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.
