give it a miss rather than whimper in public all night, but her daughter suggested that a dose would do her good, so she gave it a go. The migraine never happened, and she never suffered one again.

Psychedelics are the only known drugs that can stop cluster headaches. This condition means one or more daily bouts of several hours of agony. The cluster might last for years, or may continue on and off for months at a time. Psilocybin proved to be effective with 91 percent of sufferers, and LSD with 80 percent, even though the doses where too small to have any noticeable or measurable effects on perception. They relieve headaches within twenty minutes of ingestion, and also act as prophylactics. According to the researchers, ‘unlike other ergot-based medications, which must be taken daily, a single dose of LSD was sufficient to induce remission of a cluster period, and psilocybin rarely required more than three doses.’^[21]

We do not understand the mechanism, but psychedelics are not anaesthetics, and besides, the brain has no pain receptors, so headaches rarely have a local physiological basis. They may be messages from the body about dehydration or food poisoning, but there are also messages from other sources. I almost never suffered headaches until a migraine hit me the morning after a drug-free magick ritual when I was twenty. (See Chaos in the Crèche) This made sense nine years later after a series of synchronicities lead me to a mediumship course, where I learned that spirits sometimes communicate with pressure on the head; indeed, well-mannered spirits do not approach without knocking on the door. If something is trying to make contact and the receiver is ignoring it, it may become persistent. An unwitting medium may find relief by thanking the messenger (or her own unconscious, if he prefers) and asking what the message is. In my case, they invariably show me a picture or a word with some significance, and the ache passes instantly.

We claim our ideas as our own, whereas most cultures see the origin of genius, inspiration, and obsession in other dimensions. Our culture does not recognise invisible friends, and wisps of colour behind the eyelids and subtle tingles under the skin are thought to be nothing more than randomly firing neurones. They may be neurones firing, but they are not random; indeed, this would be a sensible way for an electromagnetic entity to communicate. The spirits are screaming to be heard, but most of us live in a world where they are not welcome. Although the doses of LSD and psilocybin were too small to be noticed in the cluster headache research, they could perhaps have opened a channel for the voice of an insistent spirit to be heard, to pop a new idea into a head, and mediumship can be as simple as that.

Medieval alchemists named psilocybin after Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. Leaving aside the spooks of the astral plane and the intelligence services, psychedelic drugs clearly have an enormous positive potential. They can alleviate crippling headaches, tackle addictions and ‘terminal’ illnesses, and have been reported effective in combating Parkinson’s disease[22] and reducing insulin requirements of diabetics.[23] They have inspired new technologies, social movements, and artforms, and most of them, including the synthetic ones, cause less tissue damage than a dose of Aspirin. They are non-addictive, and are very rarely implicated in crimes and deaths, unlike alcohol, for example, which kills something like 1.8 million every year,[24] breaking lives and livers around the globe. Whereas some drugs make you feel good and then terrible later, psychedelics sometimes make you feel rotten, but the next day you feel fantastic. As the first ‘shroom-head of the modern era put it:

the next morning, you are fit to go to work. But how unimportant work seems to you, by comparison with the portentous happenings of that night! If you can, you prefer to stay close to the house, and, with those who lived through that night, compare notes, and utter ejaculations of amazement.[25]

So why are drugs illegal? Why were millions of Americans busted for possession of cannabis whilst the president who didn’t inhale was in office?[26] Why does the DEA withhold from people the only drugs known to relieve agony? Where did this nasty little bureau come from?

The story of the first-but-one drug to be criminalised in modern history illustrates how the War on Drugs has far more to do with economics than anything else. The problem was not the psychoactivity of cannabis but its industrial impact. The psychoactive properties of ganja are first mentioned in the Vedas in the second millennium BC.[27] Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Indians, and Chinese used it for oedema, inflammation, pain, and other maladies, for religious rites, for fibre and paper, and its noble medical history continued until the nineteenth century, when Queen Victoria used it for period pains.[28] Canvas weaved from cannabis (from which the word ‘canvas’ derives) was made into the sales of merchant clippers, recycled to cover the wagons which rode west, and ended up as the original Levi’s jeans worn by cowboys and gold prospectors. The Declaration of Independence was drafted on hemp paper by Thomas Jefferson, who smuggled Chinese hemp seeds past the British to America,[29] and George Washington, who wrote a note to his gardener asking him to ‘make the most of the Indian hemp seed, and sow it everywhere!’[30] The first US president also noted in his diary that he separated male and female plants, something only done to prevent the flower from being fertilised and losing her psychoactive potency; he may have been using ganja to relieve his dental pain. It was the third biggest crop in America until 1937,[31] when the DEA was born amid tabloid claims that marijuana causes disease, sexual misconduct, criminality, murder, and leads to harder drugs. There was no evidence at the time for such claims, none has emerged since, and it has been found to cause less tissue damage than legal drugs. So why all the hoo-ha about the herb?[v][32]

In the late twenties and early thirties, new machinery made hemp processing cheaper, and Ford engineers extracted from it methanol, charcoal fuel, tar, pitch, ethyl-acetate, and creosote, all essential materials which were distilled from crude oil. The leading petrochemicals researcher was Du Pont Chemicals, which developed cellophane, rayon, Dacron, and then Nylon in 1937. Nylon was a new competitor to hemp, and so was cotton, made into a viable cash crop by pesticides developed by Du Pont. After Du Pont gained control of General Motors in 1920,[33] all GM cars were built with Du Pont plastics, painted and varnished with Du Pont petrochemicals, and ran on tetra-ethyl leaded fuel, containing additives sold by Du Pont.

