synthetic_universe

more on this later...

2006-04-12T00:25:00.000-05:00

the Myth of Race

2006-02-27T15:09:00.000-06:00

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.

Fish uses the example of a traditional American system of racial classification called hypo-descent, or “blood” descent, to support his argument. In this system, race is determined through an individual’s “blood” history. If an individual has a black parent, grandparent, or other “blood” relative, that individual may be classified as black, despite the color of his or her skin. The cultural ideals of “black blood” and “white blood” do not reflect the physiological reality of human variation. On the contrary, the ideological language of culture often acts as a filter that biases one’s perception of the physical reality.

The Brazilian tipo (“type”) system of classification is another example cited by Fish to support his argument. The tipos are complex descriptive terms that vary regionally. A tipo defines an individual’s race according to the individual’s physical traits, such as light hair, curly hair, dark skin, blue eyes, thick lips, think nose, and any other combination of attributes. Examples are loura (whiter than white, straight blonde hair, blue or green eyes, narrow nose and thin lips), mulata (dark tight curly hair, dark skin, broad nose, thick lips) and branca (light skin color, hair not tightly curled, nose that is not broad, and lips that are not thick). A tipo will describe what a person looks like, but it doesn’t carry the baggage of ancestry. Fish juxtaposes the two examples of cultural race classification by using his daughter as an example of cross-cultural racial ambiguity. Fish’s daughter considers herself black according to American standards of racial classification because her mother is black. However, under the Brazilian system of racial classification, his daughter is not “black” but “morena” because she has dark, wavy hair, tan skin, and a nose and lips that are not narrow.

Fish uses the phrase, “garbage in/garbage out” to crystallize the idea that science shouldn’t depend upon socially defined racial information when developing demographic models. The symbolic language used when classifying an individual will inevitably bias one’s perspective, thus contaminating even the best of scientific intentions. Fish cites the Bell Curve controversy and how subjective racial classifications have led to the misinterpretation of IQ tests and measurements. He states that human beings are a collective species, and that “people from anywhere on the planet can mate with others from anywhere else and produce fertile offspring.” If racial classification had a biological origin, this could not be true.

The idea that race is culturally arbitrary is an important one to recognize, chiefly because, as Fish points out, to engage in a scientific endeavor using racial classification as an objective standpoint is essentially useless. However, humans have a propensity for classifying things, regardless of the symbolic accuracy. Humans depend on those classifications for maintaining perspective and identity. The social myths of racism and social darwinism have precipitated some of history’s most atrocious acts of inhumanity. I agree with Fish’s sentiment that racial classification should be approached with an open mind and a cautious step. Race might be a myth, but people have a knack for believing in myths, often at the expense of some one else’s life.

The Supreme Court's opinion on religious hallucinogens

2006-02-22T23:44:00.000-06:00

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.

(hint- it's a bit like using Latin to rap. Don't get the simile? Just read the article, bearing in mind that while the legal Sadduccees debate, the law is at work fostering shadow economies and catalyzing an atmosphere of ontological oppression.)

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.

The author of this article knows too much about law and too little about humanity's spiritual and medicinal ancestry. The "dangerous drugs" she mentions are really no more dangerous than many socially accepted prescription drugs, and no more addictive than alcohol or cigarettes. But then, such great mis-information as the kind expressed in Marci Hamilton's article is clearly evident in the thoughts and suggestions of the members of the Supreme Court. How long will American legislators and judges draw such ignorant conclusions and repress the promises of the Bill of Rights?

More on prehistoric cave art

2006-02-15T12:12:00.000-06:00

Mirror Neurons

2006-01-19T11:07:00.000-06:00

from newscientist.com:

Brain scans reveal men's pleasure in revenge
by Will Knight
18:47 18 January 2006
NewScientist.com news service

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.

Please read the whole article by Will Knight

__________________________________________

Mirror Neurons are an interesting case.

pbs.org for more on mirror neurons.

interdisciplines.org: "What do Mirror Neurons Mean?"--

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.

and for your consideration:
from pittsburghlive.com
Man's heart stops after Bettis fumble
By Tony LaRussa
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Monday, January 16, 2006

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."

______________________________________________

More on "mirror neurons" later.

FACTS or DOGMA?

2006-01-18T00:04:00.000-06:00

A Defeat For Users Of Medical Marijuana
State Laws No Defense, Supreme Court Rules
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 7, 2005; Page A01

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.

FACT!

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.

FACT!

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."

A little DOGMATIC, but mostly FACT! (more on "'firmly established' power to regulate 'purely local activities'" later)

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.

DOGMA!

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."

DOGMA!

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."

FACT!

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.

FACT!

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.

FACT!

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."

A lot of interesting FACTS here (and who knew Justice Thomas was so funny?)

Please read Charles Lane's entire article at washingtonpost.com

************************************************

The Mind in the Cave

2006-01-14T12:20:00.000-06:00

Shamanism, Caves and France
By Sally Gosheron,
Atelier de la Rose

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.

***********************************************

Please visit the above link to read the whole article.

Revolutions of Consciousness

2006-01-14T00:26:00.000-06:00

Psychotropic Plant Consumption and Early Man

What inspired the animal to look to the night sky and see, not just stars, but constellations, deities, and mythological stories? What forces drove the evolution of the primate brain to function beyond the boundaries of behavioral instinct and into a universe of perception which displaced time and space, projected meaning and purpose upon environmental elements, and established synthetic symbols and icons for subsequent cultural manipulation? What was it that initially delineated early humans from the physical constrictions of the natural world?

Carl Sagan speculates on such questions in his book, The Dragons of Eden, and offers a little food for thought. He considers a band of human Pygmies that intoxicate themselves on marijuana while performing mundane tasks like fishing or hunting. He casually ponders the possibility that “in human history the cultivation of marijuana led generally to the invention of agriculture, and thereby to civilization” (Sagan, 201). Of course, the “real” world is perhaps a bit more complex than that. The forces that drive human evolution are vast, and modern science continues to unwrap the mysteries of our ontological existence. The fact that every human culture at some point in history practiced the consumption of at least one version of a psycho active substance shouldn’t be ignored when considering the evolution of the human animal (Weil, et al, 10). Some scientists studying the molecular composition of flora have found evidence to suggest a symbiosis between psychoactive plants (i.e. entheogens) and indigenous wild-life consumers(3).

ENTHEOGENS AND ANIMALS:
Psychoactive plants typically manufacture chemicals analogous to neurotransmitters functioning within the mammalian brain(3). Morphine from the opium plant mimics the function of endorphins, and certain cacti like Peyote produce ergot alkaloids and mescaline, which mimic serotonin(3). Tobacco produces nicotine that mimics acetylcholine, coffee beans produce caffeine which mimics adenosine (3), and marijuana produces THC that mimics Anandamide(3). Anthropologist R.J. Sullivan suggests that many of the psycho active plants which mammals consume provide necessary nutrients for brain operation, especially during times of potential malnutrition when food resources become scarce. During these times, mammals that consume psychoactive plants receive many of the chemical compounds necessary for efficient brain function and can survive until other food sources are found(3). Plants that manufacture analogous neurotransmitters potentially take advantage of ecological niches defined by mammalian consumption. Seeds, which can’t be digested, may be transported by an organism and deposited within excrement to a new location, and the boundaries of a plant’s ecological niche are expanded.

To enhance our perspective of the drug-animal relationship, examples of non-human drug consumption should be considered. Chimpanzees have been known to consume “medicinal” plants. In one case, a sick chimpanzee in Tanzania’s Mahale Mountains National Park with “barely enough energy to defecate”(4) dragged herself over to a Vernonia amygdaline bush and plucked a few leaves. She chewed the leaves to extract the juice and spit out the fibrous leftovers. To the surprise of the observing scientists, she was healthy again and socializing with the rest of her troop the next afternoon(4). Chimpanzees on occasion ambulate for twenty minutes to find Aspilia leaves that they ingest to kill parasitic infection(4). Other stories depicting the animal consumption of psychoactive plants include pack donkeys chewing on tobacco, goats munching on qat (an amphetamine like stimulant), and African elephants feasting on fermented fruit (4). In 1979, Ronald Siegel, psychopharmacologist at the UCLA School of Medicine, discovered a shard from a ceramic bowl in the Peruvian Andes depicting an image of two llamas eating from a branch of coca leaves(4). This image and other stories from tribal lore reflect the notion that animals do consume psychotropic plants, and this sets the stage for the emergence of early man possessing a brain refined by mind-bending plant consumption.

ENTHEOGENS AND HUMAN HISTORY:
Drugs are older than history. People all over the world today consume psychotropic substances, and this behavior follows an ancient line of tradition. Using archaeological evidence, we can speculate on the behavioral practices of pre-historic humans, but during the early millennia of human civilization, the consumption of “medicinal” plants predates the emergence of writing and other facets of social organization. From 10,000 to 2,000 BC ancient texts in Egypt, Sumeria, China, and the New World suggest not only that medicinal herbs were used to treat illness, but the ritualized function of psychotropic plant consumption defined early religious belief as well (Roy, et al, 8). Rock paintings in the Sahara Desert and Algeria dating from 9,000 – 7,000 BC depict scenes of “harvest, adoration, and large masked gods covered with mushrooms” (6) and imply the notion that early humans established mushroom religious cults within the time period of the Paleolithic. Other rock paintings found in Tanzania and Australia date from 40,000 BC and earlier (6). Similar rock paintings depicting images following motifs of the “Round Head Period” (9,000 – 7,000 BC) have been discovered in Tadrart Acacus in Libya, Ennedi in Chad, and also at Jebel Uweinat in Egypt (6). A painting at Jabbaren depicts five people kneeling in a row worshipping three figures, and one of the figures is shaped like a large mushroom (6). Clearly, the consumption of psychotropic mushrooms refined the religious beliefs of early humans. Would this behavior influence the evolution of human culture?

Psychotropic mushrooms are commonly found in the dung of cows, horses, and deer (6). This is significant because dung is commonly used by human hunters to track prey (6). The skills required by human hunters to kill game which are often bigger and faster are honed through the exercise of cultural techniques involving displacement in thought, group strategy, and the efficient construction and use of weaponry. The hunter human must “see” beyond natural instinct in order to survive and provide food and shelter for the human family. In this way, cultures which maintain “super natural” systems to govern subsistence and behavior plasticity will out-compete other organisms for survival, especially in an environment of perpetual change. The evolution of culture in human populations would yield the foundations for human civilization and eventually establish Homo sapiens as the ruler of the animal kingdom.

Psychotropic plants of all varieties are found alongside every human civilization. African populations not only consumed mushrooms, but also Qat (Weil, 54), Yohimbe (Weil, 54), and Ibogaine (Weil, 101) to name a few. Mesopotamian, Asian Indian, and Chinese cultures consumed qat (Weil, 54), betel (Weil, 54), opium (Weil, 82), cannabis (Weil, 114) and psychoactive mushrooms were used in Southeast Asian cultures (Weil, 99). The Greeks and Romans consumed opiates (Weil, 82), and Aristotle, Plato, and Sophocles among many others all participated in rituals involving the ingestion of psychotropic fungi during religious ceremonies at the temple of Demeter in Eleusis (6).

New World cultures maintained a profound relationship with entheogenic plants to a greater degree than other world communities because psychoactive flora grew in abundance. (note- an interesting spin on this subject consists of the idea that perhaps the reason why "old world" entheogens are fewer in number than "new world" entheogens is because humanity's oldest ancestors came from Africa and then spread to other parts of the hemisphere. In this way, our "ancestors" might have had hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years to deplete the Old World populations of native entheogens. Humanity's ancestors are relatively new to the ecological framework of the New World, and therefore perhaps New World entheogens are more numerous because humans have had less time to consume these reasources. ). These plants were: multiple varieties of mushroom (6), peyote and multiple varieties of cacti, convolvulaceae, leguminosae “Red Bean”, Yopo “DMT snuff”, ayahuasca (a culturally varied stew with an MAO inhibitor to catalyze the breakdown of DMT containing vines), coca leaves (Weil, 23), morning glory, (7), and tobacco (3) to name a few. The use of psychoactive plants for recreational, medicinal, and religious purposes is a cultural function shared by humans all over the world. Certainly, such a widespread behavior influenced in some way the evolution of the human mind.

