Greetings from cyberdelic space! This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the
 psychedelic salon. Well, at least I'm getting this podcast out one day earlier
 than I did last week and at this rate I should be back up to my early in the
 week release schedule before much longer. It's really hard to believe that
 half of January is already gone this year. I guess that old saying is right,
 that time really flies when you're having a good time. I guess I must be
 having a ball. But before I get too carried away with myself here, first I
 want to thank two people who have made recent donations to the salon and they
 are Mona F. Thank You Mona and Victoria T. who has also made donations in the
 past. Thank you both for helping to keep these podcasts going. I deeply appreciate
 your support. Well, as I was trying to decide what talk to play today, it
 dawned on me that it was way back in November of 2006 that Ralph Abraham
 loaned me his big box of cassette tapes of the trilogues he held with Terrence
 McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake. The plan at the time was to get them all digitized
 and online in podcast format as soon as possible. Well, Bruce Dahmer and I got the
 digitizing done in just a few days and nights, a few days and nights of work, but
 I guess I've fallen down on my end of the bargain to get them all in podcast
 format. Even though we've already listened to 29 of them here in the
 Psychedelic Salon, there are still about 15 left to go. So I've decided to play
 some more of the trilogue series we were listening to a couple of podcasts back.
 Like the previous two trilogue podcasts, this one was recorded with only the
 recording engineer present whose name I believe was Paul. And the date of this
 recording is September of 1991 and it may have been made partially for them
 to use while writing their 1992 book, Trilogues at the Edge of the West. Now
 this particular trilogue may be out there on the net somewhere, but it's the
 first time I've heard it myself and I found it to to be one of the most
 intimate and fascinating of them all so far. The topic Terrence and his friends
 discuss in this session is cannabis and my guess is that you're going to find
 this trilogue both interesting and fun. So let's join them now.
 Well our subject this afternoon is cannabis, a subject which is of interest
 to large numbers of people, though it's rarely discussed and in fact seems to
 have attained the status of somewhat of a taboo in polite society. My interest in
 it is intense and lifelong I must say. I remember when I first encountered it
 within a few minutes of my first exposure to it I realized that I was
 going to be able to self-medicate myself to normalcy. I was as an adolescent
 what's called a nervous child and sort of had a personal style that was very
 hard-driving and I'm told fairly abrasive and it really came with the
 force of a revelation that the mere smoking of a small amount of vegetable
 material could completely invert the structures of my personality and
 socialize me as it were into a reasonably functioning member of the
 community in which I found myself. I first encountered cannabis in Berkeley
 in this Easter vacation of 1965 and it took a couple or three exposures to it
 before I really sorted out what it was doing for me and I brought to it all the
 programming that my middle-class straight parents had given me
 concerning the subject that this was the weed of death that the road to hell was
 paved with this particular substance but I also had been exposed to some of the
 literature of the Beat Generation, the writings of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac
 and some of those people and within just a few months I had integrated into my
 lifestyle as really the central practice of my life and it has remained so up
 until just two or three months ago when under the pressure of my apparently
 dissolving marriage I stopped smoking in order to see really what sort of
 effect it would have. I was in the sort of absurd position of being in
 psychotherapy with a woman who I respected very much and who seemed to be
 a very skilled psychotherapist except that she had no sophistication
 whatsoever about cannabis and the therapeutic process kept looping back to
 the issue of my cannabis ingestion and she would ask me well now how many times
 a day do you do this I would say 10 to 14 and she would say and how many years
 have you been doing this well 25, 26, 27 and finally I saw that it was impeding
 the therapeutic process not in in its physical effects but in its effects on
 her attitude toward me so I determined simply to stop in order to remove this
 issue from the menu of issues that we were dealing with in this therapeutic
 process and I'm happy to report that though I was at that time the heaviest
 and most continuous cannabis user I have ever known or heard of it was no big
 deal I simply stopped smoking it and took up reading in the evenings and it
 seemed to have no impact on my psychological organization at all except
 that I must say my dream life became considerably more interesting in the
 wake of that decision and over the years in my traveling when there have been
 times when for just a few days my access to cannabis was interrupted I noticed
 this same phenomenon that in the absence of cannabis the dream life seems to
 become much richer this causes me to sort of form a theory just for my own
 edification that cannabis must in some sense thin the boundary between the
 conscious and unconscious mind and I sort of imagine the the unconscious as a
 system under hydraulic pressure and if you smoke cannabis the energy which
 would normally be channeled into dreams is instead manifest in the reveries of
 the cannabis intoxication the reason that I've smoked it so assiduously over
 the years is very simply that it seems to dissolve a local and personalistic
 perspective if I don't smoke cannabis I worry about balancing my checkbook the
 state of my immediate short-term career concerns in other words all the anxieties
 of the petty bourgeois pour in to claim my attention if on the other hand I
 avail myself of cannabis I'm able to rove and scan through a vast
 intellectual world that is composed of all the books I've ever read all the
 people I've ever known all the places I've ever been in no particular order
 and what I really value about cannabis is the way in which it allows one to be
 taken by surprise by unexpected ideas in the absence of cannabis my creativity is
 a kind of brick by brick linear extrapolation of certain concerns based
 on what I've just read or heard in conversation if on the other hand I
 smoke cannabis I can go in one moment from thinking about Gerta's color theory
 to in the next moment puzzling over a particular instance in Mayan
 historiography or well the examples are endless and I think that my experience
 is generalizable specifically by looking at for instance the architectural and
 art historical motifs of areas of the world where cannabis has been
 institutionalized for thousands of years what we call oriental extravagance is in
 fact the patina of design motifs and literary conventions that have been laid
 over ordinary experience in places like Bengal the Punjab and across the the
 Middle East Islam is a civilization to my mind largely though perhaps
 unconsciously under the influence of the visions and the attitudes imparted by
 hashish when I attempt to analyze in a in the broadest sense what can the
 influence that cannabis has on myself and on large groups of people who use it
 it is that it seems to exert a kind of feminizing influence it's a boundary
 dissolving drug but a very gentle boundary dissolving drug it doesn't
 dissolve boundaries in the spectacular way that the mega hallucinogens do of
 all the drugs that have been used by mankind over the centuries I would
 venture to argue that cannabis is the most benign certainly more money has
 been spent trying to find something wrong with cannabis than has ever been
 spent on any other drug and the findings are woeful well there's just no support
 for the idea that cannabis is anything other than as benign as a drug can be
 when you consider that it has to be smoked so there is the issue of the
 generation of TARS now it is true that in India charas which is what is smoked
 as the equivalent of hashish is actually a much more complex material
 charas can often contains opium nearly always contains detourer parts of the
 detourer plant which contain tropane alkaloids and it usually is held
 together by resin binders from various varieties of pine trees nevertheless
 apparently the smoking of charas in India is also an extremely non-destructive
 habit alcohol on the other hand is demonstrably one of the most destructive
 of all social habits I mean I think what a bright world it would be if every
