ENTHEOGENIC RESPONSE TO THE SUMMIT OF THE FUTURE

OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH MOTHER EARTH:
The rescue of the forbidden Sustainable Development Goal
“SDG 18 : Access to the Food of Life”
(unannotated version)

"Because only division can impose death and destruction, the task is to weave ourselves into a community as humans, as brothers, as children who belong to the great mother, this planet Earth, that is, to organize ourselves because in the face of death we decide to live." 
(Statement of the 5th National Assembly for Water, Life and Territory. EZLN)

1. Introduction

The Summit of the Future and the forgotten invitation to the Guardians of the Food of Life.
The call by UN Secretary-General António Guterres for the Summit of the Future, scheduled for 20-23 September 2024 (see Our Common Agenda) outlined ideas on how to better respond to current and future challenges. The report calls for renewed trust and solidarity at all levels and invites a fundamental rethinking of our world order to provide more fairly and effectively for everyone. No one is to be left behind.
UN Member States agreed that the summit should focus on partnerships addressing peace, people, planet, and prosperity (as outlined in the  2030 Agenda and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) annex, adopted in 2015.)
The attainment of these goals is far from successful, and 2030 is approaching rapidly. Although a multitude of people and institutions have been invited to make their voices heard, we —the consumers of the Food of Life, a.k.a. entheogens or consciousness-liberating substances — are not included, despite the  Health Poverty Action’s 2015 statement, endorsed by the International Drug Policy Consortium, becoming increasingly clear: ”Drug policy reform is a development issue: we cannot achieve the SDGs unless we end the war on drugs.”

Just as in the discussions behind the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, our voices risk once again going unheard and history will be in danger of repeating itself, producing another failure with horrific consequences. Now, admittedly even greater than ever, since next to free human existence, the ultimate survival of nature is at stake.

Thanks to the tenacity of the international harm reduction movement, the fate of users of mind-altering substances has improved significantly in recent years, but the users' position in the world community fundamentally has not changed. In addition to lunatics and terrorists, we too, the users of drugs, belong to a group against which mankind pretends it must be protected, securitized. Exposing the lie on which this prejudice is based is a mission we cannot outsource to third parties. Instead, we will have to accomplish and prove this ourselves. As citizens of the world, entitled to our spiritual beliefs and entitled to being heard, we wish to participate and share our knowledge. We may be too late for the Summit of the Future, but our mission will only end when our contribution to the future of Mother Earth is assured.

So yes, the war on nature’s plant medicines has to end if mankind wishes to survive. But to achieve that goal mankind has to be able to unite around a common denominator, a common good, a shared ideal that doesn’t divide, like religion and ideology, race and gender, but that holds us together because it belongs to us all and we belong to it and thus belong to one another.

To achieve this goal, to recognize our planet as Mother Earth and our fellow humans as siblings, all in our care, we need to be able to listen to Mother Nature of which we are part. We need to be able to retreat from the dividing stories mankind permanently creates, joining together like a splendid tapestry into which we all are woven.

Mankind presently lives under disastrous conditions of disunity but nature provides us the means to perceive the greatness of the whole, to immerse when we need it, in this wholeness, and to feel the divinity within life on Earth--in all its splendor.
To achieve this goal, we must stop the war on the Food of Life and regulate our fair access to it, so that all our siblings may enjoy the divine wholeness we all aspire for.
To achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, we therefore propose to add the overarching sustainable development goal 18: Access to the Food of Life.

The Lie invites Evil, the Truth invites Lifel
The 1961 Single Convention (1961SC or Prohibition or the Convention) introduced within its preamble a two-faced narrative expressing concern for the health and welfare of mankind by warning that addiction to narcotic drugs constitutes a serious evil for individuals and poses significant social and economic dangers to society, yet it implicitly also includes non-narcotic and non-addictive substances. Although the preamble omits to mention non-narcotic substances, the 1961SC surreptitiously welcomes them into the big drug melee of the ensuing articles.
Some of nature’s most remarkable mind-liberating medicines, like Cannabis sativa L. and Erythroxylon coca, were immediately out-scheduled, because they did not conform to the morals and interests of the presiding elites, were poorly understood by modern medicine or produced in ancestral worlds beyond the reach of Western markets. All the important benefits of these medicines are ordained to fall beyond the health concerns outlined in the Convention’s preamble.

Furthermore, all addictions stemming from authorized addictive drugs that replaced these forbidden medicines may also go untreated due the prohibition of entheogens. In this way, the human homeostasis – the self-regulating process by which biological systems tend to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that are optimal for survival - is denied to that part of mankind that has maintained itself through the ages with the help of the henceforth forbidden medicines.

The Single Convention’s concerns for humanity’s health appear to inordinately affect those humans who refuse to abjure an ill-invented “evil” as dictated by a self-proclaimed Prohibition master, even if this “evil” has been and still is nature’s “gift of the gods” for its users. It is clear that the Convention was a declaration of a global war on Nature Religions--and nature.

The 1961SC somehow pretends that humanity is superior to nature by claiming that the freedom nature embodies is subordinate to the freedom humanity has defined in its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The lie has indeed taken hold that the universality of our human rights does not include the right to consume what historically is called the Food of Life. Thus, as we stand on the brink of forming a new pact with the Earth in our quest for survival, Prohibition frivolously seeks to dictate the terms of our integration and dialogue with nature. In the 1961SC scenario, the plants of the gods, our Food of Life, nature herself, remain excluded from any dialogue, thus keeping Mother Earth enslaved, nature itself prohibited.

Since the beginning of our civilization, we have denied that humanity is part of nature, instead of its heavenly master. If we continue to disregard nature, we will ultimately find ourselves discarded as well, with the remains of nature, rejected by Mother Earth.

The preamble of the Single Convention perpetuates lies masking misanthropic policies—a cover-up for the age-old habit of ruling elites seeking to destroy others they fear could undermine the social order that protects their interests. The evil that the Single Convention enshrines appears to be a modern-day version of the deception spewed by scribes-of-the-gods-of-old to muzzle the spirit of wholeness, the religion of the human heart.

For our better understanding of the destructive intentions of the 1961SC, let us revisit the history of prohibition and meet its mythical protagonists, Adapa, and Anu and the other gods-of-the-scribes that have led us to this point.

2. The Propagation of the Lie through the Muzzling of the Spirit

Plants of the Gods, Food and Water of Life, Plant of Heartbeat and Fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil, are some of the names of the substances venerated by the ancients, but which our society has branded as evil drugs. From the start of civilization in Sumer, some 5000 years ago, till the 1961 UN Single Convention, lies and terror have been employed again and again to control entheogenic substances and persecute its consumers. Even so, there are still pockets in remote jungle corners and in high and nearly inaccessible mountain retreats where at dawn the jubilant perennial cry: “I’ve got life!” can be heard.
And just the other day, in an urban circle of ayahuasca using people a young woman told how the drink had changed her life. “No”, she retracted, “it gave me life.”

But over time the life-giving spirit was muzzled, and truth was trumped by the lie. Thus was the brilliance taken out of life, thus grew the need for artificial beauty and projects of grandeur.

Soma and Truth in Vedic Poetry
To get an idea of the entrance of the Lie on the scene of history, we should step backwards for a moment to have a look at a sacred book of the second millennium BC Hindus, the Rig-Veda: “In Praise of Knowledge.” Its hymns tell a story, interspersed with joyful exclamations, about the drink that lifts to reveal wisdom and truth, and give life.
That was a time that we can only dream of, a time when true and false, good and evil, were known instinctively, gifts of the Soma drink, deified for its “truth-speaking”:

And, by losing one’s fear of death in the realm of cosmic consciousness, one became immortal:

The soma drink defines the characters and the actions of the gods, and of the author who himself becomes a divine master of the universe under the motto “Have I not drunk Soma?”