ENTHEOGENS, MIND, AND CULTURE:
Terence McKenna, author of The Invisible Landscape and Food of the Gods, says this in an interview with Alexander Blair-Ewart: “It's a great puzzle for evolutionary biology how it is that in a two million year period the human brain effectively doubled in size. There are evolutionary biologists, Lumsden being one example, who call this the most rapid transformation of a major animal organ in the entire fossil record, and it happened to us.” (8)

It is my belief that the consumption of psychoactive plants contributed to changes in the behavior of early man that influenced this rapid brain development. McKenna suggests that the ritualistic use of psychoactive mushrooms in early human populaces induced radical changes in social behaviors, such as increased visual acuity, stimulated nervous function, increased energy, heightened sexual arousal, and gave rise to religious iconography such as cattle-like “horned goddesses” and other anthropomorphic deities (9). What is significant about this theory is that evolutionary behaviors such as reproductive success and diet can now rapidly adapt, as cultural belief revolutionizes human behavior. A great example of this type of “ontological” transition is found in The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian by ethnologist Paul Radin. This narrative follows the life of a Winnebago male who enters into the practice of a Peyote cult. Prior to this experience, he lived a life of ambiguous meaning. At a young age, he came to realize that many of his people’s religious rituals were deceptive “shows” to propagate cultural tradition and maintain social order (Radin, 20). He falls away from his tradition and becomes an alcoholic and even lands himself in jail. Finally, some family members convince him join their Peyote cult where he ritualistically consumes peyote and sees “supernatural” visions. Upon experiencing the psychotropic effects of the peyote, he embraces his radical new religious faith, and abandons the polytheistic rituals of his older tradition for the monotheism and enlightenment of the Peyote cult (Radin, 63). In this example, we see the power that the psychedelic experience has on transforming the perceptions AND the behaviors of the psychotropic plant consumer.

In our modern world, human culture influences our evolution in ways unparalleled in the animal kingdom. Humans have invented the symbols of language and math, mythologies, religion, calendars, agriculture, animal domestication, art, science, tools, weapons, material wealth, economies, and all of these creations of the human mind require psychological mechanisms which displace time and space to enhance social function. Although the influence of psychoactive plant consumption on the development of human culture is largely speculative, this idea must be included when constructing any paradigm outlining the evolution of human civilization. Drugs are, after all, older than history.

Bibliography

1) Sagan, Carl. The Dragons of Eden. Ballantine Books. Copyright 1977

2) Weil, Andrew, M.D., et al. From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs. Houghton Mifflin Company. Copyright 1993.

3) Sullivan, R.J., Phd. Psychotropic substance-seeking: evolutionary pathology or adaptation?. http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~roger_s/ADD024.pdf

4) The Sacramental Use of Cannabis Sativa. http://www.kamakala.com/cannabis.htm

5) Porter, Roy, et al. Medicine: A History of Healing- Ancient Traditions to Modern Practices. Barnes and Noble Books. Copyright 1997.

6) Mushrooms: A History of Magic Mushrooms. http://www.a1b2c3.com/drugs/mus01.htm

7) Schultes, Richard Evans, Ph. D., F.M.L.S. Antiquity of the Use of New World Hallucinogens http://www.heffter.org/review/chapter1.pdf

8) Magical Plants and the Logos: Terence McKenna in a conversation with Alexander Blair-Ewart
http://www.spiritualrealist.com/MINDFIRE/TERENCEM.asp

9) Terence McKenna. “Stoned Ape Theory”. http://users.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/McKenna/Evolution/theory.html

10) Radin, Paul. The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian- Life, Ways, Acculturation, and the Peyote Cult. Dover Publications, INC. Copyright 1963.

Freedom of Religion???

2005-11-02T21:49:00.000-06:00

Justices debate use of sacred tea

By Gina Holland

The Associated Press

from the Seattle Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court debated Tuesday whether to let a small congregation in New Mexico worship with hallucinogenic tea, the first religious-freedom dispute under Chief Justice John Roberts.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor seemed skeptical of the Bush administration's claim that the tea can be banned, but she may not be around to vote in the case.

About 130 members of a Brazil-based church have been in a long-running dispute with federal agents who seized their tea in 1999. The hoasca tea, which contains an illegal drug known as DMT, is considered sacred to members of O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal.

The Bush administration contends that the tea is not only illegal but potentially dangerous.

The Supreme Court has dealt with religious-drug cases before. Justices ruled 15 years ago that states could criminalize the use of peyote by American Indians. But Congress changed the law to allow the sacramental use in tribal services of peyote, a bitter-tasting cactus that includes the hallucinogen mescaline.

O'Connor pointed out during Tuesday's argument that Congress changed the rules. She interrupted the Bush administration lawyer in his opening statement and peppered him with difficult questions.

Other justices also seemed concerned by the government's claim that an exception could be made for peyote, but not for hoasca tea.

"That is a rather rough problem under the First Amendment," said Justice Stephen Breyer.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the 1990 peyote opinion, said tribes have been using peyote — "a demonstration you can make an exception without the sky falling."

Bush administration lawyer Edwin Kneedler told justices that the drug not only violates a federal narcotics law, but a treaty in which the United States promised to block the importation of drugs including DMT, or dimethyltryptamine. The hoasca tea had been imported from Brazil.

The hoasca tea is used in communion by the church, which has a blend of Christian beliefs and South American traditions. Members believe they can understand God only by drinking the tea, which is consumed twice a month at four-hour ceremonies.

So, to you "conservatives" out there, if government is so bad (as according to Reagan), then why should government have the right to say what is dangerous and what is illegal regarding religious belief?

Enter the Psychonauts

2005-09-15T11:14:00.000-05:00

Professor X
By Ethan Brown

from WIRED:

Shulgin's experiment with P. pringlei is part of his most ambitious project yet — to classify the psychoactive compounds that occur naturally in cacti. Hundreds of plants have such properties, but many have never been tested, and Shulgin's search to identify the effects of each have drawn him to botany guides, anthropology books, and ancient religious texts. He plans to publish his results in 2004, and the anticipation is such that online sites catering to the psychonaut scene have begun to sell the plants he's working with.

(snip)

Even some scientists who speak out against drugs see value in his work: "There are merits to what Shulgin is doing, as the government does not allow real, unbiased studies with psychedelic drugs," says Jonathan Porteus, a psychologist at Cal State Sacramento who works with clients experiencing memory and mood problems as a result of ecstasy use.

(snip)

He disapproves of the potentially dangerous doses clubbers often take, and he worries that recreational use of his drugs will overshadow their higher purpose. Psychedelics are a means for adults to gain insight into themselves, Shulgin says. "The best words I can use are research tools."

Fox News: On Marijuana

2005-07-06T10:45:00.000-05:00

Read the Whole Article

Painkiller Warnings Rekindle Debate Over Medical Marijuana
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
By C. Spencer Beggs

Frustrated researchers say the question is not whether marijuana could serve legitimate medical purposes. Marijuana has been looked at for a variety of medical applications. It can relieve intraocular pressure (search) caused by glaucoma (search), and it has been touted as an appetite stimulant for patients undergoing chemotherapy, suffering from AIDS wasting syndrome (search) or dementia.

More recently, it has been looked at to relieve the neuropathic pain — the so-called "phantom pain" — of patients with multiple sclerosis.

(snip)

The question, researchers say, is whether the benefits of marijuana outweigh the risks of its negative side effects, or whether the maladies can be better treated by other drugs. That's the very question the FDA used to evaluate Vioxx, Bextra and Celebrex, and one that researchers say the government won't let them answer about marijuana.

(snip)

Like Ecstasy, marijuana is classified as a Schedule I drug under the 1970 Controlled Substance Act, a group that includes heroin and LSD, and has been deemed by the government to have no medical benefit and to be highly addictive. But unlike other Schedule I drugs, which can be obtained through government-licensed contractors, marijuana can be legally obtained for research only from the NIDA.

(snip)

Of course, researchers like Halpern emphasize that the scheduling system was put in place with the intentions of protecting the public from junk science studies and keeping illicit drugs away from the public. But advocates for the research say political pandering, corporate greed and the power and influence of the pharmaceutical industry corrupt the system. The race to bring new drugs to the market is not only concerned with the health of the populace, they say, but also with the health of drug companies' stock portfolios, and a drug that patients can produce and use without their help is not good for drug makers' bottom line.

Please read the whole article at Fox News. Once you've done that, check out:

Fast Facts

Marijuana Fast Facts: Highs, Lows
Monday, April 18, 2005
By C. Spencer Beggs

-Texts from 2,000 years ago show that marijuana was used as a medicine in a variety of ancient cultures, including China, India, Greece and Persia.

(well, longer than that even. Prehistoric humans "used" cannabis. It wasn't dangerous then, if it was, we wouldn't be here today...

Dr. William C. Woodward, chief counsel to the American Medical Association, testified on behalf of the medical groups in 1937. The AMA feared that the Marijuana Tax Act would prevent research into legitimate medical uses for it. Woodward delivered a statement that "The American Medical Association knows of no evidence that marijuana is a dangerous drug."

(so. why are we throwing people in prison for possessing it?)

-Under federal law, marijuana cannot be prescribed by a doctor.

(But under Federal Law, the Federal Military can develope, possess, and threaten to "use" NUCLEAR WEAPONS!... just shows how much our government knows about safety anyway...)

When the Marijuana Tax Act was passed in 1937, the federal government wielded far less regulatory power than it does today and therefore imposed a "tax" on marijuana rather than prohibiting it outright. The act was worded very carefully so that the Supreme Court wouldn't overturn it for overstepping the bounds of regulating interstate commerce. The act mandated that anyone wishing to sell marijuana pay a transfer tax. Possession of marijuana without paying the tax was illegal. The required tax stamp, however, could only be issued to those already in possession of marijuana.

Research shows that long-term marijuana use is linked to some changes in the brain similar to those seen after long-term use of other drugs like cocaine and heroin. These studies have not been corroborated.

(yeah, it would be nice to know, in the "scientific" meaning of the word "know", how exactly the chemical agents in cannabis effect human cognitive architecture... it should also be noted that the Government has no problem prescribing "mind-altering" drugs like Adderall and Ritalin to school children. Does anyone else find this ironic?)

Marijuana is the nation's No. 1 recreational illegal drug. It is No. 3 if alcohol and tobacco are included.

(just goes to show what the REAL "gateway" drugs are...)

Fox News: On Medicinal Marijuana

2005-07-03T01:49:00.000-05:00

When I found this on Fox News: Fair and Balanced!... my jaw dropped.

You must See this for yourself. Just click on any of the above two links to read the whole article at FoxNews.com.

For Independence Day, Supreme Court Slams Founders
Saturday, July 02, 2005
By Radley Balko

In Gonzales v. Raich, the court ruled that the Constitution's clause to "make regular" interstate commerce permitted federal agents to raid the home of a sick woman and confiscate the six marijuana plants she was growing for her own medication — all in a state whose population had overwhelmingly voted to legalize medical marijuana.

(snip)

As a compromise, they included the Ninth Amendment (search), which says that the enumeration of some rights should not be construed to exclude rights not enumerated. So to answer the questions above, your rights to smoke a cigarette or consume pornography are both in the Ninth Amendment.

This is why the decision in Gonzales is so important — and so devastating. While the Supreme Court has smothered the Ninth Amendment for decades, Gonzales may serve as its obituary.

If the Ninth Amendment doesn't protect a man's right to consume whatever medicine might give him relief from pain — or that in some cases could save his life — what's left for the amendment to possibly protect?

Please, if you haven't yet, read the whole article

After reading the article I sent the author a response via email. Here it is:

Mr Balko,

I found your article, entitled "For Independence Day, Supreme Court Slams Founders" to be quite exhilarating. You hit on an important issue, and I wish more Americans would realize how our American ideals are in a state of regress. I completely agree with your analysis of Constitutional principle, but I would like to offer perhaps a little more insight into the nature of the Gonzales v. Raich case.

I am a student of cultural anthropology, and I am in no way associated with the parties of the Gonzales v. Raich. I am just a curious observer who reads a lot and spends hours a day pondering the mechanics of human society. The following letter embodies nothing more than my own subjective analysis of why Gonzales v. Raich represents a Constitutional crisis.

It is my belief that the Freedom of Thought represents the foundation of our most fundamental Constitutional freedoms. The Freedom of Thought is the very essence of the First Amendment, so much so that the Second Amendment was established to defend it. The Freedom of Thought is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our society churns with "drug" use. A liquor store grounds the corner of just about every suburban neighborhood in America. Tobacco products line the walls of convenient store registers. The Evening News is littered with prescription drug ads. So, how is it that something like cannabis is prohibited in our society, especially when it offers numerous medicinal functions?

I read once that both Jefferson and Lincoln fretted how the "money powers" would organize and threaten the very fabric of the Republic. I have no doubt that "economics" play a significant part in our ineffective and maladaptive "War on Drugs", but that's not the whole picture. One must dig deeper into humanity's past to understand why our "War on Drugs" is unConstitutional.

Drugs are illegal in our society because the cognitive effects of psychoactive substances render normal, or "mainstream", cultural ethics irrelevant. Basically, "Illegal" drugs are illegal because "mainstream" society requires a homogenious culture for survival. Culture represents everyway that humans organize society, but culture is a synthetic construct of the human mind. It should be noted that most "illegal" drugs, like cannabis, mushrooms, and peyote, existed in the diets of humans long before the organization of centralized state authority. "Drugs" are older than history, and many of our "illegal" substances function as a catalyst for cultural adaptation. Curiously, most of today's "illegal" substances were used for medicinal and "spiritual" purposes, and it was not until massive centralized state authorities invented "the rule of law" that mind-altering plants became "illegal". The Roman Catholic Church strategically wiped out the late tribal-shamanic societies of Europe by demonizing "pagans" as evil "witches" and "demons". Today, the ethnocentric American elite continue to stigmatize a human tradition that extends back to our most distant origins as humans. America's "War on Drugs" is belligently unConstitutional, and we all need to educate ourselves on this issue and induce change before we lose our American identity.

