An Open Letter To The Minister Of Justice Regarding Psychedelic Use For Spiritual Purposes

Dear Minister of Justice,

I am writing to seek clarification on New Zealand’s current stance regarding psychedelic substances, particularly in the context where these substances are considered spiritual sacraments.

The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act states in Section 13 that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief”. Section 15 states that “Every person has the right to manifest that person’s religion or belief in worship, observance, practice, or teaching, either individually or in community with others, and either in public or in private”.

A fair reading of these sections suggests that New Zealanders have the right to use spiritual sacraments.

Indeed, this is already true with regards to the religious use of wine in the Christian Eucharist. New Zealand Anglicans use wine as a spiritual sacrament, the psychoactive ingredient being, of course, alcohol. But there are many other substances that serve as spiritual sacraments in the religious and spiritual traditions of the world.

The use of psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca and other entheogens has been deeply rooted in various spiritual and religious practices around the world for millennia. These practices often regard these substances not merely as drugs but as sacraments crucial for spiritual exploration, healing and connection with the divine or the deeper self.

The Eleusinian Mysteries were the most famous of the mystery schools that characterised pre-Christian European spirituality, running for 2,000 years and attracting anyone who was anyone in ancient Greece or Rome: Socrates, Plato, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Thucydides, Herodotus, Marcus Aurelius and the Emperor Julian were all known or believed to have participated.

Cicero wrote of them that “Though Athens brought forth numerous divine things, yet she never created anything nobler than those sublime Mysteries through which we became gentler and have advanced from a barbarous and rustic life to a more civilised one, so that we not only live more joyfully but also die with a better hope.”

Initiation into these mysteries involved the consumption of a drink known as kykeon. The mycologist R Gordon Wasson, the chemist Albert Hoffmann and the historian Carl Ruck have argued that the kykeon contained an entheogenic substance. Their book Road to Eleusis made a compelling argument that the use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments played an integral role in the creation of Western Civilisation.

Robert Graves believed that linguistic evidence revealed the kykeon to include some kind of mushroom. Terence McKenna supported this assertion, pointing out that psilocybin-containing mushrooms had both the capacity to cause extreme psychospiritual change and the safety profile that would have allowed thousands to use them every year without getting a reputation for being dangerous.

The claimed benefits of the Eleusinian Mysteries included losing one’s fear of death, gaining a belief in the afterlife, learning to understand the will of the divine and improvement of moral rectitude. These benefits are very similar to those claimed by modern psychedelic users – Erowid.org lists hundreds of mystical experiences of people who have taken psilocybin.

It’s apparent from these arguments that the use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments played a role in the moral and civil development of Western peoples during our greatest ages. But the potential of psychedelics to induce spiritual insight is not limited to the ancient age or to the West.

The Marsh Chapel Experiment conducted by Walter Pahnke in 1962 discovered that psilocybin is capable of inducing powerful spiritual experiences in modern people. A long-term follow-up questionnaire found “experimental subjects wrote that the experience helped them to recognise the arbitrariness of ego boundaries, increase their depth of faith, increase their appreciation of eternal life [etc.]”

One of the participants in the Marsh Chapel Experiment noted in the long-term follow-up, regarding death, “I’ve been there. Been there and come back. And it’s not terrifying, it doesn’t hurt.” Such an insight is profoundly spiritual. Many of the other participants made similar observations. One remembered their experience as “one of the high points of their spiritual life”.

This experiment demonstrated that the link between psilocybin and spirituality can be established within a modern, scientific paradigm. More recent research has supported this, with a 2024 paper in Current Psychology finding that “psychedelic use is linked with a variety of subjective indicators of spiritual growth, including stronger perceived connections with the divine, a greater sense of meaning, increased spiritual faith, increased engagement in religious and spiritual practices, an increase in feelings of unity and self-transcendence, positive changes in worldview, increased connectedness with others, and reduced fear of death”.

