Your article about the cicadas was simultaneously fascinating and depressing. Am I the only one who finds it sad that the DEA has to be consulted by a scientist before he or she can even investigate certain kinds of mushrooms and their byproducts? The fungi in question are grown by Mother Nature after all, not by Pablo Escobar: and whence does the government draw its moral right to criminalize the freely offered bounty of Mother Nature?
The government's interference in mycology must steer a lot of scientists away from that field. What scientist would want the government looking over their back on every mushroom-hunting foray? I can't help but feel, therefore, that many of those who remain in the field are complacent about government interference in science and may actually take pride in being DEA collaborators first and mushroom hunters second.
Dr. Kasson himself seems to be in thrall to the Drug War based on his use of terminology. He twice refers to mushrooms as "narcotics," when from a scientific standpoint, this is false. Psilocybin is a psychedelic, not a soporific agent. But in our society, "narcotic" is a drug-war pejorative, and so Kasson's use of the term suggests an unconscious desire to libel those substances of which the DEA does not approve, thereby making a patriotic virtue out of a government-imposed necessity.
As strange as the cicada story sounds, Kasson would not be so flummoxed by it had he read the book by Giorgio Samorini entitled "Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness." That's a politically incorrect book par excellence, because it demonstrates that the desire to alter consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the animal kingdom, not some evil impulse limited to 20th-century hippies and 21st-century ravers. (As Samorini points out: moths get drunk on the nectar of the datura flower, caribou trip on fly-agaric mushrooms, and cows have such a penchant for locoweed that it caused an agricultural crisis in Kansas in 1883.)
English Biologist JBS Haldane once said (a la Werner Heisenberg's comments about the universe): "Nature is not only odder than we think, but odder than we CAN think." This is no doubt especially true for those who expect the animal kingdom to respect our modern drug-war sensibilities about psychoactive plants.
Author's Follow-up: September 5, 2022
Mycologists are not the only Drug War collaborators, of course. The government censorship of modern science continues unabated as magazines like Science and Science News continue to reckon without the Drug War. How do they reckon without the Drug War? By continuing to publish article after article on topics where both the author's assumptions and conclusions would have been very different indeed if we lived in a world where psychoactive medicines were legal. In the popular press as well, we continue to be bombarded with self-help books that promise all the results that psychoactive medicine could help us supply almost overnight -- but in which the author pretends that psychoactive medicines simply do not exist. If Americans were honest with themselves, all such articles and books would be prefaced with a disclaimer that America is a Drug War republic and that therefore the authors have refused to even contemplate the role that psychoactive medicines might have played in connection with the topics about which the authors write.
This is another reason for the Drug War's longevity: the fact that Americans pretend that such a war does not exist. They believe that they can live in a free country while pretending that Mother Nature's godsend plant medicines do not exist. But science cannot really continue as normal when scientists dogmatically ignore the facts of life, i.e., the natural baseline from which they write. They thus live in an imaginary world, one that skews all their scientific conclusions in favor of materialism and Christian Science -- blissfully unaware that they are censored by their government every bit as much as Galileo was censored by the church in the 17th century.
The Links Police
Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, because the Drug War gives me carte blanche to be a noxious busybody. But, no, I actually stopped you this time to remind you of another essay or two related to the topic of the Drug War's censorship of science in so-called free America. (Oh, and while I'm at it: your left rear tail light is out as well.)
Two of the best documentaries about fungi ("Fantastic Fungi" and "The Kingdom") do not even mention the War on Drugs, even though no job is more explicitly censored by drug law than the field of mycology, in that the mycologist is tacitly forbidden to investigate substances like psilocybin (as the above article demonstrates) -- to the contrary, they are expected to "report" those shrooms to drug authorities. But mycologists are in good company when ignoring the way that they are censored by the Drug War: the entire scientific world is ignoring this fact. And so we see nothing but pablum appearing in book form on topics like depression and treating Alzheimer's. Why? Because the authors of such books have censored their own work to ignore the thousands of psychoactive substances that might change our prognosis for such conditions for the better. And so Drug War censorship is far worse than the Church's censorship of Galileo, for at least Galileo realized that he was censored and why, whereas modern academics pretend that they are living in a free world and so they are researching modern problems from a natural baseline, whereas they are really starting their research with the Drug Warrior premise that psychoactive medicines are bad and most be ignored when it comes to scientific research.
Indeed, substance demonization has become so ingrained in American culture that many scientists will tell you that it's wrong even to write an objective book about drugs like coca and opium for fear that it will cause drug abuse. This view is based on the idea that human beings are babies when it comes to psychoactive substances, that they couldn't be helped by knowledge and so must be taught to fear the politically defined substances called "drugs" -- rather than learning enough to begin asking inconvenient questions about them. To think that those academics actually believe that ignorance is a good thing! How low science has sunk under the War on Drugs. No wonder we have overdoses and drug misuse-- because the Drug War is all about keeping Americans ignorant about the objective facts about psychoactive substances. This ignorance becomes extra deadly when prohibition incentivizes profiteers to sell the most addictive substances possible to their least educated clientele. Rather than recognizing the nightmare that this drug-war ignorance is causing, Drug Warriors point to all these negative outcomes and tell us triumphantly that: "See? Drugs are just horrible, aren't they?" Wrong. It's like an arsonist coming back to the scene of a fire and shouting: "See? Isn't fire horrible?" even though he himself had started the conflagration!
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
Most psychoactive substance use can be judged as recreational OR medicinal OR both. The judgements are not just determined by the circumstances of use, either, but also by the biases of those doing the judging.
The FDA approves of shock therapy and the psychiatric pill mill, but they cannot see the benefits in MDMA, a drug that brought peace, love and understanding to the dance floor in 1990s Britain.
We need a few brave folk to "act up" by shouting "It's the drug war!" whenever folks are discussing Mexican violence or inner city shootings. The media treat both topics as if the violence is inexplicable! We can't learn from mistakes if we're in denial.
My consciousness, my choice.
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.
"Abuse" is a funny term because it implies that there's a right way to use "drugs," which is something that the drug warriors deny. To the contrary, they make the anti-scientific claim that "drugs" are not good for anybody for any reason at any dose.
Psychedelic retreats tell us how scientific they are. But science is the problem. Science today insists that we ignore all obvious benefits of drugs. It's even illegal to suggest that psilocybin has health benefits: that's "unproven" according to the Dr. Spocks of science.
What I want to know is, who sold Christopher Reeves that horse that he fell off of? Who was peddling that junk?!
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
If media were truly free in America, you'd see documentaries about people who use drugs safely, something that's completely unimaginable in the age of the drug war.
Most psychoactive substance use can be judged as recreational OR medicinal OR both. The judgements are not just determined by the circumstances of use, either, but also by the biases of those doing the judging.