Learn more about subscribing to the print version

In the opening scene of Act I of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, his three despised but respected weird sisters intone:

When shall we three meet again?

In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

When the hurly-burly’s done.

When the battle’s lost and won.
That will be ere the set of sun.

The sun’s not yet set on this catastrophic century, this war-wearied millennium, whilst we honor the pharmacopolitical prisoners of that most cynical war of all, the so-called war on drugs; yet I am here to tell you that: “the hurly-burly’s done…the battle’s lost and won..” They lost… we won; that is, the forces of repression and sub-version of democracy, of racism, of cultural genocide and œcocide are being vanquished— ‘though’t would be the Amazon-rainforest come to Dunsinane Hill…or to Capitol Hill. Meanwhile, the technology the Pharmacratic Inquisition endeavored vainly to suppress—multiplied thousandsfold by the Scientific Revolution—is available from any bookstore and scores of shamanic-plant dealers, and those cherishing freedom above conformity, honoring archaic wisdom and common sense over the perverse pharmacopuritanism of political pawns, watch as a new sun rises over their routed and dispirited foe; watch as power spills from the o’erreaching tyrant’s hand like so many grains of sand in an hourglass, never to be recovered.

To be sure, the end-game drags on…ever more human lives are crushed beneath the awesome mass and fearsome impetus of their judicial juggernaut, however far behind the van it might be, its flat and treadless tyres spinning up dust at the rear of the column, more sound than fury. Equally sure it is, that it is easy for me to declare victory—here, in the secure confines of York University, for I, unlike my co-author, am not a “lifer” in the gulag, desperately awaiting dispatch from the field. Rather, in one of the cruel ironies of war, I am its unintended beneficiary…all the crusaders have done to me is to hand me, time and again, one and another golden opportunity, as it might be, on a gleaming, crystalline-line-festooned, silver-platter!

Still, I will say this to the more astute of the crusaders: the longer your desperate, losing end-game wears on, the greater grows the likelihood that disgraced Field Marshalls will be dragged to the dock before war-crimes tribunals; the louder will keen the doleful lament of insistent demands for reparation on behalf of victims of this monstrous evil; the more probable will become criminal trials for treason and sedition, “high-crimes and misdemeanors” by elected and appointed officials who swore oaths to uphold and defend constitutions, but instead profited by subverting them, who sold for a song and a few cheap votes, those freedoms hard-won in battle, mortgaging not the family farm, merely…but our foreparents’ very blood!

Let there be no mistake about it: Washington and Langley are the Berlin and Tokyo of this war…I would like to think we could be charitable in victory, finally break with that awful strain of our history, our relentless vindictiveness; but again, it is easy for me to say that…the truth of the matter is: you crusaders yourselves are as vindictive as can be, stopping at nothing short of the abject ruin of countless lives, and doubt not that you have made millions of enemies, very angry enemies, some of whom doubtless live for the day they might exact some small measure of revenge for what you have done to them in the name of your pig-headed, pharmacopuritanical prudery, your cynical and fraudulent shell-game, with human rights as the forfeit.

And I will also say this to my sisters and brothers in the gulag: your time will come. In a sense—as has been said—you are not serving time; time is serving you. And that time, that inexorable current of history, is clearly on your—on our—side. Only a half-wit could fail to see who is rowing upstream against that ceaseless current of years, or that it is only a matter of time before those straining at the oars run out of steam, perchance break an oarlock, then we all know what will happen next: no course to stay, adrift with clashing rocks downstream, it will be every woman or man for her- or himself; only this time there will be no safe haven, no South American country to harbor fugitive war-criminals—for the outraged peoples of that continent will be among those spearheading the inevitable witch-hunt, safely boughed within that Birnam Wood advancing against them!

Yes, the hurly-burly’s done, the battle’s lost and won…and all too soon we will see what sort of people our oppressors really are, when the victorious rebel-forces maraud at the doors of their bunkers! Will some miserable coward of a President or Prime Minister then shoot her- or himself; some despicable blackguard poison her or his own children before doing the same? Dare we even hope for such military valor from the spineless, sniveling dullards who presume to be our “leaders” and “public servants?” Their sanctimonious crusade is against us people, certain among us benighted to be associated by their judicial juggernaut with certain drugs; their misanthropic crusade is against freedom and human rights — our rights—yea, human dignity and decency; and will more likely end with a pusillanimous whimper than the heroic bang of a German Luger; mayhap with a veritable Tour de France of Olympian back-pedaling and the thriftiest and most frugal face-saving the world has ever seen! Withal, then we shall surely see what sort of people these be!

____________________________________

Jonathan Ott is a natural products chemist and entheobotanist. His books include Pharmacotheon, Ayahuasca Analogues, and Pharmacophilia or, The Natural Paradises. He is a member of the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics Board of Advisors.

Robert James Riley, is Pharmacopolitical Prisoner Number 59047D065.