Peter Gorman, editor of High Times (24th year in 1998), ties cannabis to counterculture movements that accelerated civil rights and anti-war progress, citing 1.7M Americans jailed for nonviolent drug crimes—like Jimmy Montgomery’s life sentence for 42g of marijuana—and U.S.-funded crop substitution programs in Bolivia/Peru/Colombia driving cocaine prices down to $25/g. He argues ending pot prohibition would collapse the war on harder drugs, revealing systemic corruption and health-based solutions like Switzerland’s heroin program. Meanwhile, Art Bell fields calls on UFO cover-ups (e.g., 1979 Grace Harbor crash), volcanic activity (Etna, Mono Lake), and the prison-industrial complex, underscoring his show’s blend of fringe theories and libertarian skepticism of government. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning as the case may be across all these many time zones, stretching from the Hawaiian into Easton Islands in the west, eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north all the way to the Pole.
This is Coast Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
And yes, back from the dead, or nearly dead, I have had the flu, a very serious version of the flu that kept me with temperatures varying up to around 102 for several days.
So, you're going to have to bear with me and my voice this morning.
I'm a little bit better, as you can tell.
I mean, I'm on the air, right?
But Ramona now has the flu, and for her, it is a far more serious situation because she has asthma, and she also is having a current full-blown asthmatic attack.
So we're monitoring that as the night progresses.
There is breaking news.
A Japanese gunman has entered the Tokyo Stock Exchange and has taken hostages.
Apparently, for a short time, they halted trading and then began trading again.
They are trading currently, I believe.
One cannot but mention the incredible victory of the Packers over the 49ers, where the rain came down so hard today that the sky cried for the 49ers.
Sorry about that to all of you who sent me faxes about this.
Now, having said all that and looking forward to the Packers doing it again, I've got a guest coming on in a moment, Peter Gorman, who is editor-in-chief of High Times magazine Counterculture, remember?
Yeah, High Times is still out there, as a matter of fact.
And so we'll talk to Peter Gorman, who is really much more than High Times.
You'll find out all about that.
First, updating the story that we broke at the top of last hour.
Mount Etna in Sicily would appear to be beginning to erupt.
Now, in doing research trying to find out about this, I got to a site that has live cam shots of Mount Etna.
And we have logged on my website now a whole series of those shots from today, earlier today, into the nighttime.
Some of the shots where you can see lava going straight into the air and coming down on three sides of Aetna.
It's incredible.
The daytime photographs taken earlier in the day, in sometime zones yesterday, show the lava flowing down three sides of the mountain.
This just cleared the wire from the Washington Post.
Jakarta, Indonesia.
Hot glowing lava has now been spotted on top of a volcano in central Java, promoting authorities to warn nearby residents Friday, they may have to evacuate quickly.
So there you go.
Now we've got news of one on the other side in Indonesia.
unidentified
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Now we take you back to the night of January 12th, 1998, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Peter began studying the Amazon in 1984 when he made his first trip to Peru's jungles.
Since that time, he's made nearly two dozen additional trips to the Amazon, as well as numerous trips to the jungles of Mexico, India's rainforest, and the denuded former scrub jungles of southern India, where he worked extensively with noted herpetologist, environmentalist Romulus Whitaker.
During those same years, Mr. Gorman has studied several at-risk tribal cultures firsthand, most extensively in Peru and India.
He is the editor-in-chief of High Times magazine, the voice of the counterculture since you were probably a baby.
He's got lots of other editorial clients that you would know, the Boston Globe, New York Times, Omni, Panorama, Penthouse, Playboy, Spy, just on and on and on and on.
He is a very, very interesting guy.
Somebody sent me a thoughts and begged me to have him on because he was so interesting.
Let's say in 1974, when the magazine was founded, I think High Times represented the voice of the people who were kind of, at that point, the residual voices for civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, anti-war sentiments, as well as those who were pro-marijuana and pro-mind expansion.
Some of those issues are no longer at the fore today, but they remain part of what we consider the legacy of the counterculture, or at least we hope that we had some effect in getting changes made in some of those issues.
But I did, you know, I was recently talking to somebody.
I was downstairs.
There's a place where I played darts with my beautiful wife.
And it was a fellow who was studying for his police test in New York.
