Taking Down the Drug War

The holidays brought a slight twinkle of hope to the scourge that is America’s 100-year drug war. No, the ex-hippies, now that they’re in charge haven’t reverted back to their peace-loving consciousness-expanding selves. It’s a money issue. The ridiculously named Department of Justice can’t, for the time being, make payments under the “equitable-sharing” asset forfeiture program, due to budget cuts.

The war on drugs has turned into policing for profit by giving police the option of prosecuting asset forfeiture cases under federal instead of state law. “Federal forfeiture policies are more permissive than many state policies, allowing police to keep up to 80 percent of assets they seize — even if the people they took from are never charged with a crime,” the Washington Post reported a couple days before Christmas.

Of course, law enforcement was not happy with the suspension and fired off a letter to the President and his Attorney General, squealing, “This shortsighted decision by Congress will have a significant and immediate impact on the ability of law enforcement agencies throughout the nation to protect their communities and provide their citizens with the services they expect and deserve.”  

We don’t hear much about turning on, tuning in, and dropping out these days. However, there was a time when acid was dropped by the rich and powerful. America had a chance to harness the power of mind-expanding drugs in the 60’s when a few wives on Capitol Hill were turning on with the idea an expanded mind is a peaceful one. In Mary’s Mosaic, Peter Janney tells the story of how John F. Kennedy paramour Mary Pinchot Meyer introduced JFK to LSD who wanted to explore the use of drugs for promoting world peace.

Of course these days continuous Drug War propaganda has the booboisie scared to death of psychedelics. For instance, this Graham Hancock Ted Talk was banned.  Suprynowicz offers a number of long quotes from Terence McKenna and others on the freedom of conscious, including this from Thomas Szasz’s The Second Sin, If you talk to god, “that’s prayer. If God talks to you, that’s schizophrenia.”

Upon sentencing, Reverend Annesley isn’t worried about rotting in jail, but instead is relishing the opportunity to start a revolution. And with the use of the mind-expanding sacraments and some electronic wizardry his followers push back with the only thing the state understands, violence. Suprynowicz knows his weaponry and describes what it can do with enthusiastic detail, whether the targets are Pterodactyls or arrogant judges and cops.

Hancock makes the point that we enjoy numerous freedoms denied our ancestors, making it “exceedingly strange that Western civilization in the twenty-first century enjoys no real freedom of consciousness.”

As he always does, Suprynowicz, in The Miskatonic Manuscript, takes the reader on a journey that challenges our sensibilities and forces us to think, and decide, are we willing to fight for total freedom?

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