Coast 2 Coast: Dennis McKenna

Date: 11-25-12
Host: George Knapp
Guests: Dennis J. McKenna, David Paulides

George Knapp welcomed ethno-pharmacologist Dennis McKenna, who has been studying plant hallucinogens for over forty years, and is convinced there are major therapeutic applications of psychedelics. They discussed the groundbreaking work McKenna did with his brother Terence, the great raconteur of wide-reaching philosophical ideas.

In the first hour, former lawman turned investigative journalist, David Paulides, detailed a potential breakthrough in Bigfoot DNA research.

Biography:

Dennis McKenna is an ethno-pharmacologist who has studied plant hallucinogens for over forty years. In 1975 he co-authored the book Invisible Landscape with his brother Terence McKenna. The book was based on their investigations of Amazonian hallucinogens in 1971. He also acted as co-star of his brother's book True Hallucinations, which further described their experiences while in the Amazon. He earned his Master's degree in botany at the University of Hawaii in 1979, and his Doctorate in Botanical Sciences in 1984 from the University of British Columbia. Since that time, he has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon. In 2001 he joined the faculty of the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute, serves on the Advisory Board of the American Botanical Council, and has been a board member for Botanical Dimensions. In 2012, Dennis released The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss!, a biography of his life's adventures with Terence.

Biography:

David Paulides, a former police investigator, has applied his skills to questioning Bigfoot witnesses. The results he has achieved in gaining access to witnesses and getting detailed information from them is both remarkable and intriguing.

GMO Food Dangers

Are Genetically Engineered Foods and Crops Akin to Weapons of Mass Destruction?

Jeffrey M. Smith is the author of the world's bestselling book on the health dangers of genetically modified organisms (GMOs),

Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies about the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You're Eating.
His second book, Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods,

is the authoritative work on GMO health dangers. It includes 65 health dangers, linking GMOs in our food to toxic and allergic reactions,
infertility, and damage to virtually every internal organ studied in lab animals.
The book summarizes why ending GM foods must urgently become our world's top food safety priority.

More Information about Jeffrey M. Smith

Download the Non-GMO Shopping Guide Brochure

What should every person know about the food they ingest. The documentary "The Future of Food" changed the way we think about food(and continues to do so) by answering this very question.

But, just how has food actually changed? Do we need to worry about genetically modified foods? What about artificial foods? Learn all this more as Kurt Olson, host of the Educational Forum, sits down with Deborah Garcia the award winning creator of "The Future of Food."
The Massachusetts School of Law at Andover

FROM THE PEACE REVOLUTION PODCAST

Where do 53% of your Tax dollars go?

I don’t usually get into politics; however this presentation really sums up an important issue that is causing great harm to many human beings around the world, crippling the US economy, robbing families quality of life and our reputation as a global citizen. Whoever you vote for, I would like to ask you greatly consider their position on the wars and spending most of our collective treasure on so called “defense”. The world is no safer from these psychopathic economic priorities & policies. Please make this an important issue in your decision, try not to get caught up only in the topics the candidates wish to discuss. At the bottom is a clip from my new favorite series, I typically do not watch TV but really enjoy The Newsroom: The Complete First Season. Thanks for your attention! ~EROCx1

From: Tragedy & Hope

U.S. Arms Sales Tripled In 2011 To $66.3 Billion
From: The Huffington Post
Date: 08/27/2012

Worldwide weapons sales by the United States tripled in 2011, according to a new report by the Congressional Research Service.

U.S. arms sales to both developed and developing nations reached $66.3 billion last year, up from $21.4 billion in 2010, the report found. Russia, the nation with the second highest weapon sales, sold $4.8 billion worth of arms. Meanwhile, total worldwide weapon sales nearly doubled to $85.3 billion, making the U.S. responsible for more than three-quarters of the global total.

