Portable Shrines

“Well you know John, the drug war is just an excuse to throw minorities in prison.”

The above is something my uncle, who’s a successful corporate attorney, told me after I was arrested for possession of LSD over a decade ago. It was precisely this advice that persuaded my Dad, who at first vowed zero assistance to cough up the $3500 or so dollars it took to hire a fancy lawyer to talk the charges down to the misdemeanor “attempted possession of LSD”. If it wasn’t for this money, which is little more than a demonstration to the courts that you’re not dirt poor, I might have struggled to have continued access to things like gainful employment and the ability to vote in our society.

The entire process of being thrown in jail and jumping through the endless hoops of the legal system (not to mention being financially drained) left me lower than I’d ever been previously or have sank to since. In short, they had broken my psychologically, which is what the system is designed to do. But in the process I learned a few things. For one, most drug charges are little more than a shakedown. If you can buy your way out of them, you’re probably not going to serve any serious jail time. Secondly, despite what organizations like NORML might tell you, you don’t have any fucking rights in matters like these unless you’re wealthy. It was a blatant case of illegal search and seizure, the cop’s story made zero sense, but you know how much money it would have taken to get that shit in front of a jury? Yeah, more than I had or my Dad was willing to spend. So really it’s just the cop’s word against yours and who do you think the Judge is going to believe?

All of last week’s Halloween festivities left me in the mood to write a horror blog this month, and in my mind, there’s nothing more abjectly terrifying than the drug war. The loosening of the federal government’s persecution of medicinal marijuana and the economic collapse (not to mention having a minority president who has openly admitted to smoking pot) have lead to an increasing dialogue about the legalization of the marijuana. Which is a step in the right direction for sure, but it’s important to understand that the war on drugs is more than just a war on people, it’s also a war on our spiritual development as a species.

Of course everyone reading this is aware that we incarcerate more than twice as many people as China and that an increasingly percentage of those people are locked up on non violent drug charges (and minorities by the way) scary info. And of course we all know that we’re renting out an increasing amount of the prison labor force to private corporations, right? And of course we’re all aware that America’s unquenchable thirst for illegal inebriants has led to an ascending percentage of the third world’s populace living under the ruling arm of violent drug cartels? Right? Okay, I’m just going to assume I’m right about those things and move on because that stuffs been covered pretty heavily elsewhere. But before I do, I’m just going to flash up this little nugget of terror:

Now the reason I’m lingering on this is because I can’t count the number of pot smokers I’ve talked to that don’t seem to have any kind of awareness of this fact. Yeah, that’s right folks, despite the fact that public opinion is warming up to the wacky backy and  marijuana drug laws are slowly loosening, somehow we’re actually arresting more people for weed than ever. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more. Just another example of how we’ve become a plutocracy rather than a democracy. The people want one thing, the government does another because they don’t actually answer to us. Exactly the same kind of thing we’re currently seeing with health care reform.

But that stuff’s been covered a million fold. What hasn’t been covered nearly enough is how chemicals are the most efficient means of transforming consciousness and by transforming consciousness, reality itself. The drug war is not only a war on the underclass but a war on ideas, art, culture etc. – or as I like to call it, a vast international mind control apparatus. But John, what the fuck are you talking about? That sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory horseshit.

Well to answer that question, let’s take a moment to talk about what happens to me when I smoke pot. You see, I actually see the THC high as a quite spiritual one. And to say that I’m the first one to make this assertion would be the understatement of the century. In fact there are even established religions like rastafarianism that echo this sentiment. Even after only a few tokes, I see strange otherworldly psychic vistas unfold behind my eyes and hear music from heavenly realms cascading through my mind’s ears. One might consider this kind of thing spiritual. Granted this is an atypical response, but it isn’t unheard of by any stretch of the imagination.

Now when I take say, psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin things get even weirder. I have this experience where my entire subjective world is invaded by super sentient alien forms of intelligence from dimensions hitherto unknown. They flood my life with rapidly mutating imagery from their realm which as far as I can tell is comprised from pure art (if you have any interest in reading more about these experiences you can do that here). The best visual example I’ve ever found depicting the type of beings that I encounter in the grips of a hallucinogen frenzy is the painting Baphomet by Luke Brown:

Yeah, I see shit that looks roughly like that but even stranger somehow, everywhere, beaming bolts of psychic energy directly into the core of my eternal soul. It was the intensity of these visionary experiences that created the ontological shock necessary to break my mind free from the confines of our current scientific materialist paradigm and into the realms of magickal thought. Again, it’s an atypical reaction, but not entirely unheard of. In fact, the idea that psychedelic drugs can provide access to other forms of intelligence and realities as of yet indescribable is one that’s been around pretty much since the advent of human history.

