Counter-Currents
Phil Eiger Newmann, Shroom with a View, 2020.
1,259 words
Imagine repeatedly dosing yourself with the most potent psychedelics known to mankind and still seeing the world entirely in black and white.
Were you aware that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) have used natural psychedelic substances as psychological healing agents for thousands of years, only for the white man to barge in and muck up everything like he always does?
Not only did the white man appropriate the magic mushroom from some poor little Mexican woman in the 1950s — he used his evil powers of tricknology to synthesize psychedelic compounds such as LSD and MDMA.
Sure, the latter achievements somehow eluded the Noble Indigenii for all those thousands of years they were yanking psilocybin mushrooms from the ground, tugging peyote buttons off of cacti, and scraping root bark from the iboga tree, but an emergent body of research dares to suggest that perhaps BIPOC worldwide were dealing with PTSD from white colonization and were thus frightened from indulging in psychedelics.
An article called “INSIDE THE MOVEMENT TO DECOLONIZE PSYCHEDELIC PHARMA” states that “For many people of color, the association of these drugs with violence and incarceration is deeply ingrained.”
Unlike blacks, Native Americans are somehow able to evade the multifarious traumas of colonization to the point where their lifetime use of psychedelics is statistically higher than among any other group, even affluent white hippies. But white per-capita use of psychedelics is at least three times higher than the black rate, the Chambers Brothers notwithstanding.
Mind you, intergenerational racial trauma and the looming threat of incarceration somehow never scared blacks away from shooting heroin, smoking crack, or wantonly indulging in any other known intoxicant, but groups such as the People of Color Psychedelic Collective are out there asking the tough questions such as “How does cultural appropriation show up in the psychedelic world?”
A 2018 “research paper” with the title “Inclusion of people of color in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy: a review” blames affluent white hippies for the fact that black usage of psychedelic drugs is statistically low rather than, oh, the fact that these are the people who invented voodoo and would probably start hallucinating demons in Klan hats after nibbling on half a mushroom cap:
Currently, the dominant, pervasive image of the psychedelic community is White affluence. This is not only due to the prohibitive costs and lack of access to psychedelic substances but also the glorification of 1960s/1970s White hippie drug use as a “counterculture” rather than an illicit act. The White washing [sic] of psychedelic drug use has unfortunately spread to medical research, as we find extremely low rates of participation by people of color in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy studies and a lack of generalizability of these studies to critical clinical issues for people of color.
Almost in spite of itself, the same paper admits that “African Americans report a significantly stronger ethnic identity than European Americans,” a fact that I’m not disputing but that severely undermines this intensely tiresome narrative of unending white racism and violently blind white groupthink.
In my hard-knuckled all-white milieu of suburban Philly in the 1970s — the decade where America was most shamelessly immersed in drug use both legal and illicit — the common wisdom was that black dudes avoided taking hallucinogens because such substances hold a mirror to the soul, and black identity is grounded in the strict avoidance of all forms of self-reflection and the incessant blaming of forces beyond their personal control.
It’s good to learn — rather, to be lectured — that due to things such as slavery and the Tuskegee Experiment, blacks shunned psychedelics for fear of incarceration, despite the fact that such drugs are by far the hardest to detect and easiest to conceal. Things suddenly make a lot more sense when you realize that we now live in a world that refuses to make sense.
It’s also, like, not a total bummer trip to realize that at least a sliver of the nearly $30-trillion national debt goes to funding National Institutes of Health-funded studies with titles such as “People of color in North America report improvements in racial trauma and mental health symptoms following psychedelic experiences.”
Published on December 10, 2020, that landmark slab of racial propaganda masquerading as social science laments that “There are no studies to date documenting the results of using psychedelics for racial trauma” before boldly announcing that “This is the first study to examine symptoms of traumatic stress, depression, and anxiety among those who have experienced racial trauma and whether the intensity of such symptoms can change after using psychedelics.”
Permit me to be unforgivably white for a moment so I can dissect precisely how unscientific this “study” was:
- It depended entirely on volunteers who anonymously answered an online survey. (If I had been aware of this survey, I would have anonymously answered it twelve dozen times.)
- Respondents were required to state, without proof, that they were over 18, were a member of the BIPOC coalition since “racial trauma is a necessary precursor to ethnic discrimination” (white people presumably can’t be racially traumatized even after being gang-raped by a dozen Somalis), and that they’d imbibed a “classic psychedelic” such as psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, or MDMA at least 30 days ago.
- They were asked to certify their racial trauma by answering 17 questions to establish that they were psychologically scarred by being “treated unfairly” at some point in their lives due to their race.
- They were then asked to affirm that their use of psychedelics had ameliorated their racial trauma. Everyone who alleged that psychedelics had, say, provided an intensely negative experience or unmasked their latent schizophrenia was excluded from the study.