These expressions of immortality and sovereignty, of divine wisdom and knowledge of good and evil were perchance the reasons why in the next great Hindu theological text, the Bhagavad Ghita, soma had been discarded and the yoga art to escape the human condition was taught by the god Krishna. Yoga, according to Krishna, should be accessible only to the Brahmin and the Warrior Classes. The masses of the people were never meant to escape their miserable situation in life, but suffer forever unending rebirth!
Soma - the Food of Life of ancient India - had become a thing of the past, something to be forgotten.

The Downfall of Sumer
Against this Hindu backdrop we can better evaluate the Semite answer to the problem of control over the minds of an immortal and sovereign entheogen-using populace.
A first thing to keep in mind is the treacherous 2000 BC overthrow of Ibbi-Sin, the last king of Sumer, by his trusted general Ishbi-Erra, the Amorite. Having gone up north from the capital city of Ur with a big part of the army and the funds from the state’s coffers to buy urgently needed grain, and entrenching himself in the city of Isin, Ishbi-Erra let invading armies from the east destroy Ur and its surrounding cities. After the king had been taken prisoner - never to be heard of again – Ishbi-Erra ousted the plunderers and proclaimed his own rulership.
To cover his deceit, he and his descendants would publish City Laments in which the heartless gods were made responsible for the end of the Sumerian kingdom and the destruction of its cities. Supreme divine ruler Enlil “in hate,” was said to have “ordered the utter destruction of Ur, that its people be killed they decreed its destiny.” The excuse for this betrayal was put into Enlil’s mouth when he declared icily:

From alienating the people from their gods through deception, it was but a small step for the rulers to deceive the people about the source of divine knowledge and truth. Even though truthfulness had always been proclaimed a sacred gift from the world of the spirit, in the words of the traders and their god Ea [Akkadian name for the Sumerian Enki], deceit had suddenly been declared a divinely decreed attribute, a me [its ancient Mesopotamian name]. It is not openly stated in the texts that deceit had trumped truth, that had wisely never been declared. Instead, the issue was solved in a very simple way: by no longer mentioning truth. Whence in the pre-commercial, pre-civilized epoch truth had been the highest good, a gift from supreme god of heaven Anu, in the new world order the art of deception was glorified.

The Babylonian Empire
This change of ethics became unmistakably clear in the foundational myth of Adapa, the loyal servant of the demigod of commerce Ea, who told Adapa deceitfully not to accept the food and drink god of heaven Anu would offer him because he would surely die. Upon Adapa’s refusal of the food and water of life offered to him, Anu asked him for the reason. Adapa replied with the pitiful excuse:

Adapa was refused life and chased away from heaven’s doors but, as a result of his refusal to accept the food and water of life, the demigod of commerce’s scribe pronounced the obedient servant the wisest among men.

Without the illumination from Anu’s food and water of life, wisdom could deceitfully be proclaimed to come from the Deep, a pool under the temple of Ea. The story "Inana and Enki" [Ea] describes how goddess of love Inana got Enki drunk and made off with all the mes of civilization from his mythological home in the Deep. One of the mes was deception:                

Having thus planted deceit as a divinely given ordinance, of the same order as kindness, deception had become acceptable and officially condoned, by goddess of love Inana in person.

The Change of Guards at Heaven's Doors
Then, in the thirteenth century BC epic story of Gilgamesh, the scribe gave a distorted theological treatise in which the immortalized Utanapishtim (Akkadian for “he has found life”) told king Gilgamesh that that life, eternal life - immortality - is not for humans. He had the boatman who brought the king to the shores of the world of the Immortals banned forever, symbolically separating the hitherto connected worlds of gods and humans. To make sure that the message was properly understood, the scribe had the king, as he traveled back to his city of Uruk, lose the plant of rejuvenation, which is the entheogen that generates the divine within us. Thus, whereas up till this moment in history the god of heaven had welcomed visitors with the Food and Water of Life, from now on the servant of the demigod of commerce, the source of deceit, made sure nobody would be able to enter into the realm of the divine.

After arriving at Uruk, Gilgamesh told the banished boatman to inspect the walls of the city. With the closure of the realm of the divine, these walls - a metaphor for the laws of the ruler - thus became the sole point of reference for civilization. The wisdom from the divine source within had been effectively muzzled; from now on understanding was tied to the voice from the palace and its financial enablers. This alienation from the heart was at the same time the starting point of humanity’s alienation from its natural environment.

It took till Nabonidus’ reign over Babylonia, in the middle of the 6th century BC, for Adapa’s wisdom to be publicly questioned, by the king himself, who probably had consumed food or water of life:

Ilte’ri, another name for the moon god Sin, was worshipped by Nabonidus and the cause for his discord with the priests of Marduk, patron deity of Babylon. It is rumored that these priests were helpful in the Persian king Cyrus’ defeat of Nabonidus, which not only brought Nabonidus down but the entire Babylonian empire as well.
The pool that for over a thousand years had been believed to be the source of wisdom had at last been shown to be an imaginary wishing well, only upheld by the piousness of its priests and the arms of the empire.

The Fear of Yahweh
It was in the ensuing political and cultural void that the priests of god Yahweh, exiled in Babylonia, crafted their own religious dogmas, taking heed not to repeat the errors that had brought down the Babylonian birthplace of civilization and its warped theology.

Thus, whereas in the epic of Gilgamesh the king had been ordered to leave the world of the Immortals and had lost the plant of heartbeat only at the end of the story, the Bible of the Jews started with Yahweh’s prohibition of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This was the first commandment imprinted on Adam and Eve’s minds after which the scribe had them kicked out of paradise right away for disobeying Yahweh’s commandment.
In the Gilgamesh epic the plant had not been forbidden and no law had been given to make up for the lost wisdom of the heart. Contrary to the inconclusive ending of the Gilgamesh epic, the Bible gave a divine law - the Torah - to fill the gap left by the disappearance of the divine voice of the heart. Instead of Ea’s Deep, it was now said that “The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” And fear of their Lord became the driving force of the Jewish faith. The new law was forcibly instructed to the entire population and parents were admonished:

Long gone were the days of the happy truth-speaking Vedic poets and the erstwhile dancing Israelite prophets. A dark period ensued in Israel. Only one historian, describing the massacre of the Maccabean rebels after the death of their leader Judas Maccabee in the middle of the second century BC, referred to it:

What the statement implies is that the distress caused by the cruelties of the Syrian oppressor against the Judean revolutionaries could only be compared to the distress caused by the corruption and cruelty of the priestly rulers at the time that the prophets were silenced in Israel.
Corruption and cruelty were the defining qualities of this period indeed.
Jonathan, the fifth high-priest, had a brother Jozua, who was befriended with the Persian vizier Bagoas, who had promised Jozua to give him his brother Jonathan’s job. Because of this the two brothers got into a high-running quarrel, which led to Jonathan killing his brother, in the temple.
A while later, after the Greeks had ousted the Persian overlords, a certain Jason became high priest instead of his brother Onias III by offering king Antiochus IV yearly taxes double the amount his brother Onias had given him. When three years later he sent a relative by the name of Menelaus with the yearly taxes to Antiochia, the king gave this Menelaus the high-priestship after he had offered to pay an even bigger yearly tribute than the one Jason had offered him. A year later, when Menelaus was accused by the erstwhile high-priest Onias III of illegitimately making presents of golden temple goblets to curry favor with the Syrian rulers, the usurper had the former high-priest killed. After ten years in the high-priestly position, years in which he made the Jerusalem populace suffer greatly, Menelaus was called to Antioch, where king Antiochus V ordered him to be thrown in a tower filled with ashes.  

