2. THE WAR ON SOME PEOPLE WHO USE SOME DRUGS

THE BALLAD OF TOMMY CHONG

Jonathan Shapiro, a writer and executive producer of the Fox TV series, Justice, reviewed Tommy Chong’s book, The I Chong: Meditations From the Joint, for the Los Angeles Times. Shapiro wrote:

“Being incarcerated for resisting imperial power or because of one’s sexual preference or getting sent to the gulag for dissenting opinions are searing human tragedies that inspired brave acts of artistic resistance. Selling bongs over state lines just doesn’t carry the same moral weight.”

Hey, Jonny boy, whoa! You’d better buy a new state-of-the-art apocryphal scale if you’re going to measure for comparison the moral weight of prison sentences.

On February 24, 2003, Tommy Chong was among fifty-five people who were arrested in raids across the country as a culmination of the DEA’s Operation Pipe Dreams, named after one of Cheech and Chong’s stoner movies. Agents forced their way through the door of his home at six o’clock that morning, with automatic weapons drawn. Chong was the only one who served time—nine months at a federal prison—and paid a $20,000 fine, not to mention the $103,000 that was seized when he got busted.

The reason he became an exception and received such punishment was precisely because of his “dissenting opinions” and “artistic resistance.” It simply would not have happened otherwise.

They wanted to get him really bad. Traditionally, local law enforcement has discretion to decide what priority should be given to prosecuting cases involving drug paraphernalia. Because both Pennsylvania and Ohio make that a top priority, the DEA chose to open a decoy head shop in Pennsylvania. Four times in one year, these stingmeisters tried to make an online purchase of a pipe autographed by Chong, but his Nice Dreams Enterprises would not fill any orders coming from either of those two states.

However, a request from a different return address easily passed through the apparently fake firewall of a new employee. In an appearance at the Peppertree Bookstore in Palm Springs, California, Chong said that he suspected the employee was sent to infiltrate his company. I wanted to know why Chong suspected that. He responded that it was a very strong suspicion, based on the fact that the employee left the company a couple of days before the bust, giving no reason.

In a deal with the authorities, Chong agreed to plead guilty in exchange for his wife and son not being indicted. Ironically, he was sentenced on September 11, 2003, the second anniversary of real terrorist attacks, rather than a business run by an actor in such Cheech and Chong movies as Up in Smoke and, more recently, a recurring role on a popular sitcom, That ’70s Show, where he continued to play the part of a dedicated pot smoker.

The prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan—ignoring all relevance of the First Amendment in favor of her professional career—had the audacity to introduce Chong’s fictional character in the courtroom as evidence of his “frivolous” attitude toward the enforcement of drug laws. Chong said this was “like jailing all of the Police Academy people for making fun of cops.” Furthermore, he had joked with reporters about putting this criminal case in his next movie with Cheech. The prosecution insisted that such a comment indicated that Chong was making light of the case and might exploit it for money.

Behind bars, Chong said, “I’m a doper comedian, and I’m in here because I made a stupid joke about the bongs being the only weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration had found.” Half Scottish-Irish, half Chinese and raised in Canada, he points out that “when I became an American citizen, I took a vow to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Doing anything less than exercising my right of free speech in defense of pot and against its prohibition would be a violation of my vow.”

So listen, Jonathan, for a future episode of Justice, how about considering a story line revealing the basic injustice of arresting 830,000 individuals every year for the “crime” of possessing marijuana? It may not get you high, but hopefully your consciousness will be raised in the process.

As for prosecutor Buchanan, her career had been inadvertently boosted by the terrorist attacks in 2001 when a United Airlines plane crashed inside her jurisdiction, (sixty miles southeast of Pittsburgh), catapulted her to prominence in the law-enforcement community and enabled her to instigate the yearlong undercover sting. Three days after 9/11, she became the first woman and the youngest person in Pennsylvania history ever to be named a U.S. attorney, and for her first major operation, she chose Chong as her priority target because his career had “glamorized” the use of marijuana.

