* PLANTS OF POWER *

A six-part radio series about mind-altering drugs in nature and culture -
Written and presented by Nick Rankin. This series is part of World Service
Education's Drug Watch.

POWER AND CONTROL

(website introduction): As the "War on Drugs" continues to fail, societies
are thinking again about their attitudes, and wondering if the criminal law
is the only way. Cultures who respect the plants of power as sacred or
religious may evolve more appropriate social controls. Contributors include
Anthony Henman, Raymond Kendall and Ethan Nadelmann.

TRANSCRIPT:

WADE DAVIS: Richard Evans Schultes arguably is the greatest Amazonian
explorer, certainly of this century and, perhaps, even of all time.

NICK RANKIN: Anthropologist Wade Davis, whose biography of the Harvard
ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes is called ONE RIVER.

WADE DAVIS: Schultes was a very enigmatic character; he was raised in a
very poor family in Boston and became the first of his family ever to go to
university - he expected to become a physician. But while he was an
undergraduate at Harvard, he stumbled upon the first monograph ever written
in English that described the stunning pharmacological effects of peyote,
and he became fascinated by that magical plant. He studied it for his
undergraduate thesis and that launched him on a long and varied career that
took him from the mountains of Oaxaca, where he discovered the so-called
‘magic mushrooms’ - the event that probably more than any other sparked the
psychedelic era - and later carried him, of course, into the forests of the
north-west Amazon, where he truly made his mark. And Schultes’ expeditions
took him thousands of miles down unknown rivers, often through totally
unexplored areas, living amongst uncontacted societies; all the time he was
pursuing the mysteries of the rain forests. He would collect over 27,000
botanical specimens, describe the use of 2,000 medicinal plants, find over
300 botanical species new to science and really celebrate the poetics of
that land and its people in a way that no other botanist ever has.

WILLIAM EMBODEN: I believe that all of us who have ever done anything
significant in ethnobotany were students of Richard Evans Schultes.

NICK RANKIN: William Emboden, author of the classic NARCOTIC PLANTS,
considers Richard Evans Schultes as the master.

WILLIAM EMBODEN: He has always - through his writings, through his speaking
- - been the pivotal figure in this entire endeavour of trying to understand
these plants in relationship to the civilisations of mankind, and I think
all of us must say we owe a great debt to Richard Evans Schultes. The
people of South America have given him honours, but his greatest honour, he
said, was when they set aside several million acres of rainforest in his
name. He would take this as the greatest tribute, of course, because this
is his great love. He has spent over 27 years exploring these rainforests
of the Americas and given us so much original information, so many new
ideas and new ways of thinking - changing our ideas.

NICK RANKIN: Among the plants of power that most attracted Schultes were
the hallucinogens. This fascination with the most sacred of mind-altering
plants began with a college library book. There he read about the
mescalin-rich peyote cactus Lophophora Williamsii.

WADE DAVIS: Schultes was taking a course at Harvard called PLANTS AND HUMAN
AFFAIRS, a course that had been taught at the university longer than any
other in the undergraduate curriculum. And in the laboratory dedicated to
these curious plants that were then known as “The Fantastica”, they had to
do a book report and it was racing to get the thinnest book possible on the
shelf that led Schultes to that monograph, and as he read it through the
night, he read stories and accounts of visions of orb-like brilliance,
where coloured patterns fell like rain upon the skin of all those who took
the magic plant. And he became enchanted, in a sense, he fell away in a
trance and his professor, who was another conservative Bostonian, said
that: if you want to study the plant, it was one thing to read about it,
which he would have to do, but mostly he had to live it.

VOICE: THIS IS A PEYOTE OPENING SONG:

THE NEXT SONG IS THE NIGHT WATER SONG

NICK RANKIN: In the summer of 1936, Richard Evans Schultes and the
anthropologist Weston La Barre went to live with the Kiowa Indians in
Oklahoma Territory. They took part in peyote ceremonies at night and ate
the sacred visionary plant.

WADE DAVIS: The peyote cult which came onto the Plains from Mexico, in some
sense was a pharmacological short cut to distant metaphysical realms,
traditionally reached by the pain of ordeal, the vision quest, the ardour
of battle. And the Kiowa were the very conduit through which that cult came
onto the Plains and then became disseminated at a remarkable rate of
diffusion reaching, by the 1960s, even the Cree in northern Canada. And
Schultes was the last generation of scholars actually to know the elders of
the Kiowa, who’d been raised in a way of life that had withered and died
within a century of its birth. We forget that the Great Plains culture was
not something that had gone on for centuries, it had developed with the
horse which only reached the plains in the 17th Century. So Schultes had
this remarkable initiation into the wonder of the Amerindian civilisation -
and I think at the earliest age possible, really, as a young academic, he
realised that this world doesn’t exist in some absolute sense, but is
really just a model of reality. And the lesson of ethnography is that there
are other visions - other ways of being and thinking on the earth - and it
was to pursue those visions and understand them that Schultes dedicated his
career.

