[In Lak'esh]

Barcs, you are absolutely correct, "keeping drugs illegal does nothing for society".

In my opinion, it is a war on personal freedoms-or-"Cognitive Liberty". I'll explain.

Words are carriers of thoughts, whether spoken from mouth to ear, digitized and passed electronically, or downloaded into ink and passed on paper across time and space. As you read this sentence you are receiving information. Because words are vehicles for thoughts, words can change your opinion, give you new ideas, reform your worldview, or foment a revolution.

Attemps to control the written word date from at least AD 325 when the Council of Nicaea ruled that Christ was 100 percent divine and forbade the dissemnination of contrary beliefs. Since the inventions of the printing press in 1452, governments have struggled t ocontrol the printed word. Presses were initially licensed and registered. Only certain people were permitted to own or control a printing press and certain things could be printed or copied. This was the origin of today's copyright rules, by the way. Works printed without prior authorization were gathered up and destroyed and the authors and printers were imprisoned.

Scholars disagree as to the exact date, but some time around 1560, Pope Paul IV published the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which was a list of forbidden books-i.e., controlled substances-enforced by the Roman government. When the Index was finally abandoned in 1966, it listed over 4,000 forbidden books, including works by Galileo, Kant, Pascal, Spinoza, and John Locke. The history of censorship has been extensively recorded by others. The point is simply the obvious one that efforts to prohibit heterodox texts and to make criminals out of those who "manufactured" such texts, were not so much interested in controlling ink patters on paper, as in controlling the IDEAS encoded in printed words.

I submit that in the same way, the so-called "War on Drugs" is not a war on pills, powder, plants, and potions, it is a war on mental states. It is a war on consciousness itself-how much, what sort we are permitted to experience, and who gets to control it. More than unintentional misnomer, the government-termed "War of Drugs" is a strategic decoy label; a slight-of-hand move by the government to redirect attention away from what lies at ground of the war- each individual's fundamental right to control his or her own conciousness.

In George Orwell's dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Oceania government diligently worked to establish "Newspeak", a carefully crafted language designed by the government for the purpose of making unapproved "Mods of thought impossible." Prior to Newspeak, the people of Oceania communicated in "Oldspeak," an autonomous natural language capable of expressing nuances of emotion and multiple points of view. By controlling language through the imposition of Newspeak-by eliminating undesirable words-the government of Oceania was able to control and, in some cases, completely extinguish certain thoughts.

A character in 1984 explained to Winston Smith, "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?...Every year there are fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness is always a little smaller." People raised with Newspeak, having never known the wider-range of Oldspeak, might fail to notice, indeed, might be unable to even perceive, that the government was limiting conciousness.

In 1970, just four years after the Catholic Church finally abandoned the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the United States government produced its own index of forbidden thought-catalysts-the federal schedule of controlled substances. Included on the initial list of Schedule I substances were seventeen substances denoted as "hallucinogens," which were declared to have "a high potential for abuse," "no currently accepted medical use," and "a lack of accepted safety" even under medical supervision. Among the lsit of outlawed hallucinogens were psilocybin and psilocin, the active principles of Psilocybe mushrooms. The experience elicted by these substances in their chemical and natural fungi forms is the par excellence of Oldspeak-a cognitive modality dating from pre-history.

Mushrooms, of the genus Psilocybe, were used to occasion visionary states at least as early as 4000 B.C. The Psilocybe mushroom was used in religious ceremonies long before the Aztect civilization. Some who ingest visionary mushrooms believe that the mushrooms talk to them and open up channels of communication with animals and other entities. As Henry Munn reported, Mazatec eaters of Psilocybe mushrooms are adamant that the mushrooms speak to them:

"The Mazatecs say that the mushrooms speak. If you ask a shaman where his imagery comes from, he likely to reply: "I didn't say it, the mushrooms did." ...he who eats these mushrooms, if he is a man of language, becomes endowed with an inspired capacity to speak... The spontaneity they liberate is not only perceptual, but linguistic, the spontaneity of speech, of fervent, lucid discourse, of the logos in activity. For the shaman it is as if existence were uttering itself through him...words are materializations of conciousness; language is a privileged vehicle of our relation to reality."

Just as Newspeak was intended to make certain Old[speak] thoughts literally unthinkable, so the War on Drugs makes certain sort of cognition and awareness all but inaccessible. Religious scholar Peter Lamborn Wilson has aptly framed the War on Drugs as a battle over the nature of thought itself:

"The War on Drugs is a war of cognition itself, about thought itself as the human condition. Is thought this dualist Cartesian reason? Or is cognition this mysterious, complex, organic, magical thing with little mushroom elves dancing around. Which is it to be?"

In Orwell's vision of 1984, Newspeak's power to control and limit thought depended, in part, upon the passing of time and the birth of new generations that never knew Oldspeak. As explained by Orwell in the Appendix to 1984:

"It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought-that is a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc-should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependant on words."

Much as Newspeak depended in part upon time-eradicating knowledge of Oldspeak, today's War on Drugs is sustainable, in part, because the current generation of young adults-21-30 year olds-have never known a time when most entheogens were not illegal. Those who have never experienced the mental states that are now prohibited do not realize what the laws are denying them. It is as if nothing is being taken away, at least nothing noticeable, nothing that is missed. As pointed out by Arons and Lawrence, authors of a law review article on how mandatory schooling raises issues of mass-conciousness control: "the more the government regulates formation of beliefs so as to interfere with personal conciousness,...the fewer people can conceive dissenting ideas or percieve contradictions between self-interest and government sustained ideoligical orthodoxy."

Because of the personal experiential nature of mushroom-occasioned cognition, only those who have been initiated into the modern day Mysteries-those who have tasted the forbidden fruit from the visionary fungi of knowledge and have not fallen victim to the stigmatizing psycho-impact of "being a drug user"-are acutely aware of the gravity of what is being prohitibited; power modalities for thinking, perceiving, and experiencing.

The very best argument for the potential value of the mushroomed state of mind is in the entheogenic experience itself-an experience that has, for all practical purposes been outlawed. This is the dilemma of entheogen policy reformation. The advocate for entheogenic conciousness is left in an even worse position than the proverbial sighted man who must describe colors to a blind person. With regard to entheogen policy, the position is worse because the "blind" are in power and have declared it a crime to see colors.

Left with the impossible task of saying the unsayable, of describing the indescribable, those who have tasted the forbidden fungi are left to plead their case on the fundamental philosophical and political level of what it means to TRULY BE FREE. They must state their appeal on the ground that, with respect to the inner-workings of each person's mind, the values of tolerance and respect are far weightier and far more conducive to the basic principles of democracy, than is the chillingly named "zero-tolerance" policy that is currently in vogue. This brings us, once again, to cognitive liberty as an essential substrate of freedom.

WE ARE BEING DENIED POWERFUL MODALITIES FOR THINKING, PERCEIVING AND EXPERIENCING. Again, I state: It is not a War of Drugs, but it is a War on Personal Freedoms!

Peace!