Submitted by I Was Here on
TERENCE MCKENNA SPEAKS…
TRANSCRIBED FROM A VIDEO BROADCAST AT THE MIND STATES CONFERENCE, NOVEMBER 23, 1997
I know that whenever the tribe gathers, whenever the psychedelic community comes together in one place, the issue of our status with regard to the rest of society, and the issue of the status of these substances about which we care so much is discussed. Should we expend political, capital, and social energy to make these things legal? If we did, would many more people who don't today take these things feel free to explore them? Or, in a way, is this wish to legitimize our activities by having them brought in under the umbrella of legality… in a sense, it’s a very unpsychedelic impulse. It is an effort to somehow make peace between cultural values; constipated Christianity-driven Calvinistic and the untrammeled wild wilderness of the psychedelic experience. I admire the people who have worked for medical marijuana, the chemists who have given expert testimony in an attempt to help out members of the community who have run afoul of the law, as they say. But I wonder, really, if the psychedelic agenda is to be satisfied by simply gaining legal legitimacy?
We have a very interesting plant now working its way into our midst—Salvia divinorum. Salvia divinorum is not illegal, it's easily grown throughout the civilized world, it does not have to be administered in some potentially damaging way—in other words, it doesn’t have to be shot; it can be smoked, it can be chewed. And it is without question, extremely powerful and effective. It's amazing to me that this plant could appear in our midst, with these qualities, and be accepted with such lack of fanfare. In other words, this is truly big news. In a sense, Nature has stepped into the drug legalization issue—the psychedelic legalization issue—with a deus ex machina. I don't believe the establishment is interested in demonizing and criminalizing a new easily grown, widely available psychoactive plant. I don't think the establishment needs a new Cannabis. […] Late in the dialogue about psychedelics, who would have thought that [nearly sixty] years after the invention of LSD and the flurry of psychedelic excitement among the botanists of the '60s and the '70s, that not only an entirely new substance would be discovered, but a substance in a chemical category previously unsuspected of psychoactivity. So in a sense, this is a wild card in the deck, and if we—the psychedelic community—play it to our advantage, we can perhaps transcend the them/us dualism of [drug repression/drug advocacy]. Well, how is that to be done? The answer I think, is responsibly, with attention. Let us not generate emergency room entries and drug casualties based around Salvia divinorum—this is the raw material out of which our enemies will fashion our nemesis.
In the past, the psychedelic community has too often been influenced by those who, I think, didn't have its best interests in mind. And by that I mean people who saw psychedelics as somehow a fuel for the popularization of a certain musical agenda, or a certain political agenda, or a certain commercial agenda. I think that if we insist that these things are to be taken—and taken seriously, and taken in shamanic settings—that at this point in the struggle over psychedelics, the establishment is so demoralized, spread so thin, so exhausted, that they will simply decide to leave this particular compound alone. And that will indicate, to me at least, the turning of the tide.
You know, with these new techniques of liquid CO2 distillation of plant materials, nanogram quantities of material that was previously destroyed by high temperature extraction is being gotten out and characterized. And, as you might have predicted, the revelation is that alpha-salvinorin, the active ingredient in Salvia [divinorum] is very probably only one of an entirely new family of psychoactive drugs. What these drugs eventually will do in terms of the experience they elicit, we don't know. We may be looking at new tranquilizers, new stimulants, new psychedelics, potential memory enhancing drugs, potential learning enhancing drugs, we don't know. This is a cornucopia of new psychedelic possibilities.
At this point, the average man and woman on the street has never heard of Salvia divinorum. If the community acts responsibly, they will not hear about it for some time. This is an opportunity for us, for the first time in our lives to take, advocate, synthesize, extract, explore [and] do therapy with a psychoactive compound that is not illegal. We have not been in this position since 1967, that’s more than the lifetime of many of you. So lets take this opportunity, and this plant, and attempt to use it as a model for bringing it and other potential psychedelics into ordinary human usage and put them to the purpose of reconnecting ourselves to the values of the earth, and reconnecting ourselves to each other.
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Originally Published In:
The Entheogen Review - Volume VII, Number 1 - Vernal Equinox 1998