The Maccabee rebellion highlights a spiritually trying time for the Israelite population. It is extremely unfortunate that instead of combatting the Torah's monopolization of the divine voice by prohibiting the consumption of the fruit of knowledge, the Maccabean priests had identified with the Torah to the point of fighting the priestly class for its corruption and its inobservance of a law that had led to the corrupting conditions in the first place, based as it was on priestly hubris.
It is no surprise therefore that soon after taking the reigns of government the new Maccabean rulers fell prey to the same lust for power and wealth that had led them to oust their Zadokite predecessors. Especially their most prominent king, Alexander Jannaeus [127-76 BC] was feared for his cruelty. During the Jewish civil war, while dining with his concubines, he watched eight hundred rebels being crucified as their wives and children were being killed in front of them.

The era of Life in the Embrace of the Other
As priests battled priests for control of the offices of state, the oppressed masses searched for spiritual liberation elsewhere. It is here that we must look for the source of a revolutionary movement to abandon the religion of Yahweh and other fearful and vengeful gods terrorizing the lives of the downtrodden. People became aware that their salvation would not come from the adoration of a fearsome and autocratic god, but from the love of the divine within. This is, from the worship of one’s personal god, the one revealed through the heart, only then to be understood and embraced by the mind. That personal god had nothing in common with the official, terrorizing gods adored all over the ancient world. That personal god could neither be found in the skies nor in the temples, but in the abandonment of one’s own ego and the embrace of one’s neighbour. Here theology, the study of an imagined divinity beyond the grasp of humans, became entheology, the search for the god within. The god that priests had for millennia projected into the sky as an autonomous and sovereign and terrorizing being, had returned to earth, to the human heart, the natural seat of the divine life within.
This is a change of perspective that many cannabis users also experience when leaving their egocentric mind behind and concentrate on their immediate surroundings. People are seen differently, no longer as the threatening other, but as company that can be trusted and enjoyably engaged in conversation. One’s own fears are shown to be creations of the mind, ridiculous constructions of a paranoid imagination. It reminds us of the ancient Scythians, laughing for joy when taking their cannabis vapor baths.

The ecstatic experience is of course different for each person and can go from a benign retreat of the own ego all the way to the complete disappearance of one’s self-consciousness, like the self-emptying or kenosis ascribed to Jesus by later sources. In this ecstatic state Jesus as well as cannabis consumers become aware of their neighbors. It's called love in Christian terminology. It is the joy from the feeling of belonging, when we are, not because we think, but for having lost momentarily our Cartesian thoughtful self. It is the moment when in Buddhist terms, we have liberated ourselves from the lattice of our mental tabernacles.
In this state, the fear of death disappears and eternal life, which had been denied Gilgamesh in Babylonian times, once again becomes a possible state of mind, enabling people to carry on serenely and even happily in a miserable world.

This protest movement flourished all over the ancient near east and has survived in the teachings ascribed to the prophet of Nazareth. His message was meant to alleviate the suffering of the masses, here and now. His “Kingdom of God” pointed to the possibility given each human being to find happiness and peace by listening to the divine voice within. That’s why he could say that god’s kingdom had come near, that it was right here, waiting in the re-creation of any person’s life into eternal life.
As this vast movement of personal liberation swept the ancient world it was relentlessly opposed by the authorities of the day and its adherents were mercilessly persecuted. Only in the fourth century AD, after Jesus had been declared part of a divine trinity, and was said to be waiting in heaven to judge the ones allowed eternal life - after death, could the message of Christian love be accepted by the authorities, and Christianity turn into a respectable religion of state.

Eternal life and the sovereignty and wisdom it bequeathed had once more been denied, forcing the citizens of the western world to turn into the sheep following the papal shepherd of Rome. Since the 16th century protestant Reformation, new shepherdships became available, although none of these are known to offer the spiritual liberation each living being yearns for.
Moreover, in response to the cultural and spiritual upheavals of the Renaissance, the Catholic Church initiated tribunals to stamp out heresy. Thus, the Inquisition was born, which would burn the witches and their brew and brooms and terminate their transcendental sabbaths. Nature, the realm where the spirit roams and the Living Ones were said to reside, had been closed off for spiritual adventures. The witches’ screams of anguish had traumatized western society and the fear of the Lord had taken hold of the people.
In Geneva, Protestant reformer John Calvin, had a little girl punished, not for daring to sing happily, but for not singing one of his edifying songs, in church, on a Sunday morning of all things. He !told his faithful that eveything had already been decided in advance, even everybody's fate: eternal heaven, or hell. The saving message that heaven is here for all of us, never made it off the reformer's lips. (He made one exception to his rule: in heaven, he told his closest relatives and advisers shortly before he died, they were waiting for him.)
Then, as the French historian Michelet sadly noted, “the singing stopped!”
The spirit had been muzzled thoroughly, allowing the reasoning Ego to become the undisputed master of Europeans' minds.

Life beyond the European culture of death
But beyond Europe’s borders, and especially in the Americas, the spirit still manifested itself in the jungles and on the mountains, on the desert plains and even in the barren Arctic. Through the use of the “Plants of the Gods,” as the indigenous peoples called them, or through body denying initiation techniques, as among the plains Indians and the Eskimos, the forebears and the gods within were summoned to provide understanding and spiritual well-being. It is from their interaction with - among others - ayahuasca, peyote and psilocybin mushroom-cosuming indigenous peoples that Europeans and Americans of European descent learned about the psychoactive properties of these substances and the spirituality they engender.
That process took time though since the rationalized and alienated western mind had to battle against the frightening mind-effacing effects of the different substances. According to Rene Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”, western man indeed is a mentalized being, taking a distance from the surrounding world to objectify it and think about it before acting. On the other hand, and thanks to their entheogens, native peoples are able to enter into an emotional contact with their surroundings, a contact that will sweep their self-consciousness away to make room for the experience of total belonging. This is an experience western civilization has eschewed throughout history, at the cost of its complete alienation from nature.

The western mind's confrontation with the wisdom from the heart
Richard Evans Schultes, considered the father of modern ethnobotany, is the living example of western man’s inability to understand the spiritual bond between humans and nature.
Having classified thousands of Amazonian plants, Schultes was unable to distinguish between multiple varieties of ayahuasca – the vine of the soul – which the indigenous jungle dwellers were able to tell apart, “at once and frequently on sight and at a significant distance, without feeling, tasting, smelling, crushing, tearing or other physical manipulation". All that Schultes would affirm about the enhanced indigenous knowledge of ayahuasca was that it accounted for an ocular phenomenon. Even though Schultes drank the ayahuasca brew on multiple occasions, encumbered by his classifying mind he could see different colours and patterns but not the ‘the ocular phenomena’ his indigenous interlocutors would observe. Schultes was never able to solve the enigma at the basis of his perceptive limitations; only Terence McKenna has suggested that ayahuasca could unlock invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum normally hidden from human perception.

The widening of the field of vision would explain Schultes' enigma and many otherwise invisible phenomena. Indra’s golden net in the sky, which the Vedic scriptures speak of, is hidden from those who have not taken Soma. And the colorful bands that unite the objects around us – and these objects with us, the Mexican mushrooms allow us to see.
What rational-minded people call spirit is but a static mental universe of concepts that only comes to life when the mind can escape that mental universe and become aware of the world beyond it by expanding consciousness. Some people have an inborn capacity to access this consciousness, and others might sit for ten years under a tree to reach that state. But for those that fall not within one of those privileged classes there remains the natural way, the way of all the animals, the way the African jungle dwellers say they’ve learned from the monkeys: the consumption of the spirit- enhancing substances nature offers.

