Proemium
by
Jonathon Ott

(A masterpiece From his Book 'Pharmacotheon')

Proemium

The prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me,
and I asked them how they dared so roundly to
assert that God spoke to them; and whether they
did not think at the time that they would be mis-
understood, & so be the cause of imposition.

Isaiah answer'd: "I saw no God, nor heard any, in a
finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd
the infinite in everything..."

William Blake
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793)

This book is about these wondrous entheogens, these strange plant sacraments and their contained active principles. The term entheogen was first suggested by classical scholars Carl A.P. Ruck and Danny Staples, pioneering entheogen researcher R. Gordon Wasson, ethnobotanist Jeremy Bigwood and me. The neologism derives from an obsolete Greek word meaning "realizing the divine within," the term used by the ancient Greeks to describe states of poetic or prophetic inspiration, to describe the entheogenic state which can be induced by sacred plant-drugs. This term replaces the pejorative words psychotomimetic and hallucinogenic, with their connotations of psychosis and hallucination, and the orthographically incorrect psychedelic (the correct spelling being psychodelic, as the word is commonly rendered in languages other than English), which has become so invested with connotations of sixties' popular culture ("psychedelic" art, music, etc.) as to make it incongruous to speak of ancient shamanic use of a psychedelic plant. I have summarized the logic behind the use of entheogen(ic) in Chapter 1, Note 1, and the interested reader is referred to the original paper proposing the word (Ruck et al.; Wasson et al. 1980b).

My readers would be justified in asking "why yet another book on these drugs?" for over the years there have been many good books on the topic. I might mention in particular the excellent scientific book The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens by American ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes and Swiss chemis Albert Hofmann, as well as their more popular, and more lavishly illustrated, Plants of the Gods (Schultes & Hofmann 1979; Schultes & Hofmann 1980). I will have occasion in the text following to refer to these and other valuable books on the subject. My goal in writing the present book was two-fold; first, to write a reference book for the specialist, citing the most important sources in the historical, anthropological, botanical, chemical and pharmacological literature, meanwhile placing this subject in the broader context of general ethnobotany. Thus I have updated and greatly enlarged the best existing bibliography on the subject, that of The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens. The present bibliography is triple the size of that of Schultes and Hofmann, and even so, does not pretend to be exhaustive. My second goal in the writing of this book has been to detail the complex history of entheogenic drugs, and to trace in particular the story of how these drugs came to be available to non-traditional users in the twentieth century. In contrast to the authors of many other treatises on the subject, I consider the ethnobotany of entheogenic plants and their active agents in contemporary western culture to be every bit as important as their traditional ethnobotany, if not more so. As Gordon Wasson opined:

Perhaps with all ouor modern knowledge we do not need the divine mushrooms any more. Or do we need them more than ever? Some are shocked that the key even to religion might be reduced to a mere drug. On the other hand, the drug is as mysterious as it ever was... (Wasson 1961)

I will neither promote nor inveigh against contemporary non-traditional use of entheogenic drugs. True, some of the drugs discussed in this book are illegal, and there are those who think it irresponsible to discuss this subject without denouncing their illicit use. On the other hand, the bulk of the compounds studied in this book are legal, and there is no question that there are presently in the United States alone at least a million users of entheogenic drugs, legal and illegal (Goldstein & Kalant 1990), and it is to these psychonauts (Junger 1970), as well as to interested scientists, that this book is directed. There is no need to encourage would-be users to sample the entheogens- the drugs have their devotees, and in any case the current supply is probably insufficient to meet the demand of established users (Blanco 1993).

In this exordium, however, I will denounce in no uncertain terms the futile, counter-productive and ill-advised proscription of entheogenic drugs by the governments of the United States and other countries. As Baruch Spinoza so presciently put it:

All laws which can be violated without doing any one any injury are laughed at. Nay, so far are they from doing anything to control the desires and passions of men that, on the contrary, they direct and incite men's thoughts the more toward those very objects; for we always strive toward what is forbidden and desire the things we are not allowed to have. And men of leisure are never deficient in the ingenuity needed to enable them to outwit laws framed to regulate things which cannot be entirely forbidden... He who tries to determine everything by law will foment crime rather than lesssen it.

It is one thing to furnish the law, and another to furnish the force needed to ensure obedience. That is why we have so many dead-letter laws in this country, --we forget that a law is not self-enforcing.

I will adumbrate four different lines of argument against the contemporary prohibition of entheogenic drugs and, by extension, prohibitions of other drugs- from alcohol, caffeine or nicotine (all of which have been illicit substances in the past) to cocaine, heroin or marijuana (all of which have been legal far longer than they have been controlled substances). These four lines of argument might be grouped under the following headings: 1) scientific; 2) practical or legal; 3) moral; and 4) economic. I will also pose the following question: "why is it that western society cannot cope with euphoria and ecstasy?" This question is at the heart of the prohibition of entheogens. Although they are disguised as "Public Health Laws," the strictures against the entheogens are first and foremost limitations on the practice of religion in a broad sense; or in a broader sense still, are attempts to enshrine in law a certain perverse brand of what once was called "natural philosophy." I call it science, and the modern laws against entheogenic drugs are manifestly anti-scientific and indeed represent "crimes against nature."

A Scientific Perspective

Drug prohibition statutes are typically justified as "Public Health Laws," and conventional wisdom holds that enacting and enforcing such measures, governments are exercising their paternalistic function of protecting the citizenry from dangers to the public health, much as they would in framing and enforcing laws regarding the disposal of sewage, vaccination of schoolchildren, or pollution of the air by motor vehicles and industrial processes. Regarded from this perspective, drug prohibition is seen as benign, indeed, beneficent, and this viewpoint has becomes so firmly rooted in the public consciousness as to make the concept accepted universally as a legitimate exercise, nay, as a solemn responsibility of capitalist and socialist governments alike (Szasz 1974; Szasz 1992). In the United States, only the Libertarian Party has consistently opposed drug prohibition as an abuse of governmental power. In some countries, violations of drug laws are called euphemistically delitos contra la salud, "crimes against [public] health."

Nevertheless, viewed from a dispassionate, strictly scientific perspective, this public health justification for drug control simply won't hold water, and it can be argued that, by placing certain drugs outside of the established quality control regimen for pharmaceutical products, governments are defaulting on their responsibility to protect the public welfare. While some prospective drug users dissuaded by laws prohibiting their chosen drugs, many, perhaps the majority, are not. During the experimental federal prohibition of alcohol in the United States from 1920-1933, some former alcohol users took the pledge and obeyed the law, whereas many, probably at least half, continued to use alcohol in spite of the laws (it is worth noting that alcohol use, like illicit drug use today, remained legal, and their were exceptions to the laws...sacramental wine was allowed to be manufactured and dispensed, and physicians suddenly discovered that prescription alcohol was a panacea, and it was prescribed liberally). Although it is impossible to establish firm numbers for present use of illicit drugs and the efficacy of the laws prohibiting them (Barnes 1988c), there is no question that many millions of users, more than 20-40 million in the United States or at least 10-20% of the adult population (Goldstein & Kalant 1990; Nadelmann 1989), are undeterred by the laws, and use drugs illegally. During alcohol prohibition in the United States, many inveterate users were accidentally poisoned by methanol and other solvents- poisonings which would not have occurred had legal controls of purity and concentration been in place; poisonings which ceased to occur once ludibund use of alcohol and its sale for that purpose again became legal. Similarly, now there are annually some 3500 premature deaths per year in the United States due to illicit drug use (Goldstein & Kalant 1990), many of them so-called "overdose" deaths from injected drugs, mainly opiates. Although these deaths are written off as "heroin overdose," the majority are rather due to adulterants and contaminants in illicit drug products (Chein et al. 1967; Escohotado 1989a). After all, the typical samples contain only a few percent of heroin or one or another artificial succedaneum, and illicit products may also contain dust, mites and other minuscule arthropods, spores, virus particles and bacteria, which may either promote infection or sudden death from anaphylaxis or the toxicity of one or another adulterant. On the other hand, the injection, including self-administration, of sterile samples of pharmaceutical opiates of known potency is a common and safe procedure, and deaths as a consequence of such use are virtually unknown.

