Drug War: Covert Money, Power & Policy: The Cure

Oglala Shamans Call on Earth Grandmother, 1907

In Holland the Department of Alcohol, Drugs and Tobacco is part of the federal Ministry of Welfare, Health and Cultural Affairs. The Netherlands' top nark, isn't: "The Dutch do not rely heavily on criminal law and law enforcement in general. They prefer a policy of social control, adaptation, and integration to a policy of social exclusion through criminalization, punishment, and stigmatization," says Eddy Engelsman.

"I refer, for instance, to problems of highly priced drugs causing drug-related crimes, of prostitution and social ostracism, and of increased health risks such as AIDS. The effects of heroin and cocaine use are too often confused with the effects of their illegality."

This anti-inquisitorial mentality has produced 15% of our addiction and crime rates, an efficient and humane criminal justice system that is neither overloaded nor corrupt, and the complete elimination of intravenous hepatitis and AIDS transmission. The Dutch, in other words, with almost exactly the opposite policies advocated by American Prohibitionists, have achieved most of the strategic goals the Prohibitionists say they want to achieve.

By making the safe herb available, the alkaloid's drawbacks become obvious. Where there is no legal and propaganda equation, there is no equation among users. According to the 1995 Ministry report, there are 25,000 heroin addicts in Holland, 1.6 tenths of one percent of the population of 15.1 million. That compares to 2.1-2.7 million heroin addicts reported by the U.S. Public Health Service's 1994 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse - about 1% of the population. That's 16:100. The USPHS adds that the 1% figure is probably a gross underestimation because the using population has been driven underground. Why is the U.S. rate of heroin addiction at least seven times higher than the Dutch? Why aren't we falling all over ourselves to adopt their policies?

Dutch addicts can actually exchange dirty needles for clean at the local police station. By not making addicts hysterical, Dutch police don't waste time chasing hysterical addicts. Since Dutch policy doesn't drive addicts to theft or start turf wars, Holland, in 1989, had 175 murders in the entire country, which would translate to less than 3,000 murders for U.S. population. The actual U.S. figure was 20,000.

Chicago Tribune:11/2/95: "Although drugs and violent crime often are linked in America, the violent crime rate in the Netherlands is far lower than in the U.S., despite the Netherlands’ more liberal drug policies. There were 1.9 homicides in Holland per 100,000 people in 1993. The U.S. rate was 9.5 homicides per 100,000." "The effects of heroin and cocaine use are too often confused with the effects of their illegality."

Even according to current official figures, Holland's twenty-five year decriminalization of pot has produced almost exactly the same pot use rate the U.S. has with total criminalization, but one-seventh the alkaloid use rate. And, since it prefers to finance physicians rather than drug-gangs, Holland has virtually eliminated drug-related crime.

So, if strategic success in the Drug War can be so easily demonstrated, why aren't we simply copying the successful model? Why can't rationality rule? Because the inquisitorial neurosis, upon which almost all our drug propaganda is based, is unconscious. Neurosis, emotional compulsion ruling conscious behavior, isn't susceptible to rationality. Sounds pompous, but it's true.

There is hardly an old Vietnam-era war-hawk today who wouldn't agree that we could have bought the Vietminh for a tenth of the price we paid to lose to them, because 20-20 hindsight is empirical, rational, unemotional. It's not hard to see now that buying them would have achieved the hawk goals as well as the dove. We could have had a base and a friend. But to make that suggestion in 1968, when American troops were under fire, was to risk getting your head busted - despite the fact that buying them would have saved thousands of American lives. Instead, in the name of Mom and Apple Pie, we "searched and destroyed" our way to complete defeat - destroying millions of lives in the process.

Who waved the flag of Mom and Apple Pie in 1966? Who insisted that the Vietminh were 5% of the population when it knew damn well they were 85%? Military intelligence. Drug War artificially inflates the value of these prohibited agricultural commodities to the level of precious metal - precious metal that can be farmed.   That makes them, by definition, the economic basis of military power everywhere they can be grown and delivered in quantity.  That forces U.S. military intelligence into the business of supporting the third-world military structures that are actually dealing the drugs. General McCaffrey's Apple Pie propaganda is so emotionally compelling, such effective hysteria, that rationality hasn't got a political chance.