In March 2009, she prosecuted the owners of a Northridge, California, company that sold videos depicting deviant sexual conduct, charging the couple with conspiracy to distribute obscene material, after a six-year battle over whether the First Amendment protects such material, which included scenes of simulated rape. They finally pleaded guilty. Once again, Buchanan had brought a case in western Pennsylvania, this time because the area’s “community standards”—which, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, govern what’s obscene—are more conservative than California’s.

Meanwhile, the cruel absurdity of anti-paraphernalia laws continues to be underscored by such creative substitutes as apples, soda cans, toilet-paper cardboard tubes with aluminum foil, tweezers used as roach clips, and don’t forget those plain old regular tobacco pipes.

In Fulton, Kentucky, police investigating a marijuana-smoking complaint found pot burning on a backyard grill with a large fan on the other side of the house, sucking the smoke throughout the home—in effect, said the police chief, “turning the house into a large marijuana bong.” Seize it immediately!

BARACK OBAMA AND THE POT LAWS

During a debate in the Democratic presidential primary campaign, MSNBC moderator Tim Russert asked the candidates who opposed decriminalization of marijuana to raise their hands. Barack Obama hesitantly raised his hand halfway before quickly lowering it again.

However, in January 2004, when Obama was running for the Senate, he told Illinois college students that he supported eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana use or possession.

“I think the war on drugs has been a failure, and I think we need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws,” he said during a debate at Northwestern University. “But I’m not somebody who believes in legalization of marijuana.” Was Obama now having a time-travel debate with himself?

When the Washington Times confronted Obama with that statement on a video of the 2004 debate, his campaign offered two explanations in less than twenty-four hours. First, a spokesperson said that Obama had “always” supported decriminalizing marijuana, that he misunderstood the question when he raised his hand, and reiterated Obama’s opposition to full legalization, adding that an Obama administration would “review drug sentences to see where we can be smarter on crime and reduce the blind and counterproductive sentencing to nonviolent offenders.”

But after the Times posted the video on its Web site, the Obama campaign made a quick U-turn and declared that he does not support eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana possession and use—thereby rejecting both legalization and decriminalization. What exactly is the difference? The definitions, according to Pot Culture: The A-Z Guide to Stoner Language & Life, by Shirley Halperin and Steve Bloom:

“Decriminalization: When laws governing marijuana are changed to reduce the penalties for possession of small quantities (usually below an ounce) to non-criminal status. The first state to decriminalize was Oregon in 1973, followed by California, New York, Ohio, Nebraska, Minnesota, Colorado, Mississippi, Alaska, North Carolina and Maine.

“Legalization: The complete repeal of marijuana prohibition and removal of all criminal penalties for its use, sale, transport and cultivation. The Netherlands is the only country in the world with such a policy.”

Ron Fisher at NORML told me, “Decriminalization is the elimination of criminal penalties for the possession of marijuana, usually by replacing them with a fine (similar to a speeding ticket). Full legalization is a more complex issue that involves U.S. treaties as well as the law. Legalization would be characterized by taxation and regulation of marijuana. This is NORML’s ultimate goal, but we work for decrim in the meantime for the sake of the 830,000 Americans arrested on cannabis charges each year.”

Indeed, a CNN/Time-Warner poll shows that 76 percent of Americans agree with Obama’s original position, not to mention the 48 million who smoked pot in 2007.

The Progressive Review quotes an old classmate of Obama explaining the meaning of chooming: “That’s what we called smoking marijuana. To ‘choom’ meant to get high, to smoke pot. I never heard the word used anywhere else, but Punahou kids had access to the very best pot available.” He and Obama were in the group of students who smoked marijuana, and members of the choom group did so both on and off campus. The irony is that, had Obama been arrested then, he might never have been able to run successfully for the presidency.

Review publisher Sam Smith tells a story that underscores the hypocrisy of the political pandering that continues to allow unjust laws to turn tokers into criminals: “Early in the Clinton administration your editor had dinner with, among others, a high White House official—a lawyer. The conversation turned to marijuana. The lawyer said that numerous staffers had asked how they should respond to FBI queries on the matter. The official’s reply was that they should remember that they would only be in the White House for a short while but the FBI files would be there forever. And what if friends or relatives actually saw them using pot? The White House lawyer’s response: ‘If you can’t look an FBI agent straight in the eye and tell him they were wrong, you don’t belong here.’”

