I can't find this on The Stranger's site any longer, but it was one of my favortest "New Columns" of all times, so I had to share. It's just my latest contribution to the ongoing spirit world debate...

I'm sure you've all wondered what a "localized temporal distortion" feels like. Fortunately, you can trigger it with hand-held devices, as this very short film by Seattle performance artists Gude / Laurance demonstrates:

Whaddya know, you can order coca tea--yes, that's right, tea made from the leaves of the coca tree--right here on the Internet.

Is MATE DE COCA legal ?

It depends where you live.

We ship anywhere, anybody interesting to import our herbals products must make their own arrangements with the local country authorities.Mate Coca is a natural product with no chemical additives and it is not harmful for human health.

* Actually Stephan Chemicals from Anaheim is the only US. company who imports large coca leaves quantities about 110 tons, The company sell the coca concentrates to well known US based soda companies.

* Will I get "high" If I drink MATE DE COCA ?
No, Mate de Coca does not have a mind-altering effect.

Well, I suppose that is going to open a whole Pandora's box. Have fun kids! Don't order more than a thousand boxes at once, it might make the customs people suspicious!

I hate to break up our very important psychedelic spirituality debate with matters of questionable import, but - I don't actually hate to do that, so please to enjoy this delightful Onion Radio News clip: "Area Man Pronounced Dead On The Inside." When I shared it with my wife, her response was, "Oh, honey, that's you!" And that's why I love her, of course. (They don't provide an embeddable option for their Quicktime audio clip, so you'll have to wander over to check it out.)

I was about to post a followup comment to James' case against the spirit world post, when I realized that I could get more people to read it by actually using the awesome influence granted me as an editor.

I think a kind of agnosticism is the only sane way of dealing with these things. One need only ask James Kent what kind of scientifically final proof he might expect to be able to offer which would finally, objectively and incontrovertibly convince every explorer, shaman, tripper, guru, lama, priest, and new-age party kid that his theory is "more real" then their own personal experience.

The very idea is contradictory: a person who believes someone else's theory over their own experience is not rendered more sane, more in touch with reality, merely because the theory in question happens to be James Kent's.

Clearly there are countless people who have had spiritual experiences through various means, which they experience as valid. The Catholic Church, as an institution spanning back almost 2000 years, has refined the art of using devaluation of individuals' own spiritual experience as a way of cementing their own authority.

Clearly there are countless people who have had experiences which they believe to be valid or beneficial (even if not spiritual) as a result of the use of mind-altering chemicals. The drug war establishment has refined the art of using devaluation of individuals' assessment of their own experience (i.e. defining all use of illegal substances as abuse) to its own immense profit.

In the end, if you want to play the game of saying that your interpretation is "more right" than other people's own interpretations of their own experiences, you're not doing anything different than what every other authoritarian institution has done throughout history. The mere fact that you're propping yourself up with the dominant religion of your time and place (i.e. scientific materialism) does not change that.

Having said all that, a truly enlightened agnosticism, as I am referring to it here (which is inspired by Stephen Batchelor's Buddhism Without Beliefs, incidentally) does, in fact, lead one to question one's own experience. The spiritual experience is very much worth questioning. An unquestioning attachment to and reification of a spiritual experience is probably the root of many of the worst horrors of all human history (including all the damage done by the Christian institution over the centuries alluded to above.) Questioning one position naturally places one functionally in an opposing position, and that is exactly the way it should be: if you're going to question your assumptions, don't hold back! But the secret is to be comfortable enough with uncertainty to damp the oscillations that can arise from such a system. Don't swing from one extreme belief to another. Just because the military-industrial complex is killing Gaia doesn't mean you have to be a new-age flake; just because so many psychedelic users become new-age flakes doesn't mean you have to be an angry materialist. There is room for all these (and more) in reality; true sanity requires making room in your head for them, too.

A couple days late on my part, but Dec 5th was the 75th anniversary of the end of prohibition. I have mixed feelings about this, mostly that prohibition kind of jump started a cultural revolution in art and social acceptance of freaks, and in it's very backward way, was one of the best things that ever happened to the US, creatively. Granted, it also created an entire generation of binge drinkers, but the same could be said of the college system today. It makes me wonder if the forbidden nature of illicit drugs today actually served to create the communities and art that have grown out of them. In addition to making parent-less children, and ghettos, and lifetime prison residents. Anyways, go have a nice cocktail and dance on a table somewhere.

Following the critical acclaim of their first Chick-like entheo tract, Chemical Salvation? (which dealt with LSD and was first distributed at Albert Hofmann's centennial celebration last year) Sister Sara Tonin and Brother Mel A. Tonin have kicked down with another collectible gem of a comic book. Like its predecessor, the new booklet--Adam & Evil?! (which focuses on MDMA)--is both humorous and painstakingly accurate, providing a sound historical overview. Gorden Alles, Sasha Shulgin, Leo Zeff, the Stolaroffs, Metzner, Nichols, Michael Clegg, even the Bhagwan and Rick Doblin are mentioned, among others. The printed versions make nice Solstmas stocking stuffers, if you can figure out how to obtain some copies. But even if you can't score the dope in your neighborhood, send a friend a virtual gift by pointing them to where the text is posted on Erowid

The Sydney Morning Herald and the Brisbane Times syndicated an interesting, if not particularly revelatory, opinion piece about how "drugs define the zeitgeist" of a period in history. It's more interesting for the anecdotes it provides than the conclusion it reaches. For instance, coffee had such a revolutionary influence that it was considered seditious in some places to drink it, which of course connects it by way of a stretched analogy to the counterculture of the '60s:

Voltaire, a Procope regular, reportedly downed 50 to 70 demi-tasses a day - to which is largely attributed the wit and brevity of Candide. Rousseau, Diderot, Condorcet, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were also regulars, as were Robespierre, Danton and Marat.

