Benefits And Risks Of Drugs

Disclosure Bias: I love them

In one of my comments, I wrote:

[…]..this [cells intelligently communicating with each other], is old news for people who are in holistic tune with the universe, either through advanced spiritual practice or the intentional wise use of psychedelics, or both.

To which one reader replied:

Drugs? No thank you. I don't need to know so bad.

This made me, once again, aware of how official propaganda destroyed something good and beautiful.

I wanted to write about the immense benefits (and dangers) of drugs for a long time but was held back by this unspoken social norm: “You don’t glorify drugs. That’s not cool. Too many people die from drugs.”

Pointing out the life-changing positive benefits - physical, emotional, social and spiritual - that many people have by taking drugs is not glorifying drugs.

But demonizing them has been going on for a long time now, and it is time we come out of the closet and call things as they are.

The anti-drug propaganda weaponises drug victimhood by shifting the blame of harm to the drug. As this article will point out, the drug has nothing to do with the harm. We generally don’t blame cars for harmful accidents. We blame bad drivers. The same should be done with drugs.

So this is my reply to all people who think about drugs as something negative, dark, anti-social, sick or despicable:

Dear drug haters, drug judgers and people scared of drugs. Look me in the eye. I am telling the truth.

I know drugs have a very bad name for you. This is the result of fifty years of anti-drug propaganda and bad policies. So I am not surprised.

Saying this, they are definitely not for everyone. I would never recommend taking them without being expertly introduced, guided, and kept safe by someone in the know and with good intentions. They are extremely sharp tools. That’s all they are.

They shouldn’t be demonized or glorified. They should be used intelligently and wisely, not polarized.

If used right, they can be life-saving for some, life-changing for others, and agents of healing on all levels. Unfortunately, they are very destructive if used wrongly, which happens too often.

But that's not the drug’s fault. Leave the drugs alone. They are just substances. It's stupid humans that misuse and abuse them and then blame the drug. Or people who have no clue about them and just repeat the propagandistic mantra: Drugs are bad.

Drugs, used wisely, set us free and liberate us. That is the main reason why governments hate them.

Why else would Richard Nixon call Timothy Leary "the most dangerous man in America?"

The psychedelics Leary promoted made people wake up from their sheep slumber. They thought sharper, felt deeper, cared more, and, most importantly, found a new life-changing connection to others and the universe. That's why some drugs are very spiritual.

It is no coincidence that the birth of all the great liberal, connecting and green movements went parallel with widespread unrestricted, unjudged drug use.

I am talking about the sixties when the big anti-war, anti-racist, feminist, and green revolutions started. Great art and music were also produced. It made young people realise the corruption of the elites, and protests went up everywhere.

If religion is opium for the people (Marx) and therefore keeps them docile, psychedelics are the great antidote to that. It makes people see a bigger and deeper truth.

That's why they prohibited drugs and gave them such a bad and scary reputation that it will take generations before people can use them again in a holistic and healing way.

Pharma is another reason they are prohibited—they are too much competition.

Of course, if you use them to knock yourself semi-unconscious or to turn you into a ridiculous clown, you don’t use them correctly. Many people use them to numb the pain of a meaningless, technocratic, materialistic world. Alcohol works well for that. No surprise that stayed legal.

Some use them to hype up low moods or to increase low energy, maybe due to the same sense of meaninglessness. They use coffee and tobacco. It's no surprise they are still legal, too. So are chemical “uppers” and “downers” provided by the good doctor and enriching pharma. They keep you functioning and at work.

I am not against coffee, tobacco and alcohol. I love all of them and use them in a beneficial way for myself. I just want to point out some of the political motives behind why some drugs are legal and others aren’t.

It has nothing to do with danger, health or addictiveness. Tobacco is the second most addictive drug in the world (after heroin) and one of the most harmful ones. Alcohol is right on its heels. And yet, they are legal.

In turn, psychedelics are the least addictive drugs in the world and - apart from the risks of bad psychological and emotional trips that can be mitigated - are harmless to the physical body. It is impossible to get addicted to MDMA, for example. Using more than is good for you just wears you out and makes you miserable. There is no physical dependency either.

It is also almost impossible to kill yourself with an overdose of MDMA or other psychedelics. Those extremely rare cases where young people died from MDMA were all due to a combination of extreme MDMA overdose, alcohol, overheating and dehydration in packed clubs. In other words, those poor teenagers weren’t looked after and informed by our communities as they should have been.

This, of course, is directly related to the secrecy, stigma and illegal nature of the drug involved. Instead of educating young people in Australia, the police actively contribute to harming and killing them.

The police still oppose voluntary drug harm reduction centres at concerts, wrongly claiming that it “encourages” drug use. Since when do teenagers need encouragement to use drugs? Teenagers think they are bulletproof; they don’t get “encouraged” by a help centre.

But worse, police continue to strip-search young concertgoers for drugs. Does that stop these young people from taking drugs into the concert? No, it doesn’t.