As for the presumed adverse ecological effects of illicit drug production, these are invariably the consequence of the drug laws themselves. Official drug-eradication programs involving spraying of 2,4-D, Paraquat and other herbicides have resulted in exposing smokers to toxic residues in marijuana, not to mention the massive ecological destruction, and its consequent deleterious effects on health of the exposed populace, occasioned by anti-drug herbicide spraying. By fostering the spread of clandestine laboratories, often in pristine jungle environments, drug laws lead to uncontrolled and unmonitored environmental pollution from unregulated chemical facilities. Under a legal regimen, presently illegal inebriating drugs would be manufactured in the open in existing facilities, whose liquid and gaseous effluents might effectively be observed. Not only are our health authorities defaulting on their responsibilities with regard to regulating purity of pharmaceutical products, but our environmental authorities are guilty of defaulting on their responsibilities to protect the environment and public health.

There is no doubt that illicit injection of black-market samples of drugs has become a major vector of transmission of AIDS, hepatitis and other diseases. In the United States and Europe, around 25% of all AIDS cases, including the majority of cases in heterosexuals, children and infants, are a direct or indirect result of illicit intravenous drug administration (Nadelmann 1989). The barbarous practice of denying access to sterile syringes without a medical prescription prevails in the United States, and has even taken root in some other backward countries, whereas in the great majority of the world's countries, sterile syringes are sensibly made available at low prices at pharmacies, even supermarkets, over-the-counter. The U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to prohibit use of "federal" funds for the independent state or municipal syringe exchange programs designed to halt the drug-related spread of AIDS (Hamilton 1992). This cruel and misguided drug control measure is directly responsible for at least 25% of the new cases of AIDS in the United States. Far from protecting public health, drug prohibition is drastically expanding the AIDS epidemic and contributing to the deaths of thousands of individuals in the United States alone from "drug overdose"- individuals who are deprived of the protection of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and its counterparts in other countries. This is especially important when we reflect that not all black market drugs are inebriants (Krieg 1967), not all illicit drug users are hedonists or thrill-seekers. Owing to the restrictive and monopolistic nature of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, there are black markets in curative drugs which have not been approved for sale by the FDA but for which there is demand. Recent examples of black market medicines are the controversial cancer drug amygdalin or Laetrile, dimethyl- sulfoxide (DMSO), a topical treatment for bruises and sprains (users have been forced to employ industrial-grade DMSO, as no pharmaceutical grade is available), and the AIDS drug Retrovir or azidothymidine (AZT)- thanks to reforms in the FDA this drug has been made more widely available, and it has all but disappeared from the black market. The AIDS drug Dexulate or dextran sulfate is another example of a medicine which American patients had to "bootleg" from other countries (Booth 1988b). There are even black market drugs which don't fit either in the category of inebriants or chemotherapeutic agents- some products of the biotechnology industry are coming to be used illicitly by athletes. There now exists a black market in human growth hormone (hGH) and Eprox or human erythropoietin, used surreptitiously by athletes to improve their performance (Spalding 1991). The size of the black market in steroids for athletes has been estimated at U.S. $100 million annually (Marshall 1988d) and is growing- athletic steroids are now being sold in health food stores! There are even athletic steroids which boost performance and are psychoactive- East German scientists developed a psychoactive testosteroid nasal spray for illegal use by their Olympic athletes (Dickman 1991).

Other damage to the public health is occasioned by drug prohibition policies. Some presently illicit inebriating drugs have valuable therapeutic properties and thus potential to alleviate human suffering- they are not being systematically researched and developed as pharmaceutical products owing to the pall of disreputability cast over them by their legal misclassification. As we will see in Chapter 2, the most famous entheogenic drug, LSD, was originally developed by Sandoz Ltd. of Switzerland as a pharmaceutical agent, under the trade name Delysid. While the novel medicine showed considerable promise in psychotherapy (Delay et al. 1959b; Grinspoon & Bakalar 1979; Grof 1975; Heim 1961; Naranjo 1973a; Ratsch 1989), one of the most exciting pharmaceutical prospects which developed for the drug was an analgesic and psychotherapeutic adjunct to agonious therapy, treatment of patients with painful terminal cancer or other fatal diseases (N.B. this has been incorrectly called agonic therapy; misusing a geometric term meaning "without angles" as opposed to polygonic "with many angles"). LSD, DPT (see Chapter 3) and other entheogenic drugs proved to be valuable long-lasting analgesic agents in some patients with severely painful, terminal conditions, drugs which did not benumb and cloud consciousness in the manner that potent opiate analgesics do (Kast 1963; Kast 1966; Kast 1970; Kast & Collins 1964; Pahnke et al. 1970a; Pahnke et al. 1970b). The drugs also proved their worth in "brief psychotherapy"- aiding dying patients to cope with their situation (Grog and Halifax 1977; Pahnke 1970; Pahnke 1971; Pahnke & Richards 1990; Richards 1975; Richards et al. 1977; Richards et al. 1979). Thanks to this demonstrated medicinal value, the Swiss government has recently reclassified LSD as an experimental psychotherapeutic agent, making it again available to physicians (Hofmann 1991; Rayl 1992). Entheogens have also shown promise in treatment of alcoholism (Mikuriya 1971; Mikuriya 1973; Rhead et al. 1977; see Grinspoon & Bakalar 1979 for a review of this controversial research). Despite this plethora of therapeutic benefits shown by entheogenic drugs, their development as pharmaceutical agents was cut short by their legal proscription, and their illogical classification in Schedule I, as drugs with "no currently accepted medical use," all but eliminated any further research along these lines. Even much-maligned visionary drugs like the anesthetic phencyclidine (PCP or Sernyl) and its congener ketamine (Ketalar or "Vitamin K", used by some as an entheogen; Moore & Altounian 1978) have proven to have medicinal potential- as antagonists to N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor agonists in the brain and potential protective agents against brain damage as a consequence of stroke and other neurological disorders (Barinaga 1990b, Olney et al. 1991). It has similarly been proposed to exploit the tendency of psilocybine to stimulate specific areas of the brain in the diagnosis of circulatory and other problems in the brain (Gartz 1993), perhaps in combination with magnetic imaging technologies. Even heroin, considered to be deadly poison in the U.S., continues to be regarded as valuable medicine in other countries such as Great Britain. Known pharmaceutically as Diamorphine, heroin is considered to be more effective and safer than morphine in treating pain of myocardial infarction (MacDonald et al. 1967). Since both heroin and LSD have legal, medicinal use in other scientifically advanced countries, their U.S. legal designation as Schedule I drugs (with "no currently accepted medicinal use") is patently false and prejudicial.