Schultes’ contemporary Weston La Barre, had less tolerance for the un-scientific admiration of what he must have missed out on:

Here La Barre says it all: the rational mind must not fall prey to subjective, “private feeling or the semantic ineffable.” The personal emotions revealed in the brains, which are of the essence in all peyote and other entheogenic cults, were not studied by LaBarre, since objectivity didn’t allow it:

The "Caucasoid Americans" who through their experiments with peyote or mescaline had encountered undreamed of spiritual rejuvenation did not pass that test. They had dared to concoct a ‘bogus’ “Neo-American Church” as a vehicle to legally pursue their liberation from dogmatic religious institutions. These days, we consider their endeavors laudable, following a proven legal course of action to channel their spiritual quest into a socially acceptable organization. But La Barre, even though he claimed to have used peyote repeatedly during his years among the Oklahoma natives, never seemed to have experienced the opening of “the doors of perception.” Far from being a defender of entheogens and religious freedom, he showed himself to be a worthy heir to the Inquisition, shaming young people who’d had a peyote-induced transcendental experience into refraining from joining a recently incorporated spiritual home. Mr. La Barre is an outstandingly-sad example of the mind’s alienation from its foundation in the soul, and each person’s belonging to what Albert Hofmann had called “the universal, transpersonal consciousness,” and the Bwiti participants poetically call “one-heartedness – nlem mvore.”
If only La Barre could have participated in that self-transcending ritual, not as a scientist but as a full member of the community: he too might have joined Hofmann and Huxley in trying to give voice to the ineffable.

Anthropologist James W. Fernandez, while studying the iboga-consuming Fang people in Africa, became himself aware of the conflicting demands made upon the scientist’s mind:

It is telling to hear Fernandez say that he was never inspired to take larger doses and go all the way to meeting his own dead forebears. That way is the goal of the ritual; it is in one's meeting with one's forebears and one's anthropomorphized divinities that the sense of cosmic belonging and immortality are gained.
Right from the start his fear of dying seems to have convinced the author that it would be better for him to take notes and not to participate in the ritual. He’s even providing valid arguments to cover his failure to inquire all the way, because he certainly would have had to forgo his “objective observation” post to receive “subjective revelations.” Because the Bwiti liturgy and cosmology lifted him already to a plane of intense emotional experience, he “felt no need for any narcotic excursions.” Besides his inconsistent use of the term narcotic for the experience of a unique and once-in-a-lifetime spiritual adventure, the excursion he referred to would have been the apotheosis of his years of living with the people in their village, dancing in their cult. Fernandez might have been a keen observer and a good narrator, but in the end, he didn’t know what he was talking about since he never travelled the way up the hill, there where his forebears might have taken him to meet the divine, where his fear of death would have vanished in feelings of oceanic belonging.

It is this rational state of mind that informs the reasoning behind the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and its Faustian goal to completely eradicate all entheogens.

3. Securitization: How Uncle Sam put the Lie of the gods in the mouth of the United Nations.

The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs
Just like the ancient Jewish book of Genesis, the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (1961SC or the Convention or Prohibition) and its follow-up conventions have attacked the Food of Life head-on with a harshly punitive prohibition system.

The preamble of the 1961SC starts with:
“The Parties,
Concerned with the health and welfare of mankind,
Recognizing that the medical use of narcotic drugs continues to be indispensable for the relief of pain and suffering and that adequate provision must be made to ensure the availability of narcotic drugs for such purposes,
Recognizing that addiction to narcotic drugs constitutes a serious evil for the individual and is fraught with social and economic danger to mankind"
and therefore the Parties are conscious “of their duty to prevent and combat this evil.”

The international UN drug control regime constructed upon this declaration of intent has proven itself to be an outright assault on the text and the spirit of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). In the aftermath of World War II the victorious powers of the western world imposed, under US leadership, a rigorous control system which scheduled consciousness-liberating substances into categories where they are prohibited for individual adult use and are available for research and medicinal purposes only.

Instead of being banned, the use of entheogens, which open the mind to divine perception, should have been protected in accordance with the goals of the UDHR, namely freedom of thought, religion and conscience for each person and thus of the right to individual health and well-being.

But, seemingly, such individual freedom would have proven to be, even for democracies’ champions, too easy a means of allowing human beings to escape from the bonds of universal thought control. And so, as we have seen, a ruse was devised to avoid all talk about the Food of Life and limit the attack in the 1961SC Preamble to “narcotic drugs” that lead to the “evil” of addiction.
Without ever placing the different non-addictive, mind-liberating entheogens like cannabis, coca and opium poppy into their own common grouping, they were separately classified in schedule I, the group of the most dangerous ‘drugs’, the addictive narcotic substances. The Food of Life was silenced. It had become at once the elephant in the room of the 1961SC.

However, times have changed. Historical prohibitionist regimes had derived their substance-outlawing authority from the divine orders given to high priests and kings, and no accountability was ever demanded from the deities of these rulers. But since the UDHR has enshrined the freedom of religion, religion itself has by necessity been excluded as a possible source for outlawing the Food of Life, outside its own realm of sovereignty. This obliged the UN to ground its drug policies in concrete goals, able to produce evidence-based results. The flawed motivation of the Preamble however has overridden sound medicinal policies and has led to disastrous results, exposing the renewed Lie to muzzle the Spirit once and for all at the cost of innumerous human lives.

The 1961SC is a cynical text. It pretended to globally pursue the objectives of human health and well-being, but it sacrificed them instead to the aspirations of ruling elites. By enacting a universal ban on the use of mind-liberating substances outside the strict controls of modern medicine and science, nature’s beneficial plants—bestowing individual well-being and health--have been denied to humanity. Denied these healing resources which our biodiversity offers to every human being, and forcibly subjugated in a so-called “War on Drugs”, humanity got corrupted by the figments of the imagination of authoritarian rulers, whether or not legitimized through democratic decision-making processes.

The securitization of Evil
The 1961SC defines drugs as evil, an existential threat to humanity. Mankind needed to be rescued from this barbaric threat of the antagonistic users. For the member nations, securitization against this threat was believed to be of grave importance during the 20th century. They constructed a dichotomy, a framework in which the threatened object, or ‘Self’, protects itself from an existential threat, or ‘Other’. Mankind was portrayed by the nation states themselves as a global ‘Self’ carrying out a ‘humanitarian endeavor’ to rid the world of drugs users, producers and traffickers, the ‘Other’ who threatens the ‘Self’. This global ‘Self’ was then presented as being morally superior in contrast to the ‘evil’ Other. This dichotomy would justify exceptional, extralegal measures to combat the Other.

Although it was accompanied by considerable arm-twisting and bullying, some 95% of UN-members signed the Single Convention. Under the guise of a humanitarian endeavor, prohibition has justified extraordinarily harsh measures: massive human rights violations, continued neglect of users' health, countless numbers of dead. The War on Drugs - the brainchild of the US who enlisted the UN to assist with its implementation -- has not resulted in a projected drugs-free world but in an ever-growing unregulated criminal drugs market controlled by Secret Services and international crime. The War on Drugs is a resounding failure when measured against its stated objectives. But instead of looking for alternative policy options, the Drug Warriors appear to be content with continuing their war. For them, no cost seems too high.

The 1961SC has ultimately granted every government in the world the authority to discriminate against minorities based on their unwanted consumption preferences - whether such preferences were integral to the social fabric of their communities and protected as human rights or were imposed upon them due to their weak socio-economic positions and the vagaries of Prohibition. Entire communities including men, women, children, ancestors and gods, with centuries-old religious and cultural traditions were forced to reset within a 25-year timespan to the brand-new 20th century social regulations. Traditional consumption habits now fall within the purview of criminal markets.  Additionally, prohibition policy transforms these traditional consumption habits into addictions. In this new world, it is not the Bill of Human Rights, but the lawlessness created by the 1961SC - as dictated by the strongest nations - -that reigns over large portions of the global population.