 alcoholic were a pothead what a bright world it would be if every user and
 abuser of speed and caffeine were a pothead it seems to be a plant which has
 evolved in very intimate association with human beings from a very early time
 and hence whatever deleterious effects it has we have managed to accommodate
 ourselves to them very well one of the most interesting things about cannabis
 as a cultural phenomenon I think is first of all notice how cannabis is the
 resin product of the hemp plant the hemp plant is since the Neolithic forward the
 preferred source of fiber and cordage and I think it's interesting to note how
 the language of story and the line and the technical language of weaving are
 very very similar in other words we untangle a narrative we weave a story
 lies are made of whole cloth all of these words which describe the use of
 fibrous materials are also the words that we use for storytelling and
 narrative and I think it's because probably these two concerns weaving and
 storytelling and linguistic facility go back and find themselves in congruence
 in the hemp plant the other thing that's interesting is that the in the
 cultivation of hemp for resin purposes for drug production purposes all the
 emphasis falls upon the female plant the male plant does not produce a usable
 drug material and in fact female plants if in the presence of male plants become
 contaminated with male pollen and then produce an inferior drug product so hemp
 literally demands the honoring of the female now I'm not suggesting that this
 was consciously in the minds of primitive people because the female hemp
 plant does not particularly appear female in any way that can be
 associated to human femaleness but it is nevertheless true that hemp plants come
 in two very distinct forms and we now know that one of these forms is the
 expression of the male plant the other is the expression of the female plant
 so waves of guy Lanik resurgence that have been coming and going since the
 Neolithic seem to me in many cases to carry along as one of the appurtenances
 of the guy Lanik sensibility devotion to this particular drug and this
 particular plant above all others anybody want to jump in here
 well any a small question to start with since the leaves of male plant do have
 a pharmaceutical effect I just wondered if you had anything to say on your
 experience of comparing the effects of the two well only in that if it has a
 pharmacological effect its orders of magnitude more weakened than the female
 one thing I might say we in the 20th century tend to smoke our cannabis I
 mean aside for the occasional holiday cannabis cookie cannabis for us is
 something that is smoked on the other hand for the 19th century and for all of
 European civilization cannabis was something that was eaten in the form of
 various sugared confections that were prepared and this method of ingestion
 changes cannabis into an extremely powerful psychedelic experience I mean
 if you read the accounts of people like Theodore Gautier or Baudelaire or Fitz
 Hugh Ludlow written in the mid 19th century they are describing experiences
 that obviously were for them as powerful as a 500 microgram dose of LSD proved
 in our own lifetimes and we forget this we tend to think of it as a social as a
 social drug and a kind of a minor drug on a par with smoking a cigarette or
 having a cognac or something like that but in fact for the serious eater of a
 sheesh there it is the portal into a true artificial paradise whose length
 and breadth is equal to that of any of the artificial paradises that we've
 discovered in modern psychedelic pharmacology to my mind the whole of
 Orient of by Oriental I mean Indian and Middle Eastern civilization is steeped
 in the ambiance of hashish I mean the mosque of Omar for example is a
 beautiful example of the aesthetic of hashish at work or Jama Masjid in Delhi
 or the interiors of the mosques of Isfahan this ideal of sensual beauty of
 the richness of abstract design and vaulting spaces and vast concourses of
 polished marble and travertine these seem to be the motifs of hashish in the
 same way that the Gothic vision of black ocean waters sucking at haunted islands
 is a part of the repertoire of the opium vision that's so entranced the romantic
 poets hashish cannabis has an ambiance of its own it has a morphogenetic field
 and if you enter into that morphogenetic field you enter into a an androgynous
 softened abstract colorful and extraordinarily beautiful world and in
 our own time it seems to me the intense hatred and of hashish and the efforts to
 eradicate it that reach hysterical proportions in our own country have
 nothing to do with the pharmacological impact of the drug or any deleterious
 effect that it might be perceived to have but rather it is sensed as the
 carrier of a different set of cultural values which I would broadly describe as
 Gaian or gylanic or feminizing or androgynous and that this is what really
 brings the opprobrium of the dominator society upon it it is profoundly
 disloyal to the values of modern industrialism where for instance a drug
 like caffeine exemplified in coffee and tea has been made very welcome in those
 same societies I mean no other drug other than caffeine has ever been written
 into the industrial contracts of workers as an inalienable right and yet in the
 coffee break we encounter contractually
 defined rights to drug use that seem to work in favor of both manager and worker
 cannabis is very different it promotes a dreaminess it promotes an abiding in the
 imagination that is the stuff of romantic poetry rather than the stuff of
 the modern assembly line and I've used it that way as a tool for creativity I
 mean it's incredible how just a few puffs of cannabis can carry you over a
 creative problem or a block in seeing a particular problem so that suddenly the
 perspective shifts and what was previously occluded becomes patently
 obvious so I think that there's a great argument for above and beyond the well
 known and familiar arguments for legalizing this drug that it would
 provide revenue for governments that it would decriminalize a class of people
 who if it weren't for their devotion to cannabis products would be seen to be
 among the most law-abiding of all classes within society these arguments
 are familiar and have been made very eloquently by other people but behind
 that there's a deeper issue which is the the zeitgeist if you will of cannabis
 which carries a certain implied danger to establishment values which put such
 a premium on clear-eyed hard work and Presbyterian rectitude
 well I think it's interesting that in countries like Egypt and India where
 cannabis has been used for millennia and accepted as part of society that now
 both under the influence of the United States foreign policy and of
 industrialism there's no attempt to suppress or stamp it out countries like
 Malaya where it's accepted as part of camp on life for many many generations
 now there are strict laws draconian attempts to stop people smoking it and
 death penalty even death penalties so it's true that there's a shift in
 valuation taking place imposed by the West going together with industrialism
 which is happening and it's clear that this is something to do with this
 changing consciousness it's also clear that the in the 19th century was a very
 different attitude on behalf of Western powers and cannabis was not illegal in
 Western countries and indeed in India the British government in India
 operated a cannabis monopoly the cannabis trade was the monopoly of the
 government and this continued in parts of India like United Uttar Pradesh and
 in Pakistan until quite recently maybe it still goes on but when I was last in
 Lahore in the bazaar there there's a little shop which says over the door
 government opium shop and the shop deals in cannabis and opium and is still or
 was still part of the government monopoly so different attitudes have
 prevailed at different times but it's clear that the modern industrial
 consciousness is alien to cannabis and I suppose it's clear that the growth of
 what you'd call Gaian consciousness from the 1960s onwards is closely linked to
 it most people I know whose smoking it has started in the 1960s or
 subsequently I know very few who were familiar with its use before then must
 always have been some but it was presumably the explosion of consciousness
 in the 1960s was closely associated with the explosion of cannabis and other
 psychedelic substances. Well given all these facts and given the strong case
 you make for its benevolent effects what I'm interested in is why Ralph who was
 also present on the scene in the 1960s is no enemy of the effect of psychedelics
 has spent so many years as a total abstainer. Well I'm afraid I'm going to
 have to disappoint you because I have an extremely positive attitude for cannabis.