And he happened to overhear something that somebody said.
And he made a comment, and I made a comment back, and he said, well, you know, as far as I'm concerned, people who smoke pot never did anything.
They're worthless, they're useless.
They sit around by the TV and they've never done anything that helps the world.
And coming from a family of New York City cops and almost having been one myself, I took offense and I turned around and I said, you know, without the counterculture, the free speech movement doesn't really get underway.
Without the counterculture, the Martin Luther King's civil rights movement gets stalled.
Without the counterculture, you don't have women's rights.
You don't have an anti-war movement.
You don't have gay rights.
You don't have any of the rights that we now take for granted in this country.
So whether you agree or disagree on those issues, without those issues, or if those issues were successfully non-negotiable in any way at all, we wouldn't be free.
You know, if the government has no use for a certain segment of the population, and in this case mostly poor whites or uneducated whites and uneducated inner city blacks, the government might say, we're doing great.
You know, from the point of view of high times, speaking for myself and probably speaking for the magazine, we don't care if you smoke marijuana.
We don't encourage you to smoke marijuana.
It doesn't really matter to us.
But the idea that you might do 5, 10, or 200 years in jail for smoking marijuana, depending on what state you're in, is sort of beyond and beyond.
This is not a social program.
We don't see who's being aided by this.
So from our point of view, the government, while it's losing because of the record numbers of people who are dissenting from the government's position, on the other hand, we also recognize that record numbers of us are serving time, who shouldn't be serving time, people who are doing time only for the crime of smoking cannabis, not for any other criminal activity associated with drugs.
Well, I come from a state, Nevada, that's where I am now, where it is a felony, very serious crime.
It is a felony.
In most states now, it is some form of misdemeanor.
But here it is a felony.
And in many states, there are required minimum sentences you get with certain amounts of marijuana that are going to put you in jail, mandatory minimums, and they're going to keep you there while other violent types come and go.
I mean, we've got in Oklahoma, while we consider Nevada to be one of the bad states, and while we consider a state like Rhode Island, most people consider it fairly East Coast, liberal, educated, nonetheless, a state like Rhode Island has a zero to 30 years for growing one cannabis plant.
Which means 99% of the people are getting zero time.
But if you happen to be somebody who has a personal problem with the local prosecutor, the local sheriff, if you were a kid and you used to throw snowballs at the local judge's house and now you grow up and you're growing marijuana, then goodbye.
They can nail you for 30 years.
But near Nevada, obviously, is Oklahoma.
And Oklahoma is a state.
We had a poor fellow, Jimmy Montgomery, about a year and a half ago, paraplegic with a disorder that was a bone tunneling disorder, costing him bone every month out of his body.
Got life plus 16 for 40 grams of marijuana, an ounce and a half.
He was actually out driving his car when some snitch turned over and said, well, I think he's got it.
And when they went to his house, the guy couldn't identify his house.
But nonetheless, they finally narrowed it down by looking at mailboxes.
And when they entered the house, yeah, there was 42 grams of pot, about, you know, depending on how good the quality was, maybe $100 to $200 worth of pot.
And they nailed him for life plus $16.
And a fellow named Will Foster, who's using it for medical purposes, six months ago got 93 years on a first, this is a fellow who'd never been arrested before.
Nothing.
He might have had a traffic ticket or two.
But 93 years went a snitch who was buying his own freedom by turning in people.
In Oklahoma, there's a silly program that if you're a felon and you turn in six people, you walk free.
And so Will Foster was one of the six.
He swore Will Foster had an amphetamine lab in his basement and was wholesaling methamphetamine.
And the police, of course, you know, there was a $10 buy operation.
The police trusted the informant that, oh, wow, you really, you left the car and you came back half an hour later and you don't have the $10, you know.
And poor Will Foster was found not with any methamphetamine, no methamphetamine lamp, but a small marijuana garden the size of your kitchen table, which they announced was worth $2 million, probably was worth $250, and nailed it for 93 years.
So it's still going on.
I mean, there are tens of thousands of guys and women out there smoking pot, buying pot, selling pot, who are doing legitimately 5, 10, 20, and 93 years.
And Peter, I want to ask about, you know, everybody kind of thought the first Democrat, first liberal that would get elected, i.e.
