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| Updated May 14, 2011 | IMAGINARY PRESS COVERAGE |
| "DEVASTATING!" - The New York Times "The last shot of the Drug War." - The Wall Street Journal "It's time to re-evaluate our priorities." - The National Office of Drug Control Policy | |
"People have a right to get stoned. They have a right to think and explore their own minds. This is as intimate a part of their being as their sexuality. Any culture which mitigates that is clearly afraid of a full and fair and open dialogue about what reality is and what real human values ought to be." —Terence McKenna
This policy is failing to protect both our rights and our safety. Since demand for consciousness altering substances is legitimate and will always exist, prohibition maintains a state of these substances being perpetually and completely out of control.
We must regain control over these substances by ensuring the safety of children from drugs and respecting the rights of adults to choose from certified safe and pure commercial products and to freely grow their own plants of choice. We can do both!
"If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny."—Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence; first United States Secretary of State; second Vice President of the United States; third President of the United States; founder and leader of the Jeffersonian Republican party (eventually to become known as the Democratic-Republican Party), which dominated American politics for a quarter-century.
"A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded." —Abraham LincolnNo civilized nation makes war on its own citizens
Drug War Truce with Peace Negotiations
—Terence McKenna
- Statements commonly attributed to God.
- Manna From Heaven
— curious references to a spiritual food sent down from heaven by God
- Plan, Plant, Planet proposes that we adopt the plant as the organizational model for life in the twenty-first century, just as the computer of the late twentieth century, and the steam engine of the nineteenth century served as previous organizational models.
- The Illegal Search For Self-Awareness — How is it that the leaders of our society have seen fit to try to eliminate this one very important means of learning and self-discovery, this means which has been used, respected, and honored for thousands of years, in every human culture of which we have a record?
- Psychedelics and Religious Experience — The undoubted mystical and religious intent of most users of the psychedelics, even if some of these substances should be proved injurious to physical health, requires that their free and responsible use be exempt from legal restraint in any republic that maintains a constitutional separation of church and state.
- Liberty and the Pursuit of Forbidden Fruit — The desire to recreationally ingest psychoactive drugs is deeply rooted in our biological nature. The hunger to get high is as natural as the desire to eat, sleep, and procreate. This is why the War on Drugs in America is really a war
against human nature.
- The Reunification of the Sacred and Natural — The relentless exploitation and destruction of the biosphere by the capitalist-industrial growth machine around the globe is rooted in a pathological domination complex of "civilized" humans toward the natural world. The revival of interest in animistic worldviews and in the shamanic practices of traditional peoples, including the intentional use of hallucinogenic sacraments, is among the hopeful signs that the split between the sacred and the natural can be healed again.
- Dischord: Strange Days — The social logic for the prohibition of drugs is not a public-health logic, but a truly religious logic, a logic of hatred towards the pleasure and experiences they bring or are said to bring. Drugs are really reproached with opening doors leading to artificial paradises.
"At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos."—Timothy Leary
This can be said about depressed people on antidepressants, anxiety people on their medication and impotent people on Viagra. What's the point of being "drug-free" if you can't enjoy life without drugs?
Internationally, "the war on drugs" provides a cover for intervention. Domestically, it has little to do with drugs but a lot to do with distracting the population, increasing repression in the inner cities, and building support for the attack on civil liberties. —Noam Chomsky, "The war on (certain) drugs" in What Uncle Sam Really Wants
The Painted Bird —A Perfect Symbol of the Scapegoat
Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do
The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country
Whenever you hear anyone sounding off on internal freedom and conciousness-expanding foods and drugs, whether pro or con, check out these questions: How to Handle Doubters
Prohibition Never Ended—How the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution replaced one form of "intoxicating liquor" prohibition with another.
When Drug Use In Sports Was Not Cheating—Drugs were considered acceptable food for athletes before the 1920s, which happens to be the decade of alcohol prohibition in the United States.
PRINCIPLES OF RESPONSIBLE USE
Conduct which we believe any responsible adult should follow
"Drugs" is a word that's been used by governments to make it impossible to
think creatively about the problem of substances and abuse and availability and so forth and so
on.
—DRUGS
The Government's idea of how to help people who use drugs is to break into their homes and terrorize them with guns. They want to help them by forcing them to obey the established government religion which they say is based on science. Fredric Madeleine, The Drug Controversy and the Rise of Antichrist
The Partnership's position on
Children and Drugs"Teenagers find illegal marijuana easier to obtain than legally regulated beer." Kendra E. Wright, Director, Family Watch
Kids and Psychedelics—Raising children to have a healthy spiritual attitude about entheogens in a hostile Drug War climate is challenging, but I think a few general conclusions can be drawn from our experience. Rev. Anne Zapf, Parenting the Peyote Way
Keeping Kids Off Drugs
Alternatives to Waging War
People use the word "natural"... What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is 4 years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's cathedral, and the sunday school teachings.—Tim Leary
"Let me understand what you're saying, a ton of cocaine was smuggled into The United States of America by the Venezuelan National Guard, in cooperation with the CIA?" Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes"That's exactly what appears to have happened."
