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Despite all Regan's bull shit, we are hardly a "drug free" society. Millions of citizens of the United States use drugs, often multiple drugs, on a daily basis. The vast majority of them are perfectly legal.
Of course, I'm talking about a particular class of drugs, generally called psychotropics, that effect the mind and emotions of human beings. I'm not a Dr. or a pharmacist or an expert in this field but clearly there are a wide variety of psychotropic drugs and an equally wide variety of responses to them.
One, to me, very interesting effect of certain drugs is transparency. Nicotine is the prime example. Those of you who have smoked cigarettes have seen how they are a perfected drug delivery system and product. Nicotine is a drug and it does get you 'high' in its own way for a time. Fairly quickly, though, you become habituated to it in such a way that a) you do not notice any perceptible difference in your state of consciousness (you do not feel inebriated) and yet, at the same time, you feel somehow 'satisfied' with yourself. At least for the moment. It soothes you. You feel reassured in some way. Once you're addicted, the cravings are like an itch that must be scratched, to regain that sense of--well, 'satisfaction'--however illusory or fleeting.
It is always a revelation to discover, when you're ready, that the craving for a cigarette will go away whether one has one or not. It's just a matter of living through the craving without acting on it until your attention is taken up with something else. Time passes and suddenly you realize, 'Oh, I never did have that cigarette I craved,' and that you are no worse the wear for it. Eventually, at least for most people, the cravings do subside. I've been cigarette free for four years now and I hardly notice it. But once in a while when I'm around an old friend who is still a smoker, the habit of 'sharing' that abstract satisfaction of pulling smoke into and expelling it out of one's lungs reemerges into my consciousness and the craving is felt again. Some part of me says, "Oh, for heavens sake, why not! Go ahead, have a smoke." And another part of my head screams: NO NO NO, you KNOW how sick they make you, just STOP!
It really is like that. And yes, I remain, tobacco smoke free.
Now Marijuana isn't like that, at least not for me. Other folks' millage may vary. I get 'toasted' about four times a week at the end of the day as a way to 'unwind', much the way many would have a martini. (It both is, and is not, like that.)
I started smoking pot when I was 19 years old and that was in 1967. Although I started then, there have been years at a time when I didn't smoke at all and I've never had a too difficult time quitting if it was something I really wanted to do.
For me the original lure was partly 'hip and cool white boy' and also curiosity about altered states of consciousness. More the latter, if the truth be known, as I had experienced altered states of consciousness many many times as a child, although I did not have that categorization for them at the time. For me they appeared as strong 'reveries' and upswells of emotion, and I felt my imagination opened towards the hem of a celestial awareness that transcended my individuality. It was 'awesome.'
Was this just some halllucination? Well, let me tell you, if it IS, I much prefer IT than this insanity we're living in at the moment! What a beautiful world is possible for us if we only just get ourselves together.
Terrance McKenna once said something to the effect that "Straight people often accuse us psychedelic drug users of wanting to escape reality. They have NO IDEA how right they are!"
All kidding aside, though, McKenna also asked this important question: "What role have inebriants played in the development of human society and human consciousness?" This would be a silly question if we were not willing to admit that human beings have been medicating themselves with plant 'toxins' for tens of thousands of years if not much much longer. McKenna puts forward the idea that psilocybin containing mushrooms may have influenced the evolution of human consciousness through diet because low levels of psilocybin increase visual acuity, especially in edge detection and movement. At a time when our arboreal ancestors were climbing down out of the trees and becoming foragers where we were prey to wild beasts, the ability to stand upright on our hind legs to look across tall grasses, and the ability to detect patterned movement there in was essential to survival. Those who failed were soon eaten and did not reproduce.
Humanbeings physiologically little different from you or I have inhabited this planet for something over a hundred thousand years. Really think about that. And yet, strangely, we know almost nothing about these most ancient ancestors of ours. Imagine, a whole species with a form of amnesia. Oh, yes, we've written books and built museums where we di-o-ramicly display a way of living that our so called civilization has made impossible. It is "progress" we are told and, I mean, yeah, there are some GOOD things about it--ice cream in july and all that--but there still are a lot, I mean A LOT, of unresolved problems. I mean, look where we are: On the edge of a global resource war replete with weapons of mass distruction.
H E L L O? The way it looks to me is like a global bar-room brawl between competing gangs, only on the global scale. Male egos gone berserk. (Alcohol can do that to you if you don't watch out.) Meanwhile, those of us who would like nothing better than drink our beer or smoke our pot and enjoy the show are shoved right in the middle of a trans contentental firefirght. Poor Iraq. It could be Long Island, next, though. And, no, I'm not kidding. We've already seen what can happen to an entire city.
S o o o o.
Is any one SANE enough or SOBER enough or STONED enough to get us out of this mess? McKenna put forth the theory that The mokeys are out of control" because they--we--lost touch with something he called "the Gaian mind." We lost touch with our own organic nature. We lost touch with the myths that spoke of 'gods' not as supreme beings, but as forces that shaped the world we once knew and experienced. Forces with which WE have a RELATIONSHIP. McKenna postulated that due to further climate change, possibly due to creeping overgrazing by our own ancestors, psilocybin ceased to be plentifully available and, over time, other drugs, such as alcohol, replaced it.
Alcohol, however, had a very different psychological and emotional impact and once again the 'ape', especially the males, began to think and behave territorially. Now we're closer to what our history teaches us as our history. On the other hand, all this may be be nothing more than the ramblings of maniacs. Still, if you've read this far, you must yourself be interested in these kinds of questions.
We need a change and the change needs to be bigger, much bigger, than winning the next election--if that is even possible.
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