SCHOLAR ISLAND
Drugs/Inebriantia
"Chemical roulette is a dangerous game with many losers."
William Emboden
DRUGS.
Whatever your personal reaction to these five ciphers, they add up to an awfully emotive word. A loaded word. For drugs have become a cultural obsession. They have almost ousted the Commie Spectre as Number One bugaboo of our time. And in the last decade or so there's been so much hysteria both for and against (mostly against) drug use and abuse that among all the minds blown or unblown it's just about impossible to find one that is open! On our left there's cheery Tim Leary and his fellows telling us that 'The only Hope is Dope!' And on our right is a solid body of concerned citizens warning us that the only trip we're likely to get from a drug is a fast ride to the morgue....Unfortunately for their argument, these self-same well-meaning citizens tend to be of the coffee-drinking, chain-smoking, whisky-swigging, aspirin-popping variety. Well, any kid-even their own-can see through that one! What these responsible citizens just don't realize is that some drugs are less dangerous than others:
Smoking marijuana, for instance, is probably better for your health than tobacco smoking.
Taking LSD is undoubtedly preferable to downing addictive barbiturates such as our doctors daily prescribe for thousands.
And injecting heroin, while not a pleasant sight to watch, is probably marginally safer than falling asleep across a busy rail-way track. ..."
-Michel Parry (introduction to Strange Ecstasies: A mind-blowing fantasy anthology of unearthly drug stories)
Drink has drained more blood....
Plunged more people into bankruptcy.....
Slain more children....
Dethroned more reason,
Wrecked more manhood,
Dishonored more womanhood.....
Blasted more lives.....
Driven more to suicide, and
Dug more graves than any other poisoned
scourge
that ever swept the death-dealing waves
across the world."
-Evangeline Cory Booth Salvation Army Commander
"Because drinking is legal for adults, safe in moderation, the rightful font of epicurean reveries and the foundation of a multibillion-dollar industry with lobbyists galore, it gets something of a pass. many of like it-no, love it-too much to survey the damage it can do, look at ways in which our society could work to curb that and acknowledge that the effort isn't so very vigorous."
-Frank Bruni article: "Drinking and Drugging " The New York Times, Feb 19,2012
Alcohol Abuse in College
To The Editor
RE "At Yale, Sharper Look at Treatment of Women" (news article, April 8):
The situation reported in your article about treatment of women at Yale is deplorable, but sadly not unusual thanks to excessive drinking in college students. A study by the National Center on addiction and substance Abuse at Columbia University, "Wasting the Best and the Brightest." found that on college campuses each year, as a result of alcohol abuse about 100,000 women are sexually assaulted, 700,000 students are injured and 2,000 students die from violence and accidents.
If Yale and other colleges are serious about protecting female students from verbal and physical abuse, they had better deal with student alcohol abuse as well any culture of misogyny.
Joseph A. Califano Jr.
Westport Conn, April 8, 2011
The writer is the founder and chairman of the National Center on Addiction, and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, and a former secretary of health, education and Welfare
P.S. Mr. Califano failed to mention the spread of STD and unwanted pregnancy......and yet our government is still after marijuana users.....and beer is served on tap on campus
"I've never met a stupid alcoholic," my father used to say, and I think there's something to that. My wife, a former Al-Anon junkie who still goes to meetings whenever she's seriously stressed out, likes to tell people the standard line about the difference between the two groups. "Stand in the hall between two meetings and listen. From inside the A.A. room all you hear is laughter; from inside the Al-Anon room all you hear is tears."
-Clancy Martin "The Drunk's Club: A.A., the cult that cures" Harper's Magazine/January 2011
"Bill W. believed that there were three possible solutions for the alcoholic who was not helped by A.A. alone: 1. a mystical experience 2. LSD, or 3. niacin, or vitamin B-3 treatment for alcoholism. Nevertheless, no one ever talks about drugs in meetings except as part of the problem. I've often heard people brag about not taking pain medication after a surgery. "I knew if I took one Vicodin, two weeks later I'd be back at the bar." In the two hundred or so A.A. meetings I have attended in the past year and a half, I have never once heard another alcoholic mention her or his psychiatrist."
-Clancy Martin ibid
"Although drugs are "immoral" and must be kept from the young, thousands of schools pressure parents to give the drug Ritalin to any lively child who may, sensibly, show signs of boredom in his classroom. Ritalin renders the child docile if not comatose. Side effects? "Stunted growth, facial tics, agitation and aggression, insomnia, appetite loss, headaches, stomach pains and seizures." Marijuana would be far less harmful."
-Gore Vidal
"Every alcoholic is a sugar junkie."*
*the real gateway drug ed.
-Clancy Martin
"The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life
to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober."
-Eugene O'Neill
The Iceman Cometh
"Well, my self-consciousness was such that I simply had to take that drink. So I took it, and another, and then, lo, the miracle! That strange barrier that had existed between me and all men and women seemed to instantly go down. I felt that I belonged where I was, belong to life; I belonged to the universe, I was part of things at last. Oh, the magic of those first three or four drinks! I became the life of the party. I actually could please the guests; I could talk freely, volubly: I could talk well."
-Bill W
"It is my conviction now that alcohol played a perverse trick on me when we said farewell to one another: although, as everyone should know, it is a major depressant, it had never truly depressed me during my drinking career, acting instead as a shield against anxiety. Suddenly vanished, the great ally which for so long had kept my demons at bay was no longer there to prevent those demons from beginning, to swarm through the subconscious, and I was emotionally naked, vulnerable as I had never been before. Doubtless depression had hovered near me for years, waiting to swoop down. Now I was in the first stage-premonitory, like a flicker of sheet lightning barely perceived-of depression's black tempest."
-Will Styron Darkness Visible
"The mischief done by bad ideologies is more pernicious....than done by narcotic drugs."
-Ludwig von Mises
"We are presently, and I believe unfairly, constrained from directly promoting cigarettes to the youth market. If our company is to survive and prosper over the long term, we must get our share."
-Claude E. Teague (former assistant director of research and development at R.J. Reynolds
"Nothing can be said in favor of tobacco."*
-Ashley Montagu
* My dear departed Mother claimed it kept marriages together Ed.
"Aristotle and the philosophers notwithstanding, there's not to equal tobacco. It's an honest man's habit and anyone who can live with it doesn't deserve to live at all."
-Moliere
"Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism."
-Carl Jung
"Meanwhile pharmacology, biochemistry and neurology are on the march, and we can be quite certain that, in the course of the next few years, new and better chemical methods for increasing suggestibility and lowering psychological resistance will be discovered. Like everything else, these discoveries may be used well or badly. They may help the psychiatrist in his battle against mental illness, or they may help the dictator in his battle against freedom. More probably (since science is divinely impartial) they will both enslave and make free, heal and at the same time destroy."
-Aldous Huxley (1958)
Brave New World Revisited
"Why do we want drugs? Basically, for the same reasons we want other goods. We want drugs to relieve our pains, cure our diseases, enhance our endurance, change our moods, put us to sleep, or simply make us feel better…."
Thomas Szasz
Our Right to Drugs
"Life as we find it is too hard for us, it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies....There are perhaps three of these means powerful diversions of interest, which lead us to care little about our misery; substitute gratifications, which lessen it, and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it. Something of this kind is indispensable."
-Sigmund Freud
"To boost the image of the products they sell, drug representatives are typically vivacious and cute and female. "There's a saying that you'll never meet an ugly drug rep" said Dr. Thomas Carli, of the University of Michigan. Many give off a kind of flow, as if they had just emerged from a spa or salon. And they are always, hands down, the best-dressed people in the hospital." writes Carl Elliott, longtime observer of the drug industry. A common practice is to recruit future drug salespeople from the cheerleading ranks of major colleges. "Pharma Babes," they're called by doctors behind closed doors. T. Lynn Williamson, a "cheering advisor" at the University of Kentucky, says he regularly gets calls from recruiters looking to hire women from his ranks as drug sales representatives. "The watch to see who's graduating. They don't ask what the major is, "Williamson says. When I was working in homeless shelters, I was shocked that these bubbly and perky drug reps (all women) would brave our gothic, cavernous, and squalid facilities for even two minutes with the psychiatrist who prescribed the drugs. My clients-most of whom hadn't been in such proximity to an attractive woman for decades-would eye them with a combination of caution, fear, and lust."
Charles Barber
Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating A Nation
"Bright, energetic, not too serious, not too thoughtful: these qualities are valued in our era of high technology capitalism and the SSRIs seem capable of producing more people in this mold."
-Alice Bullard
"The antidepressant Catch-22-patients who are needlessly dependent on antidepressants and do not realize it-is a hidden national health crisis."
-Joseph Glenmullen, Harvard Department of Psychiatry
"Americans have swallowed it all-literally. To say that we are the most medicated nation on earth is an absurd understatement. To say that we are the most psychiatrically medicated nation on earth is a prodigiously absurd understatement. Americans have the most luridly expensive urine in the world."
Charles Barber
Comfortably Numb
Legal Drugs Kill Far More Than Illegal, Florida Says by Damien Cave New York Times Saturday, June 14, 2008
"An analysis of autopsies in 2007 released this week by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined.".........
Article: 'So Young and So Many Pills: More than 25% of Kids and Teens in the U.S. Take Prescriptions on a Regular Basis" Wall Street Journal Tuesday, December 28, 2010
"Intoxication is not unnatural or deviant. Absolute sobriety is not a natural or primary human state. "
Richard Davenport-Hines
The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics:1500-2000
"No Civilization has found life tolerable without….the things that provide at least some brief escape from reality."
Will Durant
Life of Greece
"And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always "Soma" to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always "Soma" to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now you can swallow two or three half-gram tablets, and there you are."
Aldous Huxley
Brave New World
"Escape into altered states of consciousness, into sedation or excitement, has been a constant ambition everywhere, in all centuries. There has been no civilization which has not tried to escape from normality with the help of alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee and plants of all sorts. The Aztecs, who had a particularly gloomy view of life,, used to have 400 gods of drink and drunkenness, called the 400 Rabbits, to help them escape. Where to? When they were sober, they freely discussed their hallucinations. They saw themselves being devoured by wild beasts, taken prisoner in battle, convicted of adultery and undergoing the penalty, which was having their heads crushed, or they imagined they were rich and masters of many slaves. Drink thus did not liberate them from habitual preoccupations, but rather allowed them to contemplate them like a horror or fantasy film watched over and over again. The cacti and mushrooms they ate gave them 'horrifying or comic visions' for several days, but they persisted; 'It filled them with courage to fear neither battle nor thirst nor hunger, and they say it preserves them from all danger.' Strongly conscious of the risks of intoxicants, they punished a drunkard, for the first offence, with the shaving of his head in public, to the jeers of the crowd; and if he persisted, he was sentenced to death; officials and priests were executed on the first offence, while nobles had the privilege of being strangled in private. But when really serious trouble came, nothing could stop them, 25 million of them, from drinking and drugging themselves to death, until there were only one million left. This was the greatest mass suicide in history, doubtless hastened by the import of European diseases, but it was the loss of morale caused by the Spanish conquest, which declared their whole civilization bankrupt-rather as Communism has been declared bankrupt-that was devastating."
Theorodre Zeldin
An Intimate History of Humanity
"Drug use did not always carry the stigma it does now. Up until the passage of the Harrison Act of 1914, narcotics addiction was pretty much the province of rural, middle-aged, middle-class white women who took legal opium prescribed by well-intentioned doctors."
Georgette Bennet
Crime Warps
"I possess a secret remedy which I call Laudanum and which is superior to all other heroic remedies."
Paracelsus
(Father of modern medicine)
"The Opium Department of the Government of India, despite its unequivocal name, was not really Indian at all. It was run by Englishmen on behalf of their empire, and was in the highly lucrative business of growing poppies and producing the drug in India, where it was illegal, and then selling it to the people of China, millions of whom became hopelessly addicted. The Chinese government tried to block its ports from this insidious trade. it was for moments like this that England had a navy-ships of the fleet sailed out and bombarded forts along the Chinese coast. Thereafter England could export addiction and crime to China with impunity. Since history is written by the winners, this triumph of thuggery is known simply as the Opium War, which could leave the impression that England was trying to stop the Chinese from selling opium to them. It is as if Columbians had destroyed all U.S. border facilities and thereafter, without restriction, hooked the American population on cocaine. This was, for wellborn Englishmen, the nineteenth-century version of the global economy."
-David Lebedoff
The Same Man: George Orwell & Evelyn Waugh in Love and War
-
"…..here I cannot break out in praise of the great God, the giver of all good things, who hath granted to the human race, as a comfort in their afflictions, no medicine of the value of opium, either in regard to the number of diseases it can control, or its efficiency in extirpating them…..Medicine would be a cripple without it; and whoever understands it well, will do more with it alone than he could hope to do from any single medicine."
Dr. Thomas Sydenham 1660 (father of clinical medicine)
"The habit is gaining fearful ground among our professional men, the operatives in our mills, our weary serving women, our fagged clerks, our former liquor drunkards, our very day laborers, who a generation ago took gin. All our classes from the highest to the lowest are yearly increasing their consumption of the drug."
Fitzhugh Ludlow
"Harpers" Magazine 1867
"No stars were visible in the long night of the opium habit."
William Cobbe
"Today we associate narcotics with crime, but they didn't always go hand in hand. Cobbe observed that the classes that furnished the largest number of addicts "were trained from childhood to abhor crime" and rarely broke the law to procure their drugs." In Britain, because an opium habit was inexpensive and easy to maintain, crime was seldom an issue."
Barbara Hodgson
In the Arms of Morpheus: The Tragic History of Laudanum, Morphine, and Patent Medicines
"Opium, horrible and blessed connection of pleasure, destroys our organs and senses. The healthy appetite and the bourgeois sensation of feeling good and tired have to be sacrificed. The eyes water, the ears ring. Objects, printed words, people look faded. Sounds and words wander randomly in the tiny mechanisms of the organs of hearing".
Gezu Csath
"God seems to help a man in getting out of every difficulty but opium. There you have to claw your way out over red-hot coals on your hands and knees, and drag yourself by main strength through the burning dungeon-bars."
anonymous addict
"I remember someone saying if you try heroin once you'll become hooked. Of course I laughed and scoffed at the idea but I now believe this to be true."
Kurt Cobain
"Most junkies become idiots. That's really what finally turned me around. We've only got one subject in mind, which is the dope. Can't I be a little more smart about it? What am I doing hanging around with these dregs? They're just boring people. Worse. a lot of these are very bright people, and we all kind of know that we've been hood-winked, but then.....why not? Everybody else is hoodwinked by something, and at least we know we're fooling ourselves. No one's a hero just for taking dope. You might be a hero for getting off it. I loved the shit. But enough was enough. Also, it narrowed one's horizons, and eventually all you know are junkies. I had to move to broader horizons. You only know all this, of course, once you've gotten out of there. That's what that stuff does. It's the most seductive bitch in the world."
-Keith Richards
LIFE
"We are making these drugs for Satan-Americans and Jews. If we cannot kill them with guns, we will kill them with drugs."
-Fatwa of Hezbollah
"It seems clear to me heroin is the number one asset of Osama bin Laden. There is a need to update our view of how terrorism is financed. And the view of Osama bin Laden relying on Wahhabi donations from abroad is outdated. And the view of him as one of the world's largest heroin dealers is the more accurate, up-to-date view."
-Mark Steven Kirk (R-Il)
"Narcotics in Hollywood is a complete story unto itself, and it finds parallels with the world of stage and music, all of which received unprecedented attention from magazines and newspapers; reading them now, one gets the impression that the world had succumbed to an epidemic of addiction.
In spite of, or perhaps because of the evidence of misery, corruption and waste, our fascination with opium persists to this day. Stereotype-shattering contradictions such as the ease with which strict Victorians accommodated drug habitués throw into question our notions of pre-twentieth century lives, habits and values and in doing so, help clarify our present-day attitudes towards drugs and drug addiction. And though we may try to shake off the myth of the Morphean slumber and the promise of profound dreams and boundless creativity, it's doubtful that opium will ever let us."