We shouldn’t be surprised, as the present War on Drugs follows the historical template established since the encounter between Adapa and god Anu, back in the Mesopotamian civilization. The old motivations and methods are still of good use: the muzzling of the wisdom-providing voice from within the heart through the prohibition of the mind-liberating plants of the Earth, using lies for arguments. The 1961SC Preamble posits the inevitability of addiction to various substances which have a long tradition of well-embedded cultural and religious use. Likewise, Adapa had refused the food and water of life, at the deceitful instigation of god of commerce Ea. The same god who a few centuries later taught Gilgamesh the art of deception, so he could deny the heart as the source of existential happiness and wisdom. And, as explained earlier on, in the book of Genesis, the scribes of Yahweh immediately claimed, “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."

In the beginning years of the 1961SC regime, the focus was mainly on plants from the developing countries, many of which only recently had gained independence and were vulnerable to foreign pressure and sanctions, and unable to formulate and globally defend their opposing views. By focusing the interdiction on these substances on the supply side, where they originate, these countries were the first to be punished for non-compliance. Ironically, it was precisely in these countries that people learned throughout history to use these substances for their benefit. Now, dramatically, under the pretext of protecting their well-being they were criminalised if they used these plants for their survival. In this way the political decolonization of the 1960s was instantly replaced with a worldwide ideological recolonization, not only of sovereign nations and sustainable societies, but of the minds of the world's population.

A sublime and cynical coup de force: by obtaining the support of both the former colonies and of the former colonizers, the new Prohibitors forced them all to pledge allegiance to a new ideology, presented as a gift from the United Nations, the much-heralded advocate of human rights. It amounted to a universal colonization of minds through the global muzzling of the spirit, occurring in the delusory shadows of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Under the guise of protecting public health and fighting evil, Nature and its Food of Life were banned again, scapegoated as the source of evil. The lie was back, in full force.

The Single Convention started with the ethnocide of the indigenous societies that had their cultures based on the communion with their gods through the consumption of their now-prohibited plants. They were given whisky instead to replace their shamanic rituals. The past had to be erased for the future to correspond to the wishes of the imperial mind. These days we are witnessing the latest consequences of this brutal regime in the worldwide persecution of minorities, often outsourced by nation states to private interests, the pervasive extra-judicial killings of users of entheogens and other drugs, homologated by the most powerful regimes, and the permanent stigmatization of the victims and their defenders, the Others, who have been branded criminals by the Liars, the world's nation states.

The lie is the rule, and the rule is that entheogenic substance use is a crime
The scientific justifications for the 1961 prohibition-scheduling provided overt exercises in deceit. The 1949 Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf was one racially biased, scientifically unqualified party. Its 1950 report had been highly selective and random in its choice of available scientific literature and conclusions, and was perceived by all the Andean coca-chewing peoples as a short-sighted and a wilful insult to their cultures. It would become clear in the subsequent decades that “addictionism,” a pseudoscientific ideology launched by Prohibition, had taken hold of the United Nations, and that science had been given the back seat in drug policymaking. The Global Commission on Drug Policy - a former-Heads-of-State-and-Government anti-prohibitionist club - squarely stated that science was left behind during the classification of psychoactive substances. The 2017 complaint by the United States' National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine at the publication of its report The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids, vented the frustration of the academic community about the barriers put in the way of unbiased cannabis research. Thus, despite there being during the last half century, dozens of new clinical cannabis applications evidenced by research, the UN refused to scientifically review the classification of the plant and its compounds. It was still scheduled and stigmatized as a substance liable to abuse and addiction, supposedly containing dangerous properties and little or no therapeutic values, when in 2018 and for the first time, the World Health Organization assessed the medical uses and harms of cannabis and decided in 2020 that cannabis ought to be rescheduled.

The Vienna-based UN-drug control bodies moreover don't seem to care about the ravages that the war on drugs produces, such as government sponsored killings of users, torture presented as rehab in compulsory drug detention centers, or about the successes obtained on the ground by harm reduction, like the clean needle and syringe and the opioid substitution programs. The case of Dr. John Marks’ successful “Liverpool heroin prescription project” is emblematic.

Dr. Marks' Merseyside clinic in Liverpool, England, successfully stopped the HIV epidemic in its tracks, improved the health of drug takers dramatically and prevented further deaths from any drug-related cause. But, just as importantly, the number of heroin addicts fell significantly. Under prohibition you need to buy at prohibitive prices, so you rob or prostitute or you adulterate and sell part of your purchase. With a prescription, you don’t have to sell heroin to get heroin and persuade somebody else to take the drug too. Nevertheless, under US pressure the Thatcher government shut down the project in 1995.

Swiss home minister Ruth Dreyfus was persuaded to repeat the Merseyside model which was just as successful as the original had been. John Marks however became an ‘Other’, a pariah in his own profession in the UK and had to emigrate to New Zealand. Asked about his fate of being ‘burnt at the stake’ in the drug war's witch hunt, he said, “Whatever gave you the idea folk in authority operate according to reason? Your trouble is you’re being rational.”
And in a blistering critique of the 61st session of the Commission of Narcotic Drugs (CND), the Asian Network of People who Use Drugs (ANPUD) suggested it functions as some big drowning pit in regard to positive developments and ideas. Bias and abdication of responsibility had become the rule, stigmatization of users the social norm, harm infliction as the proof of good treaty compliance.

We have been told that only zero tolerance could ensure a drug-free world, free of any exploitation of youth and the weak by dealers. One of the foremost architects of the 1961SC, Harry Anslinger, who oversaw a previously failed prohibition of alcohol in the USA, knew better. Back home he had personally experienced how such an interdiction would turn the greedy into Mafiosi. In the same way Drug prohibition ultimately flooded the market with dangerous, adulterated products. And one of the main differences between medicine and “drug,” use and abuse, is standardized dose, and since the medical world was partly sidelined by the 1961 Convention, a black market in drugs was offered by numerous mafias that predictably concentrated their activities on the most profitable, highest dosages, with addiction creating demand. It made the most pessimistic predictions come true since it wasn't the scientifically-embedded but rather the socially-rejected and unsupervised use, controlled by a criminal segment of society, that dictated habits and procedures of consumption under prohibition. Instead of promoting the highest attainable standards of health, prohibition creates disease, produces crime and fosters death. The USA, which repealed alcohol prohibition after 13 years, as well as its partners, forced the UN to stick to a similar prohibition policy, causing worldwide distress and disease among consumers while empowering criminal cartels that terrorize entire national societies.

It's said that all these disasters produced by Prohibition were unintended even though they weren't unexpected. Even though if one can foresee a negative policy outcome and doesn't prevent it, it is meant to happen.

A similar view was expressed by the Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP), when president Trump presented a revamped US war on drugs at the 2018 opening of the 73rd United Nations General Assembly. Said the Global Commisssion, “Attempts to eradicate drug supply and use through prohibition-based repressive measures against people who use drugs have proved expensive and counterproductive for more than 50 years. The U.S. government, which tried and abandoned alcohol prohibition, and now faces an unprecedented opioid crisis, should know better than anyone.”

“Not everyone signed on to Trump’s initiative, billed a “Global Call to Action on the World Drug Problem”. Those who did were hardline prohibitionist countries, including Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia; genocidal partners like Myanmar and the Philippines and those who agreed on this return to the failed policies of the past after some US realpolitik. Apparently, all concerned knew and understood the consequences. This was especially true for those countries that decided to forgo Trump’s invitation. The bluntest answer came from a Dutch official: “We see it as a health thing, in our country we try to prevent it, we don’t believe in the way it’s being proposed by this text. We don’t want to criminalize it.”

Other UN-member countries are no longer concerned with outdated and deleterious goals when they develop drug control policy. Those Preamble-guiding objectives are viewed as out-of-date excuses and have become a travesty. Health and welfare concerns are not weighed by the Vienna crime fighters; to maintain the logic of the UN's system, they demand adherence to the rules and punishment for violation. Following the US example - to fake it until you make it - the worst outcomes seemingly become the best proof of the succes of this policy: like climbing statistics on deaths, incarcerations and homelessness and poverty.

