morphine set the pattern for the modern “hard

Years later, he would write of his work among the shamans of the Sibundoy Valley of southern Colombia: “The shamanism of this valley may well represent the most highly evolved narcotic consciousness on earth.”

A great dying, a great extinction of many species, has been occurring since at least the pinnacle of the partnership society in prehistoric Africa. Our future lies in the mind; our weary planet’s only hope of survival is that we find ourselves in the mind and make of it a friend that can reunite us with the earth while simultaneously carrying us to

It is extraordinary that in the relatively short span of two centuries four stimulants—sugar, tea, coffee, and chocolate—could have emerged out of local obscurity and become a basis for vast mercantile empires, defended by the greatest military powers ever known to that time and supported by the newly reintroduced practice of slavery.

Tobacco, on the other hand, is probably the most widely consumed plant drug on earth. No nation has decreed smoking of tobacco illegal, and indeed, any country that sought to do so would find itself at loggerheads with one of the most powerful international narcotic cartels ever to exist.

The psilocybin mushroom religion, born at the birth of cognition in the grasslands of Africa, may actually be the generic religion of human beings. All later adumbrations of religion in the ancient Near East can be traced to a cult of Goddess and cattle worship, whose Archaic roots reach back to an extremely ancient rite of

From a historical point of view, restricting the availability of addictive substances must be seen as a peculiarly perverse example of Calvinist dominator thought—a system in which the sinner is to be punished in this world by being transformed into an exploitable, hapless customer, who is punished for addiction by being relieved of his cash, by th

Central Intelligence Agency collusion in the international heroin and cocaine trade of our own time.

The age of the imagination is dawning. The shamanic plants and the worlds that they reveal are the worlds from which we imagine that we came long ago, worlds of light and power and beauty that in some form or another lie behind the eschatological visions of all of the world’s great religions. We can claim this prodigal legacy only as quickly as we