Now, I believe cannabis (including hemp) should be legalized and taxed like hell. The tax revenue would do wonders for our social infrastructure. We could even put more teachers in our classroom and provide students with financial aid for higher education and possibly even healthcare for all children under 18. It is time we enhanced our capacity to learn, if only for the future of America. However, as long as we perpetuate our "War on Drugs", America will be the ultimate fatality.

Thank you, Mr Balko, for your letter. I hope I've communicated something of value.

Sincerely,

sourmonkey

Gotta Love Those "Legal" Drugs!

2005-07-01T17:12:00.000-05:00

FDA warns about antidepressants, suicide

from CNN.com

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Food and Drug Administration issued a second public warning Friday that adults who use antidepressants should be closely monitored for warning signs of suicide, especially when they first start the pills or change a dose.

Much of the concern over suicide and antidepressants has centered on children who use the drugs. The FDA last fall determined there is a real, but small, increase in risk of suicidal behavior for children and ordered the labels of all antidepressants to say so.

A year ago, the FDA issued a warning that adults, too, may be at increased risk. The agency began reanalyzing hundreds of studies of the drugs to try to determine if that's the case, and told makers to add or strengthen suicide-related warnings on their labels in the meantime.

(snip)

there are concerns that antidepressants may cause agitation, anxiety and hostility in a subset of patients who may be unusually prone to rare side effects. Also, psychiatrists say there is a window period of risk just after pill use begins, before depression is really alleviated but when some patients experience more energy, perhaps enabling them to act on suicidal tendencies.

Aren't you glad we have this wonderful arbiter called Government to help us distinguish between the "legal" and "Illegal" drugs?

I am...

Internet Addiction

2005-07-01T10:27:00.000-05:00

from CNN

Beijing clinic ministers to online addicts

"All the children here have left school because they are playing games or in chat rooms everyday," says the clinic's director, Dr. Tao Ran. "They are suffering from depression, nervousness, fear and unwillingness to interact with others, panic and agitation. They also have sleep disorders, the shakes and numbness in their hands."

(snip)

While China promotes Internet use for business and education, government officials also say Internet cafes are eroding public morality. Authorities regularly shut down Internet cafes -- many illegally operated -- in crackdowns that also include huge fines for their operators.

State media has also highlighted cases of obsessed Internet gamers, some of whom have flunked out of school, committed suicide or murder. Nonetheless, Internet cafes continue to thrive, with outlets found in even the smallest and poorest of villages. Most are usually packed late into the night.

(snip)

A dozen nurses and 11 doctors care for the patients, mostly youths aged 14 to 24 who have lost sleep, weight and friends after countless hours in front of the computer, often playing video games with others online.

Some come voluntarily, while others are checked in by their parents. Many say their online obsessions helped them escape day-to-day stress, especially pressure from parents to excel in school.

Some can't stop playing games, while the older ones tend to be addicted to online chats with the opposite sex, Tao says. Others are fixated on designing violent games

(snip)

"I wasn't normal," said a 20-year-old man from Beijing who used to spend at least 10 hours a day in front of the screen playing hack-and-slash games like Diablo.

"In school I didn't pay attention when teachers were talking," he said. "All I could do was think about playing the next game. Playing made me happy, I forgot my problems."

The 12-year-old, a new arrival, spent four days in an Internet cafe, barely eating or sleeping.

A soft-spoken 21-year-old man from northeastern Heilongjiang province who had been in the clinic for 10 days said his addiction had helped him escape from family pressures about his studies.

"I would stay up for 24 hours. I would eat only in front of the computer," he said.

The Synthetic_Universe

2005-06-30T02:18:00.000-05:00

I started this blog nearly a year ago with full confidence in what themes it might eventually embody. However, regarding the thematic definition of the "Synthetic Universe", well, this has been difficult to pin down... until now.

The Synthetic_Universe is about culture. Specifically, culture is the "synthetic universe", one created and perpetuated by the human mind. Everything we experience in our universe is understood through culture. The symbols and beliefs of science and religion are both derived through culture. The labels we use to define our world, determine friend from foe, and maintain familial relationships are all products of culture. In our Synthetic Universe, we project value on currency, material goods, and food. In our Synthetic Universe, we watch movies, listen to music, and engage in sport. Within the Synthetic Universe we organize society, recognize authority, and enforce "law" through fear of reprisal. Our Synthetic Universe is very real. In truth, to us, it IS reality... yet, it is not the only reality.

Outside of the Synthetic Universe exists the environment: space, earth, ecology, community, the cosmos, etc. For purposes regarding this post I will refer to the natural environment as the "Entropic Universe", ie. the universe of matter and energy, time and decay. The Entropic Universe represents the antithesis of the Synthetic Universe in a manner analogous to the relationship between "entropy" and "negative-entropy", or -1 and 1. We humans exist between both the Synthetic and the Entropic Universes: our bodies consist of matter, space, and energy (i.e. the molecules and atoms that make up our cells), yet our REALITY exists within the Synthetic Universe.

Day by day, year by year, we live our lives from dream to dream. At any moment we possess memories of the past and plans for the future. Yet these represent only a small fraction of what truly exists. Our minds are influenced by cognitive filters that shape the entropic information we receive through our senses. The end product is the Synthetic Universe, a meaningful mosaic of memory, and a network of sympathetic human minds. Through the synthetic universe of culture, we maintain our identities.

I know the thoughts in this post open up a monumental can of worms, but that is the intent of this blog. It's time to explore the Synthetic Universe.

More Hemp News

2005-06-27T21:29:00.000-05:00

Published on Saturday, June 25, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Hemp for Victory
by Ralph Nader

Congressman Ron Paul, a libertarian from Texas and an obstetrician who has delivered over 6000 babies, is trying to deliver our farmers from a bureaucratic medievalism in Washington that keeps saying "No" to growing industrial hemp.

Many farmers want to grow this 5000 year old long fiber plant that has been turned into thousands of products since being domesticated by the ancient Chinese. That is their heresy. The enforcer is the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in Washington, DC, which has placed industrial hemp on its proscribed list next to marijuana.

Detailed petitions signed by agricultural groups, agricultural commissioners, International Paper Co. and others were presented to both Clinton and Bush to take industrial hemp off the DEA list and let the states allow farmers to grow it. The DEA turned the petitions down cold.

The arguments for this great, sturdy and environmentally benign plant are legion. In over 30 countries where it is commercially grown, including Canada, France, China and Romania, industrial hemp has been used to produce hemp food, hemp fuel, hemp paper, hemp cloth, hemp cosmetics, hemp carpet and even hemp door frames (Ford and Mercedes).

Factories, food stores and paper manufacturers are free to import raw hemp or finished hemp materials from foreign countries. Last year, about $250 million worth of hemp products were purchased from abroad. But federal law in the US prohibits farmers or anyone else from growing it on US soil.

Why? The DEA says that industrial hemp grown next to marijuana can camouflage and impede law enforcement against the latter. Strange. This problem doesn't bother Canadian police authorities or similar officials in other nations. Besides, since industrial hemp is only 1/3 of 1 percent THC, growing it next to marijuana would cross-pollinate and dilute the illegal marijuana plants. No marijuana grower wants industrial hemp anywhere near his or her pot plots.

You can smoke a bushel of industrial hemp and not get high. Far too little THC. Like poppy seeds on bread. You may, however, get a headache, if you try.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew industrial hemp on their farms. Drafts of the Declaration of Independence were written on hemp paper. Imagine the billions of trees and tons of bleach chemicals which would have been saved were hemp a big source of paper. A multi-billion dollar a year farm crop blocked.

During World War II, hemp was made into very strong rope for the war effort. The Department of Agriculture made a film "Hemp for Victory" to encourage more cultivation.

Enter Ron Paul, the courageous. Numerous colleagues of Rep. Paul, in both the House and Senate, believe as he does regarding the legalization of industrial hemp farming, but they are afraid to go public lest they be accused of being "soft on drugs". This is true, for example, of the North Dakota Congressional delegation, in spite of overwhelming private and public support for farmers being allowed to plant it in their spacious state.

On June 23, 2005, Congressman Paul introduced HR 3037, the Industrial Hemp Farming Act. The bill requires the federal government to respect state laws (already five of them) allowing the growing of industrial hemp. Immediately, Congressmen Peter Stark (D - CA) and Jim McDermott (D - WA) co-sponsored the legislation.

Rep. Paul's announcement was made during lunchtime in the Rayburn Office Building at the House of Representatives. Denis Cicero, owner of the Galaxy Global Eatery in New York City, served up a delicious and nutritious luncheon featuring industrial hemp. Speaking were two leading North Dakota farmers, David Monson, also a state legislator, and Roger Johnson, the North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner. Their remarks were so compelling that in my remarks, I asked whether there were any DEA representatives in the audience who wished to reply. Nobody responded.

Last summer I shared a podium with Rep. Paul at a large gathering of organic farm and food enthusiasts in New England. It was a debate of sorts. At one point, I challenged the Congressman to apply his libertarian philosophy by introducing legislation to let farmers have the freedom to grow industrial hemp and sell it to manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers. He immediately said he would. And he has done it.

There are those like former CIA chief, James Woolsey, who support growing hemp to reduce our reliance on imported oil. More broadly, industrial hemp advances the growth of a carbohydrate-based economy instead of a hydrocarbon-based economy.

Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford I and the presidents of MIT and Harvard dreamed of this transition during the nineteen-twenties. Unfortunately, the synthetic chemical industry of DuPont, Dow Chemical and others pushed this dream aside. The rest is the history of environmental damage, pollution-disease, geopolitical crises and many other external costs.

Please urge your members of Congress to support HR 3037. Free our farmers and you, the consumers, to move toward a more sustainable economy.

from common dreams

We Americans are a bunch of head cases...

2005-06-10T01:09:00.000-05:00

Study: U.S. Leads In Mental Illness, Lags in Treatment
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 7, 2005; Page A03
from Washingtonpost.com

One-quarter of all Americans met the criteria for having a mental illness within the past year, and fully a quarter of those had a "serious" disorder that significantly disrupted their ability to function day to day, according to the largest and most detailed survey of the nation's mental health, published yesterday.

Although parallel studies in 27 other countries are not yet complete, the new numbers suggest that the United States is poised to rank No. 1 globally for mental illness, researchers said.

Please read the whole article.

On the topic of mental function, ever wonder about those prescription drug commercials that suggest in their consumer disclaimers that some patients using a placebo displayed improvements in their health? Indeed some patients are effectively treated with a sugar pill... as in some patients convinced themselves that they are feeling better, and thus they "heal" themselves.

What if culture induces some forms of "sickness"? It is probably an understatement to suggest that modern society can be stressfull to an individual within that society. In the town I live in, I can find fancy liquor stores in every strip mall. Cigarette boxes line the selves surrounding the cashier at every gas station and food mart I enter. During the evening news, I am bombarded by pharmaceutical ads at every commercial break: Cialis, Viagra (stress can also minimize one's sexual behavior), and a myriad of drugs for hypertension, high cholesteral, and indigestion.

With all the drugs in our society, is it any wonder that Americans are losing their minds? I believe America has a drug problem, but our "mental illness" is the byproduct of our mind-numbingly dynamic modern culture. Individuals can experience burnout, but so can societies. Keep this in mind next time you flip on the television. Here you'll find a wonderful microcosm for the lifecycles of popular culture... just don't watch too much or your mind will go numb.

(no seriously, it will. read this)

for related thoughts, see also: Revolutions

Hemp Facts

2005-06-06T02:00:00.000-05:00

from the Hemp Industry Association:

1) Hemp is among the oldest industries on the planet, going back more than 10,000 years to the beginnings of pottery. The Columbia History of the World states that the oldest relic of human industry is a bit of hemp fabric dating back to approximately 8,000 BC.

2) Presidents Washington and Jefferson both grew hemp. Americans were legally bound to grow hemp during the Colonial Era and Early Republic. The federal government subsidized hemp during the Second World War and US farmers grew about a million acres of hemp as part of that program.

3) Hemp Seed is far more nutritious than even soybean, contains more essential fatty acids than any other source, is second only to soybeans in complete protein (but is more digestible by humans), is high in B-vitamins, and is 35% dietary fiber. Hemp seed is not psychoactive and cannot be used as a drug. See TestPledge.com

4) The bark of the hemp stalk contains bast fibers which are among the Earth's longest natural soft fibers and are also rich in cellulose; the cellulose and hemi-cellulose in its inner woody core are called hurds. Hemp stalk is not psychoactive. Hemp fiber is longer, stronger, more absorbent and more insulative than cotton fiber.

5) According to the Department of Energy, hemp as a biomass fuel producer requires the least specialized growing and processing procedures of all hemp products. The hydrocarbons in hemp can be processed into a wide range of biomass energy sources, from fuel pellets to liquid fuels and gas. Development of biofuels could significantly reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and nuclear power.

6) Hemp grows well without herbicides, fungicides, or pesticides. Almost half of the agricultural chemicals used on US crops are applied to cotton.