The illicit drug best known for its medicinal use is marijuana (see Appendix A; Paton et al. 1973; Roffman 1982; Zinberg 1979). This drug has shown many medicinally-valuable properties, but is best known as an anti-nausea agent for patients receiving cancer or AIDS chemotherapy, and as a treatment for glaucoma- a drug to lower the excessive intraocular pressure of this disease, which can lead to blindness (Roffmann 1982; Zinberg 1979). Both smoked marijuana and orally-ingested tetrahydrocannabinol (THC or Marinol, one of the active principles) have proven to be valuable adjuncts to cancer and AIDS chemotherapy and to glaucoma treatment. Nevertheless, the U.S. government, to avoid giving "mixed signals" in the matter of marijuana, recently stopped the distribution of government marijuana to new cancer, AIDS and glaucoma patients, although for the moment Marinol tablets will still be available (Blumenthal 1992). There is some evidence, however that smoked marijuana may be more effective for some patients (Roffman 1982), and it would be certainly less expensive, especially were cultivation for this purpose permitted. In any case, the U.S. government does give mixed signals with regard to marijuana and THC- on the one hand the marijuana plant and its active principal are listed in Schedule I as having "no currently accepted medical use"; then the same government shows the error of this misclassification by itself distributing marijuana and THC for medical use! Summing up the negative effect of drug prohibition on medical research in a recent article of Science magazine, Princeton University professor E.A. Nadelmann stated (Nadelmann 1989):

Current drug laws and policies, however, greatly hamper the efforts of researchers to investigate these and other potential medical uses of illegal drugs; they make it virtually impossible for any of the illegal drugs, particularly those in Schedule I, to be legally provided to those who would benefit from them; and they contribute strongly to the widely-acknowledged undertreatment of pain by the medical profession in the United States.

Nevertheless, such research will continue, perhaps in countries with fewer regulations or a more enlightened policy toward drugs. The passage in the United States of the "Controlled Substances Analogues Act" of 1986 has been widely perceived as illegalizing research involving synthesis, with the intention of studying their effects in human beings, of any of the illicit entheogenic substances or their automatically illegal congeners (Repke 1992). It has become illegal in the United States even to attempt to synthesize and test completely novel compounds... the government essentially presuming to declare anything illegal unless specifically authorized! Talk about socialistic central planning and governmental control of industry! Pursuing this sort of draconian legal overregulation will ultimately doom the United States pharmaceutical industry to technological and economic inferiority, as the next generation of mind-drugs is developed elsewhere. After an American chemist working for a U.S. pharmaceutical company published (before the enactment of the 1986 law) ethically flawless, legitimate research dealing with completely legal, novel analogues of DMT, research conducted on his own time, his company was subjected to a special investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and he was threatened with dismissal! When pharmaceutical companies are restricted by excessive regulation, they simply invest elsewhere, where their research can be accomplished with a minimum of interference. A recent example was the decision of Swiss pharmaceutical multinational Ciba-Geigy to abandon plans to construct a new pharmaceutical production facility in the firm's home city of Basel, Switzerland. Because of the political power of anti-biotechnology activists in Switzerland, the firm decided to cancel construction plans for the $125 million facility in Basel, and instead is building a plant across the border in Huningue, France (Aldhous 1992). Needless to say, jobs in Basel are threatened by this development.

Besides crippling neurochemical research and depriving the public of valuable medicaments, drug prohibition occasions other, tangential and collateral damage to scientific enterprise. An important recent example has to do with the U.S. governments deployment of a line of "aerostats"- balloons outfitted with sophisticated radar equipment and tethered at around 10,000 feet altitude along the U.S./Mexico border and the Florida coast. The purpose of these aerostats is to monitor non-commercial aviation traffic across the border in search of aircraft engaged in illicit drug smuggling (Marshall 1988b). These radar eye-in-the-sky balloons, however, interfere with radio astronomical research by observatories in Arizona and elsewhere. In particular, the aerostat radars, which are powerful radio transmitters, broadcast radio signals in the 1215-1350 MHz frequency range, and effectively blind the astronomical equipment to the red-shifted hydrogen spectra of distant galaxies (Stone 1991). Scientific research once again suffers because of the obsession of the U.S. government with drug enforcement- increasingly an anti-scientific endeavor. As an American citizen, it is profoundly embarrassing to me to contemplate the spectacle of an array of gigantic balloons strung along the border with Mexico... just imagine, balloons... the country is coming to look ever more like some sort of immense used car lot, which the broken-down economy mismanaged by an anti-scientific government increasingly resembles as well!

Practical and Legal Considerations

The fundamental problem with the concept of drug control is that most human beings, in all eras and cultures about which we know, have used and enjoyed drugs to modify their mood or state of mind. In the United States, foe example, there are nearly 200 million people over the age of 12, of which 178 million are caffeine users (89%), 106 million are alcohol users (53%), 57 million are nicotine users(28%), along with approximately 12 million marijuana users (6%), some 3 million cocaine users (1.5%), 2 million heroin users (1%), with about a million users (0.5%) each of the entheogens and non-ethanol solvents (according to the governments conservative data from a household survey; Goldstein & Kalant 1990). Not only are the numbers of illicit drug users greatly inferior to the numbers of users of legal psychoactive drugs (alcohol, nicotine, caffeine), but the scope of health problems associated with illicit versus licit drug use shows a similar disparity. Compared to the estimated three to four thousand deaths per year as a consequence of all illicit drug use combined, approximately 320,000 Americans die prematurely each year as a consequence of tobacco use, and they are accompanied to the graveyard by an additional 200,000 premature cadavers each year resulting from use of alcohol (Nadelmann 1989). Although there are approximately three times as many nicotine users in the United States as users of all illicit drugs combined, there are nearly 100 times as many deaths as a result; and although there are about five times as many alcohol users as illicit drug users, alcohol is responsible for some 50 times as many deaths. One might conclude that tobacco is some thirty times more dangerous than entheogens, marijuana, cocaine and heroin; and that alcohol is about ten times more dangerous... or one might claim that in time we will discover that additional premature deaths are in fact due to illicit drug use. Nevertheless, the disparity is striking, and it cannot be argued that illicit drugs are justifiably illegal because they are dangerous, as long as substances evidently much more dangerous are legal. Because something is dangerous does not justify illegalizing it, it any case. Whereas the comparatively benign psilocybine-containing mushrooms (see Chapter 5) are illegal, the deadly-poisonous amatoxin- and phallotoxin-containing Amanita and Galerina species are perfectly legal (Ott 1978b; Ott 1979b). Similarly, with regard to drug toxicity deaths, 70% are the result not of illicit drugs but of legal prescription drugs, of which it is said that 300 million doses per year are "abused" (Hollister et al. 1991.

I might also mention that, whereas both alcohol and nicotine are highly addictive substances (Byrne 1988; Schelling 1992), the entheogens show no pattern of habituation or withdrawal syndrome (Hofmann 1980). In a recent article arguing for drug control, on a 1-5 scale of "relative risk of addiction" (with 1 being the highest risk), addiction authorities A Goldstein and H. Kalant rated nicotine a "2" along with heroin, with alcohol rating a "3" along with barbiturates and benzodiazepines or "sleeping pills" (Goldstein & Kalant 1990). Marijuana was given a "4," and the entheogens a "5," together with caffeine. In a rebuttal to letters in response to their article (Hollister et al. 1991), Goldstein & Kalant commented that the entheogens really didn't even belong on a table of risks of addiction, since these drugs are "aversive rather than reinforcing in animal models"- that is, that experimental animals will avoid them rather than become habituated to them. Although many people persist in ignoring the fact that nicotine is an addictive drug (a recent letter complained "to compare nicotine with crack would seem an assault on common sense"; Levin et al. 1992!), former U.S. Surgeon General C.E. Koop stated in no uncertain terms (Byrne 1988:

The pharmacological and behavioral processes that determine tobacco addiction are similar to those that determine addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine... We should also give priority to the one addiction- tobacco addiction- that is killing more than 300,000 Americans each year.

