If we can change our minds, we can take hold of this process and halt it.
 We can hear the surf of history pounding on the rugged shores of Apokolips.
 The Millennium is an effort to empower shamanic understanding,
 to give a rebirth to feminism, to be fully empowered with our planetary heritage.
 While making this film, Terrence died of cancer.
 Before his death, Terrence invested a lot of time developing his website,
 where many unique aspects of psychedelics and shamanism are covered.
 Terrence lives on in cyberspace.
 Human future will be designed on how conscious we are able to make ourselves.
 And if there are plants which accelerate consciousness,
 then we must locate and utilize these things.
 Something could jump out from some unexpected dimension and change everything.
 Part of the reason we have a drug problem is because we don't have an intelligent language
 to talk about substances, plants, psychedelic states of mind, sedative states of mind,
 states of amphetamine excitation.
 We can't make sense of the purpose of the drug.
 We can't make sense of the problem and the opportunities offered by substances
 unless we clean up our language.
 Drugs is a word that's been used by governments to make it impossible
 to think creatively about the problem of substances and abuse and availability and so forth and so on.
 It's a kind of a paradox, isn't it?
 Drugs mean that which cures us and the greatest social problem of the generation.
 So there, right there, you see the schizophrenia involved in thinking about drugs.
 Apparently there are good drugs sanctioned by science and medicine
 and bad drugs used by brown people in strange rites
 and growing in unusual plants in distant parts of the world.
 This kind of thinking, because it's naive, leads, of course, to social problems
 and bad politics and bad social policy.
 From the time I was very young, I was fascinated with the idea of
 extremely dramatic changes in consciousness
 from which one recovers after a few hours, induced by plants.
 And I discovered through the writing of Aldous Huxley and other people
 that this was a worldwide religious and cultural phenomenon
 that my own Catholic middle-class upbringing had completely overlooked and denied.
 And I've been fascinated with it ever since.
 To my mind, human history is the story of one substance after another
 distorting or transforming human values and society.
 A perfect example would be sugar.
 Most people don't even think of sugar as a drug, and yet we may think
 cocaine distorted moral and political values in Latin America,
 but sugar brought back slavery.
 Slavery actually died with the Roman Empire.
 Nobody worked agricultural products with slaves in the Middle Ages.
 It wasn't until the early 1400s that the Portuguese began producing sugar,
 and they used up Jews and prisoners.
 And so then they started buying human beings from Arab traders.
 And the Pope was in on the deal, and everybody was in on the deal.
 I mean, this is drug corruption of the central institutions of society
 on a massive scale.
 Society chooses a small number of substances, no matter how toxic,
 and enshrines them in its cultural values, then demonizes all other substances,
 and uses--and then persecutes and launches witch hunts against those users
 whenever some political pretext requires witch hunts and persecutions.
 So it's an old game, and it's been played in many places.
 Hopefully part of the advancement of society toward ideas of universal human rights
 and that sort of thing, it certainly must include the idea of the universal human right
 to take responsibility for and to alter your own state of consciousness as you see fit.
 I don't think we can even pretend that we are on the edge of a civilized dialogue
 until we grant that people's minds, like their bodies, must be a domain free from government control.
 In American law, we have the notion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
 If the pursuit of happiness means anything, it must mean the right to use and experiment with substances in play.
 The fact that these things have been illegal in most countries for 50 years
 means there is a huge lag in understanding the impact of these things on human beings.
 How many people have taken MDMA, and yet MDMA has not been thoroughly studied by science?
 How many people have smoked DMT? Same thing.
 In a way, by making these drugs illegal, we're setting ourselves up for a potential catastrophe someday
 when some side effect is overlooked because the drugs were not rationally reviewed
 with an eye not toward keeping them out of the hands of the public,
 but with an eye toward public safety and educating the public in safe use of these things.
 The state should not, in the matter of drugs, any more than in the matter of sex,
 act as the secret agent for the agenda of the church.
 And that's what's happening.
 People want to stimulate themselves. They want to explore their consciousness.
 They want to sedate themselves.
 Who are we to stand in their way with a moral ideology
 and the long, heavy arm of the law to interfere with that?
 It distorts civilized values.
 That's the bottom line. Drug repression distorts civilized values and political discourse.
 I mean, anyone who has actually been around people using psychedelics
 know they have tremendous therapeutic potential,
 tremendous potential to launch people into confrontations
 with aspects of their personality or their history that they are in denial of.
 The people who hold that these psychedelic substances have no application
 have very little actual personal experience with them.
 It's the old story of "My mind is made up. Don't confuse me with facts."
 I think it's a great tragedy of 20th century science
 that the original excitement about exploring consciousness and mental illness
 generated by the discovery of LSD gave way to establishment paranoia
 and repression of drug-using populations.
 The excitement in psychology when LSD was first introduced
 was like the excitement in the physics community when the atom was smashed.
 And everybody thought, "Well, now we'll understand mental illness, schizophrenia, memory," so forth.
 And instead, the government lost its nerve
 because it saw that these substances have a potential for deprogramming people to institutional values.
 And that was so terrifying that all the promise for mental illness
 and creativity studies and so forth and so on was sacrificed to institutional paranoia
 about the fact that drugs might actually cause people to wake up
 to some of the abuses and scams that were being run by late modernism and capitalism.


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.65 sec
Decoding  : 0.76 sec
Transcribe: 520.91 sec
Total Time: 522.32 sec