7) Hemp produces more pulp per acre than timber on a sustainable basis, and can be used for every quality of paper. Hemp paper manufacturing can reduce wastewater contamination. Hemp's low lignin content reduces the need for acids used in pulping, and it's creamy color lends itself to environmentally friendly bleaching instead of harsh chlorine compounds. Less bleaching results in less dioxin and fewer chemical byproducts.

8) Hemp fiber paper resists decomposition, and does not yellow with age when an acid-free process is used. Hemp paper more than 1,500 years old has been found. It can also be recycled more times.

9) Hemp fiberboard produced by Washington State University was found to be twice as strong as wood-based fiberboard.

10) Eco-friendly hemp can replace most toxic petrochemical products. Research is being done to use hemp in manufacturing biodegradable plastic products: plant-based cellophane, recycled plastic mixed with hemp for injection-molded products, and resins made from the oil, to name just a very few examples.

also check out

vote hemp

CRS Report for Congress (pdf: Hemp as an Agricultural Commodity

Decaffeinated Children, Please...

2005-05-25T01:47:00.000-05:00

from medpagetoday:
APA: First Graders' Behavior Problems Linked to Caffeinated Cola
By Paula Moyer, MedPage Today Staff Writer
May 23, 2005

First-graders have more behavior problems on the days that they are exposed to caffeinated colas than on the days that they have caffeine-free drinks, according to Chicago investigators who reported today to the American Psychiatric Association meeting here.

(snip)

"Exposure to caffeinated cola drinks impaired children's learning ability by causing restlessness, hyperactivity, and inattention," he said. "On the days that the children were drinking caffeinated drinks, their Connors scores increased an average of 5.5 points compared to the days that they were only drinking caffeine-free drinks." Dr. Hirsch is the director of the Smell and Taste. The Connors test is a standard screen for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

(snip)

"The study shows why it is so important to completely evaluate young children who are having behavioral and emotional problems, and to review the child's dietary habits, including caffeinated beverages, as part of the evaluation," Dr. Fassler said. Although questions about caffeine consumption are typically part of the screen for anxiety disorders, pediatric insomnia, and ADHD, the findings are a reminder not to neglect this part of the evaluation.

Deus ex Machina

2005-03-06T13:53:00.000-06:00

from www.timesonline.co.uk

from the article:
Ghosts in a machine

For years brain researchers shied away from exotic experiences such as hallucinations, near-death experiences or “intimations of the divine”, on the grounds that there was no way to study them scientifically. But as consciousness has become an academically respectable topic, it has become harder to ignore “altered states”. If memory and imagination can be linked to the activity of groups of neurons, couldn ’t the experience of being “at one with the universe” just be the result of brain cells firing?

Traditionally, one of the ways to stimulate these experiences has been with hallucinatory or psychedelic herbs and drugs — a route that has been declared legally off-limits for individuals and researchers since the 1960s. But that is changing, too. Recently licences have been granted in the USA to study the medical benefits of using such outlawed drugs as Ecstasy and the peyote mushroom to treat psychological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

It may be a sign of the times that just before Christmas the US Supreme Court ruled that members of the New Mexico branch of a Brazilian church, Uniao Do Vegetal, should be allowed to use the hallucinatory herbal concoction ayahuasca in ceremonies. Ayahuasca has long been used by South American shamans and is renowned for the snake visions it induces.

The poet Allen Ginsberg tried it in the 1950s in an attempt to expand his consciousness. “I rushed out and began vomiting,” he wrote, “all covered with snakes, like a Snake Seraph, coloured serpents in an aureole around my body, I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe.”

Uncovering how a complex chemical stew triggers something as specific as serpentine visions would be a daunting scientific challenge, let alone identifying precisely which regions of the brain were involved. But for at least 100 years neurologists have been recording the bizarrely detailed altered states produced by very specific activity in the brains of epileptics. Recently, observations on epileptics have provided clues to the neural mechanism underlying out-of-body experiences (OBEs).

(snip)

“What researchers are finding is that there seem to be common brain pathways underlying all transcendental experiences,” she says. “It’s the cultural interpretations that vary. But what’s really challenging is that the research evidence is very strong that what we think of normal everyday reality is actually a construction of the brain.

“However, it is quite clear that the brain is also able to construct a version of reality that is quite unlike the survival-orientated ‘normal’, one. Now why on earth should it have evolved to do that and why is our culture so dead set against exploring it?”

Government Knows Best

2005-02-24T18:35:00.000-06:00

Below are excerpts from a fascinating article about the potential medical properties of certain "illegal" drugs. Please read the whole article if you have the time. Keep in mind that "drugs" are older than history, government, and even religion. Of course, in our "free" world, this doesn't mean anything when government knows best...

Psychedelic medicine: Mind bending, health giving
by John Horgan
from newscientist.com

JOHN HALPERN clearly remembers what made him change his mind about psychedelic drugs. It was the early 1990s and the young medical student at a hospital in Brooklyn, New York, was getting frustrated that he could not do more to help the alcoholics and addicts in his care. He sounded off to an older psychiatrist, who mentioned that LSD and related drugs had once been considered promising treatments for addiction. "I was so fascinated that I did all this research," Halpern recalls. "I was reading all these papers from the 60s and going, whoa, wait a minute! How come nobody's talking about this?"

More than a decade later, Halpern is now an associate director of substance abuse research at Harvard University's McLean Hospital and is at the forefront of a revival of research into psychedelic medicine. He recently received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to give late-stage cancer patients the psychedelic drug MDMA, also known as ecstasy. He is also laying the groundwork for testing LSD as a treatment for dreaded super-migraines known as cluster headaches.

And Halpern is not alone. Clinical trials of psychedelic drugs are planned or under way at numerous centres around the world for conditions ranging from anxiety to alcoholism. It may not be long before doctors are legally prescribing hallucinogens for the first time in decades. "There are medicines here that have been overlooked, that are fundamentally valuable," says Halpern.

These developments are a remarkable turnaround. Scientists first became interested in psychedelic drugs - also called hallucinogens because of their profound effect on perception - after Albert Hofmann, a chemist working for the Swiss pharmaceutical firm Sandoz, accidentally swallowed LSD in 1943. Hofmann's description of his experience, which he found both enchanting and terrifying, spurred scientific interest in LSD as well as naturally occurring compounds with similar effects: mescaline, the active ingredient of the peyote cactus; psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms; and DMT, from the Amazonian shamans' brew ayahuasca.

(snip)

So Halpern's first big foray into psychedelic research was aimed at risk-assessment. In the late 1990s he launched a study of members of the Native American Church, who are permitted by US law to consume peyote. Halpern examined 210 residents of a Navajo reservation in the south-west US, who fell into three categories: church members who had taken peyote at least 100 times but had had little exposure to other drugs or alcohol; non-church members who abstained from alcohol or drugs; and former alcoholics who had been sober for at least three months.

Halpern tested the subjects' IQ, memory, reading ability and other functions. His interim results showed that church members had no cognitive impairment compared with the abstainers, and scored significantly better than recovering alcoholics. Church members also reported no "flashbacks" - sudden recurrences of a psychedelic's effects long after the initial trip. Halpern believes this study, which he expects will be published soon, shows that contrary to the 1971 editorial, peyote at least can be taken repeatedly without adverse effects.

(snip)

He is also interested in the potential benefits of the true hallucinogens. In 1996, he reviewed almost 100 substance abuse trials involving LSD, psilocybin, DMT and ibogaine, an extract of the African shrub Tabernanthe iboga. Halpern found tentative evidence that the drugs can reduce addicts' cravings during a post-trip "afterglow" lasting for a month or two. Exactly how this happens is something of a mystery. A popular theory is that the benefits stem from the drugs' psychological effects, which include profound insights and cathartic emotions, but Halpern suspects that there may be a biochemical explanation too.

For now, however, Halpern isn't planning to pursue addiction therapy. He is more interested in another medical use for LSD and psilocybin: treating a debilitating condition known as cluster headaches. These attacks appear to be caused by swelling of blood vessels in the brain and are worse than migraines. Sufferers say the pain exceeds that of passing a kidney stone or giving birth without anaesthetics. They affect about 3 in every 1000 people sporadically, and 1 in 10,000 chronically. "There's a tremendous potential need for this," says Halpern, who investigated the problem after being approached by a patient group.

(snip)

Another member of the vanguard in the psychedelic revival is Charles Grob, a psychiatrist at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, and co-founder of the Heffter Institute. After years struggling to get permits, Grob says he is slowly moving forward with a study into using psilocybin to reduce distress in terminal cancer patients. He points out that studies done in the 1960s suggested that psychedelics can help patients come to terms with their impending death. So far Grob has treated three patients, but he hopes to enrol more subjects shortly.

Grob has also led several investigations like Halpern's peyote study, but looking at ayahuasca, the DMT-rich shamanic brew. Ayahuasca often causes nausea and diarrhoea, and its psychedelic effects can be terrifying, but Amazonian shamans nonetheless prize it for its visionary properties. Since 1987 it has been a legal sacrament for several churches in Brazil, the largest of which is União Do Vegetal. UDV combines elements of Christianity with nature worship, and claims 8000 members.

In 1996 a team led by Grob reported in the Journal of Nervous And Mental Disease that UDV members who regularly took ayahuasca were on average physiologically and psychologically healthier than a control group of non-worshippers. The UDV followers also had more receptors for the neurotransmitter serotonin, which has been linked to lower rates of depression and other disorders. Many of the UDV members told the scientists that ayahuasca had helped them overcome alcoholism, drug addiction and other self-destructive behaviours.

(snip)

Several other scientists are quietly pursuing psychedelic research. Since 2001, psychiatrist Francisco Moreno of the University of Arizona in Tucson has been testing psilocybin as a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Psychotherapy and antidepressants such as Prozac help many patients, but some have such severe symptoms and are so resistant to treatment that they turn to electroshock therapy and even brain surgery. As with the work on cluster headaches, Moreno's study was motivated by reports from people with OCD that psilocybin relieves their symptoms.

So far, Moreno has given both sub-psychedelic and psychedelic doses of pure psilocybin to nine treatment-resistant OCD subjects, in a total of 29 therapy sessions. His preliminary findings suggest firstly that it is safe to ingest psilocybin, which was a primary concern of the trial. Beyond that, Moreno calls his results "promising", but won't discuss them further, since he plans to submit a paper to a peer-reviewed journal this year.

(snip)

Meanwhile in Charleston, South Carolina, physician Michael Mithoefer is carrying out a MAPS-sponsored clinical trial of MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD affects up to 20 per cent of people who experience a traumatic event, and involves distressing symptoms such as nightmares and panic attacks. Conventional treatments typically consist of cognitive therapy and antidepressants, but many patients don't respond to these. In the past year Mithoefer has given "MDMA-assisted" psychotherapy to six treatment-resistant patients, all traumatised by violent crimes; he plans to treat 20 patients in all.

The longest-running psychedelic therapy programme started almost 20 years ago in Russia. Evgeny Krupitsky, a psychiatrist who heads a substance-abuse clinic in St Petersburg, has treated more than 300 alcoholics and about 200 heroin addicts with ketamine. Used primarily in veterinary medicine, ketamine is an anaesthetic that can trigger an extremely disorienting hallucinogenic episode lasting an hour or so. Krupitsky's subjects often emerge from their sessions filled with revulsion for their past lives and determined to change. The therapists encourage these feelings with tricks such as forcing the subjects to sniff a bottle of vodka at the peak of their session; the patients' disgust often persists long after the ketamine's effects have worn off.

In one of Krupitsky's studies, 73 out of 111 alcoholics stayed dry for at least a year after their session, compared with 24 per cent of those in a control group. Yet his programme, which was funded by MAPS and the Heffter Institute, was recently shut down because the Russian government tightened restrictions on ketamine. Although Krupitsky says he and his colleagues "are in the process of getting permission to continue", it may be several years before research resumes.

(snip)

Doblin's primary goal is to see psychedelics legally recognised as medicines. But he also hopes that someday healthy people may take these substances for psychological or spiritual purposes, as members of the Native American Church and União Do Vegetal do, and as he did in his youth. After all, drugs such as Prozac and Viagra are already prescribed not just to heal the ill but also to enhance the lives of the healthy.

It is still an uphill struggle. Government funds for psychedelic studies are hard to come by, and drug companies have shown absolutely no interest in supporting the research. But there are signs that the wind is changing. Although psychedelics are still classified in the US as schedule-1 drugs, and so are banned for all non-research purposes, in November a US Federal Appeals Court in Colorado ruled that a branch of the UDV based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, could import ayahuasca for use in ceremonies. Among the research findings cited in the court decision were Grob's studies showing no ill effects from ayahuasca. The Department of Justice is appealing the decision, but if the Supreme Court denies the appeal, UDV members in the US will be able to ingest ayahuasca legally.

Maybe, just maybe, after more than 30 years in the wilderness, this powerful, misunderstood but potentially mind-healing class of drugs is ready to be rehabilitated.

