War On Drugs: Failure or Success?

[LiamHaddock]

You can't tell a consenting adult what to put in their body. Most people who use drugs are not addicts and never will be addicts. The addiction rate has remained fairly constant at 10% of users through many decades of drug use and societies changing attitudes towards it.

I'm reading Food of the Gods by Terrance McKenna right now which makes the case that psilocybin was the "tree of knowledge" that led our ancestors towards developing speech, enhanced eyesight and also sexual enjoyment. Psychedelics may have played a vital part in our evolution to who we are today. They have certainly played a vital role in the development of technology. Drugs are bad and never do them unless you're a *bleep* isn't a solid arguement to make when we have benefited from their use so greatly and the vast majority of adults who use them cause no harm to society.

Amen! Marijuana, mushrooms, dmt, many psychedelics are amazing drugs very spiritual and not addictive. I've had many good trips in my younger years on various drugs. I lived and grew out of it. Its naive to think others aren't going to experiment with drugs. I'd rather drugs be clean and safe and profits not going to criminals.

[Donald G]

Liam ...

Repeating the same tired street corner knowledge of drugs in Canada is not going to cause anyone to change their mind. Your knowledge is strictly from a drug user and drug abuser perspective, as is made clear in your unending repetitious comments.

You either know nothing about the other elements of drug abuse in Canadian society or are denying it in order to try to make your completely theoretical comments credible in the real world. Best you get on with the changes you keep saying are needed while you still profess to "know it all".

[LiamHaddock]

donald disagreeing with me without being able to support your claims is never gonna get anyone to believe you or change their view..
regardless of what you say the facts and articles i share speak for themselves.

LEAP is global and was helped formed by ex Canadian Law enforcement. There is a Canadian LEAP Group. All disagree with you and facts are not on your side. All ex law enforcement that can see the war on drugs is a failure.

anyone that can read and comprehend what they are reading will usually come to the same conclusion the war on drugs is a failure.

Once again your hear trying to derail the thread and offering nothing on topic or anything to support your false claims..

In your opinion is the Global War On Drugs which Canada is a part of a failure or a success?

What do you have to support your claims?

[Donald G]

JLives wrote:
Most people who use drugs are not addicts and never will be addicts. The addiction rate has remained fairly constant at 10% of users through many decades of drug use and societies changing attitudes towards it.

I'm reading Food of the Gods by Terrance McKenna right now which makes the case that psilocybin was the "tree of knowledge" that led our ancestors towards developing speech, enhanced eyesight and also sexual enjoyment. Psychedelics may have played a vital part in our evolution to who we are today. They have certainly played a vital role in the development of technology. Drugs are bad and never do them unless you're a *bleep* isn't a solid arguement to make when we have benefited from their use so greatly and the vast majority of adults who use them cause no harm to society.

Do you not realize that Food of the Gods is kept in the Adult Fiction part of the Library? You seem to be confusing it with reality.

[JLives]

Do you not realize that Food of the Gods is kept in the Adult Fiction part of the Library? You seem to be confusing it with reality.

Wrong. It's under pharmacology in the science or medical section, sometimes in history. But I wouldn't expect someone with your outdated ideals to know that.

[Donald G]

Liam ...

Every comment that you have made on this string is an almost complete repeat of what you have previously said on other strings. Do not confuse repetition with accuracy or intelligence in terms of proof.

I am not sure why the Moderators permit you such repetition but so be it. I think most people with any degree of real world knowledge see your comments for the theoretical hype of a "born again" addict.

[oneh2obabe]

Do you not realize that Food of the Gods is kept in the Adult Fiction part of the Library? You seem to be confusing it with reality.

The ORL has this particular book in the adult nonfiction section.
http://ipac.orl.bc.ca/polaris/search/ti ... .0.3&pos=1

[LiamHaddock]

Donald they allow it because I try and stay on topic and I can support my view and am constantly sharing new links.

You just try to derail threads with your outdated unsupported usually off topic comments that have nothing to do with how much of a failure the war on drugs is.

[Donald G]

The following advertisement for the book does not sound like accurate history to me. More like "fringe" opinion;

Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
by Terence McKenna
4.17 · Rating Details · 4,641 Ratings · 228 Reviews
s/t: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs & Human Evolution
For the first time in paperback, the critically acclaimed counterculture manifesto by the wildly popular McKenna. "Deserves to be a modern classic on mind-altering drugs & hallucinogens."--The Washington Post. Photos & illustrations.

