Encounters with Dangerous Drugs

During 2009, in the U.S.A., the drug escitalopram was prescribed 27,698,000 times (figures from International Marketing Services). This made it the second most popular of all the 'psychiatric' pharmaceuticals, outgunning such well-known drugs as Prozac and Diazepam (Valium).

I have my own experience of this commonly-taken, apparently very useful, psychoactive substance. It was, I think, in 2002, during my final years of living in London. I had, in truth, outstayed my welcome in the Big City, and it showed. With 25 years of Buddhist meditation and practice behind me, I had nevertheless transmuted into a walking dictionary of modern stress-related disorders. I was sort-of able to manage it all, but eventually decided to pay a visit to my G.P.: not with any particular wish for him to do anything about it, but more because, as the cliche goes, it's good to talk - to someone, even the local G.P.

He welcomed me into his surgery. I took a seat, and began to regale him with details of my various discomforts. To my surprise, he became animated as I continued to talk: I had no idea that migraines and intestinal irregularities could cause such interest. By the time I had concluded my tales of urban malaise, he was positively bouncing up and down on his chair. He reached over and plucked a scrappy little piece of paper from beside his computer. On it were written several questions, so vague and general as to be meaningless. I answered them as best I could, after which the doctor turned to me and pronounced triumphantly:'G.A.D.!' Noticing the puzzled expression on my face, he expanded. 'Yes, G.A.D. Generalised Anxiety Disorder. By chance, we have just the thing for you here. We are trialling a new drug to deal with this very disorder. Would you like to join?' Now, taking prescription tablets for psychological difficulties was completely out of character, against all my ideas and theories about life,and the last thing I would imagine to be effective. So I said 'Yes.'

Within a few days, the escitalopram was doing its thing. Now, at last, I'd really got something to feel worried about! It seemed to have triggered a genuine generalised anxiety. I sensed that large areas of my consciousness were being closed off, and that what remained consisted of large, empty holes. Worst of all was the fact that I seemed unable to access my memory banks, which was particularly tricky since I was supposed to be teaching English language to people from abroad. Even the most basic piece of vocabulary was almost impossible to recall. One particular class was a fairly advanced one, studying for an examination that included aspects of physical geography. A student popped a question: 'What do you call it when rocks come down a mountain, for example after heavy rain or an earthquake?' I stood in front of the class, searching desperately down the empty corridors in my mind for an answer. At last something came to me. 'Avalanche' I declared proudly. Two French-speaking students in the class looked at each other doubtfully. 'Isn't that for snow?' one of them eventually piped up. 'No' I answered, looking him straight in the eye. 'In English it's different. We use "avalanche" for rocks as well.'

Soon I was back at the doctor's surgery. 'Please take me off the trial' I begged deep from within my state of babbling wreckhood. The doctor called in a senior colleague and, solemn-faced, they witnessed me signing off the escitalopram wonder drug trial. The fact that they looked so pissed off made me suspicious: did it mean that my experience wouldn't count in the final analysis of the drug? Surely 'reduced the subject to a total nervous mess' was a significant finding in evaluating the effects of escitalopram. Did my experience count in the final statistics? If not, the figures are warped.

I walked through the park on my way home. Being free of the escitalopram curse, I felt like singing to the tress in my state of semi-satori. What's wrong with a touch of anxiety, anyway? It's the natural response of any non-enlightened mind to the dualistic world it appears to inhabit. And I remembered a word: landslide.

During the course of this particular incarnation, I have had occasion to encounter a variety of psychoactive substances, ranging from sugar, coffee, and alcohol, to a number about which the U.K. Home Secretary is less enthusiastic. Sometimes this has been for fun or relaxation, sometimes out of curiosity, sometimes for reasons of gnosis, and sometimes for a mixture of all three. In the case of quite a few of these psychoactives, I have felt that too large a dose, or frequent consumption, would be unwise from the point of view of either mental or physical health. However, besides escitalopram, which seriously challenged my ability to function mentally at all, there is only one substance which I sensed could have truly blown me apart .......

It was probably 1975. Having graduated from Oxford University, I was now engaged in something far more meaningful, and living in a commune that I had helped to found. Carlos Castaneda was all the rage. Like many people around me, I was reading his books about the Mexican shaman sorcerors Don Juan and Don Genaro; unlike a lot of others, however, reading was not enough for me. Maybe supplies of acid had temporarily dried up, I do not remember. Anyhow, I turned to Castaneda's books for psychedelic shamanic wisdom. Three main plant teachers appear in his tomes. Peyote cactus was nowhere to be found, not even on a reconnaissance to Kew Gardens, and I was unfamiliar with the magic psilocybe mushrooms native to British pasturelands. The third, clearly weirdest and least predictable, plant was readily available, however. Datura stramonium, aka jimson weed, could be purchased from the local chemist as a remedy for asthma. I bought a green tin of powdered leaf over the counter, and knocked back a couple of spoons of the vile-tasting stuff.

