Under The Influence : The Disinformation Guide to Drugs

Rating:
Summary: Just Say Know
Review: Anyone who can put aside the preconceived notions of mainstream political discourse can see that the "war on drugs" is a hypocritical, expensive, heavy-handed, and nonsensical failure. The drug war is not about public health but about social control, and this book from Disinformation collects far-flung thought and knowledge on such matters. For example, small-time recreational users of comparatively harmless cannabis (which has never killed a single person) get excessive jail time, while the producers of the more addictive and hazardous tobacco (which kills hundreds of thousands of people) enjoy life in the corporate and political mainstream. Naturally occurring opiates are the subjects of multi-billion dollar wars and police state tactics, while corporate-controlled products like Ritalin, which is designed specifically to chemically alter the brains of children, are promoted by the establishment. Completely prohibited illicit substances are easier to obtain than lightly regulated alcohol. With a little independent thought, one can see that the drug war is about suppressing dissent from certain non-mainstream populations and perpetuating the prison-military-industrial complex, under simplistic sloganeering about health and crime.

Like all of the compendiums from Disinfo (I have reviewed three of the previous volumes here), the essays herein are of widely disparate quality, from hard-hitting investigative reports to whiny conspiracy theories. This particular book also has the added disadvantage of extreme repetition. While the various authors approach the concept through different specific events or issues, almost all of them repeat, ad nauseam, the basic counter-cultural thoughts on the drug war's problems, which I just did far more efficiently in the last paragraph. This adds up to 300 pages (which is effectively 600 pages given the book's large physical size and small typeface) of different authors preaching to the choir. That makes the reading of this book quite tiresome.

As for the particular essays, the subject matter can be fascinating and effective, and I can say that the entries by various authors and thinkers in the "Reform and Politics" and "For Medicinal Use" sections, and a fair amount of the essays in the rest of the book, are strongly researched with compellingly realistic observations and recommendations. However, that old lack of editorial control by the Disinfo folks has also resulted in a damaging number of clunkers, like the pointless and sensationalistic conspiracy theories of Dan Russell (law enforcement as treason) and Catherine Austin Fitts (narcodollars pervading every aspect of the world economy), and multiple writers who fail to make a convincing argument through legal and constitutional precedents for the "cognitive liberty" concept. The Disinfo philosophy is to keep an open mind when exploring controversial subjects, and that works reasonably well here, but having an open mind is a double-edged sword. With an open mind you'll also see that this book, through repetition, inflammatory language, and conspiracy theorizing, tends to sink the strong arguments of its more levelheaded contributors, who deserve to be surrounded by better material. [~doomsdayre520~]

Rating:
Summary: Raise Consciousness, Not Weapons
Review: I first tried LSD many years ago when I was relatively very young. I have always found it near impossible to describe the mystical-religious experience that ensued. It was the most spiritual and religious, in the most impersonal, non-Christian sense of those terms, I have ever known. For one split second during the trip there was a seeing, feeling and being of oneness with the Universe, all light, wisdom and bliss. It was beyond words, already shadows of the realities they represent, which are by their very nature full of dualities - subject, object; speaker, spoken to - that that experience taught me are illusions. Maya as the Hindus call this vale of tears.

I always considered my drug use to be a search to enhance and expand consciousness, not smother and sedate it. Marijuana, LSD, MDA, Ecstasy were my drugs of choice for just this reason, an attempt, to a certain degree, achievement, but also abject failure, of recreating that singular experience. Rather than an institutional and cultural framework of support for such a breathtaking discovery, there was the most mendacious dissembling around the issue of (some) drugs. Other than a few close friends, I was groping alone in the dark.

True religious freedom to me would be an exploring and attempt at recreating these kinds of states of consciousness. Understanding the potentialities and limitations of integrating them into everyday life. The freedom to create some kind of cultural and institutional framework to give them legitimacy as religious ritual. But there is no religious freedom in America. The word "religion" in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution might just as well be replaced by the word "Christianity."

Because several of the writers in Under the Influence examine seriously this religious/mystical aspect of the drug policy issue, the call for reform takes on a much more urgent and fundamental dimension. Drug prohibition is really, says Richard Glen Boire, who holds a Doctorate of Jurisprudence from UC Berkeley, "a war on consciousness itself - how much, what sort we are permitted to experience, and who gets to control it. More than an unintentional misnomer, the government-termed `war on drugs' is a strategic decoy label; a sleight-of-hand move by the government to redirect attention away from what lies at ground zero of the war - each individual's fundamental right to control his or her own consciousness."

