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Under The Influence: The Disinformation Guide to Drugs (Disinformation Guides) Paperback – Illustrated, January 1, 2004

by Preston Peet (Editor)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 15 ratings
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In the latest in the oversize Disinformation Guide series of anthologies, editor Preston Peet assembles an allstar cast to lay to rest the specious misinformation peddled by prohibitionists who depend upon the "War on some drugs and users" for their livelihood and power.

Drug users and abusers describe their feelings and fears for freedom, not only for themselves but for all their fellow citizens in the United States and the rest of the world, detailing the Constitutionshredding War on some drugs and users.

Despite the antidrug hysteria promoted by prohibitionists, drugs have been an inseparable aspect of life for thousands of years--curing disease, calming stress, easing pain, enhancing intelligence, opening the doors of perception and altering consciousness. So why is the "War on some drugs and users" underway? The answers can be found in Under the Influence.

Decades of spending trillions of dollars while waging war on neighbors, friends and families have done nothing to eradicate drug use and abuse, but it has succeeded in overthrowing governments, tearing apart families and communities, and ensured the rise of international criminal cartels. Under the Influence explains how we came to this state of affairs and how we can bring about real reform.

Bestselling writers, professional researchers, degenerate drug users and just plain folk offer factbased alternatives to the propaganda of prohibitionist antidrug warriors. Contributors include Tom Robbins, Paul Krassner, Rick Doblin, Mike Gray, Lonny Shavelson, Daniel Forbes, Steve Wishnia, Cynthia Cotts, Russ Kick, Dr. Stanislav Grof, Daniel Pinchbeck, Paul Armentano, Jacob Sullum, Peter Dale Scott and Robert Anton Wilson.

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Previous page
  1. Part of series
    Disinformation Books
  2. Print length
    360 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    The Disinformation Company
  5. Publication date
    January 1, 2004
  6. Dimensions
    8.5 x 0.9 x 10.82 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    1932857001
  8. ISBN-13
    978-1932857009
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author


The editor of Under The Influence: The Disinformation Guide to Drugs, Preston Peet is a writer, editor, photographer, musician, actor, DJ, activist, and adventurer. A regular contributor to High Times magazine and its website, the editor of the controversial website DrugWar.com, and a columnist for New York Waste, he has published in a variety of publications both in print and online.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ The Disinformation Company; Illustrated edition (January 1, 2004)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 360 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1932857001
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1932857009
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 0.035 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.5 x 0.9 x 10.82 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 15 ratings

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Preston Peet

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Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
15 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

RICHARD THOMAS
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2018
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Most of it is still true and relevant today.
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Ozzyng
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2015
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It's a quick read. Big letters and half blank pages
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noel
5.0 out of 5 stars must read
Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2017
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great book illustrating the injustices of America's war on drugs
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Barry Sharpe
1.0 out of 5 stars Tedious Drivel With Some Interesting Factoids
Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2010
Some of this book is well written, articulate and convincing. Large portions of it are repetitive drivel, restating old threadworn cliches from the sixties. It's too bad a good editor didn't realize the latter portions effectively weaken the argument for drug legalization. Obviously, many have labored to keep drugs out of the hands of the multitudes but one has to be careful when approaching the conspiracy theory. Good people over time have made some uninformed decisions that definitely ought to be re-examined in light of better evidence today. Prejudice and misconception have played their role. And, to be fair, some anecdotal evidence suggests opponents of marijuana usage sometimes may have had less than altruistic motives. But the proposition that businessmen manipulated legislation prohibiting pot smoking just don't fly.
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brydon
5.0 out of 5 stars this book is the most amazing thing ever
Reviewed in the United States on July 1, 2010
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I am truly impressed with the writting style and content of this book and the information will change your perspective towards drug atticts and drug related crime.
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Danielle H.
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2014
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Haven't quite gotten through it but love disinformation as a whole.
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Tex
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2016
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Good book
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Tracy McLellan
5.0 out of 5 stars Raise Consciousness, Not Weapons
Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2004
I first tried LSD many years ago when I was relatively very young. I have always found it near impossible to describe the mystical-religious experience that ensued. It was the most spiritual and religious, in the most impersonal, non-Christian sense of those terms, I have ever known. For one split second during the trip there was a seeing, feeling and being of oneness with the Universe, all light, wisdom and bliss. It was beyond words, which are already shadows of the realities they represent. Words are by their very nature full of dualities: subject, object; speaker, spoken to. Reality also: light, dark, positive, negative, yin, yang. That experience was not a hallucination. The LSD was a tool that helped me to expand my consciousness to the transcendental reality; and if not the only such tool, the best one. And that experience taught me that everyday reality and consciousness is the real illusion, but at the same time points at and infers this higher reality. All is paradox, and maya.