Some time later I was sitting with my fellow commune members having dinner. Unfortunately, I was unable to swallow anything, since my mouth was so dry that all the moisture in the food was immediately sucked out. People and objects around me dissolved into a blurry mess; rather than the sense of ego-softening and connectedness that can come with classic psychedelics, there was just sensory confusion. It all became too much. I decided to give up for the day, and staggered to my bed.

As I lay down, it seemed that everything was closing down except for the basic automatic processes of the body, such as breathing. My friends were justifiably concerned about me, and came to check up on my state. Apparently, I was standing stock still on the landing near the bathroom, completely oblivious to their presence. They returned thirty minutes later, to find me still there, motionless. Then something changed, and I momentarily regained awareness of the world around me. 'I'm going to the toilet' I announced boldly, then dashed into the bathroom.

Two days later, a friend called in for a chat. He was still a blur in front of me, and I feared that I had suffered permanent damage to my eyes. My trepidation proved unfounded, but the episode was a great teacher to me. I learnt the need for respect for psychoactives, and for life in general. That this life, so precious (as Buddhist texts teach us), is fragile; approach with love and reverence.

Nowadays, there is no excuse for the jimson weed misadventure: excellent sources of education and information are out there. Read about datura stramonium on Erowid, and you will know not to mess with this particular plant, unless you are a highly experienced shaman. Meanwhile, western society is sufficiently lacking in soul and vital life force so that millions of people resort to escitalopram and the like to stumble their mind-numbed way through the day. At the same time, huge numbers of folk languish in jail for selling or taking substances that are statistically less harmful than alcohol and tobacco. Hats off to Angus Mcqueen for his recent excellent three-part documentary 'Our War on Drugs' on Channel Four. As predicted on this blog, it takes Channel Four, rather than the biased BBC, to come up with a hard-hitting series that effectively tears global drug policies to shreds. Watch it if you can, it's a rarity, a highly recommendable and in places poignant piece of education on mainstream television.

Body Politic

The time has come to tear up and throw away all the markers on the political landscape that I grew up with. Socialism, Conservatism, Communism; left-wing, right-wing: all are now obsolete, and irrelevant to current conditions - in the UK for sure, and most likely for the rest of the western world. The political arena of today is defined very simply: Control System versus the Rest. It is a stark dualism of which even the Gnostics would have been proud, apart from the fact that it is based on pragmatic factors rather than ontology.

The collapse of the old distinctions could have been predicted long ago, when Labour, traditionally defender of the poor and down-at-heel, became New Labour and, under the dark magic of the Blairite grin, started hobnobbing with the rich and famous, while the rest of us just plodded on. New Labour happily oversaw and encouraged the emerging celebritocracy, along with related get-rich-quickers of the banking and big business worlds. Eventually Blair took his smirk off elsewhere, leaving Brown to fiddle while the fantasy banking world that he had helped to create started to burn all around him.

Control System versus the Rest: an elegant forces-of-darkness against bringers-of-light scenario. Even a year ago, I didn't see things much like that at all. Two visitors from Germany told me matter-of-factly that democracy doesn't exist, which I took as a bit of a blanket statement, and one which puzzled me. It was only when I began to dig more deeply that things started to click. I suppose that sufficient passion for a given subject is required before the time and effort necessary is devoted to getting beneath the skin of what the television headlines tell you. In my case, the invasion of the windfarms and UK drug policy were the triggers for the collapse of my old world view. What I began to discover was that reality was completely at odds with the 'information' dished out for public consumption by politicians and most of the mainstream media. The variance could not be put down simply to personal and reasonable differences of opinion, either; reality really was totally different. There was either a great deal of wilful ignorance going on, and/or a hidden agenda of some sort. Slowly, bits of the jigsaw puzzle began to fit together, until a picture of active collusion, if not exactly organised conspiracy, started to emerge. A collusion between politicians, the media, the world of big business and finance, maybe others: those whose aim is to maintain power, wealth, and control for themselves and themselves alone; who feel the right to dominate. Welcome to the Control System.

Uppermost in my mind of late has been the invasion of the wind turbines, following Mega-Disaster Minister of Energy Chris Huhne's pronouncement that we shall be seeing more of them soon. This is the real environmental catastrophe confronting us, not the various chimera rolled out by the not-very-Liberal and not-at-all-Democratic Huhne. Interestingly, in these days when the Anthropogenic Global Warming camp are having a bit of a hard time - even Guardian readers are expressing some doubts - he played down the 'save the planet with a turbine' line, instead mumbling something about safeguarding national energy supply. Total nonsense, since the one way that can't be done is through a source of energy that is intermittent, and completely unpredictable and unreliable.

