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+++ A Call for a Psychedelic Sanctuary (Part 1)

by Bruce Eisner

+++ Some Things You Can Do to Help Island Foundation
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This is part one of an article which I published in Island
Views No.6, which was sent to our world-wide membership in
November. I began writing this article more than a year ago
and I believe that it is more urgent that our community
consider the project proposed here -- given the events that
have occurred since I decided it was time to find a place for
us to "get away."

The article is divided into two sections, Manifesto and
Utopia. They are better read in two sittings, I have
discovered, despite much rewriting. So I will publish part
two in our annual Bicycle Day Issue of Island Views
ElectroZine and I will have an announcement of an initial
fund raising campaign for the Sanctuary Project which I think
you are going to like.

 

"Wooden ships on the water, very free and easy,
Easy, you know the way it's supposed to be, Silver
people on the shoreline, let us be, Talkin' 'bout
very free and easy... Horror grips us as we watch
you die, All we can do is echo your anguished
cries, Stare as all human feelings die, We are
leaving - you don't need us. Go; take your sister
then, by the hand, Lead her away from this foreign
land, Far away, where we might laugh again, We are
leaving -you don't need us."
Paul Kantner

 

Together - art by Mowendi

 

MANIFESTO

 

Four decades have passed since fresh winds of change blew
across our nation and around the world. In the song in the
center of the page, Paul Kantner wanted to catch some of the
wind from those changes to "keep the party going" as the
decade drew to a close. The 1960s were an extraordinary
period - a time in which millions of people acted as if they
had swallowed some kind of pill which made them quite
different - and of course they had.

The cultural icon of the man in the thin gray flannel suit
with a drink in his hand gave way to the image of a different
kind of cocktail party - the kind they had on the popular TV
show "Laugh In." They were having drinks with a different
kind of rum. It wasn't the rum that young John Kennedy's
elders had run in from Cuba in the thirties in martinis that
made sixties parties swing. Old Ike's stolid attitudes had
given way to a new vision of the Western world, as
articulated by Kennedy, who was both a symbol of the strong
stirrings of change as well as a martyr to the kind of
reaction that it would bring forth.

The sixties were inspired by a new openness (you might call
it predecessor of The Soviet Glasnost). Roles and ways of
doing things that had persisted for centuries were quickly
dissolving. In the old South, young Freedom Riders rode into
town and threatened to overturn "Jim Crow" discriminatory
laws. Women in great numbers decided not to be housewives and
play the traditional role of the submissive sex. Many
concerned that economic progress might eventually ruin the
earth began using the word "ecology" (heretofore reserved for
those seriously academic) to talk about a movement often
symbolized by the "Whole Earth" as seen by the first humans
to orbit the earth. And of course, with the advent of birth
control pills, there was the sexual revolution-before the
tragedy of AIDS.

It was a period marked by so much cultural change that the
highly respected historian Arnold Toynbee observed of this
period in American history: "I have been visiting the United
States since 1925. Before my last visit (1967), I had been
absent for two years, and I came away with the impression
that in those two years there has been more change in
American life than in all the previous forty."

Of course, it was LSD in the pills that gave people so much
insight. LSD, a potent mind-changing drug with few side
effects, was discovered in Basil, Switzerland during the
dark days prior to World War II, around the same time as a
much larger group in New Mexico was cooking up the atomic
bomb. Just as Gutenberg's revolutionary printing press in
the fifteenth century allowed for anyone to own his or her
own bible, a privilege that until then had only been enjoyed
by the monks, so now the same mass production machines that
had turned out bibles (and later Ford motor cars) were
turning out insight pills (handing out this Holy Grail to
somewhere between one and two million people between 1959 and
1970). The numbers who passed through Aldous Huxley's well-
described "doors of perception," stepping out of Plato's cave
to glimpse the white light of the sun, far exceeded any
generation before it. The mystical experience, from being
something reserved for saints, became available on sugar
cubes.

For many, LSD was a roller coaster ride through their
unconscious-a kind of virtual Disneyland. But for a few, it
took on a significance that they called "mystical" or
"religious." It was these profound experiences which led a
large segment of the Boomer generation to a commitment to
altruism and idealistic pursuits that was to became the
passion during what is often referred to as the "Psychedelic
Sixties." In many, that commitment to change has never really
faded.

The Psychedelic Revolution, as it came to be known by some,
grew from a small intellectual elite-composed mainly of
writers and artists in Los Angeles, New York, and London-into
a mass movement which involved the "best minds of [their]
generation," including college students and open-minded
people of all ages.

