Magic mshrooms: "demedicalisation of dying"

I recently read an article about this but it's old hat as this essay from 2004 suggests.

From The Hallucinogenic Way of Dying:

Almost as soon as Dr. Charles Grob secured approval to study the effects of psilocybin on Stage IV cancer patients, he faced another challenge, one nearly as formidable.
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Psilocybin is relatively safe; significantly safer, in fact, than the drug Grob had initially sought to use for the study, MDMA (otherwise known as "Ecstasy"); according to most research, you'd have to ingest your own body weight in "magic mushrooms" to poison yourself. But it's still a Schedule I drug, regarded by the federal authorities as having a high potential for abuse and no medical application.
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Grob hopes to find that, in addition to reducing psychological distress associated with impending death, psilocybin is the rare substance that can safely reduce a cancer sufferer's need for pain medication – not because it blunts pain, as morphine does, but because it "changes one's perception of pain."

The whole essay is worth reading but it just confirms my hunch, after thirty years of working in pharmacy that herbal drugs are illegal because they would cut into big pharmacy's profits. They work better and have fewer nasty side effects and they're basically free - god-given.

I have prescriptions for quite a few drugs that have "a high potential for abuse" but they are not classed as Schedule I drug because they are manufactured by big pharmacy. The problem is their side-effects which affect one's "quality of life". Most man-made drugs are two-edged swords. Think about the TV commercials for minor irritations like itches and sneezes. They all end up by saying that there is a "possibility" that you will piss your liver out through your kidneys. I'm sorry; but even nausea and constipation (side-effects of many man-made "painkillers" like morphine and codeine and all opiates) is a "quality of life" issue.

From Using 'magic mushrooms' to reduce anxiety in the final hours of life:

A medical ethics expert has said hallucinogenic drugs could be used to enhance the experience of dying.

The controversial suggestions include using ecstasy and 'magic mushrooms' to encourage closer bonding with family members and reduce anxiety in the final hours of life.

Robin Mackenzie, director of medical law and ethics at the University of Kent, will speak out at a workshop in London today to call for people to be given more choice over how they die.

Dr Mackenzie told the Independent newspaper: 'We have the technology to enhance the experience of dying.'
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She said: 'My research into the demedicalisation of dying suggests that there is a groundswell of people wanting to exercise choices in dying beyond euthanasia and palliative care options.

'We are encouraged to manage our lives and managing our deaths could be part of that.

'I can see good reasons why doctors don't want to be involved. But that will increase the demand for self-help measures.'

For a "real life" story read Stairway to Heaven: Psychedelics Soothe Dying.

I'm all for the "demedicalisation of dying." Or at least the de-institutionilization of death. It's the difference between dining in a fine restaurant and getting an intravenous infusion of "nutrition" in hospital. Anybody got any "magic mushrooms?"

Occupy Wall Street: the "herbal tea party"

I know where they're coming from - but...

Do you want chamomile or patchouli in your hot water?

I was born and raised in Africa and to me these "impoverished" neo-hippies are risible.

Taylor Marvin checks the math of the above image, which has been making the rounds:

Is this true? Is the income of the bottom 99% of US citizens in the top 1% of world income? Short answer: maybe. From the World Bank, World Development Indicators dataset, in 2009 per capita US income was $45,989, compared to a world average of $8,599. Plugging this into the Global Rich List income comparison tool tell us that the average American falls into the top 1.43% of humanity, suggesting that the 99 Percent graphic’s claim is just off.

Adbusters behind "Occupy Wall Street"

We all know that the kids camping out in NY are "useful idiots" but who are the agents provocateurs Marxist/Leninist puppeteers manipulating them?

Adbusters!

A friend sent me over a well thought-out critique of the event from Mother Jones. When I saw the third word in the article, "Adbusters," I immediately looked away from my screen and said out loud "Oh dear God. The poor kids..." The article clearly states Adbusters' hand in perpetuating this into being, which is exactly the problem. Adbusters makes caviar socialists like Dominique Strauss-Kahn look like the salt of the earth, saviors of the working class. They basically prey on college students and twenty-somethings unsure of themselves but with distrust in authority, selling their massive and expensive glossy magazine. The pages reek of anarchist navel-gazing and wankery and self-important "down with corporations/big business/capitalism" screeds that really say little if anything at all.

But worst is Adbusters' method of "protesting," called "culture jamming."

It's a cross between an elaborate prank and choosing not to do something voluntarily. "Buy Nothing Day," a protest to Black Friday by buying...nothing? "Digital Detox Week," a protest to technology by not using it for a week? To anyone else, these "culture jams" look really silly. But Adbusters sincerely believes that performing these acts of "protest," rather than confronting and attacking the institutions that harm culture directly, is the best way of changing the culture. Really. And when you ask how the culture should change, they blather without outlining a specific agenda. Hell, Adbusters' whole existence seems bent on the hopes that nobody will notice that when challenged, they are incapable of making a coherent and compelling argument defending their beliefs and politics, or seeing that their actions may not have an impact. They live in a detached fantasy world similar to Sarah Palin's, only much bigger.