NICK RANKIN: The life-work of Richard Evans Schultes has centred on the
relationship of natural plant materials to the religious and cultural life
of native peoples. But William Emboden deplores the way that modern
civilisation has profaned the plants of power.

WILLIAM EMBODEN: The peoples who use these use them in the context of the
sacred. We abuse, they use - there’s an enormous difference. The person of
today will snort a line of cocaine, whereas the coquero would chew leaves
over a long period of time and get a small amount of cocaine in their
system, and traverse paths through the Andes. The person who smoked tobacco
would blow smoke upon a sick colleague or would use smoke in a sacred
context and not walk about with a cigarette bobbing in his mouth all day!
Among the users of peyote: peyote was used only in a sacred context and
only on specific occasions after fasting and abstaining from the use of
salt, abstaining from sex; it was a very sacred thing and used in a very
specific context for a very specific purpose of understanding. We have no
context, we don’t understand the context for the use of any of the things
that are powerful and sacred and have the power to enslave us as well. We
have turned them into a monetary thing instead of a sacred thing.

NICK RANKIN: How traditional people use these plants of power without
problems is vital knowledge for us today, thinks Anthony Henman, author of
MAMA COCA and BIG DEAL: THE POLITICS OF THE ILLICIT DRUGS BUSINESS. The
example of traditional coca-chewing in the Andes has three great lessons.

ANTHONY HENMAN: One lesson is of a green pharmacological nature, that a
substance is much more difficult to abuse when it’s in a sort of crude
vegetable form, that there are certain inbuilt filters that prevent
over-doses and lots of other types of medical problems that are associated
with refined substances. The second aspect is that a society like that has
a proper ritualised context for the use of these substances. And I don’t
think that our society lacks that, we can see that similar types of rituals
exist in our society around tea-drinking or beer-drinking or in these days
even, you know, ecstasy use. I mean, it’s not yet become a totally
formalised ritual, but nevertheless there are certain types of informal
cultural controls which seem to emerge in any society, and if we understood
these at a bit more theoretical level, I think we could design policies
which are more adapted to the realities of these substances. And the third
aspect: I think is properly, let’s say, ethical; the way to prevent
substances becoming negative and damaging and evil and poisonous and so on,
is actually to say that they’re good for something, and they exist in this
universe. There was a Jesuit who was sent out to Peru in the 16th Century,
largely to justify the Jesuits’ participation in coca plantations at that
time, but he uses a basic theological argument which was: if God has
created this plant in this part of the world, he must have done it with a
reason, because we know that God did nothing for no reason and for no
purpose. And so I would say that what we need to understand is that these
substances do exist - they are not going to disappear - that the idea of
forcing them to disappear, of eliminating them from the face of the globe,
which is what the United Nations and the United States are trying to push
on us, are unrealisable goals and we would be better to say: well, these
substances are useful for something. I mean coca is useful as a stimulant,
the opiates are useful for killing pain, cannabis has a wide range of uses,
and so on and so forth, and try and build on the positive uses of these
substances, rather than constantly drawing attention to the undoubted
negative side effects that can occur.

NICK RANKIN: There's a lot of money in the illicit drug trade today. And as
the Colombian economist Oscar Rodriguez Aguilar explains, capitalism has
little to teach the Colombian drug cartels.

OSCAR RODRIGUEZ AGUILAR: This is a business: with investment, with labour,
with transport costs, with sales costs, with marketing costs, with
dealership costs - and with profits. And the reason for its success has
been, not only that it’s an illegal business, which therefore generates
enormous amounts of profit, but secondly, because it has been managed as a
business.

NICK RANKIN: Now, I know these are only estimates - because it’s illegal,
there aren’t official accounts - but can we calculate how much money is
being made? What are the figures?