The Adaptive Unconscious

2005-02-21T11:58:00.000-06:00

Please read an awesome article entitled Mysteries of the mind:Your unconscious is making your everyday decisions by By Marianne Szegedy-Maszak

Read the whole article at US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT

here are some excerpts:

According to cognitive neuroscientists, we are conscious of only about 5 percent of our cognitive activity, so most of our decisions, actions, emotions, and behavior depends on the 95 percent of brain activity that goes beyond our conscious awareness. From the beating of our hearts to pushing the grocery cart and not smashing into the kitty litter, we rely on something that is called the adaptive unconscious, which is all the ways that our brains understand the world that the mind and the body must negotiate. The adaptive unconscious makes it possible for us to, say, turn a corner in our car without having to go through elaborate calculations to determine the precise angle of the turn, the velocity of the automobile, the steering radius of the car. It is what can make us understand the correct meaning of statements like "prostitutes appeal to pope" or "children make nourishing snacks" without believing that they mean that the pope has an illicit life and cannibals are munching on children.

(snip)

When trying to probe the minds of consumers, Zaltman wondered if there was a way to move beyond the often-unreliable focus group to get at the true desires of consumers, unencumbered by other noise, which would finally result in more effective sales and marketing.

His solution became U.S. Patent No. 5,436,830, also known as the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, which is, according to the patent, "a technique for eliciting interconnected constructs that influence thought and behavior." From Hallmark cards to Broadway plays, from Nestle's Crunch bars to the design for the new Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, ZMET has been used to figure out how to craft a message so that consumers will respond with the important 95 percent of their brains that motivates many of their choices. How? Through accessing the deep metaphors that people, even without knowing it, associate with a particular product or feeling or place.

(snip)

But in a stunning study published this month in the journal Neurology, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the brains of two minimally conscious patients and compared them with the brains of seven healthy men and woman. The scans revealed that the minimally conscious patients had less than half of the brain activity of the others. But then all the subjects were played a tape made by a family member or friend, recounting happy memories and shared experiences. One minimally conscious man listened to his sister reminiscing about her wedding and about the toast that he made. The result was astonishing: All those who were scanned, including the minimally conscious patients, shared similar brain activity, some with activation in the visual cortex. "This shows that there is a life of the mind beyond what is apparent," says Joseph Fins, chief of the medical ethics division of New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center. But Fins, who was not involved in the study, points out that philosophical questions also emerge. "Does this mean that they are seeing words? Visualizing semantic concepts? Does this in some way conceptualize consciousness?" As Zaltman points out, language is only the narrowest determination of our thoughts. This study shows that our brains, even damaged brains, are exquisitely attuned to that fact.

Wow, what a great read.

Degress of Consciousness

2005-01-04T15:39:00.000-06:00

From the Scotsman.com

Higher states of consciousness

MEDICINE

by MARGARET COOK

PICTURE THIS: A 43-year-old lady is being treated for temporal lobe epilepsy in a Swiss clinic. In order to pinpoint the aberrant electrical focus in her brain, electrodes have been implanted under the dura - the membrane covering the brain. When she is wakened, the doctors stimulate different areas and watch the results.

When they activate an area called the angular gyrus on the right side, she reports a feeling of "sinking into the bed". This progresses to "falling from a height". With stronger currents she reports she is "floating two metres above the bed" and actually able to see her own body parts lying below her.

She is having an "Out of Body Experience" (OBE), and hers is a classical description.

Some 10 per cent of the population endure these sensations at some time. These can be terrifying, though mostly brief. Associated with epilepsy and migraine, they also occur in normal people, often in states of altered consciousness. They seem to be closely linked to "Near Death Experiences" (NDEs), which take place in extremis, due to an interruption in the supply of oxygen to the brain: or occur when under the influence of drugs - opiates, ketamine, LSD and other hallucinogens - or of sensory deprivation, or brain stimulation of the right angular gyrus as described above.

(snip)

Hallucinations and illusions have fascinated humankind from the dawn of our being: that is to say, from the time when our neurological networks had sufficiently evolved to experience and describe them - about 50,000 years ago, give or take. We know this from the evidence of cave art from prehistoric and more modern sites from several continents.

The famous cave paintings of South Africa, for instance, were inspired by memories of images from a state of altered consciousness - induced by plant chemicals, by sleep and sensory deprivation, by isolation, by rhythmic music and dance - by shamans in connection with rituals and religion.

Those paintings have astonishing parallels with rock art from the American continent and from the pre-historic rock art of caves in France and Spain. Many are extraordinarily inaccessible, reached by crawling along narrow, dark, wet passages, through lakes and pot-holes. It was believed that caves were anterooms to a world of spirits - and the cave wall whereon the paintings were made was a thin membrane between the two worlds.

Shamans used their inner revelations to act as intermediaries between the spirits and the people, much as priests do today. They thereby achieved power and status.

The depictions on the cave walls and the content of modern human trance-like states are strikingly similar and reproducible. Vision-questers, by whatever route, feel they leave their bodies, pass through a hole or aperture and along a tunnel or vortex. Early on, they see geometric shapes, lines and zig-zags. Later they encounter scary animals which must be overcome before meeting a spiritual supreme being. Other features common to multiple cultures are emerging from water; flight; a bright and blinding light; and, curiously, bleeding from the nose or mouth. In some cultures, aspiring shamans were obliged to go through painful and dangerous ordeals which really did bring them to the brink of death.

Please visit the above link and read the whole article.

photos from the Libyan Desert

Meet the Generous German Smoker Shamen and their Merry Christmas Mushrooms:

Ladybugs, Shamen, and Mushrooms

2004-12-22T01:16:00.000-06:00

Ladybug Lore

From Ladybug Lore:

In Europe, during the Middle Ages, insects were destroying the crops, so the Catholic farmers prayed to the Virgin Mary for help. Soon the Ladybugs came, ate the plant-destroying pests and saved the crops! The farmers began calling the ladybugs "The Beetles of Our Lady", and they eventually became known as "Lady Beetles"! The red wings represented the Virgin's cloak and the black spots represented her joys and sorrows.

Ladybug Shamanism: (also from Ladybug Lore)

In Sweden, folks believe that if a ladybug lands on a young maiden's hand, she will soon be getting married. If you find a ladybug in your house, count the number of spots and that is how many dollars you will soon receive.

In England, finding a ladybug means that you will have a good harvest.

In France, if you are sick and a ladybug lands on you, when it flies away, it will take the sickness with it.

If a ladybug has more than seven spots, then there will be a famine. If it has less than seven, then there will be a good harvest.

At one time, doctors would mash up ladybugs and put them in a cavity to cure a toothache.

Some people believe that the number of spots on a ladybug indicates how many children you will have.

If you find a ladybug in your house in the winter you will have good luck.

Hmmm, sounds familiar:

lucky charms: (from "Good Luck Charms" @ kidsweb)

Other good-luck charms people exchange at midnight include the 'lucky pig', the chimney sweep and 'the lucky mushroom'. We don't really know why the poisonous fly agaric was chosen as a good luck symbol. It might have to do with its bright red cap and its white spots on top.

(Except that Fly Agaric mushrooms, i.e. Amanita Muscaria isn't necessarily "poisonous")

a history of fly agaric mushrooms (and also a very enlightening read about mushroom consumption and warfare):

The response to the mushrooms varied from person to person and in the same person at different times. The mushrooms varied in potency and sometimes one mushroom was effective; at other times ineffective. The first response occurred in 1 to 2 hours beginning with twitching and trembling. Consciousness was maintained and during this induction phase the subjects were euphoric and contented. Then the visions came on. The subjects spoke to their visionary people and discussed various matters with them. They were quite calm but appeared entranced with a glassy stare. Other subjects became very jolly or sad, jumped about, danced, sang or gave way to great fright. Their pupils were enlarged. Lewin believed this was responsible for the distortions in size which occurred. Small objects appeared much too large. This "deceptive perception is apt to influence his action" ... "on the basis of his illusions the conclusion which he arrives at is very reasonable." In large quantities more severe hallucinations and rages occurred. The initial excitation could become more and more severe leading to attacks of raving madness. In some cases motor excitation was dominant.

Some images to consider:

When Santa was a Shaman

I also found these images during a google search under German Mushroom "Good Luck"

and finally, let not forget:

DRUGS IN THE NEWS:

2004-12-03T01:54:00.000-06:00

Meet the "legal" drug pushers:

Frontline: Dangerous Prescription

Precisely because the prospects for further accelerating the approval process seem slim, the industry in the last few years has expended considerable lobbying efforts on other issues. Many of these efforts have taken place through PhRMA, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, one of Washington's most powerful trade groups. PhRMA is a well-financed, well-staffed operation: according to a report by Public Citizen, the liberal watchdog group, PhRMA alone employed 50 lobbyists in 2001. (The drug industry as a whole used more than 600 lobbyists that year, the report said.) But the reason drug lobbyists have had so much clout is that the pharmaceutical industry has spent a great deal of money financing political campaigns, devoting dramatically greater sums each year. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the pharmaceutical industry spent $22 million on campaign contributions in 2002 -- or more than nine times what it did in 1990. Given that the industry spends untold millions more on advertising and other forms of issue-oriented public relations, it's no wonder Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat, recently declared that PhRMA "has a death grip on Congress."

(snip)

Mindful of these figures, and the fact that millions of Americans have been struggling to pay for their expensive prescription drugs (see FRONTLINE's recent report "The Other Drug War"), industry critics in Congress such as Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, tried in 2001 to renegotiate the arrangement. Under Waxman's proposal, instead of extending patents, the government would simply pay industry twice the cost of actually running the pediatric studies. But the drug lobby would have nothing of it. Warning that cuts in the financial incentive would leave the industry with little choice but to abandon pediatric testing, drug makers lobbied Congress to preserve the arrangement unaltered. It even hired two former congressional staffers, who had worked on the committees with jurisdiction over the legislation, to help make the case. The industry prevailed, and the law was renewed with no substantial changes.

Published on Thursday, December 2, 2004 by Inter Press Service
Vioxx Scandal Raises Global Doubts on U.S. Drug Safety
by Katherine Stapp
Read the full article here(RTFAH)

Since its approval in 1999, Vioxx has been used by two million people in more than 80 countries. Its manufacturer, the U.S. pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co, earned 2.5 billion dollars from the drug last year alone.

(snip)

The company voluntarily withdrew Vioxx on Sep. 30 after a study confirmed years of suspicions that the drug raises the risk of heart attack, stroke and death. The recall soon exposed serious flaws in the regulatory activities of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which stood behind Vioxx despite studies indicating the drug had dangerous side effects.

In congressional hearings last month, David Graham, an FDA drug safety reviewer, testified the agency downplayed mounting negative data on Vioxx, and that it ”seriously undervalues, disregards and disrespects drug safety” in general. He listed five other potentially dangerous medications currently on the market -- Accutane, Bextra, Crestor, Meridia and Serevent.

Looks like the "legal" drug dealers slipped up. Actually, the article as a whole is quite interesting, and worth the few minutes of eye time.

In Other News:

Published on Thursday, December 2, 2004 by Agence France Presse
Despite 25 Years of Drug War, US Prices are Down
RTFAH

WASHINGTON -- Cocaine and heroin are cheaper today on US streets, despite a multi-billion- dollar, 25-year drug war, according to the Washington Office on Latin America, citing data from the US drug czar.

"The demand for cocaine, crack and heroin is at least stable, if not rising," said John Walsh, an expert on the matter at WOLA, a Washington think-tank on Latin America.

(snip)

"After 25 years and 25 billion dollars fighting drugs in Latin America, we are no closer to winning the drug war -- which is ultimately about reducing drug abuse," said Joy Olson, executive director of WOLA, in a presentation of the 400-page report.

"We've spent billions on anti-drug efforts in Latin America and have nothing to show for it but collateral damage," Olson added. "We can do better. We've been tough on drugs; now it's time to get smarter."

Yes, smarter. Prohibition only increases criminal organization. Can we please learn something from history already?

Not to mention the fact that cars, guns, alcohol, tobacco, fast food can all kill if not approached responsibily. We can't fight "drugs", we might as well fight sex or entertainment. Drugs are older than history. Like anything else in society, the solution to the problem lies in the processes of enculturation, i.e. education and parental leadership.

Now, had we spent that $25 billion to improve the teacher-child ratio in public schools, perhaps we'd have fewer "abusers".

Then again, maybe they'd just abuse Cialis, Viagra, Adderall, Ritalin, etc...

meanwhile...

Supreme Court weighs marijuana as medicine
Attorneys for White House, women press their cases
RTFAH

Watching the argument was Angel Raich, an Oakland, California, mother of two who said she tried dozens of prescription medicines to ease the pain of a brain tumor and other illnesses before she turned to marijuana. She and another ill woman, Diane Monson, filed a lawsuit to protect their access to the drug after federal agents confiscated marijuana plants from Monson's yard.

(snip)

The justices refused three years ago to protect distributors of medical marijuana from federal charges. They are confronting a more personal issue this time -- the power of federal agents to go after sick people who use homegrown cannabis with their doctors' permission and their states' approval.

The stakes are high because 11 states have passed medical marijuana laws since 1996. A defeat for the two California women might undermine those laws and discourage other states from approving their own.

(snip)

The marijuana users won in the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that federal prosecution of medical marijuana users is unconstitutional if the pot is not sold, transported across state lines or used for nonmedicinal purposes.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the federal government has a stake in interstate commerce, but with the California medical marijuana patients: "Nobody's buying anything. Nobody's selling anything.