The G8 come out of the closet to maintain the perverse integrity of the Single Convention
“Concerned with the health and welfare of mankind,” the 1961 Single Convention and its U.S. patron mandated “the abolition of drug use that for centuries had been embedded in the social, cultural, and religious traditions of many non-Western states. This is inflicted on Mother Earth, other governments and their citizens in a manner reminiscent of colonization: through terror. The abrupt termination of age-old social traditions and religious practices - following an outrageously brief transition period of 15 years for opium and 25 years for coca and cannabis - was met with consternation and total rejection by the affected indigenous peoples. In Bolivia, a country with an indigenous majority governed by criollos (people of Spanish descent, born in Bolivia), the prohibition on traditional coca chewing among its indigenous population led to its radicalization, spearheaded by coca peasant-leader Evo Morales Ayma. Under the motto “coca no es cocaína,” Morales led his people to an electoral victory in 2005 and ascended to the presidency in 2006.

Six years later - and half a century after the adoption of the 1961SC - Bolivia gained the support in 2012 of a qualified majority of 1961SC member states to rejoin the Convention, which it had left a year earlier, through an exemption designed to align the country’s international obligations respectful of its Constitutional mandate, which upholds the coca leaf as part of Bolivia’s cultural legacy.

This exemption, in this case regarding Bolivia's obligation to abolish traditional coca-chewing among its indigenous populations, was the first of its kind in the history of UN drug control treaties. In response, the United States, upset by this development - although itself benefiting from the so-called ‘Coca-Cola exemption’ - spearheaded a position whereby all G8 countries opposed what they perceived as an “undermining of the treaty’s integrity and its guiding principle of restricting drug trade and use solely to medical and scientific purposes.” The required minimum to defeat the reservation - one-third of the 184 members of the treaty body – was not met, however, and the prohibitionist diehards lost the fight. It is a plausible assumption that many countries saw the “Coca-Cola” exemption, which authorizes the use of coca as a flavoring for a commercial US product consumed over two billion times a day worldwide, as a greater violation of the treaty integrity than the ardent rescue of a cultural heritage by the local Andean people.

Bolivia's victory marked a turning point: the beginning of decolonization from the constraints imposed by the 1961SC. But, meanwhile, the war continued and the Lie prevailed.

The War on Drugs in the Philippines: a eugenics test project
Upon his election in 2016, US President Donald Trump was eager to establish himself as a firm prohibitionist. When Philippine president Duterte called to congratulate him on his election to office, Trump in return spontaneously wished him success with his controversial drug control record, which had left 4,800 people dead since Duterte’s own election in July of that same year. Duterte said Mr. Trump endorsed his brutal antidrug campaign, telling Duterte that the Philippines was conducting it “the right way.”

In April 2017, Trump followed-up by telling Duterte that “he was doing an unbelievable job on the drug problem” in the Philippines, where Duterte had publicly sanctioned the extrajudicial killing of suspects.

Next, the two leaders had a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the 31st Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Manila in November 2017. Duterte had said the week before the meeting that he would tell Trump to “lay off” if he talked about human rights. Harry Roque, the Philippine president’s spokesperson confirmed after the meeting that, contrary to the claim of Trump’s spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the meeting did not discuss human rights, even though Duterte had explained his murderous anti-drugs campaign to Trump, who nodded and “seemed to be in agreement.”

The contradicting declarations from the press officers of the two presidents confirmed two things: Mr. Trump wanted to be seen as having brought up the human rights question without condoning Duterte's Extrajudicial Mass Killing-policy (EMK); and Mr. Duterte wanted to project himself as someone who defended his drug policy without Mr. Trump's objecting to it on the basis of it violating human rights.

Then came April 23, 2018, and the comments by President Duterte's spokesperson Harry Roque concerning the US Country Report on Human Rights for the Philippines. The report held that “Extrajudicial killings have been the chief human rights concern in the country for many years and, after a sharp rise with the onset of the anti-drug campaign in 2016, they continued in 2017.” Harry Roque commented how the Malacañang (the Presidential Palace) stuck by the statement of President Donald Trump that President Duterte is doing a good job in handling the country’s illegal drugs problem. “I personally heard the discussion between President Trump and President Duterte when they were here in the Philippines during the ASEAN Summit, and I think I heard words coming from President Trump praising President Duterte, including the war on drugs. If I am not mistaken, President Trump said he (Duterte) knows what he’s doing in the Philippines,” Roque said. “So, I do not know how to reconcile the State Department report with the actual statement of the President. But for now, we’re going with the statement of President Trump that we all heard from the mouth of President Trump,” he added.

Mr. Trump lost all credibility when his press officer's claim that Trump had discussed human rights with Duterte was not repeated by her after it had been rejected by Duterte’s press officer. As a result, for almost another six months the world--and particularly the potential victims involved—remained unaware of what had actually been discussed.
This international lack of coordination would result in the lapse by Harry Roque of April 23, 2018, whereby the full endorsement of Mr. Trump with the Philippines' EMK during the two countries' November 2017 meeting in Manilla, was revealed.

Shortly afterwards, president Duterte repeated his offer for the Philippines to host a “world summit to tackle how nations can protect human rights”. Duterte must have felt justified by the World Powers, now that, after China and Russia, even the USA noted his “exemplary” defense of human rights.

Today, six years later, Oplan Tokhang, the brutal Philippine EMK operation, is still ongoing, run from their fiefdoms by two rival drug lords: former President Duterte, who quietly sides with Beijing, and his successor, Bongbong Marcos, a longtime fan of Washington. Neither China nor the US will stop them, and that comes as no surprise since China and the United States are fighting for dominance in the South China Sea and are willing to overlook mass murder in the Philippines.

Trump in the meantime advances along his sinister path. His admiration for the Philippines Oplan Tokhang solution was not only motivated by political considerations but closely ties in with his personal lack of empathy towards “inferior” people and his eugenic beliefs that a disabled life is no longer human and should be ended. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die,” he told his nephew whose son is mentally and physically disabled.

Duterte told us he discussed with Trump possible ways for the US president to follow his example, notably suggesting that it would be the easiest thing to throw “them” out of a plane. We don't know how Trump responded, but since Duterte made this discussion public it can be surmised they were not negative if Duterte himself did not explicitly say so.

Given Trump’s enthusiasm for Duterte’s “cleansing” policies we, the “Others”, also must assume that he was genuinely interested in Duterte's policies as a viable model for the UN. Moreover, “narcotic drug use” falls perfectly in line with “chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance” which justified forced sterilization in Nazi Germany.
This devaluation of disabled lives as less-than-human, which was rampant in Germany before and during the Third Reich, provided the rationale for the methodical Nazi mass murder of 300,000 disabled people. As a test, the Nazis first killed 70,000 handicapped people. Such test killings were the subject of Duterte's advice to his great friend.

Eugenicists devalue disabled lives in order to justify their anti-life solutions. They do it through the process of dehumanization, a process nowadays in open violation of the UDHR’s championed right to life. However, the dehumanization of drug users is actively promoted by the 1961SC, on a global scale. By opposing harm reduction and withholding the proper medicines from addicted people, able people are intentionally disabled. Once hooked, addicts remain hooked and pre-programmed to hook those around them. Their horrific plight is best illustrated by the dead victims of Oplan Tokhang: abducted by night, found in the morning, hands tied behind their back, a tight plastic bag covering their head, dead. Unhooked, free at last. No screams were heard.

Two parallel universes: human rights ideals against murderous thought control.
On social media, our children - the generation of the future - witness daily how we violate our own rules on a global scale. We kill people and destroy nature indiscriminately, an erosion of principles that signals the disintegration of the rules-based order and the onset of a new era, as Agnès Callamard, the Secretary General of Amnesty International, has warned. The support of the United States and many Western countries for Israel in its conflict with Gaza, even as the carnage among innocent civilians keeps unfolding, exemplifies a troubling selective application of universal protection rules. This disintegration began in earnest after 9/11 when the U.S. launched its “war on terror”, guided by the concept of “securitization”, which posits that anything is permissible in the pursuit of “terrorists.”