But not for the taste. According to Bennett Weinberg and Bonnie Bealer's excellent history, "the heavily reboiled sediment-ridden coffee of the day … was consumed exclusively for its pharmacological benefits". This deliberate experimentation with "a new and powerful drug unlike anything their countrymen had ever seen" links these Enlightenment genii with the serious hallucinogenic experimenters of the 20th century, writer Aldous Huxley and Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary.

Whether the hunger-suppressing hashish that Picasso and Braque guzzled in their garret days helped generate cubism is still moot. But, as coffee had fuelled the Enlightenment, the '60s peacenik revolution was powered by LSD. LSD, for Leary, was a "sacrament", equivalent of the host in Catholic ritual, it offered escape from ego and "confrontation with God." The link between biochemistry and God is itself fascinating, but every drug has its day. What the '60s floated inside acid's gossamer bubble sank, soon enough, beneath the dead weight of heroin.

Where I run into trouble with the piece is its conclusion about what drug defines our current times:

Cocaine is our dinner-party drug du jour. Not the biggest, even of the illegals. (Marijuana is.) But it's unquestionably our drug of money and influence, preferred poison of Richard Florida's "creative class". The British spend $5 billion a year on it; with Ireland's new wealth, cocaine busts ballooned 750 per cent in four years. Charlie is back, big time.

Cocaine is the drug of ego. All shiny surface and hollow euphoria, it's the drug of stockbrokers and estate agents. Of puppet governments and corporate warmongers. Of thin girls with expensive teeth and cheap souls, of sharp subprime boys whipping fast financial horses. Where acid dissolves ego, cocaine is powdered narcissism. The Age of Aquarius is dead. All hail the Age of Celebrity. Do what? Invest, obviously, in coca futures.

I've been asked to speak on the nature of DMT as a Spirit Molecule, and in doing so I must return to something I wrote not too long ago. As someone who has experimented with psychedelics and explored this issue up and down from every possible angle, I now present to DoseNation readers a link to an exclusive chapter from Psychedelic Information Theory, 'The Case Against the Spirit World Model of Psychedelic Action'. It's a bit long, but it beats the case to death, or so I would hope, though I know there are people who would fight me on this. The primary conclusion of the article can be summed up in this gem:

When we designate psychedelic content as spiritual in origin we dismiss the wondrous capacity of the human imagination, simultaneously denigrating our own creative capacities and undermining all testable reason. It must stop.

So long spirit world, we hardly knew ye.

A long article in Rolling Stone, recently mentioned on DoseNation, elaborates on the topic "How America Lost the War on Drugs". The title makes it seem certain: it's an objective fact, this war has been lost. What I would like to question is this very certainty.

Rolling Stone's article (while being very interesting) is actually one-sided. It presents the War on Drugs mainly from the point of view of behind-the-scenes politics and foreign affairs. However, what makes this war more problematic is that it's much more complicated than just politics. In this particular article, Rolling Stone fails to notice how deeply drugs are entangled into American culture. The contrast between sometimes shockingly harsh penalties and eye-winking assimilation of drug culture - from psychedelic designs to cocaine-like candies - makes this conflict visible. But something else forms the biggest gap in Rolling Stone's presentation of the problem: drug users are mostly missing from the picture.

It has been stated many times: drugs don't feel, can't plan a strategy, can't seek safe hiding places themselves. So what is called "War on Drugs" is actually a war on drug users. I'm not trying to say that Nixon explicitly meant to target them - but in practice drug users have become the most vulnerable target, the real victims of this war.

It has been repeated so many times it's become much of a truism, at least for opponents of the war: the War on Drugs has long been lost, the mafia is doing well (so let's end this tragicomedy). I believe the situation is more complicated, with more shades than just black and white. For sure this war can't be won. A "drug-free America" could perhaps only be possible as a totalitarian state, where we would be controlled every day, not allowed to go anywhere without disclosing the precise reason and time schedule. But does it mean this war has been lost? At least the battle over language has been won.

Let me compare this to a situation geographically closer to me: the debate on abortion in Poland. Together with a very strict law, an equally strict language dominates, a vocabulary where "conceived life" is almost a neutral, official term. In such a situation it's very hard to argue for a pro-choice standpoint, because those who support a woman's right to choose are "child murderers".

Something similar has already happened in the War on Drugs: one side of the debate has stolen the language, forcing others to assimilate to their point of view. How to speak about spiritual use of psychedelics in a language where psychedelics = narcotics = poison = death, where psychonaut = drug addict = junkie = social degenerate?