The Psychedelic Revolution provided a catalyst for many
changes that occurred in our culture. The long-haired,
bearded hippie with his or her open, loving ways was born as
an American archetype as a result of the experiences and
unique consciousness that resulted from the use of LSD on a
grand scale.

Because these changes were sudden and profound, they were
quickly viewed as a fundamental threat by powerful forces in
our society which make up the economic, political, and other
social strata we call The Establishment. In a rather
successful effort to keep the genie in the bottle, they made
possession and use of LSD and several other related
psychedelic drugs serious crimes.

In making LSD illegal, which was formerly legal and available
in powerful and pure forms, the Establishment was able to
effectively freeze the fluid changes of the sixties. The
Psychedelic Revolution lost its ability to pass on to new
generations the opportunity to have the powerful experiences
that LSD had given them access to, leaving those that came
after them to try new synthetic and botanical substitutes
which are only a shadow of the real thing.

Despite the repressive actions of the powers that be, young
people continued to be fascinated by the lifestyle and values
represented by the Psychedelic Revolution. Many sought out
and some found psychedelic compounds-mainly the psilocybin
mushroom and various synthetic compounds-and, although it was
harder to find them, they remained determined and persisted.
The followers of the Grateful Dead kept the hippie image by
following their esteemed band "on tour" each year with the
look and feel of the hippies. Since the Dead's demise, other
bands attract this "rainbow hippie" following. The members of
this youth movement used what compounds they could get and
were able to gain an inkling of what the million-plus members
of the Psychedelic Revolution of the sixties had experienced.
New generations maintained a faith and trust in the
Psychedelic Revolution-treating psychedelic compounds as
religious sacraments for all the years that followed the
Supreme Court's ruling that psychedelic compounds could not
be protected under the rights given by the First Amendment.
And those of us who had those powerful experiences three
decades ago continue to value them and to be guided by them.

We million-plus who participated in the Movement gained an
understanding of the transparency of the superficial TV show
reality most people live their lives by that cannot be erased
by the passage of time. Many of us wondered what a world
might be like in which psychedelics were as integral a part
of society as traditional intoxicants like alcohol, coffee,
and tobacco.

The influence of psychedelics permeated many aspects of our
everyday life and permanently changed the way we live, love,
work, and play. The impact that the Psychedelic Revolution
made on our culture appears everywhere, from the television
commercials for Coors or Porsche that look like underground
films from the sixties (complete with their computer-
generated effects-impossible back then), to casual clothes in
the workplace. Our language is less formal, and filled with
the groovin' vernacular of those heady times. Our rock-n-roll
society has adopted and made commonplace the rebellious
symbols of the youth culture of the sixties. In addition, the
tremendous technological advances in many areas give a
science fiction veneer to our lives-making them somehow
resemble the fast-paced mind acceleration characteristic of
tripping. The connection between the cyberspace of computers
and the shamanic space of vision quests is one example. The
energies and mechanisms of new devices and gadgets we use
today almost seem magical, just as our LSD trips once felt.

But while widespread adoption of sixties styles and the
external advances in modern technology remain, the
metamorphosis of a new culture which sometimes led LSD users
in the sixties to think of themselves as a mutant species
("acid freaks"), has slowed to a glacial pace. In many ways
our society has returned to the conformist trends of the
early fifties that preceded the Beat movement.

Timothy Leary said back in the sixties that "this generation
will never be like their mothers and fathers." Yes, we have
moved forward in many ways technologically, and in some ways
socially, but the feeling of rapid change that gave many
participants in the Psychedelic Revolution the sense that we
were fast evolving toward a dramatically different and vastly
more humanistic society is gone. Certainly there are social
youth movements and an alternative culture. But nobody
believes-as many did in the sixties-that a new culture is
just around the next corner.

The media has gained tremendous power over the way we think
and believe. In some ways our society resembles the "Brave
New World" Aldous Huxley wrote about back in the thirties,
where people enjoy their mindless pleasure while working more
hours than ever before and living in a reality created by the
media.

Given the situation I have described, it is time for those of
us whose lives have been touched by or identified in some way
with the innovative world view inculcated by the psychedelic
experience to:

. preserve the large body of knowledge and wisdom that came
out of our Psychedelic Revolution against the possibility
that it will be forgotten over time

. develop an effective strategy for liberating ourselves from
the frustrating and stagnant situation we find ourselves in

. get those winds of change a'blowin' once again!

Essential to the strategy for accomplishing these goals is
one central fact that many of us know at a gut level but
which don't often verbally acknowledge: those of us who
believe in the appropriate use of psychedelics as an
experience, and one we wish to have or share with others, are
for the most part not wanted or tolerated in the United
States. In fact, the drug user of the year 2002 has replaced
the Communist of 1951. Strong top-down hierarchical political
institutions seem to need some group to scapegoat so that
people's eyes are diverted from the real show in front of
them. Prisons are filled with our friends.