 I made the acquaintance in 1966 so a year after Terence around my 30th
 birthday and I discovered immediately on first smoking more or less some of
 these beneficial effects even though I had no culture around the mythological
 interpretation and tradition of cannabis appreciation nevertheless I saw at once
 these functions of the deconstruction of character armor and rigid mental
 structures opening up for a free roving enormous terrains of intellectual
 territory synthetic effect of resonance between previously isolated rooms in the
 mental mansion and in 1968 there came into my possession by some miracle large
 amount of synthetic THC and caps which I circulated among friends many of whom were mathematicians.
 This oral ingestion does produce I guess what the smoker of cannabis would call
 an overdose basically and a very well benign psychedelic experience. Then after
 moving to Santa Cruz in 1968 where the subculture was thriving all events were
 accompanied by smoking joints and my main impression of it is what Terence
 described on the relationship of hemp and stories.
 I learned this word diaphanous from you Terence, thinking of triathanos, the
 triathanos web that we weave in our meetings this kind of strong coupling
 enhanced resonance was in my experience characteristic of the cannabis
 experience. We started with the chant Om Namo Shivaya and in India the smoking of
 chas is a post-traumatic form of puja or Shiva. Daniel Roux has emphasized the history of the
 Shaivite religion as preceding the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, the Aryans,
 into India as associated with the Trividians now in the south of India and
 he identifies also this Shaivite religion, prehistoric religion with
 Orphism in Greece, Shiva, Orpheus, this is the same. So the association of cannabis
 and a guiliny I think is a very reasonable conjecture on prehistory that
 cannabis was an important crop in Minoan Crete, was an important ingredient in the
 Dionysian rebels before alcohol took over it was the maybe the secret and most
 important ingredient in the maintenance of the Guilanic partnership societies of
 the prehistoric past. Therefore the fact that its arrival into mass use, breaking
 into mass use through college campuses in the 1960s did give birth to the
 subculture, gave rebirth to the Guilanic resurgence wave, yet another
 Guilanic resurgence wave in the 60s. So this is the pretty powerful benefit for the
 argument in favor of the free availability of cannabis in society. It
 has beneficial effects which are not only a little bit beneficial as for
 example creativity, enhanced health or something like that, it aids the
 diaphanous web, the communication, the empathy, the appreciation for another
 view, the possibility of resonance between one's ideas and other ideas
 opening up creativity on the scale of cultural evolution in personal
 relationship, the way in which sexual experience is enhanced for example, the
 aphrodisiac effect of cannabis in the right dose. Just one example of its
 overall synthetic role, it is medicine for cultural evolution and that's my
 experience. If you want to know why I stopped, I think, well during the time that I did
 make friends with cannabis I was also doing LSD a lot and then mushrooms a lot
 and other psychedelics and so on. So it was sort of a package deal. I found it
 convenient finally to experience with the other side an alternate behavior in
 which there would be a focusing on a tiny point of consciousness to a kind of
 focus and concentration maintained over a long period of time which was, which
 brought its own benefit, another kind of benefit. So after synthesizing and
 deconstructing armor and obtaining views over vaster territories and so on, if you
 want to produce a product like proving a mathematical theorem which sometimes
 takes seven years of concentration on single point in consciousness, this kind
 of activity for me seemed to be enhanced by abstinence from everything, from
 newspapers, from other people's stories, from dinner party talk and so on
 and from large parts of my own consciousness just focusing on a point. I
 found experimenting with every different variation of behavior that in order to
 accomplish my goals around 1980 when I quit all psychedelics for a while,
 trying all these experiments and varying the parameters, I found that the least of
 everything and building a process in Indian they call it the "syncretizing"
 giving up everything and then bragging about that, this brought about more and
 more increase of the performance for myself out of seeking a better hand. And this is
 like an elite athlete searching for ultimate performance, trying to break
 some kind of world record for focusing on a point. This evening what I was doing was difficult and
 required rigid discipline. I invoked these ideas of yogic discipline that I
 had learned in India and they're responsible for a certain kind of
 ultimate performance as cannabis and other psychedelics enhance a completely
 different kind of ultimate performance. And I suppose this is, I guess you could
 say, another binary of focusing and defocusing mental states. My current state,
 now more than 10 years old, I realize is approaching the breaking point and
 soon it may be necessary for me to relax on a fairly massive scale in
 order to regain novelty in my approach.