During the campaign, Obama promised that he would end the federal raids on dispensaries, or, as he later worded it for the San Francisco Chronicle, he would curb federal enforcement on state medical marijuana suppliers.

A few days before Obama selected Joe Biden as his running mate, Tommy Chong, in an interview with the Washington Post, was asked what the average citizen could do to further the cause of decriminalization.

Chong replied: “Check out the people you’re voting for. For instance, Joseph Biden comes off as a liberal Democrat, but he’s the one who authored the bill that put me in jail. He wrote the law against shipping drug paraphernalia through the mail—which could be anything from a pipe to a clip or cigarette papers.”

Before becoming vice president, Biden, who coined the term “drug czar,” also sponsored the Rave Act, which targets music events where drug use is supposedly prevalent. As for medical marijuana, he said, “We have not devoted nearly enough science or time to deal with the pain management and chronic pain management that exists. There’s got to be a better answer than marijuana.”

You mean like prescription drugs, which result in 100,000 deaths a year while marijuana has caused none?

Anthropologists of the future will surely look back upon these times as incredibly barbaric. Medical marijuana is already legal in thirteen states, yet it’s prohibited—and trumped—by federal law. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, the DEA raided several medical marijuana dispensaries in and around Los Angeles, but in March 2009, his new U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, announced that the Justice Department now has no plans to prosecute dispensaries in those states where it’s legal.

States’ rights . . . it’s not just for racists any more.

BONG HITS 4 JESUS

The U.S. Supreme Court sucks so badly that it finally turned itself inside out. In 2007, their outrageous 5-to-4 ruling made it acceptable to suspend a high school student for the off-campus act of holding a 14-foot banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” That harmless bit of incongruity became a federal case ending with a dangerous precedent for suppressing free speech.

Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with the school principal that “the banner would be interpreted by those viewing it as promoting illegal drug use, and that interpretation is plainly a reasonable one.” What a ton of bullshit. Justices Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy voted with him, but also stated that their decision doesn’t address “political or social issues such as the wisdom of the war on drugs or of legalized marijuana for medical use.” Ironically, this is the same Supreme Court that upheld the illegality of medical marijuana by falsely denying the existence of positive research.

Studies have concluded that cannabis is effective for relieving muscle spasms and chronic pain in AIDS patients. The miracle weed can both increase hunger in HIV patients and suppress hunger to fight obesity. It can help those with glaucoma, Alzheimer’s, asthma, hepatitis, diabetes, epilepsy, osteoporosis, arthritis, insomnia, sleep apnea, migraine headaches, scoliosis, hypertension, depression, shingles, PMS, menopause, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis. Cannabinoids can inhibit the proliferation of cancer cell lines, including breast, prostate, colon, pancreatic and brain cancer.

But cynical critics treat the legalization of medical marijuana as though it was intended to be a gateway leading to legalization of nonmedical marijuana. So this is really about the war on pleasure. I once asked the late Peter McWilliams—a leading activist in the medical marijuana movement who suffered from cancer and AIDS—“Would you agree with Dennis Peron, the co-author of Proposition 215 [California’s medical marijuana referendum], who says—not as a joke—that all use of marijuana is medical?”

“In the general sense that everything we do for our health—both curative and preventative—is medical, I’d agree,” he replied. “Even a perfectly healthy person who smokes pot once a month purely for its euphoric effects could be said to be doing so to prevent becoming ill, in the sense that people take vitamin C every day to prevent becoming ill, for I believe that euphoria is both healing and health-maintaining. . . .

“While I was using marijuana to treat my nausea, I can’t tell you how much I missed getting high. Although I’d smoke it several times a day, the average high school student was getting high more times a month than I was. That’s because after the first month, I never got high, and I really enjoy marijuana’s high. Simply put, recreational marijuana you use to get high; medical marijuana you use to get by.”

The New York Times editorialized, “Although there are other prescriptions that are designed to relieve pain and nausea, and there is concern about the health effects of smoking marijuana, there are some truly ill people who find peace only that way.” But those “other prescriptions” are pushed by the pharmaceutical industry, which spent a record-breaking $155 million to lobby the government from 2005 to mid-2006. In fact, the Partnership For a Drug-Free America was originally founded and funded by the tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceutical companies.

