Food of the Gods the substances that all through
the ages have helped is alter our awareness
our perception of reality.
Terrence Mckenna is a writer, a speaker and in
fact an activist, and what's your feeling when
I say drugs?
well drugs is a word which has polluted the
well of language, part of the reasons we have
a drug problem is because we don't have an
intelligent language to talk about substances,
plants psychedelic states of mind, sedative
states of mind states of amphetamine excitation
we can't make sense of the problem and the
opportunities operated offered by substances
unless we clean up our language drugs is a
word that's been used by governments to make
it impossible to think creatively about the
problem of substances and abuse and availability
and so forth and so on.
In the minds of the people the word drugs
which is used as healing medications and still
drug companies that make Tylenol are considered
very legitimate and so it's a kind of a paradox
isn't it drug means that which cures us and
the greatest social problem of the generation
so they're right there you see the schizophrenia
involved in thinking about drugs apparently
there are good drugs sanctioned by science
and medicine and bad drugs used by brown people
in strange rights and growing in unusual plants
and distant parts of the world this kind of
thinking because it's naive lead to social
problems and bad politics and bad social policy.
Your stance has been to at least look for
what you call those strange lands and strange
substances in strange places you have been,
you were originally a botanist, or you still
are.
Yes and from the time I was very young I was
fascinated with the idea of extremely dramatic
changes in Consciousness from which one recovers
after a few hours induced by plants and I
discovered through the writing of Aldous Huxley
and other people that this was a worldwide
religious and cultural phenomenon that my
own Catholic middle-class upbringing had completely
overlooked and denied and I've been fascinated
with it ever since you know it's a bit like
sexuality it's something which the calvinist
intellect would just prefer didn't exist but
in fact the phenomenon of Being Human Beings
in animal bodies with a relationship to Nature
makes it important for us to address these
Altered States Of Consciousness and the plants
the substances and the cultural institutions
that come into being around these things.
Your teachings in many books have been that
these substances have had a far greater influence
on culture and still have and will have than
most people would like to accept or like to
see
Yes, to my mind human history is the story
of one substance after another distorting
or transforming human values and society a
perfect example would be sugar most people
don't even think of sugar as a drug and yet
we may think cocaine distorted moral and political
values in Latin America but sugar brought
back slavery.
Slavery actually died with the Roman empire
nobody worked to agricultural products with
slaves in the Middle Ages it wasn't until
the early 1400s that the Portuguese began
producing sugar and the use of Jews and prisoners
and so then they started buying human beings
from African from Arab traders, and the pope
was in on the deal, everyone was on the deal,
I mean this is drug corruption of the central
Institutions of society on a massive scale.
But that has gone on until our days, today
we have alcohol, we have tobacco.
well, this is my very point that every society
chooses a small number of substances no matter
how toxic and enshrines them in its cultural
values then demonizes all other substances
and users and then persecutes and launches
witch hunts against those users whenever some
political pretext requires witch hunts and
persecution.
so it's an old game and it's been played in
many places
Hopefully part of the advancement of society
towards ideas of universal human rights and
that sort of thing it certainly must include
the idea of the universal human right to take
responsibility for and to alter your own state
of consciousness as you see fit I don't think
we can even pretend that we are on the edge
of a civilized dialogue until we grant that
people's minds like their bodies must be a
domain free from government control.
in American law, we have the notion of life
liberty and the pursuit of happiness if the
pursuit of happiness means anything it must
mean the right to use and experiment with
substances and plants.
do we need say more research or do we know
all we need to know about entheogens or hallucinogens?
No, no we need endless amounts of research
the fact that these things have been illegal
in most countries for 50 years, means there
is a huge lag in understanding the impact
of these things on human beings how many people
have taken MDMA? and yet MDMA has not been
thoroughly studied by science.
How many people have smoked DMT? the same
thing in a way by making these drugs illegal
we're setting ourselves up for a potential
catastrophe someday when some side effect
is overlooked because the drugs were not rationally
reviewed with an eye not toward keeping them
out of the hands of the public but with an
eye toward public safety and educating the
public and in safe use of these things the
state should not in the matter of drugs any
more than in the matter of sex act as the
secret agent for the agenda of the church
and that's what's happening people want to
stimulate themselves they want to explore
their consciousness they want to sedate themselves
who are we to stand in their way with a moral
ideology and the long heavy arm of the law
to interfere with that it distorts civilized
values that's that's the bottom line, it distorts
civilized values and political discourse.
Many people emphasise the bad effects of using,
I don't know LSD, DMT, do you think there
are positive effects in general and are there
positive effects that are yet to be discovered?
Well yes, i mean anyone who has actually been
around people using psychedelics they have
tremendous therapeutic potential, potential
to launch people into confrontations with
aspects of their personality or their history
that they are in denial of, the people who
hold these psychedelic substances have no
effication have very little actual personal
experience with them, it;'s the old story
of my mind is made up don't confuse me with
facts.
Would psychology be further ahead would you
have learned more via the way you and mind
works on itself and in interaction with others
if the research says on the use of LSD or
many many of these substances would have proceeded
in an orderly and we could call scientific
manner, way
yes i think its a great tradegy of 20th-century
science that the original excitement of exploring
consciousness and mental illness originally
generated by the discovery of LSD gave way
to establishment paranoiea and repression
of drug using populations The excitement in
psychology when LSD was first introduced was
like the excitement in the physics community
when the atom was smashed and everybody thought
well now we will understand mental illness,
schizophrenia, memory an so forth but instead
the government lost it's nerve because it
saw that these substances have a potential
for de-proggramming people to institutional
values and that was so terrifying that all
the promise for mental illness and creativty
studies was sacrificed to intitutional paranoia
about the fact that drugs might actualy cause
people to wake up to some of the abuses and
scams that were being run by late modernism
and capitalism.
Clear, clear, thank you.
