Are the dominators getting jittery? I certainly hope so. Whatever, this is just one gloss that can be put on recent events at Bouncing Bear Botanicals, which have been surreal even by the normally bizarre standards of mainstream society.
On Feb 4th 2010, the FDA (Food and Drugs people) raided the warehouses of BBB in Kansas, TSA (Totalitarian States of America). With guns drawn and handcuffs ready, they arrested a number of people, including owner Jonathan Sloan. They also seized various items, including a smoking blend called K2 (still legal at the time), miscellaneous seeds, cacti and other plant materials. Plus, er, a bunch of toads.
Various charges have since been levelled, including unlawful cultivation or distribution of controlled substances, including mescaline, DMT, LSA, possession of 'drug paraphernalia' such as plastic jugs. And the Colorado River Toads. Not to mention the removal of $900,000 (I think this is the amount, a degree of confusion exists in the various reports), so that it will be difficult for Mr. Sloan to get proper legal representation. They do that kind of thing in the TSA. Nice place.
Which is all very well, apart from the fact that, as far as I and anybody else can make out, BBB has done nothing illegal whatsoever. A look at BBB's website reveals it to be a vendor of a wide variety of plants, herbs, and natural incense (though, since the raid, the variety has become rather more limited: 'out of stock' denotes the removed materials). Among the products seized were a number that could conceivably be used for psychoactive purposes. The law, as I understand it, is clear, albeit strange, in the TSA, much as it is in the UK. To have in ones possession fresh or dried peyote, for example, or morning glory seeds, or plant material of the sort used in making ayahuasca, a psychedelic brew used for centuries, if not millenia, by Amazonian shamans, is as legal as growing tulips. If, however, you process these materials, and the cops find you with pure mescaline, DMT, or whatever - wham, bang, that's very naughty, sir, class A drug (as they are termed in the UK), off to jail with you, possibly for a very long time.
So, unless Mr. Sloan had a secret processing lab tucked away in a back room, which is highly unlikely, all the charges against him appear to be completely false, and make a mockery of the entire legal system.
The most likely explanation, it would seem to me, is totalitarian complex fear tactics. 'Listen, little boy. Don't get ideas beyond your station. We don't take kindly to the likes of you. So just be careful how you go, and shut the fuck up.' It's a message to all who dare to make available mind-altering plants and products to the wider population. We don't like you or your consciousness-expanding games. It's not part of our scheme.
The BB bust is reminiscent of what happened to Sasha Shulgin, legendary psychedelic research chemist and all-round good egg, in 1994, as recounted in the classic tome 'Tihkal'. Bullying tactics, including the senseless and unnecessary trampling of his beloved peyote cacti, offered years before as a treasured gift by a Native American chief.
For some time it has been clear to me that dominator culture has something special against psychedelics, or entheogens ('god- or spirit-facilitating') as they are often termed nowadays, that has nothing to do with public health or safety. Despite what periodic media hysteria would like people to believe, psychedelics, if used in the right circumstances and with the respect they deserve, rank pretty low in the dangerous drug stakes. People don't drop dead from ingesting LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, salvia divinorum, or the rest. They might feel strange and disoriented. They may meet God, or experience unity with the rest of the cosmos. They may sense that the world is alive, imbued with spirit. They could find the experience a scary ordeal, and vow never to repeat it. But they won't die.
In the UK, the government's response to the report of the Advisory Commission on Misuse of Drugs, which culminated in the sacking of Professor Nutt in farcical circumstances, destroyed any final shreds of credibility in UK drug policy. It was stripped bare, to reveal what it truly is: an instrument of mind control. When Nutt and his colleagues presented the facts, demonstrating that, though still capable of causing harm, LSD and ecstasy were statistically less dangerous than the state-sanctioned drugs of alcohol and tobacco, this was not what the control system puppets wanted to hear. There are, apparently, 'political' and 'cultural' factors involved in drug policy - though what these factors are, I have been unable, despite a certain amount of enquiry, to discover.
My suspicion is that dominator culture does not understand psychedelic potential, in the same way that it doesn't understand shamanic worldview. But it senses that there is something very threatening in all this. The dominators have a huge vested interest in material consensus reality, with its delusory notion of separate selfhood - it's what makes their world go round. The idea of other realities will be subjectively very scary, while objectively meaning an end to their own control agenda, which can only function within the constraints of the narrow world that they have been instrumental in creating.
