If you look at the various liberation movements of the 20th century -- the civil rights movement, for example, or the gay rights movement -- you find that at some point the victimized group stood up and asserted itself. In the 1960s there were Black Power rallies, where H. Rap Brown and Stokeley Carmichael led the crowd in chants of Black is Beautiful. In the 1980s and 90s there were Gay Pride marches. We too have to stand up in public and assert ourselves. We have to say We're stoned and we're proud.
Giving credit where credit is due, it was Terence McKenna who said we should say "I'm stoned and I'm proud." Terence and I are not friends, so it is not a pleasant duty to give him credit. But it was his idea. He said that at a meeting in Ojai in 1989. [Strangely enough, after writing this I went to his web site and found that he died today, April 3, 2000.]
But the thing is, almost no one is willing to stand up in public and say "I'm stoned and I'm proud."
In the fall of 1988, I went to Terence's Timewave Zero seminar at Esalen. That was when it first occurred to me -- there is no loyalty here, either to the drugs themselves or to the other people who use them. At the time I was thinking of psychedelics, but this also applies to pot.
With rare exceptions, drug users don't back each other up. Years ago, when I was living in Las Vegas, a friend of mine, a dealer, told me that another dealer had been busted. I said "Why don't we bail him out? How much would it cost?" My friend said "Five hundred dollars would get him out." I said, "Well, I'll kick in a hundred. Let's get some people together and do it." He looked at me as if I were crazy. I didn't even know the guy who was in jail, he was just a friend of a friend, but in my naiveté (I was younger then) I thought we were soldiers in the same cause and should support each other. No, it doesn't work that way, not with drugs.
I saw a very pathetic letter in High Times from an acid dealer who was serving a 20-year prison sentence. He said none of his customers ever wrote to him.
Drugs are illegal because they don't generate a shield around themselves. It's like the pimp said to Richard Gere in American Gigolo: "I framed you because you were frameable." The community of drug users is attackable, so we are attacked.
The solution is to form a community that defends itself. But there is no obvious way to do this.
Why are we attackable? Some groups do back each other up. Sometimes people make astonishing sacrifices for their comrades. But for some reason, this doesn't happen with drug users.
The people who attended Terence McKenna's meeting weren't casual drug users. Everybody there understood psychedelics to be part of some kind of spiritual quest. Nevertheless, we didn't bond together into a church. Why?
Part of the problem was that I thought Terence's belief system was crazy. I don't believe in Timewave Zero any more than I believe in the daily horoscope. I don't even take it seriously. December 21, 2012 is going to be even more of a nonevent than January 1, 2000. But all religions have absurd beliefs. That doesn't stop people from joining them and supporting them.
Some of the other people at the seminar did buy into Terence's belief system. Why didn't they form themselves into a church?
People are loyal to their friends, up to a point. They are loyal to their country, and to their religion, to the point of death (sometimes). But when a plant shows them visions of God, they are not loyal to the plant, nor to the experience itself, nor to the other people who do the same thing they do.
the 915 movement - We are all supposed to support the American agenda, i.e. the attempt to create a drug-free society and an integrated society. There must be a few who think, as I do, that the American agenda is monstrous. It's the exact opposite of what we should be doing.
But there is nothing we can do about it, because there is no loyalty among drug users. That's the reason for this page.
My experience of pot:
marijuana as an intelligence enhancer
Prospects for the legalization of marijuana
Cannabis in the Old and New Testaments