It was in the sixties that the laws against LSD and other
psychedelics were first enacted. Laws against marijuana had
been on the books for years but LSD was a much more powerful
experience and played a central role in creating a large
group with worldviews different from any that had come before
it.

For some who took it, LSD had such an impact that they
believed it might provide insights of a similar magnitude in
anyone who took it. There is the story told in High Priest by
Timothy Leary of poet Alan Ginsberg's taking psilocybin (an
extract of the "magic mushroom" synthesized by LSD discoverer
Albert Hofmann and used in early experiments at Harvard with
psychedelic compounds). Ginsberg became convinced that if he
could get John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev to take LSD, it
would end the Cold War; after not being able to get the
telephone operators to connect him to either man, he slowly
returned to the realities of 1962.

In a way, this kind of thinking colored many of even the most
conservative leaders of the Psychedelic Revolution. Although
known to believe that LSD should be kept for the intellectual
elite, even Huxley, in a speech delivered in Copenhagen,
Denmark, speculated on a "mass experiment" of social LSD-
taking as a remedy to the disturbing directions our society
was taking.

However, whether an experiment of mass LSD use would have
turned out differently if the Vietnam War had not been part
of the scenario will never be known. Those opposed to the war
advocated LSD use for everyone as a "weapon" against the US
government. If LSD had instead been used as a personal
development tool, the urgency to spread LSD use might have
been mitigated with the result being a smoother integration
into society (fewer "freak outs," etc).

But LSD was politicized and its image with the public deeply
scarred by its association with the anti-war movement. The
same kind of social transparency that people felt toward some
of the mundane and even violent games people play was
magnified when people examined from an altered consciousness
the terrible costs incurred by the U.S. intervention in
Vietnam. This in turn made the Establishment, already
threatened by the challenge to their traditional values by
LSD, even harsher in their counterattack on the Psychedelic
Revolution. After all, many of those in power felt, these
people (the anti-Vietnam policy hippies) were akin to
traitors.

There was a split back then in the ranks of the Psychedelic
Revolution between those who were committed political
activists and those who saw LSD more as part of an
apolitical spiritual path. There were the famous Hippies vs.
Yippies debates and efforts to reconcile them such as the
1967 Human Be-In in San Francisco. Those not specifically
political in their participation in the youth culture
imagined that when the war was over and society has
progressed, LSD and marijuana would join alcohol as socially
sanctioned drugs, and that some of the new ways of relating
which they had learned using LSD would be assimilated into
our society as a whole.

However, as one of those who looked forward with idealism and
an expectation of rapid change, I don't think in my wildest
dreams I could have imagined the "War on Drugs." In the
thirty-three years since I first puffed a joint, there has
been a trend toward marijuana decriminalization (it certainly
is by no means accepted). On the other hand, LSD has been put
in the same category as powerfully addictive drugs-heroin,
cocaine, and amphetamines, and new drugs such as MDMA-as a
threat to the health and safety of our citizens.

As the sixties ended and the seventies began, when Nixon left
office and Jimmy Carter became president, there was a sense
that there might be some change in the attitudes of
government toward drugs. But as soon as Ronald Reagan took
office, that hope was quickly dashed. Reagan and his wife
Nancy had always been firmly opposed to drugs, and Nancy
actively joined the War on Drugs; her "Just Say No" campaign
was her personal contribution to the administration.

There were many elements at play here. Reagan was an old Cold
Warrior and as the threat from Communists both at home and in
the Soviet Union ended, he felt we needed a new enemy to turn
our attention to. A new internal enemy to fight was the drug
dealer and the drug user became that enemy. While their
rhetoric was targeted toward all the major drugs we mentioned
above, it is probably no coincidence that the purity and
price of cocaine and heroin has decreased by a factor of ten
since the War on Drugs scaled up while the availability and
purity of LSD and other psychedelics has plummeted. During
the years when the Grateful Dead scene threatened to keep the
spirit of the Psychedelic Revolution alive, the DEA even
started an Operation Deadhead to make sure that there would
be no resurgence of the "craziness" of the sixties.

Because of it was used by many more people than Huxley,
Leary, or Hofmann ever could have imagined or approved of,
LSD gained a public image as a "crazy-making" drug, an image
that has been engraved so deeply and is reinforced by the
media so frequently that it is almost impossible that it can
be rehabilitated in the public mind anytime soon.