Bill Clinton, the pot laws would quickly, the federal pot laws would quickly change.
And Bill Clinton got in office, gave his famous statement about not inhaling, having tried it but didn't inhale, got himself in a lot of political trouble, then got in a lot more political trouble, had no more political capital, could have done something about pot but didn't, and now obviously will not.
I mean, at the risk of getting audited tomorrow, what a gutless bum on this issue.
You know, plenty of people in the marijuana movement had spoken to him, and I had spoken to several people who would later prove to be his aides and right-hand men, and it was a done deal.
They were not necessarily going to legalize Pot, but it was going to be discussed.
That much we were promised.
And in fact, the moment that he waffled and said, I didn't inhale, any credibility on the issue he had whatsoever.
Now, we're talking about, this remains an administration in which Donna Shalala, head of health and human resources, I mean, you know, HHS, admits to having smoked pot.
Newt Gingrich smokes pot.
Al Gore admits to having smoked pot for several years, and Bill Clinton admits to having at least tried it.
So, right, you know, on the right and the left, everybody's tried pot who's connected with this administration currently.
But waffling was the one cardinal sin that could have been committed by someone like this because it left him no out.
And I think at the moment the only political party that can do any good for easing the marijuana laws is going to have to be extreme right wing.
Yes, and if Al Gore ends up being the presidential timber for 2000, even though he's admitted that he did it and admitted that he enjoyed it for years, which doesn't mean he did it frequently, but over a period of time, he can't have any credibility on the issue.
And Gingrich's latest proclamation is either legalize it or let's make a rule that says if you import drugs, sell drugs, buy drugs, use drugs, we're going to cut your head off.
And initially, when he went over, he sent letters back talking about, well, you know, I'm doing a body bag count, and I'm finding a little heroin in some of these bags and drugs and stuff.
And, you know, I want to turn these guys in because it's criminal.
And six months later, he was saying, this is such a stinky war.
I won't even look in the body bags anymore.
I hope they're all filled with heroin.
I hope everybody gets anything they want out of this because, you know, we're certainly not trying to win it.
We're just trying to execute as many of these American kids as we can.
So whatever they can get out with, by all means, don't hold him to task for that.
That's my recollection of it.
I think when I first went to Washington, probably 67, I think all the TV cameras were able to point at us and say, scruffy hippies, smoking dope, looking like chickens.
Now, we weren't.
I think that the vast majority of us were utterly disappointed we couldn't morally go to Vietnam, right?
Because we grew up wanting to be green berets, but they didn't give us Hitler.
Music Once again, Peter Gorman, and we were talking about Vietnam.
And Peter, you know, I said I was there.
And I'll tell you the point of view of most people who were actually there.
They thought the real criminals, frankly, were in Washington.
And there were a series of criminals in Washington.
And in my view, in the view of those who were there and saw a lot of their friends die, if you're going to fight a war, if you are going to start a war, which we did in Vietnam, we began that war.
We started it.
We provoked it.
We faked our way into it.
Once you get into a war, you don't fight a half-assed war, watching people die when you have the power to fight a full war and really kill the other guy, period.
And so I can get real angry beginning to talk about that.
But that's the point of view of somebody who was there, and I understand yours as well.
And at the time, coming from a family of hawks, we all congratulated him mentally or congratulated each other as finally we're going to fight this war.
But when he decided to leave Hanoi Harbor and the Ho Chi Minh Trail unbombed, even for a kid, and this is not, I mean, whether or not me or a couple of hundred million of us, I mean, a couple of million of us who would go to Washington periodically were cowards is an entirely different issue.
But I think we lost our stomach for it, even as kids, saying, this is not a war.
This is not a war.
There are two ways North Vietnamese troops are getting armed.
But, you know, like the drug war, when we first, a lot of us and a lot of Vietnam vets came down and manned those lines marching Washington initially, people could look at long-haired, scruffy guys playing guitars, smoking marijuana and say, oh, you see, it's just cowards who don't want to go.
But by the 4th or 5th March, moms were involved.
And by the 6th or 7th, there were so many grandmas with signs that said, I am not permitting my grandson or my next grandson to die for your war, that the TV cameras couldn't avoid them.
At that point, it was critical mass.
Don't anger grandmas in this country.
They swing the vote on everything.
