Nixon's 1970 Controlled Substances Act criminalized any herb or concentrate with a "potential for abuse." That "potential" is defined by the general consensus of industrial nations that drugs are worth far more illegal than legal, and that without the international Inquisition their own internal fascism would be harder to justify, and finance.

Dan Russell wrote the passage above, with brutal clarity in his landmark book Drug War: Covert Money, Power and Policy (Camden, NY: Kalyx, 2000).

Know a parent, friend or co-worker who believes in the War on Some Drugs with a patriotic and puritanical fervour? Buy them a copy of Russell's book.

A 1970 graduate of CCNY with a BA in liberal arts, Russell has, in both Drug War, and his first book, Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda (Camden, NY: Kalyx, 1998), torn the curtain of deceit, lies, and manipulation driving the philosophy and politics of Prohibition to shreds. Russell casts much needed sunlight onto what the War on Some Drugs has become: a catastrophe the War on Some Drugs has become. Choosing to deconstruct the War, Russell continues to cover its many aspects, including this scathing expose of Agent Green, the US-pushed Bio-War, spraying of the multi-species destroying Fusarium Oxysporum onto Colombia's Upper-Putumayo valley and its native peoples. Disinformation campaigns by elite manipulators play a key role in continuing the destruction, so we're glad to introduce readers to Russell's clear-eyed view of the ongoing, ever-escalating War.

Russell is also a contributor to the You Are Being Lied To (New York: Disinformation Books, 2001). When not writing, Russell operates his own company, Kalyx.com comprising a publishing arm, and an herb retailorship shipping herbs, natural food, and herbal products anywhere worldwide.

Russell is opening another store, Shamanshop.net, in the immediate future.

Disinformation: You're obviously against the War on Some Drugs. What set you off? You've written "the fascists politicized you."

Dan Russell: What set me off? I was 19 in 1964. That summer I was at the Berkeley Poetry Conference with many of the Sixties legends. Not that I was a poet, I was just a wide-eyed kid but picking up on all of that, and taking LSD, the original Sandoz, and Owsley acid, with the graduate students around Ginsberg and Olson: it was just the milleu I grew up in. I grew up definitely among the Hippies, and experienced the spectacular brutality of the LAPD during those years.

I became politicized just by living. I did a lot of running around in those years, and by 19688 was enrolled at CCNY (Community College of New York). It was a very polarized environment. I was talking to the Chancellor of CCNY, and remember him quoting The Doors at me, "We want the world and we want it now." He completely misunderstood, he had no conception of what Jim Morrison was saying. He had no insight into it at all. He took it as a violent threat, rather than the mystical thing it was.

There was this enormous cultural gap that extended way down to the street.

Disinformation: I notice your bio at Drugwar.com says you were a "1972 graduate of the streets of NYC." What does that mean?

Dan Russell: I don't think I'm going to go too much into that, but I was a professional outlaw for a while after I got out of CCNY.

I could have gone academic and probably should have, but didn't. I choose to go hogwild. But it got old, much too violent, not a "flower-child" kind of thing at all. By 1972, I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania running a book store. I totally changed direction.

Disinformation: Do you now practice a "Shamanic lifestyle"?

Dan Russell: Yeah, as far as I can. I have a 20-acre homestead in the sticks in North Central, NY State. I can't grow pot, though I'd like to, but I risk losing the whole thing.

The hick-sticks, as I have experienced them, are quite conformist. But the cops out here are not on the hunt, they are perfectly willing to let you alone in you aren't selling pot to the kids. As long as you aren't doing anything that forces them to act, they will leave you alone.

Disinformation: Discuss the function of "inebriative behavior." Do you think there is an actual mental function inbred into us from which inebriative behavior comes?

Dan Russell: Yes. People's dreams, in whichever culture, don't vary. In other words, the dreams of 3-year old Polynesian kids from the 18th Century are identical to the dreams of 3-year old American kids now. They don't vary. You can go to China in the 16th Century and look at drawings of little children there, and they'll be exactly the same as the drawings of modern European kids in France. Regardless of the era.

Carl Jung went and did it empirically. I mean, you could have 2000-year old drawings of children from Israel, and they are identical to modern 2 and 3 year-olds in Europe, or China.

What you are dealing with there is that in reality the bulk of the mind, like the body, is universal in Human Beings, and that is part of Jung's empirical "proof" of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. There's not a lot of physical difference between people, nor a significant mental difference. The overwhelming majority of your psyche is the "collective unconscious," if you want to call it that.

Your personal experiences are unique and individual, but your needs for food, sleep, affection, all are pretty much universal and identical to everybody else. Those are the basic drives. The mental imagery that comes up in relation to that is also identical in people. This is empirically demonstrable.

So, when you talk about the archetypal inebriative function, it's a case of talking about the archetypal function of eating. The dentition is millions of years old, and inherently omnivorous. So is the relationship to the plant world.

In other words, animal imagery comes up automatically to people in dreams. It can come out in urban people who have no experience of Paleolithic hunting. It has to do with the reality that in dreams you are contacting that part of your being which has an evolutionary existence, which exists way past your individual existence. When you talk about the archetypal, the evolutionary, automatic function of inebriative behavior, it is quite like talking about the automatic function of hunger, if you get sick, or want to go somewhere spiritually.

Images that are famous in human mythology as archetypal images--the Apple, the Tree, the Golden Flower--all mythologies are rooted in this imagery, archetypal, shamanic herbal imagery.

There are no mythologies that are not, just as there are no tribal cultures anywhere on Earth for whom an inebriative herb wasn't the central sacrament and totem of the culture.

And just as psychologically, we're all tribal.

Disinformation: So, we're all still going after or chasing that?

Dan Russell: It is automatic, like hunger, and it's visceral, an oral thing, again, quite like hunger.

Hunger is not volitional. Neither are inebriative instincts and urges. That's why it is not controllable by law. It's like trying to control sex by law. It can't be done, and has never been done.

Disinformation: Which brings us to the criminalizing of culture.