Barbara Hodgson
In the Arms of Morpheus
( A description of "Big Eared Du" in 1930...China's top 'narc' and top dealer)
"I was struck and fascinated by every detail of the man's person: a gaunt, shoulder less figure with long aimlessly swinging arms, clad in a soiled, spotted blue cotton gown; flat feet shod in untidy old slippers; a long, egg-shaped head, short-cropped hair, receding forehead, no chin, huge, Baltic ears, cold cruel lips uncovering big, yellow decayed teeth, the sickly complexion of an addict....He came shuffling along, listlessly turning his head right and left to look whether anyone was following him...I had never seen such eyes before. Eyes so dark that they seemed to have no pupils, blurred and dull-dead, impenetrable eyes....I shuddered. Childhood memories flashed back; Polish peasants had told us that witches could be recognized by their abysmal eyes which did not reflect your picture....he gave me his limp, cold hand. A huge, bony hand with two-inches long, brown, opium-stained claws..."
Ilona Ralf Sues
Shark's Fin and Millet
"Popular belief labels all addicts as desperate characters but they are not. A minority maintain their habit at a steady dose rate, just keeping themselves above the threshold of withdrawal. They may live conventional lives, even hold down responsible jobs without detection by even close friends and family. George Crabbe was an example of such a ‘secret’ addict. Another was William Wilberforce: a noted evangelist, statesman, philanthropist and reformer, he succeeded against considerable vested interests in abolishing the slave trade and yet he was in thrall to opium, the one slavery he could no nothing to end."
Martin Booth
Opium a History
"Dope, Oliver said to himself, was the worst possible thing. Dope was the very denial of courage, of determination to face the facts, a betrayal of responsibility. Dope was a cowardly means of escape, of hiding one's head like an ostrich, and choosing not to know, or to tact or to think. And yet in close association with that miserable dope, appeared this strange serenity, this cool challenge to the world, this smiling and beautiful death in life, or life in accepted death."
-George Santayana
Description of man: dependence, longing for independence, need.
-Blaise Pascal
"It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts."
Shirley Chisholm
"There’s nothing classy or poetic about opium. It has the same effect as morphine and heroin. You get relaxed and energetic at the same time. Problems become unimportant. You feel sleepy, but if you go to bed you lie awake. You itch all over. You get constipated. You get hungry, especially for sweets. You get patient and understanding. You get nice…..an opium high can be described in one word: comfortable. It’s weird that people get to where they’ll give up their souls for stuff that just makes them comfortable."
Eric Detzer
Monkey on my Back
"To fully explain the politics of drugs would require a separate book, but it must be understood that drugs-particularly opium-based drugs such as heroin-have been the basis for both social control and wealth for centuries. In more recent times, Samuel Russell, second cousin of General William Huntington Russell, founder of the Skull and Bones Order at Yale, founded Russell and Company in 1823 with the intent of smuggling opium to China. He later acquired Perkins and Company, another opium smuggling operation controlled by some of Boston's finest blue blood families. These families were enriched first by the slave trade, and then by opium smuggling in the nineteenth century. Other Boston families integrated Russell's firm into an opium syndicate that include the Cabots, Lowells, Higginsons, Forbeses, Cushings, and Sturgises. An early investor was Joseph Coolidge whose grandson, Archibald, was founder of the Council on Foreign Relations."
-Jim Marrs
The Terror Conspiracy
"According to one analysis, retail sales of illegal heroin, cocaine, and marijuana generate close to $27 billion, with an unreported illegal income of about $21 billion. Illicit sales of all drugs have been estimated as high as $75 billion. Any way you cut it, that’s big business. Three groups have a vested interest in keeping it that way: Organized crime, terrorists, and drug enforcement agencies all make their living off drugs…."
Georgette Bennet
Crime Warps
Book: "Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America" by Ted Galen Carpenter
"Between 1977 and 1992 a conservative cultural revolution occurred in America. It was called the drug war."
John Walters (deputy drug Czar from 1989-1993)
Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population, vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on. In 1970, I wrote in the New York Times, of all uncongenial places,
"It is possible to stop most drug addiction in the United States within a very short time. Simply make all drugs available and sell them at cost. Label each drug with a precise description of what effect-good or bad-the drug will have on the taker. This will require heroic honesty. Don't say that marijuana is addictive or dangerous when it is neither, as millions of people know-unlike "speed," which kills most unpleasantly, or heroin, which can be addictive and difficult to kick. along with exhortation and warning, it might be good for our citizens to recall (or learn for the first time) that the United States was the creation of men who believed that each person has the right to do what he wants with his own life as long as he does not interfere with his neighbors' pursuit of happiness (that his neighbor's idea of happiness is persecuting others does confuse matters a bit)"
-Gore Vidal
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
Amendment IV
1791
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
"In an article titled 'White House Stop-Drug-Use Program: Why the Emphasis is on Marijuana,' the magazine Government Executive profiled (Carlton) Turner and summarized his views this way: Marijuana, like 'hard-rock music, torn jeans, and sexual promiscuity.' was a pillar of 'the counter culture." Turner was quoted: "Point is, illegal, i.e. non-prescription, use of drugs....is not only a perverse, pervasive plague, though it is that. But drug use also is a behavioral pattern that has sort of tagged along during the present young-adult generation's involvement in anti-military, anti-nuclear power, anti-big business, anti-authority demonstrations; of people from a myriad of different racial, religious or otherwise persuasions demanding rights or entitlements politically while refusing to accept corollary civic responsibility."
(George Bush's Drug Czar)
"The drug war has also taken a toll on an institution that's even more noble and venerated than our wallet. Drug control zealotry has led to what constitutional scholar Roger Pilon calls "the drug exception to the Bill of Rights."
I. Freedom of religion-except for religions involving peyote.
II Right to keep and bear arms-except when you point one at ninja-dressed members of a SWAT team that breaks through the wrong door at 3 a.m.
III Quartering soldiers in our houses-to be fair I haven't noticed any soldiers actually in the house, but some National Guard helicopters have been hovering over my backyard marijuana patch.
IV No unreasonable searches and seizures-except mandatory random piss tests
V. No self-incrimination-except that urine in the bottle.
VI Right to counsel-except to those caught selling 'shrooms at rock concerts."
IX The enumeration of certain rights shall not be construed to deny others-except when it looks like you might have drugs in your car
X The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution- are reserved to the DEA.
-P.J.O'Rourke
The CEO of the Sofa
.
To The Editor: New York Times May 29,2008
A May 24 letter questions whether President John F. Kennedy had an intravenous injection of amphetamine just before meeting Nikita S. Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961. We know from Robert Dallek's biography, "An Unfinished Life," that Kennedy had an injection of amphetamine 45 minutes before the meeting.
My book "In Sickness and in Power." published this week, states that Max Jacobson (Dr. Feelgood) was asked by Kennedy before a recital in the White House by Pablo Casals in November 1961 for a repeat of the Vienna treatment. This implies that the Vienna injection was different from the normal and was administered intravenously.
Also, Dr. Hans Kraus, who did so much to improve Kennedy's health from October 1961 to the missile crisis in 1962, was appalled that Kennedy was still having even a few amphetamine injections and told him in December 1962: "If I ever heard he too another shot, I'd make sure it was known. No president with his finger on the red button has any business taking stuff like that."
David Owen London, May 25, 2008 The writer is a former British foreign secretary
"The official line of the U.S. government one most recently voiced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is that drug consumers in the United States are responsible for drug murders in Mexico. Only someone who is drugged could believe this claim. The sole source of the enormous amount of money in the drug business is the U.S. prohibition of drug use by its citizens. Since President Richard Nixon proclaimed the War on drugs 40 years ago, there have been twos notable accomplishments: Drugs are cheaper than ever, and they are of much higher quality."
-Charles Bowden "The War Next Door" High County News Mar 1, 2010
One of the UK's leading doctors, Sir Ian Gilmore, said today the government should consider decriminalizing drugs because the blanket ban has failed to cut crime or improve health....
(former president of the Royal College of Physicians says blanket ban has failed to cut crime or improve health) Aug 17, 2010
"I think that most small amounts of marijuana have been decriminalized in some places, and should be."
-Bill Clinton
"Penalties against a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use. The National Commission on Marijuana....concluded years ago that marijuana use should be decriminalized, and I believe it is time to implement those basic recommendations."-Jimmy Carter
"I believe the least controversial approach is decriminalization (of marijuana), because it's unjust to see someone, because of one decision one night in their youth, carry the stigma-to be barred from studying medicine, law, architecture or other fields where a criminal record could present an obstacle."
-Joe Clark (former Prime Minister, current head of Tory Party, Canada)
"Congress should definitely consider decriminalizing possession of marijuana....We should concentrate on prosecuting the rapists and burglars who are a menace to society."
-Dan Quayle
"Use of illicit drugs is the currently accepted stigma in American society. It is no longer considered socially proper or politically correct to hate one's neighbor for their skin color or their sexual preferences (not to say it doesn't happen), but it is perfectly okay to advocate harsh jail sentences or behavior modification for those who have an innate "drive to transcend consensus reality," as Dr. Andrew Weil phrased it."
-Preston Peet
"The War on Drugs is about a lot of things, but only rarely is it really about drugs."
Dan Baum
Smoke and Mirrors
"I firmly believe that the war on drugs is doing more harm to our society than drug abuse itself."
George Soros Washington Post
"I want all drugs legalized....I say legalize drugs because I want to see less drug abuse, not more. And I say legalize drugs because I want to see the criminals put out of business."
-Edward Ellison, former head of Scotland Yard's anti-drug unit,
"The conceptual base of current programs is flawed....We need at least to consider and examine forms of controlled legalization of drugs."
-George Schultz (Secretary of State under Reagan)
"When we finally decide that drug prohibition has been not more successful than alcohol prohibition, the drug dealers will disappear."
Ron Paul (Republican Congressman Texas)
"Make drugs a controlled substance like alcohol. Legalize it, control it, regulate it, tax it. If you legalize it, we might actually have a healthier society."
-Gary Johnson (former Governor of New Mexico)
"There are a whole range of people who buy drugs, not just cannabis, but even cocaine and ecstasy, who buy those drugs with money they have earned legitimately. They use a small amount of these drugs, a lot of them just at weekends. It has no adverse effect on the rest of the people they are with, either in terms of people they socialize with, or within the wider community, and they go back to work on Monday morning and are unaffected for the rest of the week. In terms of my priorities as an operational police officer, they are low down."
-Brian Paddick, Metropolitan Police Commander, London, Britain
"I want all drugs legalized"
-Edward Ellison, (former head of Scotland Yard's anti-drug unit)
"The drug war is just a U.S. excuse to control our countries."
-Evo Morales (Bolivian Presidential Candidate Aug,2002)
"My opinion is that in Mexico it is not a crime to have a small dose of drugs in one's pocket."
Vicente Fox, President of Mexico
"Why don't we just legalize the drugs?"
-Jorge Battle, President of Uruguay
Book:" Drug War Heresies" by Robert J. MacCoun & Peter Reuter
"Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel."
H.L. Mencken
"The answer is that drug testing and other invasions of employee dignity and privacy are based upon social class and power, not safety. Drug tests are first and foremost a humiliation of "lower" people by "higher" people who hold power over their "inferiors." At a recent Supreme Court argument, Chief Justice William Rehnquist openly scoffed at the claim of an Oregon schoolboy that compulsory urine testing was an invasion of privacy. If the Chief Justice were forced to urinate into a receptacle in order to prove his competence to serve, we would all understand that dignity is profoundly compromised by such procedures. In a democracy, why should the dignity of a Supreme Court Justice be more important than the dignity of a seventh grader?
Charles A Reich
Opposing the System
"Likening the war on drugs to slavery and Jim crow in its effects on black men."
-Michelle Alexander
…It doesn’t get much stupider than this political boondoggle that wastes $50 billion of our tax money each year, that imprisons half a million of our fellow citizens for nothing but simple possession of low-level dealing, that allows police at all levels to seize the private property (cars, homes, cash, Tupperware, everything) even of innocent citizens, that results in unconstitutional racial profiling and searches, that prevents U.S. farmers from being able to grow profitable and environmentally sound fields of industrial hemp, that has our military spending nearly a billion buck a year to intervene (on the wrong side) in a civil war in Columbia….et cetera and ad nauseum."
Jim Hightower
"Daily, scores of law abiding citizens are stopped and searched because they allegedly fit "drug courier" profiles. Profiles criticized by many jurists as so vague they can apply to anyone a drug agent chooses. The U.S. Supreme Court’s constrictions on the 1st,4th,6th and 8th Amendment rights-now being followed by lower federal courts and many state courts-is creating a climate perilously close to that of a police state."
Linn Washington Jr.
(Special assistant to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of Pennsylvania)
"The American public has been led to believe that the long-term solution to the drug problem is law enforcement. I know it isn’t."
Robert M. Stietman
(former chief of the New York regional office of the DEA)
"No sooner had national Prohibition, or the 18th Amendment, become law in 1920 than bootlegging sprang up to quench the public thirst. The Federal government, out to keep the nation "dry" at any cost, made over half a million arrests and secured over 300,00 convictions within the short space of 10 years, but actually accomplished little in its attempt to prevent smuggling.
Prohibition, a dismal failure, not only increased law-breaking, but also created a criminal class that turned to gambling, drugs, and prostitution when the 18th Amendment was finally repealed in 1933"
George Bruce Woodin
The Shady Side of America
"Drugs will be decriminalized. And however great the resulting social upheaval may be, it will be better than the existing status quo."
Brian Freemantle
The Octopus: Europe in the Grip of organized crime
"Being 'on drugs' can be represented as a depraved appetite, a wretched obsession, escapism for fugitives; or as a search for transcendental visions and mystical excitement. Drug-users encrypt meaning and invent their own fabulous mythologies. Drug-taking can be claimed as a search for utopian protocols, or as the sure route to an ethical wasteland. Toxic side effects become a game for some drug-users. many of them are put under surveillance and ostracized as members of a threatening underclass; but a few users (rock stars, fashionable models or poets) are allowed an aristocratic status."
Richard Davenport-Hines
The Pursuit of Oblivion
BABIES ON DRUGS….by Jim Hightower
Sometimes I feel I’d be better off just whapping myself upside the head with the daily newspaper, rather than reading it.
I sure felt that way when I read a New York Times story about babies on drugs. These are not the infamous "crack babies," whose mothers took illegal crack cocaine while pregnant, passing the addiction to their children. Instead, these are mothers and fathers who even more deliberately drug their children, going to reputedly reputable doctors to get technically legal prescriptions for psychiatric drugs used for dosing their young ones.
The Times reports that a new study has found that the use of such stimulants and antidepressants as Ritalin has increased dramatically in the past few years, not merely among hyperactive preteens and teens, but now among preschoolers. We’re talking about two-,three, and four-year-olds. Babies! Prozac is also being prescribed….to these tiny tykes!
What kind of "doctors" are doing this? What about the "do no harm" dictum of the Hippocratic oath? At these ages, children’s brains are undergoing critical development, and almost nothing is known about the consequences of pouring psychiatric drugs into these developing brains. By the way, these drugs have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating preschoolers. Indeed, the package insert for Ritalin specifically warns against prescribing the drug to children under six. Plus, most of these children are not even sick-as the head of psychiatry at Harvard University put it: "The normal behavior of many two-year-olds looks a lot like hyperactivity disorder." That’s right-normal children who are going through nothing more serious than the "Terrible twos", are getting zonked with these powerhouse prescriptions.
This is Jim Hightower saying….Where’s the federal "Drug War" when we really need it? They’ll throw you in jail for smoking a joint, but you can get Ritalin for a two-year-old from a doctor. What a horrible joke!"
Jim Hightower
:
See TURNING OUR TODDLERS INTO GUINEA PIGS by Paul Raeburn,Business Week, April 3,2000
"When I first saw this," says a veteran U.S. anti-drug official, "my reaction was, ‘What are they nuts?"
( Commentary on learning the U.S. is getting involved in Columbian War)
read: "War No More" by Timothy Lynch….National Review Feb 5, 2001….and book: "After Prohibition: An adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century"
"When law does not promote the common good, but in fact causes it to deteriorate, the law itself becomes bad and must be changed….Authentic moral leaders cannot afford the arrogant luxury of machismo, with its refusal to consider not ‘winning’."
