Progressives Now Want “Psychedelic Medicine”

By: Cliff Kincaid -  Accuracy in Media

So-called “medical marijuana” apparently doesn’t cure all of their ailments. Now the progressives want easy access to “psychedelic medicine,” including LSD and Ecstasy.

Working with the George Soros-funded marijuana movement, which has achieved enormous “progress” in the various states, especially Colorado, a group called the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is demanding acceptance of “psychedelics,” or mind-altering drugs that create hallucinations, to be accepted as “legal prescription drugs.”

Don’t laugh. Powerful and wealthy supporters of Barack Obama such as the late Ashawna Hailey, a transgender woman, have been among the noted backers of MAPS. She left her fortune to a slew of left-wing groups, including MAPS, Code Pink, and the Soros-funded Drug Policy Alliance.

A report on a MAPS-sponsored conference has just appeared on a left-wing website called AlterNet under the uplifting headline, “The Enormous Promise of Psychedelics for Sustaining Health, Happiness and Sanity.” The conference was actually titled, “Psychedelic Science 2013,” to give respectability to the use of illegal drugs. The Drug Policy Alliance was a “promotional partner,” along with such groups as the Psychedelic Society of San Francisco.

One presentation, “Communicating the Unspeakable: Linguistic Phenomena in the Psychedelic Sphere,” was about drugs which can “enable a broad and paradoxical spectrum of linguistic phenomena,” including “interior dialogues with the Other, whether framed as the voice of the Logos, an alien communication, or communion with ancestors and spirits…”

Bringing the subject back down to earth, their current project is to promote “the healing potential of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy on psychological and emotional damage caused by sexual assault, war, violent crime, and other traumas.” MDMA is another word for Ecstasy, a synthetic drug described as having amphetamine-like and hallucinogenic properties.

The promotion of an illegal drug for its alleged “medicinal” properties is the same scam used to set the stage for the legalization of marijuana in such states as Colorado, where “medical marijuana” is already out of control. Three people were shot during the 4/20 marijuana celebration in Denver.

Don’t think MAPS doesn’t have its friends on Capitol Hill. When the marijuana movement was taking off, then-Massachusetts Democratic Senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, in 2007, sent a letter to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) urging the agency to approve a “medical marijuana production facility” that was to be under the sponsorship of MAPS. Later, 45 members of Congress signed a similar letter.

MAPS has now moved on to the “psychedelics.”

Although MDMA is classified as a drug with “high abuse potential and no recognized medicinal use,” CNN has favorably reported on the use of MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and quotes MAPS founder Rick Doblin as saying he’s working with the Defense Department in an effort to use the drug on active-duty troops. CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who was offered the job as surgeon general of the United States by President Obama, even narrated a story about a woman claiming relief from an experimental PTSD treatment using the drug MDMA.

Shawn Hailey, also known as Ashawna, supported Obama’s campaign for president and was a member of the MAPS Board of Directors. She passed away in 2011 and left $5.5 million to the organization. She made her money through high-tech companies in Silicon Valley and was a co-founder of Meta-Software Corporation, which was sold to Avanti Corporation in 1996.

She was also a strong supporter of the Marijuana Policy Project, the Soros-backed Drug Policy Alliance, Code Pink and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Actually, “she” was once a “he.” Shawn Hailey was born a man, but changed her gender to female and her name to Ashawna.

In total, she left over $10 million to the liberal-left. The Marijuana Policy Project used some of the money she left them to promote passage last November of the Colorado measure to legalize marijuana. I have previously written about all of the damage that marijuana-on-demand is already causing the people of Colorado.

A search of Federal Election Commission (FEC) records shows that under the name “Shawn Hailey,” she donated $20,000 to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2008, $4,600 to Obama for president in 2007 and 2008, and $23,000 to the Obama Victory Fund in 2007. Another $30,000 went to the DNC in 2009 under the name “Ashawna Hailey.”

A photo of Hailey and Obama is on her memorial site. “Whether it was a morning board meeting, a lunch at Taco Bravo, a dinner with President Obama, or an all night dance, the sparkle of Ashawna will be missed and cherished by us all,” it says.

