We have seen that prohibition of entheogens and other drugs is economically ruinous, largely ineffective and anti-scientific. Far from guaranteeing protection for public health, prohibition fosters the spread of AIDS and hepatitis while inhibiting biomedical research and depriving the public of vital new medicines. We have seen how anti-drug laws are grounded in racism and foster crime while subsidizing organized and unorganized drug merchants and manufacturers, and favoring the decentralized domestic production of the most potent drugs. There is no doubt that enforcing drug prohibition distorts jurisprudence owing to the lack of "victims" to file complaints with police and because of the arbitrary nature of enforcement given the ubiquity of controlled substances in our bodies, in our food, even on our money. The laws immorally corrupt our police, lead to coddling of violent criminals, set bad examples for our youth and deprive us of our freedoms as they lead to a dictatorial police-state. In the international arena, the laws lead to bad relations with other countries, military and paramilitary invasions and covert military operations, the loss of human life and rights in Third World countries, and massive ecological destruction in herbicide spraying campaigns and uncontrolled contamination from clandestine laboratories. In short, the drug prohibition laws are impractical, ineffective, uneconomic, anti-scientific, unhealthy, immoral, unecological, undiplomatic and dictatorial.
Happily, there is a straightforward way out of this horrible mess the drug prohibition laws have gotten us into- legalize the drugs! Some people consider the notion of drug legalization to be bizarre and radical, a drastic step. But inebriating drugs have been mostly legal throughout the millennia of human existence; the drastic step was taken in the second decade of this century in the United States when for the first time large-scale, comprehensive legal control of inebriating drugs was implemented. Some people claim that legalization represents a daring and risky experiment, but they are wrong. Prohibition is the daring and risky experiment, and although it would be prudent to gather more comprehensive data on the results of this experiment in social engineering (Koshland 1989), it is safe to say as we approach the end of the eighth decade of federal control of inebriating drugs that the experiment has been a dismal and costly failure (Escohotado 1989a). Human and animal use of inebriants is as natural as any other aspect of social behavior; it is the attempt to control this normal animal drive that is bizarre and unnatural, as I stated at the outset, it is a crime against nature; against human and animal nature. Although we seem far from taking the sensible course which alone will begin to "solve" the drug "problem," at least legislation is becoming a legitimate option to be discussed (Evans & Berent 1992). An Anti-Prohibitionist League began publishing a periodical in 1990 (Henman 1990) and prohibition has been justly decried at the annual Drug Policy Conference as a violation of academic and religious freedom (Roberts 1990).
The drug laws are the monstrous result of institutionalizing paranoia- they are the work of paranoid "control junkies" who have no faith in others or in human nature... they would control the lives according to their own, more "responsible," more "scientific," more "moral" scheme. But like the dog in the fable who snaps at his own reflection in the water and loses his bone, the reformers' zeal for more control has led to less... our societies have lost control over inebriating drug use by placing this outside the law. Every salvo in the quixotic "War on Drugs" is a backfire, a shot in society's own foot... we are hacking and hewing at the branches of the problem, never seeing the roots, which are the very laws against drugs. The problems we attribute to the "scourge of drugs" are the results of drug laws, not of drugs... the "overdose" deaths... shootouts between rival drug gangs... drug-related spread of AIDS and hepatitis... In the paranoid fantasies of the reformist zealots, the drug laws are all that stand between the current level inebriant use and a vastly increased "epidemic" of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and LSD "abuse." As Sasha and Ann Shulgin put it in their excellent book PIHKAL, however (Shulgin & Shulgin 1991):
Yes, it's possible that with the removal of drug laws a few timid Presbyterians will venture a snort of cocaine, but in the main, drug abuse will be no worse than it is now, and -after some initial experimentation- things will return to a natural balance. There is no "Middle America" sitting out there, ready to go Whoopie! with the repeal of the drug laws. The majority of the population will, however, benefit from the return of the criminal justice system's attention to theft, rape, and murder, the crimes against society for which we need prisons.
