222 - Crimes Against Nature_ The Civil War Against Drugs

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott

[NOTE: All quotations are by Jonathan Ott.]

“It is, of course, absurd for humankind to presume to illegalize other organisms with which we share this planet.”

“A society that coddles murderers and armed robbers in order to get tough on potheads is not walking the moral high ground.” [In reference to releasing violent criminals to make room for small-time, non-violent, simple possession offenders.]
“In short, drug prohibition is impractical, ineffective, uneconomic, anti-scientific, unhealthy, immoral, unecological, undiplomatic, and dictatorial.”

“Drug laws are the monstrous result of institutionalizing paranoia.”

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:24 ►

Psychedelic Space. This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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And since I’m still recovering from whatever it is that’s going around out here,

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I nonetheless feel like I should get this program out to you as soon as I can.

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As you already know, our featured speaker today is the one and only Jonathan Ott.

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Now, I’ve been wanting to do a program with Jonathan for a long time now,

00:00:59 ►

but he’s been kind of hard to pin down these past few years, and so I’ve never been able to get permission from him to play some of the talks of his that were recorded by a friend of mine during the ethnobotany conferences that once were held in Palenque, Mexico.

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In fact, that’s where I first encountered Jonathan in person, and I was completely, totally blown away by his intellect.

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A friend of mine and I had traveled to Palenque for that conference, mainly to see Terrence McKenna.

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But on Saturday morning when the sessions began, it was just a get-acquainted session, and so the first talk wasn’t until two o’clock that afternoon. And as my friend and I climbed up that steep, and I mean really steep hill up to the conference

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room for that first talk, which was to be given by Jonathan Ott, we had no preconceived

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ideas about him at all, other than his written work, that is.

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And to say that he blew us away is a huge understatement.

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is. And to say that he blew us away is a huge understatement. I guess there were probably about 50 of us sitting in folding chairs, and there was a small table and chair at the

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front of the room. So then Jonathan comes in, climbs up on the table, and sits there

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cross-legged like a very thin and somewhat severe Buddha. And his topic for the day, I think, was called pharmacophilia,

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or natural paradises.

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However, I can’t recall much of what he said that afternoon, because my main memory is

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of this incredible store of knowledge that he seemed to have right at his fingertips,

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and it poured out of his mouth like a scholarly version of Terence McKenna, if you can imagine

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that.

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Now, I still think that Terence McKenna is the best public speaker I’ve ever heard,

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but in my opinion, Jonathan Ott is the most highly intellectual, well-read, and intelligent person I’ve ever encountered.

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Of course, if you already know Jonathan, you also know that he can be a bit cantankerous at times,

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but that in no way blunts the sharp edge of his incredible intellect.

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I guess I better stop now, because I’ve probably oversold him already.

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And on top of that, I’m not even going to play one of his lectures about plants.

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Instead, I’ve cleaned up a talk of his that’s been floating around the net for a long

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time now, and it’s his reading from what may be his most important work, Pharmacotheon,

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Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources in History, which was published the week he gave this talk,

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actually. That was in 1993. And while it doesn’t show Jonathan in his main guise, which is that of one of the world’s

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leading ethnobotanists, but rather it’s as a serious critic of the way in which some humans

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have imposed their morality on the rest of us by declaring as outlaws anyone who was inclined to

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use non-prescription drugs. But enough of me. Let’s just listen to Jonathan Ott right now,

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and when I return, I’ll bring you up to date

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on the tragedy that has recently befallen him

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with the arson that destroyed his house and laboratory

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and part of his library,

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which puts him in the unenviable position

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of joining Aldous Huxley and Terrence McKenna

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of having the majority of their life’s work destroyed by fire.

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The good news, though, is that Jonathan is by no means defeated by this attack on his person

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and is planning on moving forward.

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But we’re all going to have to give him a little help if we can.

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First, however, here is a 1993 recording of a talk by the incomparable Jonathan Ott.

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1993 recording of a talk by the incomparable Jonathan Ott.

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Normally I don’t like to read lectures, but I’m going to do that tonight,

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and I want to beg your indulgence and I’ll explain a little bit why.

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As Bob mentioned, I just am now publishing this book, Pharmacotheon.

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Unfortunately, we don’t have copies to sell, but it is in print, finally.

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And what I’m going to read to you tonight is sort of a condensation of the proemium or introduction to this book. And as I was writing the book, actually, I could say I’ve been working

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on it full-time for about two years as a full-time endeavor, but working on gathering the information for about 20 years.

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And when I started writing it, I decided, well, I better keep politics out of this,

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because if I don’t, it will be impossible to get it published.

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But then I found it was coming out at the seams,

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and there were all these footnotes being appended to dry scientific discussions

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dealing with the political aspect,

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and there’s really no way to divorce politics from the science in this field.

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It has become politicized because the field itself is illegal.

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This call of disreputability has been cast over it by the legal misclassification of these substances.

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So I decided, well, I will just take the bull by the horns

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and I’ll go directly for the jugular

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and deal with the political aspect of it right up front.

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And so that’s what I’ve done.

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And I had to publish it myself.

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So, anyway.

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And ordinarily, I would rather speak extemporary about this or about anything else,

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but I tend to, even if I’m given the subject of one plant,

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it usually takes me about three hours to get through the basics.

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And this is a bigger subject. And so I decided the best thing to do would be to condense it,

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and then I can go hit the high points and really get to the meat of it in about an hour.

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And so that’s what I’ve done.

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And I will read it, but there will be plenty of time for discussion,

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and I hope it will stimulate some lively discussion.

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And the title I’ve given this excerpt is Crimes Against Nature, the Civil War on Drugs.

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Crimes Against Nature, the Civil War on Drugs.

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To paraphrase America’s rustic president, Abraham Lincoln,

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we are now engaged in a great civil war, testing whether the modern nation state or its citizens

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will be the ultimate arbiter and judge of individual well-being and health,

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whether the citizen will be responsible for what pleasure drugs she or he chooses to ingest or to eschew

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or whether an ostensibly benevolent paternalistic state

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supposedly guided by science and reason

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will make that decision in loco parentis

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those paranoid individuals with no faith

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in the inherent wisdom and dignity of human beings

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today hold the upper hand

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and ill-conceived laws have been crafted to prescribe certain drugs,

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with the unanticipated and unintended consequence

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of illegalizing innumerable plants and animals

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which we now know to contain those drugs.

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It is, of course, absurd for humankind

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to presume to illegalize other organisms with which we share this planet,

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and this could be seen as a laughable example of human folly run wild,

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were it not for the mounting toll of victims this tragic abuse of law and authority increasingly claims.

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Spinoza presciently foresaw the consequences of misguided attempts to, quote,

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control the desires and passions of men, unquote.

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And it is evident that the millions of contemporary users of proscribed drugs

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are laughing at the laws presuming to forbid them

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and that they are far from deficient in the ingenuity needed to outwit those laws.

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It has ever been so with laws regulating the legitimate appetites of human beings,

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and there is no question such laws represent an abuse of governmental power.

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The great libertarian Edmund Atwill Wasson commented in 1914 in a critique of the prohibition

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of alcohol in the United States that it was, quote, one thing to furnish the law and another

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to furnish the force needed to ensure obedience, unquote. Law is the instrument of popular will in democratic

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countries, and when a law is sufficiently unpopular, as was the law prohibiting alcohol

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manufacturing and sale for ludicrous purposes in the United States, the people in theory will rise

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to overturn it. Would that it were so with unjust laws or unenforceable laws. When a government proves itself all too willing to attempt to furnish the force needed to ensure obedience

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to unenforceable and arguably unjust laws,

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then the very freedoms on which democratic rule is ostensibly founded are jeopardized.

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This is the case with the Civil War on drugs

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and the unprecedented intrusions into personal liberty which it inexorably occasions.

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It is a case where the cure is far worse than the disease,

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in which the proposed therapy is toxic and will prove fatal

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if administered in sufficiently high dosage.

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While the use of the drugs this shock therapy addresses

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continues unabated or indeed increases,

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freedom and dignity are on the

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ropes and in danger of going down for the count.

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I will adumbrate four lines of argument against the contemporary prohibition of drugs.

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Although disguised as public health laws, strictures against drugs are principally limitations

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on the pursuit of happiness and on the practice of religion in a broad sense,

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or in a sense broader still, are attempts to enshrine in law a certain perverse brand of what once was called natural philosophy.

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I call it science, and the overzealous modern laws against drugs are manifestly anti-scientific

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and indeed represent crimes against nature.

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A Scientific Perspective and indeed represent crimes against nature. A scientific perspective.

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Drug prohibition statutes are typically justified as public health laws,

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and conventional wisdom holds that in enacting and enforcing such measures,

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governments are exercising their paternalistic function

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of protecting the citizenry from dangers to public health,

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much as they would in framing and enforcing laws regarding sewage disposal, vaccinations, or pollution of air and water.

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Prohibition is thus seen as benign, indeed beneficent, and this viewpoint has become

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so firmly rooted in public consciousness as to make the concept accepted universally as

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a legitimate exercise, nay, as a solemn responsibility of capitalist and

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socialist governments alike.

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Nevertheless, viewed dispassionately and scientifically, this public health justification for prohibition

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won’t hold water, and it can be argued, rather, that by placing certain drugs outside of the

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established quality control regimen for pharmaceuticals, governments

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are defaulting on their responsibility to protect public welfare.

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While some prospective drug users are dissuaded by laws, many, perhaps the majority, are not.

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During the prohibition of alcohol in the U.S. from 1920 to 1933, some alcohol users took

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the pledge and obeyed the law, whereas many, probably at least half,

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continue to use alcohol in spite of the law.

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Although it is impossible to establish firm numbers for present use of illicit drugs

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and the efficacy of the laws prohibiting them,

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there is no question that many millions of users, at least 20 to 40 million in the U.S.,

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or about 10 to 20 percent of the adult population, are undeterred

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by the laws. During alcohol prohibition in the U.S., many inveterate users were poisoned by

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methanol and other solvents. Poisonings which would not have occurred had legal controls of

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alcohol purity been in place. Poisonings which ceased to occur once ludicrous use of alcohol and its sale for that purpose again became legal.

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Similarly, now there are some 3,500 premature deaths per year in the United States due to illicit drug use,

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many of them so-called overdose deaths from injected drugs, mainly opiates.

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Although these deaths are called heroin overdose,

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the great majority are rather due to adulterants and

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contaminants in illicit drugs, typical samples of which contain only a few percent of heroin or one

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or another artificial succidanium, and illicit products may also contain dust, mites, and other

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minuscule arthropods, spores, virus particles, and bacteria. On the other hand, medical injection, including self-administration

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of sterile pharmaceutical opiates of known potency, is a common, safe procedure, and deaths

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as a result of such use are virtually unknown. Injection of black market drugs has become a

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major vector of transmission of AIDS and hepatitis. Around 25% of all U.S. and European AIDS cases, including

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the majority of cases in heterosexuals, children, and infants, are a result of illicit intravenous

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drug administration. The barbarous practice of denying access to sterile syringes without a

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medical prescription prevails in the United States, whereas in most of the world’s countries,

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sterile syringes are made available at low prices over the counter.

