A 1988 court ruling gave Native Americans the right to use peyote in worship. Native Americans only, mind, not Caucasians, nor African-Americans, nor Hispanics, nor Jews. Why not? (Wait for it, folks...) Because these latter groups do not have a history of religious peyote use.
Huh? Elizabeth, I'm comin' to join ya!
Only imagine: a court telling you that you cannot engage in a religious practice because your ancestors never found it necessary to do so. Pope Leo X should have rolled out a papal bull to that effect back in 1521 and he could have forestalled the entire Reformation. "Sorry, Martin Luther, but your descendants have no history of being saved by grace, so you must continue to find your salvation in DEEDS just like the rest of us, thank you very much."
The Conquistadores certainly never required that the Aztecs demonstrate a family history of Christian worship before welcoming them into the faith. To the contrary, the Spanish warriors downright insisted on the heathens becoming Christian or else.
This, of course, is all par for the tyrannical course.
The surprising part of this story is that many Native Americans agree with the judicial ruling mentioned above (though not necessarily with the "reasoning" behind it), contending that non-native Americans do not have the correct mind set to use peyote with due reverence.
Now, I loathe both the court ruling and the racial prejudice that informs it, and yet the Native Americans in question have a valid and a very telling point.
Non-native Americans are like little children when it comes to "drugs." They have been taught to consider the use of Mother Nature's psychoactive medicines as prima facie evidence of hedonism and "getting high." And so when they see a Native American using a "drug" for religious purposes, the non-native is kind of like a little kid in an art museum pointing at the statue of David and saying: "Aww, he's nekkid, dude!" - only in our case, the childish little kid is saying: "Aww! He's getting high, dude!! Tee-hee-hee!"
I encounter this childish attitude when a fellow Caucasian finds out inadvertently that I'm publishing a website called "Abolish the DEA dot com." They usually respond in a kind of awed and conspiratorial voice, as if to tell me: "Oh, yeah, dude, drugs! You're all about partying hearty and gettin' it on! I gotcha! Wink, wink, wink!"
And I'm thinking to myself: "No, dude. I am all about the restoration of natural law, the re-legalization 1 of plants, and the overthrow of America's State Religion, i.e. Christian Science."
But America is under the spell of Drug War propaganda which insists that Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines can only be used for "getting high." And that mindset is constantly re-enforced by books, magazines, news, TV shows 2 , and movies 34 , all of which studiously ban the positive depiction of illegal "drug use" and simply remove from the history books any references to, say, Freud's use of cocaine 567 , or Benjamin Franklin's use of opium , or Plato's use of psychedelics in the Eleusinian Mysteries8. (Of course, JFK's use of "speed," as Monty Python would put it, is "right out.")
This propaganda of omission has turned Americans into little children with respect to psychoactive substances, and in two ways:
First, by convincing us that we could never possibly learn to use such substances wisely, that we are children for life as far as that is concerned; and second, by convincing us that banned psychoactive substances can only be used for naughty purposes.
If the latter proposition is true, then we non-natives can, indeed, only sit back and snicker at the profound ceremonies of the First Americans, thinking to ourselves, "Religion, indeed! Ha ha!"
In short, we are dirty minded, just like the child tittering foolishly in front of Michelangelo's masterpiece.
Given this state of affairs, one can almost say that the judicial ruling mentioned above was actually right, though certainly not for the absurd reasons that were adduced by the blatantly racist judge in the case. Non-natives cannot be allowed to use peyote in religious ceremonies. Why not? Because they are simply too immature to do so reverently. Drug War propaganda has seen to that.
Of course, there's an even bigger threat to the respectful use of sacred substances such as peyote, and that is capitalism 9 itself. If non-natives can use peyote, then the substance could presumably be marketed freely, in which case irreverent advertising would not be far behind. But that's a topic for another essay.
Author's Follow-up: October 29, 2024
This situation is one of endless absurdities that naturally result when we outlaw Mother Nature. We simply cannot take that absurd step without absurd consequences following. The answer to this situation, one that respects both individual freedom and tribal rights, is to re-legalize Mother Nature while prohibiting commercial exploitation of sacred medicines - prohibiting their exploitation but NOT their use. For let's be freedom-loving adults with common sense for a moment: It is palpably ABSURD for the government to outlaw Mother Nature -- and a clear violation of our right to the pursuit of happiness -- and a violation of everything that the opium 10 -loving Thomas Jefferson stood for in writing the Declaration of Independence. Imagine, the silly and idiotic DEA stomping onto Monticello 11 in 1987 and confiscating the founding father's poppy plants. Is it not just childish madness and the height of injustice? Where in the Bible are we told that God created plant and fungi for governments? It's mad and blasphemous to think so, and yet most Drug Warriors I've known claim to be devout Christians. It's all just insanity -- and till it ends, we will run into crazy consequences like the above, with government telling us that we can only belong to religions that were practiced by our forebears! Madness, madness, madness!
Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.
Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks. People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took your prohibition to accomplish that! Stop arresting, start teaching safe use!
America never ended prohibition. It just redirected prohibition from alcohol to all of alcohol's competitors.
Guess who's in charge of protecting us from AI? Chuck Schumer! The same guy who protected us from drugs -- by turning America into a prison camp full of minorities and so handing two presidential elections to Donald Trump.
For those who want to understand what's going on with the drug war from a philosophical point of view, I recommend chapter six of "Eugenics and Other Evils" by GK Chesterton.
So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.
Before anyone receives shock therapy -- or the right to assisted suicide -- they should have the option to start using opium or cocaine daily -- in fact, any drug that makes them feel that life is worth living again.
A company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.
"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau
I could tell my psychiatrist EXACTLY what would "cure" my depression, even without getting addicted, but everything involved is illegal. It has to be. Otherwise I would have no need of the psychiatrist.
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