MAPS, the recipient of most of her largesse, sponsored a conference in 1990 featuring Timothy Leary, identified in literature from the event as the “psychedelic research pioneer,” but who was actually a charlatan who devoted much of his life to glamorizing LSD, marijuana, and other drugs. He eventually went to prison on illegal drug charges.

MAPS founder and executive director Rick Doblin once described himself to High Times magazine as an “LSD therapist,” after “having taken LSD rather often.” He took Leary’s advice to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” before going back to college and eventually starting MAPS in 1986. “His undergraduate thesis at New College of Florida was a 25-year follow-up to the classic Good Friday Experiment, which evaluated the potential of psychedelic drugs to catalyze religious experiences,” his bio says. He then completed a Ph.D. at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Indeed, according to a story about the “Good Friday Experiment,” which occurred in 1962, participants took hallucinogenic drugs and then attended a Good Friday worship service. They were later evaluated as to whether the drugs could produce “pseudo-mystical states.”

Doblin’s bio goes on, “His professional goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana, primarily as prescription medicines but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people…”

The 1960s “New Left,” which became the Weathermen and the Weather Underground, was an outgrowth of this approach. Members of the Weather Underground were involved in arranging the escape from prison of Timothy Leary.

The book, The Harvard Psychedelic Club, discusses how the escape occurred and members of the Weather Underground “rendezvoused with the fugitive,” kept him hidden, then gave him a disguise and a false identity. “Timothy Leary was now ‘William John McNellis,’ a salesman from Salt Lake City,” the author writes. “After hiding out for a week in a farmhouse near Redding, California Leary made his way down to Utah to meet leaders of the Weather Underground, including Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadette [sic] Dohrn. They created ‘William McNellis’ with a forged birth certificate, Social Security card, and hunting license-paper that required no preexisting photo.”

After his escape, Leary had released a message through Bernardine Dohrn’s sister urging communist revolutionaries to “turn on” and continue a campaign of violence and terrorism.

Bernardine Dohrn, who praised the drug-crazed Charles Manson gang killers, herself issued a statement on September 15, 1970, saying:

“Dr. Leary was being held against his will and against the will of millions of kids in this country. He was a political prisoner, captured for the work he did in helping all of us begin the task of creating a new culture on the barren wasteland that has been imposed on this country by Democrats, Republicans, Capitalists and creeps.

“LSD and grass, like the herbs and cactus and mushrooms of the American Indians and countless civilizations that have existed on this planet, will help us make a future world where it will be possible to live in peace.

“Now we are at war.”

The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee decided to look into this matter because of the implications for national and internal security and examined evidence that subversive groups played a significant role in the spread of the drug epidemic—both as propagandists and as traffickers.

The subtitle of the Harvard Psychedelic Club refers to how Timothy Leary and his collaborators “ushered in a New Age for America.” It is coming to pass under Obama, thanks to his transgendered backer.

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.

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SOROS REMAKES AMERICA INTO NARCO NATION

By Cliff Kincaid -  December 7, 2012  - Renew America – cross-posted at AskMarion and h/t to NewsWithViews.com and Liana Smith

As more states embrace legalization of marijuana—a pet cause of George Soros for decades—the British publication The Independent has published a groundbreaking series of articles by journalist Patrick Cockburn on how his son went insane smoking the drug.

Cockburn and his son Henry, who was treated for psychosis and partially recovered, have written an article in which Patrick Cockburn is quoted as saying his son played Russian roulette with cannabis “and lost.”

Henry, who smoked marijuana daily for seven years and was in mental hospitals for about eight years as a result, says, “When I reached a mental hospital, called St Martin’s, I spent three hours walking around the lunch tables trying to listen to my shoes. I thought my shoes were talking to me.”

