more on this later...
the world is what we make it
In his article, entitled Mixed Blood and first published November 1995 in Psychology Today Magazine, Jeffery M Fish examines the cultural foundation of racial ideology and determines that “race is a myth.” Fish designs his argument by first providing an overview of human evolution. He establishes that humans vary physiologically as the result of biological adaptations to regional environments, and that these relative adaptations do not delineate humans into separate races. The American racial terms black and white do not distinguish between separate human species any more than the terms tall or short. Instead, Fish suggests that our understanding of race is culturally arbitrary.
Click on the above link to read an article highlighting the breadth of knowledge exercised by the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the religious nature of psychotropic entheogens.
The real issue in the case is not whether Schedule I, as a whole, needs to be uniformly enforced, because the drugs covered by Schedule I are quite different from one another: Schedule I encompasses a variety of chemicals, which - while they may be similar in danger as a general category -- are not similar in effect, use for recreational purposes, potential for addiction, source, effect on children, or in their effect on international trafficking. Had the UDV asked for heroin or marijuana (as other churches have), this point would have been patently obvious.
Rather, the issue is whether the ban for each of these dangerous drugs needs to be uniformly enforced - that is, enforced the same no matter who the would-be user is, or what his or her reason for using may be. Indeed, it may be true, roughly, that the greater the danger, the more reluctant the government ought to be in allowing departures from uniformity of application.
A Peyote Exemption Does Not Entail a Heroin Exemption
Put another way, the exemption for peyote shows only that the government is willing to tolerate use of peyote - with all of its individual characteristics -- within the United States, not that it must be willing to tolerate religious exemptions to prohibitions on other Schedule 1 drugs, like heroin or marijuana or DMT.
The reason many states and the federal government have been willing to exempt religious peyote use is because it is not a terribly pleasant drug -- reportedly often causing headaches and nausea, and rather unreliable in its effect. Thus, it is not a desirable recreational drug with an active black market. Moreover, it is domestically grown, which relieves the United States of its obligations under the UN treaty.
The same cannot be said for DMT, about which much less is known, and which is grown in South America, raising the United States' obligations under the UN's treaty. The potential for this relatively new hallucinogen in the United States to foster an active black market simply is not known.
from newscientist.com:
The scans showed that both sexes experienced increased brain activity in the fronto-singular and anterior cingulate cortices – areas that the associated with the direct experience of pain – when watching other players receive a jolt of electricity. Researchers have previously shown that so-called mirror neurons will sometimes fire in empathy with another person's experience.
Both men and women also experienced slightly less activity in these areas when cheaters were given a shock, which suggests the feeling of empathy was dependent on social behaviour.
But tellingly, activity dropped much more in men when watching cheaters being buzzed. In addition, several other regions of male participants' brains "lit up" instead – areas linked to the experience of reward known as the ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens and orbito-frontal cortex.
The results suggest that men not only feel less empathy for cheaters but experience pleasure when they are punished.
Today, mirror neurons play a major explanatory role in the understanding of a number of human features, from imitation to empathy, mindreading and language learning. It has also been claimed that damages in these cerebral structures can be responsible for mental deficits such as autism.
For die-hard Steelers fans, Jerome Bettis' fumble as he tried to score from the 2-yard line was a heart-pounding moment in Sunday's game against the Indianapolis Colts. For Terry O'Neill, of Rinne Street in Arlington, it was a heart-stopping moment -- literally. O'Neill's heart stopped seconds after the crucial play in the final moments of Sunday's divisional playoff game. "Jerome is my hero," O'Neill, 50, said Monday from his bed at UPMC Presbyterian hospital in Oakland, where he was in stable condition. "I wasn't upset that the Steelers might lose," he said. "I was upset because I didn't want to see him end his career like that. A guy like that deserves better. I guess it was a little too much for me to handle."
A Defeat For Users Of Medical Marijuana
The Supreme Court dealt a blow to the medical marijuana movement yesterday, ruling that the federal government can still ban possession of the drug in states that have eliminated sanctions for its use in treating symptoms of illness. By a vote of 6 to 3, the court ruled that Congress's constitutional authority to regulate the interstate market in drugs, licit or illicit, extends to small, homegrown quantities of doctor-recommended marijuana consumed under California's Compassionate Use Act, which was adopted by an overwhelming majority of voters in 1996.
The ruling does not overturn laws in California and 10 other states, mostly in the West, that permit medical use of marijuana. In 2003, Maryland reduced the maximum fine for medical users of less than an ounce of the drug to $100. But the ruling does mean that those who try to use marijuana as a medical treatment risk legal action by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration or other federal agencies and that the state laws provide no defense.