And I think the same thing would go with the drug war, as we, more and more, for instance, medical marijuana issue.
As more and more people say, you know, I never smoked pot, but my grandson is dying of AIDS.
He can't eat.
As grandma gets on the picket line, the issue becomes reasonable to the American public.
And politicians in this country, unfortunately, have a history of not being visionaries, primarily, but being reactionaries.
Well, for example, in California, where they pass ballot initiatives, in other words, the voice of the people says, here's what we want it to be, and then they pass it.
It's approved by the voter.
That's where it stops, and the federal court system grabs it and says, oh, no, you don't.
You guys don't know what you need or want.
We're going to have to consider this and generally reject what the voters have done.
Well, some years ago, John, about four years ago, John came to me and he said, Peter, there is new material on marijuana in the brain.
How it works, what receptor sites are involved, what its mechanisms are.
These are studies commissioned by the U.S. government.
Do you want a story on it?
Now, this is dull as dishwater for people who are not chemists.
But, in his two-part study, he was able to show, using U.S. government data, that marijuana does not work along the same lines that the government claims addictive substances work, period.
It does not affect the same areas of the brain.
It does not affect serotonin, etc., etc.
After that, he decided, well, you know, marijuana has been placed on Schedule I, which means it's got no medical use and it's got high potential for abuse.
So he petitioned, essentially sued the federal government saying, on what grounds do you have high potential for abuse?
On what scientific grounds?
Well, normally this is a sort of lawsuit and petition that the federal government is allowed to toss down the wastebasket.
Except in this case, as of two weeks ago, the DEA acknowledged we have no scientific grounds to place marijuana in the schedule.
There is no scientific grounds based on new material from the U.S. government on which to say marijuana has a high potential for abuse.
Therefore, we are tossing it back to Health and Human Services for a binding arbitration on where shall this indeed be placed.
Shall it be legalized?
And they've only got two years, essentially, to come up with an answer.
And the DEA admitting that it has no scientific grounds to keep marijuana out of the hands of doctors and maybe not even out of the hands of ordinary adults is an amazing question.
Well, I'm going down to Washington, D.C. tomorrow to meet with the New York Times about it, and with John Getman, who filed it, and with Michael Kennedy, who's the lawyer for Trans High Corporation, who is the legal end of this lawsuit, which is the apparent corporation for High Times.
So now that it's been passed to HHS, well, the branch of HHS that reviews the scientific literature has already publicly for 10 or 12 years been very outspoken about marijuana does not belong on Schedule I. It simply doesn't.
There is no reason for it being there except somebody's whim and we need legs on which to pin the drug war.
How much of a change is going to be on what HHS comes up with.
But the DEA acknowledges, we've got no reason, of course, but the thing is this.
We are dealing with a very entrenched system.
The drug war and the fear generated by, I mean, you need fear to keep this drug war going.
We've got billions and billions of dollars invested in this.
We've got the largest prison industry anywhere in the world.
It's the number one growth industry or close to the number one construction industry in the entire United States.
We are exporting billions of dollars of prison-made goods, primarily to China.
You know, we object, all of us liberals here and even conservatives say, you know, hey, Chinese prison labor, how dare they?
Well, most people don't realize how many billions of dollars of goods are being sent to China by our prisoners.
So to disentrench a system like this, to actually expose it to light, it's going to be difficult.
And if marijuana prohibition ended, nobody would fund, you know, $14 billion federal dollars a year to stop, what, a million and a half heroin addicts.
We would look at that reasonably and say, hey, this is a health problem.
I have long been for the decriminalization or legalization of marijuana.
Because it's logical, because I'm tired of lying to kids.
You know, you tell a kid he's going to go crazy on marijuana, get hooked, fry his brain completely, whatever.
He tries it and he says, lie, and then it makes it easier to go on to the next step and take that first snort or maybe even some heroin or PCB or some sort of amphetamine or who knows what.
And so I thought, at the very least, marijuana ought to be separate.
We ought to start telling the truth about marijuana, separate it from the other drugs.
But then you're still left with the question about what you do with the much harder drugs.
I mean, in my heart of hearts, I'm a parent, and I'm a parent of a 12-year-old, a 9-year-old, a baby.
So, I mean, I've got a family, and I've got to deal with it as a real life issue.