John Clifton Marquis 1990
"All laws which can be violated without doing anyone any injury, are laughed at. Nay, so far are they from doing anything to control the desires and passions of man that, on the contrary, they direct and incite men’s thought toward those very objects; for we always strive toward what is forbidden and desire the things we are not allowed to have. And men of leisure are never deficient in the ingenuity to enable them to outwit laws framed to regulate things which cannot be entirely forbidden."
Spinoza
*********************
Alcohol
"All excess is ill, but drunkenness is of the worst sort: it spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men; it reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous, and mad. In fine, he that is drunk is not a man, because he is so long void of reason, that distinguishes a man from a beast."
William Penn
Book: "ALCOHOL: The World's Favorite Drug" by Griffith Edwards
article: "Letter From Moscow:The Russian God; Five hundred Years of Vodka" by Victor Erofeyev The New Yorker,Dec `16,2002
"Whoops! Sorry! Not supposed to call alcohol a drug. Some of the people who lead anti-drug organizations don’t like it because they fear it dilutes the message about the ‘real’ drugs: heroine, cocaine and marijuana. Parents are offended by it. As they try to figure out which vodka bottle came to the party and which from their teen-ager’s, they sigh and say, "Well, at least it’s not drugs." And naturally the lobbyists for the industry hate it. They’re power guys, these guys; The wine guy is George W’s brother-in-law; the beer guy meets regularly with House majority Whip Todd Delay. When you lump a cocktail in with a joint, it makes them crazy.
And it’s true: Booze and beer are not the same as illegal drugs. They’re worse. A policy research group called Drug Strategies has produced a report that calls alcohol "America’s most pervasive drug problem" and then goes on to document the claim. Alcohol-related deaths, out-number deaths related to drugs 4-to-1. Alcohol is a factor in more than half of all domestic-violence and sexual-assault cases. Between accidents, health problems, crime and lost productivity, researchers estimate alcohol abuse costs the economy $167 billion a year. In 1995 four out of every 10 people on probation said they were drinking when they committed a violent crime, while only one in 10 admitted using illicit drugs. Close your eyes and substitute the word "blah-blah" for alcohol in any of those sentences, and you’d have to conclude that an all-out war on blah-blah would result.
Yet when members of Congress tried to pass legislation that would make alcohol part of the purview of the nation’s drug czar the measure failed. Mothers Against Drunk Driving faces opposition to both its education programs, and its public-service ads from principals and parents who think illicit drugs should be given greater priority. The argument is this: Heroin, cocaine, and marijuana are harmful and against the law, but alcohol is used in moderation with no ill effects by many people.
Here’s the counterargument: There are an enormous number of people who cannot and will never be able to drink in moderation. And what they leave in their wake is often more difficult to quantify that DWIs or date rape……."
Alcohol: The Drug that pretends it isn’t
Anna Quindlen
"No nation is drunken where wine is cheap....and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth the only antidote to the bane of whiskey."
-Thomas Jefferson
"If we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been proneness in the brilliant and warm,-blooded to fall into this vice. The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and generosity."
-Abraham Lincoln
"better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian."
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Book: "Gin: The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva" by Patrick Dillon
STUDY; BEER PRICE, GONORRHEA RELATED…by Marlene Cimons…LA TIMES
"Why? When teenagers drink "They are more likely to have sex and they are more likely to have sex without a condom, with multiple partners and with high-risk partners," said Harrell Chesson, author of the study, which examined the impact of state been taxes on rates of sexually transmitted diseases in several dozen states between 1981 and 1995….
Book: "Vessels of Rage: The Secret History of Alcoholism" by James Graham
Article: "The Drunk's Club: A.A. the cult that cures" by Clancy Martin Harpers Magazine/January 2011
"We are the Drug Habit Nation."
H.W. Wiley 1911
"A Cinema crowd of Cocaine-crazed sexual lunatics."
(visitor to Hollywood 1916)
1,500,000 Drug Users in America, He Says."
(NY Times 14 May, 1923)
"Cocaine is the absolute worst of all drugs. Yeah, I've done it, so sue me. I'm not proud about it or bragging either. That doesn't make me a bad person, does it? The high is great for about 15 seconds; it is the next two days wide awake, grinding your teeth down to nubs, chain smoking cigarettes, drinking cases of beer un-affected and then sniveling away with the precious weasel dust. cocaine has taken me to the darkest, deepest parts of my psyche-undisputed. It's bad for our community, there's no upside to it and it's not a victimless crime.
Every time you put a straw up your nose, remember that somewhere down that line there's a dude with his head cut off lying in a ditch. "Good coke" is the quintessential oxy-moron. There is no such thing. It's pure evil....."
Lorenzo Semple Aspen Daily News july 2, 2011
"The situation with illegal drugs is of grave concern to me."
President Harry Truman
Nov 2, 1951
"We are calling for a new war on narcotics addiction at the local, national and international level.’
President Dwight D. Eisenhower (Nov 27,1954)
"We intend to get the killer-pushers and their willing customers out of selling and buying dangerous drugs. The answer to the problem is simple-get rid of drugs, pushers and users. Period."
Harry J. Anslinger
"The problem has assumed the dimensions of a National Emergency."
President Richard M. Nixon (June 17,1971)
"Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is*."
President Ronald Reagan
*Nancy was a 'pill-poppin Mama' according to the family
"If you want to use that "War on Drugs" analogy, then forfeiture is like giving the troops permission to loot."
Thomas Lorenzi
"Ask yourself three questions….Have we won the drug war? Are the strategies we are using working? Will doing more of the same for the next 20 years win the war?"
Kurt Schmoke (former Baltimore Mayor)
"The drug war’s sound and fury obscure an important fact; the illicit drug trade is a government protected "closed shop". Only criminals are allowed into the trade."
Richard Lawrence Miller
The Case for Legalizing drugs
The average heroin abuser’s criminality pays the legal economy over $6,100 in indirect monetary gains.
"The elimination of poverty, despair, and the huge profits from drugs would be far more effective than prisons or stepped-up law enforcement could ever be. Decriminalize, regulate, and tax drugs. With one stroke of the pen, President Clinton could erase the violent presence of the domestic drug gangs and the international cartels. But instead, President Groovy keeps the drug war going. We happen to know that he knows better. Come on, Bill. It’s okay. The voters are wising up. They’re showing a disinclination toward drug hysteria (and toward being manipulated by emotional issues in general.) Don’t let the drug-enforcement, prison-industrial complex push you around. Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow. Or yesterday!!!! We know about your acid and mescaline trips while at Oxford. The circles are small these days. We all have mutual friends. Don’t bogart that joint, my friend. Have my great old friend Jean Houston channel me and we’ll talk this one over."
Timothy Leary
Design for Dying
"Drugs that America regards as illicit provide equivalent pleasures to many, far greater pleasures to some, and this has been true for centuries, in most cultures. In fact, use of both opiates and cocaine was common among upright citizens in America and elsewhere in the later half of the nineteenth century. Freud used cocaine and advocated it as a cure for fatigue, foggy thinking and many other conditions. Several of our presidents including perhaps even the abstemious Abraham Lincoln, also used Cocaine, as well as tobacco and alcohol.
We do not produce these examples to besmirch historical figures, but to show that it is the modern stigma attached to drugs-not any inherent quality of the chemicals-that makes their use shocking. As reported by Edward Brecher, when these drugs were legal and were as widely, if not more widely, used as they are today, few serious problems with their use were noted. Few users found such drugs to interfere seriously with the quality of their lives."
Stephen B Duke & Albert C. Gross
".....I naturally learned to chew his toasted coca leaves and, finding it to be a most helpful custom when one must work hard and there is little food, I used coca for eight years while in these remote areas, with absolutely no desire to continue upon my return. Cocaine, the powerful alkaloid extracted from the leaves is, of course, a very dangerous addicting drug. But coca leaves, as they are used by the South American Indians, particularly in the bleak Andean heights, are not addictive and they do serve a useful purpose, enabling undernourished, debilitated persons to to a day's work and thus, at least, survive. The energy expended upon punitive international legislation against coca leaves might better be supplanted by an all-out attack upon the basic problems of malnutrition, disease, and a system which in many respects resembles paid slavery."
Richard Shultes
(Taken from "Green Medicine" by Margaret B. Kreig)
New York Times Saturday march 14, 2009
La Paz, Bolivia
"This week in Vienna, a meeting of the United Nations commission on Narcotic Drugs took place that will help shape international anti-drug efforts for the next 10 years. I attended the meeting to reaffirm Bolivia's commitment to this struggle but also to call for the reversal of a mistake made 48 years ago.
In 1961, the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs placed the coca leaf in the same category with cocaine-thus promoting the false notion that the coca leaf is a narcotic- and ordered that "coca leaf chewing must be abolished within 25 years from the coming into force of this convention." Bolivia signed the convention in 1976, during the brutal dictatorship of Col. Hugo Banzer, and the 25-year deadline expired in 2001.
So for the past eight years, the millions of us who maintain the traditional practice of chewing coca have been, according to the convention, criminals who violate international law. This is an unacceptable and absurd state of affairs for Bolivians and other Andean peoples.
many plants have small quantities of various chemical compounds called alkaloids. One common alkaloid is caffeine, which is found in more than 50 varieties of plants, from coffee to cacao and even in the flowers of orange and lemon trees. Excessive use of caffeine can cause nervousness, elevated pulse, insomnia and other unwanted effects.
another common alkaloid is nicotine, found in the tobacco plant. its consumption can lead to addiction, high blood pressure and cancer; smoking causes one in five deaths in the United States. Some alkaloids have important medicinal qualities. Quinine, for example, the first known treatment for malaria, was discovered by the Quechua Indians of Peru in the bark of the cinchona tree.
The coca leaf also has alkaloids; the one that concerns antidrug officials is the cocaine alkaloid, which amounts to less that one-tenth of a percent of the leaf. But as the above examples show, that a plant, leaf or flower contains a minimal amount of alkaloids does not make it a narcotic.
To be made into a narcotic, alkaloids must typically be extracted, concentrated and in many cases processed chemically. What is absurd about the 1961 convention is that it considers the coca leaf in its natural, unaltered state to be a narcotic. The paste or the concentrate that is extracted from the coca leaf, commonly known as cocaine, is indeed a narcotic, but the plant itself is not.Why is Bolivia so concerned with the coca leaf? Because it is an important symbol off the history and identity of the indigenous cultures of the Andes.
The custom of chewing coca leaves has existed in the Andean region of South America since at least 3000 B.C. it helps mitigate the sensation of hunger, offers energy during long days of labor and helps counter altitude sickness. unlike nicotine or caffeine. it causes no harm to human health nor addiction or altered state, and it is effective in the struggle against obesity, a major pro9blem in many modern societies.
Today, millions of people chew coca in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and northern Argentina and Chile. The coca leaf continues to have ritual, religious and cultural significance that transcends indigenous cultures and encompasses the mestizo population.
Mistakes are an unavoidable part of human history, but sometimes we have the opportunity to correct them. It is time for the International Community to reverse its misguided policy toward the coca leaf."
-Evo Morales Ayma President of Bolivia
"In the roster of pop-culture medical doctors who don't reflect well on the profession, includes the character of Dr. Henry Jekyll, created by Robert Lewis Stevenson. Jekyll's self-medication experiments turned him into the sociopathic Mr. Edward Hyde, with fatal side effects. After dreaming the story, Stevenson, despite suffering from tuberculosis, wrote the 60,000-word classic in a six-day, cocaine-fueled frenzy.
Erin Barrett & Jack Mingo
Doctors killed George Washington
"The Incas believed that the Gods presented coca to the people to satisfy their hunger, to provide them with new vigor, and to help them forget their miseries.....It was intimately involved in their religious ceremonies and in the various initiation rites; and that shamans used it to induce a trance-like state in order to commune with the spirits. It was a far too important commodity to be used by the common Indians, and their exposure to coca was very limited before the invasion by Pizarro and his conquistadors."
John Mann
Murder, Magic, and Medicine
"....The question constantly arose: What is a true drug plant? The banana, for instance, is one of the oldest known fruits and perhaps the first to be cultivated. It has served as a specific treatment for celiac disease since the 1920's, and it is prescribed as a dietary adjunct in cases of typhoid, colitis, and other disorders. It is said to have antifungal factors and anti-bacterial fractions, as well. Papayas and pineapples may not seem to be medicinal plants, but they provide proteolytic enzymes that are used in a host of new pharmaceuticals designed to reduce inflammation, bruising, and swelling. Their action also intensifies that of antibiotics. "
Margaret B. Kreig
Green Medicine
"The logic of legalization depends in part upon two assumptions: that most illegal drugs are not as dangerous as is commonly believed; and that those types of drugs and methods of consumption that are most risky are unlikely to prove appealing precisely because they are so obviously dangerous. Consider Marijuana. Among the roughly sixty million Americans who have smoked marijuana, none has died from a marijuana overdose…."
Ethan A. Nadelmano
Rethinking the War on Drugs
"After watching the results of the plague since heroin first came to Brooklyn in the early fifties, after visiting the courtrooms and the morgues, after wandering New York’s neighborhoods to see for myself, and after consuming much of the literature on drugs, I’ve reluctantly come to a terrible conclusion; the only solution is the complete legalization of these drugs."
Pete Hamil
Piecework
"We concede that the issue is debatable; that reasonable policymakers can differ on whether heroin and cocaine, like tobacco and alcohol, should be freely available, at low cost, to any adult desiring to purchase them. A rational case cannot be made, however, for the garrison state that we are in the process of creating. Long after the appetite for currently illicit drugs has subsided or been transferred to lawful drugs or other substitutes-or we have decided to permit our people to make their own decisions about chemical use-we will need our institutions and our civil liberties. The battles to recapture our liberty and our integrity may be fiercer and even more formidable than the drug wars in which they were lost."
Stephen B. Duke & Albert C. Gross
America’s longest War
"Mistrust those in whom the impulse to punish is strong."
Friedrich Nietzsche
Never has an American government been so busy interfering with the private lives of its citizens, subjecting them to mandatory blood, urine, lie-detector tests. Yet the war on drugs has nothing at all to do with drugs. It is part of an all our war on the American people by a government interested only in control."
Gore Vidal (The Nation Jan 27,1992)
"I feel obliged to say that I do not accept the authority of any state-much less one founded as was ours upon the free fulfillment of each citizen-to forbid me or anyone, the use of drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, sex with a consenting partner, or, if one is a woman, the right to an abortion. I take these rights to be absolute and should the few persist in their efforts to dominate the private lives of the many I recommend force as a means of changing their minds."
Gore Vidal (The Nation 7/14/89)
"Welcome to the Brave New World where the constitutional liberties which characterize the land of the Free are being sacrificed on the altar of winning the Drug War at all costs."
Linn Washington Jr.
"Questioning antidrug policy today is still considered the most rank heresy. Politicians who ask awkward questions such as 'What is the war on drugs achieving?' are ostracized and find themselves in deep trouble. As Dan Baum notes in the introduction to his book Smoke and Mirrors, 'Even the mildest questioning of prohibition is the closest thing this country has to forbidden speech. For the moment, all paths away from excess are booby-trapped. We're stuck."
Dominic Streatfeild
Cocaine
"After three decades of increasingly punitive policies, illicit drugs are more easily available , drug potencies are greater, and drug barons are richer than ever. The war on Drugs costs more than the Commerce, Interior and State departments combined- and a strangled court system, exploding prisons and wasted lives push the cost beyond measure....costly, destructive and failing in its stated mission, the war on drugs is government lunacy....Yet we soldier on, speaking the language of war, writing the budgets of war, carrying the weapons of war, and suffering the casualties of war."
Dan Baum
Smoke and Mirrors
"He (Nixon) took all those sleeping pills, and through history, drugs and demons have gone together."
-Billy Graham (1979 explanation of Nixon's downfall in the Watergate scandal)
Book: Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure" by Dan Baum
Book: The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control" by David Musto
Book: "Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, US Lawmen and the War America Can't Win...-Elaine Shannon
"Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment."
Philip K. Dick
"There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman."
