Ian Benouis's avatar

Neurotransmitter Discrimination or Only Get High on Your Own Supply

serotoninDMT

I have a very serious question for my fellow human beings.

Who on planet Earth can explain to me why the neurotransmitter serotonin (5-hydroxy tryptamine) is legal and the neurotransmitter DMT (N,N-Dimethyl tryptamine) is illegal and a Schedule I drug making every person on US soil guilty of possession and manufacture every single moment of their lives?

Seriously what is the problem? Is this hydroxy (O=H) privilege? Do we not like the extra methoxy (CH3) groups?

Is it a structure-activity relationship issue? Listen DMT it’s not that we don’t like your structure because we do we share the a lot of the same structure, it’s just we don’t like your activity, you’re so you know unpredictable and we really like predictability here at Serotonin Inc.

Well there you have it folks, it is fine allowing you to use your own 5-hydroxy tryptamine to alter your consciousness, but if try to you consume N,N-Dimethyl tryptamine you are breaking the law and the state has to stop you for your own protection because unpredictable things might happen to you and you might begin to question your culture and then what happens to law and order at that point.

I mean how can we keep this mass cultural hallucination going if too many people start opting out? The hallucination is not in the plants, it’s in the electromagnetic realities we have encapsulated ourselves in. Those are the real drugs your parents should have warned you about.

I know I warned my four kids. I taught them to get high on their own supply of neurotransmitters. We would go out for hours and bounce and play games on the trampoline in our back yard and get what now is correctly called an endocannabinoid high (rather than endorphin high). Then I told them that if they ever chose to take some plant or other substance that they would not be doing so to self-medicate a deficiency but rather to alter their consciousness in a desired way.

I can thank Finn McKenna for that last one when I met him in Palenque at Botanical Preservation Corps in 1996. He said that he believed all drug use was some form of self-medication. I’ve come to accept that. Then I’ve come to understand that everything is medicine. Then it becomes about choosing the best medicine for the dis ease. For that I will let nature be my guide.

if nature is illegal then freedom doesn’t exist

“emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but inner selves can free our minds”

with apologies to Bob Marley

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About Ian Benouis

Ian is a West Point graduate, former US Army officer, Blackhawk helicopter pilot and combat veteran. He is Patient Number One at the Mission Within which treats special operators with PTSD, TBI and addiction using iboga and toad (5-meo-dmt) in Mexico.  He is an advisor there, after being the General Counsel and spearheading the veteran healing program.  Ian has been helping wounded veterans for over 9 years. Ian has moderated numerous veteran’s panels including the MAPS Psychedelic Science conference in 2018 in Austin and the World Bufo Alvarius Congress in 2019 in Mexico City. He founded an ONAC church chapter which was later returned to the parent church.  He is a founder of a Santo Daime church which is the US chapter of a Brazilian government approved church and between himself and his law partner Greg Lake, have created over sixty entheogenic churches in the US. Ian participated in Operation Just Cause in the Republic of Panama.  This operation was the largest combat operation in US history focused directly on the War on Drugs and was the largest special operations deployment ever conducted. He was a pilot-in-command and his aviation brigade flew more night vision goggle hours than any unit in the military except for the Task Force 160 Special Operations which his unit was ultimately rolled up into when the 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord, California military base was shut down. Ian grew up in Hawaii in the 1970’s where cannabis and mushrooms were decriminalized and integrated into the culture.  He has been healing himself for over 30 years with sacred medicines, a spiritual practice, and being a student and practitioner of ethnobotany. Ian was a pharmaceutical representative for Pfizer after he got out of the Army witnessing firsthand the rise of the SSRI’s and synthetic opioids in the early 1990’s. He is a casualty of the drug war having been arrested for cannabis while in law school.  Ian is an intellectual property attorney who worked in the corporate world for over 20 years in the primary roles of VP of Sales and Marketing and General Counsel. He is a political activist in the cannabis and entheogenic medicine space nationally and locally in Texas.  Ian was previously the Chairman of the Board for a public policy foundation in Texas for over 7 years. Ian was featured in the Spike Jonze produced episode Stoned Vets on Weediquette the cannabis focused series on Viceland on HBO with a number of other veterans protesting the VA’s policy on medical cannabis and working to end the veteran suicide epidemic. In 2016 Ian organized a trip for six veterans with PTSD to Peru in May for a 10-day plant diet including ayahuasca and other plant medicines with three Shipibo trained shaman brothers.  Ian also took some of the same veterans to Mexico for treatment with iboga and 5-Meo-DMT.  This experience was captured on video and was released as a documentary in March 2017 entitled Soldiers of the Vine. He is member of the team that created the movie From Shock to Awe a feature-length documentary that chronicled the journeys of military veterans as they sought relief from PTSD with the help of ayahuasca and MDMA. Ian is a Co-Founder of the Church of the Sacred Synthesis which offers the sacrament psilomethoxin and he is the first human being to ingest it through bioassay.