Rudolph Diesel’s original engine ran on hemp fuel, and Diesel engines still can. The first Ford car was built from hemp composites and ran on hemp fuel. In 1913, when the Gulf Oil Corporation opened its first drive-in gas station and Ford opened his first assembly line, engines burned petrol, hemp fuel, or ethanol fuel. Ethanol stills became illegal, however, with alcohol prohibition in 1920, and the ban on marijuana pushed hemp fuel out of the market in 1937, leaving only petrol. The other major shift was in the paper industry. Hemp paper began to be replaced by cheap tree-pulp paper, which was first made at the end of the 19^th century. It became even cheaper in 1937 when Du Pont patented the process of pulping trees with toxic sulphides. This made it much more profitable for the Hearst Corporation to fell the forests she owned to make tabloids. Her pages printed headlines such as ‘HASHEESH GOADS USERS TO BLOOD-LUST’[34] and stories about stoners ripping out their eyeballs or hacking their families to bits, alongside adverts for petrochemical products and xenophobic tirades against Mexicans and blacks. These were the two marijuana-using groups, and this is where morality, economics, and racism became mixed.

The word ‘marijuana’, and the custom of smoking it, arrived in the American south with a Mexican wave of immigrants in the boom years of the early twentieth century. The joint was passed to black jazz musicians in the cities, but it took some time to reach white America because racist laws kept the communities apart, and white Americans were more into their booze, the first drug to be criminalized by a central government. During thirteen years of prohibition, Al Capone and Bugsy Malone got rich whilst America got wrecked on moonshine, and the police force was beefed up to cope with all the flying custard pies. Prohibition was far more successful in wiping out ethanol fuel than alcoholism, and was abandoned in 1933. The Narcotics Bureau created to replace it had very little to regulate, so a lot of cops found themselves out of work, along with millions of other Americans suffering in the Great Depression. Low-paid Mexican agricultural workers were already feeling the heat of resentment, and when their custom was banned, the police suddenly had a job to do again.

Many stood to gain from the criminalisation of marijuana, but perhaps the biggest winner was Andrew Mellon. He owned both the Gulf Oil Corporation and the Mellon Bank, which safeguarded Pierre Du Pont’s fortune and funded his takeover of General Motors.[35] As Secretary of the Treasury, Mellon appointed tax officials, and he chose his niece’s husband, Harry J. Anslinger (who went on to lend his enthusiastic support to the CIA’s clandestine testing of LSD on members of the public).[36]

The Marijuana Tax was not a criminal law but a piece of tax legislation, raised before a six-man committee rather than the full house. Anslinger presented evidence from ‘reefer madness’ tabloids printed by Hearst newspapers, and the bill was pushed though in two days rather than the usual months or years, leaving very little time for objections. The paint and lubricant industries raised a complaint, as did a birdseed vendor, and a third objection came from the American Medical Association:

In all you have heard here thus far, no mention has been made of any excessive use of the drug or its excessive distribution by any pharmacist. And yet the burden of this bill is placed heavily on the doctors and pharmacists of the country, and may I say very heavily - most heavily, possibly of all - on the farmers of this country... We can not understand... why this bill should have been prepared in secret for two years without any initiative, even to the profession, that it was being prepared ... no medical man would identify this bill with a medicine until he read it through, because marijuana is not a drug, ... simply a name given cannabis.[37]

A few days later, a clearly dishonest Kentucky representative told the house that the American Medical Association had approved the bill. The Marijuana Tax was passed without a vote, and Anslinger became responsible for awarding licences to grow hemp, something he almost never did. Du Pont patented both Nylon and tree-pulp paper in the same year, 1937. Though most interested parties knew nothing of the law until it was too late, this happy coincidence was divined with curious presentiment by the chairman of Du Pont, who courted investment months before the bill was raised, predicting that:

radical changes from the revenue raising power of government would be converted into instruments for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization.[38]

Du Pont was still the largest producer of man-made fibres in 1997, still selling pesticides for cotton, and she still faces charges of misuse of patenting laws.[39] The hemp industry was frozen, and then thawed out again with the film Hemp for Victory, made to encourage Southern farmers to help the war effort by growing hemp for sails and fatigues. After the war, the film was quietly removed from the public record, until dedicated bong-head Jack Herer dug it out of the public records depository. In the seventies, all references to ‘hemp’ were removed from school textbooks. In 1983, Reagan ordered American Universities to destroy all cannabis research from 1966-76. The Marijuana Tax was declared unconstitutional in 1969,[40] but cannabis may still not be planted, despite 31 countries producing Industrial Hemp, and fourteen US states passing pro-hemp laws. According to George the First’s government:

Hemp is a novelty product with limited sustainable development value even in a novelty market. For every proposed use of industrial hemp, there already exists an available product, or raw material, which is cheaper to manufacture and provides better results… Legalizing hemp production would send a confusing message to our youth concerning marijuana.

