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B
O O K R E V I E W
UNDER THE INFLUENCE: The
Disinformation Guide To Drugs
Edited by Preston Peet
REVIEW BY
TRACY MCLELLAN
I first tried LSD many years ago when I
was relatively very young. I have always found it near impossible to
describe the mystical-religious experience that ensued. It was the most
spiritual and religious, in the most impersonal, non-Christian sense of
those terms, feeling I have ever known. For one split second during the trip
there was a seeing, feeling and being of oneness with the Universe, all
light, wisdom and bliss. It was beyond words, already shadows of the
realities they represent, which are by their very nature full of
dualities - subject, object; speaker, spoken to - that that experience
taught me are illusions. Maya as the Hindus call this vale of tears.
I always considered my drug use to be a search to enhance and expand
consciousness, not smother and sedate it. Marijuana, LSD, MDA, and Ecstasy
were my drugs of choice for just this reason, an attempt, to a certain
degree, achievement, but also abject failure, of recreating that
singular experience. Rather than an institutional and cultural framework
of support for such a breathtaking discovery, there was the most
mendacious dissembling around the issue of (some) drugs. Other than a
few close friends, I was groping alone in the dark.
True religious freedom to me would be an exploring and attempt at
recreating these kinds of states of consciousness. Understanding the
potentialities and limitations of integrating them into everyday life.
The freedom to create some kind of cultural and institutional framework
to give them legitimacy as religious ritual. But there is no religious
freedom in America. The word "religion" in the First Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution might just as well be replaced by the word
"Christianity."
Because several of the writers in Under the Influence examine seriously
this religious/mystical aspect of the drug policy issue, the call for
reform takes on a much more urgent and fundamental dimension. Richard Glen Boire, who holds a Doctorate of
Jurisprudence from UC Berkeley, says that drug prohibition is really "a war on consciousness itself - how
much, what sort we are permitted to experience, and who gets to control
it. More than an unintentional misnomer, the government-termed 'war on
drugs' is a strategic decoy label; a sleight-of-hand move by the
government to redirect attention away from what lies at ground zero of
the war - each individual's fundamental right to control his or her own
consciousness."
Why are entheogenic-induced states of consciousness prohibited while
those prompted by the constant advertisements and come-ons to buy
consumer crap, vacuous television-watching, endlessly grinding it out on
a soul-destroying job, and a permanent wartime economy, to take just
several egregious examples of a culture empty and superficial through
and through, considered acceptable? I believe it is because the powerful and
privileged are afraid of the alternate realities these substances can
show us.
Boire adds significantly: "Those who have never experienced the mental
states that are now prohibited do not realize what the laws are denying
them." Mary Jane Borden calls opposition to drug prohibition part of the
"age-old fight against bigotry." She maintains that the struggle against
"chemical bigotry" is part and parcel of the ageless struggles against
the bigotries of racism, sexism, colonialism, and imperialism, and for
democratic rights.
Dr. Stanislav Grof's interview with Albert Hofmann, the accidental
discoverer in 1943 of LSD's singularly potent properties, is
fascinating. Hofmann was a chemist at Sandoz Laboratories in Germany
innocuously attempting to derive a drug analogue useful in obstetrics
from alkaloids of ergot, a fungus that grows on rye bread. While
conducting chemical synthesis experiments, he unknowingly and
accidentally ingested a tiny amount of one of these analogues through
the pores of his skin. He had a powerful and bewildering response.
Hofmann explores the work this led him to be interested in in other
cultures with similar substances like the magic mushroom of the Mazatec
Indians in Mexico, ololiuqui, a derivative of morning glory seeds, and
Salvia divinorum. Other essays look at the Native American Church, whose
rite of religious use of ceremonial peyote has been upheld by the
Supreme Court, and ayahuasca, a vine that contains DMT, which has been
used in Amazonia to induce religious visions for thousands of years.
Initially Hofmann considered LSD to be his wonder child. He deeply
laments it becoming a problem child with its rise as a drug of abuse in
the early 1960s that put an immediate surcease into any further research
into its psychotherapeutic applications, which until that time had been
quite substantial. The pendulum is swinging arduously back the other way
and there is again halting but significant steps being made in this
direction. They face constant official resistance. Rick Doblin, founder
and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic
Studies, glimpses into the slight thawing of policy respecting the
potential of psychedelics in psychotherapy and examines the issue of
medical marijuana. Several other essays also examine this latter topic.
This book, like the drug-policy reform movement itself, is in
great bulk on the defensive. The many negative arguments alone
against prohibition as ineffective and counterproductive ought to
prevail and prompt radical change. Cigarettes kill 430,000 Americans
every year, alcohol tens of thousands more, but they are sanctioned,
even heavily advertised. Marijuana, which has never been blamed for a
single fatality, is outlawed. Many so-called drug crimes are actually
drug law-related. Drug prohibition artificially and exponentially
inflates the price of drugs. It is the mountains of money to be reaped
dealing drugs, the battles for turf and the like, rather than drugs and
the states of mind they engender, that prompt so much violence. It is
also this that encourages a never-ending flow of dealers willing to risk
their huge profits. Several writers note that the illicit drug trade is
part and parcel of every modern day military enterprise, including those
of the United States. Legalization and medicalization would by itself
reduce armed insurgencies around the world. If drugs were legalized, no
individuals would sell them for there would be no profit. Users wouldn't
have to commit crimes to obtain them.
This book contains too many reasons for drug legalization and
medicalization to list. It has reminded me of the almost lost knowledge of
that split second in eternity, all those years ago, that momentarily renewed my hope
that life could be something other than just the war torn
battlefield it is. |
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