Some of the biggest purchasers of U.S. weapons were Middle Eastern nations, including Saudi Arabia, whose purchase of 84 advanced F-15 fighters in part accounted for a $30 billion bill. The U.S. also sold around $2 billion worth of antimissile batteries to Taiwan, a deal that stoked the ire of China and caused tension during a diplomatic Chinese military visit last July.

For its part, Russia has also faced criticism for its weapons dealings with Syria, which remains embroiled in a civil war since March 2011.

The United Nations failed to reach a consensus last month on a treaty to increase regulation of the arms industry, but further talks are expected leading up to a possible vote by the end of the year. 

If your curious, I’m considering Gary Johnson for President

New Dawn Magazine | Graham Hancock Revisiting 2012

See: http://www.grahamhancock.com/tours/lectures.php for details on Graham's upcoming speaking events in the US, Australia and the UK during October, November and December 2012.
---------
As the Mayan Calendar comes to an end (most interpretations of the Mayan Long Count place this epic event on or near 21 December 2012), and over 17 years after he first published his seminal book on the subject, Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization, Graham Hancock speaks out about the state of our planet, consciousness, time travel, and what he has learned on his remarkable journey through life.
In this provocative and often poignant interview, Graham speaks passionately and at length on these, and many other emotionally charged subjects, such as Atlantis, the significance of Göbekli Tepe, and his own experience with marijuana, ayahuasca, and DMT.

The interview is by Andrew Gough, who met with Graham in July 2012 in Graham's home in the English West Country. A condensed version of the interview can be found in the September 2012 edition of New Dawn Magazine [http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/], and an extended version will be featured in The Heretic Magazine [http://thehereticmagazine.com/] (a new history and mystery magazine for which Andrew is Editor) on 1 November 2012, and still another version will be featured on Andrew's 'Arcadia' [http://www.andrewgough.com/] website soon after that.

Please note that the interview was originally conducted for New Dawn Magazine and was only recorded for purposes of converting Graham's audio commentary into text. We apologize any loss of sound quality and hope that you nevertheless enjoy the interview.

www.grahamhancock.com

September 11, 2001

Today is the anniversary of the most horrific attack against American civilians in the history of our country. My heart hurts when I think of all the victims and their families.

This song brought me to tears this morning as it played on the radio during my drive to have surgery, it really struck me how much pain children must are endure when their parents are murdered and I thought if something went wrong in the operating room, my children would be in the same situation adding extra fear and anxiety during this difficult time. Fortunately for me, everything went well and I can continue being a father unlike many others who were not as fortunate. This attack has really caused a great deal of misery and suffering. Not only for the American victims, but also for all those who’s homes have turned into war zones thanks to the now eleven year “War on Terror”. This is the greatest tragedy of our generation and unless the evidence is heavily examined,questioned and awareness is raised it will continue indefinitely as there is no clear objective or enemy,

To those who think these “wars” are justified and and believe in “Somebody is going to pay." ~George W. Bush, Sept 11th, 2001 mentality. Please take notice that the collapse of our economy coincidently matches these military actions, making politicians and the military industrial complex more wealthy then ever. Most of Americas “collective treasure” is spent killing civilians, a few “bad guys” and policing the Middle East. So far 48,430 US military personal are dead or wounded, currently about the same as American Revolutionary War. There are millions of dead & brutally wounded Iraqi and Afghanistan people, many innocent civilians, women and children whose families are all suffering. So while we spend today in memorial of these human beings whose lives have or are being destroyed. I ask that you spend 5 minutes to listen to our friend James Corbett's presentation on 911. If any of this makes an impression on you, please share it, do your own investigating and make it clear to friends, neighbors and politicians that you want this “war” to end. Lets spend Americas resources on making the world a better place, not perpetuating war zones. I thank you for your time and consideration. Peace & Love ~EROCx1

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Everything you ever wanted to know about the 9/11 conspiracy theory in under 5 minutes.

(French, German, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese translations of this video.)