 How does it work for you in the process of relating to the problem of
 creativity? Well, I think there are two things I'd say. One is that it seems to
 create a much greater sense of ability to concentrate. So contrary to your
 experience that concentrations are easier without it, I found that one of the
 effects is a great enhanced ability to concentrate. Whether it's listening to
 music, to concentrate on the music and not be distracted by other things, or
 whether it's reading something and thinking about the ideas and following a
 chain of thought to try to concentrate on that, or a line of exploration and
 conversation, or in writing to concentrate on the flow of thought and
 on to the expression of the words and the way in which the language can
 express the idea, the tremendous concentration that's required in
 writing something, at least which I find is necessary for writing books, or
 thinking out the structure of a chapter or of an argument. I find that it's a
 great aid to concentration, partly because, as Terence says, it makes it
 possible to enter a state where these become things of importance, and the
 everyday concerns about checkbooks, banks, mailing a letter, this kind of
 thing becomes secondary importance. So it may be partly by removing the
 niggling preoccupations of mundane existence that it becomes easier to
 concentrate. The second effect I found which I have a great deal to thank the
 cannabis plant for, is that in relation to places, the spirit of places, the
 spirit of trees, the spirits of plants, and the spirits of sacred places, to temples,
 cathedrals and so on, that it gives an enormous enhancement of the sense of
 connection and relationship, which is otherwise normally filtered out by this
 chattering internal dialogue of the banal kind, which goes on much of the
 time. So that I suppose would fit with what Terence says about the dissolution
 of boundaries. There's a much greater sense of connectedness. But there are two
 other things that come in train with this. One, as Terence noted, is the
 suppression of dreams. Whenever I'm not a constant smoker, of the kind that you were, Terence,
 more sort of occasional. But in periods when I don't smoke at all, then I
 notice a much greater intensity of dreams. I remember more dreams, they seem
 much more vivid. Periods when I'm smoking, I don't remember dreams at all, usually.
 So there is this curious suppression of dreams, and I don't really know what to make of that.
 There's also an effect, which I think is a negative effect of cannabis, and which
 is one of the reasons why governments and industrial civilisations try to
 suppress it, which is that because it produces a kind of physical relaxation,
 which allows the mind to expand and journey and one's psyche to connect and so on.
 This, I think, the other side of that coin, is that there's a kind of toning down and
 tuning down the whole springs of action of the body. So one's perfectly content to sit
 around doing not very much. It doesn't produce a tremendous urge to go and
 enter the dustbin, or do chores around the house, and that kind of thing.
 And indeed it's this kind of activity which is easily identified by external
 observers as physical laziness, which is the reason for its bad reputation in
 countries where it's habitually used. And in Kashmir, for example, I was staying in
 Srinagar at one stage. I had an agricultural project in Srinagar and I
 was staying with a friend who was studying Kashmiri Shaivism. So I had my
 job and I was staying with this fellow and we were talking about this and he said,
 "Well, have you ever been to one of these shrines, Sufi shrines, Durga's, where
 cannabis smoking was tolerated as part of the standard pattern of society, but
 where you see why there is a negative image of this hashish smoking in such
 societies, which you also get in Egypt and so on. I mean some of the middle-class
 image of cannabis smoking in India and in Malaya and elsewhere is a bit like the
 middle-class image of winos and meth-related spirit drinkers and so on in the West.
 We went to the shrine, which was the shrine of a Sufi saint, and attached to it
 was a smoking room and this room was full of people smoking hashish sitting
 around the walls and there was a place where you could buy it. So we sat down and had a puff.
 It was a dreadful revelation to me when the man sitting next to me spoke to me in
 Urdu and he'd got bleary eyes, he'd got several days growth of stubble, he was in
 ragged smelly clothes. He pulled out a picture of himself, a kind of identity card
 thing, himself smart in a uniform, said "I used to be a bus driver until I started
 smoking. Now look at me, that's what it's done to me", he said as he took another puff.
 "I've lost my family, I've lost everything." And so there was a kind of a negative,
 the shadow side of it, which I saw then more clearly than ever before or since,
 which certainly fitted with what rather prim middle-class people in Malaya and
 India and in other oriental countries had told me about its habitual usages,
 which made it clear how it could accumulate this negative image, how it
 could cause alarm in people who don't want to have it to spread in modern
 efficient industrial societies. And this is certainly associated in my own
 experience with the fact that the mental expansion is bought at the price of a
 certain physical lethargy. So I wonder if that's been your experience. Actually it
 hasn't. I'm interested in the question. It has to be said that cannabis is
 chemically complicated. It's not simply one cannabinol. There are a number of
 these cannabinoids and various strains have various ratios and proportions of
 these things. But for instance I find when I'm writing books that I can only
 write for about three hours and then either the day is finished for work or I
 smoke hashish and 20 minutes later I'm ready to go two hours more at it. And I
 can do that twice in a day. If I judiciously control my intake of cannabis
 it like gives me a second wind and a third wind to go forward with creative
 activity. Now if you just sit down and smoke into stupor you're not going to be
 able to do this. But if you just stop this now tiresome and boring activity
 and have a couple of puffs and then you sit and you have a few interesting
 thoughts and you feel completely revitalized and able to go back to it.
 And I've noticed this not only with creative work but with physical work. For
 instance if I'm stacking wood I'll stack half a cord of wood and then I'll either
 think well I'll finish stacking it tomorrow and then I'll go in and smoke
 some cannabis and a half hour later I'll say well before I wait till tomorrow I'll
 just go and finish it right now. I think you all know Paul Boll's book or the
 statement that a puff of keef makes a man strong as 20 camels in the courtyard.
 There's something to this. It's not simple. It can turn you into a stupor
 sort of lazy loutish person. On the other hand it can allow you to do very hard
 work for very long periods of time. So you sort of have to manage it and I
 think a lot of people don't learn to manage it. One of the things that's
 always put against marijuana is that it destroys short-term or it destroys your
 memory. Well I dare say I have a prodigious memory and I'm the heaviest
 smoker I've ever known and my memory for dates, names of painters, writers, literary
 and scientific minutiae, odd vocabularies in specialized areas, it's very great. And
 I don't credit cannabis with that but I certainly can't believe that it has
 damaged my ability to do this. Now it is true that sometimes in a conversation
 you will lose your thread but on the other hand it gives you an equal power
 to brilliantly fake the situation and pick up the thread and restitch together
 the narrative. The other point I might make that we haven't mentioned yet, or
 two points actually, is that I think it gives an extraordinary verbal facility
 and this is actually what won me to it in the first place. My reputation as a
 public speaker is based on my supposedly dazzling oratorical abilities but I come
 out of a peer group, a carass in Berkeley, where everyone was able to do what I do.
