State Rules Citizens Have Religious Freedom to Use Psychedelic Mushrooms

By Matt Agorist

Despite the overwhelming evidence showing that kidnapping and caging people for possessing illegal substances does nothing to prevent use and only leads to more crime and suffering, government is still hell bent on enforcing the war on drugs. Like a crack addict who needs to find his next fix, the state is unable to resist the temptation to kick in doors, shake down brown people, and ruin lives to enforce the drug war. Breonna Taylor’s life was brought to an end because the police state is addicted to arresting people for drugs.

Instead of realizing the horrific nature of the enforcement of prohibition, many cities and states across the country double down on the drug war instead of admitting failure. As we can see from watching it unfold, this will only lead to more suffering and more crime. Luckily, this façade of “security” put up by the drug warriors is starting to come crashing down — and fast.

On Tuesday, the New Hampshire Supreme Court upended the 2018 conviction of a North Country resident for possession of psilocybin mushrooms, ruling that the conviction conflicts with the Native American-based religion he practices.

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According to a report in the Union Leader:

In its unanimous ruling, the four sitting justices said that the New Hampshire Constitution’s right of religion is stronger than protections under the U.S. Constitution, which requires a stricter balancing test in cases of religious use of illegal drugs.

According to the decision, Jeremy D. Mack of Colebrook had practiced a shamanic, Earth-based religion for years and in 2017 joined the Oratory of Mystical Sacraments branch of the Oklevueha Native American Church.

The church issued him a membership card, which allowed him to ingest the mushrooms sacramentally. The church had restrictions for the sacrament — it should be taken in seclusion, not in public or around children. And it should not be taken when operating a motor vehicle or shooting firearms.

“We have long recognized that in Part I, Article 5, there is a broad, a general, a universal statement and declaration of the ‘natural and unalienable right’ of ‘every individual,’ of every human being, in the state, to make such religious profession, to entertain such religious sentiments, or to belong to such religious persuasion as he chooses, and to worship God privately and publicly in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience and reason,’” wrote Supreme Court Justice James Bassett, quoting a 150-year-old opinion from 1868.

This move by New Hampshire is yet another step in the right direction taken by citizens to stop this violent war, and the implications for such measures are only beneficial to all human kind.

Seven years ago, Colorado citizens—tired of the war on drugs and wise to the near-limitless benefits of cannabis—made US history by voting to legalize recreational marijuana. Then, last year, this state once again placed themselves on the right side of history as they voted to decriminalize magic mushrooms. But this was just the beginning and their momentum is spreading—faster and stronger, toward decriminalizing all plant-based psychedelics.

As TFTP has reported multiple cities across the country and even entire states have passed decriminalization measures for mushrooms as well as other psychedelics like mescaline cacti, ayahuasca and ibogaine.

The resistance to legalization is predictable as psilocybin-containing mushrooms are an enemy to the establishment who has every reason in the world to want to keep them as illegal as possible. The same goes for ayahuasca and other powerful mind-opening substances.

Like the ruling in New Hampshire, the United States Supreme Court has unanimously ruled in favor of the legal religious use of ayahuasca by the União do Vegetal, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has affirmed the Santo Daime Church’s freedom to use Ayahuasca for religious purposes. However, ayahuasca’s principally active ingredient, DMT, remains a Schedule I controlled substance, carrying a steep prison sentence.

DMT appears in trace amounts in human blood and urine, suggesting it must be produced within the body, which means the DEA literally classifies our own bodies as have no medical purpose.

Because the US government is so tyrannically far behind the times, many people have been forced to travel outside of the country to meet with Shamans in the Amazon who are skilled and knowledgeable about the substance.

While religious freedom is certainly something to celebrate, the idea of the state loosening its grip on the consciousness of mankind is a massive leap in the right direction.

One industry in particular, Big Pharma, stands to lose billions if measures like this one began to spread to other areas as mushrooms and other hallucinogens have been clinically tested to treat a wide range of problems, including depression.

One in ten men in the US currently takes an antidepressant while 16.5 percent of women use them as well. If people can treat their depression with something that you can grow in your own home or a plant medicine from a shaman verses taking pills with side effects like homicidal ideation, the pharmaceutical industry would lose big time.