Not only is psychoactive drug use nearly universal among American adults, but virtually every culture that has been studied has been found to make use of one or another inebriating substance (Weil 1972). Moreover, there is increasing evidence for the use of medicinal and inebriating plants by non-human animals (Siegel 1989; Siegel & Jarvik 1975; Siegel et al 1974; Sigstedt 1990; Williams 1989), of which the most famous example is that of catnip (Nepeta cataria) as an inebriant by housecats, a use to which most any species of feline is susceptible, given access to the drug (see Appendix B; Tucker & Tucker 1988). The American Association for the Advancement of Science recently held sessions on "zoopharmacognosy" at its annual meeting (Gibbons 1992). Clearly, use of inebriants is a normal, ordinary, animal activity, virtually universal among members of our species, and any legal attempts to prohibit one psychoactive substance in favor of another (which, after all, involve questions of taste, tradition and prejudice rather than any scientific criterion) is automatically destined for trouble. Laws simply will not deter many millions of people from using the drugs of their choice, but they can distort and pervert the legal system and wreak all sorts of havoc in the attempt.

An avowed purpose of drug control measures in the United States is to increase the street prices of illicit drugs. In this sense, the costs imposed on traffickers by the necessity of escaping detection and by the loss of occasional shipments or the arrests of personnel constitute a sort of "business tax" which is passed on to the consumer. The governmental expenditures on drug enforcement can be seen as a subsidy of the illicit drug dealers. As Professor Nadelmann put it (Nadelmann 1989):

The greatest beneficiaries of the drug laws are organized and unorganized drug traffickers. The criminalization of the drug market effectively imposes a de facto value-added tax that is enforced and occasionally augmented by the law enforcement establishment and collected by drug traffickers. More than half of all organized crime revenues are believed to derive from the illicit drug business; estimates of the dollar value range between $10 and $50 billion [U.S. $10-50 thousand million!] per year... If the marijuana, cocaine, and heroin markets were legal, state and federal governments would collect billions of dollars annually in tax revenues. Instead, they spend billions in what amounts to a subsidy of organized criminals.

The laws controlling narcotic and other psychoactive drugs... should be evaluated for effectiveness and safety in the same way we would evaluate surgical or pharmacologic treatment. As a treatment, the drug laws appear to be only marginally effective. Their side effects are so dangerous that the treatment is often more devastating than the disease. A judgment based strictly on the effectiveness and safety of the drug laws would require their immediate repeal or overhaul.

In a similar vein, Daniel E. Koshland Jr., the editor of the premier American scientific journal Science, a man with extensive career experience in the chemistry and pharmacology of opiate drugs, commented in an editorial entitled "The War? Program? Experiment? on Drugs" (Koshland 1989):

The drug program recently unveiled by the Executive Branch... is at least a useful experiment, and should be labeled as such... A minimal requirement would seem to be ongoing analysis of the program's degree of success, to decide whether to continue in the same direction or to seek new directions if the program is not succeeding... The experiment will be acceptable only if accompanied by a scientific detachment that says, "The get-tough experiment is under way. If it fails, legalization is next."

While the government experiments with the "get-tough" approach, scientific developments have compromised severely the forensic chemical basis for evidence in the ensuing drug-related prosecutions. The interesting discovery that the illicit entheogen DMT appears to be a mammalian neurotransmitter (Christian et al. 1976; Christian et al. 1977) and that the drug normally occurs in cerebrospinal fluid (Corbett et al. 1987) raises important legal questions. Moreover, diazepam or Valium has been found to occur in rat brain and in trace amounts in wheat grains (Wildmann et al. 1987), and "diazepam-like" compounds have been found in bovine urine (Luk et al. 1983). Similarly, the controlled opiates morphine and codeine have been found to be normal components of human cerebrospinal fluid (Cardinale et al. 1987), and morphine has been found to be a trace constituent of cow and human milk, and to occur naturally in mammalian brain tissue. Trace amounts of morphine have also been detected in "various plants such as hay and lettuce" (Hazum et al. 1981). In ancient times, Pliny reported a lettuce variety called "poppy lettuce, from its abundance of juice of soporific property" (Harlan 1986) and lactucarium or "lettuce opium" was introduced to the pharmacopoeia in 1810 (Duncan 1810) and may still be purchased from companies advertising in "countercultural" drug magazines. Trace amounts of morphine in poppy seeds used in baked goods can show up in the urine of a diner. With the detection of morphine in urine being considered prima facie evidence of heroin use in methadone-clinic patients and in job applicants (Bigwood 1978; Potter & Orfali 1990), and with the drug laws flatly proclaiming that unauthorized possession or sale of "any material, compound, mixture or preparation which contains any quantity of" DMT, Valium, morphine and many other drugs, where does this leave the concept of drug control and forensic chemical evidence? If morphine occurs in hay and lettuce, in poppy-seed rolls, in every one of our bodies, even in mothers' milk... on what scientific basis can an authorized cultivator of opium poppies be punished, without also punishing lettuce and hay growers, or the proprietors and employees of supermarket chains and the corner Mom and Pop grocery for illicit trafficking in morphine present in each and every quart of wholesome milk? On what basis... as citizens subjected willy-nilly to the absurd consequences of drug laws... we demand to know... on what basis?

The absurdities and incongruities into which we fall in the looking-glass world of the drug warriors by no means end there. A recent article in Science proclaimed that the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) "Aims to Fight Drugs with Drugs," that "the agency is planning a massive search for medications to treat cocaine and other addictions," looking for "magic bullets for addiction" (Waldrop 1989)! The only "magic bullets" for addiction the authorities have found so far are the .38 caliber variety injected by police special revolvers! Let's treat whiskey addicts with gin while we're at it... or heroin addicts with methadone... surely they can't be serious! Do they say this with tongue in cheek, or do they have something else in cheek... perhaps a goodly quid of leaves from the "stupid bush" which the CIA chemical warriors were searching for in the Caribbean in the fifties and seem to have found at home on Langley (Marks 1979)? We must call recall that heroin was originally marketed as a "cure" for morphinism (Escohotado 1989a; Latimer & Goldberg 1981), and one of the "magic bullets" against addiction, bromocriptine or Parlodel (see Chapter 2, Note 9), is already suspected of being itself an addicting drug (Holden 1989b). The article goes on... claiming this could be a "Manhattan Project for chemists"- so what does that mean, "nuke" your neighborhood junkie or hippie? Maybe that's not too far off the mark- a recent review of a book about the Manhattan Project by prominent physicist Freeman J. Dyson drew a specious analogy between LSD and nuclear weapons: "nuclear weapons and LSD are both highly addictive... Both have destroyed many lives and are likely to destroy many more..." (Dyson 1992). Nobody said Dyson was an expert on entheogenic drugs, but the scary fact is that Science published this absurd fancy, and this well-respected scientist was apparently serious. Of course, I realize NIDA has no intention of treating whiskey addicts with gin... more like treating whiskey addicts with methanol... forcing people off one drug, the effects of which they happen to like, and substituting another drug which will do everything for them but provide the pleasure they originally sought in drugs! This is treatment... or assault?