And I made a decision to just tell my kids the truth about what I felt, which was that marijuana is not a drug, shouldn't be considered a drug.
It's a helpful plant.
It's not for kids.
There is a time and there is a place.
And just like there's a time and a place for having a beer, a time and a place for looking at a football game or kissing a girl, you know, some things are just, let's save them for a while.
And I mean, that kind of seems simplistic, but somehow dads try to work this out with their kids.
I think this is the, in my heart of hearts, the real answer.
We've got a law for anything you might do under the influence of drugs.
If I don't feed my kids, it doesn't matter if I don't feed them because I spent the money on crack, or because I spent the money on pot, or because I'm bad at OTV, or because I blew it all, you know, flipping cards.
If I steal from my friend or somebody I don't know, it doesn't matter if I stole because I needed heroin, because I was drunk and thought it was cool, or because I felt like it, or because I didn't like the guy.
The law says you can't steal.
So I think we've got laws in place for any and everything you might do under the influence of drugs.
So why there are additional laws for the use of drugs is beyond me.
We don't need them.
We could use, in other words, we could, let's say nobody likes a junkie.
As a rule, 90% of the junkies are tedious to be around, self-indulgent, and pretty boring.
On the other hand, according to the federal government, 70% hold jobs.
They absolutely work.
And that's, you know, it's in subways all over New York City.
70% of the people who are using drugs are working.
Are they helping your workforce?
Well, you know what?
If you include everybody in this country, that's a whole lot better than the rest of the populace.
But I've heard even our conservatives, and I don't have to name them, have come out for the legalization of drugs, but I've got one problem with it.
If crack and heroin and so forth were readily available at a good price, a cheap price, which they would be once they were legalized, I simply can't imagine the population of junkies and cokeheads not doubling, tripling, quadrupling, people partying on weekly.
You know, it begins with a party on the weekend since it's illegal and it's obtainable and it'd be great at parties and then a whole bunch of people, a whole bunch of people are going to get hooked.
As a matter of fact, you're editor-in-chief of High Times.
Yeah, so no problem for you.
But for the average executive, say, in New York City, where you are, who might get hooked on heroin, to go down and register as a heroin user is not going to be an option because it's going to get out.
Somehow, you and I both know it's going to get out.
So instead of taking that chance, he's going to turn to the black market.
Do you think that fellow at the moment, do you think anyone in America would need to spend more than an hour or two, I'll admit a couple of hours, but more than an hour or two acquiring any drug they felt like?
They are all within two hours, say, of someone who, for instance, maybe I've got sisters and they don't even know what a drug looks like.
You know what I mean?
So it's not two hours for them because they wouldn't even know what the heck to do.
But for somebody who has some experience, if it's within a couple of hours, then we've got to say, excuse me, 30 years, the largest criminal justice system ever created on the planet.
And these drugs are cheaper and more readily available now than they were 30 years ago.
Anything has to be at least an attempt at an improvement.
If it were medicalization.
What if, you know, 25 years ago, heroin was as high as $700 for a gram of something fairly pure.
20 years ago, in fact, probably 22 years ago, the last time I ever took a snort of cocaine, and I did, you know, indulge myself to the point where I had a little problem, or you know, which cost me a wife and money and everything I had.
But 20 years ago, my last snort, it was still $130, $140 a gram.
What if you had a country like Bolivia, which looked horrible on the world map?
And what if the World Bank said, you guys, we're going to try to improve your agribusiness and we're going to push you to grow some legit crops and give you some means to grow crops, which Bolivia would love, and say, great, instead of producing so much cocaine, we're now going to produce these crops.
But if at the same time, the World Bank said, in exchange, the U.S. can push as many crops into Bolivia without any restrictions on trade or any tariffs, well, the Bolivians could grow all the lettuce they want, and it's never going to make it to the U.S. as an export crop.
And that's really what did happen.
I mean, that was a condition to get the money from the World Bank.
Bolivia now looks good, but it really, to maintain its place, it's lost whatever edge it might have had in growing crops that nobody else could grow economically because of tariffs, I mean, an export, et cetera.
But once Bolivia had to swallow the bitter pill and say, okay, lose all your tariffs.
We don't care.
Suddenly, their local crops are Colombia's coffee.