TRANSCRIPT: On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 men armed with boxcutters directed by a man on dialysis in a cave fortress halfway around the world using a satellite phone and a laptop directed the most sophisticated penetration of the most heavily-defended airspace in the world, overpowering the passengers and the military combat-trained pilots on 4 commercial aircraft before flying those planes wildly off course for over an hour without being molested by a single fighter interceptor.

These 19 hijackers, devout religious fundamentalists who liked to drink alcohol, snort cocaine, and live with pink-haired strippers, managed to knock down 3 buildings with 2 planes in New York, while in Washington a pilot who couldn’t handle a single engine Cessna was able to fly a 757 in an 8,000 foot descending 270 degree corkscrew turn to come exactly level with the ground, hitting the Pentagon in the budget analyst office where DoD staffers were working on the mystery of the 2.3 trillion dollars that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had announced “missing” from the Pentagon’s coffers in a press conference the day before, on September 10, 2001.

Luckily, the news anchors knew who did it within minutes, the pundits knew within hours, the Administration knew within the day, and the evidence literally fell into the FBI’s lap. But for some reason a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists demanded an investigation into the greatest attack on American soil in history.

The investigation was delayed, underfunded, set up to fail, a conflict of interest and a cover up from start to finish. It was based on testimony extracted through torture, the records of which were destroyed. It failed to mention the existence of WTC7, Able Danger, Ptech, Sibel Edmonds, OBL and the CIA, and the drills of hijacked aircraft being flown into buildings that were being simulated at the precise same time that those events were actually happening. It was lied to by the Pentagon, the CIA, the Bush Administration and as for Bush and Cheney…well, no one knows what they told it because they testifiedin secret, off the record, not under oath and behind closed doors. It didn’t bother to look at who funded the attacks because that question is of “little practical significance“. Still, the 9/11 Commission did brilliantly, answering all of the questions the public had (except most of the victims’ family members’ questions) and pinned blame on all the people responsible (although no one so much as lost their job), determining the attacks were “a failure of imagination” because “I don’t think anyone could envision flying airplanes into buildings ” except the Pentagon and FEMA and NORAD and the NRO.

The DIA destroyed 2.5 TB of data on Able Danger, but that’s OK because it probably wasn’t important.

The SEC destroyed their records on the investigation into the insider trading before the attacks, but that’s OK because destroying the records of the largest investigation in SEC history is just part of routine record keeping.

NIST has classified the data that they used for their model of WTC7′s collapse, but that’s OK because knowing how they made their model of that collapse would “jeopardize public safety“.

The FBI has argued that all material related to their investigation of 9/11 should be kept secret from the public, but that’s OK because the FBI probably has nothing to hide.

This man never existed, nor is anything he had to say worthy of your attention, and if you say otherwise you are a paranoid conspiracy theorist and deserve to be shunned by all of humanity. Likewise him, him, him, and her. (and her and her and him).

Osama Bin Laden lived in a cave fortress in the hills of Afghanistan, but somehow got away. Then he was hiding out in Tora Bora but somehow got away. Then he lived in Abottabad for years, taunting the most comprehensive intelligence dragnet employing the most sophisticated technology in the history of the world for 10 years, releasing video after video with complete impunity (and getting younger and younger as he did so), before finally being found in a daring SEAL team raid which wasn’t recorded on video, in which he didn’t resist or use his wife as a human shield, and in which these crack special forces operatives panicked and killed this unarmed man, supposedly the best source of intelligence about those dastardly terrorists on the planet. Then they dumped his body in the ocean before telling anyone about it. Then a couple dozen of that team’s members died in a helicopter crashing Afghanistan.

This is the story of 9/11, brought to you by the media which told you the hard truths about JFK and incubator babies and mobile production facilities and the rescue of Jessica Lynch.

If you have any questions about this story…you are a batshit, paranoid, tinfoil, dog-abusing baby-hater and will be reviled by everyone. If you love your country and/or freedom, happiness, rainbows, rock and roll, puppy dogs, apple pie and your grandma, you will never ever express doubts about any part of this story to anyone. Ever.