As the Berlin Wall fell (perhaps partially the result of the
Psychedelic Revolution and its effects upon tolerance among
the younger generation), the drug user has replaced the
Communist as the identified threat to our society and our
youth. So we must hide away to use our sacraments, and read
underground magazines, and fight the propaganda war fueled by
government billions-with their prime time TV commercials and
school DARE programs -with a few Web sites and small
circulation newsletters like Island Views.

The government is waging a war on us. According to the I
Ching (hexagram 33) sometimes the best strategy for later
victory is to retreat. It is my belief that we need to go
elsewhere and establish a place where a culture can be formed
that allows for the use of psychedelic compounds as part of
its social contract. So this is a call to found a psychedelic
sanctuary somewhere in the world-perhaps somewhere in the
Southern Hemisphere, far from U.S. politics-in which those of
us in the Psychedelic Revolution can feel at home and make a
homeland.

Island Foundation and its previous incarnation, the
Psychedelic Education Center (founded in 1977), was the
earliest organization aimed at furthering the cause of the
Psychedelic Revolution. So it is fitting that Island
Foundation makes the founding of a psychedelic sanctuary our
primary mission.

In the years since our founding, many other organizations
have been formed; each with a specific set of agendas which,
they believe, will help put the Psychedelic Revolution back
on track. These include MAPS and the Heftner Foundation which
both hope to get psychedelic research going again (there were
over 4000 studies with LSD before it was made illegal in
1966); the Albert Hofmann Foundation which hopes to build a
psychedelic library; and the Council for Spiritual Practices
which aims at making a legitimate religion of the use of LSD
and other "entheogens" as they call psychedelic compounds.

None of these groups have been particularly effective in
changing the extremely negative climate in which psychedelics
continue to find themselves. Yet each of them would benefit
enormously through the establishment of a psychedelic
sanctuary somewhere in the world. Such a sanctuary could have
research parks for both MAPS and the Heftner Foundation,
permit the Council for Spiritual Practices to practice their
religion, and allow for the creation of a library and museum
in the name of the great Swiss biochemist Albert Hofmann.

Since we put on the "LSD-A Generation Later" Conference in
1977 and the Future of Consciousness Conference in 1980,
there have been an increasing number of annual events in
which members of the Psychedelic Revolution, many now in
their forties and fifties, assemble to hear speakers talk
about various aspects of psychedelics and entheogenic plants.
These conferences also would find our new sanctuary outfitted
with facilities enabling people such as Jonathan Ott and Rob
Montgomery to hold meetings with a new degree of safety.

Looking at the larger picture, organizations aiming for the
decriminalization of all drugs, including the powerful Drug
Policy Foundation and the Lindesmith Center, have attempted
to promote a harm-reduction strategy-popular in Europe and
much of the rest of the civilized world-here in the U.S. They
have had some limited success but with the recent victory of
George W. Bush, I don't think that we can look for drug
decriminalization as a national strategy any time soon. There
will be progress but unless something unforeseen occurs,
these changes will progress at a glacial speed.

In the early days of the Psychedelic Revolution, many of the
leaders attempted to found sanctuaries in other
places-including Mexico and the Caribbean. They had limited
success, I believe, because they chose to stick so close to
the United States with its powerful control mechanisms.
Later, the group leased a large estate at Millbrook, New
York, and so was born the first of the efforts to build a
community around visions emanating from the Psychedelic
Revolution. As the revolution expanded, these communes and
co-operative experiments proliferated.

Two years after the founding of Millbrook, the residents
found themselves under siege by G. Gordon Liddy. Later in
that decade, most of the rest of the hundreds of efforts at
building a representative psychedelic culture dissolved due
either to their own internal problems or negative forces
aimed at them from the larger community. Several books,
including The Modern Utopian (edited by Richard Fairfield),
describe many of these fascinating, diverse efforts at
creating something new right here in the good old USA.

A few of these efforts remain, most noteworthy the Farm in
Tennessee, but also a handful of others. There is also an
organization dedicated to intentional communities that
publishes an annual guide to literally hundreds of communal
efforts. What is different, however, is that psychedelics are
rarely a part of this new generation of experimental
communities. Even the Farm-famous for its excellent weed-has
an official rule against smoking marijuana. We will discuss
more about the quest for a utopian community in part two of
this essay.

The desire for new vistas for the "heads" of our time became
in the 1970s even- shall we say-"further out." At various
times Tim Leary advocated building a starship to carry the
hippie masses to a new star and even had the Jefferson
Airplane-turned Jefferson Starship-singing the anthem. Later,
after his release from jail, Leary decided that putting the
heads in high orbiting space habitats might be a more
immediate possibility. As we can see by the state of our
current space efforts, he was perhaps forty or more year
ahead of his time. The feeble attempts at a space station in
the year 2000 hardly look like fit housing for psychedelic
refugees.