This concept of securitization was also applied to modern-day Prohibition (see above in this chapter 3 under “The securitization of Evil”). It began with the 1961 Single Convention, a speech act that framed drug use as evil - an existential threat to the member countries of this Convention, the very body that produced the act. This framing justified extraordinary measures, often taken outside legal frameworks, against the “Others”, in this case, the users of forbidden substances.

Although the text of the 1961SC was not popular among many UN members, it benefited from a highly successful promotion campaign, and a quasi-unanimity of members endorsed the Convention. Whether based on facts, such as the 2001 Twin Towers attack, or on falsehoods, like the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 1961SC’s framing of drugs as evil, securitization often leads to illegitimate actions. These actions frequently result in disproportionate harm and they entail a denial of the rule of law, as these exceptional measures oftentimes break with law, invoking force majeure. Consequently, the securitization of an issue usually undermines the principle of universality, which asserts that all individuals are equally endowed with human rights, regardless of who they are or where they live. Even the millions of so-called “terrorist” drug users.

The 1961 Single Convention divides human universality into two, proclaiming the "Humanity" of the non-drug-users and declaring “Others”, the users, as evil. But Ms. Callamard rightly cautions us not to be discouraged: “The fate of universality resides not in the hands of those who betray it. Rather, as a perennial ambitious project for humankind, its power rests, first and foremost, in its continual proclamation and in its persistent defense.”  

The USA had accomplished a remarkable feat: it had produced, under its acclaimed leadership, the two acts that assured the world on the one hand of the undreamed personal freedom enshrined in the UDHR and, on the other hand, of its authority to undermine this pillar of the world community through unlimited punitive sanctions against those who dared to challenge the limits of freedom established under the 1961SC. In the end the facts show that all individual human rights can be violated.

Through the international securitization of prohibited drugs, the 1961SC has created a schism with the Bill of Human Rights. It can continue to punish the “Others” freely without being hindered by their rights to health and happiness. As the CEO of the UN Drug Control Program asserted in 1998 during the 50th anniversary of the UDHR, “We should not forget that the notion that drug use is a kind of human right is inherently immoral, as it suggests that human lives are not worth saving from the devastation of addiction.”

In 2008, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Paul Hunt, retorted that “international drug control and human rights systems are two parallel universes”. Indeed, the 1961SC and human-rights ideals are incompatible.

Thus, the fate of the Food of Life indeed depends on the Guardians’ persistent defense of our inclusion in humanity's universality. If the UN genuinely wishes to make an honest effort to preserve humanity, nature, its biodiversity and the Earth, it can no longer deny nature its voice and continue its subordination. If the consumers of entheogens truly want to hear nature’s voice and for that voice to be heard, they must advocate for the end of the stigmatization and eradication of the Food of Life and the persecution of its Guardians.

From the facts cited, the picture emerges of an intolerant Self, standing firmly on the side of Prohibition despite all the evidence of the failure of its policies. But facts don't matter any longer when the Lies have become articles of Faith and the Liars-in-chief dictate the commandments of the new gods. John Marks comments about his fate of being ‘burnt at the stake’ in the drug war's witch hunt when he said, “Whatever gave you the idea folks in authority operate according to reason? Your trouble is you’re being rational.”, tell a perfect truth. Divine lies only ask for loyalty.

The United Nations must stop with the securitization of Evil, so that the “Others” - we, the users of prohibited substances - can be rightfully seated at the table of humanity.


4. The Flight of Divinity

The 1961 UN speech act: a fake divine Commandment.
The 1961SC's drug policy is unmistakably a failure in the sense that it did not achieve any of its goals and it inflicted untold suffering on mankind, which it claimed it wanted to protect. But it's also a debacle of a policy since it could never have achieved its goals, given the insurmountable contradictions that the Convention’s drafters had built into it. They obviously wanted to conceal the fact that their policy choice - to not protect mankind's consumption of entheogens as a human right, encompassing freedom of thought, conscience and religion – was actually a political choice, so they concocted a confusing and demonstrably false narrative.

First, the 1961SC Preamble emerged as a kind of global UN-validated Patient Medication Notice, containing a warning to the world's population about the danger of narcotic drugs. Narcotics are salutary, they said, in that they relieve pain and suffering. But they also lead to addiction which is a serious evil for the individual and mankind and has to be combated in a coordinated and universal fashion, thereby limiting certain substance's access or prescription by the scientific and medical professions.

Next, however, in the convention's ensuing articles, non-narcotic medicines were surreptitiously included within the lists of narcotic drugs and some were deceitfully classified as lacking medicinal value.

The personal use of nature's three most-useful plant medicines – the opium poppy, cannabis and coca - were prohibited to mankind. Consequently, civilizations that have arisen alongside and through the traditional use of these sacraments were cut off from any further communion with these plants of nature, under penalty of the full range of the world’s punishments.

It was decided that no good should come from Nature’s gifts, although the world over adapted by local ecosystems to local needs and on demand and almost free available to those people who wish to be on speaking terms with nature and to partake in the communion of unlimited belonging with Mother Earth. Those who know to enjoy the ecstasy nature provides when the human quest for liberation is fulfilled by the complete immersion in Earth’ existence, the moment human schemes of subordination and terrorization have disappeared into the background and the perverse integrity of the Single Convention explodes and Soma brings the false to nothing.

To ostensibly prevent traditional societies from infecting others with this so-called evil, all people in modern societies who wish to escape the emptiness found within fossilized ideologies – such as, our youth; or the descendants of slaves; the marginalised people of our industrial societies; the perpetually dominated women of our gender-based caste-systems; our LGTBQ+ communities; our asylum seekers who are not recognized as refugees; and many more of our people who are discriminated against because of peculiarities in their belief systems, models of society, modes of communication, management of reproduction; in short, whichever of our people the dominant forces in society find offensive – had to be halted in their attempts, as envisioned by the Single Convention.

A remarkable feature of prohibition policy is that its repeated failures have no negative effect on its continuing popularity with its supporters. It appears resistant to normal performance evaluation as is the case in other policy domains such as education and food and agriculture.

Since this policy is viewed as a war against a terrorist threat, the Self needs indeed to double-down on its ill-conceived defenses each time it fails. Prohibition feeds on its own failures, with even harsher measures instituted in vain after each successive attempt to counteract the enemy, the drug mafias. In vain, that is, because the enemy thrives on prohibition’s ongoing failures, counteracts successive crackdowns, and becomes militarily and financially stronger.

However, as users of entheogens know, the Lie of Prohibition doesn’t posit the Self against a mean Other, intent on the Self's destruction through the Other's consumption of the Food of Life. But, to the contrary, we--the Others--act contrary to this Enslaver of the Self, who is intent on terminating all of Mother Earth's inputs which run against the Self's goal of ultimate domination.

The answer that will decide our future fate addresses the question of whether Nature can survive and continue to support the humanity of Mother Earth’s children or whether humankind will continue to rid itself of its brothers and sisters, only to be left with dead institutions of hubris.

The doors of perception of each person’s homecoming
A respected European Christian theologian of the ecumenist movement, which seeks to promote greater religious unity, was told during a 1960’s study trip through the US south that to create a new religion one only needs four components: a shower cubicle with a curtain and a comfortable chair inside for the creator of the new religion; a trusted and qualified secretary with a good notebook outside to take note of the creator’s narrative; the creator’s transmission of seemingly great inspiration; and a strong radio transmitter to broadcast the story of the new belief afterwards to the potential converts.

