The Big Picture: 2009 UN World Drug Report
October 23rd, 2009Oblivion.
Via: Boston Globe – Big Picture: (WARNING: Graphic content.)
The 2009 United Nations World Drug report, released earlier this year, notes that 2009 marks “the end of the first century of drug control (it all started in Shanghai in 1909)”, and that the illicit drug market worldwide has now become a $320 billion-per-year industry. As drug-related violence in Mexico appears to continue unabated, and crackdowns in Afghanistan are being made against its massive opium crops, new efforts are also being made worldwide in methods of enforcement and treatment of recovering addicts. Collected here are a handful of recent images from the rough world of illegal drugs across the globe.
Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined and obsessive behavior; these are precisely the tendencies in our psychological makeup that the psychedelics mitigate. The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motivations up to inspection by a wider, less egocentric and more grounded point of view within the individual. It is foolish to suggest there is no risk, but it is equally uninformed to suggest the risk is not worth taking.
Terence Mckenna articulates well how the psychedelic position is an ‘anti-drug’ position.
” ‘Drugs’ and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position.”
http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=1304
Be that as it may, the ‘drug issue’ is several layered deep and laminated falsely into one. Civil liberty issues of cognitive liberty and the sovereignty of the individual seamlessly dovetail into, and counter, issues of ego and alcohol fueled dynamics of nationalism, patriarchy and dominator culture and herdchuting crowd manipulation and violence adoration and mysogyny etc.
Complex enough as all this is, we now have movements by the powers that be to pro-actively assert upon us, their own drugs…
Many people don’t realize how the body drugs virtually have their own programming, as if they inhabit their human host, like the violence-promoting aspects of alcohol as a simple example. On the other hand, the head drugs actually offer themselves as resource against such problems and are being so researched ever more every day. Thus in part, roughly speaking, their very vilification!
Many don’t realize the greater scope of existence at all. Conventional reality is a truncation, held stifled by that very constructed convention. Normal reality is *not* as stupefying as conventional reality, but we are trained to act is such constricted social fashion, novelty is shunned and simply creative folks are held in suspect lest they confine their ways to socially accepted means, ways, and venues and behaviors. Straight society is a far narrower path than most realize.
Society is constricted so greatly even within the convention, radicalizing agents like head drugs are lumped right together with the deradicalizing and [and almost as destabilizing] body drugs.
http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=197
Podcast 099 – “Controlling The Culture” (Part 1)
Guest speakers: Richard Glen Boire, Erik Davis, and John Gilmore
30:14 Erik Davis: “As Dale Pendell said in a line that has just stuck with me, ‘When one learns to face the gods directly one no longer fears facing a king.’”
…WASP culture forgets what the P stands for, and what it was that Protestants originally protested against…
Damn, we don’t need drugs to just be weird, we haven’t even the freedom to be weird in the first place. How much less drug demand would there be is we had such latitude? …Conformity supports what passivity enables…
Those that share my views already agree and those who don’t partly don’t out of ignorance of what the issues even are -of what the greater contexts even are, personally and socially and experientially. It’s coming out into the mainstream more and more these days and some may wonder why for god’s sakes when we have all these other problems. For the laminated complexity of issues pressed into one here, they are all more central and core than can be admitted to. That is consigned to Oblivion, for sure.
http://deoxy.org/pdfa/woc.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_liberty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entheogen
http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=234
http://zuma.vip.warped.com/empty_sinks.htm#fotg
one last note:
http://www.hallucinogens.com/lsd/francis-crick.html
@Zuma: thanks for your thoughts and the links.
Terence McKenna’s writings really changed my outlook on the world and human existence when i first read him many years ago.
@tochigi:
‘The Bard’ was a major touchstone figure indeed.
I left much out. I would add much on his 2012 Timewave Zero stuff and so mention Teilhard De Chardin’s own earlier 2012 node, The Omega Point.
-And add how that dovetails in with Cognitive Dissonance on the Stuff Driving Us Batshit Crazy Department. Cognitive Dissonance in at least the one sense of pretending so much is normal and right when it’s nuts, like that we’re still a democracy, that we’re trying to win wars rather than etrnally hold down occupations, that we’re not pumping fouled blood into our gastanks and on and on and on…
I left so very much. It all manages, it seems, to almost go out beyond even the vast latitude of the purview of rational discourse! This is all so very core. Terence was a genius. He talks about even this matter of our discernment so brilliantly and reduces it elegantly to elegance itself as a guide. I have to take care in my own limits and my own verbosity -and the sheer seamlessness of it all. But yeah, I left out a lot. I’d run out of ink otherwise. 🙂
http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=949
“Plato said the key lay in the concepts, The Good, The True, and The beautiful.”
“The good. What is it? Tricky, tricky, tricky. The true. What is it? Trickier, even trickier. The beautiful. What is it? Easy to discern. The beautiful is easy to discern. You are going to be condemned to live out the consequences of your taste.”
—
Countering the 2008 War On Drugs conference was also [in Vienna] a Peace On Drugs convention, at which Peter Webster gave an eloquent lecture.
http://www.psychedelic-library.org/newmenu.htm
http://www.psychedelic-library.org/Vienna%202008.rtf
http://www.psychedelic-library.org/Peter%20Webster%20-%20Vienna%20speech%20March%208%202008.mp3
In the following quotation from a book by David A. J. Richards, we see how this repudiation has translated itself into modern times, how it has become a general, inbuilt, default perspective about the Christian religion that dominates the outlook of theologians and Church members alike. Now please bear with me, this quote is important but a bit tricky to understand when spoken rather than read. For the benefit of those wishing to read the quote, as well as my entire talk today, I have made it available at my website. More on that later. Here is the quotation:
“Shamanic possession and ecstasy, at the heart of much earlier religion, becomes, from [the perspective of the Church’s repudiation], one form of demonic or satanic witchcraft, a charge that Catholic missionaries made against the shamanic practices they encountered in the New World. The leading contemporary defender of this Judaeo-Christian repudiation, R. C. Zaehner, has argued that the technology of the self implicit in the orthodox western religions requires an unbridgeable gap between the human and the divine, expressed in the submission of the self to ethical imperatives by which persons express their common humanity and a religious humility. Accordingly, western, in contrast to non-western mystical experience, expresses the distance between the human and the divine. Drugs, including alcohol, are ruled out as stimuli to religious experience because they bridge this distance, indulging the narcissistic perception that the user himself is divine and thus free of the constraints of ethical submission.” (End of quote)
Ethical submission to authority, there we have it. Whereas Eastern religion and philosophy has little problem with perceiving mankind and all creation as a manifestation of the Divine, quite capable of judging right from wrong, the Catholic Church, and today its political descendants, want us to be submissive, to laud their authority, and to never get the idea that we may in fact know as much about things as they do. I’ve read this quotation many times, and its great importance only slowly became obvious to me. It explains many things about contemporary attitudes to both religion and drugs, and why so many otherwise intelligent people will automatically support notions such as “drugs are wrong” and refuse even to consider their convictions through rational processes based on evidence and logic. Nietzsche’s condemnation of convictions being more dangerous enemies of truth than lies becomes even more to the point.
…at 32 min. Webster of man’s ‘Malignant Aggression’, referring to what I always called the age-old Dominator Culture and thought it largely alcohol culture originated… Webster’s view was new to me and well articulated: Xenophobia. Kill All Weirdos, essentially… He gave me much to rethink.