A recent nationwide survey in the U.S. found only 2% of the respondents were "very likely or "somewhat likely" to try cocaine were it legalized, while 4% declared themselves "very likely" to try legalized marijuana, and an additional 6% "somewhat likely" to try the drug (Nadelman 1992). At the turn of the century, with a free market in all inebriating drugs, it is estimated that only 4% of the U.S. population was addicted to heroin, morphine, cocaine and other drugs openly sold in patent medicines (Zinberg 1963). No, the great majority of today's would-be heroin, cocaine, LSD and marijuana users are already using these drugs, for the laws not only fail to deter them but even attract a sizable number of people who use illegal drugs out of rebellion. And the fact of the matter is, we already have an "epidemic" of psychoactive drug use in this country, as evidenced by the 178 million caffeine users, 106 million alcohol users, 57 million tobacco users, 12 million marijuana users, not to mention at least 3 or 4 million regular users of psychoactive prescription drugs, such as Valium (Goldstein & Kalant 1990). Whether drugs are legal or illegal, the vast majority of users exercise control and responsibility, and a (generally small) minority of users come to be controlled by the drugs. This happens with alcohol as well as with heroin, with tobacco as well as with marijuana. Legalizing heroin and cocaine will not prevent some unfortunate people from excessive use such that their lives come to revolve around the drug, any more than the legal availability of alcohol prevents this addiction syndrome from occurring in some uncontrolled users. Making all drugs available legally will certainly change the numbers of people using individual drugs, but the total number of users will stay about the same, because already more than 90% of our adult population is using drugs. If amphetamines become legal, some people will surely begin to use them, as they have always been popular when legally available (in 1962, the U.S. FDA estimated annual domestic amphetamine production at 9000 million doses; Escohotado 1989a), but we can be sure that those prospective amphetamine users are already using caffeine, and if these people use amphetamines, they will use less caffeine, or none at all. Since caffeine generally appears to have more side-effects than amphetamines (Weiss & Laties 1962), this could represent a net gain in public health. Similarly, heroin and other potent opiates are generally incompatible with alcohol (Burroughs 1959). It is safe to assume that were more people using legal heroin, fewer would be using alcohol. Since alcohol is far more toxic than heroin (Brecher 1972; Weil 1972), this too could represent a net benefit for public health.
The unfortunate fact is that our society has blindly accepted as orthodox inebriants two of the most toxic pleasure drugs known to science. As I have already mentioned, together these drugs kill more than a half million Americans each year. Alcohol is more than simply an addictive drug... it is a carcinogenic drug... it causes irreversible brain and liver damage... it is a teratogen (it causes birth defects if taken at the wrong time by pregnant women; Brown et al. 1979; Clarren & Smith 1978). In a ranking of general carcinogenic hazards, it is estimated that the lifetime cancer-causing liability of drinking one 250 ml glass of wine daily (30 ml alcohol) was more than 5000 times greater than the combined lifetime cancer risk represented by the U.S. average daily dietary consumption of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), DDE (the common metabolite of the famous pesticide DDT) and EDB (ethyl dibromide, an antifungal fumigant- U.S. average dietary consumption of these chemical residues = 2.8 mcg/day; Ames et al. 1987)! Compared to the lifetime cancer-causing potential of the nitrosamines found in a 100g daily ration of cooked bacon, the daily glass of wine represents more than 500 times the risk? The connection between alcohol and crime and accidental injury is striking- 54% of all jail inmates convicted of violent crimes in 1983 had used alcohol just prior to commission; in 10% of all work-related injuries reported in 1986, alcohol was a "contributing factor"- alcohol use is estimated to cost the U.S. economy $100 billion ($100,000 million) each year (Department of Health and Human Services 1986)! Tobacco is more than a highly addictive drug... it is a potent carcinogen, whether smoked, chewed or taken as a snuff or in enemas (Hoffman et al. 1986; Ricer 1987), and its widespread use has reformed lung cancer from a medical curiosity to a common disease. We have already embraced a couple of worst drugs known with open arms... but we are so used to them that it's no big deal... we forget even that they are drugs... we talk about "alcoholism and drug abuse" as though alcoholism were somehow different from "drug abuse". By the same token, were heroin legal and widely used, although it might cause some health problems in a few, we would think it was no big deal (Trebach 1982). And indeed, heroin is not much more than an addicting drug. It is not carcinogenic like tobacco and alcohol; it does not cause brain or liver damage as do those legal drugs; it is not teratogenic... about the only health problem associated with its habitual use (excluding infections associated with dirty syringes, infections which don't occur with normal medicinal use of heroin in Britain) is constipation (Brecher 1972; Weil 1972)! there is no question that the United States, as a nation, would have far lower medical costs, if we had 106 million users of legal, sterile, heroin and 2 million alcohol users, instead of 106 million alcohol users and 2 million users of virus-ridden, adulterated ersatz "heroin." Truly, we already have about the worst situation vis-a-vis drugs. with our national drugs being carcinogenic, hepatotoxic and teratogenic and causing brain damage, and with the government having surrendered all control of the use of most other drugs to the criminal element. Truly, there's nowhere to go, but up!
