ScienceDaily (Nov. 1, 2010) — A new system that ranks drugs on the basis of harm caused to both the user and others places alcohol as the most harmful drug, above heroin and crack. The scale, developed by drug experts led by Professor David Nutt of Imperial College London, is published online in The Lancet.
[From Alcohol 'most harmful drug', according to multicriteria analysis]
Somewhat topically, given reports of Ayahuasquero’s facing twenty years in prison for the possession Sacred Medicine, Science Daily reports that state sanctioned drug alcohol is the most damaging drug for both the individual and society. Whilst alcohol is less harmful for the individual than Heroin, Crack and Crystal Meth, the study deemed it overall as at least more than twice as harmful as Crystal meth, cocaine, tobacco, amphetamine/speed, cannabis, GHB, benzodiazepines, ketamine, methadone, mephedrone, butane, khat, ecstacy, anabolic steroids, LSD, buprenorphine and mushrooms.
Consider the amount of money spent “combatting” the latter drugs, and the amount extolling in advertising the glamour of alcohol and one can see that there is something seriously awry with the common cultural viewpoint apropos “drugs”. Is this a case of mere misunderstanding?
In a recent post on Taita Juan, I referenced an arrest of Santo Daime members in the UK. Consider the language used in the commercial media about that case;
A COUPLE have been arrested on suspicion of importing a powerful drug linked to a secretive religion, following a police raid on a Dartington home.
Officers from the Serious and Organised Crime Investigation Team headed up the raid which seized what is believed to be a quantity of ayahuasca — a liquid which contains the powerful hallucinogenic dimethyltryptamine, also known as DMT, a designated Class A drug in this country….The drug comes in the form of a brown liquid. Police have refused to say where they are keeping the drug until it can be analysed. However it is being stored in special bio hazard bags. Det Sgt Gilroy explained: “At the moment we don’t know how potent it is.”
or more general media coverage here;
Santo Daime: the drug-fuelled religion
A new religion is spreading to Britain – its central sacrament the consumption of a hallucinogenic Class A drug. Here’s a report from the faith’s heartland in the rainforests of the Amazon
[From Santo Daime: the drug-fuelled religion - Times Online]
or here;
The lost and depressed turn to Peruvian ayahuasca rituals for guidance. A Peruvian potion called ayahuasca is drawing foreigners searching for guidance, insight, relief from trauma or a spiritual high
IQUITOS, PERU — Kevin Simmons, a 28-year-old Chicago native, said he “was stuck” — depressed, locked away in his home and taking more than a year to even open his e-mail.
[From Peruvian hallucinogen ayahuasca draws tourists seeking transforming experience]
In that latest article the lack attention to journalistic standards shows clearly in the image of a Huachumero in front of his mesa taking something, possibly Cimora from a shell into his nostril, captioned;
Peruvian Andean soothsayer Erick Caceres, 38, inhales ayahuasca through a shell during a ceremony where soothsayers announce their visions, in the central Lima district of Rimac. A range of healing centers perform rituals related to the potion.
“Soothsayer”, “potion”! Does the Washington Post purport not to understand the pejorative weight of those words in that context? Such kinds of “reporting” shows at least a lack of desire to understand the issues at hand, and at worst a clear attempt to obfuscate and manipulate popular opinion.
There have been a number of studies showing the individual and societal benefits of the Sacred Medicines, and it is these stories that we need to ensure also populate the mainstream media. Not just the stories of “drug arrests” and “ayahausca tourism” disasters, but stories of the immense capacities to heal and correct imbalance that these Teacher Plants offer us. These stories need to be presented as they are, as stories of hope and of individuals making personal and cultural changes for the better, for the healthier, for the more balanced. They need to be told in a manner accessible to other members of that culture, be it the UK, the US, Australia, Spain, or Sweden..
Certainly those stories exist, and in the mainstream media as well. I’ve referenced prior this article in the National Geographic which details an adventurer and writer’s struggle with depression, and the efficacy if not difficulty of her experience with curing in a Peruvian Ayahuasca ritual. There’s another here at the ABC. I’m sure there’s many more…and the potential for many, many more. Please let me know if you have any to share and in that sharing let us change the, seemingly manipulated, public perception and thus this absurd near global prohibition on the practice of this ancient medicinal and spiritual art and science.