-Andre Malraux (1901-1976)
Man's Fate
"Congress declared war on drugs on the streets of the nation but the only effective course of action was to eradicate the corrupt generals and officials of South Vietnam who were needed in the crusade against Communism. US aid supported the drug trade and GI’s salaries were spent on it. With the benefit of hindsight, many more American lives were probably destroyed with opium in the cause of fighting Communism than were lost to military action in the paddy fields of South-east Asia. Indo-Chinese loyalties were ultimately paid for with the lives of hundreds of thousands of American addicts."
Martin Booth
Opium a History
"No drug, not even alcohol causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power."
P.J. O’Rourke
Studying for our Drug Test 1992
"The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? …..Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that’s making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?"
John Lennon
"No civilization has found life tolerable without the things that provide at least some brief escape from reality."
Will Durant
Life Of Greece
"Given the tortures of the flesh and mind attendant on civilization, it is understandable that man turns to that which are capable of altering states of consciousness. Whether these narcotics constitute a socially acceptable pastime or violate a social taboo is a question every civilization has had to answer-and the responses have been diverse."
William A. Emboden Jr.
Narcotic Plants
"If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you’re out of your mind….If you think you need stuff to play music or sing, you’re crazy. It can fix you so you can’t play nothing or sing nothing."
Billie Holliday
"Formed in September 194f3, one of the CIA’s early projects was the funding of Corsican gangsters, especially in Marseilles, to disrupt Communist-led unions which organized labour strikes in 1947 and 1950. The underlying aim was to destroy or ineffectualize the French Communist Party. From this covert operation two Corsican gangster brothers, Antoine and Barthelemy Guerini, rose to such power that, after the 1950 dock strike, they themselves controlled the Marseilles docks. The assistance this gave to the heroin industry need not be spelt out."
Martin Booth
Opium a History
"Out of its (Bayer) laboratories emerged aspirin, the world’s most famous home remedy for pain and fever. Bayer was also responsible for the introduction of heroin, which it sold as a cure for morphine addiction and as a cough suppressant, especially effective in children. Later the Bayer laboratories developed Methadone, in preparation for World War II, in honor of Adolph Hitler. Today methadone is used principally in the treatment of heroin addiction."
Joseph Borkin
The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben
Coca/cocaine
" Coca protects the body from many ailments, and our doctors use it in powdered form to reduce the swelling of wounds, to strengthen broken bones, to expel cold from the body or prevent it from entering, and to cure rotten wounds or sores that are full of maggots. And if it does so much for outward ailments, will not its singular virtue have even greater effect in the entrails of those who eat it?"
Padre Blas Valera
Royal Commentaries of Peru ,de la Vega. 1609
"The plant is idolatry and the work of the Devil, and appears to give strength only by a deception of the Evil One; it possesses no virtue but shortens the life of many Indians who at most escape from the forests with ruined health...(it is) a useless object liable to promote the practices and superstitions of the Indians....asserted by every competent judge to possess no true virtues..."
(First Council of Lima-1552)
Book: "Cocaine, It's History Use and Effects" by Richard Ashley
"We are certain of this very extraordinary fact: that they have that secret, and put it in practice for weeks together; and undergo the greatest fatigue, without any injury to their health or bodily vigour-they want neither butcher, nor baker, nor brewer, nor distiller, nor fuel, nor culinary utensils....now if Professor Davy, when he returns from his travels, will apply his thoughts to this subject, I have here given him some important materials for his experiments. There are thousands, even in this happy land, who will pour their blessings on him, if he will but discover a temporary Anti-Famine, or substitute for food, free from all inconvenience of weight or bulk, and expense; and by which any person might be enabled, like a Peruvian Indian, to live and labour in health and spirits, for a month now and then, without eating."
Gentleman's Magazine, September (1814)
"I see that other people are turning their attention to the growing craze for opium smoking, to which I referred last week. West End bohemia is hearing some dark stories of what is going on. But still more prevalent is use of that exciting drug, cocaine. It is so easy to take-just snuffed up the nose....in the ladies cloakroom of a certain establishment two bucketfuls of thrown-away small circular cardboard boxes were discovered by the cleaners the other day-discarded cocaine boxes."
'Quex' Evening News, 3 January 1916
" Cocaine is a sensational drug. There is no more efficient product for delivering pleasure for your cash than cocaine: not fast cars, not expensive clothes, not speedboats. Nothing will make you feel as good. The moment you shove it up your nose it races into your bloodstream, heads directly into the pleasure center of your brain, kicks down the door, jams your Fun Throttle forwards into 'way too fast' and dumps the clutch. Cocaine doesn't bother about looking, smelling or tasting good. It doesn't have flashy packaging. It doesn't need to.
Real cocaine-by which I mean pure cocaine, not the crap you pick up on the street from a friend called Malcolm, that's seen more cuts than a budget Japanese feature and leaves you squatting on the lavatory for a week because, ha-ha, one of the cuts was manitol-real cocaine is in a different league. Put it this way: this is the drug that, when offered to animals, they will take-to the exclusion of all else including sex, water and food-until they drop dead. No other drug on earth has this effect. It is not possible to buy more fun than cocaine. It is just not possible. William Burroughs called it 'the most exhilarating drug I have ever taken', and, bearing in mind that he spent his entire life taking exhilarating drugs, we should perhaps take his word for it. Cocaine is at the top of the fun pyramid; science has not yet bettered it, and probably never will. And that's the problem: because cocaine is so much fun that users are willing to pay preposterous prices for it. One way or another most of them do."
Dominic Streatfeild
Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography
Book: "Peru-History of Coca: 'The Divine Plant' of the Incas" by William Golden Mortimer MD
"Woe to you, my princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward you shall see who is the stronger, a little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big strong man with cocaine in his body. In my last serious depression I took cocaine again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance."
(Sigmund Freud) 2 June 1884, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud by Ernest Jones
"The bit of cocaine I have just taken is making me very talkative, my little woman....(two pages later) .....here I am making silly confessions to you, my sweet darling, really without any reason whatever unless it is the cocaine that makes me talk so much....."
The Complete Letters, Freud-Fleiss, 2 Feb 1886, cit. Masson (ed.), 1985
Book: The Freudian Fallacy: Freud and Cocaine' by E.M. Thornton
"During recent years I have seen among men of science frightful symptoms due to the craving for cocaine. Those who believe they can enter the temple of happiness through the gate of pleasure purchase their momentary delights at the cost of body and soul. They speedily pass through the gate of unhappiness into the night of the abyss."
Lewin
Phantastica, 1924
" One of the first things I remember about crack is that it arrived with swarms of bees. You usually think of bees as something from the country, on shrubs in the sun in the summer, but this was on a city street called Pitkin Avenue, a place of low buildings, many of them burned out, all of them seeming to snarl at you-get away, get out of here!-in an East New York neighborhood!
A couple of hours before a cop named Venable was riding in a police van when he saw a man waving frantically. He was at the curb when the scarred green door to the empty building opened and somebody fired an automatic weapon and he went down at he curb. Dead at 35. Now a couple of hours later, I walked toward the spot where he was killed and the bees were everywhere and I had to wave my arms as I walked and here at the curb was a pool of Officer Venable’s blood and the swarm of bees raided the surface.
"They fight you for that. The blood is sweet for them." A woman called from across the street in front of the bodega.
"Who did the shooting?" I asked her.
"Crack drug. You can’t go near them. They’re just like the bees over there with the blood."
Jimmy Breslin (‘Crack" Playboy Dec 1988)
"A cocainist who had sniffed 3.25gr of cocaine armed himself for protection against imaginary enemies: another in an attack of acute mania jumped overboard into the water; another broke the furniture and crockery to pieces and attacked a friend....These unfortunate beings lead a miserable life whose hours are measured by the imperative necessity for a new dose of the drug and with each such dose the tragedy of life and death takes a step further towards the inevitable end....a very small percentage of cocainists recover, the rest relapse."
Lewin
Phantastica (1924)
"....the drug produces several other conditions that make the 'fiend' a peculiarly dangerous criminal. One of these conditions is a temporary immunity to shock-a resistance to the 'knock-down' effects of fatal wounds. Bullets fired into vital parts, that would stop a sane man in his tracks, fail to check the 'fiend'-fail to stop his rush or weaken his attack."
New York Times, Feb 1914
"Abnormal sensations in the peripheral nerves cause the patient to believe that there are animals under his skin. The result is frequently self-mutilation, and by a false application of subjective impressions, the mutilation of members of his own family, in order to remove the foreign substances from his body. A woman injured herself with needles in order to kill the 'cocaine bugs'. A man who suffered from twinges and pains in the arms and feet thought he was being forcibly electrocuted. He thought he could see electric wires leading to his body."
Lewin
Phantastica
"One morning you wake up and take a speedball, and feel bugs under your skin. 1890 cops with black mustaches block the doors and lean in through the windows snarling their lips back from blue and bold embossed badges. Junkies march through the room singing the Moslem Funeral Song, bear the body of Bill Gains, stigmata of his needle wounds glow with soft blue flame. Purposeful schizophrenic detectives sniff at your chamber pot.
It's the coke horrors....Sit back and play it cool and shoot in plenty of that Gi M (morphine)."
William Burroughs
Naked Lunch
Book: "Peru-History of Coca: 'The Divine Plant' of the Incas" by William Golden Mortimer
"Everywhere and at all times, men and women have sought, and duly found, the means of taking a holiday from the reality of their generally dull and often acutely unpleasant existence. A holiday out of space, out of time, in the eternity of sleep or ecstasy, in the heaven or the limbo of visionary fantasy."
Aldous Huxley "A Treatise on Drugs"
"Over the centuries our Hindu philosophers have seen everything come and go. Empires, religions, famines, good times, invasions, reforms, liberators, repressors….and drugs. Drugs are among the most influential and dangerous powers available to humans. They open up glorious and pleasurable chambers in the mind. They give great power. Thus they can seduce the searcher away from the path."
Sri Krishna Preem
"I give you cough,
I give you itch.
I make you blind
I'm your eyes.
If still you do not die,
What more can I do?
When the Effects of bhang
Rise to the head
What feelings do they produce?
The man who has drunk bhang
Holds tight to his bed
And wonders where it is going.
'Whoever smokes ganja
His face grows pale.
His wife will complain
He is impotent;
His brother will say
He is afflicted with pain,
But the smoker will turn
To his chillum again.
'Girdhar Kabra, the poet,
Says no one is good among them;
All those mentioned, they use liquor
And like children lie down in the way.
A charas smoker loses religious wisdom
Imparted by the guru
As well as vitality
He is gradually reduced To a mere skeleton
And his face resembles
That of a monkey."
(From Punjab)
"The Cannibinomaniac is good-for-nothing, lazy fellow, who lives by begging & stealing, and pesters his relations for money to buy hasheesh, often assaulting them when they refuse his demands. The moral degradation of these cases is their most salient symptom; loss of social position, shamelessness, addiction to lying & theft, and a loose irregular life, make them a curse to their families. While in the asylum they are notorious for making false charges, refusing to work & quarreling. Some deny using hasheesh, but others boast of its stimulating effects. They often have an inordinately high opinion of themselves. They are loud in their complaints of oppression by the police, and emphatically protest their innocence of any misdeeds. irritability, unconcern as to the future, loss of interest in family, malingering, continual demands for cigarettes, urgent petitions for release, emotional outbreaks when refused their demands, garrulity, abusive threats, alternating with extreme servility, are all marks of this state. These patients do not often ask for hasheesh while in the asylum, but occasionally procure it by stealth, though the craving for it does not appear to be so keen as that of a dipsomaniac or morphinomaniac. No phenomena of deprivation are noticeable, and therefore the cessation of the habit should be easier than in the case of alcohol or opium, and I believe that it is actually easier....
(Written by An English physician, director of the Cairo Hospital for the Insane,1903...from The Connoisseur's Handbook of Marijuana by William Daniel Drake Jr.)
One study that spanned two decades of investigation found that doctors tend to take more drugs-specifically, tranquillizers, sedatives, and stimulants-than do nondoctors. And it has been known for just about as long that narcotics addiction runs 30 to 100 times higher among physicians than in the general population.....
The United States "loses the equivalent of seven medical-school graduating classes each year to drug addiction, alcoholism and suicide
Charles B. Inlander,Lowell S. Levin,Ed Weiner
Medicine on Trial
"A frequent misconception regarding early exploration is that its purpose was to provide spices for European tables; in reality, this trade sought sandalwood, pepper, opium, rhubarb, and aloes not for gourmand palates, but as narcotics, aphrodisiacs, and most important, medicines."
William A. Emboden Jr.
Narcotic Plants
"Although it is common knowledge that many plants contain psychoactive substances, the fact that certain animals also do is barely known. Modern research into the psychoactive fauna is still in its infancy. The seventeenth-century alchemist and physician J.B. van Helmont described alchemical research with animals as a quest for the "Animal Stone’ which is a ‘mineral virtue’ obtainable from the ‘natural superfluities and excrements’ of animals. Excrements should here be understood to meal all bodily secretions, not just fasces and urine. Early scientists and alchemists experimented with all kinds of animals. One such experimenter, Nicholas of Poland, is known to have made extensive use of toads, snake skins and scorpions. Christian Ratsch has noted that scorpion-bite victims report hallucinogenic symptoms and that their poisons still await scientific analysis to determine whether or not they have psychoactive properties."
Richard Rudgley
The Encyclopedia of Psycho Active Substances
Book: "Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography" by Dominic Streatfeild
Book: "Cocaine: from Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States- Joseph Sillaine
Book: Cocaine Global Histories" by Paul Gootenberg
Book: "The Freudian Fallacy: Freud and Cocaine- EM Thornton
Book: "Cocaine: A Drug and its Social Evolution
OPIUM
"Why, the slave trade was merciful compared with the opium trade. We did not destroy the bodies of the Africans, for it was our immediate interest to keep them alive; we did not debase their natures, corrupt their minds, nor destroy their souls. But the opium seller slays the body after he has corrupted, degraded and annihilated the moral being of unhappy sinners, While every hour is bringing new victims to a Moloch which knows no satiety, and where the English murderer and Chinese suicide vie with each other in offerings at his shrine."
(quoted by Karl Marx an article Opium or Commerce)
Sept 20,1858
"What sinister fascination is it that seems to draw so many girls and women into the clutches of Chinamen...? It is by the seduction of the drugged pipe that many and many a girl has been tempted into the dark rooms of Chinatown to become the plaything, and often not even the wife, of Celestials who have brought their Eastern vices with them."
Umpire, 6 August 1916
"The Way of Heaven is fairness to all; it does not suffer us to harm others to benefit ourselves. Men are alike in this in all the World; for they cherish life and hate what endangers life. O majesty, control your wicked. O, Majesty, you can order the opium not to be grown, the fields hoed over, and sown instead with the five grains, and thus show the sincerity of your politeness, and humility, so our countries may have peace, together."
(Letter of Lin Tse Hsu about the opium trade to Queen Victoria
1839)
"A Chinaman is cold and cunning and distrustful: always ready to take advantage of those he has to deal with; extremely covetous and deceitful: quarrelsome, vindictive, but timid and dastardly."
Encyclopedia Britannica 1842
"Though not making use of opium oneself, to venture nevertheless to manufacture and sell it, and with it to seduce the simple folk of this land, is to seek one’s own livelihood by exposing others to death….Suppose there were people from another country who carried opium for sale to England and seduced your people into buying it, this would arouse deep hatred."
Lin Tse Hsu (Letter to Queen Victoria)
"Opium is a good cash crop, especially for undeveloped regions."
Encyclopedia Britannica
"The death of ennui is the most efficient bribe which opium offers."
-Silas Weir Mitchell (1824-1914)
"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death."
Jean Cocteau
"Opium teaches only one thing, which is that aside from physical suffering, there is nothing real."
-Andre Malraux (1901-1976)
Man's Fate
"Oh, jab me with your needle a hundred times and a hundred times I will bless you, Saint Morphine."