There have already been some limited modern experiments in relaxing the drug laws, and in general use levels stay about the same or go down. In the 11 American states that briefly "decriminalized" marijuana in the 1970s, the number of users stayed about the same (Johnson et al. 1981). In the Netherlands, legal tolerance of Cannabis use and its legal control has led to a significant decline in consumption: in 1976, 10% of 17-18 year old Dutch citizens used illegal Cannabis, whereas by 1985 this percentage has almost been halved, to 6%, according to official Dutch figures (Ministry of Welfare 1985). The Dutch government is succeeding, as it intended, in making Cannabis use boring... no rebellion there. American proponents of drug control hem and haw and try to explain away the Dutch success by claiming that the Dutch problem is easier to deal with, owing to the "homogenous population" (Jarvik 1990), which is a polite way of saying that the Dutch aren't burdened with a large, intractable population of black and Hispanic dope fiends! In fact, the Netherlands does have a large and growing minority population (over 5%) and there are poor urban districts which resemble U.S. ghettos (Beers 1991).
The Prohibition experiment has failed miserably, and it is high time we were back to the natural order of things, and let society learn how to regulate and control drug use socially and medically, not legally and by force. The introduction of distilled alcohol to European society led to "epidemics" of uncontrolled, excessive use (Wasson 1976b), but in time, without government intervention, Western societies began to make their peace with alcohol (a process which continues evolving), developing rituals to help control alcohol addiction, such as social approval of alcohol use after the day's work, and general condemnation of alcoholic, dependent behavior (Zinberg 1977; Zinberg 1984). Modern societies will not sanction nor approve irresponsible, addictive use of legal heroin, cocaine or marijuana; just as they do not sanction uncontrolled use of alcohol. The legal availability of tobacco and alcoholic beverages does not mean societies encourage their use, and there is evidence that anti-alcohol and anti-tobacco advertising campaigns conducted by the U.S. and other governments are effective in restricting use. Only by bringing all ludibund drug use into the open can we hope to develop social restraints favoring responsible use of presently illicit drugs. We must treat citizens as responsible adults, not promulgate the absurd and fallacious notion that certain drugs (like heroin and cocaine) destroy individual will and self-control- thereby giving immature and irresponsible individuals a ready-made excuse for illegal or immoral behavior- the idea that one's heroin habit made one rob friends and family, or steal an elderly woman's pocketbook (Escohotado 1989a). We must give people choices based on a free market and unbiased information about the benefits and dangers of all drugs, not unrealistically expect to scare people away from certain drugs with silly propaganda. Treat citizens like irresponsible children and many will behave accordingly. It is time our governments exercised true and appropriate control over presently illicit drugs, by guaranteeing purity and dosages and a fair market price- it is up to society and to us as individuals to do the rest.
In the pages that follow I will discuss in great detail that most exciting, most mysterious class of drugs, the stock in trade of shamans and thaumaturges the world over- the cacti, mushrooms. grasses, trees, shrubs and lianas which we call entheogenic plants, and their contained active principles. Of all the groups of proscribed psychotropic plants, it is the entheogens which have been treated most unfairly, for these are in no way "drugs of abuse." Animals shrink from them rather than become habituated to them, people use them infrequently and mostly treat them with awe and respect for their divine potency. Far from being addicting drugs, they show promise in aiding addicts to overcome their habituation to drugs like alcohol and heroin (Hoffer 1970). The controversial psychotherapeutic research on treating alcoholics with LSD and DPT has been summarized (Grinspoon & Bakalar 1979) and the promising initial results certainly justify further experimentation. The organized religious use of peyotl by the "Native American Church" has been recognized by personnel of federal government alcoholism clinics to be of some value in treating alcoholism (Albaugh & Anderson 1974; Osmond 1970), and was said by physician Robert Bergman, Chief of the U.S. Public Health Service on the Navajo reservation, to have a greater success rate than other alcoholism treatments. Bergman also noted the marked safety of peyotl, estimating only one bad reaction per 70,000 ingestions, calling that rate "probably over-estimated (Bergman 1971). The propensity of the entheogens to work against drug addiction led advocacy of their use to be termed an "anti-drug" position (McKenna 1989a; T.K. McKenna 1992).
