An interview with Terence McKenna in Palenque, Mexico 1996. (Transcript)
Amid the ongoing global debate on psychedelic drugs and specifically the legalization and regulation of both medical and recreational use of cannabis in many U.S states and nationwide in Mexico, it makes so much sense to go back to first principle thinking, to question and redefine collectively how we think and talk about substances, consciousness and altered states of mind.
I’ve transcripted this exclusive short interview by Luc Sala, made near the ancient Mayan ruins in Palenque, where Terence shared his thoughts about the use of psychedelic drugs and plants in human history and modern societies, languages and laws.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewer and interviewee.
Luc Sala: What’s your feeling when I say drugs?
Terence McKenna: Drugs is a word which has polluted the well of language. Part of the reason we have a drug problem is because we don’t have an intelligent language to talk about substances, plants, psychedelics states of minds, sedative states of mind, states of amphetamine excitation; we can’t make sense of the problem and the opportunities offered by substances unless we clean up our language. Drugs it’s a word that’s been used by governments to make it impossible to think creatively about the problem of substances, abuse and the availability, so forth and so on.
LS: In the minds of the people the word ‘drugs’ was once used is healing medications, drug companies that still make Tylenol I consider very legitimate…
TM: So it’s a kind of a paradox isn’t it? Drugs mean that which cures us and the greatest social problem of the generations, so right there you see the schizophrenia involved in thinking about drugs, apparently there are good drugs sanctioned by science and medicine and bad drugs used by brown people in strange rights and growing unusual plants in distant parts of the world. This kind of thinking because it’s naive, leads to social problems, bad politics and bad social policy.
LS: Your stance has been to at least look for what you call those strange plants and substances in strange places. You originally were a botanist or you still are…
TM: Yes and from the time I was very young I was very fascinated with the idea of extremely dramatic changes in consciousness from which one recovers after a few hours induced by plants, and I discovered through the writing of Aldous Huxley and other people that this was a worldwide religious and cultural phenomenon that my own catholic-middle-class upbringing had completely overlooked and denied, and I’ve been fascinated with it ever since; it’s a bit like sexuality, it’s something which the Calvinist intellect would just prefer didn’t exist but in fact, the phenomenon of being human beings in animal bodies and in relationship with nature makes it important for us to address these altered states of consciousness, the plants, the substances and the cultural institutions that come into being around these things.
LS: Your thesis in many books has been that these substances have had a far greater influence on culture and still have and will have than most people would like to accept or see.
TM: Yes, to my mind, human history is the story of one substance after another distorting or transforming human values and society. A perfect example would be sugar, most people don’t even think of sugar as a drug and yet we may think cocaine distorted moral and political values in Latin America; but sugar brought back slavery; slavery actually died with the Roman empire, nobody worked agricultural products with slaves in the middle ages. It wasn’t until early 1400 that the Portuguese began producing sugar and the use of Jews and prisoners, so then they started buying human beings from Arab traders and the pope was in on the deal and everybody was in on the deal; this is drug corruption of the central institutions of society on a massive scale.
LS: But that has gone on until our days, we have alcohol, we have tobacco…
TM: Well this is my very point, that every society chooses a small number of substances no matter how toxic and enshrines them in its cultural values, then demonizes all other substances and then persecutes and launches witch hunts against those users whenever some political pretext requires witch hunts and persecutions; so it’s an old game and it’s been played in many places.
Hopefully part of the advancement of society toward ideas of universal human rights and that sort of thing, it certainly must include the idea of the universal human right to take responsibility for and to alter your own state of consciousness as you see fit. I don’t think we can even pretend that we’re on the edge of a civilized dialog until we grant that people’s minds like their bodies must be a domain free from government control. In American law we have the notion of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, if the pursuit of happiness means anything, it must mean the right to use and experiment with substances and plants.
LS: But do we need more research? Or do we know all we need to know about entheogens and hallucinogens?
TM: No no, we need endless amounts of research. The fact that these things have been illegal in most countries for 50 years means there is a huge lag in understanding the impact of these things on human beings; how many people have taken MDMA? Yet MDMA has not been thoroughly studied by science, how many people have smoked DMT? Same thing. In a way, by making these drugs illegal we’re setting ourselves up for a potential catastrophe someday when some side effect is overlooked because the drugs were not rationally reviewed with an eye not toward keeping them out of the hands of the public but with an eye toward public safety and educating the public in safe use of these things.
The state should not in the matter of drugs any more than in the matter of sex act as the secret agent for the agenda of the church and that’s what’s happening; people want to stimulate themselves, they want to explore their consciousness, they want to sedate themselves, who are we to stand in their way with a moral ideology and the long heavy arm of the law to interfere with that? It distorts civilized values, that’s the bottom line, drug repression distorts civilized values and political discourse.
LS: Many people emphasize the bad effects of using LSD and DMT, do you think there are positive effects in general and ones that are yet to be discovered?
TM: Well yes, I mean anyone who has actually been around people using psychedelics knows they have tremendous therapeutic potential; tremendous potential to launch people into confrontations with aspects of their personality or their history that they’re in denial of. The people who hold that these psychedelic substances have no application have very little actual personal experience with them, it’s the old story of “my mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts”.
LS: Would psychology be further ahead? Would you have learned more about the way your mind works on itself and in interaction with others if the research says on the use of LSD or ibogaine or many of these substances had proceeded in an orderly and scientific manner?
TM: Yes, I think it’s a great tragedy of 20th-century science that the original excitement about exploring consciousness and mental illness, generated by the discovery of LSD, gave way to establishment paranoia and repression of drug-using populations. The excitement in psychology when LSD was first introduced was like the excitement in the physics community when the atom was smashed and everybody thought “well now we’ll understand mental illness, schizophrenia, memory…”, and instead the government lost its nerve because it saw that these substances have a potential for deprogramming people to institutional values, and that was so terrifying that all the promise for mental illness and creativity studies was sacrificed to institutional paranoia about the fact that drugs might actually cause people to wake up to some of the abuses and scams that were being run by late modernism and capitalism.
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