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This cruel and misguided measure is directly responsible for at least 25 percent of the

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new cases of AIDS in the U.S. and Europe.

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Far from protecting public health, prohibition is drastically expanding the AIDS epidemic

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and contributing to the deaths of thousands of individuals in the U.S. alone from drug

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overdose, individuals deprived of the protection of thousands of individuals in the U.S. alone from drug overdose,

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individuals deprived of the protection of the Food and Drug Administration

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and its counterparts in other countries.

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This is especially important when we reflect that not all black market drugs are inebriants,

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not all drug users, hedonists, and drill seekers.

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Owing to the restrictive nature of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry,

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there are black markets in curative drugs which have not been approved for sale by the FDA.

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Examples are the controversial cancer drug amygdalin or laetrile,

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dimethyl sulfoxide, a treatment for bruises and sprains.

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Users must employ industrial grade as no pharmaceutical grade is available,

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and the AIDS drugs azithrothymidine,

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AZT, and dextransulfate. There are even black market drugs which fit neither in the category

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of inebriants nor chemotherapeutic agents. Biotechnology products are coming to be used

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illicitly by athletes. There exists a black market in human growth hormone and erythropoietin for athletes.

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The black market in athletic steroids has been estimated at $100 million annually and is growing.

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These steroids are being sold by mail and in health food stores.

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Other damage to public health is occasioned by drug prohibition.

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Some illicit drugs have valuable therapeutic properties and thus potential to alleviate human suffering

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They are not being systematically researched and developed as pharmaceutical products

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owing to the pall of disreputability cast over them by their legal misclassification

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LSD was originally developed by Sandoz of Switzerland

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as a pharmaceutical agent under the trade name Delices

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While the novel medicine

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showed considerable promise in psychotherapy, one of the most exciting pharmaceutical prospects for

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the drug was as an analgesic and psychotherapeutic adjunct to agonist therapy, treatment of patients

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with painful terminal cancer or other fatal diseases. LSD and other entheogenic drugs proved

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to be valuable, long-lasting analgesic agents

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in some patients with severely painful terminal conditions,

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drugs which did not be numb and cloud consciousness in the manner that potent opiate analgesics do.

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The drugs also proved their worth in brief psychotherapy,

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aiding dying patients to cope with their situation.

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The propensity of entheogenic drugs like LSD to work against drug addiction

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led advocacy of their use to be termed an anti-drug position.

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Thanks to this demonstrated medicinal value,

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the Swiss government recently reclassified LSD as an experimental medicine,

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making it again available to physicians.

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Entheogens have also shown promise in treatment of alcoholism.

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Despite this plethora of therapeutic benefits of entheogenic drugs, their pharmaceutical

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development was cut short by their legal prescription and their illogical classification in Schedule

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1 drugs with, quote, no currently accepted medical use, unquote, all that eliminated

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further research along these lines. Heroin,

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called deadly poison in the U.S., continues to be regarded as valuable medicine in other countries

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such as Great Britain. Heroin or diamorphine is considered to be more effective and safer than

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morphine in treating the pain of myocardial infarction. Since both heroin and LSD have

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legal medicinal uses in other scientifically advanced

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countries, their U.S. legal designation as drugs with no currently accepted medical use

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is patently false and prejudicial.

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The illicit drug best known for its medicinal use is marijuana.

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This drug has shown many medicinal properties, but is best known as an anti-nausea agent

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for patients receiving cancer or AIDS chemotherapy and as an appetite stimulant.

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Smoked marijuana and orally ingested tetrahydrocannabinol, THC or Marinol, one of the active principles,

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have proven to be valuable adjuncts to cancer and AIDS chemotherapy.

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Nevertheless, the U.S. government, to avoid giving mixed signals,

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recently stopped distribution of marijuana to new cancer and AIDS patients,

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although for the moment, Marinol will still be available.

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There is some evidence, however, that marijuana may be more effective for some patients,

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and it would be less expensive were cultivation for this purpose permitted.

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The U.S. government does, in any case, give mixed signals with regard to marijuana and THC.

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On one hand, the marijuana plant and its active principle are listed in Schedule I

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as having, quote, no currently accepted medical use, unquote.

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Then the same government shows the error of this misclassification by itself,

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distributing marijuana and THC for medical use.

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These and other examples show that a decidedly negative result of prohibition of drugs

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has been curtailment of promising lines of clinical research

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and withholding potentially valuable medicaments from the public.

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Laws are thus working to the detriment of public health in contrast to their ostensible

00:19:05 ►

purpose. Meanwhile, the prescribed drugs are available to all comers, and users are deprived

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of the guarantees their taxes are paying FDA authorities and their foreign counterparts to

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provide. Yes, junkies and long-haired potheads pay taxes too, and enjoyed the same rights to protection as nicotine fiends and

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short-haired gin freaks. Just as serious as keeping potentially valuable medicaments from

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the pharmacopoeia is the curtailment of basic scientific research consequent to prohibition.

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Bureaucratic difficulties with research involving illegal drugs and stigmatization of the field in

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the eyes of other scientists

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and personnel and governmental agencies cause basic research with controlled drugs virtually

00:19:50 ►

to disappear following their prescription. Scientists have been forced, for political

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reasons, to discard tools offering an approach to the classic brain-mind problem of philosophy,

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the biochemistry of consciousness itself. Nevertheless, such research

00:20:07 ►

will continue in countries with fewer regulations or a more enlightened drug policy. The U.S.

00:20:14 ►

Controlled Substances Analogs Act of 1986 has been perceived as illegalizing synthesis with

00:20:21 ►

the intention of studying their effects in human beings, of any of the illicit substances or their automatically illegal congeners.

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It is illegal in the U.S. to synthesize and test completely novel compounds, the government

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in essence presuming to declare anything illegal unless specifically authorized.

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Talk about socialistic central planning and governmental control of industry.

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about socialistic central planning and governmental control of industry. Pursuing this sort of draconian legal over-regulation will ultimately dune the U.S. pharmaceutical industry to technological

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and economic inferiority as the next generation of mind drugs is developed elsewhere.

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Practical and Legal Considerations

00:21:01 ►

The fundamental problem with drug control

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is that most human beings, in all eras and cultures about which we know,

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have used drugs to modify their mood or state of mind.

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In the U.S., there are nearly 200 million people over the age of 12,

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of which 178 million are caffeine users, 89%,

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106 million are alcohol users, 89 percent. 106 million are alcohol users, 53 percent. 57 million are

00:21:28 ►

nicotine users, 28 percent, along with approximately 12 million marijuana users, 6 percent, some 3

00:21:35 ►

million cocaine users, 1.5 percent, 2 million heroin users, 1 percent, with about a million users,

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0.5 percent each, of the entheogens and non-ethanol solvents,

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according to the government’s conservative data from a household survey.

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Not only are numbers of illicit drug users greatly inferior to numbers of users of legal

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psychoactive drugs, but the scope of health problems associated with illicit versus licit

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drug use shows a similar disparity.

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problems associated with illicit versus licit drug use shows a similar disparity.

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Compared to the estimated 3,000 to 4,000 deaths per year as a consequence of all illicit drug use combined,

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which I might add includes people that were shot by the police during arrests,

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approximately 320,000 Americans die prematurely each year as a consequence of tobacco use, and they are accompanied to

00:22:25 ►

the graveyard by an additional 200,000 premature cadavers each year resulting from use of alcohol.

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Although there are approximately three times as many nicotine users in the United States

00:22:37 ►

as users of all illicit drugs combined, there are nearly 100 times as many deaths as a result.

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And although there are about five times as many alcohol users as illicit drug users,

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alcohol is responsible for some 50 times as many deaths.

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One might conclude that tobacco is some 30 times more dangerous

00:22:56 ►

than entheogens, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin,

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and that alcohol is about 10 times more dangerous.

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Or one might claim that in time we will discover that additional premature deaths are in fact due to illicit drug use.

00:23:09 ►

Nevertheless, the disparity is striking,

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and it cannot be argued that illicit drugs are justifiably illegal because they are dangerous,

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as long as substances evidently much more dangerous are legal.

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Many people persist in ignoring the fact that nicotine is an addictive

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drug, but former U.S. Surgeon General C.E. Cooke stated plainly, quote, the pharmacological and

00:23:32 ►

behavioral processes that determine tobacco addiction are similar to those that determine

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addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine. We should also give priority to the one addiction,

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tobacco addiction, that is killing more than 300,000 Americans each year.

00:23:48 ►

In the former Soviet Union in 1990, tobacco shortages sparked widespread riots,

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forcing emergency importation of American cigarettes.

00:23:58 ►

Long-suffering consumers would endure stoically chronic shortages of foods, clothing, and energy,

00:24:04 ►

but not tobacco.

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would endure stoically chronic shortages of foods, clothing, and energy, but not tobacco.

00:24:10 ►

This in the country in which the real czar once ordered the execution of tobacco smokers.

00:24:17 ►

Former National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIDA, Director W. Pollan stated that tobacco addiction was, quote, no different from heroin or cocaine, unquote.

00:24:21 ►

The severity of nicotine addiction has been underscored by the recent introduction of products

00:24:26 ►

to ameliorate the nicotine withdrawal syndrome,

00:24:30 ►

such as nicoderm patches, transdermal nicotine bandages, and nicorette gum,

00:24:35 ►

which became famous when former drug czar W.J. Bennett,

00:24:39 ►

who had given up a two-pack-per-day cigarette habit to set a good example,

00:24:42 ►

later admitted that he had relapsed and was still hooked on nicotine gum. Just say no and do otherwise.

00:24:51 ►

Not only is psychoactive drug use nearly universal among American adults, but virtually every culture

00:24:57 ►

that has been studied has been found to make use of one or another inebriant. Moreover, there is

00:25:03 ►

increasing evidence for the use of medicinal and inebriating plants

00:25:06 ►

by non-human animals, leading to the new specialty of zoopharmacognosy.

00:25:12 ►

Clearly, use of inebriants is a normal, ordinary activity, virtually universal among members

00:25:17 ►

of our species, and any attempts to prohibit one inebriant in favor of another, involving

00:25:23 ►

questions of taste,

00:25:25 ►

tradition, and prejudice rather than scientific criteria, is destined for trouble.

00:25:31 ►

Laws will not deter many millions of people from using the drugs of their choice, but

00:25:35 ►

they can distort and pervert the legal system and wreak all sorts of havoc in the attempt. An avowed purpose of drug prohibition

00:25:46 ►

is to increase street prices of illicit drugs.

00:25:49 ►

The costs imposed on traffickers

00:25:51 ►

by the necessity of escaping detection

00:25:53 ►

and by the loss of occasional shipments

00:25:55 ►

or the arrests of personnel

00:25:57 ►

constitute a business tax

00:25:59 ►

which is passed on to the consumer.