Meanwhile, as thousands of people are being arrested for possession of cocaine, it has been found that another "material, compound, mixture or preparation which contains any quantity" of this illegal substance is the bulk of American paper money! In an analysis of 135 American Federal Reserve Notes of varying denominations and from different parts of the country, all but four (97%) contained detectable quantities of cocaine. The average content was 7.3 mcg of cocaine per bill, and one bill contained as much as 270 mcg of cocaine (Pool 1989). This means that virtually all Americans (save only the poorest, who might have only "spare change" in their pockets) are in possession of a Schedule II drug all the time, with the richest among us perhaps falling in the "possession with intent to sell" category based on the gross weight of a big bankroll of cocaine-containing greenbacks... or should we call them "whitebacks"? But since the citizen carrying his hard-earned Federal Reserve Note is legally just a "bearer" of a monetary instrument which is the property of the Federal Reserve Bank, does this mean that it is the proverbial "higher ups" who are to be arrested... do I hear calls for an indictment against the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and the Secretary of the Treasury for cocaine trafficking... or, since the "buck" ("cocabuck"?) ostensibly stops on the desk of the oval office, let's go right to the top of this sordid drug ring, to the President of the United States. Never mind the fact that the U.S. currency is printed on paper containing hemp (i.e. marijuana) fiber, or that Betsy Ross' first American flag was sown on hempen cloth, or that the originals of the U.S. constitution and Declaration of Independence are written on hemp fiber parchment!

Chemical detection technology has progressed to such a point that we are all in danger of being the "enemy" in the "War on Drugs"... or prospective casualties. Recently a military plot, a commissioned officer of the United States Air Force, was ignominiously court-martialed for illicit drug use when amphetamine residues were detected in his urine. Thanks to a little scientific detective work, it was later proved that an over-the-counter anorexic (diet pill) he had been taking quite legally, a product which contained phenylpropanolamine as active agent was contaminated in the manufacturing process with trace amounts of amphetamine, as were other lots of similar products tested. The court-martialed pilot was given back his commission and reinstated to active duty, but not restored to his prior flight crew status (Pool 1989). It is significant that a major legal challenge to government plans to screen employees' urine for drug metabolites was mounted by U.S. Customs agents, the Grand Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police and U.S. Department of Justice federal attorneys who commented: "they test; we sue" (Crawford 1988)! Note that these are the "frontline troops" in the "War on Drugs," and they don't want "the people" to know what drug metabolites are in their urine! A company called Psychemedics is now fighting the "urinalysis lobby" for a piece of the $200 million per year U.S. drug testing market- promoting a technology based on infinitesimal residues of drugs or drug metabolites in hair samples (Holden 1990c). There is some evidence that merely allowing your fingers to touch your hair after handling some of the Federal Reserve Chairman's cocaine-blighted bills could make you a candidate for a positive reading in a "hairanalysis" drug test... or taking a stroll through the park and inadvertently passing through some marijuana smoke exhaled by some brazen lawbreaker (it has been demonstrated that such "passive" exposure to Cannabis smoke can lead to false positive readings for marijuana use in blood and urine tests too; Moreland et al. 1985). Urinalysis also involves the problem of "false positives" if detection thresholds are set low enough to detect all users (Schwartz et al. 1987). The ultra-sensitive analyses for drug metabolites in urine cannot tell whether morphine in the urine came from a shot of heroin or a few poppyseed rolls with sinner. Do you still think the troops fighting the "War on Drugs" are on your side... can you be sure you won't one day be considered "enemy"? Perhaps the "skinheads" are on to something...

Let's face it, we're all on drugs, all of the time... I'm not talking about the industrial quantities of alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, etc. consumed regularly by humankind, but about the DMT and morphine our bodies make for us and which we "consume" all the time; or our very own sleeping pill, the endogenous ligand of the Valium receptor (which may be Valium itself); or the "anxiety peptide" which blocks that receptor (Marx 1985); or our endorphins and enkephalins (our own self-produced "ENDOgenous moRPHINES"; see Snyder & Matthysse 1975) which kill our pain; or "Substance P," our own pain-causing molecule (Skerrett 1990); or anandamide, the endogenous ligand of the THC (marijuana) receptor (Devane et al. 1992)... The life of the mind, of consciousness, is a constant, ever-changing pharmacological symphony, or to put it less romantically, a never-ending drug binge. The urge to ingest opiates or DMT or Valium is completely natural (Siegel 1989) and as "organic" as can be- we are only supplementing or complementing the drugs that make our brains work, and these drugs work for us precisely because they are identical to, or chemically similar to our own endogenous drugs. Researchers have found "commonalities" in "drug abuse" irrespective of gross pharmacological differences between different classes of drugs (Holden 1985) because on one level all psychoactive drugs are the same- they are all fitting into our own brains' own receptors for our homemade, endogenous drugs.

The inequities and incongruities drug laws force on our legal system are many and weighty. Scientists presently are vociferously debating (and rightly so) the statistical and legal interpretations of forensic evidence based on DNA analysis, so- called "DNA-fingerprinting" in which the DNA of an individual left at the scene of the crime is amplified by PCR technology (The Polymerase Chain Reaction invented by K. Mullis, formerly of Cetus Corp.). A recent article in Science (Chakraborty & Kidd 1991) questioned the claimed statistical significance of "matches" between DNA "fingerprints" (in reality, autoradiograms of electrophoretic separations on polycrylamide gel of fragments of digested DNA), and the editors of the journal felt compelled to take an unprecedented step by simultaneously publishing a rejoinder to this article (Lewontin & Hartl 1991) and a news article explaining why (Roberts 1991), all followed by an editorial (Koshland 1992) and a spate of letters and rebuttals (Wills et al. 1992). This is as it should be, for the technology promises to revolutionize the nature of evidence, both accusatory and exculpatory. The extreme care with which the scientific community is treating the establishment of standards for DNA fingerprinting, however, contrasts markedly with the standards prevailing in a modern American drug-violation prosecution. Entrapment of the defendant is the rule, and sometimes undercover group A of municipal drug police is working assiduously to entrap undercover group B of state or federal police, and there have even been shootouts between two different police units. This is protecting the public welfare? Eyewitness testimony purchased from avowed criminals (whether outright with cash, or with pardons or reduced sentences) is de riguer. The luckless defendant may have been subjected to an illegal wiretap or search and seizure without warrant or probable cause, but since the police were "acting in good faith" (the police are always "acting in good faith," aren't they?) the evidence is admitted. Even more shocking and fraudulent is the established American practice of regarding one gram of 10% heroin to be one gram of heroin (when in reality only one-tenth of a gram of heroin is involved) in considering sentencing or the charge (simple possession is distinguished from possession with intent to sell, which carries much stiffer penalties, by the quantity of drug seized as evidence). This is especially absurd when doses of LSD are seized, which may contain only 25 to 50 mcg of the drug on a piece of paper or gelatin weighing tens or hundreds of milligrams (Shulgin & Shulgin 1991). Imagine the innocent farmer wending a weary way to the barn in a bucolic setting with a couple of tons of hay on the truck... hay which contains morphine (Hazum et al. 1981) in trace quantities... by this standard (s)he could be arrested for possession of a couple of tons of morphine, and go down in history as one of the all-time great narcotraficantes. How about an Untouchables-type raid on a pasteurization plant, to bust the nefarious pushers of tons of "morphine"- milk containing traces of the drug, that is? My ludibrous tone masks genuine concern- as a citizen subject to the possibility of entrapment and wire tapping, to all sorts of chicanery, prestidigitation and fraud in the name of law enforcement, I demand to know... we must know... on what basis can "the people" prosecute ill-starred individuals in possession of "grams" or "kilograms" of illicit drugs, meanwhile allowing traffickers in "tons" of Valium, morphine, codeine, DMT or any number of other controlled drugs to go free? On what basis?