I always considered my drug use to be a search to enhance and expand consciousness, not smother and sedate it. Marijuana, LSD, MDA, MDMA (Ecstasy) were my drugs of choice for just this reason: an attempt, to a certain degree an achievement, but also of abject failure, to recreate that singular experience - sort of a bar mitzvah for a goy. Rather than an institutional and cultural framework of support for such a breathtaking discovery, there was the most mendacious dissembling around the issue of (some) drugs. Other than a few close friends, I was groping alone in the dark.

True religious freedom to me would be an exploring and attempt at recreating these kinds of states of consciousness; understanding the potentialities and limitations of integrating them into everyday life; freedom to create some kind of cultural and institutional framework to give them legitimacy as religious ritual. But there is no religious freedom in America. The word "religion" in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution might just as well be replaced by the word "Christianity," with all its ridiculous nonsense, making exceptions for honorable Christians.

Because several of the writers in Under the Influence examine seriously this religious/mystical aspect of the drug policy issue, their call for reform takes on a much more urgent dimension. "Drug prohibition is really," writes Richard Glen Boire, who holds a Doctorate of Jurisprudence from UC Berkeley, "a war on consciousness itself - how much, what sort we are permitted to experience, and who gets to control it. More than an unintentional misnomer, the government-termed `war on drugs' is a strategic decoy label; a sleight-of-hand move by the government to redirect attention away from what lies at ground zero of the war - each individual's fundamental right to control his or her own consciousness."

Why are entheogenically-induced states of consciousness prohibited while those prompted by the constant advertisements and come-ons to buy consumer crap, vacuous television-watching, endlessly grinding it out on a soul-destroying job, and a permanent wartime economy, to take just several egregious examples of a culture bankrupt through and through, considered acceptable? This book explains it is because the powerful and privileged are afraid of the alternate realites these substances can show us.

Boire adds significantly: "Those who have never experienced the mental states that are now prohibitied do not realize what the laws are denying them." Mary Jane Borden calls opposition to drug prohibition part of the "age-old fight against bigotry." She maintains that the struggle against "chemical bigotry" is part and parcel of the perennial struggles against the bigotries of racism, sexism, colonialism, and imperialism, and for democratic rights.

Dr. Stanislav Grof's interview with Albert Hofmann, the accidental discoverer in 1943 of LSD's singularly potent properties, is fascinating. Hofmann was a chemist at Sandoz Laboratories in Germany innocuously attempting to derive a drug analogue useful in obstetrics from alkaloids of ergot, a fungus that grows on rye bread. While conducting chemical synthesis experiments, he unknowingly and accidentally ingested a tiny amount of one of these analogues through the pores of his skin. He had a powerful and bewildering response. Hofmann relates the work this led him to be interested in in other cultures with similar substances like the magic mushroom of the Mazatec Indians in Mexico, ololiuqui, a derivative of morning glory seeds, and salvia divinorum. Other essays look at the Native American Church, whose rite of religious use of ceremonial peyote has been upheld by the Supreme Court, and ayahuasca, a vine that contains DMT, which has been used in Amazonia to induce religious visions for thousands of years.

Initially Dr. Hofmann considered LSD to be his wonder child. He deeply laments it becoming a problem child with its rise as a drug of abuse in the early 1960s that put an immediate surcease into any further research into its psychotherapeutic applications, which until that time had been quite substantial. The pendulum is swinging arduously back the other way and there is again halting but significant steps being made in this direction. They face constant official resistance. Rick Doblin, founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, glimpses into the slight thawing of policy respecting the potential of psychedelics in psychotherapy, and examines the issue of medical marijuana. Several other essays also examine this latter topic.

This book, like the drug-policy reform movement itself however, is in the great bulk on the defensive. Even discarding the blasphemous idea that certain illegal drugs are in actuality a great boon to humanity if only it could see it, the many negative arguments alone against prohibition as ineffective and counterproductive ought to prevail and prompt radical change. A whole section of the book analyzes this aspect of the issue. Cigarettes kill 430,000 Americans every year, alcohol tens of thousands more, but they are sanctioned, even heavily advertised. Marijuana, which has never been blamed for a single fatality, is outlawed. Many so-called drug crimes are actually drug law-related. Drug prohibition artificially and exponentially inflates the price of drugs. It is the mountains of money to be reaped dealing drugs, the battles for turf and the like, rather than drugs per se and the states of mind they engender, which prompt so much violence. It is also this that encourages a never-ending flow of dealers willing to risk the huge profits of the illicit trade. Several writers note that illicit drug trade is part and parcel of every modern day military enterprise, including those of the United States. Legalization, medicalization would itself reduce armed insurgencies around the world. If drugs were legalized no individuals would sell them for there would be no profit. Users wouldn't have to commit crimes to obtain them.

This book contains too many reasons for drug legalization and medicalization to list. Its reminding me of the almost lost knowledge of that split second in eternity all those years ago renewed my hope momentarily that life could be something other than just the wartorn battlefield it is.
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