The priorities are insane. Cigarettes cause 1,200 deaths every day in the United States alone. Nearly 2,000 young people under the age of 18 become smokers every day in America. And yet, although the World Health Organization spent three years working out an agreement with 171 countries to prevent the spread of smoking-related diseases, particularly in the developing world, the United States opposed the treaty, including the minimum age of 18 for sales to minors. Around the globe, tobacco now kills almost five million people a year. Within a generation, WHO predicts, the premature death toll will reach ten million a year.

Whereas, with marijuana, the worst that can happen is maybe you’ll have a severe case of the munchies and conduct a midnight raid of your refrigerator. In the past forty years, 20 million Americans were arrested for violating anti-marijuana laws, primarily for simple possession. As long as any government can arbitrarily decide which drugs are legal and which are not, anyone behind bars for a drug offense is a political prisoner.

As for “concern about the health effects of smoking marijuana,” it was reported at the 2005 meeting of the International Cannabinoid Research Society that smoking marijuana—“even heavy long-term use”—does not cause cancer of the lung, upper airways or esophagus. As for recent claims of psychosis, the rate of psychosis has remained unchanged since 1950, while the rate of marijuana use has increased 10,000 percent since then.

Former drug czar John Walters insists that pot growers are “violent criminal terrorists who wouldn’t hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties.” But syndicated columnist Clarence Page—referring to WAMM, the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana—has written about the DEA raiding “a legitimate health cooperative that was treating more than 200 patients, some of them terminally ill, in Santa Cruz [California]. Snatching medicine out of the hands of seriously ill patients sounds like terrorism to me. In this case it was federally sponsored and taxpayer-financed.”

WAMM, founded by Valerie and Mike Corral, has been helping people dying of cancer and AIDS for fifteen years. Learning that such patients couldn’t afford the high cost of marijuana, WAMM established a communal garden where medicine is grown for patients who have a doctor’s recommendation; they may take what they need and give what they can, even if that is nothing.

The late Robert Anton Wilson, a prolific countercultural author, told me, “I never thought I would become another WAMM patient. My post-polio syndrome had been a minor nuisance until then. Suddenly, two years ago, it flared up into blazing pain. My doctor recommended marijuana and named WAMM as the safest and most legal source. By then I think I was on the edge of suicide—the pain had become like a permanent abscessed tooth in the leg. Nobody can or should endure that.”

After the DEA raided WAMM’s garden and arrested its founders, outraged Santa Cruz city and county officials sponsored WAMM’s medical marijuana give-away on the steps of City Hall and joined WAMM’s lawsuit against the DEA, the U.S. Attorney General and the Office of National Drug Control Policy. WAMM was considered the most likely organization to ultimately sway the Supreme Court. According to Federal Judge Jeremy Fogel, “WAMM is the gold standard of the medical marijuana movement.”

Meanwhile, what ever happened to Joseph Frederick? He was the 18-year-old student who, when the Olympic torch passed through Juneau, Alaska in 2002, seized upon the opportunity to hold up that banner, “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” He went on to learn Mandarin and teach English in China. He’s proud that he stood up for his rights, with the aid of the ACLU, but regrets “the bad precedent set” by the Supreme Court ruling. However, his case was settled at the state level in November 2008, winning him $45,000 and forcing the school to hold a forum on free speech.

If only that banner had read “Bong Hits 4 WAMM,” then, by the Supreme Court’s own language—that their decision did not address “political or social issues such as the wisdom of the war on drugs or of legalized marijuana for medical use”—the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” student would not have been punished. He would’ve been protected by the First Amendment, because blasphemy is protected by the First Amendment. But the prejudiced Supreme Court Justices rationalized that “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” was “promoting illegal drug use,” even though such promotion is also protected by the First Amendment.

I’ll smoke to that.

WAS MOSES TRIPPING?