 Everyone seemed to be able to hold forth for hours on the most arcane subjects
 and in fact when I got into cannabis the style of doing it that I enjoyed most
 was I ran a kind of cannabis salon as it were and people came and they smoked and
 they talked and talked and talked and this is all we did was talk and I know
 recordings exist of that era but I believe that the conversation was
 brilliant, wide-ranging, prescient, to the point and extraordinarily creative and
 capable of astonishing and I give complete credit to cannabis for that. I
 remember the second time that I smoked cannabis I was a great fan of Herman
 Melville at that time and my friend and I smoked some cannabis and then called
 on some young women at a dormitory that we were courting at that time and we
 went into the visitors room of the dormitory and I was able to hold forth
 for an hour in a pseudo-Melvillian style. I created on the spot without
 hesitation a short story in the style of Herman Melville that was dazzling
 apparently to my hearers. Well this is verbal facility of an extraordinary sort.
 The other area where I think it has an important role to play that we haven't
 talked about is in sexual performance and sexual stamina. When I first became
 sexually active and I think this is a problem of many young men simply because
 they have so much juice going, is premature ejaculation. All my sexual
 encounters were haunted by that possibility simply because I was just so
 hyped up over the idea of having intercourse with someone. Well I
 discovered that smoking hashish gave me an incredible ability to control my
 ejaculation and also my sexual stamina. So these were invaluable social skills.
 It gave me verbal facility, sexual stamina, control over my ejaculation,
 beautiful visions, a prodigious memory, did everything but suppress appetite
 which it certainly did not do. The munchies, regardless of what
 pharmacologists tell us about how this is an illusion, the munchies seem to be a
 very real part of cannabis use, meaning that 40 minutes or an hour after smoking
 cannabis one does find oneself rummaging through the cupboard looking for
 chocolate chip cookies. But this is hardly grounds for hanging which is the
 current legal response in Malaysia. My impression, Terrence, is that your
 experience is not typical and most of the things you described I would say are
 typical of my experience personally. But in Santa Cruz I remember after the
 60s came and went, there was, I mean this is a community that was very involved in
 the marijuana trade in the 70s, let's say, there were a certain number of people
 who were habitual users, I would say, habitual smokers as you were and it
 seemed as if they couldn't get their life together. Unlike you they were, you
 know, they were functional, they could stack the wood, but they never got on to
 doing what they wanted to do. And I did begin to associate a certain subtle
 disorganization with their habitual smoking. This is a different, a slightly
 more mild form of this negative effect that Rupert described in India where
 people are truly addicted and in some human state. That I think requires
 taking a really deep inhalations of cannabis with a chillum. But there are,
 let's say for the sake of discussion, that there is a negative side beyond
 what you have experienced in case of heavy use and even so it's I think very
 modest compared to the negative side of heavy use of alcohol and it's very
 insignificant in comparison with the very positive effects of cannabis use in
 a society which in the case of alcohol, I don't know of any, it might be some
 people can tell amazing alcohol stories where they really have been able to work
 wonderfully while intoxicated, but basically I think it's agreed that while
 relaxing in small doses is good for your health, it's basically has a negative
 influence. It brings up the question, I know you've both thought about this, why is
 it, how is it that cannabis in spite of these beneficial effects, its benignness
 and so on, is so strongly regulated and forbidden all over the planet now? One
 idea I know from previous, that since cannabis is the orphic drug, it's
 associated with the goddess and then in the patriarchal takeover of course it
 was one of the things that was knocked from the pedestal along with chaos and
 the goddess, but even now in this modern society where we have no recourse to
 these old myths and people are not really afraid of the goddess re-emerging,
 there's this incredibly expensive drug war going on. People are not speaking of
 cannabis now I think because the atmosphere for it is much more
 hostile today than even ten years ago. Ten years ago I used to speak about my
 experience with psychedelics in class, now I wouldn't, it's better not to, not
 because the police are going to come and carry me away, but the immediate reaction
 of these people I'm trying to communicate with is going to be very
 very negative, more negative than if I was alcoholic and put in jail for
 driving while intoxicated. So the some kind of paranoia about whatever cannabis
 represents to people, the significance and the mythological, this paranoia is on
 the increase in this decade and I wonder why you think that is.
 Well first may I say that I think this paranoia is somewhat polarized and there is a
 rising paranoia in the United States which has partly been exported to
 countries like Malaysia. The paranoia about cannabis in Europe is definitely
 on the decline. Cannabis has been effectively decriminalized in Holland,
 Switzerland, in Italy, even in Britain, even in the Thatcher regime. There was an
 article recently in the newspapers saying that something like 90% of the
 people the police catch with small amounts of cannabis are now let off with
 a caution, not even fined. In Italy the possession of small quantities of
 cannabis is not a criminal offense and even somewhat slightly larger ones is
 treated on the part of parking offenses, you know you get a ticket or something,
 minor fines. And the movement even in Britain which is probably the most
 closest to America in its history, in general attitudes in Europe, there's been
 a progressive attitude on the part of the police and even increasing numbers
 of legislators and judges towards decriminalizing the use of cannabis.
 De facto, in small quantities, this has actually happened. So rather than zero
 tolerance being the rule, there's in fact been an increasing tolerance in most
 European societies to the use of cannabis over the last decade. And full-scale
 legalization may not yet have come, but this has happened de facto in various
 parts of Europe. There are streets of Zurich for example where you can sit in
 the street at cafes and smoke openly, there are certain streets where it's
 tolerated, unwritten agreements, there are parts of Amsterdam where it's sold
 over the counter in cafes, even advertised, different brands of it, there are
 cards up with prices on public display. So there has been a countervailing move
 in Europe and so it's not as if this hysteria is gripped everywhere equally.
 Then we'll be seeing increase of novelty and cultural evolution in Europe
 outstripping developments in the United States according to our...