00:26:02 ►

The expenditures on drug enforcement

00:26:03 ►

can be seen as a subsidy

00:26:05 ►

of illicit drug dealers. By driving up drug prices, laws enrich criminals and lead to

00:26:10 ►

theft and other crime to enable users to pay. Arbitrarily classifying millions of users

00:26:16 ►

as criminals and forcing users into contact with criminal elements sometimes associated

00:26:22 ►

with drug trafficking, drug laws then provoke more crime.

00:26:26 ►

Drugs, which would otherwise be cheap, become expensive in consequence of official policy,

00:26:31 ►

and theft and related crimes increase proportionately.

00:26:35 ►

Public health is again degraded as citizens are placed in greater danger of crime.

00:26:42 ►

Scientific developments, meanwhile, have compromised severely the forensic chemical basis for evidence

00:26:48 ►

in drug-related prosecutions.

00:26:51 ►

The discovery that the illicit entheogen D-M-T appears to be a mammalian neurotransmitter

00:26:56 ►

and that the drug normally occurs in human cerebrospinal fluid raises important legal

00:27:02 ►

questions.

00:27:04 ►

Diazepam or Valium has been found in rat brain and in trace amounts in wheat grains and diazepam

00:27:09 ►

like compounds have been found in bovine urine.

00:27:13 ►

Controlled opiates, morphine and codeine have been found to be normal components of human

00:27:17 ►

cerebrospinal fluid and morphine has been found to be a trace constituent of cow and

00:27:22 ►

human milk and to occur naturally in mammalian brain tissue.

00:27:27 ►

Trace amounts of morphine have been detected in various plants, such as hay and lettuce.

00:27:32 ►

Trace amounts of morphine in poppy seeds on baked goods can show up in the urine of the

00:27:37 ►

diner.

00:27:39 ►

With detection of morphine in urine considered prima facie evidence of heroin use in methadone

00:27:44 ►

clinic patients and in job applicants, and with drug laws flatly proclaiming that unauthorized possession

00:27:50 ►

or sale of, quote, any material, compound, mixture, or preparation which contains any

00:27:55 ►

quantity of, unquote, DMT, valine, morphine, and many other drugs, where does this leave

00:28:02 ►

the concept of drug control and forensic chemical

00:28:05 ►

evidence? If morphine occurs in hay and lettuce, in poppy seed rolls, in every one of our bodies,

00:28:11 ►

even in mother’s milk, on what scientific basis can an unauthorized cultivator of opium poppies

00:28:17 ►

be punished without also punishing lettuce and hay growers, or proprietors and employees at

00:28:23 ►

supermarket chains and cornered

00:28:25 ►

groceries for illicit trafficking in morphine present in every quart of wholesome milk.

00:28:30 ►

As citizens subjected to the absurd consequences of drug laws, we demand to know, on what basis?

00:28:39 ►

The absurdities and incongruities into which we fall in the looking-glass world of the

00:28:43 ►

drug warriors by no means end there.

00:28:47 ►

A recent article proclaimed that the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, quote,

00:28:52 ►

aims to fight drugs with drugs, unquote.

00:28:56 ►

That, quote, the agency is planning a massive search for medications to treat cocaine

00:29:01 ►

and other addictions, unquote, looking for, quote, magic bullets for addiction, unquote.

00:29:07 ►

The only magic bullets for addiction the authorities have found so far

00:29:11 ►

are the.38 caliber variety injected by police special revolvers.

00:29:16 ►

Let’s treat whiskey addicts with gin while we’re at it,

00:29:19 ►

or heroin addicts with methadone.

00:29:21 ►

Surely they can’t be serious.

00:29:24 ►

Do they say this with tongue

00:29:25 ►

and cheek, or do they have something else in cheek? Perhaps a goodly quid of leaves

00:29:29 ►

from the stupid bush which the CIA chemical warriors were searching for in the Caribbean

00:29:33 ►

in the 50s and seem to have found at home in Langley. Note that heroin was originally

00:29:40 ►

marketed as a cure for morphinism, and one of the magic bullets against addiction,

00:29:45 ►

romocriptine or Parladel, is already suspected to be an addicting drug.

00:29:50 ►

Of course, NIDA has no intention of treating whiskey addicts with gin, more like treating

00:29:55 ►

whiskey addicts with methanol, forcing people off one drug which they happen to like, and

00:30:00 ►

substituting another drug which will do everything for them but provide the pleasure they originally sought in drugs.

00:30:07 ►

This is treatment or assault.

00:30:09 ►

Meanwhile, as thousands are arrested for possession of cocaine, it has been found that a, quote,

00:30:17 ►

material compound mixture or preparation which contains any quantity, unquote, of this controlled

00:30:21 ►

drug is the bulk of American paper money.

00:30:32 ►

In an analysis of 135 Federal Reserve notes of varying denominations and from different parts of the country, all but four, 97%, contained detectable quantities of cocaine.

00:30:38 ►

This means that virtually all Americans are in unauthorized possession of a Schedule II

00:30:43 ►

drug all the time, or do

00:30:45 ►

you have a prescription for those banknotes, with the richest perhaps being in possession

00:30:50 ►

with intent to sell based on the gross weight of a big roll of cocaine-containing greenbacks,

00:30:55 ►

or ought we now call them whitebacks? Since the citizen carrying his Federal Reserve notes

00:31:01 ►

is legally just a bearer of a note which is the property of the Federal Reserve Bank. Does this mean that it is the proverbial higher-ups who are to

00:31:08 ►

be arrested? Do I hear calls for an indictment against the chairman of the Federal Reserve

00:31:13 ►

Bank and the Secretary of the Treasury for cocaine trafficking? Or since the buck ostensibly

00:31:18 ►

stops on the desk in the Oval Office, let’s go right to the top of this sordid drug ring

00:31:23 ►

to the President of the United States.

00:31:26 ►

Never mind the fact that the U.S. currency is printed on paper containing hemp, i.e.

00:31:31 ►

marijuana fiber, or that Betsy Ross’s first American flag was sewn of hempen cloth, or

00:31:37 ►

that the originals of the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence are scribbled

00:31:42 ►

on hemp fiber parchment.

00:31:46 ►

Declaration of Independence are scribbled on hemp fiber parchment. Chemical technology has progressed to such a point that we are all in danger of being

00:31:50 ►

the enemy in the war on drugs or prospective casualties.

00:31:55 ►

A military pilot, an officer in the U.S. Air Force, was court-martialed for illicit drug

00:32:00 ►

use when amphetamine residues were detected in his urine.

00:32:09 ►

Thanks to a little detective work, it was proved that an over-the-counter anorexic,

00:32:14 ►

diet pill, that he had been taking legally, a product containing phenylpropanolamine, his active agent, was contaminated in the manufacturing with trace amounts of amphetamine,

00:32:20 ►

as were other lots of similar products.

00:32:23 ►

The disgraced pilot was given back his commission and reinstated to active duty,

00:32:27 ►

but not restored to his prior flight crew status.

00:32:31 ►

A company called Psyche Medics is fighting the urinalysis lobby

00:32:36 ►

for a piece of the $200 million per year U.S. drug testing market,

00:32:41 ►

promoting a technology based on detection of infinitesimal residues of drugs or drug

00:32:46 ►

metabolites in hair samples.

00:32:48 ►

There is evidence that merely touching your hair after handling some of the Federal Reserve

00:32:53 ►

Chairman’s cocaine-flighted bills could make you subject to a positive reading in a hair

00:32:59 ►

analysis drug test, or taking a stroll through the park and inadvertently passing through

00:33:04 ►

some marijuana smoke exhaled by some brazen lawbreaker.

00:33:08 ►

It has been shown that such passive exposure to cannabis smoke can lead to false positive

00:33:12 ►

readings for marijuana use in blood and urine tests, too.

00:33:17 ►

Drug tests involve the problem of false positives if detection thresholds are set low enough

00:33:22 ►

to detect all users.

00:33:23 ►

if detection thresholds are set low enough to detect all users.

00:33:32 ►

In urine, cannot tell whether morphine in the urine came from a shot of heroin or a few poppy seed rolls.

00:33:36 ►

Do you think the troops fighting the war on drugs are on your side?

00:33:40 ►

Can you be sure you won’t one day be considered to be the enemy?

00:33:43 ►

Perhaps the skinheads are on to something. Let’s face it, we’re all on drugs,

00:33:47 ►

all of the time. I’m not talking about the industrial quantities of alcohol, caffeine,

00:33:53 ►

nicotine, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, etc., consumed regularly by humankind, but about the DMT and

00:34:00 ►

morphine our bodies make for us and which we consume all the time, or our very own sleeping

00:34:05 ►

pill, the endogenous ligand of the valium receptor, which may be valium itself, or the anxiety peptide

00:34:13 ►

which blocks that receptor, or our endorphins and enkephalins, which kill our pain, or substance P,

00:34:20 ►

our own pain-causing molecule, or anandamide, the endogenous ligand of the THC marijuana receptor.

00:34:28 ►

The life of the mind, of consciousness, is a constant, ever-changing pharmacological symphony,

00:34:35 ►

or to put it less romantically, a never-ending drug binge. The urge to ingest opiates or DMT

00:34:42 ►

or Valium is completely natural and as organic as can be.

00:34:47 ►

We are only supplementing or complementing endogenous drugs that make our brains work,

00:34:51 ►

and exogenous drugs are effective because they are identical to or chemically similar to our own endogenous drugs.

00:35:00 ►

Commonalities in drug abuse, irrespective of gross pharmacological differences between different classes of drugs,

00:35:07 ►

exist because on one level, all psychoactive drugs are the same.

00:35:11 ►

They are all fitting into our own brains, own receptors for our own homemade endogenous drugs.

00:35:19 ►

Let us now examine the standards prevailing in a modern American drug violation prosecution.

00:35:27 ►

Entrapment of the defendant is the rule,

00:35:29 ►

and eyewitness testimony purchased from avowed criminals,

00:35:32 ►

whether outright with cash or with pardons or reduced sentences, is de rigueur.

00:35:38 ►

The luckless defendant may have been subjected to an illegal wiretap

00:35:42 ►

or search and seizure without warrant or probable cause.

00:35:46 ►

But since the police were acting in good faith, the police are always acting in good faith,

00:35:51 ►

aren’t they? The evidence is admitted. More shocking and fraudulent is the established

00:35:56 ►

practice regarding one gram of 10% heroin to be one gram of heroin and considering sentencing or

00:36:02 ►

the charge. Possession is distinguished from

00:36:05 ►

intent to sell, which carries much stiffer penalties by the quantity of the drug seized

00:36:09 ►

as evidence. This is especially absurd when LSD is seized. Doses may contain only 25 or 50

00:36:16 ►

micrograms of the drug on a piece of paper or gelatin weighing tens or hundreds of milligrams.

00:36:22 ►

Imagine a farmer with a couple of tons of hay on the truck, hay which

00:36:26 ►

contains morphine in trace quantities. By this standard, she or he could be arrested for possession

00:36:31 ►

of a few tons of morphine. How about a raid on the pasteurization plant to bust the nefarious

00:36:37 ►

pushers of tons and tons of morphine, milk containing the drug, that is. My ludicrous tone masks genuine concern.