Instead, they wrap the ecstasy into something digestible and put it into their mouth. If they are unlucky enough to be strip searched by a police officer who demands that they open their mouth, they simply swallow the package to avoid serious charges that ruin their future.

What was meant to be taken between 4 pm and 4 am that day was all swallowed in one go, and that’s when the rare ecstasy deaths happen. Police are literally causing it.

But mainstream media, the next day, calls for stricter drug laws and claims drugs are very dangerous and kill our children—the same old story of the establishment all working together to control the people and the narrative.

On the other hand, millions of people get killed yearly by the misuse of alcohol and tobacco. But it stays legal and doesn’t get demonized. I am not saying it should. Just pointing out the lies and manipulations.

The drugs that help regulate people feeding the machine are all legal. The drugs that help people to wake up and set themselves free or drugs that might diminish productivity are illegal. The machine has to be fed.

Lately, drug policies have gone to the other extreme in some areas, especially in the USA and Canada. Don’t the Americans love their extreme swings?

I heard stories that, in some areas, drugs are dispensed like lollies now. That, of course, is as stupid as prohibiting them. We must wonder what drives this mass destruction of young people’s lives by practically handing out drugs without education and a safety net to anyone who wants them.

It is like allowing anyone to drive a car without a driving licence. You get a lot of chaos and harm on the road.

The only upside of this policy is the supply of clean, untainted drugs, one should hope. A lot of drug harm and death is accidental and has mainly to do with bad, unregulated and spiked drugs. The prohibitions of drugs practically hand over the production and distribution of drugs to dark, greedy and criminal elements.

Humans have used drugs to expand consciousness, talk with the Gods, and heal body, mind and spirit for at least 8000 years.

Some claim that we only know about the vast, egoless states that connect us with the universal spirit, or God, because people started to eat psychedelic mushrooms. The natives of Central America referred to them as "the flesh of the gods."

Since then, we have butchered everything that is good and holy about drugs.

For most of human history, oracles, shamans, healers, midwives, and sometimes high priests used them expertly to the great benefit of the community. This is still happening in some indigenous cultures. The skill and knowledge were passed down from person to person.

Sadly, when the big religions started to monopolize and tightly script spirituality, this culture was eliminated. Midwives were labelled witches and burned alive by these lovely Christians. Shamans and healers were driven out of communities by powerful and brutal church inquisitors.

The direct path to God that drugs offer was lethal competition for the monopolistic churches. Who wants a measly priest, who almost always has no direct experience of God, when we can meet God directly? Even if it is only for a few hours, it shows us what's out there and what's possible, which can set us on a life-long spiritual path.

Richard Alpers, who, together with Leary and others, was one of the early LSD pioneers at Harvard University, perfectly illustrates this. After getting his mind opened to the universe through LSD, he didn’t become an LSD addict. (There are no LSD addicts, by the way. They simply don’t exist).

Instead, he went to India to find his spiritual path and returned as Ram Das, one of the most influential American spiritual teachers ever.

Dr James Fadiman is another early pioneer and wise psychedelic drug teacher. I had the honour of attending a webinar with him. He is a hugely inspirational, wise, and lovely man, a pioneer in advocating for microdosing psychedelics.

Microdosing has incredible health benefits, which I can personally attest to. It heals many physical diseases, and it may be the only medicine that cures extremely painful endometriosis. Tens of millions of women suffer from it every month. I saw the healing happening with my own eyes.

Sadly, because of legal considerations, unwarranted, falsy hyped-up fears and bad reputation, many suffering women never consider microdosing psychedelics, even if they hear about the healing properties for their condition.

Rather, they endure the excruciating pain every month. My own niece is an example of that. That's what the religions and the war on drugs do. They weaponize and demonize drugs.

And this is just one example of one drug. Marijuana, to name another stigmatized drug, is one of the most healing plants on the planet for many different conditions.

There is so much more to the drug propaganda, of course. I am barely scratching the surface of the deceit, lies, manipulations, and greed surrounding the "management of drugs" on our behalf and safety.

The COVID propaganda was massive and, in our face, promoting lies and harming people.

The anti-drug propaganda has been going on for more than fifty years and is ongoing.

It always blows me away how people can be awake to the first but not the latter.

This doesn't mean I am supporting a free-for-all, do-what-you-want approach to drugs. Most people with underdeveloped maturity and knowledge better stay away from them unless they are guided and under a healer's caring, wise instructions. If not, our immature egos will abuse them, and addictions are the consequence.

But the wise drug teachers have been driven underground. The whole system has been destroyed.

If you are anti-drugs, scared of drugs, or hate drugs - please reflect and find out why before you become a useful idiot for the anti-drug propaganda and help spread their lies.