Writing for the court majority, Justice John Paul Stevens said the case was "troubling" because of users' claims that they needed marijuana to alleviate physical pain and suffering. But he concluded that the court had no choice but to uphold Congress's "firmly established" power to regulate "purely local activities . . . that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce."
Echoing an argument advanced by the Bush administration, Stevens expressed concern that "unscrupulous physicians" might exploit the broadly worded California law to divert marijuana into the market for recreational drugs.
The Bush administration, which has been emphasizing marijuana enforcement in its anti-drug strategy, hailed the ruling.
"Today's decision marks the end of medical marijuana as a political issue," said John P. Walters, President Bush's director of national drug control policy. "Our nation has the highest standards and most sophisticated institutions in the world for determining the safety and effectiveness of medication. Our national medical system relies on proven scientific research, not popular opinion."
But California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said that "seriously ill Californians will continue to run the risk of arrest and prosecution under federal law when they grow and or they use marijuana as medicine." The ruling, he said, "shows the vast philosophical difference between the federal government and Californians on the rights of patients to have access to the medicine they need to survive and lead healthier lives."
Supporters of medical marijuana, noting that Stevens wrote that "the voices of voters allied with these respondents may one day be heard in the halls of Congress," said the fight over federal drug policy will shift to a new battleground.
"The decision highlights the opportunity we have to go to Congress and change these laws," said Robert Raich, a lawyer whose wife, Angel Raich, was one of two women who had sued to block enforcement of federal marijuana laws against them. A House bill that would forbid the use of federal funds to prosecute medical marijuana use in states that permit it was defeated overwhelmingly last year but will be voted on again soon, advocates of medical marijuana said.
Yesterday's Supreme Court decision represented a victory for the court's supporters of federal power over its proponents of states' rights. In two cases in the past decade, the court limited Congress's power to make laws in the name of regulating interstate commerce, saying that it had begun to intrude upon local affairs. Backers of medical marijuana had hoped to apply those precedents in this case, Gonzales v. Raich, No. 03-1454. But Stevens concluded that the court was still bound by a 1942 Supreme Court decision that defined interstate commerce broadly to include, under certain circumstances, even subsistence wheat farming.
Much modern government regulation exists because of this broad definition of interstate commerce, which permitted the court to uphold, as exercises of Congress's commerce clause power, laws including New Deal farm controls and the ban on racial segregation in hotels and restaurants.
Stevens was joined by the court's three other consistent supporters of federal power, Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. He also picked up the votes of two justices, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy, who usually support states' rights. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas dissented. Writing for the three, O'Connor noted that she "would not have voted for the medical marijuana initiative" in California, but she chided the majority for stifling "an express choice by some States, concerned for the lives and liberties of their people, to regulate medical marijuana differently."
In a separate dissent, Thomas added that if "the majority is to be taken seriously, the Federal Government may now regulate quilting bees, clothes drives and potluck suppers throughout the 50 states."
How do you begin to explain the truly fabulous images found in prehistoric caves in the Lot and Dordogne regions of France? Why are only certain animals drawn and not others? What is the meaning of giant spotted horses and negative handprints?
Theories that explain the cave images in terms of religion have been proposed by several academics. One of the most recent attempts has been made by a leading French prehistorian, Jean Clottes. He collaborates with people of other academic disciplines in his search to understand the mysterious marks. Clottes' work uses areas of anthropology and neuropsychology to propose that the prehistoric images are the product of a shaman culture (or a succession of shaman cultures).
His theory is speculative, like all the others, but it is one that is highly informed and well argued. He has published his ideas in a book, co-written with David Lewis-Williams, called Les Chamanes de la Préhistoire (The Shamans of Prehistory). Lewis-Williams is an archeologist and anthropologist whose specialist area of study is the San people of South Africa and their shaman belief system.
Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. Shamanism is most often associated with such cultures in the contemporary world. Nevertheless one cannot blithely transpose modern cultures onto prehistoric ones, which is why Clottes also draws on other disciplines and an analysis of the prehistoric images themselves to provide more convincing links between the ancient and the modern.
Prehistorians do not know how to interpret these marks. Clottes' and Lewis-Williams' book offers an answer. As shamans, of whatever period of history, have the same biological brain as everyone else the study of the brain's functions is relevant and revealing. When one goes into a trance, however this is induced (by sensory deprivation, fasting, intense pain, certain illnesses, drugs or prolonged, rhythmic percussion or dance) one encounters several levels of hallucinations. The initial stage is one of abstract signs: dots, zigzags, grids or a composition of straight and curved lines. At a deeper level of trance one can encounter animals and even seem to become one.
These different levels of hallucinations are universal, although the details of the experience may vary according to the social or cultural background of the subject. Dots, grids and other abstract marks occur in many caves. According to these ideas the spotted horses may well represent several stages of the trance experience.
Psychotropic Plant Consumption and Early Man