Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Years and years ago before the term "psychedelic" was settled on there was
just a phenomenological description. These things were called
"consciousness-expanding" drugs. I think that's a very good term. Think
about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not
loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be? To my
mind the psychedelic position is most fundamentally threatening when fully
logically thought out because it is an anti-drug position, and make no
mistake about it, the issue is "drugged." How drugged shall you be? Or to
put it another way: consciousness. How conscious shall you be? Who shall
be conscious? Who shall be unconscious? Imagine if the Japanese had won
World War II, taken over America, and introduced an insidious drug which
caused the average American to spend six and a half hours a day consuming
enemy propaganda. But this is what was done. Not by the Japanese but by
ourselves. This is television. Six and a half hours a day! Average! That's the
average! So there must be people out there hooked on twenty-four hours a
day. I visit people in L.A. who have one set on in every room so they're
racking up a lot of time for the rest of us.
So now the culture crisis grows ever more intense. The stakes rise ever
higher. If there were ever a time to be heard and be counted in order to
clarify thinking on these issues it would be now because there is a major
attack on the Bill of Rights underway in the guise of a so-called "Drug War"
and somehow the drug issue is even more frightening than communism,
even more insidious. McCarthy told America that communism was under
the bed; he was wrong. Ronald Reagan and George Bush tell America that
drugs are in the living room and they're right! It is here. It is real. It is the
hydrogen bomb of the third world. The quality of rhetoric emanating from
therapists and psychologists and psychoanalysts is going to have to radically
improve or we are going to have happen to us what happened to genetics in
the Soviet Union. We're going to be Lysenkoized. We're going to be made
lilly-white and all opportunity for exploring this dimension is going to be
closed off - almost as a footnote to the supression of these synthetic
poisonous narcotics which are mostly dealt by governments anyway. But the
psychedelic issue, as I said, it's a civil rights issue. It's a civil liberties issue.
The reason women couldn't be given the vote in the nineteenth century, there
was a very simple overpowering reason that was always given: it would
destroy society. This was also the reason why the king could not give up a
divine right, chaos would result! And this is why we're told drugs cannot be
legalized, because society would disintegrate. This is just nonsense. Most
societies have always operated in the light of various habits based on plants.
The whole history of mankind could be written as a series of made and
broken relationships with plants. Think about the influence of tobacco on
mercantilism in 17th and 18th century Europe. Think about the influence of
coffee on the modern office worker, or the way the British influenced opium
policy in the far-east to rule China, or the way the CIA used heroin in the
American ghettos in the 1960s to choke off black dissent and black
dissatisfaction with the war. History is about these plant relationships. They
can be raised into consciousness, integrated into social policy and used to
create a more caring meaningful world, or they can be denied the way
sexuality was denied until the force of the work of Freud and others just
made it impossible to maintain the fiction any longer. This choice of how
quickly we develop into a mature community able to address this issue is
entirely with us. Certainly people like Stan Grof and others have worked
valiantly to keep this kind of thing alive but, my god, you can count them on
the fingers of one hand.