illigalisation of shrooms...

i was reading in the guardian today about how the police are trying to step up arrests on mushroom sellers...and the government are looking to make supplying an offence...because they know as well as we do that we're only eating them to get fucked up...

anyone else as upset as i am?

(i will type up the article when i'm soberer)

 

Very upset! Labour are taking the piss


Mushrooms have had tonnes of publicity last couple of years, so the consumption must have shot up. But the only real figure you can relate that to is money. Folk are making a fortune off something which grows wild and free and they aint getting a cut.

There's no more deaths to speak of, never were, no one's waking up with mushroom hangovers regretting taking them night before, and as far as I know there hasn't been an increase in any mental disorders relating to ingesting them.

So what other reason could there be? They plan to pretty much to ban smoking outdoors by 2000-whatever, but outright banning the cause of a vast majority of deaths in the UK they wont do. They keep talking about 24 hour drinking, but alcohol is the cause of all kinds of nasty shit in our society.

But shrooms have got to go

 

End of the world

 

dear oh dear, imagine that! people will have to rely on only themselves to have fun and interact with people! whatis the world coming to?!?!

namaste
x x x

 

how the fuck can they ban shrooms, sure they can ban selling them, but shit me, they grow naturally all over the british country side! just go and pick them out of the ground! flick them first so they grow back, and store them in honey...and your sorted all year around!

 

It's more the principle of the thing ... should the government have the right to tell us what we can ingest and not ingest?

 

...just because you have friends doesn't mean everyone else does...some people just like their friends to be 50 feet tall...and made of pigs in some sort of stunt display formation...

 

I guess it largely depends on wether or not that substance is harmful to our health or to the health of others around us, and also the extent of the health risk. I can understand the government wanting to discourage people from ingesting harmful substances but as many of us are aware, psychotropic mushrooms are fairly low down on the fatal-to-health-substances hiearchy (did I spell that right) and they are a naturally occuring plant. The way I look at it, the current legislation on psychotropic mushrooms in the UK is very confused and incoherent and I can't see much change in that coming any time soon.

 

Certainly when it comes to harming others around us there is a case for prohibition - smoking in enclosed public spaces for instance. But if I want to inject a fatal dose of heroin isn't that my choice?

 

i agree...

 

By that logic we should ban all intoxicating substances, certainly alcohol considering the number of drink-driving deaths this causes.

 

anyone can harm others...whats your point?

 

yeh why?

 

What I was trying to say is, the dangers of that substance and it's potential risk to others are logically the cases upon which the government would make to legalise, illegalise, or re-classify it. As has been pointed out earlier, there is little sign of a large impact on anyone's health as a result of the recent increase in the intake of the mushrooms, they pose very little risk in terms of cigarette's equivelent of passive smoking and when you add the fact that (some of the species at least) are a naturally occuring plant then I can see no practicality of them being illegalised, even though they were in the states!

 

cocaine rots the nasal linings etc .. its bad for the stomach .. rots that .. it also makes you depressed with moderate use.

As with everything .. use is one thing abuse is another.

Things taken in moderation is ok .. A little from time to time never hurt anyone .. except those who use drugs to escape their lives it seems .. those who are addictive personalities .. though generalising doesnt help anyone.

Sigh, its a difficult subject fraught with volitile opinions from both sides it seems .. with those on one side saying any use of drugs is totally unacceptable and is for those with no personalities or social skills etc and those on another side who can't see and think for the drugs. Essientally fundamentalist, extremist opinions that help no-one and get nowhere.

Then you have the legal drugs like nicotine and alcohol, with alcohol being responsible for more harm both to others and the self than any other drug.

Then you have medicine .. medicine produced by corporations for profit .. pushed onto Doctors with incentives to push there product over others regardless of which is better and with goverment backing and funding etc.

Drugs .. people .. goverments .. hmmmn

 

Yeah that's a great point to bring up here. Anti-Depressants being the only I can comment on really, but probably the worst of the lot. Unless they're still giving out anti-bios for colds.

The fact they're called 'happy pills' is pretty disgraceful. Whoever coined that term was checking bank balances instead of doctors reports at the time!

This is another way labour are, taking the piss to me. Ahhh, you hear one story about the increase of anti-deps going out to school children in record numbers, but mushrooms are the worry for our youth today.

'We just want peace and a stable government in Iraq' but let's build a few hundred more fighter jets and a couple more aircraft carriers to be sure. £££. It's a differant war now, with on the ground insurgents, let's disband our regiments and just pick any large number we want to go fight it. £££. Terrorist are running wild in the UK, ID Cards should fix it. £££.

A lot of war stuff there which has no relation to shrooms. And I guess banning them wont actually cost the government anything really. Bit of pointless paperwork. But nails in the coffin man they just keep banging them in!

 

i dunno...i find i dont feel the want to play with soft drugs anymore...they were fun...but meh...i guess you go through different stages in life?...happiness comes from the mind and all that ...still all for internal freedom though xxx

 

Absolutely

I think with the likes of coke and heroin, they're illegal for good reason, maon was just telling saying what the coke does to you and we all know heroin is rather awful too. The personal choice thing should maybe be taken away from you there. As no one in their right mind chooses a heroin addiction, and this in the majority of cases is what it leads to when you do try it 'that odd time'.

I've never heard any religious connections with these drugs either, but they're there with mushrooms. I'm sure the UK houses a few shamans who neither use them just to get smahsed and certainly don't abuse them. Mushrooms probably have some Pagan connections too, a native plant of Britain and all that. I wonder if any of that will be taken into account when this decision is made. I doubt it though.

Peyote in the US springs to mind, members of the Native American Church are still allowed to grow and ingest this despite it being illegal overall.

 

I wonder then if there is a way of convincing the government that shrooms can have a very positive effect on an individual even though they may be abused by some. I'm thinking of things such as aerosols or sleeping tablets for example. These are things which can do a lot of good but do a hell of a lot of harm if misused, but the fact that they can do good means that they will not be illegalised.

I wonder if the same recognition can happen with shrooms? Maybe not, because unlike aerosols or sleeping tablets, shrooms and other psychedelics can encourage a very radical way of thinking (enter Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Terence McKenna, Ralph Metzner etc, etc), a way thinking where the user may seriously question the government and those in power etc. I know certainly from the few times I've experienced psychedelics that I have found myself thinking about things like that in depth: questioning government, politics, nature, science etc, you name it....

Could that be the real reason why the government would want to illegalise them? Not on the grounds of the fact that they are good or bad for health or wether they are abused or not but because of the possibilty that those substances could encourage the user to question or even oppose the government? Do the government want people expanding their minds and questioning them? I think not. The solution: ban the shrooms. Just a theory.

 

To put it in brief: To govern is to control - to control is to keep the controlled trustworthy of the controller and to not question them - the contolled experiment with psychedelics - the controlled as a result begin to think independtley from the controller, and may even become a 'self controller' - this in turns undermines the original controller's position - the obvious solution is to ban whatever enabled the controlled to become this way. 'Much easier to control a population without a freed mind isn't it?'


Excuse me if I may seem like I've watching too many 'Matrix' movies recently folks.