Psychedelics arrived on the Western agenda only about 100 years ago, when German chemists brought peyote to Berlin and extracted mescaline; and for the next 50 years, up until about 1945 very little happened. Mescaline did not – though it was taken by Havelock Ellis and William James, and F. Weir Mitchell – and it did not spawn a craze; it did not influence large numbers of intellectuals particularly. Then in the 1940s, LSD was discovered; in the 1950s, DMT and psilocybin were discovered; and then, in 1966, all these things were made illegal. There was no real opportunity for Western science to grapple with these things before they were decided to be too hot to handle. Made not only unavailable to people such as you and I, ordinary people, but taken off the agenda of scientific research! In the Middle Ages, the church forbade dissection of human bodies, and medical students would visit battlefields and the gallows at night, and steal the bodies of victims of war and executed prisoners, in order to learn human physiology. Where that spirit of scientific courage has gone, I don’t know; but there is very little of it left. Now, people feed at the trough of government grants and enormous corporate research budgets, and the idea of actually pursuing truth, or attempting to understand the phenomenon in an unbiased fashion, divorced from its commercial, social and political dimensions, is unheard of. ~ Terence McKenna, The World and Its Double 1993
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 12:09:23 +0000