I've always tried to be hopeful and keep my chin up, but it's difficult and increasingly so when videos like this go viral. Does anyone else just feel like tuning it out and not being emotionally invested in the legalization/decriminalization of psychedelics? It only seems to be a source of frustration and I find that more and more I prefer not to think about it and just go about life keeping my illicit medicine use under wraps. I don't see how I can make a difference, and until I do I'll try to be ignorant of the ignorance that surrounds me.

Don't ignore/block out the emotional reality of whats going on. That's the easy way out, and as carl sagan once said, "its far better to see the world as it is, rather than persist in delusion no matter how enticing it may be". IE ignorance is bliss, and the reality is that you/we all are emotionally attached to this issue that has profound affects on society, both good and bad.

Don't let cynicism break your will, thats exactly what they want you to do. Because they know they're wrong and have the upper hand, and were right and intellectually dangerous to the system they perpetuate if we resist it in a righteous way.

The only way its going to chance is intellectual powress, and dissemination of that knowledge to those who don't care about what prohibition does to us as a society. To do so you need to be emotionally motivated in regard to the issue at hand. The reality is that you care, don't move away from that by forcing what naturally comes to you out of your mind.

Ellroy can lay it down.

Yeah Art, we don't always see eye to eye, but we do agree on quite a bit... and it always fun to have someone worthy around to spar with. If we all agreed about everything around here it could get kinda boring, no? Preaching to the choir gets old after the 3rd spliff.

While I understand and respect this feeling--lord knows everyone in the trenches gets this wave of melancholic ennui from time to time--you can't give up. This is how they win. This is why we have over 850,000 arrests yearly for marijuana in the US (out of 1.6 million total drug arrests).

Sure, you can play the odds (around .5% per person per year)... and if you are smart, live in a more tolerant area of the states, are clean cut, or white, these odds will be even better. But even if you never get arrested... even if you are never even harrassed... this situation is still intolerable for anyone of even moderate consciousness. Forced to live in the closet, carry stress and paranoia around, vilified and demonized by the ignorant masses. Something is seriously wrong when 3 times as many people are arrested for a victimless crime like simple drug possession than are arrested for all forms of violent crime combined.

You may be young. To those of us who have been fighting the Drug War since it began in earnest... who lived through its worst and most hopeless phases (like the crack and meth epidemics of the 80's & 90's)... there is clearly some positive change. We may not have won yet, but public opinion is rapidly shifting. More people are using drugs than ever before, and thus more people are realizing that it is not the evil they were taught to believe it was. When 78% of law school students can admit to smoking grass... the time for legalization can not be too far away. These kids will be the politicians, judges, and lawyers of the coming years... and we have already won their hearts & minds.

I said it before, but it needs repeating. This is the first year in the history of drug prohibition that a majority of polled Americans support full legalization for marijuana. This means that the actual statistic is far higher, because they know to do their polling in a manner that sways the results towards the right wing position by calling primarily during the day when the elderly and the rich paranoid housewives are the only ones home. They don't poll cell phone numbers, and the majority of youth don't even have a fixnet number. Perhaps the high unemployment numbers are working in our favor at the moment, because there are a larger number of people home taking bonghits in the afternoon these days.

What this tells you, at any rate, is that we are finally nearing critical mass.

If the situation we are facing today makes you want to give up, you would never have had the stomach for what we dealt with in the mid 80's. I remember legalization rallies that were regularly broken up with tear gas, dogs, and baton swinging gestapo who would haul large numbers of us off in paddy wagons after cracking skulls and twisting arms. You were lucky if they didn't plant drugs on you just to make sure you got locked up. Or how about the tragic sadness of operation "Dead End" in the early 90's when the undercover narcs invaded the Grateful Dead parking lot scene and sent hundreds of thousands of peaceful, loving deadheads to the penitentiary for ridiculous mandatory minimum sentences simply for a couple hits of LSD or a handful of mushrooms. The worst thing was that they would flip the scared kids and turn them into narcs for reduced sentences or dropped charges... thus the scene quickly devolved into acute paranoia and the inability to trust even friends that you had known for ages.

