Simon G. Powell
THE PSILOCYBIN SOLUTION
My plea to scientists, administrators, and politicians who may read my words is this: look again at psilocybin, do not confuse it with the other psychedelics, and realize that it is a phenomenon unto itself with an enormous potential for transforming human beings—not simply transforming the people who take it, but transforming society in the way that an art movement, a mathematical understanding, or a scientific breakthrough transforms society. It holds the possibility of transforming the entire species simply by virtue of the information that comes through it.
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
“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.”
Disclaimer
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.
Foreword
Graham Hancock
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