This has been a public service announcement by: the Friends of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, SEC, MSM, White House, NIST, and the 9/11 Commission. Because Ignorance is Strength.

I also recommend reading: Eleven Years Later, We Are Still at War

Graham Hancock: Ancient Mysteries

Graham Hancock discusses his views on the following topics:

1 - Precession of the equinoxes
2 - Bringers of wisdom from the Heavens
3 - Monuments aligning to 10,500BC
4 - What happened in 10,500BC?
5 - The Mystery of the Pyramids
6 - The Sarcophagus
7 - Dating Giza
8 - Hidden Halls of Records
9 - Structures on Mars
10 - Cataclysm of Mars
11 - A species with amnesia
12 - Where is the Lost Civilization?

www.grahamhancock.com

Richard Dawkins on Psychedelics

Graham Hancock questions Richard Dawkins on psychedelics and challenging his world view. Dr Dawkins, author of books such as The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author and The God Delusion, is famous for his materialist views about the nature of reality and his belief that "the supernatural... can never offer us a true explanation of the things we see in the world and the universe around us."

On 3 November 2011, Dr Dawkins visited the British city of Bath to promote his new book The Magic of Reality and gave a reading at the Bath Central Library. In the Q&A session following the reading Graham Hancock, author of books such as Fingerprints of the Gods, Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind and Entangled, pointed out to Dr Dawkins that many traditional hunter-gather cultures believe there are other realities -- spirit worlds and so on and so forth -- and concrete techniques, such as the use of psychoactive plants, to access them. "As a scientist," Hancock asked, "have you ever seriously engaged such techniques to have first-hand experience of what they're talking about, and perhaps even to challenge your own concept of what is real?"

In view of Dr Dawkins' influence and importance as a shaper of public opinion his reply, given before an audience of several hundred, is a matter of public record and public interest and shows him to be more open-minded than many of his critics might allege.

Terence McKenna: Final Art Bell Interview

Terence McKenna
Art Bell Interview
Coast to Coast AM
16th July 1999

A longtime sufferer of migraines, in mid-1999 McKenna returned to his home on the big island of Hawaii after a long lecturing tour. He began to suffer from increasingly painful headaches. This culminated in three brain seizures in one night, which he claimed were the most powerful psychedelic experiences he had ever known. Upon his emergency trip to the hospital on Oahu, Terence was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer. For the next several months he underwent various treatments, including experimental gamma knife radiation treatment.Terence describes these experiences in his final Coast to Coast interview with Art Bell on July 16, 1999. He joined the ancestor spirits on April 3, 2000 at the age of 53, with his loved ones at his bedside. He is survived by his brother Dennis, his son Finn, his daughter Klea and many friends, students and admirers.

"I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you'd have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, it's a kind of blessing. It's certainly an opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you're going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights. ... It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, a la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears. " ~Terence McKenna

Right Click and save file as to download Mp3’s
Terence McKenna on Art Bell 1998
Terence McKenna on Art Bell 1997 part 1
Terence McKenna on Art Bell 1997 part 2

Also see the audio files hosted on archive.org
http://archive.org/details/TerenceMckennaWithArtBell

Terence McKenna: Paul Herbert Collection

Hello all, I am excited to announce that our friend Lorenzo recently obtained a precious box of over 150 Terence McKenna workshop & lecture recordings from Paul Herbert at Bruce Damer and Lorenzo Hagerty’s Beyond 2012 conference held at Esalen from June 15 – 17^th 2012. Lorenzo is currently digitizing these tapes and will share this magnificent collection in the order in which Paul recorded them on future episodes of the Psychedelic Salon. He is also providing a photo of each cassette as well as notes and quotations at www.psychedelicsalon.us.