Entrapment, wiretaps, searches without warrant or probable cause, arbitrary enforcement due to the very ubiquity of controlled substances in our own bodies, on our money, in the milk we drink... these disreputable, slipshod and unethical enforcement techniques of questionable legality threaten our freedoms and human rights. However bizarre or patently illegal a police tactic may be, once it is accepted in a court of law, and then cited in another judgment, a body of precedent begins to accumulate, and what was once a heavy-handed excess by rogue elements of police operating outside of the law slowly becomes standard practice acceptable in any courtroom (Shulgin & Shulgin 1991). The use of extraordinary "emergency" measures instituted to deal with the "epidemic" of "drug abuse" and tolerated by judges who have swallowed the anti-drug propaganda hook, line and sinker, is changing the relationship of citizen to state to the detriment of individual freedom. Our civil rights guaranteed under the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution, such as the right to privacy, freedom from unauthorized search and seizure practices, such as the presumption of innocence are steadily eroded and wear away as surely as Thomas Jefferson's face disappears from an aging nickel coin, and police-state tactics that once were "wartime" expedients justified by the "deadly menace" of drugs are suddenly applied to any and all areas of law enforcement. Already we are seeing the same Gestapo-inspired police-state tactics applied to the enforcement of other laws (Gestapo was the German acronym for Geheimne Staats Polizei, or Secret State Police" under the National Socialist German Worker's Party, or "Nazi" government of Adolf Hitler). Bizarre and illegal raids and seizures have been directed against so-called "computer hackers," the police assiduously taking advantage of the legal dispensations given to "drug warriors" (Gans & Sirius 1990; Holden 1990b; Levy 1991; Sirius & Gleason 1990; Sterling 1992. As a recent article in Mondo 2000 noted:

Acting on the request from certain corporations, the FBI and the Secret Service- armed with vaguely worded warrants- have raided businesses and homes of private citizens and seized tremendous numbers of computers and related items, with very few corresponding arrests. The language of the warrants was vague because even in the rare case where the government knows what it is looking for, on the electronic frontier, it probably has no idea what it is looking at. (Gans & Sirius; italics in the original)

In a recent interview with an American journalist, the chief of Amsterdam's narcotics police commented that the idea of a "War on Drugs" reminded him of Gestapo, German police who "thought they could change society's behavior. The police are a very dangerous element in society if they are not limited. We know what war means... We fight war against our enemies, not with our own citizens" (Beers 1991). In the Netherlands drug laws similar to the American laws are on the books, but the Dutch government administers them in a fashion characterized as "harm reduction" or "flexible enforcement"- narcotics chief Zaal commented that illegal drug users are "patients, and we can't help them by putting them in jail" (Beers 1991.) In the wartime United States, then-Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that illicit drug users "ought to be taken out and shot" for "treason" (Beers 1991). In the "War on Drugs" only the users are shooting the drugs, the police are shooting at us; people are the enemy, people become casualties. It is a dangerous cat-and-mouse game, and although the police are ostensibly the cats catching and destroying the mice, nevertheless the mice in this case are leading the cats around by their noses, always a step ahead. This is an inevitable and predictable result of concentrating drug control efforts on the supply, rather than the demand.

The U.S. "War on Drugs" is a "supply-side" endeavor- 71% of the funds in the fiscal year 1991 "National Drug Control Strategy" was destined for reduction of supply (29% for "interdiction and international control"; 42% for law enforcement); only 29% for "demand reduction" (Goldstein & Kalant 1990). Since more than 75% of the nearly 750,000 yearly arrests for drug-law violations in the U.S. are for simple possession, mainly of marijuana (Nadelmann 1989), it can be said that the bulk of U.S. law enforcement effort is directed at punishing users, rather than reducing the supply. "Interdiction and international control" efforts have been, by and large, ineffectual. Despite intensive efforts directed against the illicit production of cocaine in South America, and toward interception of the drug at U.S. borders, the wholesale price of cocaine dropped 80% during the 1980s, while the purity of the drug as retailed increased fivefold, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) figures (DEA 1989). Since the DEA reported in 1987 that the foreign export price of cocaine represented only 4% of the U.S. retail price, there is no reason to expect a reversal in this utter failure to reduce supply- the drug is so cheap to produce and so lucrative that traffickers can and do easily counteract any increased activity or expenditures by the authorities. Once again, the laws constitute a subsidy to the traffickers- a "value-added tax," and the foreign aid money put into crop substitution programs in Peru constitutes a direct subsidy to increased planting of coca. Since the interest rates are so high, farmers simply plant a small parcel in one of the accepted substitute crops, as a cover, then use the bulk of the funds to plant more coca - the only crop sufficiently remunerative to enable them to repay the loans (Morales 1989). Except for opium poppies, that is... (Morales 1989; Ott 1992a)

Heroin production is even more lucrative and even less influenced by enforcement activities- according to the DEA, the foreign export price of heroin is only a fraction of 1% of its U.S. retail price. As the international control efforts against heroin have been directed chiefly at the "Golden Triangle" area of Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, traditional opium poppy growing regions, the traffickers have simply begun to introduce opium and heroin production in areas not traditionally known for this. Opium poppy cultivation has become so widespread in Mexico, that the country has emerged as one of the leading heroin suppliers to the U.S. market. Moreover, opium poppies have become the natural and preferred substitute crop for coca in South America, and heroin production in being introduced in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and even Guatemala. Enforcement activities have thus led the black market to its own crop-substitution scheme, and opium poppies are being substituted for coca, with the inevitable result that any reduction in the supply of cocaine will be more than compensated for by a substantial increase in the supply of heroin. This is progress... this is protecting the public health?

The U.S. authorities have been relatively more successful in reducing the smuggling of marijuana into the country, yet there is a plentiful supply of marijuana on the U.S. market. Not only is the drug cheap to produce (foreign export price 1% of U.S. retail price, according to DEA figures), but the unintended (though entirely predictable) results of the U.S. campaign against the drug have been the conversion of the U.S. into one of the world's leading producers of the drug and the transformation of many former marijuana smugglers into cocaine and/or heroin smugglers (Adler 1985)- as costs of smuggling increase, smugglers will turn to loads with a higher value per unit of weight. Thus exaggerated attention focused by the authorities on the smuggling of marijuana has led to vastly increased domestic production, obviating the necessity of sneaking the drug past beagle-eyed customs officials. The value of the U.S. marijuana crop in 1987 was estimated at $33.1 billion ($33,100 million; Siegel 1989). The market is still supplied, but in a manner less visible to the authorities, immeasurably more decentralized and much less susceptible to control efforts. While this development may help the country's international balance of trade, it hasn't made much of a dent in the supply, and has made future attempts to influence the supply infinitely more difficult. Furthermore, the necessity of indoor intensive cultivation to escape surveillance has led to the development of super-potent strains of Cannabis approaching 20% THC, nearly double the concentrations found in natural, outdoor strains previously considered to be the most potent. The price has gone up, yes, but producers have managed to continue to supply the market with a product superior to that formerly smuggled, are much less likely to be arrested, and are making much more money! Does anyone still doubt, as Professor Nadelmann claimed, that the producers and traffickers of illicit drugs are the chief beneficiaries of the laws (Nadelmann 1989)?