Patrick Cockburn spent months speaking to the experts in the field and reports on the substantial evidence linking sustained marijuana use with mental illness. One expert, Sir William Paton, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, reveals “that even limited social use of cannabis could precipitate schizophrenia in people who previously had no psychological problems,” and noted that “smoking a single joint could induce schizophrenia-like symptoms such as hallucinations, paranoia and fragmented thought processes.”

“Three-quarters of consumers may take cannabis with no ill effect but the remaining quarter, the genetically vulnerable, play Russian roulette,” Cockburn says.

The added significance of the series of articles by Patrick Cockburn is that he is a left-wing media figure—the son of Marxist author Claud Cockburn—and might be predisposed to believe that marijuana is, as the liberal media constantly tell us, a relatively harmless drug or a substance with “medical” qualities. But he knows the harm it causes firsthand through what it did to his son.

AIM noted back in 2004, in a special report on George Soros, the main financier behind the drug legalization movement, that although marijuana is depicted by the media as a “soft” drug, it has “extremely negative consequences.” The book, Marijuana and Madness, cites studies and evidence from around the world, some of it going back 40 years, linking the use of marijuana to mental illnesses, including schizophrenia and psychosis.

In a previous article for the left-wing publication Counterpunch, Patrick Cockburn took issue with a report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy which played down the dangers associated with marijuana. “They fail to make clear that for people genetically susceptible to psychosis the risks involved in taking cannabis may be lethally high,” he noted. “Cigarettes and alcohol, whatever harm they cause, do not, at a young age, send you mad.”

The Global Commission on Drug Policy is funded by the Open Society Institute of George Soros.

In this country, the case of Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell stands out as a case study of the harmful effects of the drug. Bedell, who shot and wounded two guards at the Pentagon in March of 2010, was a psychotic pothead who hated a government that he believed was standing in the way of his desire to use, grow and glorify marijuana. He virtually worshipped the drug. “I’m a cannabis enthusiast,” he proclaimed.

John Podesta, head of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress (CAP), had suggested on ABC News that the taxing and legalization of marijuana on a national basis could be a way to pay for Obama’s health care plan.

“The pro-cannabis lobby says that the so-called ‘war on drugs’ has failed and legalization or regulation should be tried, though critics argue that no government would ever license a drug that sends at least two percent of its consumers insane,” Cockburn reports.

In the first of Cockburn’s articles, “Is this the ‘tobacco moment’ for cannabis?,” the veteran foreign correspondent suggests a connection between marijuana use and psychotic episodes that is comparable to the scientific recognition that tobacco smoking causes lung cancer and other illnesses.

In addition to the dangers of mental illness, Cockburn notes that a major study finds a drop in intelligence associated with heavy marijuana use.

Cockburn’s articles on the link between marijuana and mental illness become increasingly relevant as the public in the U.S. comes to grips with the fact that voters in the states of Washington and Colorado on November 6 passed ballot measures legalizing marijuana, in violation of federal law. Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette has introduced federal legalization that would amend the Controlled Substances Act to assert that federal law does not preempt state laws.

In response, a group called Save Our Society From Drugs, has said, “Many concerned citizens, community groups, law enforcement agencies and elected officials are concerned how these laws will impact their communities, states and the nation, and are urging the Obama Administration to take action by clearly communicating and enforcing federal drug policies.”

The group added, “Keeping marijuana illegal is a treaty obligation under the 1961 International Convention on Narcotic Drugs and is supported by the two other Conventions: the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Drugs and the 1988 Anti-Trafficking Convention. Allowing state marijuana laws to supersede federal drug laws violates our treaty obligations.”

It said, “Marijuana legalization will significantly impact our environment, school scores and drop-out rates, accident and vehicle fatality rates, employee productivity, and healthcare and treatment costs.”

But the Soros-funded Drug Policy Alliance is rallying behind the DeGette bill, saying it would “end federal marijuana prohibition and allow states to set their own marijuana policy without federal interference.”

Cliff Kincaid

Technorati Tags: destroying America,drug use,drungs,George Soros,John Podesta,leglaization of marijuana,stand-up America,wake-up America,watch the other hand,mental health,Cliff Kincaid,manipulation of the public