Her colleague, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, observed that homegrown medical marijuana never makes it to the interstate market.

So, is there a "big picture" to all this?

Psycho Active Plants and Civilization

2004-11-15T13:56:00.000-06:00

This post exists as storage for future research. Feel free to explore the links below.

I'm exploring the idea that early pre-agrarian humans ritually consumed psychotropic plants, and this practice refined the human-animal mind and gave rise to primitive astronomical calendars which yeilded agriculture and, subsequently, civilization.

I can not vouch for the scientific validity of these writers, but I'm curious about what they have to say, so, as with anything, interpret these links with a grain of salt... so to say.

Round Head Period rockart

art prehistory

Libyan Desert rock Art

From prehistoric mushroom artifacts:

Since most of the works of rock art were, or were related to, initiation rites, or were part of religious practice and its context, the idea that these works should be associated with the use of hallucinogenic vegetals (as has already been put forward for some specific cases on the basis of ethnographic and ethnobotanical data) comes as no surprise. This use, where it arises, is historically associated with controlled rituals involving social groups of varying dimensions. It is perhaps not a chance occurrence that the areas where examples of rock art are to be found - areas in which it is most often asserted that the use of hallucinogens might have taken place, on the basis of the scenes represented or on the basis of the consideration that this practie might have served as a source of inspiration - are also the areas where the most famous examples are to be found in terms of imagination, mytholigical significance and polychromy.

cultigenic taxonomy

ethnobotany

kamakala

Anthropologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University observed on many occasions that a large number of chimps walked as long as 20 minutes in search of Aspilia, a member of the sunflower family. The animals would then gulp down the leaves of this plant whole, even to the point of vomiting. It was later discovered that Aspilia is high in a red oil called thiarubrine-A which kills parasites, fungi and viruses. However more recently, biochemists, inspired by the chimps repeated use of the plant, began to test the properties of thiarubrine more seriously in the lab. They found to their surprise that thiarubrine-A killed cancer cells in solid tumors, such as those of the lungs and breast.

Maybe some of the mystery as to how early humans discovered medicinal plants is hereby revealed. For on further observation scientists have found that chimpanzees use at least 15 different species of medicinal plants, which supply the animals with a full range of potions and salves for a number of various ailments.

Scientists have also discovered however that it's not just chimpanzees that take advantage of Nature's pharmacopeia, but there are many other animal species that do as well. In fact there are so many different kinds of animals that use plants as medicine, a specialized branch of zoology has developed just to study this phenomena called "zoopharmacognosty".(1)

Within this specialized branch of study some very interesting discoveries have been made. One of these is the fact that animals use psychoactive plants to deliberately alter their consciousness. Ronald Siegel, a psychopharmacologist at UCLA's School of Medicine has spent most of his career studying drugs and their impact on animals. In 1979 he discovered a shard from an ancient ceramic bowl in the Peruvian Andes. A painting on the piece, shows two llamas eating from a branch of coca leaves. Two Indians are pointing to the llamas while they themselves conspicuously reach for the leaves with open mouths.

Major Types Of
Chemical Compounds
In Plants & Animals

Marijuana is native to central Asia, and the Chinese appear to have been the first to harvest the plant for its hemp fibers and medicinal uses. The psychoactive properties of marijuana were first exploited in India. The Indians classified Cannabis products into ganja, consisting of the potent female flowers and upper leaves, and hashish, the golden resin containing THC. The largest quantity of resin is produced by C. sativa ssp. indica, also known as C. indica. High quality hashish may contain up to 50% pure THC. The most potent and resinous plants are bushy, well-spaced female plants grown in warm, sunny climates without male plants. The term "sinsemilla" (sin: without) and (semilla: seed) refers to unpollinated, unfertilized female plants without seeds. Through the travels of Marco Polo, Napolean and British colonists, the virtues of marijuana as a fiber plant and psychoactive drug spread to Africa, Europe and the New World.

Marijuana has a number of therapeutic uses. For casual smoking and medical purposes, the gland-covered female flowers and floral bracts are commonly used, rather than the potent hashish. Marijuana reduces the nausea experienced by cancer patients undergoing radiation and chemotherapy. Since THC dilates bronchial vessels, it provides relief for asthma sufferers. It also relieves hypertension, and is effective in reducing pressure in the eyes of glaucoma patients. Although it is illegal to grow without special medical permits, it is the number one cash crop in some remote areas of the United States.

mushrooms

The oldest representations of hallucinogenic mushrooms in the world are in The Sahara Desert. They were produced 7000-9000 years ago.

The idea that the use of hallucinogens should be a source of inspiration for some forms of prehistoric rock art is not a new one. After a brief examination of instances of such art, this article intends to focus its attention on a group of rock paintings in the Sahara Desert, the works of pre-neolithic Early Gatherers, in which mushrooms effigies are represented repeatedly.

The polychromic scenes of harvest, adoration and the offering of mushrooms, and large masked gods covered with mushrooms, not to mention other significant details, lead us to suppose we are dealing with an ancient hallucinogenic mushroom cult.

What is remarkable about these ethnomycological works, produced 7,000 - 9,000 years ago, is that they could indeed reflect the most ancient human culture as yet documented in which the ritual use of hallucinogenic mushrooms is explicitly represented.

Many cultures portray Amanita muscaria as the archetypal mushroom. Although some Vedic scholars disagree with his interpretation. Aristotle, Plato, and Sophocles all participated in religious ceremonies at Eleusis where an unusual temple honored Demeter, the Goddess of Earth.

the brainy encyclopedia

Hallucinogenic drugs are among the oldest drugs used by humankind, as hallucinogens naturally occur in mushrooms, cacti, and various other plants. Whether the use of hallucinogens is encouraged, unregulated, regulated, or prohibited, and whether hallucinogens are used for recreational, medicinal, or spiritual purposes, varies from culture to culture and nation to nation. Hallucinogen use is relatively rare in most current societies. In most countries of the world, common hallucinogens are illegal and their possession is considered a crime (as of 2004.) Rarely, an exception will be made for religious purposes. For example, in the United States, possession of peyote cactus is illegal for most purposes, but the cactus is legally grown and used for religious rituals among various Southwestern Native American tribes.

In human culture hallucinogens have historically most commonly been used in the setting of religious or shamanic rituals. In this context they are more precisely referred to as entheogens. Evidence exists for the use of entheogens in prehistoric times, as well as in numerous ancient cultures, including the Ancient Egyptian, Mycenaean, Ancient Greek, Vedic, Maya, Inca and Aztec cultures. The rise of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam caused a decline of entheogen use in its area from the Middle Ages onwards, with practitioners of entheogenic drug use in Western Europe accused of associating with the Devil, especially since the Great Witch Hunt of the Early Modern Age. Nevertheless, some (mainly tribal) cultures have survived this (ongoing) assault and still practise entheogen use. In others, non-religious hallucinogen use, while not exactly encouraged, is tolerated and not seen as uncommon. Present-day, historical and mythological aspects of entheogens are discussed in the entry entheogen.

other links

plants and people

archeological evidence

holistic path

hallucinogenic antiquity

tree of knowledge

religion and drugs

shroomery forums

stoned ape theory

Out of Africa:
one
two
three
four

Early Culture:

ancient calendars

I found these links by typing "prehistoric psychedelic plant use" in google. These are just a few of the MANY links I found.

Hmmm. Maybe there is something to this theory...

Afterall, what would inspire an animal to look up at the night sky and see not just stars, but patterns, cycles, gods, and meaning?

Something else to consider:

mindfire

ABE: Now you speak of what is called in the native tradition "teacher plants." You speak of psilocybin, for instance, as being informative and educative, and you appear to see it as being involved in getting the "naked ape" to a higher level of consciousness. Can you talk about that?

TERENCE M: Yes. This is what Food of the Gods explores in great detail, the notion being that what orthodox anthropology and human evolutionary theory have overlooked (in trying to account for the emergence of human beings out of the animal substrate) is the impact of our switch from a fruitatarian and highly specialized diet to an omnivorous diet at the very moment that we were ceasing to be arboreal and were beginning to become binocular, bipedal animals of the African grassland. And psilocybin would have been present in those environments, because psilocybin mushrooms of many species have a preference for the dung of ungulate animals. Now those mushrooms would surely have been tested for their food value at the same time that many other potentially mutagenic compounds in foods were being exposed to the human genome. The interesting thing about psilocybin is that at very low doses it increases visual acuity, and to my mind this would tip the evolutionary scales in a situation of natural selection towards selection of those individuals and their families that were admitting this exotic item into their diet. They would be better hunters and consequently better able to supply food to their children, and raise them to reproductive maturity. At slightly higher dose levels, psilocybin, like many central nervous system stimulators, causes arousal and an energizing of the organism. Well, in highly sexed creatures like primates, this inevitably ends in sexual activity. So that's a second factor imparted by the psilocybin that would tend to force the outbreeding of the non‑psilocybin portion of the population. Finally, and most significantly, at the level of a truly boundary dissolving intoxication, the psilocybin causes spontaneous outbursts of glossolalia (speaking in tongues). This may have to do with the elaboration of language. It creates a flood of hallucinagenic imagery, which may become the models for inspired members of the community to carve or paint or tattoo, or whatever. So, in other words, psilocybin looks to me like the chemical catalyst of the leap out of high primate organization and into human organization. And the way in which it achieves this effect is by dissolving dominance hierarchies; specifically it dissolves the construct in the personality that as moderns we call "the ego.”

ABE: Let me just backtrack a little bit, because you've just covered a lot of territory. You suggest that psilocybin increases sexual arousal. At some point in the evolution of primates their sexuality became freed from the menstrual cycle. And animals, as you know, only breed at specific times, because they're only in heat at specific times. I'm wondering if something like psilocybin could have been the cause of creating what we would think of as " transcendental sexuality" in the sense that it transcends purely nature based rhythms?

TERENCE M: Well, what it does is it tends to dissolve boundaries, and all primates, including very primitive primates right back into the squirrel monkeys, have what are called male‑dominant hierarchies, in which females are strictly controlled by powerful males and assigned to them. I think what the exposure to psilocybin in the diet did was that it temporarily intervened in this tendency to form male‑dominance hierarchies, and instead it was a catalyst for community, for group mindedness, for a more relativistic attitude towards ownership and possession of females, and it did this by promoting orgy, meaning group sexual activity. You know, the nearest relatives to the human line alive in the world today are the pygmy chimpanzees, and their sexual behaviors can barely be reported in a family publication. They are almost entirely bisexual, constantly sexually active in groups and apart, breaking and making pair bondings very readily, and I think that this must have happened over a long period of time. The protohominids, the psilocybin mushrooms, and the ungulate cattle were probably in association with each other for upwards of two to three million years, and it was a relationship of increasing closeness and attraction which ends finally about fifteen to twenty thousand years ago with the domestication of these ungulate animals and the establishment of the paleolithic religion of the Great Horned Goddess. I argue in my book, Food of the Gods, a kind of paradisiacal, quasi‑symbiotic dynamic was involved there on the grasslands of the Sahara in the wake of the last glaciation. And what destroyed this was simply further climatological drying when the Sahara became a desert and we begin to get the institutions which we can recognize.

ABE: You talk about the relationship of psilocybin to the evolution of art. We know that totem societies go back an awful long way, and that totemism is, as Claude Livi‑Strauss pointed out, a sensibility, a culture form, and also an art form. Everywhere these kinds of substances were used we run across cave paintings, petroglyphs, that kind of thing. Do you think that psilocybin was responsible for that, too?

TERENCE M: Well, it has the quality of somehow empowering cognitive activity. It empowers poetics, dance, artistic productions in the form of carving and painting. It seems to somehow stimulate the organism to self‑reflection in combination with self‑expression. And so, yes, I would argue the evidence for the little scenario on the Saharan grasslands that I just laid out for you are these magnificent rock carvings in the Tassili Plateau region of southern Algeria, and they are not greatly different and certainly no less in quality than the rock work at Lascaux in France.

ABE: Something very significant happened to human consciousness in a very short period of evolutionary time.

TERENCE M: It's a great puzzle for evolutionary biology how it is that in a two‑million‑year period the human brain effectively doubled in size. There are evolutionary biologists ‑ Lumsden being one example‑who call this the most rapid transformation of a major animal organ in the entire fossil record, and it happened to us. Short of the intercession of God Almighty, theories have been thin indeed, and yet this goes to the existential core of what it is to be human. We stand apart from the general order of nature. I mean, you can talk about dolphin speech and honey bee dances, etc., but that's a long way from Milton. Science, in its rush to exorcise the paranormal, the occult, the inexplicable, has brushed over the major piece of evidence for something highly unusual going on, on this planet ‑ ourselves.

more McKenna

DIALOGUES I - Subjective Realities

2004-11-05T13:39:00.000-06:00

I've taken the liberty to publish excerpts from a philosophical conversation I had with other members of Understanding Politics.

Here is a conversation for your consideration (edited):

Frodo:
Numbers describe reality. This is their purpose.

sourmonkey:
sure, and money describes power as its purpose, and god describes meaning as its purpose. Of course, all of these symbols (including the numbers) are inventions of the human psyche. Their value is also determined by the human psyche (as in no dog understands Pi). The numbers we use are subjective in value, therefore, our reality as defined by our understanding of symbols is likewise subjective.