 It may in fact be happening. I mean I certainly feel much more at the center
 of novelty when I'm in Germany, where by the way people smoke cannabis in
 restaurants and quite openly. The United States seems to be on a kind of
 fundamentalist religious bender that carry in its attitude toward women's
 reproductive rights and drugs and all these things that is making us the kind
 of pariah in the first world. I mean we represent values which are
 incomprehensible to educated Europeans. One thing that occurs to me that I'm
 sure Rupert would have enthusiasm for because it involves his grassroots
 science thing, this question of does it make you lazy, does it give you energy,
 does it destroy your memory, does it enhance your memory. Because I've smoked
 so many years, so many different kinds of dope, of cannabis, I've come to
 hold pretty strong opinions about its various forms and I think that number
 one, charas is a debilitating drug. It has opium in it, it has detoura in it and it
 has various additives and binders that are not good. Marijuana, which is how most
 Americans smoke their cannabis, involves the incineration of too much inert
 vegetable material so that you are getting pesticide residues, carbon
 monoxide, tars, all of these things are complicating the question of what does
 cannabis do. To my mind the true test of whether or not cannabis is what the
 pharmacological effects of cannabis are, we should almost restrict our discussion
 to high-grade Lebanese hashish, which is truly nothing but the compressed resin
 of the female cannabis plant, and that's the classical hashish of the Arab and
 that's what I prefer and feel almost to be a different drug from both Mexican
 marijuana and Pakistani or Indian hashish. Those things do carry detrimental
 qualities that are not present in the pure, for instance, three lion or so-called
 red Lebanese hashish. That's the hashish that we want, that's the cannabis product
 that I would feel is the one that everyone should smoke before they judge
 or form a strong opinion about what cannabis can do. In spite of the
 increasingly repressive atmosphere in the United States, I imagine that marijuana
 smoking is still on the increase. I mean it's very widely used, at least
 secretly. They claim not, but there's a decrease in the percentage.
 Yeah, they claim so. Still it's sufficiently widespread that a certain
 amount of grassroots scientific experimentation could be going on if
 there was a way to share the results of the experiments. Yes, this is something
 that grassroots, no pun intended, grassroots science could tell us is the
 relative benignity of various forms of hashish or of cannabis. Indeed, yes, and
 this would be a fairly easy project to carry out. I mean, assuming people had access to
 supplies of which they could compare. There's no testing grounds available. I don't know if there still are on the streets in
 Berkeley or San Francisco, for example. You could take your specimen of hashish
 and find out if it was opiated or not. Yes, that is a simple test, but questions
 about tars, pesticide residues, carbon monoxide output, various methods of
 smoking. You'd have to have a revival of kitchen chemistry, as it were. Right, but I
 think that the pure resin of the cannabis plant is, you would be hard
 pressed to design a drug with as many laudable qualities as that one.
 So then, perhaps we should consider what would happen if the trend that's
 happening in Europe anyway continues, if cannabis is actually legalized, which is,
 as I say, it's already de facto legalized in parts of Germany, Switzerland, Italy,
 even to a limited extent in Britain. So what would happen? I mean, it's not a prospect I
 actually ever relished, because I then imagine Philip Morris and
 Anglo-American Tobacco Corporation moving into this area, and there's no doubt
 the restrictions on their commercials, but the idea that this could then be a
 mass-marketed product, large-scale international corporations would be in
 on it, BCCI, well, the main high street banks and so on would then be financing
 these deals, rather than they'd take over the role of BCCI quite legally. Yes. I'm
 not sure that I particularly relish that, and the other issue which we haven't
 talked about, which is no doubt of some concern to you Terence, is at what age
 children might be permitted or encouraged to experiment with cannabis,
 and would we want this to be going on in the gazebo here in Eslo, in nursery schools,
 junior high school, you know, if it's legalized and much more readily available,
 the same questions would arise as arise already, but more so because it would be
 more available. Well, I prefer decriminalization rather than legalization.
 I don't think we need to simply say that any entrepreneur can invest in land,
 plant cannabis, patent a brand name, and begin to sell it on the open market. It
 would be much better simply to decriminalize it, so that, and say
 something like, each person could possess ten plants, but that the transport and
 sale of it would be discouraged in some way, so that it isn't - you see, we seem to
 have the attitude that something is either illegal, or we can just go gung-ho
 with it and turn it into a meg - the product of a multi-million dollar
 corporation. It would be much better to just say that the possession of small
 amounts of cannabis for personal use pose no threat to society, and leave it
 at that. Well, how are you going to get your red Lebanese then? Well, you would
 find a way, just as one finds a way today. It would be easier if there was a government
 hash shop. Yes, although I don't find it difficult to find, to get red Lebanese,
 the only thing I would hope is that we might get a price break if it were
 decriminalized. It's currently being sold, because it's an illegal commodity, it's
 being sold at an enormous market for what it costs to produce it, and this
 might be something - It's a very expensive business. Why - we have legal alcohol, and some of the other things, why not simply legal - so there can be shops, there can be huge industries, and there can be gourmet growers using special methods, and -
 Like wine, you mean? Like wine. Well, but then you have these problems, which Rupert is
 pointing out, that once more it's handed over to Madison Avenue to be turned into
 something where they can't simply say it's available to those who want it.
 Well, people living in downtown New York City are not going to be able to grow eight or ten plants themselves. I was recently in
 downtown New York City, and I examined a pot garden that would have been the
 envy of any resident of Humboldt County. Real estate is expensive. Stay on hand-grown with rum, like, pee bulbs is expensive, and that's alright, but I think why not legalization? What are the problems?
 Well, probably this would come, and then it would be, as far as the question of children, it would be
 available, you know, it would be restricted to people below age 18 or so.
