All Quotes

"Be useful where thou livest."

"The evolution of LSD from remedy to inebriating drug was, however, primarily promoted by the activities of Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert of Harvard University"

"It gave me an inner joy, an open mindedness, a gratefulness, open eyes and an internal sensitivity for the miracles of creation.... I think that in human evolution it has never been as necessary to have this substance LSD. It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be."

"With regard to the purpose of these studies, all were to some extent exploring the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs rather than their psychotomimetic properties. This was least true of Freedman and his coworkers (1962) who viewed LSD primarily as a means of studying the schizophrenic process by "intensifying pre-existing symptomology." This orientation contrasted sharply with Bender's view. Noting that withdrawn children became more emotionally responsive while aggressive children became less so, she hypothesized that psychedelic drugs "tend to 'normalize' behavior rather than subdue or stimulate it." This basic difference in expectations seems at least partially responsible for Bender's extremely favorable outcomes and Freedman's rather poor results. Regarding all forms of psychotherapy, it has become a truism that " where there is no therapeutic intent, there is no therapeutic result" (Charles Savage in Abramson, 1960, p. 193)."

"Consistent with their explicit therapeutic intent, Bender, Fisher, and Simmons each offer essentially the same hypothesis based on a psychological interpretation of childhood schizophrenia: " The working hypothesis of this study is that the psychosis is a massive defensive structure in the service of protecting and defending the patient against his feelings and affectual states" (Fisher & Castile, 1963). Psychedelic drugs were viewed as a powerful means of undermining an intractable defense system and thereby making the patient more receptive to contact and communication with others."

"Although Freedman was prompted to use LSD primarily as an experimental device to study psychosis, he did mention that he was influenced to some extent by the dramatic improvement in autistic children reported by Peck and Murphy (in Abramson, 1960) and by the apparent success of Cholden, Kurland, and Savage (1955) in their work with adult mute catatonic patients. As will become apparent in the discussion of results, a partial and often transient alleviation of mutism by LSD treatment has been one of the most consistent effects reported in the children studies."

""...the vocabularies of several of the children increased after LSD or UML; several seemed to be attempting to form words or watched adults carefully as they spoke; many seemed to comprehend speech for the first time or were able to communicate their needs... Very few of these changes in communication had been noted previously in such a large number of children, and at such a relatively rapid rate" (1963, p. 91)."

""They appeared flushed, bright eyed, and unusually interested in the environment... They participated with increasing eagerness in motility play with adults and other children. . . They seek positive contacts with adults, approaching them with face uplifted and bright eyes, and responding to fondling, affection, etc." (1962, pp. 172- 3). "There is less stereotyped whirling and rhythmic behavior. . . They became gay, happy, laughing frequently... Some showed changes in facial expression in appropriate reactions to situations for the first time" (1963, pp. 90-91)."

"The effects of mescalin or LSD can be, in some respects, far more satisfying than those of alcohol. To begin with, they last longer; they also leave behind no hangover, and leave the mental faculties clear and unimpaired. They stimulate the faculties and produce the ideal ground for a peak experience."

"Man is God's image; but a poor man is Christ's stamp to boot: both images regard."

"“Meth, until recently, has been largely seen inside North Korea as a kind of very powerful energy drug — something like Red Bull, amplified,” said Andrei Lankov, an expert on the North at Kookmin University in Seoul, South Korea, who directs the news site NK News. That misconception, he said, highlighted a “significant underestimation” within the country of the general risks of drug abuse. Methamphetamine was introduced to the Korean Peninsula during the Japanese colonial period, in the early 20th century, and defectors have reported that the North Korean military provided methamphetamine to its soldiers in the years after World War II. Since the 1970s, many North Korean diplomats have been arrested abroad for drug smuggling. ...The Radio Free Asia report could not be independently verified, and the North Korean government has long denied that its citizens use or produce methamphetamine. “The illegal use, trafficking and production of drugs which reduce human being into mental cripples do not exist in the D.P.R.K.,” the North's state-run news agency said in 2013, referring to the initials of the country's formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea."

""Normally, when someone [with PTSD] would be instructed to relive the traumatic experience, they would be overwhelmed with fear, anxiety, and despair," Grob says. "But while under the influence of the MDMA, it's as if they can navigate the experience more safely." In recent clinical trials, 61 percent of 107 participants no longer had PTSD symptoms two months after MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Sixty-eight percent were still PTSD-free a year later. In light of findings like these, the FDA recently deemed MDMA a "breakthrough therapy," putting it on the fast track for approval."

"The MDMA experience is something like artificial sanity, a temporary anesthesia of the neurotic self. I mostly use MDMA as an "opener" at some point in psychotherapy, not only for the wealth of the material gained during the session but for how it facilitates therapeutic work in the aftermath."