I am including the first 2 tapes here on my blog. Podcast 317 is simply incredible and beautiful. An early 1982 recording of Terence at his best. Of course he never did cease to amaze me, so my enthusiasm could be partially due to the novelty of hearing this recording for the first time but I am certain you will equally enjoy it. He unleashes idea after idea with such elegance and brilliance I can’t really write a description that does it justice.It will take most people many listens to fully appreciate Terence’s work here. So without further ado, here is just the beginning of this amazing gift to our community. Friends please support the Salon however you can to ensure Lorenzo is able to properly host all these, I am certain demand will be high and does this work for the love of it, he deserves our help and then some.

Peace,
EROCx1

Podcast 317 – “New and Old Maps of Hyperspace”

Download: FREE Mp3

PROGRAM NOTES:

This is Tape Number 001 of the Paul Herbert Collection.

Some of the topics covered in this talk:

Two types of shamanism, narcotic and non-narcotic
UFOs and aliens
The end of history – the eschaton
The psychedelic experience
Psilocybin allows dialogue with the Other
Death and afterlife
Dreams
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.]

“The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.”

“Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.”

“Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.”

“The content of the dialogue with ‘the Other’ is a content that indicates that man’s horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, ‘the body is the placenta of the soul’”

“Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.”

“Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.”
[Regarding UFO's] “A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.”

“But a mature humanity could get into a place where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings from messiahs and flying saucers that come along every thousand years or so to mess up the mess that has been created and try and send people off on another tack. And the way to do this is to look at the abysses that confront man as species and individuals and try to unify them. And I think that psilocybin offers a way out because it allows a dialogue with the overmind. You won’t read about it in “Scientific American” or anywhere else. You will carry it out.”

“Escape into the dream. Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs, that they are for escapists. I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapist.”

“All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.”

“We are, in fact, hyperdimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter, and the shadow in matter is the body. And at death, what happens basically, is that the shadow withdraws, or the thing which cast the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases, and matter which had been organized into a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustaining itself against entropy by cycling material in and degrading it and expelling it, that whole phenomenon ceases, but the thing which ordered it is not affected by that.” [From the point of view of the shamanic tradition.]

“In shamanism and certain yogas, Daoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening. You will know what to do. And you will make the clean break.”

“There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical space AND the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.”

“The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the overself.”

“I’m not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won’t be ripped this time.”

“Now your question about the dialogue. I mean this very literally. It speaks to you. You speak to it. It says things.”

More quotes from this talk may be found in Podcast 267.

Podcast 318 – “Psilocybin and the Sands of Time”

Download: FREE Mp3

PROGRAM NOTES:

This is Tape Number 002 of the Paul Herbert Collection.

Some of the topics covered in this talk:

Repression of psychedelic drugs
Element of risk in taking psychedelics
The imagination
Interiorization of the body/exterization of the soul
Death
The importance of psychedelics
Bell’s Theorem

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“I regard [my] degree more or less as a joke because it was self-directed study. They don’t really; there is no degree in shamanism.”

“This [repression of psychedelic drugs] has, in my opinion, held back the Western development of understanding consciousness because quite simply, these states, I do not believe, are accessible by any means other than drugs.”

“There is an element of risk [in using psychedelics]. I never tell people that there isn’t, but I think that the risk is worth it.”

“Psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and causing history, essentially.”

“The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed. The present cultural crisis on the surface of the planet is caused by the fact that this is not a fitting theater for the exercise of imagination. It wrecks the planet. The planet has its own Eco-systemic dynamics, which are not the dynamics of imagination.”
“A birth is a death. Everything you treasure, and believe in, and love, and relate to is destroyed for you when you leave the womb. And you are launched into another modality, a modality that perhaps you would not have chosen but that you cannot do anything about.”

“There is no knowledge without risk taking.”

“It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind.

“Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles, and they occur essentially to bedevil science.”

“The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.”

“I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain.”

“We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.”