-Jules Verne (1828-1905)
(Opium by N.B. Eddy-of the National Institute of Health, Bethesda ,Maryland)
"As to the morality of the opium question, I am fortunately able to give the home reader, by analogy, and in a few words, as exact an idea of it as I have got myself. Smoking a little opium daily, is like taking a pint or two of ale, or a few glasses of wine daily; smoking more opium is like taking brandy as well as beer and wine, or a large allowance of these latter; smoking very much opium is like excessive brandy and gin drinking, leading to delirium tremens and premature death. After frequent consideration of the subject during thirteen years, the last two spent at home. I can only say that, although the substances are different, I can, as to the morality of producing, selling, and consuming them, see no difference at all; while the only difference I can observe in the consequences of consumption is that the opium-smoker is not so violent, so maudlin, or so disgusting as the drunkard."
Mr. Meadows
(Chinese Government interpreter at Hong Kong 1868)
"….As regards the effects of the habitual use of the drug on the mass of the people, I must affirm that no injurious results are visible. The people generally are muscular and well-formed race, the laboring portion capable of great and prolonged exertion under a fierce sun, in an unhealthy climate. Their disposition is cheerful and peaceable, and quarrels and brawls are rarely heard amongst even the lower orders, while in general intelligence, they rank deservedly high amongst Orientals."
Dr. Eatwell
(Victorian Englishman traveling in China 1850)
"I do not pretend to justify the prosecution of the opium trade in a moral and philanthropic point of view, but as a merchant I insist that it has been a fair, honourable and legitimate trade."
(excerpt from a letter from Warren Delano…Franklin Delano
Roosevelt’s grandfather 1833)
"This begs the question: What can be done to counteract the problem? Legislation, crop replacement, informal and formal controls, medical advice and detoxification, advertising and educational campaigns, military campaigns and law enforcement have all failed. Prohibition does not work. Indeed, it promotes demand thereby increasing profit margins exacerbating the situation and encouraging organized crime, social destabilization, violence and vice.
Perhaps one course of action would have been follow the findings of the British 1895 Royal Commission on Opium in India, which suggested a society left to its own devices with opium eventually maintained an addict equilibrium which was not detrimental to the society as a whole. Addicts were not criminalized, opium was available, the price remained low and those habituated simply fed their habit and continued with their lives unburdened, as today’s addicts are unable to do, by the constant need to search for their next fix and the money to pay for it."
Martin Booth
Opium A History
"Sure, we all kill ourselves, all of us, men of our times. and the spreading cocaine venom is but a symbol of the death to which we all succumb. Cocaine is not merely the hydrochenate of cocaine; it is also the fierce and subtle and sweet death--truly, a thing of black shadows like some nameless cataclysm, which we inflict upon ourselves voluntarily, with different voices and different words, while waiting for the consummation of our fate. "
Pitigrilli-l92l
"Predictably the Catholic Church attempted to outlaw the plant. At ecclesiastical councils held in Lima in 1551 and 1567 the bishops condemned its use as a form of idolatry and secured a royal proclamation declaring the effects of the leaves an illusion of the devil. By then it was too late even for the Church. Too many Spaniards were making fortunes growing and trading coca, and those running the mines had found that without leaves Indians would not work. A face-saving compromise allowed the Church to reverse the position. The cultivation and selling of coca was deemed acceptable, but the use of the leaves in religious ceremonies remained punishable by death. In 1573, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo removed all control on secular commerce, and for the next two hundred years, as thousands died in the mines and on the plantations, coca became a mainstay of the colonial economy. Production soared by a factor of fifty, and by the end of the sixteenth century, taxes on coca were providing the Church with much of its revenue."
Wade Davis
One River
Did you ever hear tell about Cocaine Lil?
She lived in Cocaine town on Cocaine hill,
She had a cocaine dog and a cocaine cat,
They fought all night with a cocaine rat.
She had a cocaine hair on her cocaine head.
She had a cocaine dress that was poppy red;
She wore a snowbird hat and sleigh-riding clothes,
On her coat she wore a crimson, cocaine rose.
Big gold chariots on the Milky Way,
Snakes and elephants silver and gray.
Oh the cocaine blues they make me sad,
Oh the cocaine blues make me feel bad.
Lil went to a snow party one cold night,
And the way she sniffed was sure a fright
Kankakee Liz and Yen Shee Jim.
There was Morphine sue and the Poppy Face Kid,
Climbed up snow ladders and down they skid;
There was the Stepladder Kit, a good six feet,
And the Sleigh-riding Sister who were hard to beat.
Along in the morning about half past three
They were all lit up like a Christmas tree;
Lil got home and started for bed,
Took another sniff and it knocked her dead.
" They laid her out in her cocaine clothes;
She wore a snowbird hat with a crimson rose;
On her headstone you'll find this refrain;
'She died as She lived, sniffing cocaine."
sung by Taj Mahal)
Coca
"My conversion is complete. Praise Mariani’s wine."
Zadoc Kahn (Grand Rabbi of France)
"Your Coca from America gave my European priests the strength to civilize Asia and Africa."
Cardinal Lavigerie
"To Mariani, who spreads Coca."
Auguste Rodin
"Since a single bottle of Mariani’s extraordinary wine guarantees a lifetime of a hundred years, I shall be obliged to live until the year 2700!"
Jules Verne
"Coca is the finest nerve tonic and exhilarator ever discovered. Coca stimulates the brain to great activity and gives tone and vigor to the entire system."
Cocarette Co. advertisement from the late 1800s
"Here , for example, are the golden-needled hypodermic syringe favored by a wealthy morphine addict in the last century; the delicate porcelain cocaine container that would sit within reach at a wealth woman’s bedside; the opium tonics that kept many a teething baby quiet at night; the bottles of opium-based home remedies; the stills, quiet at night; the bottles of opium-based home remedies; the stills, casks and bottles that kept much of a young nation in an alcoholic haze."
(description of a Chicago Historical Society show called "Altered States:
Alcohol and Other Drugs in America)
"I take very small doses of it (cocaine) regularly against depression and indigestion, and with the most brilliant success."
Freud
"Woe to you my Princess, when I come…you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body."
Sigmund Freud
"There's a blizzard of cocaine around England at the moment and I hate it. Everyone's so blasé, they're thinking they're so ironic and witty and wandering around with this stupid cokey confidence."
-Damon Albarn 1996
"Cocaine is like really evil coffee."
-Courtney Love
"Confusion about the effects of crude coca leaves and those of cocaine has caused many people to regard the chewing of coca leaves as practiced by the Indians of South America as merely an addictive vice, with the result that coca is now being suppressed even in the areas where the Indians have relied on its stimulating and medicinal properties for thousands of years, and where it has formed a significant part of their religious and cultural heritage….to deny the use of coca to the Indians is as serious a disregard for human rights as would be an attempt to outlaw beer in Germany, coffee in the near east or betel chewing in India. The recent attempts to suppress and control the use of coca can be interpreted only as the latest step in the white man’s attempt to exterminate the Indian way of life and make him completely dependent on the alien society and economy which has gradually surrounded him."
Richard Martin
Executive Mansion, June 14
1898
My dear Sir,
Please accept thanks on the President’s behalf and on my own for your courtesy in sending a case of the celebrated Vin Mariani, with whose tonic virtues I am already acquainted, and will be happy to avail myself of in the future as occasion may require.
Very truly yours,
John Addison Porter
Secretary to the President (William McKinley)
"No one will ever tell me it's not a great feeling. A clean fresh high, especially early in the morning, will set you free."
-Marvin Gaye
"Cocaine is terrible, man I used to sell the shit. I know."
-Snoop Dogg (1999)
Phantastica
"If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we would wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise."
Aldous Huxley 1949
"From the beginning of our knowledge of man, we find him consuming substances of no nutritive value but taken for the sole purpose of producing for a certain time a feeling of contentment, ease and comfort."
Louis Lewin
(Berlin Toxicologist 1938)
"Their potential energy has covered the whole earth and established communication between various races, in spite of dividing mountains and sundering seas. These substances have formed a bond of union between men of opposite hemispheres, the uncivilized and the civilized; they have forced passages which, once open, proved of use for other purposes: they produced in ancient races characteristics which have endured to the present day evidencing the marvelous degree of intercourse that existed between different people just as certainly and as exactly as a chemist can judge the relations of two substances by their reactions. Hundreds or thousands of years were necessary to establish contact between those nations by these means…..
Louis Lewin
"The motives for the occasional or habitual use of these drugs are of greater interest than collections of acts concerning them. There all kinds of human contrast meet" barbarism and civilization, with all their various degrees of material possessions, social status, knowledge, belief, age and gifts of body, mind and soul."
Louis Lewin 1938
"On this plane meet artisan and sybarite, ruler and subject; the savage from some distant island or from the Kalahari Desert associates with poets, philosophers, scientists, misanthropes, and philanthropists; the man of peace rubs shoulders with the man of war, the devotee with the atheist."
Louis Lewin
(The use of ants for their apparent hallucinogen properties was once a common tradition among various California Indians)
"The physical impulses which bring under their spell such diverse classes of mankind must be extraordinary and far-reaching. Many have expressed opinions about them, but have probed their intrinsic properties, and fewer still perceived the inner-most significance and the motives for the use of substances in which such energies are stored."
Louis Lewin 1924
Phantastica
"That certain plants and drugs can produce high spiritual or ecstatic states has been established beyond question, whether or not the religions or governments of today want to admit it. Through the expedient of consciousness-enhancing substances a class of "knower's" has once again arisen in society and it is receiving the same welcome the Gnostics and other ‘heretics’ received in the past: scorn, ridicule and sometimes active persecution, from both religion and governments. These chemically-aided spiritual experiences are real; they are psychological facts that meet all the criterion of what is classically deemed a ‘religious experience’. Religion finds this bitter pill impossible to swallow; governments declare it illegal and fill prisons with the "illegally religious’ just as surely and irrationally as the Romans filled theirs with early Christians. The religious persecutions of the past have not left us, they have merely changed form."
Clark Heinrich
Strange Fruit: Alchemy & Religion, The Hidden Truth
"There is a vast history regarding the use of psychedelic (mind-manifesting) plants like psilocybin, peyote, and marijuana to obtain spiritual and religious visions and shamanic healing powers, allowing individuals and groups access to the numinous realm without the intercession of any religious authority. This history is widely disregarded within the mainstream culture, but readers can learn all they need to know simply by reading Huston Smith's Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals.
-Ken Goffman
Counter Culture Through the Ages
"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather......."
-Bill Hicks
"We have drunk the Soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the gods. What can hatred and the malice of mortals do to us now, O immortal one?"
Rig Veda
"Picture yourself in a boat on a river,
with tangerine trees and marmalade skies.."
John Lennon
"The real Hell's Angels are the ones who've taken LSD and had the carpet jerked out from under them. i never really became a Hell's Angel until I took LSD. Not to speak of becoming a man and finding myself. LSD is a medicine and not a drug. I only hope it gets in the right hands, and is used for love rather than fame and fortune."
-Freewheeling Frank Hell's Angel
"I believe that the psychedelics provide a chance, perhaps only a slender one for homofaber, the cunning, ruthless, foolhardy, pleasure seeking greedy toolmaker to emerge into that other creature whose presence we have so rashly presumed, homo sapiens, the wise the understanding, the compassionate, in whose fourfold vision-art, politics, science and religion are one. Surely we must seize the chance."
-Dr. Osmond
"Seven million people I turned on....and only 100,000 have come bye to thank me."
-Timothy Leary
"In the year 1692, Indians of the state of Coahuila had established a mission El Santo de Jesus Peyotes indicating the early widespread influence of this plant It is not surprising that the dried sliced pieces of peyote were being referred to in the same manner as the Eucharist of the Mass.
William A. Emboden Jr.
Narcotic Plants
"Man must sometimes take a rest from his memory."
Guatemalan Indian to Lewis Lewin
"Perhaps the first step towards combating the evils of opiates is a societal readjustment that will make life tolerable without addictive drugs."
William A. Emboden
"It can be very well seen and proven how they worship tobacco , for they confide in it, ask for its aid, and entrust it with the task. May God free us through His mercy from him (the Devil) who for our perdition disguises and whitewashes his lies and presumptions under the cover and mask of the tobacco. Amen
ruiz de Alarcon (16th Century Priest the Treatise on Superstitions
see: A History of Smoking
Book: "Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization" by Jain Gately
Book: "The Craving Brain" by Ronald A. Ruden M.D. Ph.D.
"Among other evil practices, the Indians have one that is especially harmful, the inhaling of a certain kind of smoke which they call tobacco, in order to produce a state of stupor…."
Oviedo 1526
The number of complaints which the plant was said to cure was fabulous. Nicolo Monardes, a celebrated Physician of the University of Seville, who was employed at the time in investigating the various products which kept arriving from the West Indies with reference to their usefulness in medicine, gives a long account of the wonder virtues of tobacco as reported to him by the Spanish sailors. After a casual mention of the ‘smoke tubes’ of the Mexicans he devotes the bulk of his work to its medicinal properties: coughs, asthma, headache, cramp in the stomach, gout, and diseases of women were some of the ills which, according to Monardes, were unable to resist the effect of tobacco; the more application of the fresh leaves to the belly would at once expel any intestinal worms that might be present, while a salve prepared from the same substance would rapidly heal all open wounds and malignant tumours."
From A History of Smoking
"Have you not reason then to bee ashamed, and to forbeare this filthie noveltie, so basely grounded, so foolishly received and so grossely mistaken in the right use thereof? In your abuse thereof sinning against God, harming your selves both in persons and goods…..by the custome thereof making your selves to be wondered at by all forraine civil Nations, and by all strangers that come among you, to be scorned and contemned. A Custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomlesse."
King James of England
In the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign the enormous increase in the habit of smoking had filled the King with astonishment and dismay; so far had it gone that many a man could boast of having "drunk tobacco," as the expression went, with the highest nobles of the Court. To acquire the art of smoking was the duty of every man of fashion, and it was considered a disgrace not to be able to inhale smoke through the nose; there were even professors of smoking who initiated beginners into the mysteries, and were not satisfied until their pupils had acquired the art of blowing smoke-rings in the air."
A History of Smoking
"Why has smoking been so readily accepted into so many different cultures, where it has been the subject of creation myths and demonologies? What is the secret of its strange compulsion, which causes experiment to lead to slavery? And why, ultimately, a generation after the practice has been revealed as a killer, does it persist, and even multiply?"
-Iain Gately
La Diva Nicotina: The Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World
"....There is, however, archaeological evidence proving that smoking was going on around the Shakespeare household in Stratford-upon-Avon during his life, and fingers have been pointed at the bard. Recent investigations have uncovered a number of clay pipes from residues of tobacco, cannabis, and unidentified hallucinogen and cocaine."
-Iain Gately
Ibid
"Whatever Aristotle and all the philosophers may say, there is nothing like Tobacco; it is the passion of all proper people, and he who lives without tobacco has nothing to live for. Not only does it refresh and cleanse men’s brains, but it guides their souls in the ways of virtue, and by it one learns to be a man of honor. Do you not see how readily men offer their tobacco right and left, wherever they are? No one waits to be asked; he anticipates another’s wish; so it is true that tobacco begets honorable and virtuous sentiments in all those who use it."
(a character of Moliere’s comedy of Don Juan 1655)
"I have had no experience of tobacco except in its botanical aspects; I have never smoked or even tried to do so, simply from principle (or obstinacy, if you like!). My father too was a rigid non-smoker. When we consider the enormous number of things which our modern civilization has taught us to regard as necessities it seems to me an advantage in the struggle for existence to know nothing of so tyrannous a ‘necessity’ as tobacco."
Professor Haeckel
"Tobacco, is a filthy and abominable vice; but the recognition of the fact does not stop me from thoroughly enjoying a cigar, especially in my leisure time, or when I am writing."
Ludwig Anzengruber
"Tolstoy sought for an explanation of the enormous popularity of smoking, and believed that he had found it in man’s desire to stifle the voice of conscience. "The brain," he wrote , "becomes numbed by the nicotine," and the conscience expires."
"That men who have reached a higher stage of moral development are able to give up smoking altogether, while others fall back into the habit as soon as they find themselves in the sort of low company which is given to the vice? Verily man is at once a beast and a spiritual being! The stamping out of this fearful disease (the habitual use of strong drink and tobacco) would mean a new era in the history of mankind.
Tolstoy
"Smoking has always been somewhat daring and has become much more so since the 1960s....There's a commercially approved way of being daring, and it's called smoking cigarettes."
