The real drugs problem - Ignorance of drugs.

Someone said to me recently: “Drugs, I don’t want to know.” Full stop. This is what I consider to be a huge problem. People who have made their minds up about something they haven’t researched, based on the criminalization of the said phenomenon by a bunch of knee jerk reacting bureaucrats, who themselves, have also not intensively researched.

In the eighties there was an advert/public information film in Britain about Aids. The slogan said “Don’t die of ignorance”. I consider ignorance of drugs to be a bigger problem than heroin or crack addiction, and I'd also go as far as to say that ignorance of drugs could be as detrimental as ignorance of Aids. I treat people who think like this the same as I’d treat any other person who is a member of a brainwashed cult. A few people may consider that last comment to be a bit radical, but think again - imagine your parents had a “drugs - I don’t wanna know” mentality, and the only drug education you ever had was a needle or a crack pipe. Remember what Timothy Leary said? Drugs - Just Say Know!

A person who can tell you the chemical compound, latin name and type (stimulant, depressant, empathogen, entheogen) is in a stronger position than someone who is sanctimonious in their arrogance, and arrogant in their ignorance. Their children are less likely to become junkies and also THEY THEMSELVES are less likely to become junkies too, should their ideology suffer a paradigm shift.

I, like many people, have experienced the unpleasant reality of having outlived a lot of people who took the wrong drugs, and at time of writing I am in my late thirties, so still fairly young. But the untimely deaths I tell you about happened when I was in my twenties. So were they. I was lucky because I knew heroin and crack (and alcohol) were potentially fatal, and I saw a few people drop like flies. I could have been coerced into that culture myself, but I was cautious. I stuck with marijuana and LSD because I knew they had little or no recorded deaths attached to them. Thankfully I did know that. My education about drugs was my saving grace. Amongst the ‘just say no’ brigade, I was fortunate enough to see literature which explained the different types of drugs and their effects. One thing that was clear was that heroin and crack had the potential to be like plagues, whereas LSD stories were usually unfeasible and grossly exaggerated at best and just plane false at worst. There may have been one or two elements of truth, but that’s exactly how tenuous arguments win.

So when It came to realising that Western culture did a considerable amount of disregarding of the things it did not understand, I was easily able to warm to the possibility of shamans having used LSD like compounds for spiritual growth, and even to this day it beggars belief to me that psychedelics are lumped into the same category as heroin and crack amongst a lot of young people. What went wrong?

One answer that comes to mind is 9/11. That enormous cataclysmic lie by the ruling elite had far reaching implications beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. When gargantuan amounts of fear are released like that, people become easier to brainwash. It’s a perfect time for a conservative backlash, and out of old staid habits, the scared do not want to know that which scares them any more - even if it could end the problems forever.

You see when the Cold War ended, Rave and MDMA exploded out of nowhere. People were uniting because there was no ‘bogeyman’ anymore. 9/11 put the ‘bogeyman’ back. What else could have done?

I’m not saying that everyone should take psychedelics (maybe once?), but consensus reality is reflective of who are alcoholics or anti depressant addicts. Those who are not quite driven to those extremes are nevertheless incredibly stressed out. Those of a conservative mindset and lifestyle who maintain the status quo in a profoundly diseased society are not the antidote!

There’s a no-brainer for you.

So what do we do? There’s no doubt that the world is becoming more fascist than ever, and this book is not going to go down the David Icke road, but I would still suggest that you read his books anyway, and make your own mind up. The road I want to lead you down is what I would consider the positive symbiotic sister to the conspiracy consciousness. We are alive, and the mind is amazingly complex, and whether we want to believe it or not, the thing Terence McKenna called ‘the transcendental presence of the other’ is always in the background, and if psychedelics open up a portal to that realm then prohibition will only encourage people to misuse these valuable tools, and carry on being bad to their reputation, thus reinforcing the ‘just say no’ brigade. Maybe the powers that be know this, and are happy to perpetuate it.