All I can say is buck up and don't wimp out. If all the young trippers and stoners these days had even half the balls that we had at their age... this would be over already.

'I believe all illegal drugs are bad'....Well, there´s only one definite answer to that problem, is there?: legalisation.

"If all the young trippers and stoners these days had even half the balls that we had at their age... this would be over already."

Okay, but where are they all now? Half the people just sort of re-mainstreamed it seems through the 70's and 80's..all the yuppies..look at Jerry Rubin..It might also be over if everyone did not just pack up and go home(or to wallstreet).

I think it is far to easy(and typical) for people to look back into the past with a sort of nostalgia this way.

I do care. I mean, I didn't used to before I started working with these sacred medicines. When I was smoking marijuana, it never really mattered that much to me, although I was a younger man then in a lot of ways. But now I do care, and now that I do, what do I do?
I originally jumped on the bandwagon because I started using certain "illegal drugs" and judging by the progress of marijuana legalization, that would seem to be the only way forward: more people need to start using more entheogens and more often. I've taken an oath not to sell or distribute any of my goods, however, so I can't really recruit anyone. I've had talks with my parents, for example, about entheogens, but they probably won't touch them in this lifetime, so that's not done any good. At this point, my only psychedelic confidant is a close friend. I mean, it's hard enough for me to work up the nerve to drink ayahuasca, so how can I expect others to do it?
If I can do my part I will make a concerted effort to do so, but I don't really know where to start. I welcome any sincere advice. And I'm not suggesting I'd rather others fight my battles for me, but I think someone like Joe Rogan should start taking some action for the movement rather than just talking the big game that he does. He could certainly do more than I ever could.

What you just experienced was the illogial rambling of someone who thought they knew what someone else was feeling/thinking. My opologies for assuming i knew what you think/feel about the topic, and most of all for telling you how to think/deal with your emotions. That was pretty ignorant of me.

Its obvious you do care, and i feel very much the same as you in regards to the situation. Its either put yourself at risk of imprisonment for actively protesting the laws (imho theres profiling and targeted prosecution against those in the community that are actively trying to spread the message of the failure of prohibition). Its dangerous to rock the boat, and thats how they keep us underground and oppressed. When the time comes when theres too many people that know the truth, 100 monkeys and all, and we see a movement like the black rights issue back in the 60's in regard to the basic human right of altering our consciousness, things will change. The spiritual oppression of the worlds oldest religion can't last forever, especially if they become more mainstream and more people are able to recognize the dogma of it all like the mmj movement has been working hard at doing.

Our job is to abstract people away from their close minded reality's into one of higher understanding and rationality of though. One that will show them how terrible the drug laws are in this country/rest of the world.

I also see now how feeble voting is in regards to this issue, while i think the idea that the system is rigged at its core is a bit conspiratiorial, theres definately very powerful factions actively trying to influence peoples minds on the matter to perpetuate the policy for financial gain. We just need to fight destrictuve fire with illuminating light. And theres many more people out there that do a hell of alot more than i do, and its made me want to get actively involved in legalization movements of all kinds, no matter what the risk, its the right thing to do. Thanks for that bit of enlightenment snozz!

And please excuse my use of harsh language, its just the way i express myself IRL a lot. Something i've been trying to more accurately communicate the feelings that cause me to use such IMHO crude language. I know better, and can insult people like Ms. Leonhart without resorting to cliched offensive to some language. I see now its not about censorship like i assumed the nexus's disencouragment of slang/crude language. Not to say it doesn't have its uses, sometimes carlin's dirty words just fit exactly how you are trying to communicate how you feel, i just think i misuse that kind of language irl far too much. In any case thanks for the friendly warning/advice. It was not make in vain.

While I am a big fan of the basic 100th Monkey concept, it might be worth mentioning that the original studies of Japanese monkeys have been called into question and somewhat discredited. Lyall Watson was the first to publish the info, and it has changed form a number of times with retelling. Probably the most famous being Ken Keyes Jr. using the whole phenomenon as a parable for his book The Hundredth Monkey.