So now I have a new theological question: What exactly was Moses tripping on while hallucinating that he was parting the Red Sea? After all, Benny Shanon, who teaches cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, theorizes in the journal of philosophy Time and Mind that Moses was simultaneously high on Mount Sinai and high on psychedelics when he heard God delivering the Ten Commandments.

“The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a people in an altered state of awareness,” he writes. “In advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings.”

Concoctions based on the bark of the acacia tree, which is frequently mentioned in the Bible, contain the same molecules as those found in the vines of the powerful psychotropic plant from which the liquid ayahuasca is prepared. Professor Shanon has himself ingested ayahuasca during a religious ceremony in Brazil’s Amazon forest.

His article came out of a lecture he gave at a conference organized a few years ago by Chris Bennett, who tells me, “It would be interesting to know if anyone has produced a working ayahuasca-like preparation from the local mid-Easter flora and fauna. As it now stands, the information regarding cannabis, or keneh bosem, which is regarded as the Hebrew word for pot by a growing number of linguists and etymologists, is much more substantial and believable. What is more interesting about Shanon’s theory is that it helps demonstrate the possibility of both shamanism and the use of psychoactive substances in the Bible.”

However, Daniel Sieradski, who has been researching the subject of Jews and drugs for six years, claims that “while in Israel, Benny Shanon was one of the individuals I met on two separate occasions during the course of my research, and he basically lifted his ‘Moses was high’ theory from me, which I shared with him. Though I’m quite pleased that he’s bringing attention to these ideas, and that he makes them ‘his own’ by adding his own spin to the subject—I can’t deny that Shanon has his own body of work to draw from, nor can I even necessarily fault him if he doesn’t recall our conversation—although it still kind of sucks, missing the boat on publishing the theory before he did. Ah, bitter lemons. Anyway, I believe the Israelites were likely consuming psilocybin.”

Sieradski proceeds to tell me the story of the manna: “After the Jews left Egypt and were wandering in the desert, they’re starving and complaining and pleading to God for food, and so there’s this miracle of manna, which has traditionally been viewed in mainstream religious discourse as this magical bread that falls out of the sky and it keeps the people fed for the duration of their wandering in the wilderness before entering the Holy Land. What manna seems to be is a hallucinogen.” He speaks of “mass hallucination . . . seeing sounds and hearing colors.” From my own experience, I recall tasting ice cream in my toes while on LSD. In any case, Shanon suggested on Israeli public radio that Moses was also on drugs when he saw the Burning Bush.

High Times editor Steven Hager says, “I’ve long believed the Burning Bush story was about cannabis, and that is what most Rastafarians believe. When the New Testament was constructed by the Roman Empire, all references to psychedelics and cannabis may have been removed, because those were probably considered secrets for an elite priest class. The only references that survive are from the Old Testament (keneh bosem, burning bush), which was already published and not under their control.”

Aided by this new perspective, let us step into the time machine and travel to ancient civilizations and witness certain aspects of religion as history instead of a fairy tale.

Here we see Jesus and his disciples in the midst of an Ecstasy party, embracing each other as they slow-dance to the music of Mistress Magdalene and the Merry Maidens. Oh, look, Judas is French-kissing Jesus.

Going further back in time, we find Joseph plucking the magic mushrooms out of a pile of his donkey’s manure, and then sharing them with the dove that somehow impregnated his wife, the one and only Virgin Mary.

Even further back, we come upon Moses, thoroughly stoned on the DMT that he has been snorting as he begins to set the original Ten Commandments in stone:

“Thou shalt not bogart that joint.”

“Thou shalt not dose anyone with acid.”

“Thou shalt not dilute cocaine with baby powder.”

“Thou shalt not watch TV while using mescaline.”

“Thou shalt not steal from thy parents’ prescription medicines.”

Moses stops to check his spelling, then speaks to God: “Some day, oh Lord, these commandments will be posted on every citizen’s door.”

HOOKAHS ON PARADE

You might want to read this while listening to “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane: “Tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call.” I smoked a hookah for the first time at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Cleveland. I liked it. And passing the many-tentacled water pipe around the dinner table enhanced our sense of community.