Why are entheogenic-induced states of consciousness prohibited while those prompted by the constant advertisements and come-ons to buy consumer crap, vacuous television-watching, endlessly grinding it out on a soul-destroying job, and a permanent wartime economy, to take just several egregious examples of a culture empty and superficial through and through, considered acceptable? I believe because the powerful and privileged are afraid of the alternate realites these substances can show us.

Boire adds significantly: "Those who have never experienced the mental states that are now prohibitied do not realize what the laws are denying them." Mary Jane Borden calls opposition to drug prohibition part of the "age-old fight against bigotry." She maintains that the struggle against "chemical bigotry" is part and parcel of the ageless struggles against the bigotries of racism, sexism, colonialism, and imperialism, and for democratic rights.

Dr. Stanislav Grof's interview with Albert Hofmann, the accidental discoverer in 1943 of LSD's singularly potent properties, is fascinating. Hofmann was a chemist at Sandoz Laboratories in Germany innocuously attempting to derive a drug analogue useful in obstetrics from alkaloids of ergot, a fungus that grows on rye bread. While conducting chemical synthesis experiments, he unknowingly and accidentally ingested a tiny amount of one of these analogues through the pores of his skin. He had a powerful and bewildering response. Hofmann explores the work this led him to be interested in in other cultures with similar substances like the magic mushroom of the Mazatec Indians in Mexico, ololiuqui, a derivative of morning glory seeds, and salvia divinorum. Other essays look at the Native American Church, whose rite of religious use of ceremonial peyote has been upheld by the Supreme Court, and ayahuasca, a vine that contains DMT, which has been used in Amazonia to induce religious visions for thousands of years.

Initially Hofmann considered LSD to be his wonder child. He deeply laments it becoming a problem child with its rise as a drug of abuse in the early 1960s that put an immediate surcease into any further research into its psychotherapeutic applications, which until that time had been quite substantial. The pendulum is swinging arduously back the other way and there is again halting but significant steps being made in this direction. They face constant official resistance. Rick Doblin, founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, glimpses into the slight thawing of policy respecting the potential of psychedelics in psychotherapy and examines the issue of medical marijuana. Several other essays also examine this latter topic.

This book, like the drug-policy reform movement itself however, is in the great bulk on the defensive. The many negative arguments alone against prohibition as ineffective and counterproductive ought to prevail and prompt radical change. Cigarettes kill 430,000 Americans every year, alcohol tens of thousands more, but they are sanctioned, even heavily advertised. Marijuana, which has never been blamed for a single fatality, is outlawed. Many so-called drug crimes are actually drug law-related. Drug prohibition artificially and exponentially inflates the price of drugs. It is the mountains of money to be reaped dealing drugs, the battles for turf and the like, rather than drugs and the states of mind they engender, that prompt so much violence. It is also this that encourages a never-ending flow of dealers willing to risk their huge profits. Several writers note that the illicit drug trade is part and parcel of every modern day military enterprise, including those of the United States. Legalization, medicalization would by itself reduce armed insurgencies around the world. If drugs were legalized no individuals would sell them for there would be no profit. Users wouldn't have to commit crimes to obtain them.

This book contains too many reasons for drug legalization and medicalization to list. Its reminding me of the almost lost knowledge of that split second in eternity all those years ago renewed my hope momentarily that life could be something other than just the wartorn battlefield it is.


Rating:
Summary: Wide Ranging and Informative.
Review: I found this book to be surprising when I first opened it. I had been waiting for its release, having heard that Preston Peet was looking for people with a history and/or knowledge of what Prohibition and "The War On Drugs" is all about.

I suppose, for some reason, I was expecting a rehash of the statistics that all add up to show what a dismal failure the War On Drugs really is; stats which are contained and which most certainly do show. But what surprised me most I guess, was the amount of personal experience contained within the pages. There are any number of glimpses and personal insights into "The War" and into the lives led by the contributors during these oppressive decades. There are numerous personal anecdotes; some quite chilling, many of them humorous, all of them thought provoking. These are told by people of whom many of us will have already heard.

But there is also good representation from people on the periphery, or at least persons not normally associated with righting the wrong that we know of by it's more formal name-----The War on Drugs; perhaps the greatest hoax of the 20th century, something that the contributors to this book make quite clear.