So I believe that a technological re-creation of the after-death state is what history pushes toward. And that means a kind of eternal existence where there is an ocean of mind into which one can dissolve and re-form from, but there is also the self, related to the body image but in the imagination. So that we each would become, in a sense, everyone.”

“There can be no turning back. We are either going to change in to this cybernetic, hyperdimentional, hallucinogenic angel, or we are going to destroy ourselves. The opportunity for us to be happy hunters and gatherers integrated into the balance of nature, that fell away 15,000 years ago and cannot be recaptured.”

“It is the people who are ‘far out’ who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.”

“Modernity is a desert, and we are jungle monkeys. And so new evolutionary selective pressures are coming to bear upon the human situation, new ideas are coming to the fore. Psilocybin is a selective filter for this. The wish to go to space is a selective filter for this. Just the wish to know your own mind is a selective filter for this.”

“On these matters of specific fact, like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial and that sort of thing, I haven’t the faintest idea. The mushroom itself is such a mercurial, elusive, Zen sort of personality that I never believe a word it says. I simply entertain its notions and try and sort through them, and I found that to be the most enriching approach to it.”

“Could any symbol be any more appropriate of the ambiguity of human transformation? What mushroom is it that grows at the end of history? Is it Stropharia cubensis, or is it the creation of Edward Teller? This is an unresolved problem.”

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Robert Anton Wilson: The Power of Maybe

Tim Leary, Robert Wilson, 90’s Psychedelia

Sound Photosynthesis presents PSYCHEDELICS IN THE 1990'S - MAPS Conference Compilation. Historical. A gathering together to discuss the fate of psychedelics in the 1990's and their possible regulation or continued prohibition, are a group of speakers with divergent views and past experiences. Nevertheless, they share a deep commitment to the development of a constructive policy towards psychedelics. They graciously agreed to speak to help raise funds for psychedelic research, a field that has been at a standstill for a generation. Participants were: Timothy Leary, Alice Agar Wittine, Ram Dass, Rick Doblin, Mark Kleiman, Robert Zanger, Terence McKenna, Emerson Jackson, Ralph Matzner, Andrew Weil, Laura Huxley, Dennis McKenna, Jerome Beck, and Bruce Eisner. This is the closest you will get if you weren't there to begin with...if you were, this is better than your memories.

Robert Anton Wilson & Timothy Leary
@ The Bridge Psychedelic Conference 1991

Sound Photosynthesis presents Robert Anton Wilson & Timothy Leary @ The Bridge Psychedelic Conference 1991. For the full length recording please contact us at www.sound.photosynthesis.com

History Channel: The Stoned Ages

THE STONED AGES explores the history of drugs. From the early cave dwellers who first stumbled upon psychedelic mushrooms to the over 6000-year-old tradition of opium cultivation in the East to a modern pharmaceutical industry with over 24,000 drugs on the market, drugs have played a role in our lives since well before recorded human history.

THE STONED AGES explores the reasons we've used drugs through the ages to heal our bodies and minds, to connect with a higher power, to feel better, for recreation, to escape, for performance enhancement, and even to prolong our lives while considering the devastating consequences that accompany the choice to use certain drugs. This fascinating, fresh, and insightful documentary will ask the question: overall, have drugs done more to help us or hurt us?

Hosted by Dean Norris, THE STONED AGES will journey through the millennia and look in on the greatest civilizations in human history to discover if drugs helped these societies flourish or fail and whether drug use was holy or hedonistic, a savior or a curse. How can drugs that are worshipped in one society be morally reprehensible and often illegal in another? And what causes some good drugs to go bad?

THE STONED AGES will interview the writers, historians, doctors, pharmaceutical reps, religious leaders, policy makers, FDA scientists, DEA representatives, and drug addicts who shape the often conflicting roles that drugs play in our lives today.

Drugs can kill and enslave, heal and provide hope, and alter our consciousness in deeply profound ways. THE STONED AGES will tell the story of how drugs have helped us become who we are.