The extraordinary, ecstatic 60's threw the fascist power structures into their present inquisitorial mania, the worst, the most dangerous, in American history. The Drug War is a propaganda-fed neurotic repeat of the medieval Inquisition. I don't mean that metaphorically. The most common evidentiary bust of the medieval Inquisition was "the possession of prohibited substances." In fact, the legal phrase "prohibited substance" can be found in the Malleus Maleficarum of 1484 in relation to the "witches medicines" of the curanderas. "Possession," one of the premier indicia of "witchcraft," was the most common evidentiary bust of the Inquisition. Today's propaganda barrage is a technologically-updated duplicate of that propaganda. History - the psychology of contemporary politics - moves much more slowly than technology.

An ecstatic Greek priestess holding the sacred herb carrier, the thyrsos, and the jaguar, symbol of her ferocity. She wears the magical snake in her hair - not a bringer of evil fruit, but symbol of her vegetal power to heal or destroy. The Brygos painter, c.490 BC.

The despicable Partnership For A Drug-Free America, financed by Big Tobacco and Alcohol, assures us that "This is not the 60's. There is no such thing as a safe drug," and that "60% of all rape victims are under the age of 18." We are then shown two teenage girls, dressed up as hippies, laughingly sharing a joint - amidst the libidinous stares of menacing bikers in the seediest part of town. And if the bikers don't get you, then the narks will, in loco parentis. That the parental ostracism of partying teenagers drives them to rebellion and criminality was painfully obvious to the Dutch. The rape threat is an exact repeat of medieval inquisitorial propaganda, the medieval Devil wielding a joint even bigger than that of a hulking Biker.

The fixation on "sobriety" is as sick and manipulative as the fixation on celibacy or witchcraft. By "witchcraft" the medievals usually meant pharmaco-shamanism, the essence of the spiritual spontaneity of pre-industrial cultures. Tribal cultures have always valued occassional spiritual intercourse with the "parental hermaphrodite," as the Greek Gnostics put it, that's why they called it "sacred marriage." When one is "in the spirit" in church, one is "drunk on God," not sober. Because of the social support, there is nothing dangerous about this state, but one would be insane to get behind the wheel of car. Not everything we do is an industrial activity, Bismark to the contrary notwithstanding.

As alcohol Prohibition abundantly proved, Prohibition causes alienated inebriative behaviors. It also, unquestionably, institutionalizes organized crime, military fascism, the driving engine of both the medieval Inquisition and today's Drug War. To allow the likes of the BIA, the WCTU, Wiley, Hoover, Anslinger, Bennett, Califano and McCaffrey to dictate medical and pharmakon law to our culture is precisely the equivalent of allowing the sadistic Kramer and Sprenger, authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, to control medical and pharmakon law in sixteenth-century Germany. It was done, but it triggered endemic bloodletting that drove the culture mad.

Jung: "Much, that is to say, that proves to be abysmally evil in its ultimate effects does not come from man's wickedness but from his stupidity and unconsciousness. One has only to think of the devastating effects of Prohibition in America or of the hundred thousand autos-da-fé in Spain, which were all caused by a praiseworthy zeal to save people's souls. One of the toughest roots of all evil is unconsciousness, and I could wish that the saying of Jesus, 'Man, if thou knowest what thou doest, thou art blessed, but if thou knowest not, thou art accursed, and a transgressor of the law,' were still in the gospels, even though it has only one authentic source. It might well be the motto for a new morality."

That authentic source was Gnostic Christian, not Orthodox. Orthodox Christianity is too intentionally unconscious, building fascist political hysteria, a scapegoat, into its canon, as the Gnostics, who claimed descent from the Essenes, the Iassai, the "Healers," Jesus' Hebrew sect, did not. The difference between Christian gnosis, or for that matter any other kind of gnosis, and Orthodox Christianity is the difference between Joshua, an Israeli war shaman who abhorred Roman slavery as the very definition of evil, and Augustine, a Roman slaver, who extolled slavery as the height of divine wisdom.

It is the difference between Crazy Horse and Custer, between the Essene Dead Sea Scrolls and the Pauline New Testament. Although Paul's Greek was based on the Essene Hebrew, a whole hell of a lot was lost in translation (see Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda). Paul was not Jesus, however hysterically he and his followers confuse eidolon with pharmakon. Iasius ("The Healer") didn't say he was the eidolon; he said he was the pharmakon, what the Essenes, the Iassai, the "Jesuses," on Dead Sea scrolls we have, called "the plant of truth."