The sweet-flavored combination of apple and peach was tasty, plus I got a pleasant kind of dizziness. This was a legal high, because there was no pot in it. I was smoking a blend of 70 percent fruit, honey, herbs, flowers and molasses and 30 percent tobacco. I’ve never been a cigarette smoker, but Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld—who, as Dr. Hippocrates, wrote a syndicated column for the underground press in the ’60s and who now specializes in the causes and effects of addiction—explains why I got stoned:

“Continuously and deeply inhaling cooled, flavorful tobacco mixtures will cause the user to experience a very relaxed, elated mood. And if the user is traditionally a nonsmoker, they will experience an even more concentrated feeling of relaxation, because their system is not used to the effects of inhaled smoke. A non–tobacco user will experience an altered mental state.”

However, the World Health Organization warns that using a hookah to smoke tobacco is “not a safe alternative to cigarette smoking” and that the rising popularity of hookahs is partly due to “unfounded assumptions” of safety and misleading commercial marketing.

Not to mention the fact that, according to Scott Graber—sales manager of the Austin-based hookah-shisha.com, one of the country’s top retailers of hookah products—“Media exposure to the Middle East is the biggest factor in growth. Servicemen and women returning from Iraq have embraced it. And it is seen as the cool social thing to do among college students.”

Although cigarette smoking is prohibited in California bars and restaurants, hookah bars are exempt. There’s even a hookah-smoking place in Hollywood where you have to know the password to get in. But the question remains, will a control-freak government eventually crack down on hookahs simply because they can be considered drug paraphernalia?

Since 1990, federal law has made drug-paraphernalia violators subject to RICO—Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization—and money-laundering charges. Jerry Clark and Kathy Fiedler ran a head shop called Daydreams that turned into a nightmare when they were raided by the DEA, U.S. Postal Inspectors, local police and sheriff’s deputies. The RICO Act was used against them, so they faced ten to twelve years behind bars.

Under federal law, merely manufacturing, distributing or selling nontraditional pipes is enough evidence to be found guilty of paraphernalia offenses. Authorities insist that companies can no longer protect themselves by posting signs or Internet warnings that indicate that their products are intended for tobacco use only.

So I hereby call to the attention of law enforcement officials an invitation to “Come and have fun at our Hookah Party Fundraiser to support Iraq Veterans Against the War”—obviously a group of Rush Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers”—and to an article in Time magazine which states:

“At cafes around UCLA and in college towns across the country, students are passing around the hookah, the ancient Middle Eastern water pipe filled with sweetened tobacco. In the past couple of years, the hookah has been resurrected in youth-oriented coffeehouses, restaurants and bars. The Gypsy Cafe serves up as many as 200 hookahs at $10 a pipe. At the Habibi, smokers have rented more than 500 hookahs in a night. Young patrons of the lounges agree that part of the hookah’s charm lies in its illicit associations. ‘It looks illegal,’ says a Gypsy customer, 18, with a grin, sucking on his hookah with the insouciance of the blue caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, ‘but it’s not.’ ”

And finally, just in case you guys at the DEA missed it, High Times magazine presented Late Night host Conan O’Brien with the beautiful Stoney Bong Award for comedy, and he kept it. Hurry, it’s still in his possession. He said that he planned to use it as a glass-eye holder, but that doesn’t matter, you can still bust him.

GOT VOMIT?

Ethan Nadelmann, head of the Drug Policy Alliance, has said that “No one should be punished for what they put into their bodies.” Of course, he’s referring to punishment by law enforcement, but the punishment can also come from the insides of a curious experimenter. It’s the risk of freedom.

Besides the usual suspects, among the substances that have been eaten, smoked, snorted or sniffed in order to get high are morning glory seeds, cough medicine, mace (the food seasoning), rug cleaner, dramamine, kanemanol, nutmeg, banana skins and flagyl (intended for vaginal infections).

According to an article in the journal Pediatrics, there’s an online drug encyclopedia that gets 250,000 clicks a day. The Web site lists hundreds of mind-altering chemicals, herbs and plants, plus thousands of posts by youthful users about their own particular experiences.

Every two years, the California Department of Education conducts a survey with the state attorney general’s office. In October 2006, the results of their latest study of 10,638 students in 113 middle and high schools revealed that 15 percent of eleventh-graders, 9 percent of ninth-graders and 4 percent of seventh-graders have been using pharmaceutical drugs without a prescription.