In REALITY, numbers approximate reality. There purpose is only determined by our minds.

You only believe what you want to believe, Frodo.

Frodo:
And what kind of fool thinks volcanos and earthquakes are the result of man's activity? Oh right.... A liberal fool (sorry for the redundancy).

sourmonkey:
You're in left field, er, right field Frodo. I never implied this. Why did you interpret this?

What kind of fool thinks the terrorists "hate freedom"?
What kind of fool thinks mercury levels are safe at some level?
What kind of fool thinks Americans are the center of existence?
What kind of fool thinks climate change is not happening?
What kind of fool thinks human society WON'T be affected by climate change?

SimonJester:
What kind of person bases his attacks on a thesis of an entirely subjective reality and expects us to take him seriously when he attempts to rely on the same subjective numbers to prove his points? Indeed, why should we believe that climate change is happening at all?
Tell me SourMonkey – is that air you’re breathing?

sourmonkey:
thank you for asking.

Do I really need to answer your question?

Okay.

1- because our "reality" IS subjective, i.e. DEFINED AND MEASURED BY OUR HUMAN MINDS. I know this really isn't fair... you can't really win an argument here because to deny this is to prove my thesis true. Just accept it and take the next step into the reality of a relativistic universe.

2- not only is CLIMATE CHANGE a reality, but universal entropy, the motivating force behind climate change, is undeniable.

So, within a subjective reality, how do you prove climate change is occuring? How do I know I'm breathing air? How can you KNOW anything?

Oh, like ALL things governing human existence, it's all in the DEFINITIONS (which are subjective, as explained above).

Need I go on? I can, and will, but perhaps you "thinking" people already know where this is going....

How far do you want to go to define your reality?

Interestingly, whenever I ask this (above) question, no one answers it.

SimonJester:
I don’t see how you’re going to uncover some grand truths about the world without accepting some basic assumptions about the way it works. Two and one will always be three, no matter what you call them.

sourmonkey:
Good. Premise One is established.

Premise Two involves cognitive ability, and this is where things get sticky.

You see, One and Two and Three, regardless of the nature of the symbols, only exist because a mind exists to perceive them.

SimonJester:
There's an old riddle, "If a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to hear, does it still make a sound?" (or of course the feminist variant, "If a man speaks in the woods and no one's around to hear, is he still wrong?". Your reasoning falls along these lines. The answer (to the former...) is of course, "yes". Assuming the universe is something real, "Two" does exist, even without it's conception, just as planets existed long before there were minds to percieve them.

sourmonkey: Sure. I'll give you the "planets" thing... although try thinking about "planets" without using the word "planets"... or ANY word (or mathematical symbol) for that matter. if you can do that, then you might have an idea of how the universe functions without human consciousness.

Personally, I'm still working on it...

"Two", well, that's a different story. No symbols exist outside of the mind of the conceptualizer, therefore, "two" doesn't exist outside of the human mind.

My point in this silly little exercise is that we should be more mindful concerning the nature of our reality, and we should apply this to our understanding of human society and human social relationships. Until we at least recognize these subjective trends, we will always have war, and as we continue to build the unimaginably destructive tools of war, we only ignorantly threaten the very miracle which gives the universe meaning.

SimonJester:
Sure, numbers are conceptual tools, much the same way that the word “planet” is a conceptual tool. So we share at least some common reference point in this conversation. What does this mean?

We base our perceptions of the world using words and concepts that are certainly subjective. Yet if everyone understands “two” and “planet” in exactly the same way, and they do so because the existence of both is implicit in their definition, then how subjective is the reality upon which they are based? You could not use these tools – the decimal numbering system for instance – to prove that “Two” and “one” is “four” without changing the meaning of the word “four”, "one", or "two" – that is, without making our subjective conceptions conform to the real world. This must be done in order to have any useful view of the world – subjective cognitive perception must conform to some underlying structure (reality) in order to be of any utility whatsoever.

Reality exists, whether we think it does or not.

sourmonkey:
I'm not denying the existence of reality, I'm just saying that the nature of OUR reality is subjective.

SimonJester:
"Yet if everyone understands “two” and “planet” in exactly the same way, and they do so because the existence of both is implicit in their definition..."

sourmonkey:
yes, implicit in their definition. the symbols that we use to define the meaning of our reality can be refined per observation and agreement, hence, "fact", but the truth is there are elements to our universe that we have no understanding of (so far...). We're still constructing a vocabulary of symbols to define these events. Look at string theory. Any shmoe from the street could listen to what string theorists speak about and determine that it is utter nonsense simply because, so far, there aren't any "real world" application for hyper dimensional symbols. However, as our technology advances, we develope the means to apply "string theory" to social function.

Another example. Humans perceive only a narrow band of sound and light frequencies. We build our initial understanding of the world within these limitations, but the exercise of technology reveals that radio, microwave, and gamma frequencies are a very "real" part of our universe, and we use symbols to build devices which manipulate these universal functions. Our brains are hardwired to initailly perceive only a limited bandwith, but by extension of our super primate minds we construct methods to see beyond the limitations of our physical existence.

my point is that our understanding of the universe is evolving. in the paradigm of quantum physics every event can be represented by a wave function has well as a corpuscle of matter. this wave/particle duality represents a paradox created ONLY by our observing minds. if the observer stops observing, the paradox resolves, and the universe exists pre cognitively in its natural state... physics is still trying to figure out what that is.

and numbers, well, we MUST agree on their value, otherwise science wouldn't exist, and we'd still be living in caves thinking the stars above our heads are our ancestors.

So, reality is subjective.

this isn't to say reality doesn't exist, nor is it suggesting that our cultural symbols have no real value... it just means that these values are limited by our own understanding, and this is always evolving

SimonJester:
Come on SourMonkey! How can you throw out a bomb like that without clarifying? How should a “Realist” with no background or knowledge of “Subjectivist” theory be expected to interpret that statement? Are you implying there’s more than one reality (ok it’s possible, but so what)? Are you saying that reality doesn’t matter because we can shape it as we see fit?
Or are you saying something more reasonable, as the rest of your post suggests – that Reality exists, that our perception of it is limited by our current understanding, that because we do not have a full understanding we are prone to errors in judgment that impact our view of the world, that people with different knowledge bases and experiences will inherently have different – subjective – views of reality without changing the nature of reality itself.

I’ve noticed that very few Liberals are willing to engage in any debate about Global Warming. This has given me – and probably other conservatives – the impression that they simply take it on Faith and do not actually care to understand the science. I’ve made this clear in many posts on the subject – including the one that prompted him to respond. His response basically boiled down to “There is no debate – all scientists agree” – repeat as necessary. Taking into account my perception of reality, what does his response do to change my perspective of Liberals? Now, what if I attempt to look at this from a Liberal standpoint? Given that I am not a Liberal, this is a challenge. But I did glean something. Liberals believe it so whole-heartedly that debate is not even a realistic consideration for them. Because I question the theory (sorry, “Fact”), I am delusional and cannot be reasoned with – so why bother?

sourmonkey:
just be mindful that all values projected within a "Realist" perspective are arbitrary, and that significance is determined according to the bias of the "Realist" observer.

How else can I say it? How about homgeneity? Everything "out there" is basically another version of "here" but with random entropic differences. The Milky Way galaxy is just another version of those collective forces which create the Andromeda Galaxy. Our solar system is just another version of a solar system in Andromeda. My human mind is just another version of your human mind. My observations, and therefore, my perspective, are another version of yours. There are over six billion "other versions" of the human mind on this planet. "Subjectivist Theory" (if that's what you want to call it) means that 1- the universe exists, but how it exists is determined by those living in it. For example, my cat has no human concept of what the stars, or the sun, or the moon function as. She might not even recognize their existence.

SimonJester:
"Are you implying there’s more than one reality (ok it’s possible, but so what)?"

sourmonkey:
YES! First of all, the only REALITY is the present. It's now.... NOW.... Now... ..... ..... .... now...... ... .... ... now... .... .... ? ... ... now...

Where is all that reality going? The only thing that truly exists is the present moment as it zips through TIME (... and what really is THAT?)

Everything else is displacement in thought, i.e. analysis, memory and prediction.

This is true for every "mind", and therefore in a world with over six billion minds (and climbing), civilization is a miracle. Cultural and moral relativism define cognitive functions (relativily speaking). So, in short, YES, there is more than one REALITY. Try counting them... just for fun.

SimonJester:
"Are you saying that reality doesn’t matter because we can shape it as we see fit?"

sourmonkey:
No, I'm saying we tend to threaten or destroy what DOES matter because we shape reality as we see fit.

What DOES matter is this perpetual cycle called life on Earth and all the universal factors which maintain environmental stability favoring the existence of modern human civilization. Historically, war tends to stagnate things, and in the nuclear age, our ideological "short comings" ony threaten what we believe to be the universes most significant miracle.

We DO change the nature of reality. Technological civilization is the SYNTHETIC CREATION of the human mind. All the numbers and symbols which provide energy to the economy are synthetic creations of the human mind. The computer that I type into and my home encasing it are synthetic creations of the human mind. They have a ROOT in the physical, molecular universe but their existence is induced by the human creative mind.

What started as a dream became reality. Architecture an art, government and economy, science and airtravel. Hell, we even went to the moon, and sent robots to Mars.

In my interpretations of science, I find enough evidence to take it on faith that the earth HAS ALWAYS CHANGED, is currently changing, and will continue to change. I find enough evidence to take it on faith that our precious human civilization depends on environmental stability. The limitations of our perspective prevent us from accurately forecasting the weather, never mind predict the consequences of climate change. I think we should take precautions, if only because our natural resources are diminishings despite population increases. Combine this with our love of war and ideological absolutism, and our prospects for a prosperous near future are dim.

SimonJester:
Hmmm… Fun stuff Sourmonkey, fun stuff. You’re losing me. If our goal is to understand reality, then it must adhere to some fixed rules – rules that do not change based on what you or I think they might be. Eons ago, people believed that there were no fixed rules, that no discernable patterns existed, that we owed our existence to the whims of the gods. We have since amassed enough evidence to demonstrate that patterns do indeed exist, and that certain rules will always apply, everywhere. It seems likely we will continue finding such evidence. You mentioned String Theory earlier – what is that, if not an attempt to determine the rules of a static reality at the most basic level?
Making pots and pans, carving out weapons, painting on walls, erecting temples and towers, manufacturing cars and computers, constructing virtual worlds – we take advantage of these regular patterns to do all these miraculous things – but we do not change reality in any fundamental way by doing so.

sourmonkey:
"No, I'm saying we tend to threaten or destroy what DOES matter because we shape reality as we see fit."

SimonJester:
There are two problems with this. First, you’re making a subjective morality judgment – “what matters”. What matters to whom, and more importantly – why? Why is “what matters” to you more important than “what matters” to me? Second, it is known that the world changes constantly. You and I even agree on this much. Life has survived earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardments by comets and asteroids and meteors, world wide floods, tidal waves, world wide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, and recurring ice ages. Life has survived all that, but it won’t survive humanity? Do you really have the conceit to believe we’re that powerful yet?

If our goal is to understand reality, then it must adhere to some fixed rules – rules that do not change based on what you or I think they might be.

sourmonkey:
Rules, like the speed of light, the force of gravity, or the orbit of electrons about a nucleus? These change too, but this is beside the point.

SimonJester:
"Eons ago, people believed that there were no fixed rules, that no discernable patterns existed, that we owed our existence to the whims of the gods"

sourmonkey:
These people recognized astronomical patterns, which probably gave them the ability to settle into society, create crops and gods, and lay down the law.

Still, this is beside the point.

Ah, so here's the problem. It's a problem of definition. for example:

SimonJester:
"...but we do not change reality in any fundamental way by doing so."

sourmonkey:
how do you define reality? how do you define it in a fundamental way?

All of the things you listed were created by the human mind. How is it that we don't change reality? All of the things you listed were synthesized by human hands. How is it that we don't change reality? All of the things you listed affect the lives of the humans that interact with them. The invention of the internal combustion engine transformed the human family, the human environment, and the human community in ways we're still trying to comprehend. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not denying the raw physics of the universe, which is what I think you're missing me on. All I'm saying is that we are still learning. Our theories are evolving. Our understanding of the universe and the significance of our life on Earth is also evolving. Change is everpresent, and there is so much more to learn.

The human reality is subjective. There, like that better?

I'll conclude this chapter by asking you, good reader, "how do YOU define reality?"

Homogeneity and our Synthetic Reality

2004-09-09T22:17:00.000-05:00

No, this isn't about gay rights.

After giving the meaning of this blog some deep thought (did I say that already?), I've decided to stick with my ...(oh yeah, I already said this...)

If you are reading this, then thank you for stopping by. If you, good reader, have an interest in philosophy, then please, help me create a little dialogue out of this otherwise stuffy monologue. I think a lot, and I have many ideas about things, but I've never actually studied philosophy (in depth at least), and to be honest, I don't think I ever will... However, I would love to have philosophical conversations with living people, so comment away...