Same thing with Colombia's coffee.
Same thing with Peru's bananas.
All of them drop to zero.
There is no agri-crop.
We can talk all we want about crop substitution, but if they can't protect with tariffs their crops in terms of getting into a world market at a reasonable price, and we in turn can use government-subsidized crops to flood their markets, we have really reduced them to looking for anything they can produce that will give them an edge.
And, you know, Peru and Bolivia, obviously, I'd run Coca-Leaf, and Colombia is refining it.
No, no, this is, no, and if you're really conspiracy buff, I mean, we at high times who actually spend our lives involved in this, you know, the corruption that has grown out of this trade, the corruption of Bolivian, Peruvian, Colombian, Mexican, and, you know, the Caribbean island government officials, and corruption in the U.S. government.
It's beyond the beyond.
I mean, it goes to pretty high levels.
People drop all the time, and they get indicted, and they just kind of disappear from administrations for little, you know, small infractions.
But it's, I mean, you know, as long as we're going to have dirty little wars, as long as we're going to need, oh, Afghani freedom fighters are not being funded by the U.S. government, how are we going to get their money to them to buy guns?
Well, we're not asking them to make heroin instead of hashish.
We're going to have quite a program for you, presuming that it can continue.
Now, I am back after four days of having had the flu, and I still now have a low-grade temperature.
I was very, very sick for about four days, and I'm still not all the way back.
Unfortunately, this morning, my wife came down with it as well, and she is Now, in the middle of a full-blown asthmatic attack, a bad one, at this hour.
She's also running high temperature, and so everything is sort of tentative, folks.
And if you hear me bail out of here suddenly, that's going to be why.
Having said that, we will continue with Peter Gorman in a moment.
Two items to catch those in LA who just joined.
I began getting reports yesterday that something was going on on Mount Etna in Sicily, that there may soon be an eruption.
I found a live cam site on the internet which actually has a camera sitting there taking pictures of Mount Etna.
I found that about two hours ago, and I started looking at the photographs over the last several hours, tonight, and into the daylight hours, and it was a true, oh my God, kind of moment.
If you'll look at the photographs, they're on my website now, you will see Etna with hot lava blowing straight out of the top of it and coming down three sides of that mountain.
It is not yet, as far as I know, a full eruption, but Aetna is obviously, we've got the photos up there, active.
It's at www.artbell.com.
If you want to see the photographs, I've got them up there for you at www.artbell.com.
In addition, I've got this from the Associated Press, Jakarta, Indonesia.
Hot glowing lava has been spotted on top of a volcano in central Java, prompting authorities in Indonesia to warn nearby residents they may have to get out of there quickly.
Stan Deo had a report.
Linda Moulton Howe had a report last, or no, in the first hour.
And I just got a fact saying it's worth mentioning, Art, that all of this recent volcanic activity just happens to coincide with the most recent full moon, January 12th.
It seems this is yet another confirmation of Jim Birkeland's theories regarding celestial influences on geographic activity.
I couldn't agree more.
Add to that the earthquake in China and predictions of earthquakes on the West Coast for the short term.
So I wanted to get that out.
And in a moment, we'll get back to Peter Gorman.
unidentified
Peter Gorman Now we take you back to the night of January 12, 1998, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Many of you know that magazine probably from your youth, as do I. It is considered, or was considered to be, the voice of the counterculture, and if you look at present conditions, it really can still make that claim.
We have talked about marijuana and the drug laws extensively in the last hour.
Peter Gorman is also an environmentalist.
And Peter, there's a lot of stuff going on environmentally that I would like to ask your opinion about.
We've got deformed frogs showing up worldwide now.
We now know for sure that it is ultraviolet radiation.
We have a very large ozone hole thinning ozone over the U.S. We have more environmental disasters underway in the sea, for example, than you can shake a fishing pole at.
We've got cysteria coming out of North Carolina into the Atlantic and now up in the North Atlantic, something that kills fish and puts bloody sores on them and now is beginning to affect people.
We've got simple-celled organisms in the Antarctic beginning to show actual genetic change.
I could really go on and on and on and rattle on what's wrong in the environment, and it really is wrong.
I mean, without trying to be wild and extravagant, I think that I'm not sure how much is the hand of whatever and how much is our hand, but I feel quite certain that we've played a large, you know, we've stirred the pot.