Indeed, there are mounds of evidence and studies showing the positive benefits of magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, and ibogaine.

As TFTP reported, a study, published in the scientific journal Neuropharmacology, found that clinically depressed people had increased neural responses to fearful faces one day after a psilocybin-assisted therapy session, which positively predicted positive clinical outcomes.

“Psilocybin-assisted therapy might mitigate depression by increasing emotional connection,” neuroscientist and study author Leor Roseman, a Ph.D. student at Imperial College London, explained to PsyPost.

This is almost the exact opposite of how standard anti-depressants operate, as SSRI’s typically work by creating an “emotional blunting.”

“[T]his is unlike SSRI antidepressants which are criticized for creating in many people a general emotional blunting,” noted Roseman.

“I believe that psychedelics hold a potential to cure deep psychological wounds, and I believe that by investigating their neuropsychopharmacological mechanism, we can learn to understand this potential,” explained Roseman.

The government also stands to lose if more measures like this take hold in other cities and states too.

As TFTP previously reported, mushrooms and psychedelics used to be widely accepted as a treatment for many ailments until government moved in to stop the expansion of human consciousness.

As MAPS points out, although first-hand accounts indicate that ibogaine is unlikely to be popular as a recreational drug, ibogaine remains classified as a Schedule I drug in the United States (it is also scheduled in Belgium and Switzerland). Yet despite its classification as a drug with a “high potential for abuse” and “no currently accepted medical use,” people who struggle with substance abuse continue to seek out international clinics or underground providers to receive ibogaine treatment.

In the 1940s, Western medicine began realizing the potential for psychedelics to treat addiction and psychiatric disorders. Tens of thousands of people were treated effectively, and psychedelic drugs were on the fast track to becoming mainstream medicine. But the beast of oppression reared its ugly head.

In 1967 and 1970, the UK and US governments cast all psychedelic substances into the pit of prohibition. People were waking up to the fact that governments intended to keep the world in a state of war, and that governments were working to keep the populace sedated under a cloak of consumerism. The collective mind expansion of that era came to a screeching halt under the boot and truncheon.

As John Vibes pointed out last January, a study actually confirmed the fear of authoritarians and showed they have every reason to oppose legal mushrooms. According to the study from the Psychedelic Research Group at Imperial College London, published in the journal Psychopharmacology, psychedelic mushrooms tend to make people more resistant to authority. They also found the psychedelic experience induced by these mushrooms also cause people to be more connected with nature.

“Our findings tentatively raise the possibility that given in this way, psilocybin may produce sustained changes in outlook and political perspective, here in the direction of increased nature relatedness and decreased authoritarianism,” researchers Taylor Lyons and Robin L. Carhart-Harris write in the study.

Now, as people share information globally, instantaneously, on a scale unstoppable by the state, we are resuming the advancement of medical research on psychedelic substances. Scientists are challenging the irrational classification of psychedelics as “class A” (UK) or “schedule 1” (US) substances, characterized as having no medical use and high potential for addiction. And, the recent push in Colorado is evidence of this.

While the stigma associated with mushrooms and other psychedelics has been perpetuated by those who wish to keep them illegal—to keep society in a constant state of obedient mediocrity—in reality, they are extremely safe.

In fact, a major study last year declared magic mushrooms to be the safest recreational drug.

Of an astonishing 120,000 participants from 50 nations, researchers for the Global Drug Survey found the percentage of those seeking emergency treatment for ingesting psilocybin-containing hallucinogenic mushrooms to comprise just 0.2 percent per 10,000 individuals.

Rates of hospitalization for MDMA, alcohol, LSD, and cocaine were an astounding five times higher.

“Magic mushrooms are one of the safest drugs in the world,” Global Drug Survey founder and consultant addiction psychiatrist, Adam Winstock, told the Guardian, noting the biggest risk users face is misidentification — ingesting the wrong mushroom — not from the psychedelic fungus, itself.

After 40 years, it appears that another brick in the wall of prohibition is beginning to crumble in the face of science and logic. There may be hope for humanity after all.

Source: The Free Thought Project

Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Minds.

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