"MDMA doesn't just make us honest. E-like consciousness makes us sweeter-natured. Even better, the idealised self activated by MDMA does not take the form of alien impostor, so to speak, but feels utterly authentic, constructed from elements of an idealised persona that we can't live up to in drug-naïve life. If, in a hypothetical E-based society, everyone were constitutionally sweet-natured, then enriching our cognitive architecture would entail capturing this sweet-naturedness in our interpersonal perceptions. With E-like consciousness, emotional honesty and intellectual integrity can, in principle, go hand in hand. It is possible, but unproven, that ugly representations of ourselves and each other belong to a dark Darwinian world that we will shortly leave behind."

"Today, for a few hours, MDMA offers perhaps the richest chemical tool for social intimacy in existence. If nothing else, the MDMA experience demolishes the conventional wisdom that "artificially"-induced happiness must be amoral and selfish - hedonistic, one-dimensional and shallow."

"... on pure MDMA, the subject can inwardly access the kind of person s/he wants to be; "the ideal me". Whether this idealised self-identity is created or discovered may be philosophically debatable. But the deeply-felt sense of authenticity and emotional self-honesty of the MDMA experience is an unexpected delight. One just won't ever get to read about its nature in the peer-reviewed Journal of Introspective Studies."

"As chemical stopgaps go, MDMA is a magical revelation. It's perhaps the best aid to insight-oriented psychotherapy ever synthesized. Tragically, when MDMA is used to excess the outcome can be harmful, not healing. So as a weekend club drug, MDMA is seriously flawed. Today, of course, empathogens and entactogens are outlawed for any purpose. The altered states of consciousness they induce are criminalised. People who take such agents are stigmatised as "drug abusers". Yet some MDMA users feel, rightly or wrongly, they've been granted a tantalising glimpse of what true mental health may be like in centuries to come; and an insight into what the rest of us are missing."

"I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria. I have never felt so great, or believed this to be possible. The cleanliness, clarity, and marvelous feeling of solid inner strength continued throughout the rest of the day, and evening, and through the next day. I am overcome by the profundity of the experience ... . All the next day I felt like ‚a citizen of the universe‘ rather than a citizen of the planet, completely disconnecting time and flowing easily from one activity to the next."

"In 2016, for instance, a Johns Hopkins study and a concurrent New York University study found that about 80 percent of cancer patients showed clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety even six months after receiving one to two psilocybin treatments. Psilocybin also appears to be an effective treatment for addiction. Echoing past research with LSD, scientists recently showed decreased cravings for and increased abstinence from alcohol after psilocybin treatment in a proof-of-concept study — and the benefits were still in evidence nine months later. Psilocybin seems especially promising as a tool for smoking cessation. In a preliminary study of smokers conducted in 2014, 80 percent of participants remained nicotine-free six months after receiving three psilocybin sessions. And 60 percent of the participants remained nicotine-free an average of 30 months after treatment."

"As might be expected, tripping on ‘shrooms’ isn't a recent phenomenon. For thousands of years they have been widely used in Central America for religious ceremonies. The Aztecs called them teonanacatl, or “flesh of the gods”. There is a theory that several Mesolithic rock paintings at Tassili n'Ajjer in Algeria depict the ritual use of mushrooms. Some of these pictures reportedly show mushrooms actually growing out of people, so presumably the painter had been vigorously engaging with the proceedings. Anthropologist John Rush thinks magic mushrooms gave us Father Christmas. Apparently, Siberian shamans would hand out the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria to the region's tribesmen every December. Often the snow was so heavy they couldn't use the door, so would climb down the chimney. Where does that particular type of mushroom grow? In coniferous woodland (i.e. pines, firs etc...). It's red with white spots. Father Christmas wears red and white. The spirit animal of these shamans? Reindeer... it all makes sense now."

"Lines 379-380"

"Chase brave employment with a naked sword Throughout the world."

"Three-phase drug studies with FDA approval will also have to be completed before these types of drugs can be removed from the list of substances with no medical purpose. Safety and quality control are always important and will also need much more research. The problem is that pharmaceutical companies are not interested in researching an inexpensive substance that has been around for a long time. There is no money to be made with a non-patentable drug that is given only once or twice in a lifetime."

"I first explored mescaline in the late '50s.... Three-hundred-fifty to 400 milligrams. I learned there was a great deal inside me."

"Renowned addiction expert Gabor Mate believes that addiction is a direct result of the coping mechanisms developed in early childhood to deal with stress, abuse, or trauma (Mate is a member of the Psychotherapist/Trauma camp defined in my book, The Abstinence Myth). He believes in the power of Ayahuasca as a treatment to the underlying psychological distress experienced by people facing addiction. "No matter what a person is addicted to—whether it’s eating, shopping, sex, drugs—each addicted person harbors a deep pain, which they may or may not be in touch with. The plant removes the self-created barriers to get in touch with the source of that pain, so you realize what you’ve been running from all of your life.”"