Although its legal status is confused by the federal classification of peyotl and mescaline as controlled substances, and by the plethora of state laws against both the plant and its entheogenic alkaloid, in general American courts have upheld the constitutional protection of sacramental use of peyotl by members of the "Native American Church" (an example is the 1964 California State Supreme Court ruling in the Woody case exonerating three Navajo peyotists). Twenty-three states have in some way exempted peyotl from controlled substances laws (Blackmun 1990). In general, anthropologists who have studied the "Native American Church" have supported the right of Indians to use peyotl sacramentally on grounds of freedom of religion. For example, W. La Barre, D.P. McAllester, J.S. Slotkin and O.C. Stewart signed a "statement on peyote" to that effect in Science magazine (La Barre et al. 1951). When in 1937 New Mexico Senator D. Chavez introduced a bill to prohibit interstate transportation of peyotl, a number of anthropologists and ethnobotanists, including F. Boas, W. La Barre and R.E. Shultes, submitted letters opposing the bill, which was defeated (Stewart 1987). One must, however, have at least one-fourth Indian blood to join this church, and the church itself does not seek non-Indian members owing to the limited supply of the sacrament (Mount 1987). Nevertheless, a New York Federal District Court found in 1979 that "the use of peyote for sacramental purposes... is not to be restricted solely to the Native American Church," effectively clearing the way for non-Indians to use peyotl religiously, and the Arizona "Peyote Way Church of God" was incorporated in Arizona in 1979, and filed a discrimination suit in Texas when Arizona church members were arrested there while harvesting peyotl. Drug possession charges against the church members were dismissed (Mount 1987; Ott 1992c). A Caucasian member of the "Native American Church" was recently exonerated of drug charges the New Mexico State Supreme Court, Chief Justice J.G. Burciaga stating his court "compelled to halt this menacing attack on our constitutional freedoms" (Gorman 1992). Similarly, the Canadian government has sanctioned the sacramental use of entheogenic mushrooms by a religious organization called "The Fane of the Psilocybe Mushroom" ("fane" in the sense of "temple," rather than "fairy" or "banner")- actually, the organization was chartered at a time when the psilocybian mushrooms were legal in Canada, owing to a favorable ruling in a court case.
It is interesting that some anthropologists who supported the (non-traditional) use of peyotl as a sacrament by North American Indians have denounced use by non-Indians. La Barre, for example, called British peyotl or mescaline users from Havelock Ellis to Aldous Huxley "ethnologically spurious, meretricious and foolish poseurs" and ridiculed Huxley's book on his religious experience with mescaline, The Doors of Perception, as a "rather absurd book" (La Barre 1975). I don't know how one can be "ethnologically spurious other than by faking field work ala Castaneda, and La Barre is certainly entitled to his opinion, but the man who wrote The Perennial Philosophy (Huxley 1944) cannot fairly be called "meretricious"- somebody with a more sincere interest in spiritual matters would be difficult to find. La Barre went on to denounce the "Neo-American Church," which had adopted entheogens as sacraments, as a "wholly synthetic, disingenuous and bogus cult"! This is pure, unalloyed discrimination... racial and religious discrimination. As we will see in the pages that follow, sacramental use of entheogens is as much a part of Caucasian heritage as it is a part of New World Indian heritage. I have just as much right to ingest peyotl or entheogenic mushrooms as any Navajo or Mazatec or Huichol Indian- to say otherwise, as La Barre has done, would be to discriminate against me because of my racial background and to deny me the right to worship as I wish or see fit.
It is my sincere wish that this book contribute to an objective reappraisal of entheogenic drugs and their place in the modern world. I have dedicated it to my late teacher Gordon Wasson, who more than anyone catalyzed the contemporary revival of ecstatic, shamanic religion, and who wrote beautifully about the "bemushroomed" state. At the outset I reiterated Wasson's rhetorical question, whether, with all our modern knowledge, we needed the divine entheogens any longer. I would answer with Wasson, that precisely because of our modern knowledge we need them more than ever. Mother Earth, Our Lady Gaia, is suffering mightily the ecological consequences of all that modern knowledge and especially Judeo-Christian heritage which treats us as a special creation enjoined to subdue and master the Earth. But to paraphrase one of the greatest Americans, Chief Seattle, the Earth does not belong to humankind, humankind belongs to the Earth. Any experience, pharmacological or otherwise, which makes us aware that "every thing that lives is Holy," that we are all sisters and brothers... black, white, two-legged or four-legged, legless or centipedal; that the universe of which we are an integral part is divine and sacred... any such experience can be of vital importance in helping us overcome our ecological plight, which is the inevitable consequence of treating the world as matter, not as divine energy... as objects to be bought and sold, not as "Eternal Delight." I firmly believe that contemporary spiritual use of entheogenic drugs is one of humankind's brightest hopes for overcoming the ecological crisis with which we threaten the biosphere and jeopardize our own survival, for Homo sapiens is close to the head of the list of endangered species. We need to recapture the mysterium tremendum of the unio mystica, the millennial awe our ancestors felt in the divine presence, in the sublime majesty of our marvelous universe, in the entheogenic "bemushroomed" state the sage Gordon Wasson described (1961):
Elsewhere I once wrote that the bemushroomed person is poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen. In truth, he is the five senses disembodied, all of them keyed to the height of sensitivity and awareness, al of them blending into one another most strangely, until the person, utterly passive, becomes a pure receptor, infinitely delicate, of sensations. As your body lies there in its sleeping bag, your soul is free, loses all sense of time, alert as it never was before, living an eternity in a night, seeing infinity in a grain of sand. What you have seen and heard is cut as with a burin in your memory, never to be effaced. At last you know what the ineffable is, and what ecstasy means. Ecstasy!