Fortunately, growing numbers of people are seeing that the UK and many other governments' drug policies have no credibility whatsoever. We like to think that injustice with regard to personal worldview is something we read about in history; but it seems to me that the witch-hunt is still very much with us today. The irrational persecution of those who choose to make available or use entheogens is no different to the persecution of witches in medeival Europe. A witch was a person - usually a woman - who did not conform to the prevailing ethos; a person who penetrated multidimensional realities. A person who was a threat to the christian status quo. A modern entheogenic advocate is similar. Such people do not make very good citizen-slaves. Their explorations of world and consciousness may lead them to see things in different ways. They are not good members of modern 'spend, watch television and shut up, and don't think for yourself' society. Nothing so dangerous as an independent mind.
All of this wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't real peoples' lives we are talking about. The modern Inquisition doesn't burn people at the stake, but its consequences are barely more edifying. Casey Hardison, five years into a twenty-year sentence for producing psychedelics in his bedroom in Sussex. In the TSA, Leonard Pickard serving two concurrent life sentences without parole (what does that mean??? I didn't realise the authorities had such a handle on reincarnation). Victims of the war against people who use certain kinds of drugs.
You don't need to be a basement shaman or entheogenic enthusiast to see the glaring injustice in the situation, in the same way that you didn't need to be a slave on a plantation to realise that slavery was inhuman, or be a woman to understand that female inequality was not right. History will decide, I suppose, that this is indeed a Dark Age we currently inhabit. We hope, in the meantime, that Jonathan Sloan and associates can pull their lives back together as soon as is possible.
Oh, what about the toads? Apparently their skin and glands contain 5-MeO-DMT and bufotenin, both controlled substances. Yum yum!
At this moment, with spirits flagging slightly, in the parallel world of Pale Green Vortex podcast we would sit back and listen to 'Ritual - Nous sommes du Soleil' by Yes. This would help us recall that, beneath all the dung, we are indeed bright orbs of light, each connected to all others. Typical of Yes, it is also a rather long piece, in which case it also gives us plenty of time for a nice cup of coffee.
P.S. Further personal research has revealed that 'yum yum' is hardly appropriate for the toads, since direct ingestion of the toad venom is likely to poison the subject. Anybody wishing to enter into a symbiotic relationship with this toad should apparently dry and smoke the secretions. Not something I shall be recommending - though there are one or two positive reports by toad fans on Erowid.....
On Feb 4th 2010, the FDA (Food and Drugs people) raided the warehouses of BBB in Kansas, TSA (Totalitarian States of America). With guns drawn and handcuffs ready, they arrested a number of people, including owner Jonathan Sloan. They also seized various items, including a smoking blend called K2 (still legal at the time), miscellaneous seeds, cacti and other plant materials. Plus, er, a bunch of toads.
Various charges have since been levelled, including unlawful cultivation or distribution of controlled substances, including mescaline, DMT, LSA, possession of 'drug paraphernalia' such as plastic jugs. And the Colorado River Toads. Not to mention the removal of $900,000 (I think this is the amount, a degree of confusion exists in the various reports), so that it will be difficult for Mr. Sloan to get proper legal representation. They do that kind of thing in the TSA. Nice place.
Which is all very well, apart from the fact that, as far as I and anybody else can make out, BBB has done nothing illegal whatsoever. A look at BBB's website reveals it to be a vendor of a wide variety of plants, herbs, and natural incense (though, since the raid, the variety has become rather more limited: 'out of stock' denotes the removed materials). Among the products seized were a number that could conceivably be used for psychoactive purposes. The law, as I understand it, is clear, albeit strange, in the TSA, much as it is in the UK. To have in ones possession fresh or dried peyote, for example, or morning glory seeds, or plant material of the sort used in making ayahuasca, a psychedelic brew used for centuries, if not millenia, by Amazonian shamans, is as legal as growing tulips. If, however, you process these materials, and the cops find you with pure mescaline, DMT, or whatever - wham, bang, that's very naughty, sir, class A drug (as they are termed in the UK), off to jail with you, possibly for a very long time.
So, unless Mr. Sloan had a secret processing lab tucked away in a back room, which is highly unlikely, all the charges against him appear to be completely false, and make a mockery of the entire legal system.
The most likely explanation, it would seem to me, is totalitarian complex fear tactics. 'Listen, little boy. Don't get ideas beyond your station. We don't take kindly to the likes of you. So just be careful how you go, and shut the fuck up.' It's a message to all who dare to make available mind-altering plants and products to the wider population. We don't like you or your consciousness-expanding games. It's not part of our scheme.