 Right. No, I think ultimately what we're going to have to do is legalize all
 drugs. Now, a hidden aspect of this is that governments make enormous profits
 out of the fact that these drugs are illegal. A harmless drug like cannabis, the
 interdiction, eradication, and the mafias which move it are all spun into
 government policy. I mean, governments have always been, and continue to this
 day to be, the major purveyors of drugs worldwide. So, really, another factor
 mitigating the drive to legalize cannabis is, where then would the CIA
 obtain, it would eat into its ability to finance the various rebel armies, front
 organizations. Yes, but what other way? I mean, for instance, when the Mullahs took
 over in Iran and gained control of the Iranian opium trade, the CIA turned to
 cocaine and brought on the crack epidemic of the 1980s. So, governments
 will turn to, would the government then create new synthetic drugs like ice and
 then peddle them to the public? Without doubt. Well, this is just something to
 realize, that governments, you see, wrap themselves in a mantle of
 righteousness and tell us, just say no. But, in fact, governments are making
 millions off the illicit, billions off the illicit drug trade. The entire
 Mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was financed
 with the connivance of the CIA. Hashish was being unloaded on the docks of San
 Francisco in broad daylight by the metric ton at the height of the Afghan
 war. We've never been able to get Afghani hash of such quality as we were
 able to get during the period when the CIA was keen that we buy it so that they
 could finance the armed resistance to the Soviet occupation. And the day the
 Russians left, the hashish market in Northern California collapsed
 catastrophically and has never been able to build itself back to previous levels.
 Well, as John just said, the more it's organized, the easier it is to steal. See, the more substances are
 controlled, the more shadow space there is for shadow governments, CIAs, mafios,
 and so on, to operate in the dark. So, it's better to let go on all these fronts.
 And it's happening in Europe, especially, I think, it's much more significant, the
 decriminalization of heroin. There in the same parks in Switzerland, you see
 people sharing needles and so on. I think that's a very courageous experiment and
 we'll get to see the results and eventually, perhaps, it will spread to the
 United States. But you wouldn't suggest that we make heroin so legal that you
 can flip open Time magazine to a color ad that says, "What's missing in your life?
 Heroin, the drug of choice of the chic young set." This is not what we want.
 That would perhaps not be worse than what we've got now. I think that I feel as badly about
 tobacco as I do of many of these other things. Personally, I had a very negative
 experience with freebase cocaine. I found this material to be very
 surprisingly addictive. You know, the tiniest experiment leaves you a total
 addict. So, in my personal view, this stuff is extremely evil. Nevertheless, I don't
 think that restricting it by law is an effective strategy to prevent people
 from getting addicted. I think that crack is similar, I'm not sure. It's extremely toxic
 material in society, but simply making it illegal just creates this huge shadow
 trade where it's out of control and people have to experiment in order to find out what it is.
 Instead of the ad in Time magazine would, without doubt, say this material is
 harmful to your health. The Surgeon General has found that shooting heroin is
 harmful to your health. It's very addictive after a single experience and so the
 information would be circulated, the shadow would be eliminated, the secret
 would be eliminated. I don't think that that necessarily means that a lot more
 people would be addicted. I think probably fewer. Well, the drug issue brings up the
 question of whether society should organize themselves along the assumption
 that citizens are adults or children. And if you view citizens as children, well
 then you have to keep various things out of their hands. If you believe citizens
 are adults, then you have to believe that certain checks and balances will keep
 any negative practice from simply sweeping through society and destroying
 it. I believe that. I believe that if heroin were legalized, a very small
 number of people would destroy themselves with it and that's their
 business and society can absorb the cost of their slow suicide in the same way
 that we absorb the cost of the slow suicide that people undergo with tobacco
 and alcohol. Here are some more questions for grassroots science. Yes, well in this
 drug area, grassroots science could do amazing things. It's just that the
 questions are never asked by big science because it really doesn't want the
 answers to some of these questions. To my mind, the life, liberty and pursuit of
 happiness clause of the United States Bill of Rights, if it means anything, it
 must mean the right to experiment with psychoactive drugs as you personally see
 fit. What does pursuit of happiness mean otherwise? Nevertheless, there is an
 enormous and growing problems of cocaine and heroin abuse. A problem that no one seems to have an answer to and which seems to be far worse than problems in the past.
 Well, I think it's a red herring. I think that if governments would stop dealing
 with these drugs, these problems would disappear. I mean, the entire... I think it's very unlikely. The mafia and the
 General Noriega's and the Medellin cartels of this world, I think it'd carry on perfectly well without the help of the CIA.
 I think if the CIA told them that they would be highly at risk if they disobeyed
 orders and that a directive had just come down from the top that this was no
 longer going to be tolerated. I mean, much of the American cocaine comes in on
 Air Force planes. If you simply deny them the use of the American Air Force, it
 would pose a major problem to them in moving their...
 It's not an executable one. They've got other methods, boats, trucks across the Mexican border, all sorts of things.
 Well, you're not going to wipe it out, but you don't have to grease the slides for it. This is what the CIA is doing.
 But I think the experiments going on now with the decriminalization of heroin, which is similar to crack cocaine, I think, in its addictive form,
 they are very encouraging that a method other than legal restriction could be successful in dealing with the crack problem.
 Well, for instance, take the tropanes. I mean, these are powerful mind-altering drugs, cause visions, and so forth and so on.
 The entire western United States is a range for the Jimson weed plant, and it poses no social problems whatsoever to anyone.
 And it's as powerful as any drug which exists. And no, it just is not a problem.
 So it's something about focus and glamour, glamourization of habits.
 There are a number of examples like this, where opium poppies, for example.
 The garden here at Esalem has a wonderful stand of opium poppies. This is not doing anybody any harm,
 and I don't see people availing themselves of the raw opium which is being shed copiously just three steps off the path as you walk to the dining room.
 It's actually the legal restraint that raises the price that creates this economic attraction for the illegal substances.
 So the legal restraints actually create the opposite effect than they're designed for.
 Yes, hemp was a major crop in this country up until the 1930s, and it was not discontinued because of the drug potential.
 But because it posed problems for those corporate entities which had huge holdings in forest timber that they planned to turn into paper.
 And the DuPont Chemical Corporation, and Standard Oil, which wanted lubricants and high petrol distillates to come from petroleum rather than from a biological source.
 So it's simply the glamorization and restriction of these things which creates artificial markets.
 I mean, airplane glue is an excellent example here. Airplane glue costs a buck twenty-nine a tube.
 Powerful drug, hallucinogenic drug, enhances sex, great drug.
 Only mad people avail themselves of airplane glue. If you were to drop the price of crack cocaine to a buck twenty-nine a gram,
 you wouldn't see people driving around in their Maseratis with crack cocaine crumbs in their, I mean, with airplane glue in their beards.