The reception in Europe of this model of faith-creation was met with hilarity since it presents religion as an easy-to-manufacture and profane product without even the slightest mention of any seemingly-required divine intervention in the production process. A good sales pitch for instant-religion.

However, in retrospect, (and barring any time-sensitive contexts) this is the historical way things go for institutionalized religion-building, as it is standard practice that invisible gods speak to sole visitors, like Anu to Adapa and Yahweh to Moses. These invisible gods moreover always prefer to meet in isolated places such as heavens, mountains or the other sides of huge bodies of water, where the gods are said to live, far away from other people who can only pervert the private narrative and cause the transmission to fail. As the self-proclaimed prophets are the only witnesses to the events they claim to have been a part of, the results, as narrated by themselves, are written down over time for history to preserve as clear and convincing a story as possible for the potential worshippers.

The US version of religion-production mentioned above contains these four constituent elements and differs from the familiar mythical and historical accounts only in the condensed, instant production process inherent in its culture to avoid waste of time. However, all these religions, old and new, suffer from a basic production deficiency in that they seek to establish themselves as an institution and thus become a self-interest group. Contrary to the ecstatic individual religions, which desire to hold the wholeness unbroken and which welcome the whole of humanity, institutions seek to appeal to a specific group only and create barriers for others. They may even divide a similar group into warring factions and disunity like we’ve recently most dramatically seen with the split between the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Moscow Patriarchate.

Man tears his churches, religions and gods apart whenever it fits him, populating his pantheon with combating warriors who will justify the fights humans will task them with. If humanity wishes to survive it will have to define itself no longer in short-sighted ideals, profane ideologies, commanding their gods to wage their wars and rip the world apart, but in a uniting ideal available to us all: Mother Earth.

As the German-American theologian Paul Tillich observed, “Instead of transcending the finite in the direction of the infinite, institutionalized religion actually becomes a finite reality itself—a set of prescribed activities to be performed, a set of stated doctrines to be accepted, a social pressure group along with others, a political power with all the implications of power politics.”

At the opposite end of institutionalized religions we find the ecstatic religion, the celebration of the living spirit present in our heart, where, with the help of nature’s Food of Life, the Doors of Perception are opened for the personal Divine Homecoming. Even when the Mexican Huichols visit their gods on the Wirikuta mountain in a group, their encounters with the gods are personal, one-on-one events. It is each Huichol’s personal interaction with--and understanding of--the gods that bonds her/him with the divine, the maize, the deer and her/his forefathers. Even the Marakame (Shaman) will not intervene, out of respect for the group participants’ ecstatic experience, including their individual encounter with the wholeness imparted. The Huichols therefore don't want their system of faith to be called a religion, since the term is too clouded by profane ‘Institutions’ which were imported from abroad.

The UN has declared itself competent and authorized to govern the world's drug and belief policies. It has taken on this responsibility in a despotic and sneaky way, like the gods of the past, manipulating mankind into accepting the prohibition of the mind-liberating medicines of nature and its muzzling of the spirit.
The United Nations has reached here the apotheosis of its reductionist policies in the social exclusion, the carceral confinement and even the physical liquidation of humans as punishment for their individual quest for participation in the wholeness of humanity and creation, from which no one should be left behind.
Looking at the disastrous results that Prohibition has caused since its adoption, as has been pointed out by international human rights and harm reduction movements - backed by a growing body of science - which run contrary to the force and decrees of the United Nations, we see how the War on Drugs has led to an acceleration of the criminalisation of the drug policy control system, the violation of human rights, the capture of complete administrations at local and national levels by the drugs mafias, and an increase in the  depletion of Earth’s resources necessary for its sustainable development.

Through the adoption of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and its follow-up conventions, the United Nations has failed to pursue the objectives set out in
Article 1. of its Charter, i.e.
- to maintain international peace and security,
- to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples,
- to achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and
- to be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.

By accepting the rights of individuals to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, humanity has, in principle, opened up the gates for institutionalized religions themselves to meet UN's very own tests of human rights compliance – tests that ought to be conducted in the very spirit of the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The lies that the United Nations has used to deny legitimacy to Nature Religions through the 1961SC would not pass such a test, since these enforced falsehoods constitute the most serious violation of human rights imaginable. Not only because of the immense scale of human rights violations which victims of the ban have been subjected to -- committed worldwide, daily, under UN protection since the ban’s introduction -- but especially because the offender, namely the author of both the violating Convention and of the violated Declaration, has exempted himself from punishment. Impunity is, once again, a hallmark of False Gods, who draw their power from the forced consent of mankind, in their supposed fight against the evils being done to humanity.

Inevitably, the term ‘criminal’ must be applied to the United Nations' very own violations of the rights of humanity. It's a charge rightfully directed at the UN by those of us who view the 1961SC as an incitement to — as well as the furtherance of – the crime of genocide.

Within the truly divine, the sense of unity and wholeness is honored and heightened. That's the goal the United Nations mission symbolizes and which it has solemnly pledged to pursue, and which it seemingly consecrated within places for humanity to celebrate. In New York, Geneva, The Hague and elsewhere around the globe, in her palaces of the establishment of unity, testimonies of the victorious search of mankind for humanity.

However, the divine is what is being desecrated by the UN Member Nations, who murder their fellow human beings for choosing Mother Earth's divine transmissions over the lies of authorities, their equals. The UN Member Nations are the ones who are wreaking havoc upon Nature — whose workings the Food of Life intimately reveals to its initiates. It's that intrinsic wholeness every human being is entitled to within the homeostasis which Mother Earth provides: our divine Homecoming.

 
Lest humanity forgets: SDG18 - The Protection of the Food of Life
Cannabis is the most used medicinal plant in the world. Not only for its psychoactive but equally for its bodyactive therapeutic effects. Comprising well over 400 different chemicals, it is in all senses a Food of Life as the ratio variations of these chemicals in preparations determine the effects on the symptoms of a variety of pathologies to be treated. As its therapeutic values start being recognized again, medicinal cannabis is legalised in a growing number of countries, states and lower-level communities, but still prohibited in a large part of the world, due to political considerations. It would seem that a logical path towards the re-introduction of the notion of the Food of Life as a healing medicine for the totality of humankind and as the driver for our peace with Nature as well as the checkpoint for the sustainable development of Mother Earth, could have a symbolic kick-off with a global expression of respect for Earth's most generous gift to humanity, allowing us to integrate again into our natural environment.
To this end the Drugs Peace Institute proposes to the UN Secretary General, Mr. Antonio Guterres, to undertake whatever actions he deems necessary to promote the universal acceptance of cannabis by its re-classification in the appropriate schedule, or its de-classification altogether.

Guardians of the Food of Life are invited to support the proposal to the Secretary General by signing the petition to this effect.

Herewith we provide a copy of the letter from the Dutch “Society and Cannabis Foundation” (SMC, or “Stichting Maatschappij en Cannabis”) to the members of the Dutch House of Representatives, many of whom had been newly elected, as forwarded to the Drug Enforcement Administration at its request.
The letter provides background information about Dutch soft-drug policy, a successful fifty-year undertaking that has regulated cannabis use within the framework of the 1961 Single Convention by exercising prosecutorial discretion, in full respect of the international drug treaties.
A second document, “The Moroccan Colonel: My Preferred Assassin” describes how Moroccan soldiers mitigated Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by beginning the healing of their wounds before the slaughter of their enemies through self-medication with hashish, enabling them to embrace their future victims in their hearts. Not as others, but as brothers.

Both documents describe the integrated use of cannabis in two completely different settings, for different purposes but with the same conclusion: adult use of prohibited substances is possible if the regulator respects the objectives of the adult user, i.e. healing of the mind and body.

Version 02, November 28, 2024
by the Drugs Peace Institute

Drugs Peace Institute  – Foundation, Chamber of Commerce Utrecht, The Netherlands, KvK 41213130 www.drugspeaceinstitute.org