Iasius, the healer, arises from Demeter’s sacramental cauldron, amidst floating mushrooms and vines; from a Greek sacramental vase, c.500 BC; Cook

Evangelical Protestantism, a Rennaissance German religion, changed the dogmatic Catholic image of Christ, which included a sacramental apprehension of the Mother of God. Mary was an image that Catholicism, the last great syncretism of the ancient world, was very careful to nurture.  Protestantism instituted a more patriarchal Jesus, who stressed community and business ethics, and abhorred all mysticism. It suppresses the ancient feminine imagery completely, burying the inherently pharmaco-shamanic, the inherently ecstatic and sacramental, image of the Holy Mother. But the psychic pull of the feminine can't be so easily manipulated, since we are all born of the womb and first drink at the breast.

Holy Mother Churches are powerful political institutions precisely because that's where many people, snug within the sanctioned confines of their adopted tribe, come closest to shamanic emotions. Shamanic analogues are the way inside the mind. Many churches, of course, are far more concerned with helping their communicants call up the Holy Spirit than with politics, and music is a fine substitute for pharmacology. Pan played the pipes. But it's good to remember that Pan was a Goat, not a Lamb.

Inlay from the Soundbox Harp of Ur, c.3000 BC:
“On meeting Gilgamesh as he searched for the land of the magical fruit trees, the scorpion-man says to his wife, ‘The body of him who has come to us is flesh of the gods.’"

Music is obviously a genuine shamanic technique with which innumerable communicants call up, or attempt to call up, the Holy Spirit every week. It is the fascist extrapolation of this, that, since we do it one way, all other ways ought to be illegal, that is the problem. That extrapolation, unfortunately, is built into Orthodox Christian theology. The fascist error is political, not necessarily religious, if such a distinction can be made within the confines of Pauline theology.

Buzz-word disinformation - constant, effective association of the archetypal herbal imagery with social chaos and stress - can manipulate a culture like a puppet on a string. That is, sacramental herbal imagery - the Burning Bush, the Tree of Life, the Cross, the Blood of Christ, the contents of the Chalice - the Kalyx, the "Flower-Cup" - the Golden Apples, the Golden Flower - is instinctive. Like animal imagery, plant imagery comes up automatically in dreams.

The archetypal mammalian imagery is understood emotionally, unconsciously, leaving its recipients susceptible to authoritarian suggestion. Hitler used the wheel of life, the swastika, and the Star of David, both ancient shamanic images, to great effect with this technique. The Theban sacramental vase below dates to 700 BC. The swastikas have nothing to do with Hitler, but everything to do with the contents of the vase and the meaning of dreams. If Christ is the Fish, then He is in the right place.

Theban sacramental vase, c. 700 BC; Harrison:1

The body, and its automatic imagery, are the sea we swim in. In a climate of legal industrial terrorism, the prohibitionist argument that sacramental herbs must be equated with social chaos makes perfect emotional sense because the target assumes that the planted attitudes, rooted in its own dream imagery, are its own. It is the dream imagery that is sacred, not its demonization.

Marijuana is illegal, as Rasta shamans still insist, precisely because it is sacred to tribal peoples. The ancient Herb is a true sacrament capable of helping to call up the Holy Spirit of Jah. It is a connection to, real magic of, Holy Mother Earth - biological magic. But it simply is not legal anymore to be an Mbuti from the Ituri forest. It is no longer permissable to be part of the ecstatic forest, because that mitigates against industrial values. The forest, we are told, is no longer our awesome Holy Mother, but just so many board-feet of lumber, and the Mbuti, well, they can be made to haul the lumber. Slaver law - assembly line law - Suharto law - prevails.

Social chaos, conducive to the militarization of culture, is also created by the legal equation of the ancient sacramental herbs with refined alkaloids and poisons - sort of like legally equating Judaism with treason and pedophilia, a classic technique Hitler got from the medievals. Above, North Africa's favorite sacramental herb, khat, with which untold generations of Yemenis have gone personally to sit with the Prophet.

Engraved Bone, France, c. 13,000 BC; Mainage

That stag, and the floating-eyed shaman who carved him into bone, lived in France, 15,000 years ago. Should the Inquisition end, values other than industrial will pervade the culture. The thoughts of the animals will once again become visible. Nektar will again flow from the breast. Flowers will again reveal the respiration of the Earth. The "demographics," as they did in the 60's, will go haywire for the promulgators of the Official Faith. That's the peril the Bismark heads see in sophisticated adult shamanism. The assembly line would cease to be the official state religion. Mother Earth would be remembered.

Persephone and Demeter adore the Sacred Mushroom, from the temple wall at Eleusis, c. 450 BC