Albion Dreaming (44 page)

Hardison was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment in December 2004. As he was led from the dock, he shouted: “You would think I was a terrorist.” His appeal in 2006 failed, the judges once again dwelling on the financial potential. Mr. Justice Keith told the court: “This was not an amateurish operation in a garden shed. It was a sophisticated and calculated attempt to introduce synthetic drugs in the UK market, which could have reaped great financial rewards.” Adding that he though Hardison deserved every day of his sentence.
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The sentence Hardison received exemplifies the inconsistencies in court disposals for LSD manufacturing in Britain. In 1978, during a decade when LSD use was at its zenith, responsible for the development of a visible counter culture, Richard Kemp was sentenced to thirteen years. That was a long enough sentence, yet twenty-six years later, with LSD use at its lowest, Hardison was imprisoned for twenty years and is due to be released in 2014, after which he will be deported to the U.S. despite having married a UK citizen. In both cases, the defence was ideology and it is tempting to suggest the heavy sentences were handed down as much to punish the temerity displayed as for the crimes committed. Murderers, paedophiles and armed robbers are rarely given sentences of twenty years and inconsistent sentencing that can be interpreted as an attack on personal freedom and lifestyles diminishes respect for the law as a whole.

Two years into his sentence, Hardison wrote from prison affirming his beliefs, “I am an ideologue who wanted to embrace and experience Albert’s problem child!” He went on to explain how his libertarian values were forged by his upbringing “... in a barn, a boat and a school bus at various times and places, raised by a family who had homesteaded in the Depression in the mountains of Montana and Idaho. Told by them that I could do anything I
damn well please provided I put my mind to it and harmed no one in the process.”
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Kemp’s musings in
Microdoctrine
notwithstanding, it’s rare we have the opportunity to hear from an LSD chemist on why they devote their lives to creating the potent psychedelic. In Casey Hardison’s case it had its origins in personal and family experiences with the addictive qualities of alcohol and drugs, which he transcended through AA’s Twelve Step programme. An early experiencee with LSD showed him:

“... a rare glimpse of the power of the human mind to shape reality. I saw that my limited neurotypical consciousness was only one plane, level or aspect and that there were infinite new things to discover. I found new perspectives on birth, death, and the nature of mind and consciousness as the field of creation. The experience of the oneness of all things replaced the myth of separation. Perennial wisdom dawned and my heart burst forth in praise, gratitude and love, rooted in a mindset of compassion for self and other.”

Personal experience with LSD, and how the psychedelic community was treated by the government and its agencies also led Hardison to seriously question the ‘War on Drugs’ as it relates to psychedelics. He concluded that the ‘War on Drugs’ was fundamentally concerned with those in positions of authority (the ‘Establishment’) being hell-bent on maintaining control of psychedelic substances to prevent people changing their consciousness:

“... the so-called ‘war on drugs’ is not a war on pills, powder, plants, and potions, it is war on mental states — a war on consciousness itself — how much, what sort we are permitted to experience, and who gets to control it. More than an unintentional misnomer, the government-termed ‘war on drugs’ is a strategic decoy label; a slight-of-hand move by government to redirect attention away from what lies at ground zero of the war — each individual’s fundamental right to control his or her own consciousness.”

These thoughts are hardly of someone who manufactures LSD purely for profit and greed as the trial judge suggested. Hardison
made an Ideological commitment to himself to synthesise LSD and eventually, after trial and error with other psychedelics, he did just that. Further clarifying why he took the path he did, Hardison was brutally honest:

“There is no single pat answer. The simplest: my love of learning. The veiled: for my ego, for the attention, to feel special, to be loved. The flippant: because I could. Semi-consciously: civil disobendience, academic and religious freedom in the study of the mind, and an expression of equal rights. The most accurate: my desire to share entheogenesis with others, to wake humanity up from the penumbral dream-world of materialist delusion, to help end the blatant injustice and rape of human dignity that occurs with the context of a ‘War on (some) drugs’, to seize the world stage and help to create a forum for the cooperative and conscious stewardship of Mother Earth and all her relations.”
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Kemp and Hardison’s involvement in manufacturing, distributing and taking LSD for ideological reasons may be seen as an act of civil disobedience; the conscious breaking of a law because it is believed to be unworkable or immoral. Their actions were conscious and in full knowledge of the way the law treats those who create substances that alter consciousness. An “us and them” situation between LSD users and the authorities has always existed, two sides each with radically different beliefs and aspirations.

