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.

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The Following is an excerpt from the book “Entrails of the Multiverse” by Seattle writer John Gillanders of the band Black Science. There will be more to come…Enjoy and Expand Your Mind…

In his ground breaking and extremely controversial research on supposed Alien Abductees, Harvard professor John E. Mack coined the phrase “ontological shock” to describe the nature of how these experiences can affect a person’s view towards the universe. In a nutshell, most people are brought up to think about their own existence in a particular way and yet certain things can happen that suddenly change that view radically and uncontrollably. He uses the word shock to emphasize how wholly unpleasant these experiences can be to accept. It isn’t always easy to completely dismiss decades upon decades of societal programming in favor of a new, widely unpopular belief structure.

It can be even harder to come to terms with the fact that the world in which you once conveniently existed now thinks that you’re functionally insane. Imagine waking up one day only to realize that nearly everyone on Earth, going about their tedious daily routines, were wrong. All the dominant religions that people put so much faith and energy into were grossly off the mark. Feelings of overwhelming frustration and confusion would inevitably set in, most likely followed by anger and alienation.

While I can’t even come close to claiming that I’ve been abducted by hyper-intelligent trans-dimensional space-faring beings, I can say that I have experienced this ontological shock that Mr. Mack refers to and, oddly enough, done so by my own volition.

I remember the night well. I later began to refer to it as the night my innocence was slaughtered. I was staying in a friend’s dorm room at San Francisco State University. A couple of friends and I were in town for the night lured by the promise of ingesting psychedelic mushrooms for the fist time. Now, up to that point the only illicit substance any of us had ever consumed was marijuana so we were anxious for a new kick–not knowing at all what we were getting ourselves into.

We ate the disgustingly flavored ovoid capsules and elongated stems, masking the flavor with peanut butter and pretzels. They went down okay and we began the mile or so long trek to the nearest beach. On the way down we were kind of smiling off handedly–looking at each other nervously wondering when and if anything significant would happen. We even made somewhat disappointed comments as to how it didn’t seem much different than getting stoned.

Then, as if by magick, the second we hit the beach everything changed. The other world invaded. We all became lost between dimensions. The next few hours were kind of a blur. We ranted and laughed at one another incoherently. When I say incoherently I mean that quite literally. I honestly don’t think that any of the words spoken over the next several hours meant anything at all in a conventional sense, and yet they all seemed perfectly intelligible at the time.

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