And in a lot of areas, we can really see where we've done that.
If you look, for instance, in Seattle or in the northwest when you have clear cutting and the following year, you've got, you know, nine feet of flooding in the middle of big cities.
And people say, whoops, this must be heavy rains when the trees, the roots of the trees acted like sponges and are, you know, absorbing that rain and are no longer there.
Or if you look at some beautiful islands like the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean and see that, hey, let's cut all the trees down here and, whoops, all the coral reefs die.
Certainly nobody who's an environmentalist or even an armchair environmentalist could look at any of these phenomena and not realize that we have done a great deal of disservice to the planet.
But I mean, do I pin it particularly on feeding cows with parts of I'm not sure.
I've got a year of sabbaticals starting next month.
Wow.
Yeah, I I think my my employers realize that answering the phone calls, people who are in the process of, you know, I mean their typical phone call might be, hello, uh, is this Peter Guam?
Well, the police are here and they're saying if I don't testify against my husband, they're taking my children.
Can they do that?
It's been wearing on me for a while.
And I think it wears on anybody who's in the field and I just have to be lucky enough to have some employers who understand, like, get out of here, get fresh.
I can be a journalist, but there are certain things you get privy to in a small place like the Amazon.
It's small in terms of where the populace hit.
And in those places, other people make the rules.
And as much as I can disagree with policies of the U.S. government, as much as I will fight to change them, it still is the U.S. government where there is a certain, in the end, reasonableness for most of us.
In other parts of the world, we don't have that.
You know, and you don't have the luxury of being able to tell the government to jump to the lake and talk about it the next morning.
It's just been in my blood since I was a little kid.
And 20 years ago, I was with somebody who, on hearing I was going to start going into the jungles of the Amazon, bought me a book called Headhunters of the Amazon, written Turn of the Century.
And she meant it to steer me away with the frightening tale of a fellow who was lost six years down there.
And instead, it kind of gave me the roadmap of, cool, that's where I got to go.
I know that you don't go to the area where the Yanamama people are.
But I did a program with an expert on the Yanamama people.
And it was his view that we're out of our minds to be intruding upon them and trying to cause them to become Christian and change their ways.
And they do have some rather brutal ways.
There's no question about that.
The anthropologist who's been studying them did several hours on it with me and I think makes a very convincing argument.
I had another fellow on named Mark Ritchie who wrote a book called Spirit of the Rainforest who has exactly the opposite view and I interviewed him, thinks we ought to go down there and turn them into Christians and stop all this brutality and that that is our job as a civilized world, you know, to go down there and change everything.
No, I certainly would agree with the former and not Mr. Ritchie.
I think that I deal with a group called the Mattez Indians who are kind of a subgroup of an anthropological group known as the Mayaruna.
And they are changing.
When I met them, they still painted their faces.
They still wore, kind of painted their faces like jaguars and primarily hunted and gathered, although there was some agriculture involved in their lifestyle.
And like the Anamamo, they could be, they're brutal.
But it's a very brutal world.
And they were being Christianized, and there were being, you know, missionaries come through and traders have come through.
And when I met them in 1985, I was certainly not the first white boy they'd ever seen.
But they still have, and even to this day, it's reasonably sporadic, you know, influence.
A teacher in Peru, to get their license, has to go into rural communities at some point and teach for some months.
So you might get somebody from Lima, and they just get plunked down in a community.
It could be a mestizo, could be Indian, and they bring their influences, as a rule, to that community and say, oh, this is no good.
I mean, you know, you kill this animal, but you're not killing it.
You're letting it suffer overnight, and you're waiting until the morning to kill it.
That's no good.
If you're going to hunt, you have to kill the animal right away.
Which is humane to our point of view, but if you're actually living in the jungle and realize the heat and that the meat is going to go bad overnight, you suddenly would say, hmm, better to just wound it and let it sit overnight.
It is brutal.
It's very difficult for me to cope with that at first sight or for any of us.
But that's life.
That's life in the jungle.
And I think I do my best to be as uninfluential as possible.
I don't bring people out to them as Indians.
Other people can find them if they want to.
I can't really stop them.
But when I've written stories, I draw fake maps and fake rivers.