Another predictable response to "supply-side" enforcement efforts has been the introduction to the black market over the past 15 years of a series of completely artificial heroin analogues. The first of these so-called "designer drugs" (Kirsch 1986) to appear on the U.S. market were derivatives of Meperidine or Demerol, such as MPPP, which is about 25 times the potency of the parent compound and about three times the potency of morphine. The most famous of "designer narcotics," however, are the compounds known as "China White"- derivatives of the medicinal Fentanyl, a compound some 100 times the potency of morphine. The best-known of these black-market derivatives is (alpha)-methyl-Fentanyl, roughly 3000 times the potency of morphine. According to the DEA, starting materials and equipment to make a kilogram of this drug cost about $2000, with the product being worth as much as a billion dollars ($1000 million)! It is important to note that this compound was an invention of black market chemists, never described in the chemical literature (Baum 1985; Shafer 1984; Shafer 1985). Once again, "supply-side" enforcement directed against opium poppy cultivation and heroin production has stimulated domestic production of inexpensive succedanea thousands of times the potency of morphine. In a similar manner, exaggerated attention focused on illicit cocaine production and smuggling is fueling the growth of the U.S. amphetamine industry. Annual domestic production of methamphetamine is estimated to be worth $3 billion ($3,000 million; Cho 1990). Again, the U.S. trade deficit has been helped, but comparatively large-scale and visible enterprises such as heroin and cocaine production are being replaced by practically invisible small-scale substitutes. Instead of international networks of growers and harvesters, chemists and smugglers, now all that is required are solitary chemists inside the countries of consumption. As drug policy experts A. Goldstein and H. Kalant stated in a recent article:

Advances in pharmaceutical chemistry are such that highly potent psychoactive drugs of every kind can be synthesized readily in clandestine laboratories, so the illicit market would adjust quickly even to a complete sealing of our borders, were that possible. (Goldstein & Kalant 1990)

Misguided enforcement efforts have resulted in the creation of decentralized and small-scale production of alternatives, practically invisible to the authorities. Production costs go down, profits skyrocket, and the chances of detection and arrest are reduced- the illicit drug manufacturers and retailers couldn't be happier.

It is simply too easy to outwit the drug laws. Well before the authorities realize what is going on, talented surreptitious chemists have invented new, more profitable, and legal succedanea for controlled drugs. When one of the "designer heroin" labs was busted, the chemist told police he was experimenting with "snow cone flavorings" (Shafer 1984). When the results came back from the forensics laboratory, the police found they had no case against the person. When (alpha)-methyl-Fentanyl was finally identified (the first structure proposed by the DEA chemists, 3-methyl-Fentanyl, later turned out to be erroneous; Ayres et al. 1981; Baum 1985) and the drug was scheduled, the ingenious chemists made para-flouro-Fentanyl, still legal. Finally, the government concocted the "Controlled Substances Analogues Act" establishing the novel principle that any chemical or pharmacological analogue of any illicit drug could be deemed to be illegal! This is a textbook case of an unconstitutionally-vague statute, and is the purest essence of arbitrary and selective law enforcement, crystallized in a form more potent than any Fentanyl derivative. Never mind that this absurd law makes virtually anything illegal which some police chief or district attorney doesn't like (Shulgin 1992), and is virtually illegalizing scientific research into mind drugs and making the whole field of chemistry suspect; the important thing is it simply will not work. Sure, it will enable charges to be brought against manufacturers of new analogues, on the rare occasions when such are detected and arrested, but the genie is out of the bottle. The laws have made illicit drug synthesis so profitable and it is such a simple endeavor, that no law will stop it, not even capital punishment. The laws even serve as textbooks for would-be black market drug chemists, who look through the schedules for ideas for new products (Shulgin & Shulgin 1991).

Having touched on the subject of Constitutional vagueness, it is important to stress that scientific research continues to reveal new plant (and animal) species containing illegal compounds. Since controlled substances such as DMT, morphine and codeine appear to be general mammalian neurotransmitters, dog and cat (or other mammal) owners are technically in unauthorized possession of illicit drugs all the time. As we will see in Chapter 5, there are at least 89 species of mushrooms now known to contain illegal psilocybine, and another 57 species can safely be assumed to contain these compounds. This book mentions some 250 plant species known to contain illicit drugs. Some, such as the forage grass Phalaris arundinacae, are common articles of commerce which can be purchased cheaply by the truckload; some, like the psilocybian mushrooms, grow adventitiously all over the world. Since one would have to be expert in plant taxonomy and phytochemistry, and would have assiduously to study the latest research reports in order simply to know which plants are illegal, plants which might grow unbidden on one's property at any time, it can be said that the laws interpreted as proscribing these plants are "unconstitutionally vague"- it is not immediately obvious to the ordinary citizen, nor indeed to anyone, just what is illegalized by these laws. In fact, with the advent of the "Controlled Substances Analogues Act" of 1986, any and all plant and animal species can be said to be illegal, at the whim of the government. Short of being an expert in several scientific fields and devoting considerable time and effort keeping abreast of the latest phytochemical and botanical research, some of which is published in German (Gartz 1986c), Spanish (Guzman 1983), French (Heim & Hofmann 1958), Italian (Festi 1985; Fiussello & Ceruti-Scurti 1972; Samorini & Festi 1989), Czechoslovakian (Pouzar 1953), Norwegian (Kvambe & Edenberg 1979; Nordbo 1979) or other languages, there is no way for any citizen to be certain (s)he is not in illegal possession of a proscribed drug.

This is all a result of misguided, supply-side enforcement. As long as demand exists for illicit drugs, and as long as the laws guarantee, nay, subsidize the profitability of meeting this demand, people will line up for the chance to enter this business. As even informed opponents of drug legalization acknowledge, only by targeting the demand side can we make strides toward reducing the consumption of illicit drugs (Goldstein & Kalant 1990; Jarvik 1990). Empty propaganda accompanied by a "war" against users (recall that 75% of arrests in the U.S. are for simple possession) who are treated as vermin, as vectors of transmission of a "plague" (Szasz 1974) only alienates them still further from authority. Only by treating people with respect and offering them unbiased information and viable alternatives (N.B. jail is neither an effective deterrent nor a viable alternative; Packer 1968; Skolnick 1968) can governmental authorities hope to dissuade users from this or that drug. There is evidence that information campaigns can influence drug use (Elickson & Bell 1990). Suasion, not coercion is the answer, and the voice doing the persuading must be morally impeccable. As Shakespeare's Hamlet lamented: "ay, there's the rub."