Guess where they find them: at parties in a game called “pharming,” which involves the use of a bowl of randomly collected pills. Researcher Rodney Skager states, “young people come in and grab the ones that look pretty and take them. This is obviously a really dangerous practice. I have no idea how common it is.” And they find them in their parents’ medicine cabinets, where teenagers have been snatching legal drugs like OxyContin and Vicodin even before trying marijuana or alcohol.

Kathryn Jett, director of the California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, said, “We will be targeting our research now on the issue of prescription drug use to make certain that this does not continue to increase. As a parent, you need to be vigilant as to where those drugs are kept. Or if you have painkillers and don’t need them, you need to dispose of them. If you have painkillers and you do need them, count them—know how many there are.”

The New England Journal of Medicine reported the case of 18-year-old twin sisters in France. Their mysterious symptoms were scaly skin on their legs and hands; they were also unsteady and mentally sluggish. The cause? A bag of mothballs, which was stashed in the the drawer of a night table in the hospital room, and discovered by a cleaning lady. The girls had been using the mothballs to get high, inhaling air from the bag for about ten minutes a day because classmates had recommended it.

The sicker of the two had also been chewing half a mothball a day for two months. She told the doctors that she continued to use the mothballs during her hospitalization “because she thought her symptoms were not related to her habit.” It took her six months to fully recover. Her sister had only been “bagging” for a few weeks, and recovered in three months.

Although radio talk show host Michael Jackson has said, “Anything that can make vomit pretty is certainly worth taking,” referring to psychedelics, Prison Legal News discloses what is perhaps the most bizarre example of self-intoxication: drinking drug-laced vomit. Prisoners at the Pine Grove Correctional Center in Canada have been drinking each other’s drug-laced vomit to get high. In fact, one inmate died there as a result of this practice.

Sonia Faith Keepness was found dead in her cell at the women’s prison from ingesting a lethal combination of methadone and librium. She had swallowed two hits of methadone-laced vomit and taken four pills of librium. Two fellow prisoners admitted that after receiving their daily dose of methadone, they returned to their cells and regurgitated into a container for Keepness. They have been charged with drug trafficking, along with a third woman who provided the librium.

Methadone is a narcotic painkiller that is prescribed for drug addicts because it alleviates the unpleasant symptoms associated with the withdrawal from heroin. At the Pine Grove infirmary, prisoners in the methadone program receive their daily dose of the narcotic—ironically, itself addictive—mixed with orange juice. They routinely traded their methadone-laced vomit in return for certain favors from other prisoners.

“Methadone is a powerful drug,” an inmate pointed out. “They wanted to get high, and they were desperate enough to drink someone’s puke.”

Prisoners are now required to remain under observation for one hour after drinking their daily dose.

Finally, in September 2007, a Collier County, Florida, sheriff’s Information Bulletin issued a warning about “Jenkem,” a new drug made from raw sewage—a mixture of fermented fecal matter and urine—and included photos of the brown liquid in a bottle and a teenager inhaling the gas produced by the mixture from a balloon in order to achieve a “euphoric high similar to ingesting cocaine but with strong hallucinations of times past. The high has been described by subjects as a feeling of being ‘out of it’ and talking to dead people. All subjects who used the Jenkem disliked the taste of sewage in their mouth and the fact that the taste continued for several days.” The Bulletin reported that Jenkem “is now a popular drug in American schools.” Word began to spread. By November, a drug counselor on KXAN in Austin was advising parents, “If there is a very funky smell or odor, ask. . . .”

Could it have been a hoax? Someone named “Pickwick” took credit on the Internet for staging that photo and confessed that his Jenkem was just dough rolled in Nutella hazelnut chocolate spread. But then a DEA offical told the Washington Post, “There are people in America trying [Jenkem].” Was that true or had a hoax transmuted into an urban legend? Certainly it’s true that in Zambia, many thousands of street children have been resorting to Jenkem for over a decade. “Initially, they used to get it from the sewer, but they make it anywhere,” said John Zulu, director of the Ministry of Sport, Youth and Child Development in Zambia. “They say it keeps them warm and makes them fearless.”