00:36:46 ►

As a citizen subject to entrapment and wiretapping,

00:36:48 ►

to all sorts of chicanery, prestidigitation and fraud in the name of police work,

00:36:54 ►

I demand to know, we must know,

00:36:57 ►

on what basis can ill-start individuals in possession of grams or kilograms of illicit drugs be prosecuted while ignoring traffickers in tons of Valium, morphine, codeine, DMT,

00:37:10 ►

or any number of other controlled drugs?

00:37:13 ►

On what basis?

00:37:16 ►

Entrapment, wiretaps, searches without warrant or probable cause,

00:37:20 ►

arbitrary enforcement due to the very ubiquity of controlled substances

00:37:24 ►

in our own bodies,

00:37:25 ►

on our money, in the milk we drink,

00:37:28 ►

these disreputable, slipshod, and unethical enforcement techniques

00:37:33 ►

threaten our freedoms and human rights.

00:37:36 ►

However bizarre or illegal a police tactic may be,

00:37:40 ►

once accepted in a court of law, then cited in another judgment,

00:37:44 ►

it becomes a precedent.

00:37:46 ►

And what once was a heavy-handed excess by rogue elements of police operating outside of the law

00:37:52 ►

slowly becomes standard practice acceptable in any courtroom.

00:37:57 ►

The use of emergency measures to deal with the epidemic of drug abuse

00:38:02 ►

and tolerated by judges who have swallowed anti-drug propaganda

00:38:07 ►

is changing the relationship of citizen to state

00:38:10 ►

to the detriment of individual liberty.

00:38:13 ►

Civil rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution,

00:38:18 ►

the right to privacy, freedom from unauthorized search and seizure,

00:38:21 ►

the presumption of innocence are steadily eroded and wear away,

00:38:27 ►

as surely as Thomas Jefferson’s face disappears from an aging nickel coin, and police state

00:38:32 ►

tactics that began as wartime expedience, justified by the deadly menace of drugs,

00:38:38 ►

are suddenly being applied to all areas of law enforcement. Already we are seeing the same Gestapo-inspired police state

00:38:46 ►

tactics in the enforcement of other laws. Bizarre and illegal raids and seizures have been directed

00:38:52 ►

against so-called computer hackers, the police assiduously taking advantage of the legal

00:38:57 ►

dispensations given to the drug warriors. Can anyone be deluded into supposing that the U.S.

00:39:03 ►

government will draw the line at computer hacking

00:39:06 ►

as it flexes its new police muscle?

00:39:09 ►

Is it likely U.S. law enforcement officials will draw the line anywhere?

00:39:14 ►

The chief of Amsterdam’s narcotics police commented that the war on drugs reminded him of the Gestapo,

00:39:21 ►

German police who, quote, thought they could change society’s behavior.

00:39:26 ►

The police are a very dangerous element in society if they are not limited.

00:39:30 ►

We know what war means.

00:39:32 ►

We fight war against our enemies, not with our own citizens, unquote.

00:39:37 ►

The Netherlands has drug laws similar to American laws,

00:39:40 ►

but the government administers them in a fashion characterized as harm reduction or flexible enforcement.

00:39:46 ►

Narcotics Chief Zoll commented that illegal drug users are, quote, patients, and we can’t

00:39:52 ►

help them by putting them in jail, unquote.

00:39:55 ►

In the wartime United States, then Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates testified to the

00:40:01 ►

Senate Judiciary Committee that illicit drug users, quote, ought to be

00:40:05 ►

taken out and shot for treason, unquote. In the war on drugs, only the users are shooting

00:40:12 ►

the drugs. The police are shooting at us. People are the enemy. People become casualties.

00:40:18 ►

It is a dangerous game, and the black marketers are setting rules of engagement, an inevitable

00:40:24 ►

and predictable result of concentrating control efforts on the supply rather than the demand.

00:40:30 ►

The U.S. war on drugs is a supply-side endeavor.

00:40:34 ►

Seventy-one percent of the funds in the fiscal year 1991 National Drug Control Strategy

00:40:39 ►

were destined for reduction of supply,

00:40:42 ►

29 percent for interdiction and international control,

00:40:45 ►

and 42% for law enforcement.

00:40:48 ►

Only 29% for demand reduction.

00:40:51 ►

And I might add that to his credit,

00:40:54 ►

Clinton continued those same priorities in his first budget for drug control, so-called.

00:41:01 ►

Since more than 75% of the 750,000 yearly arrests for drug violations in the U.S.

00:41:08 ►

are for simple possession, mainly of marijuana,

00:41:11 ►

it can be said that the U.S. law enforcement effort is directed at punishing users

00:41:15 ►

rather than reducing the supply.

00:41:18 ►

Interdiction and international control toward interception of the drug at U.S. borders.

00:41:23 ►

The wholesale price of cocaine dropped 80% during the 1980s,

00:41:27 ►

while the purity of the drug as retailed increased five-fold,

00:41:30 ►

according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s figures.

00:41:34 ►

Since the DEA reported in 1987 that the foreign export price of cocaine

00:41:40 ►

represented only 4% of the retail price,

00:41:43 ►

there is no reason to expect a reversal in this utter failure to reduce supply.

00:41:48 ►

The drug is so cheap to produce and so lucrative

00:41:51 ►

that traffickers easily counteract any increased activity or expenditures by the authorities.

00:41:57 ►

Again, the laws constitute a subsidy to the traffickers,

00:42:00 ►

a value-added tax,

00:42:02 ►

and the money put into crop substitution in Peru constitutes a direct

00:42:07 ►

subsidy to increase planting of coca. Since interest rates are so high, farmers plant a small

00:42:13 ►

parcel in one of the accepted substitute crops as a cover, then use the bulk of the funds to plant

00:42:19 ►

more coca, the only plant sufficiently remunerative to enable them to repay the loans,

00:42:27 ►

except for opium poppies, that is.

00:42:33 ►

Heroin production is even more lucrative and even less influenced by enforcement activities.

00:42:40 ►

According to the DEA, the foreign export price of heroin is only a fraction of 1% of its U.S. retail price.

00:42:46 ►

As the international control efforts against heroin have been directed chiefly at the Golden Triangle area of Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, traditional opium poppy growing regions,

00:42:53 ►

the traffickers have simply introduced opium and heroin production in areas not traditionally

00:42:57 ►

known for this.

00:42:59 ►

Opium poppy cultivation has become so widespread in Mexico that that country has become a leading

00:43:04 ►

heroin supplier to the U.S.

00:43:07 ►

Opium poppies have become the natural and preferred substitute crop

00:43:10 ►

for coca in South America,

00:43:12 ►

and heroin production is starting in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and Guatemala.

00:43:17 ►

The drug war has thus led the black market

00:43:20 ►

to its own crop substitution scheme,

00:43:23 ►

with the result that any reduction in the supply of cocaine

00:43:25 ►

will be more than compensated for

00:43:27 ►

by a substantial increase in the supply of heroin.

00:43:31 ►

This is progress.

00:43:32 ►

This is protecting public health.

00:43:35 ►

The U.S. authorities have been relatively more successful

00:43:38 ►

in reducing the smuggling of marijuana into the country,

00:43:42 ►

yet there is a plentiful supply of marijuana on the U.S. market.

00:43:46 ►

Not only is the drug cheap to produce, for an export price 1% of U.S. retail price according

00:43:51 ►

to DEA figures, but the unintended, though entirely predictable, results of the U.S.

00:43:57 ►

campaign against the drug have been the conversion of the U.S. into one of the world’s leading

00:44:01 ►

producers of marijuana and the transformation of many former marijuana smugglers into cocaine and or heroin smugglers. As costs of smuggling

00:44:10 ►

increase, smugglers will turn to loads with a higher value per unit of weight. Thus, exaggerated

00:44:16 ►

attention focused by the authorities on the smuggling of marijuana has led to vastly increased

00:44:21 ►

domestic production, obviating the necessity of sneaking the drug past beagle-eyed customs officials.

00:44:28 ►

The value of the U.S. marijuana crop in 1987 was estimated at $33.1 billion.

00:44:35 ►

The market is still supplied, but in a manner much less visible to the authorities,

00:44:40 ►

immeasurably more decentralized, and much less susceptible to control efforts.

00:44:46 ►

While this development may help the country’s international balance of trade, it hasn’t

00:44:50 ►

made much of a dent in the supply and has made future attempts to influence the supply

00:44:55 ►

infinitely more difficult.

00:44:57 ►

Furthermore, the necessity of indoor intensive cultivation to escape surveillance has led

00:45:03 ►

to the development of super potent strains of cannabis. The price has gone up but producers continue

00:45:09 ►

to supply the market with a product superior to that formerly smuggled are

00:45:13 ►

much less likely to be arrested and are making much more money. Does anyone still

00:45:18 ►

doubt that producers and traffickers of illicit drugs are the chief beneficiaries

00:45:22 ►

of the laws.

00:45:29 ►

Another predictable response to supply-side enforcement efforts has been the introduction to the black market of a series of completely artificial heroin analogs.

00:45:34 ►

The first of these designer drugs to appear on the U.S. market were derivatives of Demerol,

00:45:39 ►

such as MPPP, which is about 25 times the potency of the parent compound

00:45:44 ►

and about three times the potency of the parent compound and about three times

00:45:45 ►

the potency of morphine.

00:45:47 ►

The most famous of the designer narcotics, however, are the compounds known as China

00:45:52 ►

White, derivatives of the medicinal narcotic fentanyl, a compound some 100 times the potency

00:45:58 ►

of morphine.

00:45:59 ►

The best known of these black market derivatives is alpha-methyl fentanyl, roughly 3,000 times the potency of morphine.

00:46:07 ►

According to the DEA, starting materials and equipment to make a kilogram of this drug

00:46:12 ►

cost about $2,000, with the product being worth as much as a billion dollars.

00:46:17 ►

Of course, they tend to inflate those figures, but…

00:46:21 ►

This drug was an invention of black market chemists, never described in the chemical literature.

00:46:27 ►

It took the DEA a while even to figure out what it was.

00:46:29 ►

They first published an incorrect structure.

00:46:33 ►

Supply-side enforcement directed at opium poppy heroin production

00:46:37 ►

has stimulated domestic production of inexpensive succidania,

00:46:41 ►

thousands of times the potency of morphine.

00:46:43 ►

In a similar manner, exaggerated attention focused on cocaine production and smuggling

00:46:48 ►

is fueling the growth of the U.S. amphetamine industry.

00:46:52 ►

Annual domestic production of amphetamines is estimated to be worth $3 billion.

00:46:57 ►

Again, the U.S. trade deficit has been helped,

00:46:59 ►

but large-scale enterprises like heroin and cocaine production

00:47:03 ►

are replaced by practically invisible substitutes.

00:47:07 ►

Instead of international networks of growers, harvesters, chemists, and smugglers,

00:47:11 ►

now all that is required are solitary chemists inside consuming countries.

