The drug czar’s Rx for prison fodder costs dearly, as lives are flushed down expensive tubes. My shaman’s second opinion is that psychoactive plants are God’s gift. Behold, it’s all good. When Eve ate the apple, she knew a good apple, and an evil prohibition. Canadian Marc Emery is being extradited to prison for helping American farmers reduce U. S. demand for Mexican pot.

The CSA (Controlled Substances Act of 1970) reincarnates Al Capone, endangers homeland security, and throws good money after bad. Fiscal policy burns tax dollars to root out the number-one cash crop in the land, instead of taxing sales. Society rejected the plague of prohibition, but it mutated. Apparently, SWAT teams don’t need no stinking amendment.

Nixon passed the CSA on the false assurance that the Schafer Commission would later justify criminalizing his enemies, but he underestimated Schafer’s integrity. No amendments can assure due process under an anti-science law without due process itself. Psychology hailed the breakthrough potential of LSD, until the CSA shut down research, and pronounced that marijuana has no medical use. Former U.K. chief drugs advisor Prof. Nutt was sacked for revealing that non-smoked cannabis intake is scientifically healthy.

The RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993) allows Native American Church members to eat peyote, which functions like LSD. Americans shouldn’t need a specific church membership or an act of Congress to obtain their birthright freedom of religion. God’s children’s free exercise of religious liberty may include entheogen sacraments to mediate communion with their maker.

Freedom of speech presupposes freedom of thought. The Constitution doesn’t enumerate any governmental power to embargo diverse states of mind. How and when did government usurp this power to coerce conformity? The Mayflower sailed to escape coerced conformity. Legislators who would limit cognitive liberty lack jurisdiction.

Common-law holds that adults are the legal owners of their own bodies. The Founding Fathers undersigned that the right to the pursuit of happiness is inalienable. Socrates said to know your self. Mortal lawmakers should not presume to thwart the intelligent design that molecular keys unlock spiritual doors. Persons who appreciate their own free choice of path in life should tolerate seekers’ self-exploration. Liberty is prerequisite for tracking drug-use intentions and outcomes.

What strikes me is that the rationale for the ‘war on drugs,’ which you so convincingly refute, is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. There is a lot more at play there than well-considered, logical public policies. To wit:

How did the ‘war on drugs’ arise in, by far, the most legally drugged society in the history of this planet? A culture that countenances the massive drugging of its own children to force their submission to regimented ‘education’? A culture where the idea of living healthy and drug-free is perceived as highly eccentric, if not antisocial? A society so steeped in fear that it holds as a worthy aspiration the idea of ‘health insurance’ – the periodic, indefinite and substantial expenditure of money in the hope that, in the best-case scenario, the monetary outlay will remain a complete waste instead of paying for drugs?

There is a great deal of irrationality right under the surface of the ‘war on drugs.’ It is patterned after war, the old-fashioned kind, a human institution that is still relied upon – actually, more than ever — to vent off collective malaise. When was a war prevented by an impeccable cost-benefit analysis? We are dealing with the collective roots of psychosis, not just unintelligent policies. When has a madman been healed by a logical demonstration of his madness?

You rightly point out that the targets of the ‘war on drugs’ are those drugs that facilitate access to other dimensions of being, in other words religion. Is it an accident that such a compulsively suppressive approach emerges at a time when authoritarian, literalist, life-stifling religious groups threaten our very survival and the very conditions of life on this planet? I do not think so. I rather think that dealing with insanity at this most dangerous level is a worthy challenge for the shamanic knowledge that people like you are collecting at its source. But persuasive policy papers do little to address that challenge.

And how many supporters of the ‘war on drugs’ do you think read blogs with titles like ‘Singing to the Plants’?