So as a result of confining the study to people who stated with absolutely no evidence that they were black, had been racially traumatized as a result of being “treated unfairly,” and claimed that ingesting psychedelics had lessened the sting of the white man’s lash, the “researchers” boldly concluded that psychedelics may help black people overcome racial trauma.
According to Alan Davis, one of the study’s co-authors:
Their experience with psychedelic drugs was so powerful that they could recall and report on changes in symptoms from racial trauma that they had experienced in their lives, and they remembered it having a significant reduction in their mental health problems afterward. . . . This was really the first step in exploring whether people of color are experiencing benefits of psychedelics and, in particular, looking at a relevant feature of their mental health, which is their experience of racial trauma. This study helps to start that conversation with this emerging treatment paradigm.
Something tells me that a lot of people smell money in this “emergent treatment paradigm.”
But cutting through the swampy reeds of social-justice psychobabble, if putting the coons on shrooms calms them down to the point where they stare at their fingernails or stare at pictures of unicorns on their smartphones instead of raping and burning and murdering with abandon, I see nothing wrong with letting 40 million new Jimi Hendrixes bloom. Assign them 40 million self-hating white social workers as spirit guides, and force them to deal firsthand with the inevitable Big Bad Black Trip.
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22 comments
Their experience with psychedelic drugs was so powerful that they could recall . . . symptoms from racial trauma . . . and they remembered [shrooms] having a significant reduction in their mental health problems afterward. . . .
This smells like a replay of implanted memory recall exploded in the 90s by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, this time using psychedelic drugs administered by one of the “researchers” to implant false memories in low-IQ guinea pigs. The subjects will recall things like being gang raped by the Pope and Donald Trump in a closet with giraffes and circus clowns, if past experience with the objectivity of the “social sciences” is any guide. The results of using drugs would also not be unlike some of the photos in Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals that Darwin paid for of mental patients whose heads were wired with electrodes that were then conveniently painted out of the prints.
Hi Jim,
I stumbled across a peculiar book called Race War:Facing the Riding Sun by Gerald Horne a professor of black studies in Houston.
While it possibly overstated the agency of black organization at the time it proves that organized blackness was objectively pro Imperial Japan even after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Blacks were forming militias to welcome their Japanese liberators. I shit you not. MalcolmX, Marcus Garvey Web DuBois and Elijah Mohammad all expressed opinions that got American Bund guys arrested and killed. There is evidence that the Japanese even cultivated a black uprising to coordinate with their onslaught in the Pacific Rim and that the Japanese deftly used white colonialism against itself in dividing and conquering much of Asia.
I could not help but think of BLM this summer and various tantilizing connections to Chinese lucre. It might be worth diving into black chatter about Chinese hegemony and see who’s gleefully awaiting the overthrow of whites in the US and peek into the finances.
The US military intelligence services were so concerned about AfroNippon cooperation that they surveyed the issue in 1942 and made some startling recommendations for post war policy.
I, too, wondered briefly about a Chinese (CCP) connection to BLM. They would be a mighty force teamed up. But actually, the Chinese have to tip-toe around Africa unless they tip-off the natives to their sure takeover there. I’m sure we will hear more in the future about all this.
I haven’t heard of any Chinese connection. BLM first was backed by the Ford Foundation and Soros. As for lately, they got showered with donations from Woke Capital after the Floyd thing. It makes me sick.
This year the US was funding riots in Hong Kong and an insurgency in Uigher land. Its hardly a stretch to think that there was a retaliation.
They have offered clumsy diplomatic support to BLM.
After their big victories in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, the Japanese earned the esteem and admiration of the entire non-European (huWhite) world, and became the leaders in the emerging anti-colonial movement—-which in actuality was anti-huWhite Supremacy movement. But the Japs were very condescending and paternalistic to the other brown-eyed races, calling them “our little brown brothers.” And of course, they were very racist and supremacist in their own right (ask any Chinaman, Korean or Filipino), so they lost whatever People of Colour solidarity they had.
Malcontent X and Elijah Poole both adhered to Wallace Ford’s Mothership/Yacoob religion which held that all non-huWhite people are descendants of the ‘The Original Bl@ck Man’. I know that Poole sided with the Japs and was prosecuted for draught evasion activities.
W E B duBois did journey to Japan to confer with the top Japs about the huWhite Man’s raycizm; far as I know they strung him along.
Niall Ferguson reckoned that the wars of the Twentieth century were triggered by the Russo Japanese War and more or less ended with the US getting chased out of Vietnam and the Rise of Chimerica, predicting the dominance of China in that partnership.
hilarious… i needed that gut laff!!! Happy New Yr, Goad!
Alexandra,
The tea might not have too much power, but the sugar sure does.
Did a similar thing tonight, at a convenience shop, bought a small packet of Christmas chocalates, slowly ate them all, somewhat elevated my mood.