[Donald G]

A review of Terence McKenna's Food of the Gods, the Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
http://deoxy.org/t_nahole.htm

From Pills-a-Go-Go Summer 1994 (issue #20)
Front Cover sez: '...Terence McKenna gets a new *bleep*.'
Page 12: Book Review, T-Shirt Syllogism
By Will Self
Aldous Huxley, that veteran psychedelic experimenter, once said of his younger and more turbulent acolyte, Timothy Leary, 'If only Tim weren't such a silly *bleep*...' This could serve as a blanket condemnation for most of the philosophically inclined figures who owe their mind-set to the cultural revolutions of the sixties.

Certainly Terence McKenna is a silly *bleep*. But his heart is so clearly in the right place, and so much of what he says is a fresh synthesis of a collection of sixties ideas, that are rumbling on into the nineties, and acquiring further arational acolytes, that his book, Food of the Gods, deserve some careful attention.

Food of the Gods, follows from Flesh of the Gods, the seminal collection of papers on the ritual use of hallucinogens, edited by Peter Furst and published in 1972. The theory that McKenna puts forward, is an honest and heartfelt attempt, to move the issue of drug-induced intoxication to center stage.

McKenna is a believer in an unusual form of dialectial materialism, for the material in question is any psychoactive substance, whether crack cocaine or cane sugar. He holds that cultural form can be "read off" from the drugs ingested by any given population group. Thus, "Dominator" cultures, which McKenna thinks are a Bad Thing, are exemplefied by their use of alcohol and tobacco; whereas "Partnership" cultures, an empathically Good Thing, are hip to the use of psilocybin mushrooms, marijuana, and especially dimethyltryptamine, an extremely powerful, short-acting psychedelic drug, found in the ayahuasca and yopo of the Amazonian rainforest shamen.

DMT is McKenna's favorite drug. He writes of "the most profound of the indole hallucinogen-induced ecstasies, the rarely encountered but incomperable experience of smoking dimethyltrayptamine." And in this lies one of the admirable aspects of McKenna's work: he is not a man who is afraid to join in the debate on drugs at a level, which implies giving positive account of the social and spiritual value of intoxication. Most contemporary writers fall foul of this, precisely because of their fear of being tarred with the Leary brush.

McKenna sees the World in the blue-grey flesh of the psilocybin mushroom. He is a meta-Kantian, holding that the very phenomenon of sentiience itself is a function of a symbiotic relationship between *bleep* sapiens and the plant species that contain psychoactive alkaloids.

Just as Darwinists identify even secondary qualities such as color as being impacted upon by natural selection, so McKenna goes several steps further. For him the "wetware" of our minds is profoundly bound up with our own ecoysystem. this he characterizes as the "Gaian biosphere'. By this McKenna means a self-regulating planetary organism, a "transcendent Other," a "Vegetable Mind." Although why vegetables shoud necessarily have the upper designatory hand is beyond me. After all, the biosphere is just as much a function of purely chemical reactions; so this must be another unfortunate example of McKenna's proclivity for seeing the world in the gills of a mushroom.

His theories are challenging and germain, the trouble is that McKenna defelops it with a series of arguments that can be characterized as "T-Shirt Syllogisms." One such is: "Agriculture brings with it the potential for overproduction, which leads to excess wealth, hoarding and trade. Trade leads to cities; cities isolate their inhabitants from the natural world." This sounds uncomfortably like: "If I drink, I get drunk. If I get drunk I fall over. If I fall over..." etc.

McKenna doesn't seem to see that his refusal to acknowledge the wholly reciprocal relation between human consciousness and drug "effect" (Leary's concept of "set" and "setting," which he quotes with approval), leads to a biological reductionism that smacks suspiciously of the kind of Scientism he is keenest to refute.

On a more prosaic level, it is by no means certain that the plant alkaloids McKenna so reveres, "play an active part in the plant organisms they occur within." This would be crucial to his Plant/God theories McKenna is promoting.

A more traditional view is that the adaptive advantage of many alkaloids (many of which are highly toxic), for the plant species that contain them is as poisons. This would make sense. After all, what could be a better way of ensuring -- if you are a mushroom -- that you will only be eaten by a small group of McKenna-minded hominids, than synthesising psilocybin?