00:47:16 ►

Production costs go down, profits skyrocket, chances of arrest are reduced.

00:47:21 ►

Illicit drug manufacturers and retailers couldn’t be happier.

00:47:26 ►

It is simply too easy to outwit the drug laws. Before the authorities realize what is going on, talented

00:47:32 ►

surreptitious chemists have invented new, more profitable, and legal succidania for controlled

00:47:37 ►

drugs. When one of the designer heroin labs was busted, the chemist told police he was experimenting with snow cone flavorings.

00:47:46 ►

When the results came back from the forensics laboratory, the police found they had no case

00:47:51 ►

against the person. When alpha-methyl fentanyl was identified and the drug was scheduled,

00:47:56 ►

the ingenious chemists made parafluorofentanyl still legal. Finally, the Controlled Substances

00:48:03 ►

Analogs Act established the novel principle that any

00:48:06 ►

chemical or pharmacological analog of any illicit drug could be deemed to be illegal.

00:48:12 ►

This is a textbook case of an unconstitutionally vague statute, the purest essence of arbitrary

00:48:17 ►

and selective law enforcement, crystallized in a form more potent than any fentanyl derivative.

00:48:24 ►

Never mind that this absurd law makes anything illegal

00:48:26 ►

which some police chief or district attorney doesn’t like

00:48:29 ►

and is illegalizing scientific research into mind drugs

00:48:33 ►

and making the whole field of chemistry suspect.

00:48:36 ►

The important thing is it won’t work.

00:48:38 ►

Sure, it will enable charges to be brought against manufacturers of new analogs

00:48:43 ►

on the rare occasions when such are arrested,

00:48:46 ►

but the genie is out of the bottle.

00:48:48 ►

The laws have made illicit drug synthesis so profitable,

00:48:51 ►

and it is such a simple task that no law will stop it.

00:48:55 ►

Having touched on the subject of constitutional vagueness,

00:48:58 ►

it is important to stress that scientific research continues to reveal new plant and animal species containing illegal drugs.

00:49:06 ►

Since controlled substances such as DMT, morphine, and codeine

00:49:10 ►

appear to be general mammalian neurotransmitters,

00:49:13 ►

dog, cat, horse, or other mammal owners

00:49:16 ►

are technically in unauthorized possession of illicit drugs all the time.

00:49:20 ►

There are at least 89 species of mushrooms now known to contain illegal psilocybin, and

00:49:25 ►

another 57 species can safely be assumed to contain this compound.

00:49:30 ►

There are at least 250 plant species known to contain illicit drugs.

00:49:35 ►

Some such as the forage grass Phalaris irundinacea are common articles of commerce which can

00:49:40 ►

be purchased cheaply by the truckload.

00:49:43 ►

Some like the psilocybin mushrooms grow adventitiously all over the world.

00:49:48 ►

Since one would have to be expert in plant taxonomy and phytochemistry

00:49:51 ►

and would have assiduously to study the latest research reports

00:49:55 ►

in order simply to know which plants are illegal,

00:49:58 ►

plants which might grow unbidden on one’s property at any time,

00:50:02 ►

it can be said that the laws interpreted as prescribing

00:50:05 ►

these plants are unconstitutionally vague. It is not immediately obvious to the ordinary citizen,

00:50:11 ►

nor indeed to anyone, just what is illegalized by these laws. With the advent of the Controlled

00:50:18 ►

Substances Analogs Act of 1986, any and all plant and animal species can be said to be illegal at the whim of the government.

00:50:26 ►

Short of being an expert in several scientific fields and devoting considerable time, money, and effort

00:50:32 ►

keeping abreast of the latest phytochemical and botanical research,

00:50:36 ►

some of which is published in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Czechoslovakian, Norwegian, or other languages,

00:50:42 ►

there is no way for any citizen to be certain she or he

00:50:45 ►

is not an illegal possession of a prescribed drug. This is all a result of misguided supply-side

00:50:52 ►

enforcement. As long as demand exists for illicit drugs, and as long as the laws guarantee, nay,

00:50:59 ►

subsidize the profitability of meeting this demand, people will line up to enter this business.

00:51:04 ►

the profitability of meeting this demand, people will line up to enter this business.

00:51:08 ►

As even informed opponents of drug legalization acknowledge,

00:51:14 ►

only by targeting the demand side can we make strides toward reducing the consumption of illicit drugs.

00:51:19 ►

Empty propaganda, accompanied by a war against users.

00:51:23 ►

Recall that 75% of arrests in the U.S. are for simple possession.

00:51:28 ►

Users who are treated as vermin, as vectors of transmission of a plague,

00:51:31 ►

only alienates them still further from authority.

00:51:36 ►

Only by treating people with respect and offering them unbiased information and viable alternatives can governmental authorities hope to dissuade users

00:51:40 ►

from this or that drug.

00:51:43 ►

There is evidence that information campaigns can influence

00:51:46 ►

drug use. Suasion, not coercion, is the answer, and the voice doing the persuading must be morally

00:51:52 ►

impeccable. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet lamented, aye, there’s the rub. Moral aspects of war.

00:52:03 ►

It is commonly stated that illegalizing drugs is the moral thing for a

00:52:08 ►

government to do, since drug use is thought by some to be immoral, even to degrade the moral

00:52:13 ►

fortitude of citizens. But governments taking this moral stance mostly sanction and support

00:52:19 ►

use of drugs like alcohol and nicotine, as do the vast majority of those citizens morally opposed to illicit drug use,

00:52:25 ►

the great bulk of whom are themselves drug users. I might add this holds true for moral condemnation

00:52:31 ►

in some Muslim countries of alcohol and corresponding prejudice in favor of hashish and opium.

00:52:37 ►

This is a universal, not an American tendency, although the drugs accepted vary from one society

00:52:43 ►

to the next, as of course do the drugs scorned.

00:52:46 ►

The most obvious of the immoralities of drug prohibition involved the above-mentioned perversion of law enforcement

00:52:53 ►

the drug laws inevitably foster.

00:52:56 ►

Since the nebulous alleged victims of drug law violations do not file charges with the police,

00:53:02 ►

to enforce the drug laws the police have to become criminals

00:53:05 ►

themselves. Thus, tax monies are used to buy and sell drugs. The police disguise their true

00:53:10 ►

employment and act as though they were everyday illicit drug merchants, hoping to get close to

00:53:15 ►

Mr. Big to try to sell him some of their dope or buy from him some of his. Then, surprise,

00:53:22 ►

out come the guns and badges. Not only do police immorally become liars and drug

00:53:27 ►

dealers, but such operations invite corruption, and there are innumerable instances of police

00:53:33 ►

freelancing on the side. Annually in the U.S., some 100 police officials are indicted in federal courts

00:53:39 ►

on corruption charges related to drugs. Should Mr. Big come up short of cash for the big buy,

00:53:46 ►

some other undercover agents will step in and provide financing. There have even been cases

00:53:51 ►

in which reluctant individuals were provided with government money to buy government drugs

00:53:55 ►

and then arrested. This is law enforcement or manufacturing airs out crimes. Besides shootouts

00:54:02 ►

between rival gangs of police fighting over turf and mistaking each other

00:54:07 ►

for the enemy, there was recently a case of computer hacking by the police. During confirmation

00:54:12 ►

hearings for drug czar W.J. Bennett, Delaware Senator Jay Biden, chairman of the Senate Judiciary

00:54:19 ►

Committee, described a case in which personnel of an unnamed federal agency involved in the war on drugs,

00:54:30 ►

quote, surreptitiously lifted another agency’s budget by altering a computerized file, unquote.

00:54:34 ►

No wonder Bennett went back to his nicotine habit.

00:54:40 ►

Another immorality of the war on drugs involves questions of emphasis.

00:54:46 ►

Grossly exaggerated attention has been directed toward apprehending and convicting drug offenders, many of whom become subject to compulsory sentencing.

00:54:50 ►

Although the staggering number of annual drug arrests in the U.S. represents only about

00:54:54 ►

2% of the true number of offenders, trying and punishing those convicted is clogging

00:54:59 ►

our criminal justice system.

00:55:01 ►

In Washington, D.C., 52% of the felony indictments were for drug law violations

00:55:06 ►

in 1986. In New York in 1987, 40%. Police resources, which ought to be destined for

00:55:13 ►

arresting violent criminals, are being squandered on drug users and the occasional merchant.

00:55:19 ►

Worse, already convicted violent criminals are being released from jail early to make room for the compulsory sentenced drug offenders.

00:55:28 ►

When the second drug czar, R. Martinez, was governor of Florida between 1986 and 1990,

00:55:34 ►

Florida had in place strict mandatory sentencing laws mandating three or minimum sentences for using, buying, or selling illicit drugs near schools, public parks, or college campuses.

00:55:46 ►

During his tenure, average sentences served by Florida murder convicts decreased 40%,

00:55:52 ►

and the average robbery sentence served declined 42%.

00:55:57 ►

The overall average sentence for all Florida convicts declined 38%,

00:56:02 ►

to the point where the average convict was serving 32.5% of his sentence before release, less than a third.

00:56:10 ►

Some luckless student caught sucking on a joint after school serves three years, if not more,

00:56:15 ►

while the violent criminal gets three years and walks in one.

00:56:19 ►

A society that coddles murderers and armed robbers in order to get tough on potheads is not walking the moral high ground.

00:56:28 ►

Is it moral to launch aerial herbicide spraying programs in South America against coca cultivation,

00:56:36 ►

indiscriminately destroying crops and forests, polluting watersheds, and in general causing untold ecological havoc?

00:56:43 ►

and in general causing untold ecological havoc.

00:56:46 ►

It is significant that the Eli Lilly Company,

00:56:50 ►

manufacturer of an herbicide which the U.S. government wished to spray in Peru,

00:56:53 ►

refused to sell the product for this purpose.

00:56:57 ►

The biocide is so persistent in the environment that it is not approved in the U.S. for spraying on cropland

00:57:00 ►

and the area in which the coca spraying was to be carried out

00:57:03 ►

is interspersed with plots of food crops.

00:57:06 ►

A State Department official told Congress the Department was exploring ways

00:57:10 ►

to compel Lilly to produce the herbicide for the government.

00:57:14 ►

So this is how free trade works.

00:57:17 ►

In the upper Huallaga Valley of Peru, 1.5 million liters of Paraquat have already been sprayed,

00:57:23 ►

while massive spraying of Paraquat 2,4-D and glyphosate in Colombia have already provoked health problems in the indigenous population.

00:57:45 ►

crop, coca, which is legal in their countries, in favor of some substitute acceptable to bureaucrats in the United States, which will yield them a much lower return, perhaps only

00:57:50 ►

a third of their already meager income?

00:57:53 ►

It is immoral and a fundamental violation of their human rights.

00:57:57 ►

How does a rich, well-shod, well-fed city slicker explain this drastic pay cut to a

00:58:02 ►

poor, malnourished, possibly barefoot Indian,

00:58:06 ►

that he or he must cease to grow her or his traditional crop, the legal stimulant coca,

00:58:11 ►

and substitute instead coffee, another legal stimulant acceptable to the gringos.