In any case, snopes.com, the Bible of Rumor Research, has not found any evidence to substantiate the original sheriff’s Information Bulletin claim.

HOW MAGIC ARE YOUR MUSHROOMS?

There I stood, in San Francisco on April Fools’ Day 1995, with my feet spread apart and my arms outstretched against the side of a car. As I was being frisked by a police officer, I realized that he was facing the back of my Mad magazine jacket, the face of Alfred E. Neuman smiling at him and saying, “What, me worry?” And, indeed, this cop was worried. He asked if I had anything sharp in my pockets.

“Because,” he explained, “I’m gonna get very mad if I get stuck,” obviously referring to a hypodermic needle.

“No,” I said, “there’s only a pen in this pocket”—gesturing toward the left with my head—“and keys in that one.”

When he saw the contents of the baggie that he removed from my pocket, he asked a rhetorical question—“So you like mushrooms, huh?”—with such hostility that it kept reverberating inside my head. I hadn’t done anything that would harm somebody else. This was simply an authority figure’s need to control. But control what? My pleasure? Or was it deeper than that?

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In 2008, the Journal of Psychopharmacology published the results of a daylong experiment involving psilocybin, also known as “magic mushrooms.” Although this psychedelic has been used for centuries in religous ceremonies, it’s still illegal. The study, which took place at a Johns Hopkins University laboratory, was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and involved thirty-six male and female volunteers.

Fourteen months later, 64 percent still felt at least a moderate increase in well-being or life satisfaction, in terms of creativity, self-confidence, flexibility and optimism; 61 percent reported at least a moderate change of behavior in positive ways; 58 percent rated the session as one of the five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives; 67 percent said that the drug had produced one of the five most spiritually significant experiences they’d ever had. Many spoke of being more sensitive, tolerant, loving and compassionate. According to one participant, “I feel more centered in who I am and what I’m doing. I don’t seem to have those self-doubts like I used to have.” She referred to “taking off . . . being lifted up.” Then came “brilliant colors and beautiful patterns, just stunningly gorgeous—more intense than normal reality,” she added. “I feel much more grounded and that we are all connected. There was this sense of relief and joy and ecstasy when my heart was opened.”

Head researcher Roland Griffiths stated, “This is a truly remarkable finding. Rarely in psychological research do we see such persistently positive reports from a single event in a laboratory. This gives credence to the claims that the mystical-type experiences some people have during hallucinogen sessions may help patients suffering from cancer-related anxiety or depression and may serve as a potential treatment for drug dependence.”

Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), has been able to break through “the forty-year-long bad trip” that he and other researchers have faced in dealing with the negative fallout from the introduction of LSD and other psychedelic compounds in the mid-1960s. He describes this four-decade intellectual Dark Age as being characterized by “enormous fear and misinformation and a vested interest in exaggerated stories about drugs to keep prohibition alive.”

Charles Shaw points out on AlterNet that “What was lost in all the derision and urban myths about LSD and other psychedelic compounds like ayahuasca, peyote, psilocybin and iboga—plant medicines thousands of years old—was the fact that they are miraculously powerful medicines, with the ability to effectively treat, and in some cases, cure some of the most debilitating illnesses and disorders plaguing humanity: addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and migraine and cluster headaches. They are also effectve palliatives for the sick and dying. . . .”

Referring to Doblin’s pioneer work, he writes, “Western governments had to ask themselves what was more important to them: their irrational and erroneous drug propaganda, or the possibility that the millions of lives they had devasted by war, violence and iniquitous economic policies might actually be repaired. In this, the seeds of a psychedelic renaissance were planted.”

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As for my psilocybin bust, I got off with a $100 fine and nothing on my permanent record. But I finally understood what that police officer had meant when he sarcastically snarled, “So you like mushrooms, huh?” What was his actual message? Back through eons of ancestors, this cop was continuing a never-ending attempt to maintain the status quo. He had unintentionally revealed the true nature of the threat he perceived. What he had really said to me was, “So you like the evolution of human consciousness, huh?”

“Well, yeah, when you put it like that, sure I do. I like it a whole lot.”