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'A Weekend With Terence McKenna' Feb. 1992
From: ScottoSubject: Terence on the WODDate: Mon, 6 Jul 92 21:35:34 EDTTerence McKennaExcerpted w/o permission from'A Weekend With Terence McKenna' Feb. 1992
Psilocybin actually erodes the ego. This is what is put against a lot of psychedelics. They say,'These stoners, they don't punch the time clock, and when you threaten to fire them, it seems tohave no effect on them. I don't know how to reach these people.' Well, the way you reach them isyou appeal to something other than the ego.Modern industrial civilization has very skillfully promoted certain drugs and supressed others. Aperfect example is caffeine. Caffeine -- I hate to tell you this -- caffeine is a fairly dangerous drug.It isn't dangerous in that a cup of coffee will kill you, but a lifestyle built around caffeine is going to-- you're not going to live to be a hundred years old, or even seventy, unless you are statisticallyin the improbably group. Why is caffeine not only tolerated but exalted? Because, boy, you canspin those widgets onto their winkles just endlessly without a thought on your mind. It is *the*perfect drug for modern industrial manufacturing. Why do you think caffeine, a dangerous, healthdestroying, destructive drug, that has to be brought from the ends of the earth, is enshrined inevery labor contract in the Western world as a right? The coffee break -- if somebody tried to takeaway the coffee break, you know, the masses would rise in righteous fury and pull them down.We don't have a beer break. We don't have a pot break. I mean, if you suggested, 'Well, we don'twant a coffee break. We want to be a ble to smoke a joint at eleven,' they would say, 'Well, you're just some kind of -- you're a social degenerate, a troublemaker, a mad dog, a criminal.' And yet,the cost health benefit of those two drugs, there's no comparison. Obviously, pot would be thebetter choice. The problem is, then you're going to be standing there dreaming, rather thanspinning the widgets onto the nuts. (laughter)Coca leaves would be very good. I suspect in the near future we may see the legalization of cocaas a sop to the mentality that wishes to see cocaine... Andy Weil, who's a good friend of mine --we don't agree on everything, but -- a few years ago he had great enthusiasm for a coca chewinggum. And I never got on the bandwagon because I didn't see that we needed another high focusindustrial stimulant on the market. But coca would be great, and certainly in the Amazon, if you'rea petrone, you encourage your workers to chew coca. I mean, they're worthless without coca.Give them coca and put a machete in their hands and they will just flail for hours at the bush.Another example that's interesting, that shows how blinded and unaware we are of how drugshave shaped our society...We all know that slavery ended in the United States in the Civil War.And most people, if you question them, think that slavery existed before the Civil War in manyplaces back into ancient times. This is not true at all. Slavery died in Western civilization with thecollapse of the Roman empire. During the Dark Ages and the medieval period, if you owned aslave, you owned *one* slave. It was the equivalent of owning a Ferrari or a Lamborghini. It wasan index of immense wealth, and social status, and that slave would be a houseboy, or a cook orsomething like that, someone close in to you, taking care of you. It was inconceivable to useslave labor in the production of an agricultural product, until Europe acquired an insatiable desirefor sugar.Now, let's think about sugar for a moment. Nobody needs sugar. You can go from birth to thegrave without ever having a teaspoon full of white sugar. You will never miss it. Throughout theDark Ages and the Middle Ages, sugar was a drug, a medicine. It was used to pack wounds, to
 
keep wounds septic. And it was very expensive and there was very little of it. Nobody even knewwhere it came from. It was called cane honey, because they knew it came from some kind of jointed grass, but nobody had a clear picture of what sugar was.Well, when you extract sugar from sugar cane, it requires, in pre-modern technology, atemperature of about 130 degrees. You cannot -- free men will not work sugar. It's toounpleasant. You faint, you die from heat prostration. You have to take prisoners and you have tochain them to the sugar vats. And so, before the discovery of America, in the fifty years before thediscovery of America, they began growing sugar cane in the east Atlantic islands, Medeira andthe Canary Islands. And they brought Africans, and sold them into slavery specifically for sugarproduction.Now when we get American history, they tell you that slaves were used to produce cotton andtobacco. In fact, this is not quite the truth. They had to find things for slaves to do, because theybrought so many slaves to the New World to work sugar, and they had so many children, thatthen they just expanded and said, 'Well, we've used slaves to work sugar, we might as well usethem in cotton and tobacco production.' In 1800, every ounce of sugar entering England wasbeing produced by slave labor of the most brutal and demeaning sort. And there was very littleprotest over this. It was just accepted. To this day, sugar cultivation in the third world is a kind ofinstitutionalized slavery. Christian, you know, the Popes, the kinds of Europe, all of Christiancivilization acquiesced in the bringing back of a practice that had been discredited during the fallof Rome, in order to supply the insatiable need for sugar. It was an addiction. It had no culturaldefense whatsoever.These things (psychedelics) have another quality which we haven't talked too much about, whichis, the psychedelics are the source of special information. And these hierarchies want to controlthe information. I mean, in other words, it's the pipeline to God problem. You know, the ProtestantReformation was a whole effort to overthrow the Papal claim that you couldn't just pray. You hadto have theologians interpret scripture and dogma, and they would gently guide you toward theright understanding, but that you weren't supposed to have a direct relationship to spirit. Youwere supposed to leave that to experts.So I think that's another issue, that the psychedelics empower, with gnosis, true information. Andevery society is based on a lie of some sort. So having people going around the official lie andgetting in touch with reality turns them into social dissidents. And you have to control that. I mean,that was exactly what happened in the 1960's. What happened was, too many people weregetting stoned, and then checking out of the official canon of the culture. And people just said,you know, 'You can take that job and shove it.' And this was very alarming. Now every societycan tolerate a certain amount of this. You always have people who just aren't playing the game.But what happening in the 1960's was that LSD entered the picture, and LSD is different from allother psychedelics in one tremendously important quality, and that is:A single skilled chemist, in a small apartment, with about $40,000 worth of equipment, in a singlelong weekend, can produce forty to sixty million hits of a drug. Forty to sixty *million* hits! This isa loaded gun at the head of society. Now I wrote a book on growing mushrooms, and years agogrew mushrooms quite a bit. And I can tell you, an absolutely dedicated mushroom grower,working his ass off for six months, can produce maybe four or five thousand hits of mushrooms.In other words, it's entirely a neighborhood phenomenon. It doesn't affect the dials that measurethe fate of society. But you produce forty to sixty million hits of a drug, you have entered the realmof global politics. You now probably have more power -- you and your friends probably now havemore power to affect the fate of the world than, let's say, the government of Switzerland. Well, no,not Switzerland, they have the banks. But -- the government of Finland, let's say. You have justshoved Finland out of the way and taken your place in the hierarchy. So no government wouldput up with that for a moment.