OSCAR RODRIGUEZ AGUILAR: There is a figure which estimates that, for
example, in 1978 in just Colombia, when the cocaine boom began, the value
of the drug trade - the value - was estimated at 200 billion dollars. But
the most recent figures were mentioned at the beginning of this year, 1997,
at a very specialised conference in Prague in Czechoslovakia. There is a
firm called Inter-Access Risk Management, in fact, which put forward this
figure, which is the so-called gross criminal product of drug-trafficking
in the world, calculated, estimated, at 1,000 billion dollars. Now, that
figure is roughly just below the United Kingdom’s GDP. Now, just in the
United States, drug trafficking was valued at 400 billion dollars for last
year, and that is roughly more than the GDP for Russia, and just under the
GDP for Spain. Certainly more than the GDP for Mexico and South Korea.

NICK RANKIN: That money can buy a lot of power. Last year police in Europe
seized 11 tons of heroin, 30 tons of cocaine and 630 tons of cannabis. How
much got through to consumers no one knows. These figures came from
INTERPOL, the International Criminal Police Organisation that's an
information clearing house for police from 177 countries round the world.
60 per cent of Interpol's time and resources is spent on drugs and
organised crime. He won't admit he's losing the war on drugs, but the
Secretary General, the top cop in Interpol, thinks it's time for a change
in tactics. From a police family, he's been a policeman himself for 40
years and his name is Raymond Kendall.

RAYMOND KENDALL: I think we need to get a different approach at the
political level, because unless there is a political will to do something,
it won’t happen. I mean, however much we would like, as policemen, to be
able to provoke action here, there and everywhere, the most we can do, and
I think it’s our job to deal with the distribution networks and so on. But
if we want to be successful, we’ve got to do it against a background of
some sort of strategy. What happens at the moment is that we find that, of
the total resources that are being spent on dealing with this problem,
about 75% of the resources are being spent on law enforcement activity and
only 25% are on dealing with the question of demand. Now, it’s very clear
that if there’s that sort of imbalance in the use of resources that you’re
never really going to, in a coherent way, come up with a policy that’s
going to really serve a useful purpose.

NICK RANKIN: So, what do you think? You say we’ve got to change it
politically. What do you think the politicians should be facing up to?

RAYMOND KENDALL: It’s very nice to put money into law-enforcement, because
if you increase the size of your drug squad, you will seize more drugs, you
will arrest more drug-traffickers, but at the end of the day, you’re not
doing anything to deal with the basic problem. And the answer to that, I
think, is the fact that if you start dealing with social action and social
policies which require enormous investment, the probability of you seeing a
valid result is going to take maybe one generation, ten years, shall we
say. And most politicians don’t think that far ahead and wouldn’t have the
courage to propose that sort of investment.

NICK RANKIN: So what sort of social policy do you think they should be
investing in for the long term?

RAYMOND KENDALL: It’s a very complex issue because it concerns so many
aspects of our societies. Not only, obviously, police but the judicial
system, and the social services system as well. For example, in some
countries I know, there are legal provisions to deal with drug addicts, by
way of alternative procedures. In other words, instead of putting them in
prison or whatever, by obliging them to go into treatment centres and
things like that. But the problem is that in most of our countries, that
provision may exist in the legal sense, but it doesn’t exist in reality -
simply because the institutions are not there to put people in.

NICK RANKIN: Now, Raymond Kendall, forgive me for pushing you on this, but
you say there are different ways the law has for dealing with people. Are
you suggesting that the users, the people who might be addicted to these
things, should not be treated as criminals? Is that partly what you’re saying?

RAYMOND KENDALL: It’s totally what I’m saying, because I think there must
be a certain amount of frustration on the part of many policemen who are
confronted, on a daily basis, with having to deal with issues which are
social issues as opposed to purely police criminal issues. The police
obviously has a social role - you’re in the front line there in the street,
you’re going to come across the problems that are of a social nature, but
you should not be called upon to deal with that social side. I think the
police role, the law enforcement role, is to deal with the distribution
networks - distribution networks right down to street level. What I feel is
a waste of time, in a way - and a waste of resources - is simply arresting
the addicted people, putting them through the legal system, as if that in
some way or other was going to solve the problem. Now we have to be careful
here because - where I’ve got into trouble in the past - there are terms
which are used like ‘decriminalisation’ ‘depenalisation’, ‘liberalisation’
and so on. What I would like to express in the way that you did, is to say
that I certainly don’t think it’s of any value to treat drug addicts like
criminals. On the other hand, I don’t believe in total liberalisation. I
don’t think any kind of drug, be it cannabis or any other, should be
legalised. I think that if you want people to go into treatment, you need
some coercive possibility simply because, human nature being what it is, it
means that unless there is some coercion, perhaps many people would not
voluntarily go into treatment. On the other hand, we can say that I’m sure
there’s not a single serious drug abuser that would not want to get off the
habit if he could.

