http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/science/12psychedelics.html?ref=todayspaper
If you don't want to read it, a pertinent quote from the early paragraphs of this story, which appeared on the front page:
"Today, more than a year later, Dr. Martin credits that six-hour experience [with psilocybin*] with helping him overcome his depression and profoundly transforming his relationships with his daughter and friends. He ranks it among the most meaningful events of his life, which makes him a fairly typical member of a growing club of experimental subjects."
*Psilocybin is a four-substituted indole (the only 4-substituted indole in nature, I might add); a tryptamine, it gets dephosphorolated in the gut to become the hallucinogen psilocin, the principle alkaloid in psychedelic mushrooms of the psilocybe family.
Bear in mind, folks, that these favorable comments come from the New York Times, a fabulously fascist US daily, by Chomsky's very convincing arguments, anyhow. Now, if these weasels have clambered on board the mushroom float, isn't it time to have a look into the matter yourselves?
Terence McKenna, a writer, ethnobotanist, shaman and public speaker I have great respect for, said the psychedelic experience is taboo because, like sex, it reveals something about where we come from. Indeed, with the exception of sex, no subject has been more flatly closed to public discourse than the psychedelic experience. Regarding where we come from, McKenna argues that, being commonly found on ungulate-inhabited grasslands - i.e. the cattle populated African landscape our ancestors spent the first million years - psilocybin mushrooms would surely have been tested for dietary applications by early man. After all, if your bountiful canopies have receded, the food source decimated, anything resembling food in the new habitat would have been systematically tested. And anything carrying the clout of a tryptamine revelation is not going to go unnoticed.!
It is undeniable, and I've seen it again here this very week, that these mushrooms fruit from the dung of grassland cattle. Prior to agriculture, early nomadic hominids would have followed the cattle herds as a food source for the meat and milk: Is it even worth arguing that these peoples never attempted to inculcate this new fruit, the coprophitic mushroom, into their diet, strewn in the wake of the herd as it was? Still not convinced? McKenna also noted that he had observed even modern era monkeys in arboreal environments to leave the safety of their trees for the ground, only to gather certain species of mushroom! They never seemed to leave the trees for any other purpose. (I've forgotten the species of ape, now, I'll try to look it up.) Now, as a monkey, you seemingly have everything you need in the trees - you are not likely to risk predation by jungle cat or snake for a bit of fungus, unless its importance to one's diet is undeniable. Are we to doubt that early man was less vigilant, less curious than monkeys who haven't even made it down from their branches yet? I think not.
The gentleman mentioned in the Times article, however, underwent a very different experience than mere increased visual acuity, enlivened colour perception, or somatic arousal - all of which would have been important to a hunting, gathering species, incidentally. No, this guy underwent the full-blown Mushroom frenzy. And that is what society ought to confront: In high enough doses, psilocybin brings about all kinds of interesting pertubations in consciousness: glossolalia (speaking in tongues), which arguably led to rudimentary language in our ancestors; but, more importantly, contact with what McKenna terms the Other. I'm not sure what my term would be. Christ has been popular for the last two thousand years; God for even longer; people talk about UFOs these days. McKenna himself suggested that the Mushroom was so Other that it amounted to the extraterrestrial contact many have been waiting for!
Here is an excerpt from McKenna's book True Hallucinations, in which he recounts the message conveyed to him via psilocybin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkqO9sdH6AQ
And here, a TED lecture from the mycologist Paul Stamets on other incredible properties of fungi. Worried about oil spills? Not anymore...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI5frPV58tY
Doubtless, you're thinking something along the lines of, "Okay, you can write quite persuasively, but ultimately we're talking about getting stoned here, right? What a waste of time!" Fair point, I suppose. But I put it to you that humankind uses and abuses every sensation under the Sun to positive effect and negative - why should chemical experiences be any different? That human history can be described in cultures' various and varying relationships to drugs over time is obvious, from the Soma rituals of the vedas, to the Eleusinian mysteries of the Greeks, to the bullying Brits' opium wars to control the east, to the methamphetamine markets of today's underground, culture is driven by it's approach to chemicals. Consider the age we live in now: Nearly every chemical experience is banned (and propagandised against), first of all. Well, does that seem particularly civilised? That a person could be prosecuted for eating a fucking mushroom!! No, clearly we are dealing with a deliberate repression, the reasons for which lie partly in the taboo outlined above, and partly, I contest, because once you've been through the total perspective vortex, the sitting on a till of some supermarket that you might help prop up this outmoded, malingering age of vampiric capitalism is an act surely to be left way behind in your slipstream.
Number 2: All tryptamine hallucinogens are banned, and placed in a control group comprising of dangerous addicting chemicals without medical value. Well, once again, this is proven pure rot: The linked Times article is yet another piece on psilocybin's interesting ability to give people perspective and comfort during terminal illness. Furthermore, have you ever heard of somebody undergoing mushroom withdrawal? LSD, the semi-synthetic tryptamine and structural cousin of serotonin, was shown in pre-ban trials to be curing chronic alcoholism - curing - after a single 500 gamma dose in 50% of test subjects. One dose! Does that not smack of medical value?