David Drogh
Smoking: The Artificial Passion
"I'll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell if for a dollar. It's addictive, and there's fantastic brand loyalty."
-Warren Buffett
"Today's smokers have no less than Christopher Columbus to thank for introducing them to the pleasures and hazards of smoking. A South American native in a canoe reportedly gave Columbus some tobacco leaves when he first landed in the New World in 1492. Later, explorers spotted the natives smoking from a Y-shaped contraption called a tobaca. It was an early version of the pipe, guaranteed to give users a concentrated hit. The two prongs were put into the nostrils while the end of the pipe was set in burning tobacco leaves. Centuries before modern scientists would debate the addictive nature of tobacco, Columbus had it figured out. Watching his sailors puff away the hours, he noted that "it was not within their power to refrain" from it. Columbus's men took the new plant back to Europe, where for the next 50 years it was a smelly vice of sailors and a curiosity cultivated by botanists."
Tara Parker-Pope
Cigarettes: Anatomy of an Industry From Seed to Smoke
"Smoking is a strange habit. Nobody really knows how or why man first came up with the idea of setting fire to a batch of brown tobacco leaves and then sucking the acrid smoke down into his lungs."
ibid
"Cigarettes free the soldier by momentarily making the cruelty of his condition; their effect is less that of producing a narcotic sensation that of permitting an intellectual stance detached from reality-one that, Janus-like, invites the return of nostalgia or speculates in dreamy anticipation. But cigarettes are more than therapy. It is not enough merely to assert that though bad for health, they provide remedies for ills of the spirit. In fact, cigarettes serve soldiers in other ways, more puzzling and in peacetime less apparent. Consider the enigmatic assertion of General Lasalle (1755-1809), a Napoleonic hero who, before he fell valiantly, at the battle of Wagram, is reputed to have said: "A bussard must smoke; a cavalryman who does not smoke is a bad soldier." What does this mean? The general's claim that there is a link between smoking and being a good soldier is not argued; it is merely asserted, apodictally like one of those mute Marlboro or Camel advertisements that have only the vivid image of a man clearly accustomed to pitting his strength against the forces of nature.
At times in recent history refusing to smoke was considered anti-American, a rejection of a certain idea- some might call it a myth-of the heroic linked to the pathos of the frontier. By heroism is meant in the strict Hegelian sense, courage in the face of death, looking death in the face. When one smokes, one does not merely suck a tit of consolation: cigarette smoke is not always, not often, perhaps never mother's milk-it mostly tastes bad, produces a faint nausea, induces the feeling of dying a little every time one takes a puff. But it is the poison in cigarettes that recommends them to the heroic-a strong poison; it takes an infinitesimally smaller amount of nicotine to kill an adult than it does of, say heroin or cocaine. in every puff there is a little taste of death, which makes cigarettes the authentic discipline of good soldiers."
Richard Klein
Cigarettes Are Sublime
"You ask me what we need to win this war. I answer tobacco as much as bullets."
General John J. Pershing (in an urgent cable to Washington in WWI)
"During World War II (1941-45), President Franklin D. Roosevelt legitimized smoking by declaring tobacco an essential wartime crop. Even Army training manuals of the day urged leaders to "smoke and make your troopers smoke." Gen. Douglas MacArthur himself demanded a better supply of tobacco in the soldier's daily ration. He ordered that $10 million raised for the war effort "be used to purchase American cigarettes, which, of all personal comforts, are the most difficult to obtain here."
Tara Parker-Pope
Cigarettes: Anatomy of an Industry From Seed to Smoke
"Tobacco is certainly the most equivocal substance in daily human use. According to the World Health Organization. 'The tobacco epidemic is a communicated disease. It is communicated through advertising, through the example of smokers and through the smoke to which non-smokers-especially children-are exposed. Our job is to immunize people against this epidemic.' However, to the 1.2 billion smokers of the world, tobacco is not just a killer, but a pleasure, a comforter and a friend. for over five centuries, tobacco has been integrated into cultures as diverse as mankind itself, each of which has evolved justifications for using the weed, some ancient, others original. Although tobacco has lost most of its religious associations, many of the oldest reasons for smoking are still in use, and still valid. Tobacco has recently been discovered to protect against some of the most devastating ailments of old age, including Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. It also has been shown to guard against cancer of the womb. As to tobacco's association with contemplation and thought, there are centuries of precedents of eminent smokers, who cannot be dismissed as simply victims of their ages or habits. Many great men and women have left elegant testimonies to their tobacco habits, which will be joined, I believe, with others made in centuries to come."
Iain Gately
La Diva Nicotine: The Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World
"We don't yet know what evil genius came up with the scheme to associate the continued manufacture of cigarettes with prudence, using the call for "more research" to slow the threat of regulation, but it must rank as one of the greatest triumphs of American corporate connivance. The idea was that people would continue to smoke so long as they could be reassured that "no one really knows" the true cause of cancer. The strategy was to question all assertions to the contrary, all efforts to "close" the controversy, as if closure itself were a mark of dogma, the enemy of inquiry. The point was to keep the question of health harms open, for decades if possible. Cancer after all was a complex disease with multiple causes, all of which would have to be explored without rushing to any kind of judgment. We owed as much to those poor souls suffering from this terrible scourge, we had to keep an open mind, leaving the question of causation open. Do you want to close down research? Can't you keep an open mind?"
-Robert N. Proctor & Londa Schiebinger
Agnotology: The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance
"a deep dichotomy between reason and irrationality can be seen in the world’s tremendous appetite for alcohol and caffeine. Alcohol is the liberator of the irrational. Caffeine is the stimulator of the rational. It would appear that the human spirit craves both poles and turns to these most familiar of drugs to achieve those ends."
Braun
The Science and love of Alcohol and Caffeine
"The erotic reputation that has surround chocolate since the time of the Aztecs continues unabated; one has only to watch chocolate commercials. Although it is a mild stimulant containing caffeine and theobromine and ‘chocoholics’ are not exactly hard-core drug addicts, chocolate is, at least in the Western world, the first drug that most individuals experience; the toddler’s desire for more chocolate foreshadows the use of other, more potent, psychoactive substances later in life."
Richard Rudgley
"The Encyclopedia of Psycho-Active Substances
"We need to free ourselves from the superstition that that which is legal is, for that reason, something we approve of."
William F. Buckley
**********************
"All excess is ill, but drunkenness is of the worst sort. It spoils health, dismounts the mind and unmans men. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous and bad."
William Penn
"Thanks be to God, since my leaving drinking of wine, I do find myself much better, and do mind my business better, and do spend less money, and less time lost in idle company."
Samuel Pepys (1660)
"It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the amount of money that goes out of the country as a consequence. Everybody is using coffee; this must be prevented….."
Frederick the Great (Prussia 1777)
In Russia the official term for alcoholics is "partial suicides."
ONE STUDY ESTIMATED THAT 106,000 HOSPITAL PATIENTS DIE AND 2.2 MILLION ARE INJURED EACH YEAR BY ADVERSE REACTIONS TO PRESCRIPTION DRUGS
Long-term marijuana use does not seem to adversely affect mental function, according to a study of 1,318 Baltimore residents. Twelve years after they were first given a standard test of mental ability, volunteers’ average scores had declined only slightly. Those who admitted to having smoked marijuana, even heavily, were no more likely to show signs of impaired mental function than people who had never tried the drug, researchers report in the May 1 American Journal of Epidemiologie
"This is the food of paradise....Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected."
Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
"Governmental resistance to the medical marijuana represents a triumph of ideology over science."
Jacob Sullum
This is your Brain on Conservation
Red eyes, impaired coordination, and misbehavior in school are the clearest signs that a child may have a drug problem. But there may be less obvious clues, according to "How Parents Can Help Children Live Marijuana Free," a pamphlet sponsored by the Salt Lake Education Foundation and featuring an introduction by U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. In addition to such evidence as spending "hours on the Internet" the guide warns against " excessive preoccupation with social causes, race relations, environmental issues, etc."
Chris Chiang
"No era agitates Americans quite like the sixties-ground zero for the contemporary culture war. In their heyday, the sixties conjured up a dreamy Woodstock nation reaching for social justice. The civil rights crusade spilled out of the churches and into the streets. Even the hippies "evoked the early Christians," declared Episcopal Bishop James Pike, when they celebrated peace, love, Jesus, Buddha, and the Hobbit. Popular magazines kept rolling out the same adjectives to describe a nation of young activists: gentle, idealistic, nonviolent, utopian, all-American. In startling contrast, recent critics recall a d decade of demons. The revised sixties plunged the nation into a spiritual abyss. Idealists? The destructive little nihilists razed our standards and trashed the culture. Peace and love? Richard Nixon served up the antidote. "To erase the grim legacy of Woodstock, we need a total war against drugs."
James A. Morone
Hellfire Nation
"by the early 1960s, though, something bigger was afoot than whether or not LSD was a truth drug. The public was discovering the wonders of the CIA's brainwashing drugs, and attitudes towards hallucinogens in the United States were shifting.
The shift had resulted partly from the fateful chain of events set in motion in September 1952, when Robert Graves had alerted Gordon Wasson to the existence of teonanacatl, the Flesh of God. This stage had culminated in 1957 with the publication of 'The Discovery of Mushrooms that Cause Strange Visions' in Life magazine That year, Graves visited Wasson in New York, and the two men spent an evening listening to a recording of Maria Sabina's mushroom ceremony. This, wrote Graves, was 'the most exciting event' of his stay in the United States.
On 31 January 1960 the pair listened to the recording again, this time after they had eaten some mushrooms. Graves found the experience revelatory. A week later he wrote to Wasson that 'this was not merely a red letter day but a day marked with all the colours of the rainbow'. The mushrooms, he said, had broken down the barriers in his consciousness with the result that 'I am now able to see pictures in my mind far more clearly than I did before." He concluded that the sacred mushrooms should be distributed across Europe and America. 'Why reserve these drugs for the mentally sick?' he wrote. "They should be given to the mentally whole. Especially to poets and artists.
Four months later he indulged again, this time taking synthetic psilocybin tables made by Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. On 8 July 1960 he reported to his friend William Sargant that the synthetic product did not compare favorably to the real thing. 'Don't be deceived,' he told the psychiatrist. 'It has left out the magical principle and sends you to Coney Island not to Eden (like the other).'
Dominic Steatfeild
Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
"....Hundreds of CIA agents were dosed (LSD) in the early 1050s. Many of them wrestled deeply with their psyches, rolling around, laughing, crying, and even praising God. According to Lee: "One MK-ULTRA veteran wept in front of his colleagues at the end of his first trip. 'I didn't want to leave it,' he explained. 'I felt I would be going back to a place where I wouldn't be able to hold on to this kind of beauty.' " Despite several responses of this sort, none of the spooks are known to have changed their minds about their sometimes violent mission on behalf of state authority. they did, however get a bit carried away with the acid, sometimes dosing themselves above and beyond the call of duty. According to Lee, by 1954, there was a growing "sense that the MK-ULTRA was becoming unhinged by the hallucinogen.....The straw that broke the camel's back came when a Security informant got wind of a plan by a few....jokers to put LSD in the punch served at the annual CIA Christmas office part," The plan was scotched and the after-hours tripping was brought to an end. (Agents who had taken LSD were dubbed "enlightened operatives" by the CIA.)
Ken Goffman
Counter Culture Through the Ages
"Four hours later the kava was still speaking. Geckos chirped loudly on the ceiling of the bungalow as I lay flat on my back laughing-covered in perspiration. Adrift in a sea of wild visions, I saw myself barefooted wandering the sacred turtle trails with a procession of Tannese warriors. Like the other men, my buttocks were bared and my dick was wrapped up in a nambas. The warm stiffened straw felt good against my skin. Glistening female bodies were dancing all around me, nudging me with their shoulders, their hips, their breasts and thigh's. There was the swishing sound of grass skirts, laughter and the intoxicating sweet sensual scent of women aroused. Everywhere I looked there were clapping hands., swaying hips and jiggling firm brown breasts with stiffened nipples. Over-whelmed by the jostling of hot, wet, undulating bodies all around me I felt myself go hard and thanked God I was wearing the nambas.
Down on the beach, I thought I heard the sound of conch shells being blow, but I didn't have the strength of the will to get up to investigate. It was all I could do to keep pace with the hallucinations of what looked like twelve-foot-long geckos fornicating upside down on the ceiling and attacking mosquitoes the size of seagulls. Moments of darkness mingled with dreams of wandering across a forest clearing bathed in silvery moonlight. People were laughing or screaming. I couldn't tell if the sounds were coming from outside my hut or from inside my head, and at some point I fell unconscious."
-Eric Hansen story of drinking Kava
The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer
THE MAN WHO GAVE US THE DRUG WAR
"Dr. Hamilton Wright was famous for his discovery that beriberi is an infectious disease. It isn't. It's a vitamin deficiency, but by the time his error was uncovered he had already married well. Very well in fact-to the daughter of Senator W.D. Washburn, head of the Republican Party.
When Dr. Wright moved to Washington his new father-in-law got him a job as a delegate to the Chinese Opium Commission of 1909. This conference, aimed at helping the Chinese with their opium problem, was billed as an American good will gesture. The actual intent was to pull the rug out from under the British and open China's vast markets to US merchants.
But Dr. Wright who always suspected he was destined for greatness, took the assignment seriously and by the time he returned from China he had persuaded himself that opium addiction was a global scourge. His mission would be to save the world from the evil of narcotics.
He faced daunting odds. The other key players-England, France, the Netherlands did not share Wright's horror of opium. A British study had recently concluded that opium addiction was no worse than alcoholism and maybe not as bad. But Wright's moral certainty finally carried the day on Capitol Hill. Badgering superiors and threatening foreign ambassadors, Wright managed to get the State Department to convent two follow-on conferences at Hague in spite of resistance from almost every other nation involved.
In the end they all caved in and agreed to control cultivation, manufacture, and distribution of narcotics. Wright was able to achieve this stunning reversal through simple deception. At the Hague he said the United States was demanding narcotics control, then back in Washington he squeezed Congress with fabricated demands from the Hague.
The U.S. legislation that Wright engineered finally made it through Congress in the winter of 1914 and at first glance the Harrison Narcotics Act appeared to be just a means of gathering information. It called on everybody in the drug trade to purchase a license and keep precise records. The bill passed in minutes. The New York Times didn't even mention it.
But Hamilton Wright had installed a land mine in the language, an extra clause that enabled federal agents to decree that all narcotics addicts should go cold turkey. Most addicts at the time were productive citizens with jobs, homes and a medical problem. Overnight they went from patients to criminals.
Today, as a direct result of using lawmen to supervise doctors we have 30 million Americans under treated for chronic pain. And what did we get in return? After spending $1 trillion over the last 90 years the rate of narcotics addiction in the US has increased 500 percent."
-Mike Gray
Drug Crazy
WHY the DRUG WAR LIVES
It’s a useful tool for politicians seeking to whip up the electorate
It profits the prison industry and even the weapons industry
Legalization would threaten the profits of the pharmaceutical, tobacco and alcohol industries
Users of marijuana and psychedelics are less enamored of material consumption, so legalization would threaten the profit of those promoting consumerism."
Drug prohibition facilitates control of the population
Enforcement agencies (police,DEA ,customs,etc.)profit greatly from the civil asset forfeiture laws.
The illegality and high prices for heroin and cocaine allows the CIA to obtain secret funding for its activities
The Drug War has lead to draconian "money laundering " laws, which are a way for the U.S. to pry into the details of everyone’s financial transactions.
The Drug War provides an excuse for invasion of South and Central American countries (possibly Canada)
Following the demise of the Red threat another scapegoat is needed and "drugs (drug users) are it.
The Drug War is a tool of racism, providing an excuse to disenfranchise the black population
The DEA is a major bureaucracy and lives from the Drug War, so it is in the interests of the DEA to keep the "drug menace" on the front burner.
Puritanism is a major component of the American Psyche, and the advocates of drug prohibition appeal to this.
For the U.S. Govt. to reverse its stance on drug prohibition would mean admitting it was wrong , which it will never do.
Peter Webster
Rethinking Drug Prohibition
"Official corruption will be a major problem as long as we cling to the present drug policies."
-Joseph D. McNamara (former Police Chief of San Jose, Ca. and Kansas City, Mo.)