To Right_On,
Wilson .is pretty great in his way, everyon e who has a strong stomach should read his Illuminatus trilogy. It is a satire on everything it touches, particularly Anna Rosenbaum (ayn rand).
The inventor of LSD only (relatively) recently passed away, well into his 90s. Had been habitually tasting it throughout his life since discovering it.
Yep, Swiss chemist – and creator of LSD – Albert Hofmann left us in 2008. He remained an advocate of the psychedelic until his death. One of the first people he shared the drug with was Ernst Jünger, no less! They tripped out together often. Jünger seems to have particularly appreciated the more challenging (i.e., scary) aspects of a session (he even compared it to the anxiety of a WWI soldier!) but he later became disillusioned after dirty, undisciplined hippies championed the chemical.
Robert Anton Wilson seems to have a bad rap on the Right – despite his being heavily influenced by Aleister Crowley. I don’t think those who’ve never read him realize how skeptical – in a healthy way – he was, seeing no one map of the world as The Truth but rather as one particular perspective (point of view) which you may or may not find helpful to provisionally adopt.
Does this post tell me that now we ‘Master Whites’ are discriminating, yet again, against BIPOCs (about 9/10ths of the planet) by not ‘sharing’ the wonderful effects of psychedelics? Well, there you have it folks — we are truly terrible racists with no sympathy whatsoever for our poor, struggling brethren worldwide who are suffering from events that we have caused them right along, and who would benefit so greatly from yet another drug to sop their brains and make them more likely for arrest and incarceration.
BTW — I have to admit, I know next to nothing about drugs, being an older Privileged White Woman, and I can only assume that fentanyl is not a psychedelic drug, and was not being used intentionally by Mr. George Floyd at the time of his death ‘at the hands of police’ to alleviate his previous racial trauma.
And after reading Goad’s marvelous descriptive prose — ‘social-justice psychobabble’ and ‘coons on shrooms’ — I have tears streaming and I’m reaching for my drug of choice: English Black Tea with a load of sugar.
Careful with using tea. It’s a gateway to harder stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijFDkpNma-k
” blacks shunned psychedelics for fear of incarceration, despite the fact that such drugs are by far the hardest to detect and easiest to conceal. Things suddenly make a lot more sense when you realize that we now live in a world that refuses to make sense.”
This reminds me of a passage late in Burroughs’ first book, Junky, where “William Lee” is off junk but begins to deal mary jane. He soon gives it up, for two reasons: your customers are hipsters and “tea heads” who just want to sit around your apartment after scoring, and call you “a bring down” when you suggest they hit the road; and if the cops bust in, instead of easy to hide or destroy powder or syrettes or baggies, you have “a stash the size of a bale of hay.”
Since when have blacks feared incarceration? That’s new to me.
Vikings used ‘shrooms
Good for berserking
Back in the day I recall one of the advocates of psychedelic drug use – probably Robert Anton Wilson – mentioning that LSD was the very first drug seen as cool by whites but which African-Americans weren’t keen on at all. When Timothy Leary was on the lam in Algeria he tripped-out with Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers. The trip didn’t go well for Cleaver and he later gave a bizarre TV interview condemning both drug use and “High Priest” (pun intended) Leary.
Robert Anton Wilson and Leary might be of more interest to the more outré types on the Dissident Right than is usually assumed. Sure, they were both wacky but they also weren’t afraid to think outside the box – and then some! Leary in particular was an emphatic genetic elitist (and “racist” and “sexist”) and believed high IQ types had migrated westwards over the millennia. Their offspring having finally ended up in California the only available next stop was space exploration. Irish blarney, for sure, but he was always a fun and stimulating writer.
Leary advocated “mind expansion” and “consciousness raising” but The Light proved too blinding which no doubt encouraged our societies’ retreat into drug narcosis. Shame really.
I think a psychedelic funk revival band named Coons On Shrooms could potentially bring racial harmony to our society.
With Al Sharpton & his Nindo Nuffins Quartet as back up.
I remember buying a used vinyl LP of Richard Pryor’s Bicentennial Nigger in the mid-80s for a dollar or so, hoping for a laugh riot. Nah-uh. There was a long track about his acid trip that was almost all silent, like a Marcel Marceau LP. He just made whooshing sounds and did nonverbal things only the theater audience could see, but they sure laughed crazily at. It was the first time I realized the scam of comedy albums.
The pleasures of psychedelics are more cerebral than opiates or crack. Um, at least that’s what I’ve heard (cough cough).
I understand the point of this article and I don’t intend to disparage it in the least. It’s dead-on 100%. But it scares the pants off me. Given my age, I have 10, maybe even 15, years left to live, barring some accident or major illness. The point is, I don’t want to live in a society surrounded by nutsos. That’s my biggest fear at this late time in my life.
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