NICK RANKIN: Ethan Nadelmann is the Head of The Lindesmith Centre: the Open
Society Institute’s drug policy think-tank in New York City. How would he
change drug policy in America? What’s the rational way to deal with this
problem?

NETHAN NADELMANN: I think one has to look at the underlying assumptions.
First, let’s change the underlying assumption. The assumption so far has
been that we should seek a drug-free society. Let’s forget that, let’s stop
saying it, let’s accept instead that there has never been a drug-free
society in civilised human history. That the challenge is not how to get
rid of drugs or even how to keep them at bay, the challenge is how do we
learn how to live with drugs in such a way that they cause the least
possible harm. Now, that seems to me the more sensible objective. What does
that mean in practice? Well, I don’t think it means that you legalise all
drugs tomorrow. But it certainly doesn’t mean that you keep the drug war
going the way it’s been going. What it means is you start to fight for a
more humane and decent and sensible version of drug prohibition that begins
to look for public health priorities, that begins to decriminalise certain
aspects, to institute better regulation. That means that if you’re dealing
with junkies who can’t quit, you adopt a harm-reduction policy, you make
clean needles available, you teach them how to “shoot safe” rather than
ending up in a hospital emergency room. When it comes to drug treatment,
whatever works. That’s different strokes for different folks - you want to
do whatever works. If it’s oral methadone, do that. If it’s what you do in
England with injected methadone, do that. If it’s a drug-free programme or
a 12-step programme, do that. If it’s prescribing heroin to a hard-core
drug addict, as you do in England and now they’re doing in Switzerland, you
do that. Whatever works to reduce the death, disease, crime and suffering
associated with drugs. Do we need to be sending drug dealers to prison for
30 or 40 or 50 years as we do in this country? No! Drug dealers - if we’re
going to punish drug dealers - should not be punished the same way as
rapists and murderers. They’re not engaged in the same sort of activity. If
somebody is a simple drug possessor, drug user, there’s no way that they
belong in prison - that’s not the place for them. If they’re a drug user
and don’t have a drug problem, then leave them alone. If they’re a drug
user and they do have a problem, then allow them access to treatment. With
respect to marijuana, I cannot understand why marijuana should continue to
be treated as an illegal substance. I don’t know about broad-based
legalisation, but when it comes to marijuana per se, it seems to me we need
a sensible, tax-regulated policy with respect to the sale of marijuana to
adults. It would earn revenue for the government, it would avoid the loss
of revenue that we now spend on the drug war, it would avoid maybe other
problems that we have with the current illegal market. It seems to me it’s
a simple case. At the same time: alcohol, tobacco - I’d get tougher on
them. Just stop short of prohibition, tax it more, regulate it more, but
stop short of prohibition. It’s when you go to prohibition that you start
to create our current disasters.

VOICE: THIS NEXT ONE IS THE CLOSING SONG:

THE ONE THAT THEY UNTIE THE DRUM

ANTHONY HENMAN: I like your title PLANTS OF POWER. I think we have to
recognise that these plants do have powers. They have particular capacities
to change ones awareness, consciousness - whatever you want to call it - in
particular ways. And that power has got to be recognised, that power has
got to be harnessed, that power has got to be understood, you know, and
that power has got to be turned to our advantage. As long as we view this
power as being something inherently malefic, it will be malefic, it will
turn malefic, it will go on producing gang wars in Colombia and
destabilising states and undermining economies and boosting prison
populations and generally creating havoc, socially and politically, across
the planet. It’s only when we come to a serious awareness of the powers
that these plants have and understand the way in which we can use that for
the benefit of society, that I think there will be any way to kind of move
forward on this. I think probably the most problematic is not actually
cocaine in that respect, but it’s heroin, because the opiates do produce a
proper physical addiction which is difficult to treat. What needs to be
understood better is the way in which people sort of just shift from very
occasional - largely unproblematic - use of heroin, into properly dependent
addictive use of heroin. That is a shift which is something which has got
to be addressed, not just as a form of individual pathology, but it’s got
to be addressed culturally - it’s got to be addressed socially. The only
example I know of where that works was a group of Mong hill-tribe people I
lived with, not for long, for a couple of weeks on the border of Thailand
and Laos. And there, although young men smoked opium on occasion, like once
a week or once a month or once a year, or even two or three nights in a
row, they nevertheless were strongly discouraged by the older men from
smoking every day, because they knew that would produce addiction and
dependence. Some of the older men, however, were already addicts because
they were suffering from serious aches and pains and so on and therefore
they needed their opium every day. But it seemed to work well as a form of
generational control. Young men were not prohibited from using opium, but
they were encouraged just to use it on occasion and there seemed to be a
kind of, a form of social learning there that was going on between the old
junkies and the young experimenters, that served to seriously communicate
the risks to people who were just beginning to use the substance. And I
think one would have to look for something along those lines.

