Friday Afternoon:

Letter from Albert Hofmann (read by Myron Stolaroff)

In a letter addressed to the Mind States II audience, Dr. Albert Hofmann spoke of the unbreakable connection between the spiritual and material realms.
[Full text of Dr. Hofmann’s letter]

“Psychedelic Culture: One or Many” — Erik Davis

[From the Mind States II brochure]
Though still underground, today's psychedelic scene is no longer exactly counter-cultural. Even as consensus reality grows increasingly trippy, the psychedelic scene itself has diversified. There are scientists and religionists, pagans and transhumans, policy wonks and pranksters, historians and hardcore psychonauts. What does this diversity say about the role that psychedelics now play in society? And how do the psychedelics themselves help us navigate and understand the contradictions that can sometimes arise between these different perspectives?

[Sound bites, but not exact quotes]
One of the best aspects of psychedelic culture is its open-endedness.

A problem with the modern world is the absence of the sacred.

It is the fact that we can’t capture the experience entirely that makes it so powerful.

The primary importance of subjective experience is what psychedelics teach.

When considering set and setting in relation to tribal cultures, the shaman can be thought of as a technician of culture.

It is not always about content. Sometimes the lessons come as a result of the process of going in and out of these various states of mind.

There is a spiritual potential in these molecules.

Alchemists and shamen once guarded information about psychedelics tightly. This is no longer the case, for the genie is seriously out of the bottle.

“Psychoactive Information: The Complexities and Ethical Challenges of Publishing Data About Mind Altering Plants and Chemicals” — Earth and Fire Erowid

[From the Mind States II brochure]
Over the past century, a small but zealous prohibitionist minority has shaped people's choices about psychoactives by influencing legislation, education, and popular media. As the War on Drugs collapses under the weight of its promises and failures, and the Internet catalyzes dramatic changes in publication and communication, we are faced with a difficult transition to a world where information about psychoactives is available from a wide variety of independent sources. Erowid and other drug information web sites make choices that affect people's lives, and the struggle over what to publish is challenging and complex.

[Sound bites, but not exact quotes]
Currently the Erowid website has over 10,000 pages of information and receives almost 20,000 unique visitors each day, most of whom find the site through search engines.

The complexities of providing information about mind altering substances to the general public call for a high degree of ethics.

Although not everyone agrees that the First Amendment right of free speech should apply to information about entheogens, they often receive messages from parents thanking them for providing such useful information.

The only path out of our current drug war insanity is through the dissemination of more and better information about these substances.

Bad information isn’t going to disappear any time soon, so we need to develop systems where the quality of information improves over time.

Prohibition is a doomed policy.

As the power elite have been unable to stop the distribution of these substances, it is unlikely that they will ever be able to stop the dissemination of information about them.