Albert Hofmann described how the teonanacatl of the Aztecs was a psilocybin-containing mushroom. This teonanacatl, or “flesh of the gods”, was used as a spiritual sacrament to commune with the divine. Indigenous North Americans have used psilocybin-containing mushrooms as entheogens for thousands of years. The Aztec use of entheogens, including both mushrooms and others, is extensive.

R Gordon Wasson believed that the soma referenced in the Rig Veda was the fly agaric amanita muscaria. Supporting his contention was the fact that Siberian shamans were still using this mushroom for spiritual purposes. More recently, Russian researchers have found evidence suggesting the active ingredient in soma was psilocybe cubensis. In either case, psychoactive mushrooms have a history of religious and spiritual use in India as well.

Although the record of historical psychedelic use is not as strong in Europe as it is in the Americas and Asia, there is still evidence of magic mushroom use in Spain from some 6,000 years ago.

In New Age spirituality, psychedelics are used extensively. In Nelson, where I am from, it’s common to use psychedelics as spiritual sacraments outside the purview of any institutional authority. “Mushroom Season” describes the time of the year beginning in early winter and ending around midwinter when psilocybin-containing mushrooms are foraged, dried and consumed as spiritual sacraments.

In light of all this, significant questions arise concerning the human rights implications of New Zealand’s drug laws as they pertain to psychedelic substances. Once it is understood that psychedelics are spiritual sacraments, there’s a compelling argument to be made that restrictions on their use infringe upon the freedom of religion and belief, a fundamental human right protected under various international treaties to which New Zealand is a signatory.

Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to freedom of religion” and “to manifest his belief in practice”. Given the widespread use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments throughout time and space, this right must surely encompass the right to use psychedelics to manifest spiritual belief in practice.

An appropriate reading of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act suggests that the right to use psychedelics for spiritual purposes is guaranteed. In reality, however, a hierophant who wanted to conduct a sacramental ritual akin to the Eleusinian Mysteries could potentially face life imprisonment for the supply of Class A drugs.

This letter seeks to understand how current New Zealand drug laws reconcile with the rights of individuals to practice their spirituality freely, especially when such practices involve substances that are currently classified under the Misuse of Drugs Act.

The laws against the use of psychedelics for spiritual purposes reflect, to a major extent, the historical Christian dogma against pharmakeia. This is the same dogma that led the Christian fanatics under Alaric to destroy the Eleusinian Mysteries in 396 by killing its priests, that led the inquisitors of medieval Europe to burn witches at the stake for using spiritual sacraments, and which inspired the Catholic invaders of the Americas to eliminate the sacramental use of teonanacatl by murdering the shamans who specialised in it.

It has also been suggested that much of the modern opposition to the use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments comes from organised religious groups who want to position themselves as ticket-clipping intermediaries between the people and divinity. However, as can be seen from reading the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, Kiwis have the right to commune with divinity without the need of an intermediary. This necessarily means the right to use spiritual sacraments.

As other laws based on Christian prejudices – such as those regarding marital rape, homosexuality, prostitution and abortion – have been discarded in favour of greater freedom, the laws prohibiting the use of psychedelics for spiritual purposes ought to be discarded. Indeed, many countries and territories have reformed their psychedelic drug laws, based on arguments such as the ones made in this letter, plus others.

In closing, I respectfully request a detailed clarification or review of how New Zealand’s drug policies align with the principles of religious and spiritual freedom and human rights. Understanding the government’s perspective on this matter would not only inform those within New Zealand who use psychedelics as spiritual sacraments but would also contribute to broader discussions on drug policy reform that respects cultural and spiritual diversity.

Thank you for considering this important issue. I look forward to your insights and hope for a dialogue that can potentially lead to policies that honour both the law and the deeply held spiritual convictions of many New Zealanders.