The BB bust is reminiscent of what happened to Sasha Shulgin, legendary psychedelic research chemist and all-round good egg, in 1994, as recounted in the classic tome 'Tihkal'. Bullying tactics, including the senseless and unnecessary trampling of his beloved peyote cacti, offered years before as a treasured gift by a Native American chief.
For some time it has been clear to me that dominator culture has something special against psychedelics, or entheogens ('god- or spirit-facilitating') as they are often termed nowadays, that has nothing to do with public health or safety. Despite what periodic media hysteria would like people to believe, psychedelics, if used in the right circumstances and with the respect they deserve, rank pretty low in the dangerous drug stakes. People don't drop dead from ingesting LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, salvia divinorum, or the rest. They might feel strange and disoriented. They may meet God, or experience unity with the rest of the cosmos. They may sense that the world is alive, imbued with spirit. They could find the experience a scary ordeal, and vow never to repeat it. But they won't die.
In the UK, the government's response to the report of the Advisory Commission on Misuse of Drugs, which culminated in the sacking of Professor Nutt in farcical circumstances, destroyed any final shreds of credibility in UK drug policy. It was stripped bare, to reveal what it truly is: an instrument of mind control. When Nutt and his colleagues presented the facts, demonstrating that, though still capable of causing harm, LSD and ecstasy were statistically less dangerous than the state-sanctioned drugs of alcohol and tobacco, this was not what the control system puppets wanted to hear. There are, apparently, 'political' and 'cultural' factors involved in drug policy - though what these factors are, I have been unable, despite a certain amount of enquiry, to discover.
My suspicion is that dominator culture does not understand psychedelic potential, in the same way that it doesn't understand shamanic worldview. But it senses that there is something very threatening in all this. The dominators have a huge vested interest in material consensus reality, with its delusory notion of separate selfhood - it's what makes their world go round. The idea of other realities will be subjectively very scary, while objectively meaning an end to their own control agenda, which can only function within the constraints of the narrow world that they have been instrumental in creating.
Fortunately, growing numbers of people are seeing that the UK and many other governments' drug policies have no credibility whatsoever. We like to think that injustice with regard to personal worldview is something we read about in history; but it seems to me that the witch-hunt is still very much with us today. The irrational persecution of those who choose to make available or use entheogens is no different to the persecution of witches in medeival Europe. A witch was a person - usually a woman - who did not conform to the prevailing ethos; a person who penetrated multidimensional realities. A person who was a threat to the christian status quo. A modern entheogenic advocate is similar. Such people do not make very good citizen-slaves. Their explorations of world and consciousness may lead them to see things in different ways. They are not good members of modern 'spend, watch television and shut up, and don't think for yourself' society. Nothing so dangerous as an independent mind.
All of this wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't real peoples' lives we are talking about. The modern Inquisition doesn't burn people at the stake, but its consequences are barely more edifying. Casey Hardison, five years into a twenty-year sentence for producing psychedelics in his bedroom in Sussex. In the TSA, Leonard Pickard serving two concurrent life sentences without parole (what does that mean??? I didn't realise the authorities had such a handle on reincarnation). Victims of the war against people who use certain kinds of drugs.
You don't need to be a basement shaman or entheogenic enthusiast to see the glaring injustice in the situation, in the same way that you didn't need to be a slave on a plantation to realise that slavery was inhuman, or be a woman to understand that female inequality was not right. History will decide, I suppose, that this is indeed a Dark Age we currently inhabit. We hope, in the meantime, that Jonathan Sloan and associates can pull their lives back together as soon as is possible.
Oh, what about the toads? Apparently their skin and glands contain 5-MeO-DMT and bufotenin, both controlled substances. Yum yum!
At this moment, with spirits flagging slightly, in the parallel world of Pale Green Vortex podcast we would sit back and listen to 'Ritual - Nous sommes du Soleil' by Yes. This would help us recall that, beneath all the dung, we are indeed bright orbs of light, each connected to all others. Typical of Yes, it is also a rather long piece, in which case it also gives us plenty of time for a nice cup of coffee.
P.S. Further personal research has revealed that 'yum yum' is hardly appropriate for the toads, since direct ingestion of the toad venom is likely to poison the subject. Anybody wishing to enter into a symbiotic relationship with this toad should apparently dry and smoke the secretions. Not something I shall be recommending - though there are one or two positive reports by toad fans on Erowid.....