 
 You see, the hidden issue, and it need not be hidden among us...the government always tries topaint itself as the mother hen, concerned about her errant chicks. And so, to keep you fromcrashing into other people on the freeway, to keep you from leaping out of buildings or committingsociety, we have to control these drugs. As a matter of fact, you know, this is absurd. Morepeople die because of alcohol than all illegal drugs combined in a given year. The government isnot your friend on this issue. The government is very concerned to control the mass mind. Andmarijuana -- my God, since the British Commission on Hemp, which was in 1889, I believe -- theBritish East India Company commissioned a study of hemp -- they have spent millions andmillions and millions of dollars to find something, anything, you name it, wrong with cannabis.There is nothing wrong with cannabis. It is the most thoroughly tested, pawed over, andexamined drug in human history. And they just come up with the lamest stuff. I mean, they tellyou, you know, you're gonna have tits. Give me a break. They say, 'You won't be motivated inyour job.' Like your job is supposed to be the (pinnacle) against which all things are to bemeasured.And I think people on our side of this question have been tremendously naive, because people just think, 'We just have to convince them that it's harmless.' *It ain't harmless.* It is a knife poisedat the heart of dominator values. It would make the modern industrial assembly line, politicalloyalites, the macho image projection -- all of these little tricks that they're running are severelyeroded by cannabis. And they will stop at nothing to eradicate it. Look at the budget of the DEA --what are they doing? They're giving, 65% is dedicated to cannabis eradication. Heroin gets 20%,coke gets all the rest. It's demonstrably absurd the way the money is spent, unless you have asecret agenda of some sort. And if your agenda is to supress the evolution of unwanted socialattitudes in the American public, then you have to keep your eye on cannabis very very closely.The new guy who heads the War on Drugs, Martinez? This guy, I heard him on NPR this week,and his most passionate moment in the half hour interview was, he said, 'We have pushed theprice of an ounce of cannabis past the price of an ounce of gold, and we're going to keep it thatway.' Nothing about eradication, talk about keeping the price high. The fact that they refuse to taxit when they're starving for revenue shows that there must be a secret agenda. It doesn't makeany kind of sense.When I wrote this book, I did a lot of research on an area I didn't know that much about, which is,let's say from 1500 to the present, drugs of addiction. And what I discovered is drug smuggling islike assassination. If the government isn't involved, it never seems to really happen. Andgovernments have been using drugs for centuries as forms of secret revenue. This whole sugarthing that I laid out to you, those were decisions made by the crown heads of Europe in collusionwith the Pope. It wasn't common people who set those policies in place.During the 1960's, when the black ghettos began to come apart, suddenly number three Chinawhite heroin was cheaper and more available than it had ever been in any time in this history ofthe heroin problem in the United States. Why? Because the CIA saw, you know, all these blackguys are getting up, a bunch of uppity niggers as the government calls them, you just smother itin heroin. Get everybody either hooked or making money...And they don't care really about the effects of drugs, and one group, one faction will work againstanother. For example, I'm a great afficianado of hashish, and hashish became very hard to get inthe United States in the late 70's. But as soon as the Russians invaded Afghanistan, suddenlythere was massive amounts of excellent Afghani hashish, at prices that nobody had seen forfifteen years. Well, the reason was, the CIA knows that hashish is not really a problem. But whatthey wanted is, they wanted an income for the mujahadin. And they had to pay for all theseweapons. So they just started bringing it in wholesale. And it wasn't even a smuggling operation. Imean, I received reports from people who said, you know, 'Smuggling? They're not smuggling.They're unloading it on pier 39, union local 1030 is taking off, you know, five hundred poundblocks of hashish by the tens of thousands.' And the day the Afghan war ended? They staged an
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