Yours sincerely,

Vince McLeod

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The Working-Class White Question

Conventional political understanding is that the left wing is for the working class and the right wing is for the ruling class. But conventional understanding is in the process of being replaced by an alternative politics. In the politics of the 21st Century, the left wing is for browns and blacks. This has raised a number of, until now, unanswered questions.

Perhaps the foremost of those questions is: what is the position of working-class whites in the new paradigm?

The labour movements that formed in the West in the 19th and early 20th Centuries were almost entirely white. They formed in opposition to the capitalist interests that were also almost entirely white. But when globalists won World War Two, and began the mass importation of cheap Third World labour to the West, the white working class were put in a bind.

According to the Marxists, the white working class were obliged to embrace their replacements. The world’s working class were prophecised by Marx to come together across international borders, and so the destruction of national consciousness through mass cheap labour imports was a good thing. The white working class would have to recognise that they and the newcomers were of a shared mission: to destroy the capitalist system.

Working-class whites, however, didn’t feel like they had much in common with the newcomers. For one thing, the vast majority of working-class whites have at least some middle-class people in their extended family. For another, the newcomers usually hated the working-class whites and made that hatred obvious.

This caused working-class white sentiments to split: some embraced working-class culture, some embraced white culture, and others bunked down into an exclusivist working-class white culture that was hostile to outsiders. The net result was the shattering of working-class white solidarity and the neutralisation of working-class whites as a political force.

Today, we see working-class whites, on account of being white, forced to take a back seat to everyone else, even when those others are wealthier. Working-class whites are excluded from racial scholarships just as much as Bill Gates’s kids are. Working-class whites can also be, and often are, excluded from certain jobs under Diversity, Inclusion and Equity initiatives.

Naturally, this has led to immense resentment among working-class whites towards the Western political establishment. This resentment is strongest for those leftists who claim to be fighting for the white working class, but who in reality are fighting for an ideology that doesn’t care at all about working-class whites.

The working-class white question, then, is a way of distinguishing sane leftists from insane wokists.

If a person truly supports the underdog, they will support the working-class whites upon whose backs industrial civilisation was built, and who still bear the majority of the intergenerational trauma incurred through the various wars of the past 100 years: the same working-class whites who are currently getting squeezed out of housing all over the West.

If they are an insane wokist, by contrast, they might consider working-class whites traitors for their refusal to support the globalist revolution. Thus they will not care about the suffering of working-class whites from the mass importation of Third World cheap labour. That suffering is just a means to the end of globalist revolution.

Thus sane leftists can be distinguished from insane ones, simply by asking them what they think about working-class whites.

A leftist might make the argument that some particular racial group is disadvantaged because of colonisation, and therefore deserves special treatment by way of compensation. Very well. But what, then, explains the disadvantage of working-class whites?

If a left-wing politician makes the argument that browns and blacks are disadvantaged by colonisation, but working-class whites, who may be poorer than those browns and blacks, are advantaged by that same colonisation, and therefore are obliged to pay some of the reparations that are due from the whites to the browns and blacks, that politician is the enemy.

Likewise if a politician says that browns and blacks are poor because they have not had a chance yet, but working-class whites are poor because they have had a chance and have already blown it, that politician is the enemy. This is akin to saying that working-class whites are the only truly low-IQ faction of society, and therefore deserve a place at the very bottom of the ladder.

Working-class whites need to realise that, if a left-wing politician doesn’t support working-class whites explicitly, they will not support working-class whites at all. The fact that they are on the left cannot be taken to mean that they implicitly support working-class whites.

The working-class white question is a way for working-class whites to determine if a given leftist is a friend or a foe.

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Ambassadors Of Weed

The cannabis referendum in 2020 may have failed (even if non-Chinese voters voted in favour of it), but it was close enough that no-one has really complained about the liberal medicinal cannabis regime that the Sixth Labour Government introduced.