Maybe you had a horrible experience with drugs yourself. But before you lash out at the drug, ask yourself, why did you have a bad experience? Maybe because the drug was of terrible quality? Maybe because you used too much? Maybe because you were in an unsafe environment? Maybe because the unconscious inhaled propaganda that all drugs are dangerous and destroy you caused paranoia?

There could be other reasons, but all of them have to do with the total loss of a safe, healing and positive drug culture. This was replaced with a dark, criminal, greedy drug culture run by brutal cartels and enabled directly by the church and government policies and prohibitions.

Maybe you lost someone you loved through drug addiction. That could be physically - through death - or emotionally - through them becoming emotionally or physically absent. That is very sad and heartbreaking. But once again, these loved ones are also victims of the same dark anti-drug policies mentioned above. It’s not the drug.

And finally - when it comes to opening your mind to universal love and wisdom, God, bliss and joy - yes, we all need to know badly about universal intelligence because our collective spiritual ignorance destroys our species.

I am convinced that the wise use of drugs, combined with genuine spirituality (not religious lip service), can save us from extinguishing our own race.

I am not saying everyone needs to take drugs, far from it. It is even better if you can connect to the universe without them. Taking drugs is risky. Praying, meditating, faith, and other spiritual practices are risk-free. If that works for you, you can stop reading.

You are blessed. But you belong, according to my observations, to a tiny minority.

Podcaster Sam Harris (which I don't like, in general) once correctly said that the advantage of psychedelics is that something is guaranteed to happen when you take them. This can’t be said of spiritual practices. The world is littered with failed meditators and miserable churchgoers.

Drugs make things happen; that is guaranteed. The skill is to make something positive happen. That can be learned. I learned it, and it worked.

My experience is that drugs heal ourselves and the planet, are beautiful and are not dangerous at all if used wisely by a mature, spiritually inclined person.

Dropping acid at a party or concert is lightyears away from that. I am not saying it is bad to drop acid at a concert as long you know what you are doing and are safe. It can provide an amazing sensual experience; nothing is wrong with that. Each to their own.

Not everyone wants to grow spiritually, and there should be no monopoly here for just that.

The same is true for the vastly expanding clinical use of psychedelics for mental health patients. Here, we have the opposite problem. There is a danger that psychedelics are restricted to clinical use only and controlled by psychiatrists.

However, hardly anyone is advocating for the spiritual use of psychedelics. There is no lobby for it. Not much money can be made. Therefore, I feel compelled to spread the good news.

What do I mean by “spiritual use?”

My first intentional spiritual MDMA session is an example:

I didn't know what spiritual love was until I had an intentional spiritual MDMA session. At that stage, I had lived most of my life and had beautiful, loving experiences all along. I loved my wife and my children dearly and loved many other things. I thought I knew what love was by then.

But this journey temporarily opened up a channel to a love that was so intense it was almost unbearable. It was spiritual love beyond duality, independent of any lovable objects. Everything was lovable and loved. It was way beyond the love for my children or wife - but it included it.

There was no competition between the two.

Flying in an aeroplane doesn’t make a beautiful drive through the countryside less attractive.

I never forgot the insight I gained during this journey. If anyone had forced me at that stage to choose between giving up my life and giving up this love, there would have been no contest. It simply made no sense to live at all without this love. It was literally bigger than life itself.

Obviously, it all faded away again (and usually can't be repeated). It left me with this wonderful flavour of love and newfound wisdom. My "daily" love is of the same essence, the same nature. There is no difference in quality. It is all the same love.

Only this difference in awareness, gratitude, and humbleness - egolessness - creates this intensity of love.

Most importantly - because that’s what most drug takers don’t realize, especially the addicted ones - I realized that it is not the drug that “gives” me this extraordinary experience of boundless, objectless love. This love is real. It is there. It is not an illusion produced by a drug. We simply can’t connect to it because our ego is in the way.

It is scientifically proven that the ego is an illusionary part of our brain called the Default Mode Network. When scientists shut this area in the brain down (through psychedelics), the sense of me, myself and I disappeared. So all the drug does is to get rid of the obstacle - our own ego. With the ego out of the way, we ditch the illusion of being separated and become one with the universe.

Spirituality really is that simple. No specifically named Gods and Judgment days and morals and good and evil are needed at all. That’s just spiritual bullshit and religious propaganda. That’s at least what I learned. But each to their own. What do I know?

The teaching I got through this particular journey has lifted my life ever since. It was one of the most spiritually profound experiences I have ever had.

There is more and more research and proof of how psychedelics, under the right protocols and guidance, can induce spiritual life-changing peak experiences for many people.

In a world devoid of spirituality and on the brink of destroying itself, with outdated corrupt religions that give less and less meaning to people, there are new ways to have profound spiritual experiences that feed our souls and create meaning. Psychedelic and other drugs, used maturely and wisely, can be one way.

Non-duality, as always, is another one. There are many more, of course.

Further, combining non-duality with psychedelics is a perfect union and incredibly powerful and eye-opening.