In case anyone is confused: this ‘novelty product’ with a ten thousand year history of cultivation makes healthier food and stronger clothes than its competitors, and tougher, lighter fibre composites preferred by Ford, BMW, and Honda. The raw material mentioned is petroleum, subsidised to the tune of $84 billion per year, leaving aside the collateral costs in securing the supply from the Middle East. Other profiteers include pharmaceuticals companies dealing drugs that mimic its medical properties, and breweries selling a different high. 35 US states have endorsed referenda on medical marijuana in the light of evidence of anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, antimicrobial, anticonvulsive, analgesic, anti-emetic, laxative, and sedative properties, and action against glaucoma, asthma, tumours, and nausea.[41] Ganja stimulates the appetite and relieves depression without the risk of abnormal bleeding and psychotic episodes associated with drugs like Prozac.[vi][42] Even government funded research found no relationship between ganja and either lung cancer[43] or low grades at school.[44] Despite this, the prescription of medical marijuana is still a federal offence.

The DEA repeatedly destroyed industrial hemp grown legally on Lakota reservation land, against an 1868 ruling that the Indians can grow whatever they please, and against the wishes of 80 percent of South Dakotans polled. Shipments of non-psychoactive hemp foods have been held until their best-before date passed, and a box of hemp T-shirts a company I worked for sent was once impounded (as if someone might try and smoke a T-shirt?). Countries under American pressure follow suit. In Japan, for example, cultivation has been heavily restricted since the American occupation, despite being a traditional ingredient in Japanese food, and used for the ropes in Shinto shrines and the robes of monks and emperors.

More than twice as many Americans than Dutch smoke ganja,[45] though it is decriminalized in Holland, and Americans also consume most of the annual cocaine crop.[46] The War on Drugs is a $50 billion per annum exercise in protecting commercial interests, causing no obvious reduction in the consumption of drugs. It is conducted by people like the US senator who once ordered an aircraft carrier to the Bolivian coast in order to force her cooperation, only to learn that Bolivia has no coastline.[47] Six years and $4.7 billion spent spraying defoliant over Columbian rainforest and its inhabitants affected neither coca cultivation nor the availability of cocaine on US streets, and in the UK, intensive police operations have ‘no discernable impact on drug availability, price or purity.’[48] In fact, the price of a gram has fallen steadily over the last 25 years, whilst drug producers aggressively push deeper into Indian territories in the jungle to escape the authorities.[49]

Heroin was banned in Britain in 1956, but not because it was addictive. There were only 50 addicts in the country, and both tobacco and alcohol were legal.[50] It was judged to be a moral problem, and the government has been harassing increasing numbers of users ever since. Most people use it without becoming addicted, and the minority who do often have lives so painful that prison is no deterrent. Heroin may screw you up in the long term, but in the short term it pushes your happy buttons. Whereas prohibition increases, or perhaps creates a drug problem, decriminalization has the opposite effect. When the Swiss Medical Service began prescribing heroin in a safe and, significantly, a boring clinical environment, all the grimy chic was taken out of the habit. Addicts used less and committed fewer crimes, and their health, work, and financial situations improved dramatically. The state saved 45 francs per user per day,[51] and the park once known as Needlespark became safe for children to play in again.

Used with the respect they deserve, psychedelics do nothing more sinister than open your eyes. They liberate a chained mind, making robots into rebels, and this is the only danger they pose to anyone. They threaten the powers that be, because they teach us how life could be without them.

TV is far more pathogenic than many drugs, rooting users to the couch and interfering with our physiology. It causes pupils to dilate as soon as it is switched on, and blood pressure falls as blood pools in the buttocks.[52] Like many things, it is not too serious in moderation, but TV is seriously addictive, claiming six and a half hours of the average American’s day. Even the most dedicated acid-fiend doesn’t spent six and a half hours every day tripping. TV makes sustained thought impossible, crippling social life and conversation. It should carry a surgeon’s warning: ‘Caution: using this device around children makes them stupid’. More than any mind-bending drug, TV bends the mind towards familiar themes, towards sports, sex, trivia, and state-approved news. I prefer to bend my mind in another direction, around the laws, mores, and bars of my cage.

Good drugs? Bad drugs?

Good laws? Bad laws?

Mummy? Or Daddy?

Are drugs and laws the problem here, or is it dualism itself?

Ω