 No. It would be viewed as so de classe that no respectable person would get near it.
 Well, now that we've got the legalization of cannabis and probably other things, and the resurrection of the hemp industry worldwide, how can we bring this to a conclusion?
 Well, I think you just did, Ralph. There you have it.
 Part of the pursuit of human freedom, part of citizenship and responsible adulthood and responsible government means live and let live.
 This is a philosophy of which we hear far too little.
 Somebody is always trying to mess with somebody else's life, their sex life, their drug habits, their political stances, so forth and so on.
 Long live autism.
 Hear, hear.
 Hear.
 Boom, cheeba, boom, chonka.
 Okay, gang.
 You're listening to the Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
 Okay, gang. Well, what did you think about that one?
 I really enjoyed it myself, even though a lot has changed in the world since that recording was made.
 For one thing, there was only talk about smoking cannabis, most likely because in 1991, vaporizer technology was still a little primitive,
 at least when compared to the volcano, which is about as fine a piece of kit, as my friends in the UK say, as fine a piece of kit as you can get.
 Another thing that came to mind when I was listening to this trilogue just now was that you can now find a wide range of information about cannabis from places like ASA,
 Americans for Safe Access, which you can find at www.safeaccessnow.org.
 I've seen some of the pamphlets that they have written, like "Cannabis and Cancer," "Cannabis and Aging," etc.,
 and I highly recommend them as sources of information that you can pass on to friends, relatives, and neighbors who are still ignorant about the vast amount of medical benefits available from the cannabis plant.
 In the talk we just now listened to, Terrence mentions the brilliant cannabis-fueled salons that he participated in during his Berkeley years in the 60s,
 and that brought to mind some late-night conversations that I've had with friends over the years.
 Not that my friends and I were in the same intellectual league as our three merry triloguers.
 We nonetheless made a point every now and then that sparked other thoughts and spurred us on to greater heights.
 And my guess is that you've been involved in similar groups, which finally leads me to the point I'd like to make,
 and that is that you might want to think about hosting and recording your own dialogues, trilogues, and other group conversations just to see where they lead.
 Who knows, maybe one of our fellow salonners will discover the next great bard among us.
 In any event, even if you can only find one other person nearby that you can get together with and discuss some of the things we talk about here in the psychedelic salon,
 I think you'll find that the time you spend in the company of other like-minded people will probably do more for your attitude than ten years of therapy.
 It's really amazing when you think about it how little discussion there is about psychedelics in our everyday conversation.
 Once you've experienced these sacred medicines a few times, I think you'll agree that the experience is by far the most profound experience you can imagine,
 and yet we're afraid to discuss it in public.
 In fact, I was a little surprised just now when I heard Ralph say that ten years earlier he felt more free to reveal his personal psychedelic history to his students than he did at the time of the recording.
 So if you do the math, it was easier to talk about drugs in 1981 than it is today, or at least in 1991.
 In other words, here in this great republic, this supposed bastion of free speech, even university professors have to be careful about what they're saying about psychedelic medicines.
 Which means that, ultimately, even with the vast resources now available on the internet,
 there is mainly widespread misunderstanding and ignorance about what I believe to be the most important physical materials that we know about.
 Which brings me to an interesting question that I received from Trey.
 Here's what he said.
 "I fear that the psychedelic community is surrounded by the danger of becoming dogmatic in its thinking due to its isolation.
 Do you have any podcasts that involve a psychedelic thinker versus a non-psychedelic thinker?
 What I have in mind is the kind of debate that people such as Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins go through.
 Putting aside whether one agrees with their beliefs or not, they're at least willing to put them on the line against others.
 So again, do you have any podcasts that involve a psychedelic proponent versus a psychedelic opponent?"
 Well, Trey, that's an interesting thought.
 But after thinking about it for a while, I've decided that a conversation like that might work on the evening news,
 but I'm not going to spend the time on it myself here in the salon.
 And here's why.
 First of all, I've never heard of an anti-psychedelic person who's actually used psychedelics in the past.
 So any opinions that they might have would have to be without much value,
 since they would be basing their opinions on what others have told them, not on their own personal experience.
 The other thing that bothers me about the idea is that it reminds me too much of why I've quit watching the television news.
 That is, their constant, and I think phony, attempt to always present their view of a balanced picture.
 Yet one side may have 90% of the people in agreement, and by giving the other side equal time,
 the audience comes away thinking the world is equally divided on the topic, when that really isn't the case.
 Of course, this opens me up to people saying that I must be afraid of the outcome if such a debate were held.
 But that simply isn't the case.
 For my part, I just don't have any time to listen to the rantings of these religious people
 who think that anything that gives one pleasure is to be avoided.
 Hey, besides all of the great intellectual insights that can be gained from using these substances,
 they also provide a significant amount of pleasure.
 And we all know that the powers that be don't want the minions to receive too much pleasure,
 particularly if they aren't spending money and using oil in the process.
 So I'm a bit jaded about hosting a debate between a psychedelic intellectual and someone who is still groping in the dark.
 But I'll tell you what may be more interesting and actually spark a lively debate.
 And that is to raise the question as to whether psychedelics should be available for the masses,
 or if they should be held back for only the intellectual elite to use.
 Now before you get too excited about such an exclusive way to treat these substances,
 I should remind you that no less a psychedelic and intellectual luminary than Aldous Huxley
 talked about restricting the use of psychoactive substances to select individuals.
 I'm not sure I agree with that, but I think the topic is something worth talking about.
 Now that I'm thinking about it, Trey, maybe what we should do is get several fully psychedelic people
 to take opposite sides on that question.
 The question of whether psychedelics should be restricted to highly trained individuals,
 or if they should be made freely available to anyone who wants to try them.
 Maybe some of our fellow salonners will add to this discussion on our blog at psychedelicsalon.org
 or on our forum at thegrowreport.com.
 But thanks for raising the question, Trey, and I look forward to hearing any other thoughts
 some of our other salonners might have about this as well.
 And before I go, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
 are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Like 3.0 License,
 which basically means you can use the content of this podcast as you wish.
 And if you have any questions about that, you just click on the Creative Commons link
 at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage.
 And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
 Be well, my friends.
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