Book: "Drug War Crimes" by Jeffrey Miron
"Prisoners pass their days in narrow, ill-lit cages; there are no chairs or tables, so the men pace up and down like zoo animals or slouch upon the floor."
(from William F. Buckley Jr. Misfire On Drug Policy
National Review /Feb 26,1996
(Report)
Don’t DRINK,
DON"T SMOKE
WHAT DO YOU DO?
From a report by Tom Zoellner, Salt Lake Tribune,
Two college students were smoking cigarettes on a Salt Lake City street Saturday were confronted by a gang of twenty bleach-haired teenagers wielding chains, bricks, and a giant spray can of pepper gas. A violent gang called Straight Edge is being blamed for the brawl that took place in front of the Pie restaurant, which put one University of Utah student in the hospital after he was beaten on the head with a baseball bat.
The fists started flying at about 1:15 A.M. when some members of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity were leaving The Pie after a night of drinking beer.
A pair of Straight Edgers reportedly confronted two fraternity members and told them to put out their cigarettes. After an exchange of words, a gang member purportedly threw a large metal bolt at the fraternity members.
Witnesses said the Straight Edgers went back to their cars as if to leave, but came running back with bats, chains, a hatchet, and other fearsome weaponry in their hands.
Straight Edgers blend the punk-rock style of the early 1980s with militant health standards. They do not drink, smoke, or take drugs, and some are known to enforce their moral standards on strangers by beating them severely. Some vegetarian members of the group have been responsible for firebombing leather stores, vandalizing egg trucks, and torching a West Jordan McDonald’s restaurant, said Sergeant Chuck Gilbert of the Salt Lake City Police Department’s gang unit.
It is not uncommon behavior for them to cruise around looking for cigarette smokers or beer drinkers to harass, headed. "They’ll get four or five of them in a car to look for someone smoking cigarettes and then they’ll beat the tar out of them."
Last year, a gravel pit in Kearns was the site of two mass battles between Straight Edgers and a rival group who, in open defiance of the Straight Edge ethos, called themselves "Smoke More Pot."
"The idea of drug use in religions is a very controversial subject. It is also a subject about which many people are rather sensitive, preferring to consider such usage as an aberration of the distant past; yet it remains a topic that ignorance will not make go away. In a time when wars are being waged against drug use and all non-prescription drugs are lumped together as the enemy, it is more important than ever to speak openly and rationally about drugs, especially those that serve a useful and relatively benign purpose."
Clark Heinrich
Strange Fruit: Alchemy and Religion
Peyote
"But, I repeat, I am going to make an effort to overcome all these obstacles and I will pray to Jesus Christ especially on this subject, for it is He who is behind my whole voyage to Mexico and it is He, the Word of God, whom the Tarahumara worship, as I was able to observe in the Rite of Tutaguri which takes place exactly at the rising of the Sun.
And they sometimes recognized this and told me so when two impressions of the Face of Christ were shown them….."
(from a letter written by Antonin Artaud from the Hospital
psychiatrique Rodez, Aveyron 1937)
" The informed use of entheogenic, consciousness-enhancing plants and drugs presents a direct and powerful challenge to any system that seeks to spoon-feed the masses with false ideals of nationalism, racism, sexism or pre-digested religion, and this is precisely the reason they have been criminalized…."
Clark Heinrich
"I took Peyote in the mountains of Mexico and I had a dose of it that lasted two or three days with the Tarahumara, and at the time those three days seemed like the happiest days of my life.
I had stopped tormenting myself, trying to find a reason for my life, and I had stopped having to carry my body around.
I realized that I was inventing life, that that was my function and rason d’etre, and that I suffered when my imagination failed, and Peyote gave it to me."
Antonin Artaud
A note on Peyote 1936
"There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby, and invisible. And there is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints, a world where everything has already happened and everything is known. That world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says. The sacred Mushroom takes me by the hand and brings me to the world where everything is known. It is they, the sacred mushrooms, that speak in a way I can understand. I ask them and they answer me. When I return from the trip that I have taken with them, I tell what they have told me and what they have shown me."
Maria Sabina
Mazatec Shaman
"Wow, I have learned more in six hours than in the last sixteen years!"
from a letter to Arthur Koestler from Timothy Leary
"We are not drug addicts, we are not criminals, we are free men, and we will react to persecution the way free men have always reacted....I'd rather see the prison system become inoperable....We would have to regard these places as concentration camps where people are being imprisoned because of their religion....I would resort to violence."
-Art Kleps (testimony before the U.S. Senate)
"The CIA bought a property in San Francisco-225 Chestnut Street-where they ran a brothel. Entitled "Operation Midnight Climax", prostitutes were paid $100 a night to lure customers. The men would be plied with LSD-laced drinks while CIA agents observed the effects of the drugs and any bedroom action from behind two-way mirrors. They also worked with doctors at the National Narcotics Hospital where they gave unknowing black patients steadily increasing doses over a 75-day period. Plans were also drawn up to try and dose a whole platform of people on the New York subway. Agents even set Timothy Leary on the path to become a global advocate for the drug.
The CIA appears to have stopped testing LSD in 1966, causing one of those involved -George Hunter White, a narcotics officer seconded to the project-to comment. "I was a minor missionary, but I toiled wholeheartedly because it was fun, fun, fun."
-David Southwell
Secrets and Lies
"There is much hype about scientific discoveries. Hyperbole such as "revolutionary" and "paradigm-shifting" are used in the same way advertising people use "major new advance in whiteness" to sell soap power.
In 1953, Francis Crick went into his local pub in Cambridge on a February evening and told the whole pub that: "We have found the secret of life." For once, someone was not exaggerating. Crick and his colleague Dr. James Watson had worked out the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and that it could unzip to make copies of itself.
This discovery revolutionized biology, medicine and how we see the world. It led to the creation of the biotechnology industry and provides hope that through genetics we may conquer some of the worst diseases to afflict the human race. Much has been written about the discover, but the role LSD plays is almost always ignored.
Crick told biochemist Richard Kemp that he often used small doses of LSD to boost his powers of thought and that he had first perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD, using the vision as a basis for his research. This staggering revelation, as well as Crick's idea that life on Earth began when a spaceship from a higher civilization dropped micro-organisms, is rarely mentioned in any scientific literature.
Francis Crick was not alone in the world of science when it comes to the creative use of LSD. Dr. Gary Mullis, the 1993 Nobel Prize Winner for Chemistry and inventor of PCR-without which genetic engineering would be impossible-claimed in an interview that: "I doubt I would have invented PCR if I hadn't taken LSD. It allowed me to sit on a DNA molecule and watch the polymers go by."
While there is a blue plaque in the Eagle pub in Cambridge city centre to mark where Crick made his dramatic statement, there is no corresponding commemoration of the place where he took the LSD that led to his revelation about the double helix. Were it not for scientific hypocrisy and small mindedness, there would be."
-David Southwell
Secrets and Lies
"On May 15,1952, Dulles and Wisner received a a report on Project Artichoke, spelling out the agency's four-year effort to test heroin, amphetamines, sleeping pills, the newly discovered LSD, and other "special techniques in CIA interrogations." Part of the project sought to find an interrogation technique so strong that "the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning." A few months later, Dulles approved an ambitious new program code-named Ultra. Under its auspices, seven prisoners at a federal penitentiary in Kentucky were kept high on LSD for seventy-seven consecutive days. When the CIA slipped the same drug to an army civilian employee, Frank Olson, he leaped out of the window of a New York hotel. Like the suspected double agents sent to the secret brig in Panama, these men were expendable conscripts in the battle to defeat the Soviets."
-Tim Weiner
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
"I have been born again. I have just been through a psychiatric experience that has completely changed me. It was horrendous, I had to face things about myself that I never admitted. I was an utter fake, a self-opinionated bore, a know-all who knew very little."
-Cary Grant
"I felt that the saint children-elevated me. I don't feel like that anymore. The force has diminished.."
Maria Sabina
"What is terrible is that the sacred mushrooms no longer belong to us. The language has been spoiled and is indecipherable to us....Now the mushrooms speak English!"
Apolonia Terran (a friend of Maria Sabina's)
"From the sublime to the ridiculous? For serious acid troopers , the sublime and the ridiculous are one and the same. So....is Polyphonic Spree a parody of a psychedelic cult performing letter-perfect orchestral flower power psychedelic anthems in a spirit of deeply camouflaged snark? Or are they a hollow-but-brilliant, earnest-but mannerist presentation of pop psychedelia just for the hell of It? Or are they authentically cosmic and strange neohippie innocents? Considering that David Bowie had them open for him on his "Reality Tour," I'd guess they are all three at once."
R.U. Sirius
Everybody Must Get Stoned: Rock Stars on Drugs
"the sad thing about the Sixties was the weak mindedness of the so-called radicals and the way that they managed to get co-opted. I think one of the things that helped that happen was LSD."
-Frank Zappa
"Whether joyful or dark, the drug vision can be astonishing, but eventually....the magic show grows boring....Drugs can clear away the past, enhance the present; toward the inner garden, they can only point the way. Lacking the temper of ascetic discipline, the drug vision remains a sort of dream that cannot be brought over into daily life. Old mists may be banished....but the alien chemical agent forms another mist, maintaining the separation of the "I" from the true experience of the One."
Peter Matthiessen
"This question of drugs is very old; they have been taking drugs in India for thousands of years. At one time it was called soma, now it is hashish and pan; they haven't yet reached the highly sophisticated level of LSD, but they probably will very soon now. People take hashish and pan in order to becomes less sensitive; they get lost in the perfume of it, in the different visions it produces and accentuates. These drugs are generally taken by the laborers, the manual workers (here you do not have "untouchables" as they are called in India). They take drugs because their lives are dreadfully dull; they have not much food, so they haven't much energy. The only two things they have are sex and drugs.
The truly religious man the man who really wants to find out what truth is, what life is-not from books, not from religious entertainers, not from philosophers who only stimulate intellectually-such a man will have nothing whatever to do with drugs, because he knows full well that they distort the mind, making it incapable of finding what truth is."
J. Krishnamurti
"…the young men have a rude health which runs into peccant humours. They drink brandy like water. They chew hasheesh….taste every poison…."
Emerson
Essay on English Traits 1856
Why Marijuana?
"It makes you feel good, man. It relaxes you, makes you forget all the bad things that happen to a Negro. It makes you feel wanted, and when you’re with another tea smoker it makes you feel a special sense of kinship."
Louis Armstrong
Who created the Drug War?
"Soft-headed psychiatrists who work in places like NIMH (National Institute for Mental Health), favor marijuana because they’re probably all on the stuff themselves."
Richard Nixon (June 15,1971)
(President Nixon) emphasized that you have to face the fact the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to…."
H.R. Halderman (to his diary)
"Narcotics suppression is a very sexy political issue. It usually has high media visibility. Parents who are voters are worried about narcotics. They listen to a politician when he talks about drug suppression just as they seem to tune him out when he makes speeches about the energy problem. Therefore, the White House often wants to be involved in narcotics problems even when it doesn’t need to be….For example, the Feds went into street enforcement partly in response to the obvious political mileage to be gained."
-former white house adviser John Ehrlichman in testimony
To the Senate Subcommittee ,July 28,1976
"The United States Today is both the World's largest importer of illicit drugs and the world's largest exporter of bad drug policy"
Foreign Policy Magazine May/June 2009
"Mistrust those in whom the impulse to punish is strong."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"Drug Czar William Bennett recently alleged that the "estimated frequent use of Cocaine" has doubled since 1985, despite National Institute of Drug Abuse evidence that the number of those using the drug actually dropped by 48% between 1985 and 1988.
"If the government cannot stop people from using drugs in the prisons over which it has total control, why should Americans forfeit any of their traditional civil rights in the hope of reducing the drug problem?"
Inmate (Federal Correctional Institution El Reno, Oklahoma. TIME Oct 16,1989)
"The only societies that can "solve" such problems are totalitarian dictatorships."
Steve Allen
"The Narcotraficantes’ are simply ‘Primitive but efficient capitalists….catering to a hungry market-the 25 million Americans who use or abuse drugs, and who pay $50 billion each year to get them."
Gustavo Goriti
Specimens of marijuana nearly 4,000 years old have turned up in Egyptian sites.
"….Marijuana for one has been involved with for so long, thousands of years, following campsites and settlements and the like, that there’s no information about what it was like in prehistory. It appears that some plants make some kind of evolutionary decision to become involved with our trip. Marijuana is very involved."
Andrew Weil
"Marijuana is….self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?"
P.J. O’Rourke
"Rolling Stone Magazine Nov 1989
TOBACCO
"There is one evil custom which is the forerunner of the Tempter himself. It is spreading among the general population as well as among the garrison forces. It is the unceasing use of the evil, stinking, poisonous weed named tobacco. The smoke from this drug defiles the sacred objects of worship, the Images, the Books, the Relics. It weakens the gods above, causes fighting among the Spirits of the Middle Air, and injures the Serpent Spirits below. From this cause arises an endless cycle of epidemics, wars, and famine in the human world."
Lohi-Cho-Jung
Religious History of South Tibet
"If alcohol is queen, then tobacco is her consort. It’s a fond companion for all occasions, a loyal friend through fair weather and foul. People smoke to celebrate a happy moment, or to hide a bitter regret. Whether you’re alone or with friends, it’s a joy for all the senses. What lovelier sight is there than that double row of white cigarettes, lined up like soldiers on parade and wrapped in silver paper?….I love to touch the pack in my pocket, open it, savor the feel of the cigarette between my fingers, touch the paper on my lips, the taste of tobacco on my tongue, love to watch the flame spurt up, love to watch it come closer and closer, filling me with its warmth."
Luis Bunuel (1900-1983)
"But when I don’t smoke I scarcely feel as if I’m living. I don’t feel as if I’m living unless I’m killing myself."
Russell Hoban
"Which is better: to have Fun with Fungi or to have Idiocy with Ideology, to have Wars because of Words, to have Tomorrow's Misdeeds out of Yesterday's Miscreeds?"
-Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
See (www.addictionsearch.com) offers a vast array of articles about addiction
The illegal drug business may be the third-biggest economy in the world today, with an annual value of $1.5 trillion to $5 trillion. And it could soon be bigger than the American economy. The estimate comes from a study by the Group of Seven (G-7) leading industrial nations, reports the independent newspaper in London, The G7 also estimates that at least $120 billion from the drug trade is laundered through the world’s financial system each year. The amount is nearly the same as investments in emerging markets last Year.
"The spread of coffee drinking during the Enlightenment was partly due to the fact that it fitted so well with the prevailing notions of the era, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch put it: ‘Coffee functioned as a historically significant drug….it spread through the body and achieved chemically and pharmacologically what rationalism and the Protestant ethic sought to fulfill spiritually and ideologically. With Coffee the principle of rationality entered human physiology.’
Richard Rudgley
The Encyclopedia of Psycho-Active Substances
"Among the estimated 100 million street children worldwide, volatile-substance-sniffing is widely practiced. It’s done to stay alert to possible violence, to bring on sleep, to dull physical and emotional pain, or as a substitute for food. The products selected are the cheapest and most readily available; glues in shoemaking areas; solvents where there is nearby industry. In Uganda, street children gulp the fumes of aviation fuel and petrol. In Guatemala, as many as nine out of ten rough-sleeping youngsters are thought to be dependent on paint thinner and cheap glue. A South African survey of a group of their own young homeless showed high levels of brain damage, with the ‘subjects’ unable properly to think, speak, remember things, or physically co-ordinate their movements."
Andrew Tyler
"It was through CIA links to the underground science community in the early 1960s that Ibogaine came to be discovered by researchers such as Howard Lotsof, who recognized those with addictions of any kind came out of the experience cured of their need for cocaine, heroin, alcohol or nicotine.
Today, more scientists are confirming that the drug-induced experience of stepping out of time, reviewing your life and meeting some form of "intelligence" (which often echo the descriptions of Bwiti) does cure addiction. Dr. Deborah Mash, professor of Neurology and Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at the University of Miami, has said: "I didn't believe it when I first heard about Ibogaine. I thought it was something that needed to be debunked but it is effective for blocking opiate withdrawal, diminishes the desire to use alcohol and blocks cocaine cravings."
