“THEN GOD SAID, I GIVE YOU EVERY SEED-BEARING PLANT ON THE FACE OF THE WHOLE EARTH, AND EVERY TREE THAT HAS FRUIT IN IT.” GENESIS 1:29-30
Good Friday, 1962, fell on April 20. That morning, 20 university theology students — all men — delivered themselves into the hands of Boston University researchers in the basement of Marsh Chapel. Each participant was handed a gelatin capsule and a glass of juice.
Ten of the students in the room would wash down a hefty dose of naicin — an over the counter B-vitamin gauranteed to evoke a hot flush, or at least a tingling sensation on the skin.
The other ten were each handed a capsule containing 30 mg of psilocybin — a psychoactive drug found in psilocybin mushrooms.
Almost all the Divinity students who ingested the psilocybin reported a significant increase in their perception of God or Spirit. The control group showed no such results. The study therefore offered empirical evidence for the causal connection between entheogenic substances and spirituality.
That was almost 50 years ago — just as modern Prohibition was getting underway. Not long after that the federal government shut down further research along these lines for decades to follow.
Now flash forward to this 2006 John Hopkins University press release:
Using unusually rigorous scientific conditions and measures, Johns Hopkins researchers have shown that the active agent in sacred mushrooms can induce mystical/spiritual experiences descriptively identical to spontaneous ones people have reported for centuries.
As the electorate has changed over time, the baby boomers — the first post-industrial generation to be widely introduced to entheogens like Cannabis — have begun to populate the voting booths and power positions formerly occupied by another generation.
Even without the new academic research, it is easy to demonstrate anecdotally that entheogens had widespread religious, spiritual and mystical uses in pre-industrial societies. It is likewise reasonable to assume that human societies have used entheogens for tens of thousands of years.
Certainly nature has selected our neurological systems to be receptive to Cannabinoids:
Cannabinoid receptors are one of the most numerously occurring G-protein linking receptors in the brain. (wiki).
As a religious practitioner, I chose to believe this is not an accident, but a measurable anthropic coincidence.
The use of entheogenic medicines by qualified practitioners is an age-old and distinctly human inheritance that no Government can legitimately outlaw.
In this matter I invoke the Harm Principle, wherein law enforcement has no prevailing interest in arresting qualified practitioners who grow and use Cannabis for private entheogenic purposes.
The Prohibitionist is further burdened by the fact that the personal domestication of the Cannabis plant is itself a wholesome and healing activity — much less one protected by the First Amendment.
An anthropologist or behavioral psychologist would admit that the reward of getting high is itself a motivator. That is, to receive the reward, the Cannabis religious practitioner must plan, plant, tend, harvest, and prepare the crop in an ordered sequence over an extended period of time.
Cannabis husbandry is an empowering, positively-reinforcing and spiritually productive human activity; it is precisely what men have been doing since before the dawn of civilization. Over thousands of years of prehistory, agriculture was THE signature feature of the human race. As a species and as individuals, we are behaviorally pre-disposed to engage in some form of domestic agriculture or related enterprise.
But successful husbandry of the Cannabis plant for entheological purposes requires careful nurturing over time. A person must learn to nurture the plant before they can get the psychological reward of getting “high”. (Otherwise, they are simply growing hemp — a valuable domestic biomass resource in its own right, but not suitable as a entheogenic Sacrament.)
Thus the planning, planting, tending, and harvesting of a Cannabis plant at home is an explicitly existentialist act if you assume that “getting high” is a spiritual experience — which it is.
Over the 6-month authorship of his Marijuana garden, an urban grower is given a lesson in the procession of life. In this way God speaks symbolically through nature, leading by example, and practically suggesting a course of action: “Nurture the plant, nurture each other, nurture the world.”
Unfortunately, in the postmodern world, men have become increasingly disassociated from their original anthropic profile. We used to be hunters, or planters, or warriors, or medicine men, or shaman; it’s only recently have we’ve been turned into a paler version of Thomas Anderson from The Matrix…
It is time for Neo to wake up. The war on drugs is a naked failure. We are all prisoners of its effects. It is time to end prohibition. A plant must be released from dumb bondage.
Legalize it, tax it, regulate it, and get over it.
Mike LaSalle is the publisher of MensNewsDaily.com
________________________________________
Reference:
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
Walter Norman Pahnke, Drugs and Mysticism: An Analysis of the Relationship between Psychedelic Drugs and Mystical Consciousness, Ph.D. thesis at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (June 1963).
Rick Doblin, “Pahnke’s ‘Good Friday Experiment’: A Long-Term Follow-Up and Methodological Critique”, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1991), pp. 1-28.
R. R. Griffiths, W. A. Richards, U. McCann and R. Jesse, “Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance”, Psychopharmacology, Vol. 187, No. 3 (August 2006), pp. 268-283, doi:10.1007/s00213-006-0457-5.
R. R. Griffiths, W. A. Richards, M. W. Johnson, U. D. McCann and R. Jesse, “Mystical-type experiences occasioned by psilocybin mediate the attribution of personal meaning and spiritual significance 14 months later”, Journal of Psychopharmacology, Vol. 22, No. 6 (August 2008), pp. 621-632, doi:10.1177/0269881108094300.
