Category: Opiates

Yeah, here I am today. I’m a veteran working to share this kind of healing with other people, and am really honored and blessed to be you know, working the rest of you in this movement to get these plants resacralized, and I’ll just say the last thing is that … And I experienced this under Ayahuasca is that I came to the understanding that veterans are the moral conscience for this country because we go and exercise the politicians’ will, and are the instruments, deliverers, and witnesses of these horrible things that you know, no human being should experience, and then we have to come back and reintegrate, and there’s no real plan, or way that’s currently set up to do that.

I’ve seen that veterans are going to be the ones that get to prove this model to show how we can turn ourselves from warriors that are killing machines into warriors that are loving machines that can actually beat our own swords in to plowshares, and that’s what I see for veterans, and that’s what I’m committed to.

I guess this my official coming out party. It’s my 15 minute Forrest Gump moment as part of the Psymposia’s Drug War Stories – Catharsis on the Mall: A Vigil for Healing the Drug War. This was part of the Drug Policy Reform Conference last November 20th in Washington, DC.

Horizons are apparent boundaries that constantly shift and eventually disappear entirely through an enlightening vantage point. What the sacred visionary plants do is they show the culturally conditioned boundaries that we have constructed to be pretty flimsy, arbitrary, manipulated and as always sold to the highest bidder. It is a mass consensual hallucination that if not maintained with sufficient attention and participation falls apart like a stock market crash or a bank run. This is the reason that corporations and governments are afraid of the teacher plant. It is the red pill. Once you take it you can still go back to the Matrix, but you can not ever unsee the Truth that you saw while under the effects of the medicine.

I’m sharing this because I initially wrote it over 20 years ago and it still a useful indictment of our failed War on Drugs today.

The Entheogen Review, Summer Solstice, 1995

The following essay first appeared in the March 13, 1995 issue of Legalese, the student publication of the University of Houston Law Center. It also ran in the University of Houston student publication the Daily Cougar. The author has generously made it available to the public — it may be photocopied and sent to officials and policy-makers concerned with decisions related to The War on Drugs.