Food of the Gods: RECOVERING OUR ORIGINS
Using plants such as those described above will help us understand the precious gift of plant partnership that was lost at the dawn of time. Many people yearn to be introduced to the facts concerning their true identity. This essential identity is explicitly addressed by a plant hallucinogen. Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing— a golem.
And, indeed, this image, sickeningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryptofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.
I believe that the failure of our civilization to come to terms with the issue of drugs and habitual destructive behavior is a legacy of unhappiness for us all. But if we sufficiently reconstructed our image of self and world, we could make out of psychopharmacology the stuff of our grandest hopes and dreams. Instead, pharmacology has become the demonic handmaiden of an unchecked descent into regimentation and erosion of civil liberties.
Most people are addicted to some substance and, more important, all people are addicted to patterns of behavior. Attempting to distinguish between habits and addictions does damage to the indissoluble confluence of mental and physical energies that shapes the behavior of each of us. People not involved in a relationship with food/drug stimulation are rare and by their preference for dogma and deliberately self-limited horizons must be judged to have failed to create a viable alternative to substance involvement.
I have attempted here to examine our biological history and our more recent cultural history with an eye to something that may have been missed. My theme was human arrangements with plants, made and broken over the millennia. These relationships have shaped every aspect of our identities as self-reflecting beings —our languages, our cultural values, our sexual behavior, what we remember and what we forget about our own past. Plants are the missing link in the search to understand the human mind and its place in nature.
THE FUNDAMENTALIST CONTRIBUTION
In the United States, the federal government's zeal to appear to wish to eradicate drugs is directly linked to the degree to which the government has been co-opted by the values of fundamentalist Christianity. We entertain the illusion of the constitutional separation of church and state in the United States. But in fact the federal government, when it acted to prohibit alcohol during Prohibition, when it interferes with rights to reproductive freedom, or with the use of peyote in Native American religious rituals, and when it attempts unreasonably to regulate foods and substances, is acting as the enforcing arm for the values of right-wing fundamentalism.
Eventually the right to determine our own food and drug preferences will be seen as a natural consequence of human dignity, as long as it is done in a way that does not limit the rights of others. The signing of the Magna Carta, the abolition of slavery, the enfranchisement of women—these are instances in which the evolving definition of what constituted fairness swept away ossified social structures that had come to rely more and more on a "fundamentalist" reading of their own first principles. The war on drugs is schizophrenically waged by governments that deplore the drug trade and yet are also the major guarantors and patrons of the international drug cartels. Such an approach is doomed to failure.
The war on drugs was never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long as possible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wring the last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits from the global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared.
"Defeat" will mean, as it did in the case of the Vietnam War, that the media will correctly portray the true dimensions of the situation and the real players, and that public revulsion at the culpability, stupidity, and venality of the Establishment's role will force a policy review. In cynically manipulating nations and peoples with narcotics and stimulants, modern governments have associated themselves with an ethical disaster comparable to the eighteen century rebirth of the slave trade or the recently renounced excesses of Marxism-Leninism.
THE LEGALIZATION ISSUE
The conclusion seems obvious: only legalization can lay the basis for a sane drug policy. Indeed, this opinion has been reached by most disinterested commentators on the problem, although the political consequences of advocating legalization have made it slow to be considered. Most recently Arnold Trebach's thoughtful book, The Great Drug War, has marshaled persuasive arguments in favor of a revolution in drug policy:
Another model for guidance in approaching the subject of drug abuse may be found in the manner with which America has historically dealt with conflicting religious creeds; virtually all are accepted as decent moral options that ought to be available for those people who believe in them. The subject of drugs should be approached in the same spirit—more like religion than science. My wish is that law and medicine recognize the personal and nonscientific nature of the drug-abuse arena by enacting some form of First Amendment guarantee of freedom to select a personal drug abuse doctrine, but limited somewhat by enlightened principles of medicine.
What Trebach does not discuss, indeed does not even mention, is the role to be played by hallucinogens in the post suppression scenario. Indeed, psychedelics seem unimportant if the only measure of a drug's social impact is the estimate of the millions of dollars of street sales that may have taken place. Only LSD continues to be occasionally singled out among the psychedelics as a possible large-scale problem. However, estimates of the amount of psychedelics produced and used in the United States have been politicized and hence are unreliable and meaningless.
But another measure of the social importance of a substance argues that we are remiss in not at least beginning to discuss the social impact of psychedelic use when we contemplate legalization of drugs. A clue to that other measure is the interest the CIA and military intelligence gave to psychedelics during the sixties through projects such as MK (for mind control) and MK-ULTRA. The widespread belief that the conclusion of these studies was that television was the drug of choice for mass hypnosis, while reasonable, should not be taken at face value. I believe that, once drugs are legalized, the fear that there will be a vast epidemic of cocaine or heroin addiction will be proven groundless. I also believe that there will be increased interest in and use of psychedelics, and that this possibility is of great concern to the Establishment. This new interest in psychedelics should be anticipated and provided for. If use of psychedelics makes it easier to recapture the social attitudes and assumptions of the original partnership cultures, then eventually educational institutions may wish to encourage this awareness.