00:58:17 ►

And as much as coca is known to be one of the most nutritious vegetables available in the Andes,

00:58:22 ►

and an integral and nourishing part of native diets.

00:58:25 ►

And coffee, apart from a decent amount of the B vitamin niacin, is virtually worthless

00:58:29 ►

as a food, forcing the substitution in the moral struggle against drugs will increase

00:58:35 ►

malnutrition and hardship for these poor Indians.

00:58:38 ►

There is also a glut of coffee on world markets, and coffee prices continue to fall with no

00:58:44 ►

relief in sight for

00:58:45 ►

beleaguered growers. Of course, we must explain to them that cocaine is destroying the health of

00:58:51 ►

our children a continent away, although we do need some of their coca to flavor our Coca-Cola,

00:58:57 ►

our accepted caffeinated stimulant that we give to children as a matter of course,

00:59:01 ►

and to produce pharmaceutical cocaine. But how would we feel if a force of morally outraged South Koreans

00:59:08 ►

descended on Virginia and nearby states

00:59:11 ►

and began to spray herbicides on the tobacco and adjacent food crops

00:59:14 ►

and to insist that our farmers instead plant ginseng?

00:59:19 ►

What has that to do with the subject?

00:59:22 ►

It happens that our government recently coerced the Korean government into accepting American tobacco in exchange for computers, stereos, and ginseng

00:59:29 ►

to help balance the payments. And there are Koreans who are justifiably outraged morally

00:59:34 ►

and claim that our tobacco and moral bromance propaganda for use of this pernicious addictive

00:59:39 ►

drug is destroying the health of young Koreans. What if a renegade band of Mexican police kidnapped an American citizen,

00:59:47 ►

dragooning him to Mexico to be tried and punished under Mexican laws?

00:59:52 ►

American police have done precisely that in Mexico, and more than once,

00:59:56 ►

despite protests from the Mexican president and ambassador.

01:00:00 ►

How can it be possible that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that American police operating out of the country

01:00:06 ►

are not bound by constitutional limitations on their power?

01:00:10 ►

That came as a shock to the Mexican government, which knew all too well

01:00:14 ►

that the DEA mermitans were not operating under Mexican law.

01:00:18 ►

Is it moral that American tax monies be used to finance in other countries police tactics

01:00:24 ►

like indiscriminate roadblocks and searches,

01:00:26 ►

which are illegal in the U.S.

01:00:29 ►

The only moral principle followed here is that might makes right.

01:00:34 ►

There is another flagrant immorality in drug prohibition.

01:00:38 ►

Try, though the government may, to convince America’s poor

01:00:41 ►

that crime doesn’t pay and drugs equal slavery,

01:00:45 ►

a bizarre and insulting message to African Americans

01:00:47 ►

whose ancestors were brought to the Americas in chains of literal slavery

01:00:51 ►

with the sanction of the government making the statement.

01:00:55 ►

Children in America’s ghettos see who is upwardly mobile in dead-end neighborhoods,

01:01:00 ►

who has the cars, friends, and fancy clothes.

01:01:03 ►

The drug dealers.

01:01:04 ►

The drug dealer on the corner is doing obviously much better

01:01:07 ►

than the guy flipping burgers for minimum wage or sweeping up at the supermarket.

01:01:12 ►

The lure of the free market and drugs brings out the entrepreneurial instinct

01:01:16 ►

in people who haven’t fair and open access to the legitimate business world.

01:01:21 ►

By making drugs a lucrative business open to all,

01:01:24 ►

prohibition sets bad examples for youth,

01:01:26 ►

and there’s the rub. Young ghetto children can see where the opportunity is, and in the ghetto,

01:01:32 ►

it’s definitely not at the corner burger joint. It is in drugs. I need not mention that laws

01:01:39 ►

contributing to the spread of AIDS and hepatitis, laws which keep valuable medicines from sick people whose suffering would be alleviated by them, laws which hamper medical research,

01:01:49 ►

laws which lead to deaths by poisoning from contaminated and adulterated drugs the government

01:01:54 ►

is responsible for overseeing, that laws like these are immoral. If we study the history of

01:02:00 ►

these laws in the U.S. where they were first enacted, we find them grounded in racial

01:02:05 ►

discrimination. This is immoral, and drug legislation used as a cover for official discrimination

01:02:11 ►

is morally tainted thereby. This litany of immoralities of drug prohibition, which by no

01:02:18 ►

means exhausts the subject, is less significant than the glaring and fatal flaw in the supposititious moral campaign of the U.S. government against drugs.

01:02:28 ►

It is a case of the filthy pot calling the kettle black.

01:02:32 ►

For the U.S. government, like many other governments in the world, is and has ever been earnestly engaged in the drug business.

01:02:39 ►

According to U.S. government figures,

01:02:46 ►

According to U.S. government figures, recent annual direct tax revenues to federal, state,

01:02:50 ►

and municipal governments in the U.S. from alcohol sales amounted to $10.3 billion.

01:02:56 ►

In other words, all levels of government in the U.S. are engaged in the drug trade,

01:03:03 ►

making about $50 per year in alcohol income from every adult American, teetotalers included.

01:03:07 ►

Governments in the U.S. also profit from taxes on tobacco,

01:03:08 ►

feeding nicotine habits,

01:03:13 ►

and the U.S. federal government subsidizes cultivation of this most deadly of all drugs.

01:03:19 ►

Recall that tobacco use causes 320,000 premature deaths per year in the U.S. alone.

01:03:25 ►

Thus, all levels of government in the U.S. are profitably engaged in the drug business,

01:03:29 ►

even monopolizing sale of alcohol in many states and fixing prices.

01:03:36 ►

The moral campaign against illicit drugs is thus exposed for the hypocritical exercise it is.

01:03:40 ►

For moral reasons, we won’t let you use this or that drug,

01:03:44 ►

but we’ll be happy to profit from your use of alcohol and nicotine. Hell, we’ll even

01:03:45 ►

guarantee profits of tobacco growers and help them push their dope on unwilling foreign customers.

01:03:51 ►

This is no moral campaign. It is basest hypocrisy. Furthermore, the United States government is

01:03:59 ►

guilty of massively abusing LSD and other drugs. In the 1950s, the Cold War raged,

01:04:06 ►

and one American fruit of the resulting institutional paranoia was MKUltra,

01:04:11 ►

an insidious domestic research and spying operation run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency,

01:04:17 ►

and similar non-conventional chemical warfare studies conducted at the U.S. Army’s Edgewood Arsenal.

01:04:23 ►

In research into interrogation drugs and illegal chemical warfare agents,

01:04:28 ►

LSD and other drugs were given to at least 1,500 American soldiers and countless civilians.

01:04:34 ►

Some of the troops were coerced into volunteering for the tests,

01:04:37 ►

and some of the civilians were given drugs without their consent or knowledge.

01:04:42 ►

One such dosing of a civilian employee of the CIA, Frank Olson,

01:04:46 ►

led to depression and suicide. The government kept secret the circumstances of the death,

01:04:52 ►

but when a lawsuit forced public disclosure of the MKUltra files, then-President Gerald Ford

01:04:58 ►

was forced publicly to apologize to Olson’s family. Canadian citizens subjected to psychological torture,

01:05:05 ►

including repeated doses of LSD,

01:05:08 ►

as part of this research,

01:05:09 ►

later sued the U.S. government

01:05:11 ►

and were paid compensation.

01:05:13 ►

One civilian subject

01:05:14 ►

of the Edgewood Arsenal tests

01:05:16 ►

was killed by an overdose of MDA,

01:05:18 ►

an Army doctor commenting,

01:05:20 ►

quote,

01:05:21 ►

we didn’t know if it was dog piss

01:05:23 ►

or what it was we were giving him,

01:05:24 ►

unquote.

01:05:26 ►

The CIA employed prostitutes and surreptitiously filmed U.S. citizens unwittingly drugged by the

01:05:32 ►

prostitutes as they disported in bed. Helpless mental patients in a New York institution

01:05:38 ►

were almost killed by murderous injections of bufotinine and DMT, combined with electroshock and insulin coma.

01:05:46 ►

Over 800 drugs, including LSD and bufotinine,

01:05:50 ►

were tested on prisoners in the federal government’s

01:05:52 ►

Lexington, Kentucky Addiction Research Center Hospital.

01:05:57 ►

In this publicly funded institution,

01:05:59 ►

officially a penitentiary,

01:06:00 ►

which existed to cure drug addiction,

01:06:03 ►

prisoners were given injections of heroin and

01:06:05 ►

morphine as payment for cooperation in the experiments. When Sondos of Switzerland, owner

01:06:11 ►

of the patents on LSD, refused to cooperate with the U.S. government’s desire to stockpile the drug

01:06:17 ►

for military purposes, the government ordered Eli Lilly of Indiana to make the drug in violation of international patent accords.

01:06:25 ►

Yes, Eli Lilly and the CIA became the first illicit manufacturers of LSD

01:06:31 ►

more than a decade before the drug was illegalized.

01:06:35 ►

Dosing people with experimental drugs without their consent or knowledge,

01:06:39 ►

especially helpless mental patients and prisoners, is highly immoral,

01:06:43 ►

not to mention the immorality

01:06:45 ►

of employing prostitutes with taxpayers’ money to dope unwilling johns while perverse CIA

01:06:51 ►

agents made spag films.

01:06:54 ►

There is no doubt this research was instrumental in spreading extra-scientific use of LSD all

01:06:59 ►

over the U.S. and in many other countries, while publications by phony CIA front research foundations,

01:07:06 ►

such as the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation,

01:07:09 ►

were fostering scientific, popular, and clinical interest in the drug.

01:07:13 ►

This immoral research and consequent promotion of lootable use of LSD

01:07:18 ►

was conducted by the same government which later presumed to illegalize entheogenic drugs

01:07:24 ►

on the grounds of morals and to protect public health.

01:07:28 ►

Not only is the U.S. government engaged in trafficking legal inebriating drugs and guilty

01:07:34 ►

of abusing LSD and other drugs in secret experiments, but there is abundant evidence that at times

01:07:40 ►

this same government itself has been engaged in illicit drug trafficking to raise money for covert military campaigns.

01:07:48 ►

Under the pretext of aiding the Hmong of Laos, our democratic allies in Vietnam, secret CIA

01:07:55 ►

front companies such as Air America were smuggling opium to Saigon from the Golden Triangle area

01:08:01 ►

of Southeast Asia.

01:08:03 ►

Since the major cash crop of the HmMONG was opium poppies

01:08:06 ►

for illicit heroin production, the government secretly began opium smuggling to help our allies

01:08:12 ►

get their product to refineries in Saigon. Such smuggling was repeated in the shameful Iran-Contra

01:08:18 ►

affair during the administration of Ronald Reagan. In violation of a congressional ban on military assistance to the

01:08:25 ►

Contras, a CIA-organized and funded band of anti-sandinista contra-revolucionarios, Reagan’s

01:08:32 ►

covert warriors organized secret shipments of weapons and ammunition to the Contras. Some pilots

01:08:39 ►

engaged in the illegal gun running testified before a U.S. Senate committee that once munitions were unloaded

01:08:45 ►

from the aircraft in Central America, cocaine or marijuana was loaded for the return trip.