This is certainly not to say that the effect doesn`t exist. Especially in human populations, this morphic field "tipping point" idea is very much alive and well.

While it is easy to look backwards with nostalgia, this fact doesn't mean that every time it is done it is without merit. In the case of activism of the youth and general creative pushing back of boundaries, there is no question that the young people in the 60's & 70's were light years ahead of today's youth. No serious student of history would even dream to suggest otherwise. Even the youth of the 80's & 90's were more progressive by a long shot.

There may be mitigating factors in this. Kids today are kept busy and are more controlled than their counterparts in past generations. We hung out outdoors and didn't have cellphones... so no one knew where we were. Kids that sit at home playing video games are naturally less active than kids that are out playing basketball and skateboarding.

But even still, it is clear that this generation is far more timid and unwilling to break new ground than those that proceeded it. Case in point, between 1965 and 1970 no less than 10 new genres of music came into being. It would be difficult to point to a single new genre that has emerged since the millennium. (sub-genres and hairsplitting styles within them don't really count) Even the most edgy styles of the day all go back to the late 80's and early 90's. (psy-trance, goa, techno, dubstep etc.)

As for your observation that many people from the earlier youth movements have assimilated and are not pushing the envelope now... this is only natural. The minute one has children, one has exponentially less time for being revolutionary. One becomes focused on protecting and providing for one's kids and, as such, becomes more cautious and conservative. Thus, the hippies by and large went to the countryside to start communes and grow permaculture gardens. They became interested in meditation, yoga, and juicing... leaving the fighting of the power to those with more time and energy for it.

Basically, 20 year olds are more suited for dodging tear gas canisters and running from cops.

Even still, there are a large number of old farts still in the front lines. Most of the people writing books and being outspoken about these issues tend to be boomers and x-ers. Today's youth think they have done their job when they "like" something on facebook and youtube. It is simply a fact that every single Medical Marijuana initiative in the US was written by a boomer & the movements that got them passed were organized by boomers and x-ers. The handfuls of young people involved in true activism these days tend to be restricted to college kids at liberal universities in California and other like minded zones and a portion of the neo-hippy jam band heads you find at places like bonnarroo and burning man... and even then, they mostly just collect signatures for things that the old guard are coming up with.

We have 2 official wars, a number of unofficial ones, unprecedented attacks on personal freedom, been teetering on the edge of a depression for half a decade, kids have to borrow enough money to buy a house just to go to college, they graduate with no job prospects but unpaid internships, fully 25% of the world's prison population are in US jails (only 5% of the world`s population), prisons which are unabashed slave labor businesses for profit... and yet the best these kids can do is a tepid Occupation of some downtown parks.

Shit. In the 60's and 70's the parks were occupied anyway, and that is where people met up to decide what REAL actions they were going to do that day.

This. Probably the most ignorant comment of the whole video. Absolutely horrible person to put in that type of speaking position. She acted like she knew nothing about any real facts whatsoever.

Sorry to resurrect this year old thread, but this news article today makes my point more here in spades:

http://www.huffingtonpos...l?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular

Yes, on Thursday... John McCain came out tentatively in favor of legalization at a town hall meeting.

"Maybe we should legalize. We're certainly moving that way as far as marijuana is concerned. I respect the will of the people"

Note, he starts out talking about total drug legalization, and then goes on to recognize the weed legalization is basically a matter of time now.

This, a little over a year since his daughter came out in favor of weed legalization after trying her first joint.

I'm telling you people, the time is ripe. The Drug War is old, tired, unpopular and up against the ropes. We need to redouble our efforts and knock this decrepit bastard out while we have the chance. Full court press my Nexians. At the very least, it is time to flood your "political representatives" with letters demanding an end to this criminal war on our own people.

Please, could someone pay her a visit and give her an extraction tutorial and a GVG?

Thanks HF for sharing.

By the look on her face i get the impression she's thinking "GOD i can't wait to fire up the spliff in my pocket"

DC has medical rights. WTF is up with that shit?