Hur kan eget bruk av narkotika blivit olagligt?

swastika is an ancient religious icon in the cultures of Eurasia. It is used as a symbol of divinity and spirituality in Indian religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism

''In 1954 Aldous Huxley had published The Doors of Perception, an essay detailing the effects of his first encounter with mescaline. But while Huxley loaded the gun, it was Wasson who pulled the trigger. On February 13, 1957, Life magazine published a 15-page article detailing, experientially, Wasson’s first experiences with the shamaness Maria Sabina. The fantastic style of the text, coupled with Richardson’s extraordinary photographs ushered in, with one fell swoop, the age of psychedelics.

Wasson described the ritual in such amazing terms that years later the leaders of the psychedelic revolution would all nod their heads to him: He inspired them, told them the ideal conditions under which hallucinogens were to be taken, what they could expect, and how to have a good and beneficial trip. Timothy Leary dedicates a chapter in his book High Priest to Wasson. Others, from Owsley to Sandoz to Wolfe, acknowledge the Life article as having burned into their consciousness the desire to know what Wasson had experienced.

For Wasson, it was never his intent that anyone should follow him to Maria Sabina’s home in Huautla de Jiminez. In the Life article he never mentioned a town, and he changed Sabina’s name to Eva Mendez in an effort to protect her privacy. But Wasson was well-known, stylishly flamboyant, and already had been the subject of magazine articles. Other writers who knew the real location of his velada were not as thoughtful. Maria Sabina and her little town were soon descended upon by hordes of would-be visionaries, curiosity seekers, and even tour guides and their charges.

In a sense, it couldn’t have been any other way: Huxley had whetted the appetites of a generation for mind-expanding drugs; Wasson excited the imaginations of those who excited us. His descriptions of tripping in a deep Mexican night with a powerful modern-day curandera must have boggled the mind in a day when hallucinogens were nearly unknown. Some writers have gone as far as to say that had he not published his story in Life, there would never have been a psychedelic revolution (the term psychedelic was one Wasson refused to use, coining instead entheogen for plants which produce a divine experience). For better or worse, the world was changed forever.

Unfortunately, the change was not for the better. Maria Sabina herself is quoted in a biography as saying: “When we Mazatecs speak of the veladas we do so in a low voice, and, so as not to pronounce the mushroom’s name in Mazatec, we call them ‘little things’ and ‘little children’… From the moment when the strangers arrived the holy children lost their purity. They lost their strength… before Wasson I felt that the Holy Children elevated me. I no longer feel so.”

Wasson was crushed when he realized how she felt and how disturbed the Mazatec rituals had become. Shamans and curanderas began to crop up all over Mexico offering their services to all, regardless of the intent of the seekers. For Wasson, this was a profaning of a sacred ritual of enlightenment. Schultes says that Wasson’s intent was “purely scientific and sociological. His interest was in the effect of these plants and the use of them in religious and magical ceremonies, ancient and modern. Secondly, he wished to see if they might not lead to compounds that could be used in our medicine.” But Wasson would later defend himself by saying, “What else could we have done? Had we refrained from presenting to the world the facts as we knew then, a novel and major chapter in Early Man’s cultural history would perhaps have vanished forever.” It was, he felt, just an accident that he had arrived in Mexico during the same decade as the highways, airports, and telephones.''