AbolishTheDEA.com
May 25, 2019
Too White to Use Mushrooms
by Ballard Quass
In 1975, a U.S. court ruled that the Church of the Awakening could not use "magic mushrooms" in its rituals because (get this...) the congregants were white and hence came from a people that had no history of using entheogens in religious ceremonies.
First, that premise is wrong (besides being blatantly racist, of course). The Eleusinian Mysteries were celebrated in the West on a yearly basis for almost 2,000 years, and this longevity (along with the many mystical accounts of the rite) only makes sense under the supposition that a powerful entheogen was involved. You don't continue a tradition 2,000 years, non-stop, if it's just another convivial fad.
Second: based on this rationale, I could never convert to Islam because "my people" had no experience with that religion. Nor need we grant civil rights to African-Americans under this theory since they often came from non-democratic countries that had no history of such protections.
In 1975, a U.S. court ruled that the Church of the Awakening could not use "magic mushrooms" in its rituals because (get this...) the congregants were white. More proof that Americans will lie, cheat, and steal in order to keep the Drug War in place, and if it means blatantly enshrining bigotry into judicial case law, so be it.
In other words, the 1975 ruling reveals the fundamental tyranny of the Drug War: not only does it deny Americans the pursuit of happiness (by outlawing the substances that can facilitate that happiness) but any exceptions to the rule are based on racist and anti-democratic rationales.
What could be less American than telling me that I cannot attend a given church due to the color my skin?
Yet this is the type of injustice to which a war on plants naturally leads. Being itself a violation of a basic human right, namely our access to the plants and fungi that grow unbidden around us, it should come as no surprise that government should not stint at protecting this anti-democratic status quo by any means necessary, including in this case an implicit repudiation of everything that America purports to stand for, especially freedom of religion and the right to be judged by the content of one's character as opposed to the color of one's skin.