Play audio here
Last week I spoke with Dr Stephan Beyer, author of Singing to the Plants: A guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon.
We spoke for an hour and a half about the themes in his book, and his knowledge of Curanderismo in the Upper Amazon. The conversation for me was an engaging one, although we barely scratched the subject matter in the book.
I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of reading the book, and my discussion with Steve, and would recommend the book to anyone who seeks to understand something of the modern work with the Sacred Teacher Plants in the Upper Amazon.
The interview is available to listen to directly at the beginning of this post, or as a download here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.
“When we want to understand something strange, something previously unknown, we have to begin with an entirely
different set of questions. What is it? How does it work? Are there recurrent regularities?” Margaret Mead
I wrote recently about the culturally sanctioned belief [and an incredibly resilient one at that] which flies in the face of ever mounting evidence to the contrary, that quantum effects occur at a quantum level and any observation of them in daily human life is evidence of “magical thinking”, superstition or lack of critical facility. Now whilst I agree with Israel Regardie in the matter of their being a great deal of “new age cosmic foo-foo” to sift through in current popular literature around the subject, I believe the matter requires our urgent collective attention, if we are to have any hope of some manner of directing our personal and collective destinies.
Obviously I work in a realm where non human consciousness are not only conceptually considered, but interacted with on a regular basis. These are not abstractions, but rather conscious, self organising and determining entities, with particular personalities who, in certain situations, will interact with the human realm and share their particular wisdoms. By the definitions of a Western reductionist cultural model such ideas are quirky and amusing idiosyncracies to be tolerated at best, or dangerous pathologies to be medicated out of existence at worst, and yet,
“As if it wasn’t bad enough for the military to muck about with mind control, they’re also bent on creating an online, self-teaching artificial intelligence.”
[From Military AI Could Rule the Internet | Wired Science from Wired.com]
Internet Map
So notions of plant sentience are off limits for cultural examinations, but multi million dollar budgets to build the same thing in the machine are up for serious discussions in the rarified halls of the power elite? If nothing else, as the Wired writer suggests;
“there is something vaguely creepy about the idea of greater-than-human artificial intelligence unleashed on the Internet by the military”
Why is it that working in collaboration and harmony with the ecological systems we inhabit is a “fringe” solution, and hurling huge sums of money at technological replications of preexistent structures in nature [which inevitably function with more grace and efficiency] is the dominant course of action to try to ameliorate the damage wrought by our current oil addicted economies?
Again, a regular occurrence in the work conducted here in South America in collaboration with the plants, telepathy when examined in modern intellectual psychological models is largely discounted, unable to be statistically held up as a possibility worthy of serious attention. Again, it’s examination by “fringe” scientists such as evolutionary biologist Rupert Sheldrake are often ridiculed by “serious” scientists and “skeptics”. And yet from here , here and here
“A team of UC Irvine scientists has been awarded a $4 million grant from the U.S. Army Research Office to study the neuroscientific and signal-processing foundations of synthetic telepathy”
Why are these subjects allowable in the cultural domain to be examined for the agenda of dominance and control, for the facilitating of killing people? The use of the such technologies for malefic intent in the Amazon is considered brujeria, or sorcery, yet another notion discounted by modern psychology and philosophy as primitive superstition. and not to be taken seriously. Why are we not spending millions of dollars examining usage [such that has occurred in the Amazon for millenia] in the realms of healing, caring for community and society, and finding visionary means of navigating our way through what is widely held to be a very critical juncture in the evolution of the human species?
A widely quoted aphorism is “the devil’s greatest achievement was to convince humans that he didn’t exist”. If we are to take responsibility for our own destinies [if indeed that is possible] then we must be aware of the possibilities and technologies of consciousness available to us, and be aware that to redress the significant imbalance in the current global mind, we must work actively with those technologies for the betterment of our individual ecosystems and the collective health of the incredible diversity of relations with whom we share this planet. We must have the courage to ask new questions, perhaps uncomfortable ones, if we are to break out of the stupor of our current spiral of self destruction and life denial, as it is clearly obvious that our habituated questionings are not providing us with the answers we need. I have no doubt that we are capable of such a leap of consciousness.
Aho Mitukuye Oyasin
