Simon Powell - The Psilocybin Solution

“This book provides a clear and up-to-date picture of what goes on in the brain during the visionary psilocybin experience. The author’s intrepid speculations, centering on information as the fundamental stuff of the universe, are clearly signposted. The writing is lucid and a joy to behold, an important contribution.”

“The profound experiences unlocked by the visionary psilocybin-containing mushrooms are more than a recreational holiday for the mind. They are, in fact, the key to understanding that consciousness is not an aspect of reality, it is reality itself.”

“A worthy successor to Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, The Psilocybin Solution takes the reader behind the grand curtain of reality with a compelling hypothesis that approaches a unified field theory of human consciousness in an intelligent and interconnected universe.”

“In this fascinating and provocative book, Simon Powell speculates on the nature of reality. He posits Nature is a deliberate and intelligently behaving system, and he proposes that psilocybin, by altering the neurochemistry of the brain in specific ways, enables novel patterns of information to emerge, allowing the psyche to become a sort of conduit to the Other. If in fact that is what actually happens, then entheogens (psychedelics) are much more important to the human species than has been realized.”

This book is intended for informational and educational purposes only. The legal situation concerning psychoactive fungi varies from country to country and is subject to unpredictable and sometimes ruthless change. Indeed, many countries forbid the possession of such fungi even if they are to be found growing naturally in the environment. Thus, no clear and concise guidelines can be given here regarding issues of legality. Readers, should they wish to explore the contents of this book in a more direct fashion, must do so entirely at their own risk. Both the author and the publisher can accept no responsibility for the actions of any reader. For the record, the bulk of this book was written and researched at a time when fresh, unprocessed psilocybin fungi were legal to possess and consume in the United Kingdom.

The year 2011 marked the fortieth anniversary of the so-called War on Drugs, which was declared by Richard M. Nixon in June 1971. It is appropriate that this misguided, morally bankrupt “war” of harassment against a sizeable minority within society—those adults who choose to alter their own consciousness through the use of drugs—was the initiative of one of the most dishonest, violent, and authoritarian presidents America has ever had the misfortune to elect, a man who stands enthroned by history as the absolute epitome of morally bankrupt leadership. Forty years on, it is our shared misfortune, despite the opprobrium that rightly surrounds Nixon’s name, that his “War on Drugs” is still being fought not only in the United States but throughout the world—for where America led in 1971, all other members of the United Nations swiftly followed. Armed bureaucracies were established to police the consciousness of citizens and given powers to break down the doors of drug users in the middle of the night, confiscate their property, send them to jail, humiliate them, and generally ruin their lives. In some countries they can even be executed. All this has been accompanied by years of glib propaganda, paid for with large sums of public money, designed to convince us that drugs have such evil and degrading effects, and are so lacking in any redeemable qualities, that those who use them “deserve” to be persecuted and punished for their “sins.”

It is a witch hunt, a moral panic, with nothing rational about it at all.

Indeed the very societies that attempt most vigorously to suppress various drugs, and in which users are subject to the most stringent penalties, have seen a continuous increase in the per capita consumption of these drugs over the past forty years. This is tacitly admitted by the huge armed bureaucracies of the drug war that every year demand more and more public money to fund their suppressive activities; if the suppression were working, one would expect their budgets to go down, not up.

Worse—and we may all see the effects—the criminalization of drug use has empowered and enriched a global criminal underworld by guaranteeing that it is the only source of supply of these drugs. We have, in effect, delivered that large minority within our societies that feels the need to experience altered states of consciousness into the hands of the very worst mobsters and sleazeballs on the planet. Those who wish to buy drugs have no choice but to approach and associate with violent and greedy criminals. And because the proceeds from illegal drug sales are so enormous, we are all caught up in the inevitable consequences of turf wars and murders among the gangs and cartels competing in this blackest of black markets.

It should be completely obvious to our governments, after forty years of dismal failure to suppress illegal drug use, that their policies in this area do not work and will never work. It should be completely obvious, a simple logical step, to realize that by decriminalizing drug use and making the supply of all drugs available to those adults who wish to use them through legal and properly regulated channels we could, at a stroke, put out of business the immense criminal enterprise that presently flourishes on the supply of illegal drugs.

It should be obvious, but somehow it is not.

Instead the powers that be continue to pursue the same harsh and cruel policies to which they have been wedded since 1971, ever seeking to strengthen and reinforce them rather than to replace them with something better. Indeed the only “change” that the drug warriors have consistently sought across the decades has been to demand ever more money, ever more surveillance technology, ever more arms, and ever more draconian legislative powers to break into homes, confiscate property, and deprive otherwise law-abiding citizens of liberty. In the process we have seen our once free and upstanding societies, which used to respect individual choice, conscience, and adult responsibility above all else, slide remorselessly down the slippery slope that leads to the police state. And all this is being done in our name, with our money, by our own governments, to “save us from ourselves”!