01:08:51 ►

Pilot M. Tolliver described transporting 15 tons of weapons from Homestead Air Force Base in

01:08:57 ►

Florida to Aguacate, Honduras in a DC-6, which he flew back to Homestead, loaded with 25,360 pounds of marijuana. This cocaine and

01:09:08 ►

marijuana no doubt contributed greatly to the off-the-books financing of the sleazy operation.

01:09:14 ►

One of the most famous LSD chemists of the 60s, R.H. Stark, was later exposed as a U.S. CIA

01:09:20 ►

contract agent in a sensational Italian trial. Was this man freelancing, or

01:09:26 ►

was the CIA purposefully distributing LSD among radicals and hippies in a harebrained

01:09:32 ►

sort of unconventional chemical warfare attack? After all, the CIA had pioneered underground

01:09:38 ►

LSD synthesis and had fomented use of the drug in research sponsored by phony CIA front organizations.

01:09:47 ►

I submit that a government like that of the United States of America,

01:09:51 ►

which is running a profitable multi-billion dollar legal drug pushing operation,

01:09:55 ►

a government which has secretly poisoned countless civilians,

01:09:59 ►

including helpless mental patients and prisoners with LSD and other drugs,

01:10:03 ►

and surreptitiously filmed doped taxpayers

01:10:06 ►

cavorting in bed with government-paid prostitutes, a government which has driven one of its own

01:10:11 ►

employees to suicide by secretly doping his cocktail with LSD, a government which has

01:10:17 ►

not hesitated to smuggle narcotics and cocaine to raise dirty money for illegal military

01:10:23 ►

campaigns in violation of congressional bans,

01:10:26 ►

that such a government has no moral basis whatever for prohibiting any drug.

01:10:31 ►

The actions of this government, not its words, show callow disregard for public safety

01:10:37 ►

and a willingness to stoop to anything to further domestic or international political aims.

01:10:45 ►

The economic side of the coin.

01:10:48 ►

In President Clinton’s first budget,

01:10:51 ►

the annual cost of the American war on drugs rose to more than $13 billion.

01:10:56 ►

As U.S. military forces get more deeply involved in the war,

01:11:00 ►

costs are bound to skyrocket.

01:11:03 ►

Michigan Senator C. Levin estimated military costs at $2 million

01:11:07 ►

per drug seizure, U.S. Navy costs at $360,000 per arrest. Now the country with the world’s highest

01:11:15 ►

per capita prison population, the U.S. Sentencing Commission estimates that in consequence largely

01:11:21 ►

of drug laws, federal prison populations will double or triple

01:11:25 ►

from the 50,000 current inmates to 100,000 to 150,000 in the next decade,

01:11:30 ►

half of whom will be incarcerated for drug violations.

01:11:34 ►

Drug convictions have become the leading cause of incarceration

01:11:37 ►

in the state of New York and elsewhere.

01:11:40 ►

This massive misappropriation of taxpayers’ money is enriching criminals,

01:11:44 ►

contributing to the spread of AIDS and hepatitis,

01:11:47 ►

hampering biomedical research,

01:11:49 ►

degrading the morals of police personnel who succumb to corruption,

01:11:53 ►

contributing to lack of respect for authority,

01:11:55 ►

and abjectly failing and deterring the 20 to 40 million Americans

01:11:59 ►

who persist in using illicit drugs.

01:12:01 ►

If, instead of ceding control of the drug market to criminals who become rich and powerful,

01:12:07 ►

our government were to legalize these drugs,

01:12:10 ►

the $13 billion loss could be converted

01:12:12 ►

to a like or far greater sum in new taxes,

01:12:15 ►

which could be used for education and treatment.

01:12:18 ►

Psilocybin showed promise in preliminary experiments

01:12:21 ►

of cutting the recidivism rate of paroled convicts.

01:12:25 ►

Instead of going broke building prisons for 20 to 40 million American drug war criminals,

01:12:30 ►

ought we not investigate one illicit drug which may keep people out of the prisons we already have?

01:12:37 ►

Far more important than money saved by ending prohibition, however,

01:12:41 ►

is the fact that the government could finally begin to exercise control over the market

01:12:45 ►

instead of defaulting on its responsibilities

01:12:48 ►

and relinquishing control of the market

01:12:50 ►

to the criminal element.

01:12:52 ►

Let there be no mistake about it.

01:12:55 ►

Illegalizing drugs in no way controls the market.

01:12:58 ►

The government illegalizing drugs

01:13:00 ►

is turning its back on control

01:13:01 ►

and leaving it to the black marketeers

01:13:04 ►

to control the market.

01:13:05 ►

The illicit merchants, not the government, determine purity and adulteration.

01:13:10 ►

They, not the government, decide what products to sell and set prices.

01:13:14 ►

Instead of wasting $13 billion a year on a war on drugs,

01:13:18 ►

which exacerbates the problem and subsidizes criminals,

01:13:21 ►

it is high time the U.S. government stopped abdicating its responsibility

01:13:25 ►

and began to attempt to control the use of drugs in American society.

01:13:31 ►

From the past to the future.

01:13:34 ►

We have seen that prohibition of drugs is economically ruinous, largely ineffective and anti-scientific,

01:13:40 ►

far from guaranteeing protection for public health.

01:13:43 ►

Prohibition leads to the spread of AIDS and hepatitis

01:13:46 ►

while inhibiting biomedical research

01:13:48 ►

and depriving the public of vital new medicines.

01:13:51 ►

We have seen how anti-drug laws are grounded in racism

01:13:54 ►

and foster crime while subsidizing drug merchants and manufacturers

01:13:58 ►

and favoring decentralized domestic production of the most potent drugs.

01:14:03 ►

There is no doubt that enforcing drug prohibition distorts jurisprudence

01:14:07 ►

owing to the lack of victims to file complaints with police

01:14:10 ►

and because of the arbitrary nature of enforcement

01:14:13 ►

given the ubiquity of controlled substances in our bodies, in our food, even on our money.

01:14:19 ►

The laws immorally corrupt our police, lead to coddling of violent criminals,

01:14:23 ►

set bad examples for our youth,

01:14:25 ►

and deprive us of our freedoms as they lead to a dictatorial police state. In the international

01:14:31 ►

arena, the laws lead to bad relations with other countries, military and paramilitary invasions

01:14:37 ►

and covert military operations, loss of human life and rights, and massive ecological destruction by herbicides and uncontrolled

01:14:45 ►

contamination from clandestine laboratories.

01:14:48 ►

In short, drug prohibition is impractical, ineffective, uneconomic, anti-scientific,

01:14:55 ►

unhealthy, immoral, unecological the sake of democracy, and the interests of

01:15:12 ►

shoring up the battered U.S. economy, it is time to call a truce in the war on drugs, an unconditional

01:15:18 ►

ceasefire. Happily, there is a straightforward way out of the horrible mess the drug prohibition laws have got us into.

01:15:26 ►

Legalize the drugs.

01:15:27 ►

Some people consider the notion of drug legalization to be bizarre and radical, a drastic step.

01:15:34 ►

But inebriating drugs have been mostly legal throughout the millennia of human existence.

01:15:39 ►

The drastic step was taken in the second decade of this century in the United States,

01:15:43 ►

when for the first time large-scale comprehensive legal control of inebriants was implemented.

01:15:50 ►

Some claim that legalization represents a daring and risky experiment, but they are wrong.

01:15:56 ►

Prohibition is the daring and risky experiment,

01:15:58 ►

and although it would be prudent to gather more comprehensive data

01:16:01 ►

on the results of this experiment in social engineering,

01:16:05 ►

it is safe to say as we approach the end of the eighth decade of federal control of inebriating drugs,

01:16:11 ►

that the experiment has been a dismal and costly failure.

01:16:14 ►

Use of inebriants is as natural as any aspect of social behavior.

01:16:19 ►

It is the attempt to control this normal drive that is bizarre and unnatural.

01:16:23 ►

As I stated, it is a crime against

01:16:25 ►

nature, against human and animal nature. Drug laws are the monstrous result of institutionalizing

01:16:33 ►

paranoia. They are the work of paranoid control junkies who have no faith in others or in human

01:16:38 ►

nature. They would control the lives of others according to their own, more responsible, more scientific, more moral scheme.

01:16:46 ►

But the reformers’ zeal for more control has led to less.

01:16:50 ►

Our societies have lost control over inebriating drug use by placing this outside of the law.

01:16:56 ►

Every salvo in the quixotic war on drugs is a backfire, a shot in society’s own foot.

01:17:03 ►

We are hacking and hewing at the branches of the problem,

01:17:06 ►

never seeing the roots, which are the very laws against drugs.

01:17:10 ►

The problems we attribute to the scourge of drugs

01:17:13 ►

are the results of the drug laws, not of drugs.

01:17:15 ►

The overdose deaths, shootouts between rival drug gangs,

01:17:20 ►

drug-related spread of AIDS and hepatitis,

01:17:23 ►

and the paranoid fantasies of reformist zealots,

01:17:26 ►

drug laws are all that stand between the current level of inebriant use

01:17:30 ►

and a vastly increased epidemic of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and LSD abuse.

01:17:37 ►

But a recent nationwide survey in the U.S.

01:17:40 ►

found only 2% of respondents were, quote,

01:17:43 ►

very likely or somewhat likely to try cocaine were it legalized,

01:17:47 ►

while 4% declared themselves very likely to try legalized marijuana,

01:17:52 ►

and an additional 6% somewhat likely to try that drug.

01:17:56 ►

At the turn of the century, with a free market in all inebriating drugs,

01:18:00 ►

it is estimated that only 4% of the U.S. population

01:18:03 ►

was addicted to the heroin, morphine,

01:18:05 ►

cocaine, and other drugs openly sold in patent medicines. No, the great majority of today’s

01:18:12 ►

would-be heroin, cocaine, LSD, and marijuana users are already using these drugs, for the laws not

01:18:18 ►

only fail to deter them, but even attract a sizable number of people who use illegal drugs out of rebellion.

01:18:26 ►

And we already have an epidemic of psychoactive drug use in this country, as evidenced by

01:18:31 ►

the 178 million caffeine users, 106 million alcohol users, 57 million tobacco users, 12

01:18:39 ►

million marijuana users, and at least 3 or 4 million regular users of psychoactive prescription

01:18:44 ►

drugs such as

01:18:45 ►

Valium. Entrapment of the defendant is the rule, an eyewitness testimony purchased from avowed

01:18:51 ►

criminals. Majority of users exercise control and responsibility, and a generally small minority of

01:18:58 ►

users come to be controlled by the drugs. This happens with alcohol as well as with heroin,

01:19:03 ►

with tobacco as well as marijuana.

