The War on Drugs Is a War on Consciousness

I watched the funny video Weed Fields of Afghanistan made by a group of American soldiers in Afghanistan who come across a huge field of 5 foot tall marijuana plants. Later the soldiers set the footage to "Afroman's" popular "weed song" Because I Got High, including explicitly stating crude lyrics merely mouthed in the original.

It immediately reminded me WHY marijuana is illegal. Smoking marijuana can cause soldiers to get a new perspective on their actions, rebel against authority and lose interest in war! Remember Vietnam?
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Maybe Middle East ganja weed is a contributing factor not mentioned in a May 2007 story buzzing about the Internet. Written by "Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers" it is entitled: Rebellion By US Forces In Iraq Prompts ‘Rapid’ Pentagon Crackdown. It reads in part:
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Reports from Russian Military Analysts are describing what they term as a ‘rapidly declining will-to-fight” among American Soldiers fighting in Iraq, with the greatest concern being placed upon US Soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division who reportedly this past week refused orders to ‘take to field’ against their Iraqi insurgent enemies...prompted by an Iraqi insurgent attack upon their fellow Soldiers wherein 4 of their comrades were killed and 3 captured by the enemy forces...The concerns of the US Soldiers in Iraq, that they do not have the resources they need to fight their enemy...Adding to the growing rebellion by these US Soldiers against their War Leaders was the Pentagons recent orders extending the tours of their forces in their war zones...Unlike their counterparts in the Vietnam War, however, present day US Soldiers had begun to communicate their rebellious feelings against their War Leaders through the use of the Internet, to include posting thousands of videos and blogs which ran counter to the ‘positive’ message of the war being given by the United States media organs....This will no longer be the case as the Pentagon, in a ‘rapid’ response to the growing rebellion of its Soldiers fighting the United States wars, has immediately denied Internet access for all its fighting forces in an attempt to bring them back under ‘control’.
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Of course, we know psychoactive drugs can be abused to encourage soldiers to kill. Hitler kept his soldiers pumped up on methamphetamines. And the Arabic-origin word "assassins" refers to the "hashish" supplied to Muslim secret order members to encourage them to kill the Christian Crusades rampaging through Muslim Palestine in the 12th century.
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Nevertheless, in western culture of the last 40 years -- and this IS the 40th Anniversary of the Summer of Love -- psychoactive drugs have been identified overwhelmingly with the desire to expand and heighten consciousness, evolve consciously, reject the status quo and create a new reality. Just what this blog is all about! (Unfortunately it is written only with the aid of the legal psychoactive caffeine.)
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Anyway, as I write in my 1998 article "The War on Drugs Is a War on Consciousness":
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I believe that a prime motivation of those waging the current "war on drugs" is to discredit and destroy any" counterculture" before it becomes the dominant culture. Religious fundamentalists have not forgotten the religious upheavals of the 1960s when millions of young people, often after using marijuana and other psychedelics, reading Timothy Leary or Alan Watts, or listening to "psychedelic" music by the Beatles or the Jefferson Airplane, rejected Christianity and Judaism. Even ministers, priests, nuns and rabbis abandoned their callings! Consciousness, altered consciousness, and higher consciousness rather than obedience, duty, and sacrifice became the prime concern of the new spirituality.
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The response of Catholic, conservative and fundamentalist religious groups was to feverishly expand their efforts to enforce more fundamentalist views among their members and to gain greater political influence. While fundamentalists have lost many battles over abortion, prayer and pornography, they have found the government a willing ally in the "war on drugs". For just as drugs, the counterculture and "consciousness" undermine faith in hierarchical religious authority, so do they undermine faith in political authority.
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John Lennon's "IMAGINE", an anthem of the counter culture, asks us to imagine "no religion" and "no countries". Lennon, a drug use advocate, was murdered by a fundamentalist Christian, a former fan, who knew how subversive and powerful this message is. In 1990, on Lennon's 50th birthday radio stations worldwide played "IMAGINE" simultaneously to a billion people. All heard Yoko Ono say, "The dream we dream alone is just a dream, but the dream we dream together is reality." The message is that we are not subjects of an authoritarian god or even natural law, but that we consciously co-create reality. Implied is the possibility of a diversity of realities.
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Despite the crackdown on drug use, the belief that consciousness is not only the purpose, but perhaps even the very nature, of reality has spread through writings and practices of "new physics" aficionados, humanistic psychologists, and the new age, eastern religion, wiccan, and eco-spirituality movements. Their millions of advocates still lack a coherent and motivating philosophical synthesis or organizational focus. And while many of these individuals have used drugs, and still do, decriminalization of drugs is not yet a major focus of their thought or action. .
However, as the horrors of the drug war mount and the injustices spread to all of us, the uneasy feeling that there is some hidden agenda behind the "war on drugs" grows among more aware and conscious individuals. Some of these agendas are scapegoating drug users for larger ills, excuses for racial repression and expanding government power, an outlet for militarism, and the desire of tobacco and liquor producers to squash potential competition.
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However, a prime hidden agenda remains the suppression of an alternate religious view -- that consciousness is the nature and purpose of reality, that humans freely create their realities. Because psychoactive drugs are a means of quickly and effectively initiating individuals into this view they must be suppressed -- even if it means punishment, incarceration and death for hundreds of thousands of people. But such is the nature of all religious wars.
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Go to the link to see excerpts from the books INTOXICATION THE "FOURTH DRIVE" by Dr. Ronald K. Siegel; THE NATURAL MIND - An Investigation of Drugs and the Higher Consciousness by Dr. Andrew Weil; and FOOD OF THE GODS by Terence McKenna.
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Groups currently working hard to end the war on drugs and give us access to one more gateway to higher consciousness include Tim Leary's site which lives on despite his death, Terrance McKennaLand, Lycaeum psychoactive drug information, NORML, Marijuana Policy Project, Drug Policy Alliance, November.Org and StopTheDrugWar.Org.