David Southwell
Secrets and Lies
"The discovery of coffee was, in its way, as important as the invention of the telescope or the microscope....For coffee has unexpectedly intensified and modified the capacities and activities of the human brain."
Heinrich Eduard Jacob
"Intelligent people discussing interesting things in an intelligible manner. Quite a concept. Steele's newsletter became Tatler, the first modern magazine; his idea of correspondents and sections provided the prototype for the modern newspaper, the one institution that all agree is essential for a vital democracy (London's second oldest newspaper is Lloyds News, which began as a bulletin board in Lloyd's Coffeehouse.) Small wonder that pamphleteers of the time wrote that "coffee and commonwealth came in together.....to make a free and sober nation." Coffee-houses had made civilized conversation into a popular sport."
Stewart Lee Allen
The Devils Cup
"It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects....Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished by beer, and the king does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be relied on."
Frederick the Great (1777)
"The coffeehouses of Palais Royal present the most astonishing spectacle, crowded within and without by crowds listening to (impromptu) speeches.....the thunder of applause (with which) they receive every sentiment of violence against the present government cannot be easily imagined."
Arthur Young (English traveler visiting Paris 1789)
"For this sparkling outburst, there is no doubt that honor should be ascribed in part to the great event which created new customs and even modified human temperament-the advent of coffee....which brings forth the sparkle and the sunlight of truth."
Michelet
(Michelet goes so far as to categorize the French Enlightenment by the changing coffee supply. When the lighter beans of Yemen were available, the lighthearted cafes and salons of the aristos dominated. The medium-strength bean of Bourbon brought on the "sparkling verse of Voltaire". When the 'full, coarse' coffees of the Caribbean became the norm, the age turned dark and violent)
“a deep dichotomy between reason and irrationality can be seen in the world’s tremendous appetite for alcohol and caffeine. Alcohol is the liberator of the irrational. Caffeine is the stimulator of the rational. It would appear that the human spirit craves both poles and turns to these most familiar of drugs to achieve those ends.”
Braun
The Science and love of Alcohol and Caffeine
"I started this Coffecentric History of Humanity in Jest. After all, people have made similar charts based on the rise and fall of the hemline, and it would be absurd, even for me, to fail to acknowledge that historic events are spawned by a myriad of circumstances. But the coincidences at times seem overwhelming. When coffee was the sole provenance of the Arabs, their civilization flourished beyond all others. Once the Ottomans got hold of the bean, they became the most powerful and tolerant nation on the planet. Its early appearance in Great Britain helped jump-start that nation's drive for world dominance. It was in the cafe's of Paris that the French Revolution was born. Napoleon, a coffee lover equal to any, then led his countrymen to the domination of Europe, only to fall almost immediately after foolishly banning Paris's beloved petit noir; he repented, and his dying request was for a cup of St. Helena's espresso. As colonists, the Americans actually made tea illegal. They replaced it with joe, causing an inevitable power shift that continues today with Japan, traditionally tea-consuming, now doting on the finest Jamaican Blue Mountain.
Only three times has the West voluntarily dosed itself with mind-altering agents: alcohol starting at an unknown date, caffeine in the seventeenth century, and psychedelics in the late twentieth. How alcohol affected early society is impossible to measure, and the jury is still out on psychedelics. but it's worth noting that coffeeor caffeine) and psychedelics have been associated with strikingly similar cultural revolutions. Richard Steele drinking coffee and talking about reforming the monarchy is the same person as Abbie Hoffman smoking a joint and plotting how to resist the Vietnam War. Voltaire's caffeinated cynicism was as symptomatic of his era's favorite buzz as Ginsburg's was of his. Politically, the human rights movements of the 1700s (antimonarchical) and the 1900s (civil rights) both came to fruition as their associated pharmacies entered the mainstream. The coffee-crazed mobs of the French Revolution bear a certain resemblance to the pot-addled Vietnam War protesters of the 1960s. All this, by the way, is why American pundits should find consolation in the popularity of drugs like cocaine: despite their negative effects, it indicates Yanks still view getting wired as the preferred state of being. They should reserve their wails for the day when heroin and hot milk become the drugs of choice."
Stewart Lee Allen
The Devils Cup
Coffeepot give us peace
coffeepot let children grow
let our wealth swell
please protect us from evils
(ancient Ethiopian prayer)
"One need only compare the violent coffee-drinking societies of the West to the peace-loving tea drinker of the Orient to realize the pernicious and malignant effect that bitter brew has upon the human soul."
(Hindi dietary tract)
"In a coffee house just now among the rabble I
bluntly asked, which is the treason table."
Malone (1618)
"When the sweet Poison of the Treacherous Grape
Had acted on the world a general rape.....
Coffee arrives, that grave and wholesome liquor
That heals the stomach and makes the genius quicker."
(anonymous Puritan (1674)
" Aside from sobering up the workplace, coffeehouses gave Brits an alternative to taverns in which to meet and talk. Taverns were not the safest place to discuss politics or religion. Everybody was armed or drunk, usually both, and proprietors sensibly discouraged heated discussions. Coffeehouses, on the other hand encouraged political debate, which was precisely why King Charles II banned them in 1675 (he withdrew the ban in eleven days). Even worse, from the monarchists' point of view, cafes posted rules urging:
Gentry, tradesmen, sit down together,
Pre-eminence of place none here should mind
But take the next fit seat that he can find
Nor need any, if finer person come,
Rise up to assigne to them his room
This democratic inclination manifested itself most forcefully in London's famous Turk's Head Coffeehouse, where the ballot box, the foundation of modern democracy, first appeared so customers could safely voice their opinions on controversial political topics. This innovation occurred after the repressions of Oliver the Great and ensured that the government spies who plagued the cafe could not identify "traitors"."
Stewart Lee Allen
The Devil's Cup
"At breakfast Beethoven drank coffee, which he usually prepared himself in a percolator. Coffee seems to have been the nourishment with which he could least dispense and in his procedure with regard to its preparation he was as careful as the Orientals are known to be. Sixty beans to a cup was the allotment and the beans were often counted out exactly, Especially when guests were present"
Anton Schindler
"We qat chewers, if we are to believe everything that is said about us, are at best profligates, at worst irretrievable sinners. We are in the thrall of the 'the curse of Yemen' and 'the greatest corrupting influence on the country' (two British ambassadors to San'a); we are in danger of 'loss of memory, irritability, general weakness and constipation', and from our water-pipes 'there is certainly a danger of getting a chancre on the lips' (Handbook of Arabia,1917); worse, we are prone to 'anorexia' and to becoming 'emotionally unstable, irritable, hyperactive and easily provoked to anger, eventually becoming violent' (Journal of Substance Abuse,1988), while in Somalia, qat has 'starved the country's children' and 'exacerbates a culture of guns and violence' (San Francisco Chronicle,1993); even if we don't turn nasty, we 'doze and dribble green saliva like cretinous infants with a packet of bulls-eyes' )the English writer David Holden). In Saudi Arabia we would be punished more severely than alcohol drinkers; in Syria blue-eyed Muhammad would be swinging on the end of a rope.
In contrast to the above quasi-scientific poppycock, the only full and serious study of the effects of qat (Kennedy's-funded, it should be noted, by the US National Institute of Drug Abuse) concludes that the practice appears to have no serious physical or psychological effects. Yemenis themselves, while admitting that their habit is expensive, defend it on the grounds that it stimulates mental activity and concentration; they point out that at least the money spent on it remains within the national economy.
Qat has inspired a substantial body of literature. Compare, for example, Holden's dribbling infants with a description of a handsome chewer by the seventeenth-century poet Ibrahim al-hindi:
Hearts melted at his slenderness. And as he chewed, his mouth resembled
Pearls which have formed on carnelian and, between them, an emerald melting.
As well as poetry, there is a weighty corpus of scholarly literature on the legality of qat in Islam. It has been unable to find any analogy between the effects of the leaf and those of the prohibited narcotics. In the end, though, the question of its desirability and permissibility resolve around matters of politics, taste, ethnocentrism and sectarian prejudice."
Tim Mackintosh-Smith
Yemen-The Unknown Arabia
"Pilots occasionally used amphetamines during the Second World War, but the USAF expanded their use during the 1991 Desert Storm campaign. Half of the pilots in the conflict took amphetamines. They were prescribed for the nocturnal bombing runs. Depressants, or sedatives-"no-go pills"- were given to help them sleep through the heat and noise of the day, John Pike, a senior defense analyst, describes the policy as :"Better bombing through chemistry."
While the drugs are legal when given by a doctor and pilots can refuse to take them, by the time of the US war in Afghanistan almost no pilots were drug free out of fear of what would happen to their careers if they said no. The "go pill" most commonly used by the USAF is Dexedrine. Made by the UK's GlaxoSmithKline, it is used in medicine for treating narcolepsy. The company warns it has a "high potential for abuse" and "may impair the ability to engage in potential hazardous activities such as operating machinery or vehicles".
Even the flight surgeon's Guide to Performance Maintenance During Continuous Flight Operations mentions that likely side effects are "euphoria, depression and addition". It also mentions "idiosyncratic reactions" such as increased paranoia and aggression, which probably sound quite attractive to the military."
-David Southwell
Secrets and Lies
Methamphetamine
"in the U.S. 78 percent of users are white, 13 percent Hispanic and 4 percent black: 78 percent are male, and 82 percent are 26 years of age and over. In 2004, 1.4 million people used methamphetamine and 800,000 used it in the past month
"As the party gets into full swing, and beer and pot are making the participants feel no pain, a few Amish girls huddle and make plans to jointly rent an apartment in a nearby town when they turn eighteen, as some older girls have already done. Others shout in Pennsylvania Dutch and in English about how much it will cost to travel to and attend an Indianapolis rock concert, and the possibilities of having a navel pierced or hair cut buzz short. One bunch of teens dances to music videos shown on a laptop computer; a small group of guys, near a barn, distributes condoms.
As the parties wear on, the Amish youth become even less distinguishable from their English peers, shedding their demureness, mimicking the -in-your-face postures of the mainstream teen culture, with its arrogance, defiance, raucousness, inner-city-gang hand motions and exaggerated walking stances."
Amish youth experiencing Rumspringa
by Tom Shachman
Rumspringa
Even the Amish?
"In the Brave New World of my fable there was no whiskey, no tobacco, no illicit heroin, no bootlegged cocaine. People neither smoked, nor drank, nor sniffed, nor give themselves injections. Whenever anyone felt depressed or below par, he would swallow a tablet or two of a chemical compound called soma. The original soma, from which I took the name of this hypothetical drug, was an unknown plant (possibly Asclepias acida) used by the ancient Aryan invaders of India in one of the most solemn of their religious rites. The intoxicating juice expressed from the stems of this plant was drunk by the priests and nobles in the course of an elaborate ceremony. In the Vedic hymns we are told that the drinkers of soma were blessed in many ways. Their bodies were strengthened, their hearts were filled with courage, joy and enthusiasm, their minds were enlightened and in an immediate experience of eternal life they received the assurance of their immortality. But the sacred juice had its drawbacks. Soma was a dangerous drug-so dangerous that even the great sky-god Indra, was sometimes made ill by drinking it. Ordinary mortals might even die of an overdose. But the experience was so transcendently blissful and enlightening that soma drinking was regarded as a high privilege. For this privilege no price was too great.
The soma of Brave New World had none of the drawbacks of its Indian original. In small doses it brought a sense of bliss, in larger doses it made you see visions and if you took three tablets, you would sink in a few minutes into refreshing sleep. And all at no physiological or mental cost. The Brave new Worlders could take holidays from their black moods, or from the familiar annoyances of everyday life, without sacrificing their health or permanently reducing their efficiency.
In the Brave New World the soma habit was not a private vice; it was a political institution, it was the very essence of the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness guaranteed by the bill of Rights. But this most precious of the subjects' inalienable privileges was at the same time one of the most powerful instruments of rule in the dictator's armory. The systematic drugging of individuals for the benefit of the State (and incidentally, of course, for their own delight) was a main plank in the policy of the World Controllers. The daily soma ration was an insurance against personal maladjustment, social unrest and the spread of subversive ideas. Religion, Karl Marx declared, is the opium of the people. In the Brave New World this situation was reversed. Opium, or rather soma, was the people's religion. Like religion, the drug had power to console and compensate, it called up visions of another, better world, it offered hope, strengthened faith and promoted charity. Beer, a poet has written,
....does more than Milton can
to justify God's ways to man.
And let us remember that, compared with soma, beer is a drug of the crudest and most unreliable kind. In this matter of justifying God's ways to man, soma is to alcohol as alcohol is to the theological arguments of Milton.
-Aldous Huxley
Brave New World Revisited
"When we look back at the history of rock and roll, it is almost exclusively populated by people from two categories: (1) Those Who Got Fucked Up, and....(2) Those Who Got Really Fucked Up."
-David Crosby
"I don't need drugs to make my life tragic."
-Eddie Vedder
"I think in the 21st century drug-taking is something that is synonymous with life."
-Kele Okereke, Bloc Party (2007)
"The United States has become the psychiatric drugging capital of the world, medicating children at younger age."
-Evelyn Pringle
"Although drugs are "immoral" and must be kept from the young, thousands of schools pressure parents to give the drug Ritalin to any lively child who may, sensibly show signs of boredom in his classroom. Ritalin renders the child docile if not comatose. Side effects? Stunted growth, facial tics, agitation and aggression, insomnia, appetite loss, headaches, stomach pains and seizures." Marijuana would be far less harmful."
-Gore Vidal
**************************************
Article: "U.S. Drug Move Said to Deprive Elderly" by Duff Wilson New York Times March 24,2010 "We're taking nursing staff away from the patients' bedside to do all this falderal to make the D.E.A. happy"
Books: "Marijuana; The First Twelve Thousand Years…by E.L. Abel
"Food of the Gods" by Terrance McKenna
Book: "This is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America."-Ryan Grim
Book: "Prescribed: Writing, Filling, Using, and Abusing the Prescription in Modern America" ed by Jeremy A. Greene and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins
Book: "Drugs For Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health" by Joseph Dumit
Book: "The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America" Don Lattin
Book: "Waiting for the Man: The Story of Drugs and Popular Music" by Harry Shapiro
"The coca leaf and cocaine Papers" by G. Andrews & D. Solomon
Book: Addiction by Design: machine Gambling in Las Vegas" by Natsha Dow Shull
" Cocaine" Dominic Streatfeild
"CRAZE: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason" by Jessica Warner
"Plants ,People, and Culture: The Science of Ethno botany"
Book: Cleansing The Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals" by Huston Smith
Book: "Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness" by Giorgio Samorini
"the Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine" by S. Braun
"Intoxication" by DR. Siegel
"The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethno pharmacology and its Applications" by Christian Ratsch
Book: "The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics, 1500-2000" By Richard Davenport-Hines
"Out Of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication" by Stuart Walton
"The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances" by Richard Rudgley
"Storming Heaven" by Jay Stevens
Book: "Drugs and the Making of the Modern World." By David Courtright
Book: "The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics" by Richard Davenport-Hines
Book: "Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization" by Iain Gately
Book: "Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China" by Frank Dikotter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun
Book: "TEA: Addiction, Exploitation and Empire" by Roy Moxham
Book: "Drug War Crimes" by Jeffrey A. Miror
Book: "Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs" by Judge James P. Gray
Book: "The Fire Next Door; Mexico's Drug Violence and the Danger to America" by Ted Galen Carpenter
Book: "More Terrible than Death: Massacres, Drugs and America's War in Columbia" by Robin Kirk
Book: "History of the Methamphetamine Problem" M. Douglas Anglin, cynthia Burke, Brian Perrochet, Ewa Stamper and Samia Dawud-Noural
Book: "Methamphetamine Use, Abuse, and Dependence"
Book: "Bad Trip: How the War Against Drugs is Destroying America" by Joel Miller
Book: "Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use" by Jacob Sullum
Book: "Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures"
Book: "Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market" by Eric Schlosser
Book: "SHROOM: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom" by Andy Letcher
Book: "Everybody Must Get Stoned: Rock Stars On Drugs" by R.U. Sirius
see www.psychedelicadventures.com
www.alchemind.org
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