It’s now very, very easy to get hold of a medicinal cannabis prescription. There are now numerous outfits that will give you a prescription after a teleconsultation. Some of these might demand that you go through a multi-stage process of first trying CBD oil, then THC oil, before you can first get a prescription for THC flowers. But it’s not a difficult process.

Despite this ease, cannabis is not fully accepted in New Zealand. Decades of Drug War programming has brainwashed hordes of idiots into thinking that cannabis fries brains, causes violence and sexual assaults, and is a gateway to criminality. The truth about cannabis doesn’t matter. The perceptions are what lead to the opposition.

In almost every case where cannabis has become legal (excepting Thailand and a few other places) it only became so after a long struggle. The masses have been brainwashed for so many decades to see cannabis as something evil that changing mass perception is something that can only happen slowly.

Millions of conversations must be had before widespread acceptance of cannabis can exist. This must consist of millions of people hearing from multiple other people each how cannabis helped them, whether medicinally, recreationally or spiritually. And then millions of slow realisations that the government lied about it.

Not only must cannasceptics hear the arguments for cannabis law reform, they must hear them from people they respect if they are to change their opinions.

Whether people accept it or not, human society is status-based. This is how we have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years: in tribes where the higher your status, the higher your chance of surviving and reproducing. Status-seeking and status-judging are as hard-wired into us as sleeping.

Thus, people are more likely to become accepting of something if they see high-status people engaging in it. Status can be hard to judge, but most people realise that polite, happy, pro-social people are higher status than bitter, angry and resentful people.

This essay is an encouragement to all the new legal cannabis users to consider themselves ambassadors of weed.

Many people will not have met a medicinal cannabis user before. So if you can create a polite, happy, pro-social impression on such people, it will normalise in the public consciousness the idea that cannabis users are good people. Let’s not forget, most people who voted no in the cannabis referendum did so because they hated cannabis users.

Some political ambassadors end up representing civilisation among the savages. If you are a cannabis user, this is essentially what you are, among all the pissheads, screen zombies and painkiller addicts. So don’t forget it! Act like you are surrounded by ferals, because you are. Modern drug culture, with its belief in the harmlessness of alcohol and the absolute harm of everything else, is a mass psychosis.

This essay, then, is an encouragement for those with medicinal cannabis prescriptions to act as if they were early traders with cannibal tribes. Try not to shock the natives of Boozelandia too much. They’re superstitious and poorly educated. Try to act in a friendly and understanding manner.

This especially relates to doctors and other medical staff.

If you get a prescription for e.g. Tilray 10:10 oil, such that you are directed to take 1mg every day from a 40mg bottle, then take 1mg every day. Don’t drink half the bottle on the first day and then start hassling the doctor for refills. Holding to the prescribed dose will convince people that it’s possible to use cannabis responsibly without ending up like Trainspotting.

None of this is to say that anyone should use less cannabis or not enjoy it.

Modern Rockefeller medicine has been slow to realise it, but one of the main psychiatric benefits of cannabis is precisely that it gets you high. Being high is the opposite of being low, and being low for too long (so that you get stuck there) is commonly known as depression. Therefore, cannabis is a cure for depression.

I have personally found that cannabis can stop dead all manner of suicidal and/or homicidal ideation, and this is primarily achieved by making you feel good when you would otherwise have felt bad. This sounds straightforward to most people, but it’s still a shock to those who believe that people need to suffer for various reasons of character building/anti-degeneracy/religion/sadism.

Anyone who implies that cannabis is bad because it makes people happy is the sort of authoritarian who ought to be kept far from any decision-making. So, please, enjoy it to the max. As with so many other things, an intelligent balance is necessary.

If New Zealand is ever to step fully into the 21st Century and legalise cannabis, it will first require acceptance of cannabis users by the herd. This will require ambassadors of weed to create that acceptance through positive interactions.

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Clean And Dirty Information, And How To Tell The Difference

This essay describes a concept in information science. This is a concept that is of extreme importance in today’s Post-Truth Age, now that the media is even more full of propaganda than usual. It relates to the art and science of deciding whether a given set of information is trustworthy.