I have written already, in 'Manna from a hot heaven', about the lack of credibility to the invasion of the wind farms. It has no reasonable justification whatsoever. It serves two unspoken purposes, however. Firstly, lots of money for Control System bigwigs through indirect subsidies and high energy prices. Secondly, the menace of Anthropogenic Global Warming provides a good excuse for fear-mongering, an excellent weapon in the fight to increase control over people's lives, and a reason to circumvent the fragile vestiges of democracy in the name of 'saving the planet for our grandchildren.'

Various internet sites rail ferociously against this stuff. References to 'Green Stalinism', and even more talk of 'eco-fascism'. Strong terms but on reflection, and after consulting a dictionary, I find them not greatly exaggerated. On orwelltoday, Green Stalinism is defined as 'a planned economy in the name of environmentalism.' 'The consequences are the familiar Soviet ones: centralised decision-making and localised devastation.' That is it precisely. And these 'familiar Soviet consequences' are exactly what our Control System emissaries have in mind, be it Huhne, Second-in-Command Corporal Clegg (whose wife, by pure coincidence, works for a wind farm company.....), partners-in-crime the Millibands, or the Not-so-Green Party's Caroline Lucas.

Control System gets full backup from its various organs of miscommunication and spreading of lies to the rest of us. Two deserve special mention. First off, the BBC. I am fed up with hearing the refrain (thankfully less common in recent times) that the BBC is somehow superior and more trustworthy because it doesn't depend on courting advertisers, and is therefore more independent. It is NOT independent! It depends on licence payers' money, which in turn depends on continued consent from the government. Which more-or-less defines what the BBC's agenda is. Take UK drug policy as an example. It is completely untenable, and could be destroyed with ease in next-to no time, should the BBC decide to do so. Strangely, our national broadcasters have thus far failed to rise to the challenge. Instead, when the opportunity arose, around the time of the Professor Nutt fiasco, they dealt with the good man's impeccable logic in perfunctory and derisory fashion. Hidden agenda of complicity with the government is clear for all with eyes to see. It has been left to Channel Four to dish the dirt in a hard-hitting three-part documentary on the 'war on drugs', starting this week. And, back on the wind, read for yourself James Delingpole's blog on 'BBC; official voice of Ecofascism.' By the way, ever wonder why the once-ubiquitous David Bellamy no longer does his much-loved nature programmes on BBC? He dared to disagree with Central Control belief system on global warming: made into a pariah because of his inconvenient views. Yes, the BBC: Control System propaganda machine par excellence.

The other Control System stooges I would like to highlight are resident at the Met Office. A look at the 'climate change' section on their website shows it to be a hotbed of lies, half-truths, deception, and opinion expressed as fact. Example: Question: 'Are you sure there's a link between temperature rise and CO2?' Answer: 'Yes. Temperature and CO2 are linked. Studies of polar ice layers show that in the past, rises in temperature have been followed by an increase in CO2. Now, it is a rise in CO2 that is causing the temperature to rise.' Er, excuse me, but the logic of this would baffle even a demented walrus. Go to your GP and tell him or her: Eating cheese was followed by my having migraines. Now, my migraines are causing me to eat hunks of cheddar. You will be told to stop wasting limited NHS resources, or sent to see a shrink.

All this would be laughable, except that it is nonsense churned out as propaganda in a shameless attempt to dupe the public in what are serious matters. In the meantime, protesters on the Lammermuir Hills in southern Scotland made a giant heart from stones on the hills as an expression of their love for the places they say will be devastated by a proposed wind farm. Ah yes, love! How quaint! How cute! How often do our pseudo-environmental Control System advocates speak of love, and of beauty? Caroline Lucas, Brave New Green World MP for Brighton, speaks of targets, not love and beauty. Such talk makes Control System people distinctly uneasy; it's not in their ball park. 'Green' is now a mental abstraction, an ideology used to justify all manner of terrible thing, and to manipulate people by playing on their fears. Certainly not a matter for the heart and the soul.

It's weird: leap outside the Control System box, and you find yourself in unlikely company. A seemingly disparate bunch of alternative culture people, disaffected Tories, conspiracy theorists, real liberals, psychedelic people, and the rest. All have in common a sense of being marginalised by the diktats of the Control System. I'm not the only person to feel a trifle confused: in an interview on Red Ice Radio, Peter Taylor talks of how he used to feel that he was 'left', but now finds himself agreeing more with what some people 'on the right' are saying. And the best thing I can find to read in mainstream media is James Delingpole's Daily Telegraph blog!

In the meantime, it befalls us to act, however clumsily or imperfectly. As James Hillman, in his 'time capsule for the year 2100' reminds us (see youtube), we are in part political animals: political, not in the debased dominator sense, but in its true, noble meaning, as being related to public affairs. Our soul is not ultimately separate, but is connected to and part of the world around us. To repress its horror and sense of injustice at what goes on outside the shell of our individual body is the same as to repress any other constituents of our mind. To be fully human means to act in defence of the true and beautiful in the world of which we are part. Brothers and sisters, take up your hearts, souls, and pitchforks! The world needs you......