McKenna trawls for the usual suspect evidence and arguments in social anthropology, to put forward the now largely discredited theory, that at some point in the human past, there existed a pacific, pastoral Ur-Culture, an Eden from which we have all been expelled. McKenna is confused about self-consciousness, because on the one hand it is our bit of the Gaian mind, the "Transcendent Other," and on the other it is so clearly the substratum of the nasty, meat-eating, tooth-rotting, ego obsession, which he blames for the "moral decadence" we now face.

In Food of the Gods, McKenna argues persuasively for a freeing of the market in drugs, remarking pithily at one point that, "any society that can tolerate the use of a drug such as alcohol, can cope with just about anything." But it's a shame his monomania for shrooms didn't allow him to recall that Bwitiists, the Fang adherents to the only extant psychedelic religious ritual in the Old World, hold that the "ecstasies" they achieve through chanting and drumming are superior to those induced by ibogaine, one of McKenna's precious harmaline alkaloids.

McKenna also turns his back on all drugs he associates with the "Dominator" cultures, leading him to some tendentious reasoning concerning the use of tobacco plants in Central American shamanic ritual.

Obviously the idea of human consicousness breaking through the meniscus of conditioned ontology under the influence of a pack of Marlboros is too much for him to bear.

McKenna also digs into the controversies concerning the identity of "soma," the ancient ecstatic drug of the Rig Vedas; and attempts to prove it was not fly agaric.

Unsurprisingly, McKenna plumps for another mushroom, Stropharia cubensis, which contains his beloved psilocybin. It is just as possible that soma may have derived from the opium poppy; not something McKenna would look kindly on.

McKenna is an active guru. His ideas chime in with the lifestyles of the growing numbers of New Agers, or "Archaic Revivalists" as he would term them. And for that reason it is depressing to conclude that if -- as one of McKenna's source thinkers, Marshall McLuhan, opined -- the medium is the message, then we have a steadily lengthening, ever-billowing cosmic clothesline of McKenna's T-shirt syllogisms to look forward to.

I am surprised that the local library stores the book in the True Adult History Section. According to that Books on Religion also fall into the True Adult History Section. I disagree with that classification and according to the above article, so do others.

[JLives]

Are you done dragging this off topic? I'm not getting into a *bleep* match with you on book reviews. Good god.

I know you don't want to have to focus on backing up your claim that the war on drugs isn't a failure but that IS the topic here.

[LiamHaddock]

Of course Donald you'd rather spend time arguing over a book instead of doing research for your unsupported opinion and try and stay on topic of the failed war on drugs.

Regardless of your stance on the book JLives had a valid point you of course ignored.

You can't tell a consenting adult what to put in their body. One thing not mentioned in this discussion is that drugs can be fun. More people use them for that reason than a means of escaping reality. It's the same reason why various other species use them too. Elephants don't get loaded on fermented fruit because they're struggling with a broken home or "are idiots". Most people who use drugs are not addicts and never will be addicts. The addiction rate has remained fairly constant at 10% of users through many decades of drug use and societies changing attitudes towards it.

I'm reading Food of the Gods by Terrance McKenna right now which makes the case that psilocybin was the "tree of knowledge" that led our ancestors towards developing speech, enhanced eyesight and also sexual enjoyment. Psychedelics may have played a vital part in our evolution to who we are today. They have certainly played a vital role in the development of technology. Drugs are bad and never do them unless you're a *bleep* isn't a solid arguement to make when we have benefited from their use so greatly and the vast majority of adults who use them cause no harm to society.

Drugs can be fun, they can be spiritual and many cultures use drugs for such reasons. You can't control or tell someone what they can put in their body. We've tried that approach and it's not working. We shouldn't be telling people what they can or can't put in their body.

So Donald why don't you try doing some research to support your failed out dated opinions come back and make a post on topic. It would be a nice change from. Your normal unsupported claims.

[Donald G]

Another false and useless repeat Liam. How about you and JLives get together and go about telling the the millions of Canadians your theories on out of control hard core addiction and I will go about observing your antics from my life in the real world.

[oneh2obabe]

Back on topic NOW. Thanks.

[LiamHaddock]

Another false and useless repeat Liam.

Only false and useless in for being repeated is yours. Again learn to support your unsupported opinions please and if your going to post in this thread it would be appreciated if you could stay on topic which is if the war on drugs is a failure or not. Only goes around in circles cause you join in derailing threads going off topic with nothing to support it.

Ending war on drugs and regulating drugs would save lives and reduce profits from going to criminals.