Along with the strong bonds of group identity that the
psychedelic community felt in the sixties, there was a strain
of thought that perhaps the only way to live the way we want
was to go somewhere else. In the sixties, Crosby Stills, and
Nash made famous the song "Wooden Ships" which suggests we
set sail and find a "distant" land. "We are leaving; you
don't need us" was their refrain. Indeed, we still aren't
wanted and that distant land still beckons. The mutant genes
that carried our forefathers from England need new soil.

We who were the youth generation that comprised the
Psychedelic Revolution are now middle-aged. We are an
important segment of the huge Baby Boom generation- the
population explosion that followed World War II. We went to
Woodstock, we dropped in and had careers, and many raised
families. Many have not forgotten their idealistic past, and
our income supports many projects which we all hope in some
way may improve the "psychedelic situation."

I propose in this manifesto for a sanctuary, that Island
Foundation set up a separate account to raise capital to
purchase the land and build the facilities for a psychedelic
sanctuary. Before the account is set up, there would be a
committee formed to look into two important issues:

. The legalities of such a sanctuary with regard to
international law. The United Nations and its related World
Health Organization attempt to enforce drug laws
internationally. Considerations such as this must be taken
into account as they relate to the feasibility of the project
as well as to the decisions regarding the acquisition of the
sanctuary.

. The availability of an island or island property with the
proper requirements for the creation of the psychedelic
sanctuary must be investigated. A German broker, Dr. Farhad
Vladi, has sold over 700 islands over the past ten years and
there are currently 3000 on the market.

Once these two items have been clearly understood, the
committee would project a budget, and a separate "lock-box"
account administered by two Island members would be formed,
in which all tax-free donations would be kept and not used
for any purpose until a fixed amount of money was raised. The
committee would determine the amount needed to fund the
project used for any purpose and no money would be withdrawn
until the committee determined there would be sufficient
funds to purchase the land and build the facilities for the
island. Of course, all contributions would be tax-deductible
and could be placed in an interest-bearing account, which
would leverage our contributions.

A study committee would be formed to decide the exact
requirements for being allowed to go to the island, and also
to define some of the parameters-economic, political, social,
and ethical - by which the island's psychedelic sanctuary
should function. In fact, there might be two portions of the
island, a welcoming area that would be the place where
outsiders would first visit, and one or more experimental
community areas where the actual Huxley experiment, detailed
in his novel Island, would take place.

 

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth
even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which
Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it
looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress
is the realization of Utopias."
- Oscar Wilde

 

 

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SOME THINGS YOU CAN DO TO HELP ISLAND FOUNDATION

Although Island Foundation is a Federally Chartered Non-
Profit Educational organization, it is difficult to raise
grants or public funds and so we rely mainly on private
donations, memberships and sales on our Island Marketplace to
sustain our projects. After September 11, we experienced as
did many other non-profits, a drop-off in our funding from
these sources. You may have notice our web site went down
for a week due to lack of funds to pay our web host.So if you
want to see our project realized, here are some of the ways
you can turn our psychedelic vision into a global reality...

1. Join Island Foundation -- We have several levels of
membership. Information on joining can be found here:

www.island.org

 

2. Donate! Island Foundation relies on financial support from
private individuals to continue its work as a communication
hub for the psychedelic community. Island Foundation is a
Island is a 501 (c) 3 organization and all donations are tax-
deductible.

3. Volunteer! Island Web is in need of individuals with web
experience. Currently, we have no individuals to help put up
additional content which can be done by anyone who has web
access anywhere in the world -- who has the time to do some
volunteer work that might prove to be fun. Our links database
needs updates (I have a collection of about 200 links to
review. We have a lot of content to put up and so if you are
oriented in this direction, here is your is a chance for make
a big difference on our website and in the world as you work
on one of the pioneer web sites on the Internet. Also,
someone who can coordinate development on the site (i.e. work
with programmers, content providers, etc) would be of amazing
benefit. Send email to Bruce@mindmedia.com if interested.

I am also looking for volunteers in the Santa Cruz and
greater South Bay area to work donate an hour or more of work
to help me get things organized at Island headquarters.
Currently, I've been doing it all by myself since our long-
time administrative secretary Cathy Weiss moved to Maine. I
actually ship products ordered from the marketplace -- which
is why you don't see more content coming from Island. I need
your help! Call (831) 427-1942

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Island Foundation 849 Almar Ave. Suite C-125 Santa Cruz, CA
95060 Phone: (831) 427-1942 Fax: (831) 426-8519.
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