Cosmologists have much to say about the overarching homogeneity of our universe. What does this mean? Basically, it's a dimension of thought problem. On one level, this means that the Andromeda spiral galaxy looks a lot like our own Milky Way spiral galaxy. It contains the same universal elements (matter and energy) and it appears bound by the same physical forces (gravity, nuclear and electromagnetism). This is just a simple way to think about homogeneity, though. On another level, homogeneity means that the Andromeda galaxy is another version of here. This is true for all universal elements: quarks, light, electrons, protons, molecules, stars, planets, etc. Einstein's theories of relativity revolutionized the way we think about space, time and motion. In a homogeneious universe, "out there" is simply another version of "here" and it is only the mind of the observer which defines the two.

I want to take this synthetic_universe blog down a path of "universal relativity"... if that makes sense. Who knows, maybe some Enlightenment guy came up with this term and defined it differently... I don't care, "universal relativity" describes exactly what I want it to.

As I look around my room, I see that everything in it is man made... including me. My house was the dream of an architect; my computer the cause of many headaches. Even the electricty in my neighborhood is man made; it wouldn't exist without human manipulation. At some point, and perhaps with the help of God, the animals of Earth rose from the dust and built their own environments using the power of their minds. About this time, we simultaneously built the tools of our own destruction, and we consistently threaten to use them on each other... but I digress.

Our world is synthetic. Our realities are dreams made real, and in a universe where ALL things exist simultaneously as matter and energy, it is the human mind which defines the meaning.

Welcome to the synthetic_universe.

Any thoughts?

Chocolate is a Drug Too

2004-08-26T00:56:00.000-05:00

I've given great thought to the meaning of this blog, and I'm deciding to stick to my guns on this one. America is leading a dangerous "war on drugs" campaign which will only ruin civil liberties and corrupt the fabric of society, but I'll get more into that later.

Eventually, this blog will focus more specifically on various theories within the field of cognitive sciences. This blog is named synthetic_universe for a reason...

I recently became a member of my local public library. These places are simply amazing to me. Anyone can learn about anything for free in today's modern public library. It's the last vestige of a free eduction, I say! My first three borrowed books were a biography of Carl Sagan, an anthropological translation of Hopi culture and mythology, and finally, a text entitled "From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs" by Andrew Weil, M.D. and Winifred Rosen (revised and updated). Pretty cool, huh?

The authors make it clear that they do not advocate the use of drugs. They also make it clear that they are presenting the most qualified facts about modern drug use and it's history within society. They are honest about the information they present, and much of it adds weight to the idea that America is doing "the drug thing" the wrong way. I invite anyone to read this book, or even others like it because there are many. The facts all too often correlate. Truths are not being heard.

For the sake of brevity I'll keep this short.

The Things I Learned From This Book (and maybe already knew):

1-Cigarettes are the most addictive drug of all. This was actually a surprise to me. They made their point by saying that nicotine is both highly addictive and fatally poisonous. According to them, one cigar, left overnight in a cup of water, will produce enough nicotine poison to kill three men. Most of the nicotine is burned off during use, though, the most addictive vehicle of use for tabocco is the cigarette because it represents an easy "delivery" into the blood stream. This makes cigarettes more addictive than heroine.

2-Alcohol is the most dangerous drug of all. The authors list several reasons to back this up, but I don't think I need to do that here. Just think about it. Alcohol related deaths occur way too frequently in this country; alcohol abuse and alcoholism can be found in any neighborhood. The truth is, we've grown desensitized to this phenomenon. Drug Corporations push their products using sexy women and images of fun. The big tobacco pushers got the legal spotlight, why not the beer guy?

3- Cocaine, heroine, opiates, yes, they're dangerous. But the authors, time and time again, point out that the biggest problem with drug abuse is that drug use is criminalized. Our legal system pushes these not-really-all-that-dangerous substances into underground markets where it gets refined, cut and mixed, and that's when the drugs get dangerous. The authors also state that many of our "legal" medical drugs chemically derive from the natural form of the "illegal" ones like opiates and cocaine.

4- Marijuana is the least dangerous of almost all drugs. The authors devote an entire chapter to this plant, and as it turns out, marijuana and hemp can do all kinds of useful things. The seeds are edible. So are the leaves. You can make a strong fabric out of it. On top of that, the authors include scientific evidence suggesting that the chemical ingredient THC improves blood circulation, improves glaucoma, relieves muscle tension and thus improves the lives of MS patients. I read brief testimonials from two MS patients who confimed this, and one of them said it enabled him to walk again.

Hmm. And it 's a weed. It grows anywhere...

That's why "capitalism" is afraid. There's probably more money to be had in the prosecution of marijuana possession.

5- Caffeine, chocolate, and sugar (especially high fructose corn syrup) are all drugs that we use and mostly abuse. These were all illegal at one time, and then society got real and lifted the prohibition. Now, we can't wake up without a cup of coffee.

6- The authors make a grand suggestion. Everything is a drug. Flying a kite, driving a car, rock climbing, eating chocoalte, eating anything gratifying, having sex, turning circles until you're dizzy, and on down the line it seems like our lives are a constant quest for feeling "good" and getting high.

7- Drugs have always been a part of society. The first five words in the first chapter of the book are "Drugs are here to stay." It follows, "History teaches that it is vain to hope that drugs will ever disappear and that any effort to eliminate them from society is doomed to failure." And that's just the beginning of the book, folks!

And so, my quest is confirmed.

now, the synthetic_universe stuff...

My Affliction

2004-07-23T00:41:00.000-05:00

My wife and I are in the process of moving to Austin where she will teach and I will finish a degree in anthropology. Recently, my wife decided that I should be tested for adult ADD. She consulted the advice her parents, and her Mom seems to agree. My wife's brother and sister have both been diagnosed with ADD and are currently taking medication for it. I have a good friend who has been diagnosed with ADD and received a prescription for Adderall. After many conversations with him regarding the symptoms of ADD, I'm beginning to think that, indeed, I have it too.

I have an obsession with music and sound. I've been producing my own music for several years now, but I've always been frustrated with the way I work. My brain is always scattered, always thinking about multiple things, crazy thing, and I honestly have a hard time focusing. This handicap has certainly slowed me down in life. I didn't do very well in school, despite my "potential", and it is a rare occasion when I sit down for an extended period of time and do serious work in my studio.

My wife and I have decided that we'll hand over the $500 so that I can get tested for ADD once we settle in Austin. I've actually tried Adderall on several occasions, and for me, it was like putting on glasses. It was a paradigm shift. The first time I tried it, I sat in my studio and wrote a song from beginning to end with no interruption. The whole process took something like nine hours, but I sat there and worked non stop until I was finished. All of my few experiences with Adderall have been this way. Wow! A streamlined mind! Look out life, here I come!

Except, Adderall is a drug. It is a "legal" drug, with a "legal" dealer, but it is a drug none the less. Another friend of mine who takes Adderall put it this way (I'm paraphrasing), "Once you see what it does for you, buying it every month becomes a leading priority." Sounds like addiction to me. So, I've got a decision to make. Do I pay the $500 bucks to get tested so that I can buy the drug and use it when I need to in order to "focus" my mind? Or, do I save the money, struggle with the limitations of my mind, and face the possibility of an underachieving and frustrating life?

On the hand, perhaps the problem isn't my mind at all. Maybe it's the structure of society itself. Afterall, my life is very pleasing to me. I tend to be overly nonconformist at times, and it makes "plugging in" a difficult thing. I walk to the beat of my own drum machine, but society requires a specific level of engagement: jobs, money, food, family, school. These require that I plug in somehow, but my "ADD" makes this difficult.

Maybe my brain is normal (afterall, it is organic), and SOCIETY is messed up (after all, it is synthetic). So, good reader, should I use drugs, or not?

Judges Against The Drug War

2004-07-19T20:29:00.000-05:00

Once again, just to show I haven't fallen off my rocker, check out the above link.

From the main page:

"For the past thirty years Judges have looked on as America’s War on Drugs has played itself out before their eyes. They have seen the inevitable increase in police powers and erosion of civil rights needed to facilitate the investigation of drug offenses. They have witnessed the widespread, unprecedented use of asset forfeiture. And they have been forced to impose unjust mandatory minimum sentences."

This is definitely worth a read.

Re-examine the problem

2004-07-17T03:08:00.000-05:00

Introspectively, I don't know why I've adopted this campaign. I think it's because, on a personal level, I tend to be a sensitive, friendly guy. I've had all kinds of friends in my life, and some of them did a few "drugs." I remember a co-worker I had once at an old job. She was a middle aged african american woman with several children . She worked two jobs, and was trying to send her youngest daughter to college. She also sold drugs on the side to supplement the cost of tuition. She told me she was trying to give her daughter a chance at something that no one else in her family was going to get. This really impacted me. Is it fair that we stigmatize her for doing what she's doing? If she had gotten caught, she would've been placed in jail. This might've ruined her family and her daughter's chance at a better life.

Drugs are a problem. I agree. But the problem requires a serious re-examination. At the core of the drug problem sits addiction. This force provides the impetus for much of our survival instinct. There are human societies on Earth right now which still criminalize sex. In truth, we ain't much better than them.

Drugs are chemicals. Drugs don't kill people, people kill people. We've legalized guns, right? Aren't guns dangerous? Don't they also ruin lives? We shouldn't be "fighting drugs with drugs." We should be fighting addiction with education. And the anti-drug propaganda needs to stop dissemenating lies. Marijuana isn't "bad". Heroine, crack, cocaine... YES, but not marijuana. Not anymore than tobacco, and it's certainly more benign than alcohol. Ecstasy, as pure MDMA, is not dangerous either. The reason why Ex is illegal is because it hit the streets in mass before the government could regulate it. However, because it is illegal, it is now more dangerous because, for various street reasons, it gets cut with other more dangerous substances. Religion maintains a long tradition of ritualizing hallucinogenic compounds for "spritual awakenings." Our drug policy even prohibits this expression of religious faith (depending on the "drug", that is).

As with every drug, the "danger" is determined by how much is taken, what else is taken, and all of this is determined by the mindset of the "user" as it is controlled by addiction. Drugs don't kill people, people kill people. Quality of education would go much further to curb the use of drugs in society than legal punishment and the threat of incarceration. We should be spending more money on our teachers, and less on enforcing rediculous and maladaptive drug laws.

Of course, we won't do this. Not when we're making the tools of war instead of the minds of peace. Not when we're chugging oil like a fratboy at a kegger. Not when corporations can control all the "legal" drug outlets and push their "this will only help you feel better" medicine. And not when we're encouraging children to take Ritalin to help them "focus" in school.

Humanity is precious and fleeting. I wish we would stop and take notice.

Freedom of Thought

2004-07-14T14:57:00.001-05:00

This is the basis for all of our other constitutionally guaranteed rights as American citizens. So, why does our federal governemtn draw the line at "illegal" drug use? Because it's dangerous? Automobiles are dangerous. Planes are dangerous. Guns are dangerous. Surgery is dangerous. Life is dangerous, actually, DEATH is dangerous, although unavoidable. Capitalism is dangerous... run out of money, and you're screwed! Alcohol is stupid (in my opinion). The point is, people should have the right to do what they will to their bodies. This includes the consumption of peyote for "religious purposes", and the use of mushrooms (also for "religious purposes"). Heck, even Christ turned water into wine, and that was for fun!

For more on the idea of "freedom of thought", click on the above link.

Pharmacotherapy- fighting Drugs with Drugs

2004-07-14T14:57:00.000-05:00

Click the above link to read the report at Cognitive Liberty.

I have a friend who knew someone with a heroine addiction. A doctor prescribe another drug to combat the effects of heroine addiction. The kid with the heroine addiction overdosed on the "prescription" drug and died. He died, not from the heroine, but from the "antidote" to heroine addiction. Ironic, isn't it?

The doctor who prescribed this drug failed to acknowledge to broader effects of addiction. His short sightedness cost the kid his life.

The point is, drugs are a problem in society because we've failed to acknowledge the neurological ROOTS of addiction. In short, everything about our world relative to "conscious experience" is determined through a cascade of chemical reactions in our brain. Everything can be addictive to some degree, which is why people in America buy too much, consume too much, and live an ever increasingly stressful lifestyle.

Our society, in it's complexity, promotes drug use, especially alcohol, cigarettes, and prescription drugs. These are they real gateway drugs, we need to de-criminalize certain illegal drugs, or we'll maintain a legal double standard which will ultimately ruin our society.

The War on Drugs needs to be re-examined under intense scrutiny. Until we in America do this, we'll support a tragic legal system which further deteriorates basic human rights.

The Box

2004-05-14T19:50:00.000-05:00

your mind is a box. you are trapped within it until the day you die. perhaps you'll "move on", perhaps your box will turn to ash, and your mind will vanish like wisps smoke in the air. but for now, you are alive.

your mind has a screen upon which you "see" the world before you. your eyes convert light into brainwaves, and your mind translates those signals into "reality". your mind filters away much of the data, and what you know to be "reality" is subconsciously determined by the experiential programming of your neural brain.

the world is what we make it.

we see only what we want to see.

how far out of the box do you want to look?