A new global consensus appears to be building. What was previously inchoate and unconscious is now becoming conscious and at the same time structured. The collapse of the Marxist alternative to media-dense, high-tech democratic consumerism has been swift and complete. For the first time in planetary history, a defined, albeit dimly defined, consensus exists for "democratic values." This trend will encounter real resistance from various forms of monotheistic religious fundamentalism during the 1990s. It is a phenomenon of expanded consciousness driven by the information explosion. Democracy is an articulation of the Archaic notion of the nomadic egalitarian group. In its purest expression it is thoroughly psychedelic and its triumph seems ultimately certain.
The "drug problem" runs against the tendency toward global expansion of consciousness through spread of democratic values. There is no question that a society that sets out to control its citizens' use of drugs sets out on the slippery path to totalitarianism. No amount of police power, surveillance, and intrusion into people's lives can be expected to affect "the drug problem." Hence there is no limit to the amount of repression that frightened institutions and their brainwashed populations may call for.
A MODEST PROPOSAL
A drug policy respectful of democratic values would aim to educate people to make informed choices based on their own needs and ideals. Such a simple prescription is necessary and sadly overdue.
A master plan for seriously seeking to come to terms with America's drug problems might explore a number of options, including the following.
1. A 200 percent federal tax should be imposed on tobacco and alcohol. All government subsidies for tobacco production should be ended. Warnings on packaging should be strengthened. A 20 percent federal sales tax should be levied on sugar and sugar substitutes, and all supports for sugar production should be ended. Sugar packages should also carry warnings, and sugar should be a mandatory topic in school nutrition curricula.
2. All forms of cannabis should be legalized and a 200 percent federal sales tax imposed on cannabis products. Information as to the THC content of the product and current conclusions regarding its impact on health should be printed on the packaging.
3. International Monetary Fund and World Bank lending should be withdrawn from countries that produce hard drugs. Only international inspection and certification that a country is in compliance would restore loan eligibility.
4. Strict gun control must apply to both manufacture and possession. It is the unrestricted availability of firearms that has made violent crime and the drug abuse problem so intertwined.
5. The legality of nature must be recognized, so that all plants are legal to grow and possess.
6. Psychedelic therapy should be made legal and insurance coverage extended to include it.
7. Currency and banking regulations need to be strengthened. Presently bank collusion with criminal cartels allows large-scale money laundering to take place.
8. There is an immediate need for massive support for scientific research into all aspects of substance use and abuse and an equally massive commitment to public education.
9. One year after implementation of the above, all drugs still illegal in the United States should be decriminalized. The middleman is eliminated, the government can sell drugs at cost plus 200 percent, and those monies can be placed in a special fund to pay the social, medical, and educational costs of the legalization program. Money from taxes on alcohol, tobacco, sugar, and cannabis can also be placed in this fund. Also following this one-year period, pardons should be given to all offenders in drug cases that did not involve firearms or felonious assault.
If these proposals seem radical, it is only because we have drifted so far from the ideals that were originally most American. At the foundation of the American theory of social polity is the notion that our inalienable rights include "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." To pretend that the right to the pursuit of happiness does not include the right to experiment with psychoactive plants and substances is to make an argument that is at best narrow and at worst ignorant and primitive. The only religions that are anything more than the traditionally sanctioned moral codes are religions of trance, dance ecstasy, and intoxication by hallucinogens. The living fact of the mystery of being is there, and it is an inalienable religious right to be able to approach it on one's oprinciple in law.
EPILOGUE: LOOKING OUTWARD AND INWARD TO A SEA OF STARS
We have arrived at the point in our story where history merges with the political energies of the moment. The current controversies that have use and abuse of substances as their theme must share the stage with other issues of equal import: poverty and overpopulation, environmental destruction, and unmet political expectations. These phenomena are the inevitable by-products of the dominator culture. In struggling with these social problems we must remember that the roots of our humanness lie elsewhere, in the cascade of mental abilities that were unleashed within our species many tens of millennia ago—the ability to name, to classify, to compare, and to remember. These functions all can be traced back to the quasi-symbiotic relationship that we enjoyed with psilocybin mushrooms in the African partnership society of prehistory.
Our breach of faith with the symbiotic relationship to the plant hallucinogens has made us susceptible to an ever more neurotic response to each other and the world around us. Several thousand years of such bereavement have left us the nearly psychotic inheritors of a planet festering with the toxic by-products of scientific industrialism.
IF NOT US, WHO? IF NOT NOW, WHEN?
It is time for us to undertake a dialogue based on an objective assessment of what our culture does and means. Another hundred years of business as usual is inconceivable. Dogma and ideology have become obsolete; their poisonous assumptions allow us to close our eyes to our hideous destructiveness and to loot even those resources that properly belong to our children and grandchildren. Our toys do not satisfy; our religions are no more than manias; our political systems are a grotesque aping of what we intended them to be.