01:19:06 ►

Making all drugs available legally will certainly change the numbers of people using individual

01:19:11 ►

drugs, but the total number of users will stay about the same because already more than 90%

01:19:17 ►

of our adult population is using drugs. If amphetamines become legal, some will surely

01:19:23 ►

begin to use them as they have always been popular when legally available.

01:19:27 ►

In 1962, the U.S. FDA estimated annual domestic production at 9,000 million doses, 9 billion doses.

01:19:36 ►

We can be sure that these prospective amphetamine users are already using caffeine,

01:19:41 ►

and if they use amphetamines, they will use less caffeine or none.

01:19:45 ►

Since caffeine generally appears to have more severe side effects than amphetamines, this

01:19:50 ►

could represent a net gain in public health.

01:19:53 ►

Similarly, heroin and other potent opiates are generally incompatible with alcohol.

01:19:59 ►

It is safe to assume that were more people using legal heroin, fewer would be using alcohol.

01:20:04 ►

Since alcohol is far more toxic than heroin, fewer would be using alcohol. Since alcohol is

01:20:05 ►

far more toxic than heroin, this too could represent a net benefit for public health.

01:20:11 ►

The unfortunate fact is that our society has blindly accepted as orthodox inebriants two of

01:20:17 ►

the most toxic pleasure drugs known to science. Together, these drugs kill more than a half

01:20:23 ►

million Americans each year. Alcohol is not simply an addictive drug

01:20:27 ►

It is carcinogenic and causes irreversible brain and liver damage

01:20:31 ►

It is a teratogen

01:20:33 ►

It causes birth defects if taken at the wrong time by pregnant women

01:20:36 ►

In a ranking of general carcinogenic hazards

01:20:40 ►

It was estimated that the lifetime cancer-causing liability

01:20:43 ►

Of drinking one 250-milliliter glass of wine daily,

01:20:48 ►

or 30 milliliters of alcohol, was more than 5,000 times greater than the combined lifetime cancer risk

01:20:54 ►

represented by the U.S. average daily dietary consumption of PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls,

01:21:01 ►

DDE, the common metabolite of pesticide DDT, and EDB or ethylenedibromide,

01:21:07 ►

an antifungal fumigant.

01:21:09 ►

The U.S. average dietary consumption of these chemical residues equals 2.8 micrograms per day.

01:21:15 ►

The connection between alcohol and crime and accidental injury is striking.

01:21:21 ►

Fifty-four percent of all jail inmates convicted of violent crimes in 1983 had

01:21:25 ►

used alcohol just prior to commission.

01:21:28 ►

In 10% of all work-related

01:21:30 ►

injuries reported in 1986,

01:21:32 ►

alcohol was a contributing factor.

01:21:34 ►

In 40% of the 46,000

01:21:36 ►

traffic deaths in 1983

01:21:38 ►

and 40% of suicide

01:21:40 ►

attempts that year, alcohol was

01:21:42 ►

likewise a contributing factor.

01:21:44 ►

Alcohol use is estimated

01:21:46 ►

to cost the U.S. economy $100 billion each year. Tobacco is more than a highly addictive drug. It

01:21:53 ►

is a potent carcinogen, and its widespread use has transformed lung cancer from a medical curiosity

01:21:59 ►

to a common disease. We have already embraced a couple of the worst drugs known with open arms, but we

01:22:06 ►

are so used to them that it’s no big deal. We forget even that they are drugs. We talk about

01:22:12 ►

alcoholism and drug abuse as though alcoholism were somehow different from drug abuse. By the

01:22:18 ►

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.

01:22:27 ►

And indeed, heroin is not much more than an addicting drug.

01:22:31 ►

It is not carcinogenic like tobacco and alcohol.

01:22:34 ►

It does not cause brain or liver damages due to those legal drugs.

01:22:37 ►

It is not teratogenic.

01:22:39 ►

About the only health problem associated with its habitual use,

01:22:43 ►

excluding infections associated with dirty syringes,

01:22:46 ►

infections which don’t occur with normal medicinal use of heroin in Britain, is constipation.

01:22:52 ►

There is no question that the U.S. would have far lower medical costs

01:22:57 ►

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

01:23:08 ►

of virus-ridden adulterated airs out heroin we already have about the worst situation vis-a-vis

01:23:15 ►

drugs with our national drugs being carcinogenic hepatotoxic neurotoxic and teratogenic and with

01:23:22 ►

the government having surrendered controlled the use of most other drugs to the criminal element. Truly, there’s nowhere to go but up.

01:23:31 ►

There have already been some limited experiments in relaxing the drug laws,

01:23:35 ►

and in general, use levels stay about the same or go down. In the 11 American states that briefly

01:23:41 ►

decriminalized marijuana in the 1970s, the number of users stayed about the same. In the Netherlands, legal tolerance of cannabis

01:23:49 ►

use and its legal control has led to a significant decline in consumption. In

01:23:54 ►

1976, 10% of 17 to 18 year old Dutch citizens used illegal cannabis, whereas

01:24:01 ►

by 1985 this percentage had almost halved to 6% according to official

01:24:06 ►

Dutch figures.

01:24:07 ►

The Dutch government is succeeding, as intended, in making cannabis use boring.

01:24:12 ►

No rebellion there.

01:24:14 ►

The prohibition experiment has failed miserably, and it is high time we went back to the natural

01:24:20 ►

order of things and let society learn how to regulate and control drug use socially and

01:24:25 ►

medically, not legally and by force. The introduction of distilled alcohol to European society led to

01:24:32 ►

epidemics of uncontrolled excessive use, but in time, without government intervention,

01:24:37 ►

Western societies began to make their peace with alcohol, a process which continues evolving,

01:24:43 ►

developing rituals to help control alcohol

01:24:45 ►

addiction, such as social approval of alcohol use only after the day’s work, and general

01:24:51 ►

condemnation of alcoholic dependent behavior. During the U.S. alcohol prohibition period,

01:24:57 ►

the government of Great Britain was able to achieve equivalent or greater reductions in

01:25:02 ►

alcohol consumption than were seen in the U.S.,

01:25:05 ►

with careful regulation of a legal market, increased taxation, restriction of hours of sale,

01:25:10 ►

controlled sale to minors, etc.

01:25:13 ►

Modern societies will not sanction nor approve irresponsible use of legal heroin, cocaine, or marijuana,

01:25:20 ►

just as they do not sanction uncontrolled use of alcohol.

01:25:23 ►

The legal availability of tobacco and alcoholic beverages

01:25:26 ►

does not mean societies encourage their use,

01:25:30 ►

and there is evidence that anti-alcohol and anti-tobacco advertising campaigns

01:25:35 ►

conducted by the U.S. and other governments are effective in restricting use.

01:25:39 ►

Only by bringing all ludicrous drug use into the open

01:25:43 ►

can we hope to develop social restraints

01:25:45 ►

favoring responsible use of the presently illicit drugs.

01:25:49 ►

We must treat citizens as responsible adults,

01:25:52 ►

not promulgate the absurd and fallacious notion

01:25:55 ►

that certain drugs destroy will and self-control,

01:25:59 ►

thereby giving immature and irresponsible individuals

01:26:02 ►

a ready-made excuse for illegal or immoral behavior,

01:26:06 ►

the idea that one’s heroin habit made one rob friends and family or steal a woman’s pocketbook.

01:26:13 ►

We must give people choices based on a free market and unbiased information about the benefits and

01:26:19 ►

dangers of all drugs, not unrealistically expect to scare people away from certain drugs with silly

01:26:25 ►

propaganda. Treat citizens like irresponsible children, and many will behave accordingly.

01:26:33 ►

It is time our governments exercised appropriate control over the presently illicit drugs by

01:26:38 ►

guaranteeing purity and dosage. It is up to society and to us as individuals to do the rest.

01:27:05 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:27:09 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:27:16 ►

So I hope that now you’re looking forward to hearing one of Jonathan’s lectures about the plants that he is working so hard to protect and understand,

01:27:20 ►

and I’ll work on getting one of those out to you before too much longer.

01:27:24 ►

As to the arson that destroyed his home and laboratory, stand, and I’ll work on getting one of those out to you before too much longer.

01:27:31 ►

As to the arson that destroyed his home and laboratory, for now, I think it best to not pass along any of the rumors that have been circulating about this tragedy until the complete

01:27:36 ►

story is known.

01:27:37 ►

As I understand it, this is still an unsolved crime.

01:27:41 ►

So let’s not come up with any conspiracy theories here, because my hunch is that once the truth

01:27:47 ►

comes out, it’ll be something well short of a government conspiracy to force Jonathan

01:27:52 ►

to end his work.

01:27:53 ►

But what we can do is to send whatever cash we can afford to help with the recovery and

01:27:59 ►

cleanup of his library.

01:28:01 ►

Once that job is done, Jonathan is planning on relocating from Mexico to Colombia,

01:28:06 ►

where he can continue with his research.

01:28:10 ►

Now, my friend Richard Glenn Boyer

01:28:12 ►

of the Center for Cognitive Liberty

01:28:14 ►

has set up a fund where donations may be sent.

01:28:18 ►

And once I get our program notes blogs fixed,

01:28:20 ►

I’ll post the link there.

01:28:22 ►

But here’s the full notice that Richard sent out. It

01:28:25 ►

reads, A tragic fire by arson has burned our dear friend Jonathan Ott’s lovely home to the ground.

01:28:32 ►

He was lecturing in Spain at the time, and he is personally safe, but homeless and shaken. This is

01:28:38 ►

a tremendous loss, and Jonathan could use your help right now. He must relocate. How often have we heard Jonathan referred to as

01:28:47 ►

the leading authority on entheogens,

01:28:50 ►

a word he jointly coined, by the way.

01:28:52 ►

His writings are considered the gold standard of accuracy

01:28:55 ►

and those of us who know him personally

01:28:57 ►

have experienced his endless generosity, wit, and talent.

01:29:02 ►

He is one of the legends in our midst to whom we owe so much. Now is our chance to pay him back in his hour of need. Thank you. slash Jonathan underscore ot, O-T-T underscore fund dot H-T-M.

01:29:47 ►

I hope you can remember that long URL,

01:29:49 ►

and as soon as I recover a bit from this winter cold

01:29:52 ►

and get back to working on my web problems with our blog,

01:29:56 ►

I’ll post the link there as well.

01:29:59 ►

And I’m sorry to end on this kind of a downer today,

01:30:02 ►

but hey, we all have to go through one crisis after another, it seems.

01:30:07 ►

And right now it’s our turn to help a friend get through a larger-than-normal situation.

01:30:12 ►

And if you are tight on cash right now, well, don’t feel bad if you can’t make a donation.

01:30:17 ►

But it would be really cool of you to just spend a moment or two every day or at least once, in silent thought, and wing a few good vibes Jonathan’s way.

01:30:27 ►

I know he appreciates your love and concern.

01:30:31 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:30:36 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

222 - Crimes Against Nature_ The Civil War Against Drugs

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