Introducing myself: Divinecomedia

Introducing myself enough to get us rolling. Rolling used to mean taking MDMA or Ecstasy. Maybe it still does. That is not what I mean, but I do intend to talk about drugs, psychedelic drugs. I've been involved with them in a lot over the last three decades, different ways: as a scholar, a guide, a researcher, a manufacturer, distributor, book editor, publisher, professor, and now I like to think I'm old enough and wise enough to be a philosopher.
I became interested in these drugs when I was 9 years old, in 1967, when my 5th grade teacher told me L-S-D stood for Let's Save Democracy. By my third year of college I began to study psychology under Frank Barron, who turned on Leary, and things moved very fast from there. Within a few more years I had sought out many of the seminal figures of modern psychedelia and became their student and eventually colleague, editor, publisher, and friend. Including Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Stanislav Grof, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, and quite a few others. I went to graduate school at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago to study religion with Mircea Eliade.
I was an early explorer of MDMA, which I was turned onto by Timothy Leary who sent me to Alexander Shulgin who helped me set up a lab to make it before it was illegal. I had quite a good time turning on many hundreds of people in a quasi formal study-- simply giving it to people, with little preparation, and asking them to describe it's effects. By 1985 I'd turned on a wide range of people, from the President of the American Psychiatric Association, Daniel X.Freedman and Charles Schuster at the University of Chicago. Schuster made up the idea that MDMA caused brain damage so the government could make this valuable drug illegal. So it immediately became the most popular recreational drug in the world, making lots of money for organized crime secretly affiliated with government. That's a fascinating story we'll get into later.
There is a psychedelic renaissance going on. Research is underway with psilocybin at several leading universities in the US and Europe. The Pentagon is taking an interest in psychedelics to treat the horrible epidemic of PTSD in war vets. That is another important story to write about. Cheered on by the mainstream media this renaissance also includes recreational, non-medical uses of psychedelics, like microdosing LSD, which has become a global trend. That is, taking very small, barely active doses of acid to make you more creative and productive at your job. I had a hand in starting that trend too, just by telling James Fadiman about it. As you know if you're reading about it in the media, now the world's leading authority and researcher. Ayahuasca is another psychedelic thing that has gone from an obscure jungle medicine which rids the body of parasites into into a global phenomenon of modern seekers trying to cure their existential crisis by traveling to of South America to drink this utterly putrid tasting drink that might give you visions and make you puke and shit like never before.
The whole subject is immensely fascinating to me. That's why I joined Steemit: to blog about modern developments and lead discussions about psychedelics today.
While I began my inquiry into these drugs with great enthusiasm for their healing and mystical-religious effects, sort of recently in the post 9/11 world, I've entered another phase of inquiry. Maybe you know Robert Heinlein's notion of "the man who learned better." That's what I feel like. I still appreciate there are positively enriching uses but I have become aware of another level of use by government agencies like the CIA and other institutes of social engineering that are important and also disturbing to investigate and make conscious. Like religion in general, psychedelics can be enlightening, but unfortunately they are used in mind control much more than we typically realize. I have published a couple books on the religious history of these drugs, and a book about Leary--mostly a favorable memorial for him. My next book will be more about what Huxley warned of Brave New World, as part of a social engineering scheme. I'm hoping that blogging here about current developments and the new press about psychedelics, and having discussions with other Steemers will help me write this book, Psychedelic Drugs: Sacred and Profane.
So how's this for a brief introduction? Now what?