Nobody says it better than TM:
“What needs to happen, is we need to evolve language. We need to make a distinction between synthetic drugs and plants. Not an academic distinction. Not a distinction under a larger heading. But to actually say “no, these things are as different as tricycles and donuts.” They have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
This has been a difficult split to make because, first of all, we really haven’t seen how high the stakes are, and there have been hybrid cases that spread confusion in the community. I’m thinking for instance of MDMA. You know, many people think this is a fine thing. Well, it’s obviously a synthetic drug. It can be manufactured in laboratories in doses of millions, and so forth and so on. So, what about it? Is it just as good as a plant? Well, the answer is “no,” for those reasons. That anything that can be criminally syndicallized, and produced in boxcar size lots, and sold as an unidentifiable something, in a capsule, plays into the hands of this male dominated consumer psychology that is destructive. And you can also attack the substance on a “for-itself” argument, and say amphetamines ultimately are not constructive in the social situation.
I would like to solve the problem by just saying we have a cornucopia of shamanically validated substances that range over a wide gamut, all the way from slight stimulation to unimaginably intense psychedelic breakthroughs, and all of these compounds have been used over tens of of millennia. They are use proven. We know they don’t cause miscarriages, or tumors, or chromosomal breakage because they are part of the legacy of our history on this planet.
So then it isn’t so much a matter of seeking through pharmacology ever more and varied kinds of consciousness altering things, it’s more about trying to get back to our roots, and trying to get the most benign plant-person relationships possible put in place. And I think, in the indoles, we have this, and it’s a good way to think of it, because it can be understood by our critics. Because they are reductionists and materialists, so if we say to them, it’s the indoles that are the special categories, we will save 90% of what we want to save and exclude 95% of what we wish to exclude. Because the indoles are the Lysergimides, the beta carbolines, the tryptomines, and the iboga alkaloid. And I think that’s a sufficient spectrum with their antomers, coginers and so forth that we can do what we need to do politically and for our own spiritual group, and remain within that small net, and try to create a redifining of what these things are.”
- Terrence McKenna
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