How can we hope to do better? Although fears of nuclear confrontation have diminished with the recent changes in the Eastern bloc, the world is still plagued by hunger, overpopulation, racism, sexism, and religious and political fundamentalism. We have the capacity—industrial, scientific, and financial—to change the world. The question is, do we have the capacity to change ourselves, to change our minds? I believe that the answer to this must be yes but not without help from nature. If mere preaching of virtue could provide the answer, then we would have arrived at the threshold of angelic existence some time ago. If mere legislation of virtue were an answer, we would have learned that a long time ago.
Help from nature means recognizing that the satisfaction of the religious impulse comes not from ritual, and still less from dogma, but rather, from a fundamental kind of experience—the experience of symbiosis with hallucinogenic plants and, through them, symbiosis with the whole of planetary life. Radical as this proposal may appear, it has been anticipated in the work of no less a sober observer of Western culture than Arthur Koestler:
Nature has let us down, God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out. To hope for salvation to be synthesized in the laboratory may seem materialistic, crankish, or naive; but, to tell the truth, there is a Jungian twist to it—for it reflects the ancient alchemist's dream to concoct the elixir vitae. What we expect from it, however, is not eternal life, nor the transformation of base metal into gold, but the transformation of homo maniacus into homo sapiens. When man decides to take his fate into his own hands, that possibility will be within reach.
Koestler concludes from his examination of our history of institutionalized violence as a species that some form of pharmacological intervention will be necessary before we can be at peace with one another. He proceeds to make an argument for conscious and scientifically managed psychopharmacological intervention in the life of society that has grave implications for the preservation of ideals of human independence and liberty. Koestler was apparently unaware of the shamanic tradition or of the richness of the psychedelic experience. Hence he was not aware that the task of managing a global human population into a state of balance and happiness could involve introducing the experience of an internal horizon of transcendence into people's lives.
FINDING THE WAY OUT
Without the escape hatch into the transcendental and transpersonal realm that is provided by plant-based indole hallucinogens, the human future would be bleak indeed. We have lost the ability to be swayed by the power of myths, and our history should convince us of the fallacy of dogma. What we require is a new dimension of self-experience that individually and collectively authenticates democratic social forms and our stewardship of this small part of the larger universe.
Discovery of such a dimension will mean risk and opportunity. Seeking the answer is the stance of the ingenue, the preinitiate, and the fool. We must now have done with such posturing; it is for us to face the answer. Facing the answer means recognizing that the world we have prepared to hand on to the generations of the future is no more than a mess of broken pottage. It is not the dispossessed people of the ruined rain forests who are pathetic, it is not the stoic opium farmers of tribal Burma who menace distant hopes and populations—it is ourselves.
FROM THE GRASSLANDS TO THE STARSHIP
Human history has been a fifteen-thousand-year dash from the equilibrium of the African cradle to the twentieth-century apotheosis of delusion, devaluation, and mass death. Now we stand on the brink of star flight, virtual reality technologies, and a revivified shamanism that heralds the abandonment of the monkey body and tribal group that has always been our context. The age of the imagination is dawning. The shamanic plants and the worlds that they reveal are the worlds from which we imagine that we came long ago, worlds of light and power and beauty that in some form or another lie behind the eschatological visions of all of the world's great religions. We can claim this prodigal legacy only as quickly as we can remake our language and ourselves.
Remaking our language means rejecting the image of ourselves inherited from dominator culture—that of a creature guilty of sin and hence deserving of exclusion from paradise. Paradise is our birthright and can be claimed by any one of us. Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored. Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies. These allies are the hallucinogenic plants and the mysterious teaching entities, luminous and transcendental, that reside in that nearby dimension of ecstatic beauty and understanding that we have denied until it is now nearly too late.
WE AWAIT OURSELVES WITHIN THE VISION
We can now move toward a new vision of ourselves and our role in nature. We are the omniadaptable species, we are the thinkers, the makers, and the solvers of problems. These great gifts that are ours alone and which come out of the evolutionary matrix of the planet are not for us—our convenience, our satisfaction, our greater glory. They are for life; they are the special qualities that we can contribute to the great community of organic being, if we are to become the care giver, the gardener, and the mother of our mother, which is the living earth.
Here there is great mystery. In the middle of the slow-moving desert of unreflecting nature we come upon ourselves and perhaps see ourselves for the first time. We are colorful, cantankerous, and alive with hopes and dreams that, so far as we know, are unique in the universe. We have been too long asleep and shackled by the power we have ceded to the least noble parts of ourselves and the least noble among us. It is time that we stood up and faced the fact that we must and can change our minds.
The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion. Now the air is hushed and the east is streaked with the rosy blush of dawn. Yet in the world we have always known evening grows deeper and the shadows lengthen toward a night that will know no end. One way or another the story of the foolish monkey is nearly forever over. Our destiny is to turn without regret from what has been, to face ourselves, our parents, lovers, and children, to gather our tool kits, our animals, and the old, old dreams, so that we may move out across the visionary landscape of ever-deeper understanding. Hopefully there, where we have always been most comfortable, most ourselves, we will find glory and triumph in the search for meaning in the endless life of the imagination, at play at last in the fields of an Eden refound.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/468529/food-of-the-gods