NICK RANKIN: Dr Andrew Weil, a botanist and a physician. Ultimately with
drug plants, some are allowed: alcohol, tobacco. Some are not allowed:
opium and marijuana. The problem seems to me control, social control,
personal control.

ANDREW WEIL: I agree, I agree.

NICK RANKIN: Where do you stand on this?

ANDREW WEIL: I think this is an issue that society needs to come to terms
with. These substances have potential for harm. I have always written and
said that there really are no good and bad drugs, there are just good and
bad uses of drugs. I think any drug can be put to constructive uses and any
drug can be put to destructive uses. I think that society should be
concerned about drug abuse and should work to try to reduce it. But I feel
that the use of the criminal law is completely inappropriate and
ineffective. So here’s what I would like to see happen. I would like to see
us back away from the commitment to use the criminal law as the vehicle
through which we try to influence people’s drug-taking behaviour. I don’t
think that means we can undo the drug laws all at once overnight, but I’d
like to see them dismantled in a gradual step-wise fashion, while allowing
society to adjust to the changes. You know, an easy place to begin would be
with the decriminalisation of cannabis, for example, since that’s the most
popular of the illegal recreational drugs. But I think that has to be
accompanied by real drug education, because I think education is our best
hope. And that means teaching people and, by the way, it’s everyone (it’s
doctors that are in as much need of drug education as kids are) about what
are really the benefits and risks of these substances. And I think we have
to look at it all. It does have to be ‘from chocolate to morphine’, you
know. It’s got to be all of the mind-altering substances, including the
ones that we now profit from: alcohol, tobacco, the various forms of
caffeine. And I would also like to see gradual restrictions placed against
the commercialisation and glamorisation of all substances, including the
legal ones. I think if we began moving in those three areas: that is,
beginning to dismantle the criminal laws, really working to develop real
drug education, and restricting the promotion of all substances, we would
see the problems associated with drugs begin to recede instead of
continuing to get worse, as they have for all this century, as we’ve been
using the same old methods. I also feel that our best hope is really with
social controls rather than legal controls. Even if you look at what’s
happened, you know the change with tobacco is quite interesting, because as
I said: here is the most addictive substance known. And yet in America now
there has been an enormous change in smoking behaviour and at the root of
this is that smoking is going out of fashion. So this is a social change
and even dealing with such an addictive difficult drug, this kind of new
social consensus is enormously influencing people’s behaviour for the
better. I think that’s our best hope. It’s not through legal controls. One
of the observations that I presented in THE NATURAL MIND - that I have seen
again and again - is that in these Indian cultures in South America, where
there were no criminal laws, there were very effective social controls. For
example, I lived with a tribe in the Amazon called Kubeyos who use coca
leaf. Coca was prepared every day and made available to everyone in the
tribe, but kids didn’t use it. And I asked every kid in the tribe that I
could find, questions like: “Don’t you want to try coca?” and they would
say “No!” “Aren’t you interested in how it makes you feel?” “No!” Don’t you
want to know how it makes your dad feel?” “No! I’ll wait till I grow up.” I
never hear kids in our culture say things like that. You know, this was in
a culture where there were no external controls, it was not illegal; this
was a social consensus that everybody bought into. I think that is a really
effective way of dealing with all this.

NICK RANKIN: Andrew Weil. Plants of power can harm or heal, kill or cure as
they are used and abused. They hold keys to the locks of our minds. They
can open the gates of heaven to sacred ecstasy, or open the gates of hell
to addiction , degradation and death. In THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION, his 1954
account of taking mescalin, derived from peyote, the author Aldous Huxley
was astonished by "the sacramental vision of reality" that he was granted.
And in all the horror and hysteria around the word "drugs" today, we should
not forget that ancient transcendental instinct at the core of the
experience. For a shared moment, creatures of biology, like this woman
invoking an Amazonian plant of power, Mother Ayahuasca, reconnect to the
universe, and to the source of all our life, the Sun.

SONG : MADRE AYAHUASCA : LLEVAME AL SOL

© BBC World Service Bush House The Strand London

Checked-by: Richard Lake