Again, I know, this isn’t what happens to most people when they trip out on ‘shrooms. But under the influence of say, DMT, the likelihood of encountering shape shifting intergalactic emissaries is apparently fairly high. One of the greatest tragedies of the drug war is that psychedelic drugs, which were once seen as having enormous potential in scientific circles, became completely out of bounds for legitimate research when they were made illegal back in the 60’s. In fact, since then, only two major studies have managed to fight through the ridiculous layers of red tape and make it happen in the United States. That’s how hard it is. Although to look on the bright side, the general attitude does seem to be changing somewhat as of late. One of these studies was conducted by University of New Mexico professor Rick Strassman (which you can read about in this book) to investigate the effects of DMT on consciousness. To briefly summarize his research, the thing he found that most surprised him was the consistency of people’s reports of inter-dimensional contact with seemingly sentient alien beings. These often came in the form of cosmic jesters, hive mind insects, and weirdo reptilian gods.

And yet in a country that was supposedly founded on the concept of FREEDOM OF RELIGION, the substances that produce spiritual experiences such as these remain illegal. So let’s reflect on why that is exactly. When LSD first hit the scene, a less materialistic, racist, homophobic, violent, and yet more spiritual and sexually experimental counterculture began to emerge. The idea of an upturn among the amount of the populace resisting their expansionary agenda frightened the existing power structure and so they spent a fuckton of money spreading propaganda to infect the minds of Joe Sixpack with ideas that benefited their continued economic supremacy. As far as I can tell, this type of shit always works. In the end they got their way and LSD, along with psilocybin, DMT and a handful of other substances were banned to the supreme detriment of everyone.  But then they went even farther than that and infiltrated the counterculture with black ops designed to discredit their opinions and prevent them from spreading to the hoi polloi.

Now I’m not sure how you can argue that this isn’t mind control. Let’s think about the classic 60’s mantra of “better living through chemistry”. This never went out of style per se, it’s just been perverted beyond measure. Pharmaceutical companies are making more money than ever marketing Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibition pills (among other things) which, oh by the way, only work better than standard talk therapy in cases of severe depression. So basically yes, you should take drugs that help you fit into the hell society of financial exploitation that we’ve created. Take these and you won’t have to think about or confront your spiritual crisis. Did I mention that a lot of these drugs have: “certain sexual side effects”, namely, they suppress healthy sexual impulse in a lot of cases. I have a friend that was on Prozac for a while and went off because he quite legitimately couldn’t cum. This is a guy I’m talking about.

And it doesn’t end there. Somehow when the tragedy that was Michael Jackson finally ended a few months back, no one in the media bothered to turn it into a forum to discuss the fact that all the research, “even our own government’s, indicates that prescription drug abuse is skyrocketing out of control and is the hot new abuse trend among the youth of America.  The Drug companies get kick backs on all of that. So who’s the government arresting there?

No one of course, because of high paid lobbyists. In fact, the pharmaceutical companies could have prevented the meth epidemic but they stepped in and said: No, that’s bad for our profit margin. Yep, they make buck on most of the meth that’s flying around as well. And therein lies the most frightening aspect of all in regards to drug war: We’re not fighting one. We’re just controlling the populace for the means of the upper class by regulating the chemicals we’re “allowed” to use to alter our consciousness.  “cia_drug_trafficking” The CIA has been involved with the drug trade for decades. In a nutshell, they use it to funnel money into fun things like the military/prison industrial complex. Think about it, have you ever had a serious problem finding illegal drugs in America. And what about drug prices? Yeah, they’ve remained pretty much constant ever since I’ve been taking them, despite vast inflation in most other sectors of our economy.

I used to know a guy that referred to it as the military/prison/extraterrestrial industrial complex (this is but one of about a billion links to this kind of thing).  And that’s my supremely horrifying thought for the season. That forces we don’t understand, angelic, demonic, extra terrestrial, or inner dimensional as they might be, exist and have been influencing our culture, possibly exploiting us since the advent of human history.
Now I don’t consider myself a conspiracy theorist per se, mainly because I agree with the counter argument that people just don’t strike me as smart enough to pull off a lot off the things we want to attribute to them. But as a student of and practitioner of magick, I’m well aware that the spiritual world exists and the physical world is a reflection of it to a certain extent. The world outside is born from the universe within. So yes, our world is in fact being influenced by forces we can’t comprehend entirely. I’m not even going to try and pretend I know who these forces are, or what their agenda is, although I have my theories. Maybe the drug war actually has something to do with warring factions in the heavens. The ones who work to exploit us and those who wish to free our cosmic potential like the self transforming machine elves of the DMT flash. It’s all speculation, but I will say this: the stupidity and spiritual ignorance of mankind, especially as we enter a new age of information, certainly seems conspiratorial.