"The Tabernanthe iboga plant grows in the rainforests of Gabon. It's a leafy green shrub with fruits that look not unlike fat, orange jalapeño peppers, but it's the bark of the root from which you extract ibogaine. For centuries it has been used to induce visions in participants in the bwiti ceremony, a traditional, days-long tribal coming-of-age ritual where hallucinogenic visions are understood as a death and rebirth. They believe that iboga enables them to commune with their ancestors (bwiti is roughly translated as ancestor). According to the Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance, which publishes research and information on ibogaine, this ancestor worship by Gabonese tribes holds that by learning the language of the spirits of things it is possible to communicate with God. In the mid-1800s researchers brought a specimen back to France and, 60 years on, ibogaine was being marketed there under the name Lambarène for use as a stimulant. In 1985 a man called Howard Lotsof was awarded the first US patent for its use in treating opioid addiction – two decades earlier Lotsof had himself been an addict when he'd first tried ibogaine. “The next thing I knew,” he told the New York Times in 1994, “I was straight.” But it remained banned in the US even as, by the late 1990s, it was being touted on the nascent internet as a miracle drug for opioid addicts."

"Fly Chick Light It Going pay all day But won't ever get away From skinny white pimp"

"Atmosphere, in "The Skinny"."

"Ashes to ashes, funk to funky We know Major Tom's a junkie Strung out in heaven's high Hitting an all-time low"

"Life is a waste of time, and some say time is a waste of life, but if you get wasted all the time, then you might just have the time of your life"

"Well, they'll stone ya when you're trying to be so good, They'll stone ya just a-like they said they would. They'll stone ya when you're tryin' to go home. Then they'll stone ya when you're there all alone. But I would not feel so all alone, Everybody must get stoned."

"Purple Haze, all in my brain, lately things just don't seem the same, actin' funny, but I don't know why, 'scuse me while I kiss the sky."

"Lets go home and get stoned We could end up makin love instead of misery Go home and get stoned Cause the sex is so much better when you're mad at me"

"I've come to decide, that the things that I tried, were in my life just to get high on."

"It's such a waste to be wasted in the first place"

"Ride, ride my see-saw. Take my place On this trip Just for me Ride, take a free ride Take my place Have my seat It's for free"

"And you can fly High as a kite if you want to Faster than light if you want to Speeding through the universe Thinking is the best way to travel"

"We need to take effective measures to rob the dealers of their markets and the only way that we can do that is by supplying addicts through the medical profession, through prescription. We cannot afford to be shy about being prepared to do that."

"Prohibition has failed to protect us. Leaving the drugs market in the hands of criminals causes huge and unnecessary harm to individuals, communities and entire countries, with the poor the hardest hit."

"Now it's one thing to say (I say it) that people shouldn't consume psychoactive drugs. It is entirely something else to condone marijuana laws the application of which resulted, in 1995, in the arrest of 588,963 Americans. Why are we so afraid to inform ourselves on the question?"

"We're sending the kids to the department of human services, we're sending the parents to jail over marijuana. Well, I knew some of these people and I knew they weren't gangsters. I knew they were nonviolent people."

"Today, our nation is fighting two wars: one abroad and one at home. While the war in Iraq is in the headlines, the other war is still being fought on our own streets. Its casualties are the wasted lives of our own citizens. I am speaking of the war on drugs. And I cannot help but wonder how many more lives, and how much more money, will be wasted before another Robert McNamara admits what is plain for all to see: the war on drugs is a failure."

"Since you [US "drug czar" McCaffrey] control a federal budget that has just been increased from $17.8 billion last year to $19.2 billion this year, is asking people like you if we should continue with our nation's current drug policy like a person asking a barber if one needs a haircut?"

"Lines 25-28"

"The “war on drugs” has been lost and should never have been waged. I can think of no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time."

"I certainly engaged in petty crime, but it had nothing to do with drug addiction. It was about money and status. In other words, if you take drugs out of the equation, poverty and crime still exist."

"Despite the ever-increasing scope of the international drug control system, diversions of narcotic drugs from the licit to the illicit market are virtually non-existent."

"Half of what government spends on police, courts and prisons is to deal with drug offenders."

"We are not drug addicts. We are not criminals. We are free men, and we will react to persecution the way free men have always reacted."

"Currently, the punishment for possessing a certain amount of drugs is the mandatory death sentence and the judge has no right to drop a punishment other than that one. Some people feel that it is too harsh, so perhaps we would amend the law so those found guilty will be sentenced to life imprisonment instead. We will study if the claims (that mandatory death penalty is ineffective) are true, and if there are other ways to prevent the usage and trafficking of drugs, then we will amend the laws. It is also important for us to understand that the abuse of drugs is harmful not just to ourselves, but also to our family, the community and the country."