Now look at drug use in our culture: You are not only able but encouraged to work your life out in order to purchase, amongst things of total inconsequence, vast quantities of alcohol, tobacco and caffeine. Is it not strange to think that every work contract in the western hemisphere provides for the periodic pause in labour where one engages in the self-administering of an addicting, stimulant drug? The coffee break! I wonder if I will ever see a cannabis break signed in to law..? (Well, no, because cannabis is like a natural, feminising vaccine against the spirit-crushing game show that is a male-run, corporate world: Hardly a perpetuating strategy for a dominator culture.) Seriously, though: Why are we encouraged to indulge in a certain drug at work, and certain drugs outside of work? Well, obviously, caffeine, the stimulant, aids you in maintaining pace at boring, repetitive and trivial tasks for hours on end, day after day. And alcohol, of course, enables us to blot out the vast emptiness accrued from years spent wondering just why we continue to turn up to the same idiot workplace under the same idiot boss. Alcohol, as well as caffeine, also gives us the excuse we (nowadays) need to engage in social intercourse - Would you like to go out for a drink? Can you imagine just how lost young Britons would be of a weekend if they weren't able to get drunk and screw and forget it all again before Monday rolls back up, at which point stories of tremendously painful mornings after accompanied by backslappings can be traded? People wouldn't be able to communicate without their drugs of choice. And make no mistake, we are talking about drugs here: It is not a 'hangover', it is a period ofwithdrawal. You couldn't 'do' with a coffee, you are suffering a xanthine craving.
Terence McKenna very presciently observed that 'culture is not your friend'. And I think it's quite easy to prove this, without straying into the domains of American healthcare, bank bail-outs, the Caucasian war machine, or even the 'War On (some non-prescription) Drugs': For example, did you know that cigarettes are radioactive? I've managed to quit, but the last of the radioactivity won't be out of my system for another 21.4 years or something. Now, how easy is it to pick up a pack of cigarettes in England? Why are these downright evil things legal? Where is the medical value in putting into your body a radioactive drug more addictive than heroin? Ohhh! But it's part of our culture yeah! It's simply what one does yeah: There are certain sanctioned - poisonous - drugs, your use of which will not incur ridicule or rebuke from your peers, but will perversely raise you higher in their esteem (much higher, in the case of your social superiors); but you should not put naturally occurring, mystical, soul warming compounds into you, because we don't have the language or the maturity to deal with them. And frankly, that kind of behavior will do nothing less than bring about the utter dissolution of society as we know it, just as giving women the vote did - or, but, hang on...
The question is this: How conscious are you willing to be? Are you actually willing to go through life without ever entering into the presence of the psychedelic tremendum just because some gangsters tell you that it's evil and demonic and against everything we stand for? Well, what do we stand for? We are killing Mexico, for example: Because people can't grow marijuana on their windowsill without prosecution, massive criminal syndicates control an underground market for it instead. People are still going to get high, they just have to deal with psychopathic street crooks to get there. Two generations of feral children in Ciudad Juarez is still not enough to convince people to rally in support of these poor folks, who have no other means of employment, their cities having been gutted by the cartels (see Charles Bowden's work on this). In my opinion, life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience would be analogous to going through life permanently pre-pubescent, never having experienced sex. A perpetual caterpillar. Are you actually willing to let some coffee-drinking politician tell you that cannabis, for example, is a dangerous, addicting drug with 'no accepted medical value', in spite of wide anecdotal evidence of cannabis' efficacy in combating multiple sclerosis, glaucoma, nausea, rheumatism, chemotherapy side-effects, and even anger to name a few. What proportion of Saturday night town centre fights can be traced to cannabis intoxication, I wonder, in comparison to straight drunkenness? And yet, it's the same cannabis story in the 'paper every time, we've all seen it: Unequivocally, cannabis use results in schizophrenia. (In spite of no increase in schizophrenia cases over the last few decades despite a massive non-corresponding increase in cannabis' popularity.) I read the other day that cannabis actually alleviates schizophrenic symptoms, which makes sense - that's probably how the government linked this fabulous plant to the condition in the first place. Incidentally, you'll often hear Walters, the cuntish American drug 'czar' (what a socialist nightmare this truly is!) say that increasing numbers of young people are entering rehabilitation clinics for cannabis 'addiction' (!!) every year. In reality, when 754,600 or so Americans can be arrested for possession of a plant (for the year 2008) and then be offered the options of jail or clinic, the likelihood that all of the clinic's occupants actually have any interest in 'rehab' is pretty slim-jim. (89% of total arrests for cannabis were for simple possession in 2008 - not really going after the dealers, are they? One person every 41 seconds is arrested for cannabis in the USA. They're converting the next generation into a victimless-criminal underclass.) To quote an anonymous blogger on this topic: "America, without a doubt, is the war whore the Bible warns mankind to watch out for." The war is on choice, it is on Mind itself, it is a war on people, not drugs. If it were, they'd be locking up CEOs from every major pharmaceutical company on the planet.
Are you to settle for your own choices, or those of power grubbing barbarian liars? We are, after all, led by the least among us, and they do lie to you: Surely, you've picked that up by now. Well, theywere lying, at least. Maybe the New York Times is showing that cracks in the misery are beginning to appear.. If consciousness does not loom large in the immediate human future, what kind of future will this be? What kind of a mushroom is fruiting at the end of time - is it a hydrobomb cloud, or the beginnings of a doubt, that perhaps there really is such a thing as a 'magic' mushroom?
This picture dates to 5,000 B.C. and comes from the Tassili plateau in modern day Algeria; it's existence argues fairly convincingly that not only have we known about the otherness of the Mushroom for aeons, we used to worship that otherness, too:
