Today’s Thoughts . . . Oct. 19, 2013

Metascience is every bit as important as science.

The War On Consciousness – Graham Hancock
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKHMH4FfWrw

From 12:58 to the end is the best part
Partial transcription:

Winners and losers

Who benefits from this colossal stupidity and systematic wickedness?
And who loses? The beneficiaries are easy to spot.
First, the large and ever-expanding armed bureaucracies,
funded with large and ever-growing sums of public money to
suppress the use of drugs, have benefited enormously.

Everyone who works for them, including the PR people and
spin merchants who concoct the propaganda used to sell their
policies to us, including their subcontractors both public and
private, and including the (often privately run) prisons stuffed
to bursting point with their victims, are the beneficiaries of this
catastrophic failure on the part of our governments to think
laterally, generously, and creatively. Whether you are a Drug
Enforcement Administration agent or a prison guard, you naturally
have a deeply vested interest in maintaining the miserable
status quo, justified by the “War on Drugs,” that keeps you in
your job, that ensures your monthly paychecks continue to
come in, and that continuously expands your budgets.
The second main category of beneficiaries is—of course!—the
criminal gangs and cartels that the present misguided official
policies have empowered as the sole source of drugs in our societies.

Over the past 40-plus years they have earned countless
billions of dollars from the sale of illegal drugs which, had they
only been legal, would not have earned them a single penny.
Who are the losers? First and most directly those millions upon
millions of good, nonviolent people in our societies who have
been jailed or otherwise punished for the possession and use
of drugs.

And second (regardless of whether or not they use
illegal drugs themselves), virtually everyone else in our societies as well.
For the quality of life of all of us has been diminished by the growth of the
police state and by the murderous activities of the criminal gangs
enfranchised, and kept in business, by the blind and mindless
perpetuation of this failed and bankrupt “War on Drugs.”

So, in summary, the criminalization of drug use has brought no
positive effects, only negative ones, and it has not stopped or even
reduced the use of dangerous and harmful drugs. On the contrary,
we have been so little “saved from ourselves” by this phony war
that the use of almost all illegal drugs, far from decreasing, has
dramatically increased during the past 40 years.

Learning from tobacco

A contrary example, but one that is most instructive, concerns
the use of tobacco in our societies.
Tobacco has never been illegal; far from that, its use has been
actively encouraged by clever advertising campaigns mounted
by the multibillion-dollar tobacco industry. But the use of
tobacco does undoubtedly lead to great harms, both for the
It appears to be a natural human urge, as deep-rooted as our
urges for food, sex, and nurturing relationships, to seek out
and explore such “altered states of consciousness.”

Freedom of consciousness

What is Western civilization all about? What are its greatest
achievements and highest aspirations?

It’s my guess that most people’s replies to these questions
would touch—before all the other splendid achievements of
science, literature, technology, and the economy—on the nurture
and growth of freedom. Individual freedom. Including, but not
limited to freedom from the unruly power of monarchs,
freedom from the unwarranted intrusions of the
state and its agents into our personal lives, freedom from the
tyranny of the Church and its Inquisition, freedom from hunger
and want, freedom from slavery and servitude, freedom of
conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of thought and
speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to elect our own
leaders, freedom to be homosexual—and so on and so forth.

The list of freedoms we enjoy today that were not enjoyed by
our ancestors is indeed a long and impressive one. It is
therefore exceedingly strange that Western civilization in the
twenty-first century enjoys no real freedom of consciousness.

So it has to be highly significant that, far from encouraging
freedom of consciousness, our societies in fact violently deny
our right to sovereignty in this intensely personal area, and
have effectively outlawed all states of consciousness other
than those on a very narrowly defined and officially approved
list.

The “War on Drugs” has thus unexpectedly succeeded in
engineering a stark reversal of the true direction of Western
history by empowering faceless bureaucratic authorities to
send armed agents to break into our homes, arrest us, throw
us into prison, and deprive us of our income and reputation
simply because we wish to explore the sometimes radical,
though always temporary, alterations in our own
consciousness that drugs facilitate.

Other than being against arbitrary rules that the state has
imposed on us, personal drug use by adults is not a “crime” in
any true moral or ethical sense and usually takes place in the
privacy of our own homes, where it cannot possibly do any
harm to others. For some it is a simple lifestyle choice. For
The reason the anti-marijuana campaigns have failed is that
millions of users know from their own direct, long-term experience
that marijuana does not do them any great harm and
(with reference to the most recent anti-marijuana propaganda)
most definitely does not drive them mad.

others, particularly where the hallucinogens such as LSD,
psilocybin, and DMT are concerned, it is a means to make
contact with alternate realms and parallel dimensions, and
perhaps even with the divine. For some, drugs are an aid to creativity
and focussed mental effort. For others they are a means to
tune out for a while from everyday cares and worries. But in all
cases it seems probable that the drive to alter consciousness,
from which all drug use stems, has deep genetic roots.
Other adult lifestyle choices with deep genetic roots also used
to be violently persecuted by our societies.

A notable example is homosexuality, once punishable by death
or long periods of imprisonment, which is now entirely legal
between consenting adults—and fully recognized as being
none of the state’s business—in all Western cultures. (Although
approximately thirteen US states have “anti-sodomy” laws
outlawing homosexuality, these statutes have rarely been
enforced in recent years, and in 2003 the US Supreme Court
invalidated those laws.) The legalization of homosexuality lifted
a huge burden of human misery, secretiveness, paranoia, and
genuine fear from our societies, and at the same time not a
single one of the homophobic lobby’s fire-and-brimstone
predictions about the end of Western civilization came true.

Likewise, it was not so long ago that natural seers, mediums,
and healers who felt the calling to become “witches” were
burned at the stake for “crimes” that we
now look back on as harmless eccentricities at worst.
Perhaps it will be the same with drugs?

Perhaps in a century or two, if we have not
destroyed human civilization by then, our
descendants will look back with disgust on
the barbaric laws of our time that punished a minority so
harshly (with imprisonment, financial ruin, and worse) for
responsibly, quietly, and in the privacy of their own homes
seeking alterations in their own consciousness through the use
of drugs. Perhaps we will even end up looking back on the
persecution of drug users with the same sense of shame and
horror that we now view the persecution of gays and lesbians,
the burning of “witches,” and the imposition of slavery on
others.

Meanwhile it’s no accident that the “War on Drugs” has been
accompanied by an unprecedented expansion of
governmental power into the previously inviolable inner sanctum
of individual consciousness. On the contrary, it seems to me
that the state’s urge to power has all along been the real reason for this
“war”—not an honest desire on the part of the authorities to
rescue society and the individual from the harms caused by
drugs, but the thin of a wedge intended to legitimize increasing
bureaucratic control and intervention in almost every other
area of our lives as well.

This is the way freedom is hijacked—not all at once, out in the
open, but stealthily, little by little, behind closed doors, and with
our own agreement . How will we be able to resist when so
many of us have already willingly handed over the keys to our
own consciousness to the state and accepted without protest
that it is OK to be told what we may and may not do, what we
may and may not explore, even what we may and may not
experience , with this most precious, sapient, unique, and
individual part of ourselves? If we are willing to accept that
then we can be persuaded to accept anything.

Tor, once again, a great post. Do you have a website for it? I’d like to read it in depth. Thanks again.