There are already conceptions of clean vs. dirty data. However, those conceptions are inadequate, because cleanliness is considered the same thing as accuracy. As such, they are not useful, because it would be simpler and easier just to use the term ‘accurate’ instead of ‘clean’.

A useful conception of clean vs. dirty information has to take into account the moral dimension of the people promulgating the information. Essentially, then, clean information comes from a clean source who cares about the truth only, with no view to the propaganda value of the information, and dirty information comes from a dirty source, who doesn’t care about the truth at all.

This division is very simple, but applying it in the real world of propaganda is highly complex.

For one thing, it takes great knowledge of the world and of the people in it to make accurate judgments about other people’s biases. The usual, poorly-educated approach is to trust people based on whether they have attributes in common with oneself: race, class, education, occupation etc. The more qualities they have in common, the more trusted.

Another poorly-educated approach used by many people is to determine truth based on whether the speaker has a high rank in the listener’s herd or not. So one’s pastor, boss, father or club leader becomes the authority to which one listens. All that matters is a high position in a friendly dominance hierarchy. This was the approach described in detail by Edward Bernays in Propaganda.

It can safely be said that all information from a political source is dirty. Any press release put out by a political party can be considered filthy. So can any article or book written by a member of a political party. The greater the influence of politics on any source of information, the dirtier it is.

It can also safely be said that most information from religious sources, particularly Abrahamic ones, is dirty. This is especially true of those who are seeking to gain followers for money or political power. Anyone who says that you have to obey them or suffer everlasting pushishment in a Hell Realm can be confidently written off as a dirty source. But in this regard, as with others, the world’s religions vary greatly.

Here it’s necessary to look at the reputations of the people pushing the information. Have they murdered their way around the world over the centuries? Do they regularly sexually abuse their children? Do they practice barbarisms such as infant genital mutilation? Do they have transparently sadistic animal slaughter protocols?

Perhaps there was once a time when the mainstream media was a clean source of information. This was back in the times when honest people chose to become journalists for the sake of spreading the truth (i.e. before the Charlie Mitchells took over). Today, no rational or intelligent person can trust anything in the mainstream media.

It used to be possible to trust scientists, because a lot of the people drawn to academia are the sort of person who values truth above merely material concerns such as political power or wealth. But then corporations started buying research favourable to their products. It turns out that scientists are only slightly harder to buy than politicians.

Who actually does tell the truth?

In order to reliably tell the truth, a person has to believe that there are positive consequences for speaking truth and negative consequences for telling lies. They have to believe in something like karma, or at least the Law of Attraction, before they can be trusted to put the truth before their own interests.

This is to say that it’s possible to trust genuinely spiritual people. But there, again, is another major problem: usually it’s impossible to tell if someone is genuinely spiritual or not. The low-IQ approach is to trust people at the top of the same religious herd as yourself. High-IQ people go on the reputation of the source among other high-IQ people.

If you would ask the ten most intelligent people you know who they consider clean sources of information, and if more than one of them suggested the same source, you could be reasonably sure that source was clean. This is the same logic as academic peer review, and, while an effective way of distinguishing clean from dirty, it’s far from infallible.

The tough news is that there’s no truly reliable way to tell if someone is a clean source of information other than going through everything they have written or said, comparing all facts therein stated to known truths, and subjecting their logic to the most rigourous examination. If they regularly make predictions that turn out to be false, that’s a good sign they’re a dirty source.

Perhaps the two rules of thumb are firstly: never trust an authority figure, because they have reason to lie to you. Secondly: prefer to trust someone who is trusted by smart people and distrusted by dumb people.

The great thing about clean information is that it can be absorbed without the need to take time and energy correcting for bias. A truly clean source of information is worth gold in the information marketplace of 2023. In this age of pervasive AI-generated content though, best of luck finding it.

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