Moral Aspects of War

The time is long overdue to recognize officially, publicize, and incorporate into common speech and legislation the fact that tobacco (nicotine) and alcohol are potentially hazardous addicting drugs. We need to expunge from the language the phrases, "alcohol and drugs and "tobacco and drugs." This is not mere semantic nit-picking; language influences the way we think. (Goldstein & Kalant 1990)

I had already made this same point five years before (Ott 1985; Ott 1993b), in a book on chocolate addiction which treated our provincial and prejudiced attitudes toward drugs with ludibry. As Princeton Professor Nadelmann put it in his well-conceived "moral" arguments for the legalization of all drugs (Nadelmann 1989):

"Moral" condemnation by the majority of Americans of some substances and not others is little more than a transient prejudice in favor of some drugs and against others.

I might add that this holds true for the "moral" condemnation in some Moslem countries of alcohol, and the corresponding prejudice in favor of hashish and opium (Gelpke 1966a)- this is a universal, not a peculiarly American tendency, although the drugs socially accepted vary from one society to the next, as of course the drugs scorned. So firmly rooted is our tendency to ignore alcohol and tobacco when thinking about "drugs," that the American Society of Pharmacognosy (which should know better) announced in 1992, 33rd annual meeting featuring two symposia, one of which was about "Drugs of Abuse," under the sponsorship of Phillip Morris- USA- one of the country's leading tobacco companies and pushers of one of America's most-abused drugs!

As for the immoralities of drug prohibition, the most obvious of these involve the above-mentioned perversion of law enforcement the drug laws inevitably foster. Since the nebulous alleged victims of drug law violations (our children? our schools? the public health?) do not file charges with the police, in order to enforce the drug laws the police have to become criminals themselves (some would argue that in many cases, this is a seamless transformation). Thus our tax dollars are used to buy and sell drugs, as the police disguise their true employment and act as though they were everyday illicit drug merchants, hoping to get close to "Mr. Big." Then they will try to sell him some of their "dope," or buy from him some if his, then... surprise! Out come the guns and badges. Not only do the police immorally become liars and drug dealers and drug dealers, but this type of operation invites corruption, and there are innumerable instances of police freelancing on the side. Annually in the U.S. some 100 police officials are indicted in federal courts on corruption charges related to drugs (Nadelmann 1988). Should "Mr. Big" come up short of cash for the big buy, no problem... some other "undercover" agents will step in and provide financing. There have even been cases in which reluctant individuals were provided with government money to buy government drugs, and then arrested! This is law enforcement... or manufacturing ersatz crimes? Not content to be ludificatory dope dealers, the "moral" police become spies and snoops, "Peeping Toms tapping phones, espying windows, hiring criminals to spy on their associates, cajoling people to inform on their spouses, children to inform on their parents, even sifting through garbage in search of "evidence." Not only do we have shootouts between rival "gangs" of police fighting over turf and mistaking each other for the "enemy," but there was recently a case of illegal computer hacking by the police. During confirmation hearings for former "Drug Czar" W. J. Bennett, Delaware Senator J. Biden, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, described a case in which personnel of an unnamed federal agency involved in the "War on Drugs" "surreptitiously lifted another's budget by altering a computerized file" (Marshall 1989(! o wonder Bennett went back to his nicotine habit!

Another immorality of the "War on Drugs" involves questions of emphasis. Grossly exaggerated attention has been directed toward apprehending and convicting drug offenders, many of whom become subject to compulsory sentencing. Although the staggering number of annual drug arrests in the U.S. represents only about 2% of the true number of "offenders," trying and punishing those convicted is clogging our criminal justice system. In Washington, D.C., for example, 52% of the felony indictments were for drug law violations in 1986. In New York the following year the number was 40% (Nadelmann 1989). Vital police resources which ought to be destined for arresting and processing violent criminals are being squandered on drug users and the occasional merchant. Worse than that is the fact that already convicted, violent criminals are being released from jail early, to make room for the compulsory-sentenced drug offenders (Marshall 1988c). When the second "Drug Czar" R. Martinez was governor of Florida between 1986 and 1990, Florida spent more money than any other state on drug enforcement, and had in place strict mandatory-sentencing laws mandating three-year-minimum sentences for using, buying or selling illicit drugs within 310 meters of schools, public parks or college campuses. During this tenure, the average sentence served by Florida murder convicts decreased 40% and the average robbery sentence served declined 42%. The overall average sentence for all Florida convicts declined 38%, to the point where the average Florida convict was serving 32.5% of his sentence before release... less than a third (Keil 1990). The bottom line is that some luckless student caught sucking on a joint after school serves three years (if not more), while the armed criminal who knocks off the convenience store gets three years and walks in one. A society that coddles murderers and armed robbers in order to "get tough" on potheads is not walking the moral high ground.

Another egregious case of the immorality of drug prohibition involves the infamous "Operation Just Cause." In the name of police activity and drug law enforcement, the sovereign nation of Panama was invaded by a large American military force, hundreds of innocent bystanders were killed [transcriber's note: some cite a figure close to 9,000. J.T.], hundreds of millions of dollars of private property were destroyed, and a couple of dozen of "police" were killed in the line of duty, mostly by their own troops. Is it any wonder former President Bush was practically tarred and feathered when he foolishly dared to set foot in Panama in spring of 1992? The ostensible purpose of the invasion was to arrest Gen. Manuel Noriega and "Shanghai" him to the United States to stand trial. We've all seen Hollywood "shoot-'em-up" cop fantasies, but by what standard of "morality" does any "police" operation justify such massive carnage and monumental property destruction? Never mind that Gen. Noriega who was later tried as a prisoner of war, not as an arrested criminal) was a longtime U.S. government employee in various covert operations involving immoral attempts to destroy one sovereign government and prop up another. It is a basic tenet of police work that the innocent must be protected. "Just Cause" indeed... "Just 'Cause Uncle Sam says so"! Later, the government went to all lengths to convict Noriega to "justify" the operation. It is significant that former heads of the U.S. DEA were subpoenaed to testify on Noriega's behalf, and the drug convict Carlos Lederer, considered by U.S. officials to have been one of the world's major international drug traffickers, led the hit-parade of criminals testifying against him. Lederer was all but pardoned in exchange for his turncoat testimony against Noriega, and will apparently be released from prison into the Witness Protection Program (Cohn & Reiss 1992). Once again, the "big fish" goes free in order to get the "small fry" into the skillet.

Is it "moral" to launch aerial herbicide spraying programs in South America against coca cultivation, indiscriminately destroying crops and forests; polluting watersheds and in general causing untold ecological havoc It is significant that the Eli Lilly Company, manufacturer of the herbicide Tebuthiuron which the U.S. government wished to spray in Peru, refused to sell the product for this purpose, citing "practical and policy considerations" (Sun 1988). The herbicide is so persistent in the environment that it is not approved in the U.S. for spraying on cropland, and the area in which the coca spraying was to be carried out is interspersed with plots of food crops. We will see in Chapter 2, Note 15, that in the 1950s the Eli Lilly Company went to bat for the U.S. government in illicit LSD synthesis, but not this time, and a State Department official told Congress that the department was exploring ways to compel Lilly to produce the herbicide for the government! So this is how "free trade" works... In the Upper Huallaga Valley of Peru, 1.5 million liters of Paraquat have already been sprayed (Brackelaire 1992), while massive spraying of Paraquat, 2,4-D and Glyphosate in Colombia have already provoked health problems in the indigenous population (Bourgetau 1992). A successful non-government crop substitution scheme in Colombia's Cauca Valley, involving planting of mulberry bushes for cultivation of silkworms (offering prospective legal incomes even higher than illicit coca cultivation; unlike government-sponsored substitute crops) has been frustrated by U.S.-backed spraying of Glyphosate directed agains