DEA Chief and Federal Judge Robert Bonner
- SHOCKING TESTIMONY: 25-year veteran federal law enforcement agent and court-certified expert witness Mike Levine mediates this presentation of contradictory testimony from CIA Inspector General Frederick R. Hitz1 and DEA Chief and Federal Judge Robert Bonner2 concerning U.S. Government involvement in drug trafficking.
1testimony to Congress, and 2appearance on 60 Minutesstream or download the smoking gun!
Link: Evidence of 50 years of CIA drug trafficking into the United States
- "The issue that's highlighted by marijuana prohibition that particularly gets me angry is the hubris of outlawing a plant that is part of nature." Abrupt talks to Bob Fass
- Pacifica Network News commentary
on an ironic New York Times pro-legalization article
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The U.S. government is waging an immoral and unconstitutional civil war on a vulnerable segment of its own population. Similar to the early days of German persecution of their Jewish population, goon squads are sent to terrorize communities where the demonized beliefs and practices are prevalent.
- "We are now living in the third generation since the ceremonial reemergence of hallucinogenic plants in global culture." Vegetalismo by Peter Lamborn Wilson
- Terence McKenna
- The transformation of culture through art is the proper understanding of what you can do with psychedelics besides blow your own mind.
- The reason psychedelics are so threatening in this society is because they immediately throw into high-relief the internal contradictions of the dominator style of doing business.
- Drug war newspeak refers to all illegal substances as "drugs", and all non-medical use as "abuse", and all who partake as "addicts". This conscious engineering of language parallels the Nazi generation of stereotypes to justify their crimes against humanity.
- Alan Watts
- To ask the police to go and look for people who have LSD or marijuana or heroin or opium or whatever, or who are living irregular sex lives, or who have a gambling joint, or a whorehouse, this is to ask the police to act as officers of the state in service of the church, uniformed ministers, and that's not their job.
- Richard Glen Boire
Humor is an effective weapon against lunacy
- Ronald and Nancy Reagan on drugs
- Bill Hicks imagines a positive drug story in the news
"The contemporary World War on Drugs is nothing more nor less than the modern manifestation of the millennial struggle between state power and individual freedom; between the proselytizers of purely symbolic simulacra of religion - propagandists of what Blake called "pale religious letchery" - and the practitioners of the real thing - for religion is an experience, not merely a "social activity with mild ethical rules." This War on Drugs originally started as a War on Religious Experiences, and it is nothing new..." Jonathan Ott
- The Alchemind Society is an international nonprofit association of people working in the public interest to protect the fundamental right to freedom of the mind.
- On Cognitive Liberty: I, II, III
- Against "Legalization" by Hakim Bey
- Journal of Cognitive Liberties online
- Schaffer Library of Drug Policy - contents
- The United Nations
- Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief Proclaimed by General Assembly resolution 36/55 of 25 November 1981
- The Lindesmith Center
- Public Letter to Kofi Annan Secretary General United Nations June 1, 1998 "We believe that the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself." Signed by many prominent people from around the world.
- The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
- Drug Reform Coordination Network
- Media Awareness Project
- Drugwar.com
- Marijuana, official from 1850 to 1942 in the U.S. Pharmacopeia, were it legal today, would be approved for glaucoma, high blood pressure, migraine, anorexia, depression, sleep disorders, multiple sclerosis, spasticity disorders, chronic pain, AIDS wasting syndrome, asthma, motion sickness, depression, mood disorders, pruritis, menstrual cramps, the effects of cancer chemotherapy and epilepsy. This list, by the way, comes mostly from the official position paper of The American Public Health Association, written exclusively by experienced physicians. Fake Science
- Ethnic cleansing is a bit trickier in South Central Los Angeles than it is in South Central Europe. It is essential in a “democracy” to have people do it in a way that makes it look like they're "doing it" to themselves. You need a socially induced suicide. Ethnic Cleansing in the USA
- According to the U.N. Drug Control Program, the biggest heroin and cocaine trading institutions in the world are the Burmese, Pakistani, Mexican, Peruvian and Colombian militaries—all armed and trained by U.S. military intelligence—in the name of the anti-drug effort, of course. Funny how all that effort never has any strategic effect. Neocolonialism
- We firmly agree with Thomas Jefferson that a well informed public will almost invariably come to the right conclusion. You and I both know what the problem with that equation is. Let's consider some examples about how well—by design—you have NOT been informed: Why It Is Time To Decriminalize Drug Use
- Salon
- In Drugs We Trust
Why do Americans make war on some drugs and build fortunes on others?- More
- Psychedelics: The Anti Drug
- Anti-Entheogen People Have Dirty Minds
- What Prohibition Has Done to America
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against
every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Thomas Jefferson
BURN MARIJUANA NOT THE FLAG