This “us and them” situation has led politicians, the media and the judiciary to frame the attacks on LSD and other psychedelics as part of an ongoing “war on drugs”. “War on Drugs” looks meaningful when delivered in oration from the lectern of a party political conference, or screaming from a newspaper headline. It is, however, a meaningless phrase, a political catch-phrase used to manipulate opinion against a nebulous enemy, doublespeak to disguise the fact that what lies behind a war on drugs is actually a war on the people involved with them.

The history of LSD in Britain shows this to be not just a war on the personal freedoms of individuals who wish to alter their consciousness, but also a war on the lifestyles connected with particular drugs, such as LSD. This has been shown by the
draconian treatment meted out to hippie travellers and the Acid House party scene to give but two relevant examples. At a time when politicians are stressing anti-discrimination, diversity and equality of opportunity, large sections of society are being discriminated against solely because of their choice of drug and the lives they choose to lead based on that choice.

LSD is illegal; manufacture and distribution is a crime. But a crime against whom? In many ways, LSD is a victimless offence. Unlike drugs like heroin, cocaine, amphetamines and alcohol, LSD is not linked to acquisitive crimes, so there is no direct cost to society from shoplifting or theft. It is not a physically addictive drug, and any mental compulsion to take LSD repeatedly is soon rendered pointless due to the body’s tolerance to the drug. Drug prevention and treatment services see few people who have had a problem with LSD and its use does not clog up substance misuse services. The more LSD is examined dispassionately, uncoupled from its political baggage and the media circus, the fewer reasons there are for its illegal status.

This view is shared by consultant psychiatrist Ben Sessa, at least for the use of LSD in a medical context. When he took an interest in the medical uses of LSD, Sessa reviewed the papers published by Ronnie Sandison who ran the LSD psychotherapy unit at Powick Hospital in the Fifties and Sixties. Sessa concluded that LSD did have relevance for use in therapy. He also discovered that a degree of revisionism had taken place within the medical establishment. “Scientists, psychiatrists and psychologists were forced to give up their studies for socio-political reasons,” he remarked in January 2006. For instance when he was a medical student the textbooks claimed there was no medical use for the drug. “It was as if a whole generation of psychiatrists have had this systematically erased from their education. But for the generation who trained in the 50s and 60s, this really was going to be the next big thing. Thousands of books and papers were written, but then it all went silent. My generation has never heard of it. It’s almost as if there has been an active demonization.”
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The government, Sessa contends, has not banned the use of morphine in hospitals because its derivative, heroin, is used
and trafficked by criminals. This is a compelling argument, illustrating that the medical ban on LSD stems more from the fact that the potential for using it in psychotherapy has not yet been fully explored. Richard Horton, editor of the medical journal
Lancet
, added weight to Sessa’s case in April 2006, saying “the demonization of psychedelic drugs as a social evil” had helped suppress useful medical research that would lead to a better understanding of how the brain functions as well as treatments for a wide variety of mental conditions such as depression.
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Sessa and Horton’s attempts to persuade the medical establishment to look again at LSD’s potential paled when compared to the findings of a two-year study commissioned by the Royal Society of Arts. The results, published in March 2007, called for the legal status of
all
drugs to be reclassified in line with their potential for actual harm. The study found that the current drug classification, introduced under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, was irrational, arbitrary and lacking in consistency. One of the authors, Professor Colin Blakemore, said the object had been “... to bring a dispassionate approach to a very passionate issue ... Some conclusions might appear to be liberal in stance, but that was not our starting position. We intend to reach conclusions that were evidence based.”
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Twenty drugs were selected for the study, including tobacco and alcohol. They were each ranked on a combination of factors including their potential for physical harm, their tendency to cause dependence and their social impact on families, communities and society. Two separate groups of experts worked on giving an overall harm score to each drug. The results were that heroin was top with a score of 2.8, while LSD came fourteenth with a score of 1.3, well below the currently legal alcohol and tobacco. Blakemore noted: “We hope that policy makers will take note of the fact that the resulting ranking of drugs differs substantially from their classification in the Misuse of Drugs Act and that alcohol and tobacco are judged more harmful than many illegal substances.”
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The study’s conclusions were taken a step further in October 2007 when Richard Brunstrom, one of Britain’s most senior police officers called for all drugs to be legalised. Brunstrom, then Chief
Constable of North Wales, issued a fully referenced paper detailing why drug prohibition had not been and will not ever be effective. Brunstrom concurred that the present system of classifying drugs as outlined in the Misuse of Drugs Act was unfit for purpose and should be radically overhauled. Prohibition, he claimed, was harmful in itself, causing five key harms; increasing crime, causing a crisis in an already overloaded criminal justice system, economic harm, undermining public health, the destabilization of countries producing drugs and the undermining of civil rights.