Were Occupy Wall Street an organic creation, then I'd be slightly more sympathetic to the cause. But this is Adbusters' wet dream: Twisting and diluting the positive and overwhelming force of the Arab Spring (even name-checking Tahrir in their announcement of Occupy Wall Street), even going as far as warping the definition of civil disobedience, to create a slightly more advanced form of culture jamming that might give them the attention they so crave. Of course the people in Occupy Wall Street don't have clear reasons or goals. Adbusters made it that way. And that alone fills me with rage.

My immediate thought is: Who's behind Adbusters?

Here's their website.

Wikipedia:

Adbusters Media Foundation is a not-for-profit, anti-consumerist, pro-environment organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The foundation describes itself as "a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age."

The Adbusters Media Foundation publishes the reader-supported, advertising-free Adbusters, an activist magazine with an international circulation of 120,000 devoted to challenging consumerism.

Lasn and Schmalz sound like "useful idiots" too. Where do they get their money? Or maybe just typical opportunistic predators:

In 2004, Adbusters began selling vegan, indy shoes...The V2 is designed by Canadian shoe designer John Fluevog. It is made from organic hemp and recycled car tires."

Even though the founders are "Jews", they have been accused of anti-semitism. Sounds just like the opportunistic "Jews" in Hollywood.

Culture Jam:

Adbusters is the brainchild of Kalle Lasn, an Estonian-born documentary filmmaker. He spent his childhood in a German refugee camp and in Australia. Lasn founded a market research company in Tokyo in the 1960s and eventually moved to Vancouver, Canada. For twenty years, he produced documentaries for PBS and Canada’s National Film Board. Then, as he tells it, a “realization” hit him.

Lasn stood in a Canadian supermarket parking lot frustrated because he had to insert a quarter into a cart to shop there. He jammed his quarter in so that the cart became inoperable. This was the first “culture jam” (quite literally). “I didn’t stop to analyze whether this was ethical or not,” Lasn would later explain in his book. “I just let my anger flow.”
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Adbusters magazine began as a local quarterly in 1989 with three full-time volunteers and a circulation of 5,000 copies. Now an international bi-monthly (still advertisement-free), it boasts a dozen editors, over 250 freelancers, and a circulation of 120,000. Two-thirds of those readers are American, but there are subscribers in more than 60 countries. The magazine is the top-selling Canadian title in the U.S., and can be found at mainstream outlets like Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Leafing through a copy of Adbusters, however, the typical book-browser is likely to be shocked. The publication is a sort of MAD Magazine for the pretentious -- but much more sinister. There are always parodies and rip-offs of well-known ads. There are articles on how to be a better activist, and justifying the targeting of activism’s latest disfavored industry. And there is art: sometimes obvious, sometimes incomprehensible. One recent issue included a picture of adolescents giving the finger, and a photograph of hair being plucked from a human nipple.
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At the heart of Adbusters is hatred of big business, in any form. As Naomi Klein writes in No Logo, “Simply put, anticorporatism is the brand of politics capturing the imagination of the next generation of troublemakers and shit-disturbers, and we need only look to the student radicals of the 1960s and the ID [identity politics] warriors of the eighties and nineties to see the transformative impact such a shift can have.”

This leads Adbusters to its animus: the desire to make corporations extinct.
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Self-described culture jammers are typically also rabidly opposed to economic globalization and harbor virulent hatred for multinational corporations. Don’t call them “lefties,” though. Lasn thinks the Left is too “establishment” these days.
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Despite all its bluster about the virtues of an advertising-free world, Adbusters uses the very techniques it excoriates corporations for. It uses marketing to try and kill marketing.
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Why do Adbusters writers and editors hate personal choice so much? Because their utopia would be a nightmare for most Americans. “What makes you think you have the right to drive around with a ton of metal wrapped around you,” asks the September/October 2003 issue, “the right to twist a tap and get hot water, the right to flick a switch and get your house warmed up?” Were the Adbusters group to get its way, hundreds of years of progress would vanish.
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Adbusters generally prefers rage to discernment. “Let your anger out. When it wells up suddenly from deep in your gut, don’t suppress it -- channel it, trust it, use it. Don’t be so unthinkingly civil all the time,” Kalle Lasn advises. “Rage drives revolutions.”

The very name of the group implies destruction of private property. This is specifically advocated in nearly every issue of the magazine. Of course, its leaders prefer to couch this directive in lofty rhetoric, thinking of themselves as freedom fighters. “Consumer capitalism is by its very nature unethical,” Lasn writes, “and therefore it’s not unethical to jam it … liberating a billboard in the middle of the night can be a rather honest and joyful thing to do.”
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The slick glossy has a cover price of $7.95 -- more than twice the price of People, Vogue, or GQ. The Adbusters website features a plethora of products for sale, including videos, posters, calendars, postcards, books, and even a 3x5-foot “corporate” flag -- the American flag with the stars replaced by corporate logos. In 2002, Adbusters suggested substituting its version for the real Stars and Stripes on July 4 in front of stores, schools, and embassies.

Lasn is Estonian i.e. born and raised under Soviet socialism and, just like his fellow former communists, the Russian kleptocrats, is not human but a cockroach. Sadly the "useful idiots" will keep buying his bullshit at $7.95 a pop.