Commenting on the hierarchy of harm from earlier in the year, Brunstrom noted that tobacco and alcohol were both ranked higher than many currently illegal substances. He commented, “No one is seriously proposing that alcohol and tobacco become banned substances; for these very harmful drugs our society has already settled upon a regime of control and regulation, rather than proscription, albeit with rather mixed results to date. The big question is therefore this: if that is our preferred option for these drugs then why do we treat other, demonstrably less harmful, substances so differently?”
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The Chief Police Officer’s conclusions were stark and controversial. His first point summed up what he saw as the problems inherent in drug prohibition. “Current UK drugs policy is based upon an unwinable ‘war on drugs’ enshrined in a flawed understanding of the underlying UN conventions and arising from a wholly outdated and thoroughly moralistic stance based on rhetoric and dogma rather than a rational (and more ethical) philosophy.” Brunstrom’s solution is for the Misuse of Drugs Act to be scrapped, and all drugs to be legalised, with the proviso that the “careful regulation of substances of abuse” is undertaken via a new “Substance Misuse Act”.
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Just what would comprise such an Act, Brunstrom does not expand on, and any such Act would take years of political finessing before it came to fruition. For the legalization and appropriate regulation of drugs to take place society would firstly have to stop being in denial about the reality of drugs and the redundancy of prohibition. A comprehensive programme of drug education would need to be in place and a system would
be needed by which good quality, reasonably priced, substances could be made available. This would be a complicated process but there are existing models to build on such as the way the Dutch cannabis cafés are licensed.

Whatever one thinks about the conclusions drawn by the Medical Research Council and Richard Brunstrom, they are based on scientific medical fact and long years of police experience. If fact and experience are to be ignored over ignorance and prejudice then society will continue to reap the dubious rewards of a disenfranchised youth who know from their own experience that, if used carefully, most drugs are not particularly dangerous.

Any discussion about the right to use LSD, or any other drug, hinges on the relationship between government and the individual. A government’s function should not be to limit personal freedoms, but to encourage its citizens to live as free a life as possible. It is necessary for the government to legislate and protect against individuals causing any form of harm or harassment to others but interference in the lives of its citizens should not extend to deciding which drugs they are at liberty to take. In matters concerning drugs, the law should only be involved if someone’s
behaviour
causes problems. This is the situation alcohol enjoys now. Anyone is free to become intoxicated and provided their behaviour is acceptable, they are free to enjoy themselves with their chosen drug. Why should this not be the case with all drugs?