And occasionally, an anthropologist will accuse me of not knowing where they are because, Peter, this river doesn't make any sense.
Instead of them recognizing, like, hey, look, I'm just kind of giving a general indication.
But I mean, you know, but certainly I think the more change, look in Mexico.
If you just take people who are farmers, their life can be full and it can be a jubilant, wonderful celebration of life.
If you convince them they're better off coming to work in a factory near the border for six bucks a day, and they say, wow, I've never had six bucks a day.
Well, they end up essentially becoming our indentured servants at best, our slaves at worst, and living in a community where for their six bucks a day they can't get nearly as much as they got for their six bucks a month when they were growing their own food and living with their own extended families in a community that supported itself and supported each other in lean times and shared their goods.
So, yeah, you're talking to somebody who prefers to leave people the heck alone.
In certain other areas, the problem was solved by attrition in western Brazil, in Acre, when Brazil had overpopulous on the east coast and said anybody who would go west to open up these territories, probably like we did in the 1840s, you know, you take a chance, but we're going to give you your 40 acres and a mule.
Well, a couple of million people did go to Acre, to the western states in Brazil.
Fortunately, for people who like the forest, and unfortunately for the people who tried to settle it, the road functions very badly and is washed out most of the year.
And about 75% of the people who actually moved out there moved back east and said, what are you kidding?
I mean, we can't grow anything.
Everything we grow, by the time we get it anywhere, is rotten.
Well, there's a couple of things, and I'm going to forget this fellow's name now, and he'll shoot me.
A fellow is working out in South Pacific, and he just wrote a book, People, Culture, and Plants, with Mike Valick.
And I apologize to him on the air for forgetting his name.
And he had found something that did actually work for AIDS in a test tube, which is not to say a cure.
But at the time, it was an APY story.
And when he went back, the people that he was working with had been ordered by their government, the indigenous people that he worked with, had been ordered by the government to build a school.
And the only way they could build a school was to cut down their 40,000 acres of forest.
And so he ended up raising a fund and starting a fund and ended up saving their forest.
But that was one that really mimicked Medicine Man to the teeth.
I collected twice for small pharmaceutical companies, and I think both are going to have immense success with products that maybe I was involved in, but it wasn't really me, it was the Indians.
There was this big announcement here recently about some sort of something that comes from frogs that has the same, I think they said, same medicinal effect as the medical equivalent of heroin, morphine, without any of the side effects.
During the 1970s, there was a tremendous interest in amphibian skin.
The same frogs that are disappearing now have produced certain kinds of mucus on their body, or what I call mucus, which protects them from bacteria and protects them from infection.
And so some terrific herpetologists and scientists went down to the Amazon and all around the world and began studying these frogs for their chemical components in the mucus.
Would this be something that would be good, like a natural penicillin, for instance, you know, the equivalent?
And one of them that was studied was a frog called the epidatees, which is a small tree frog.
And it was studied by a fellow named John Daly.
Now, where I came into it was all the study of frogs and amphibian skins, there was still nobody had ever written a first-person account of having used it or used any of these substances.
Now, when I was at the Masas Indians, 1986, I was in a hut with a friend of mine, Pablo, and I was pointing to different things, trying to find a vocabulary that we could share.
And I was pointing to his arrow and a bow and this and that.
And I pointed to a little small medicine bag over a fire, and I said, you know, kind of what's that?
And he grinned and said, Sappo, pulls it down, takes a stick out of the fire, burns my forearm, spits into this stick of stuff that was hanging over the fire, mixes it up, and puts it onto the open wounds.
Like a subcutaneous, not an injection, but a subcutaneous infusion in my system.
And immediately, I had no idea what it was.
I was terrified.
My heart began to race.
I started to vomit and defecate and urinate and sweat and rolled around the floor.
And at first, the Indians thought it was hilarious.
Art Bell All right, we're going to finish this story, and then we're going to go to the phones.
Peter, so they scratched you, they put this stuff on you, you proceeded to sort of wet your pants and so forth, which I would too, not knowing what they had just given you.
You know, maybe on your way toward a serious acid trip or something, who knows?
Well, 15 or so minutes later, my heart starts to beat fast and faster and faster, and I thought, okay, I'm going to explode, and this is all over, and I don't know how to undo this.
And instead, 15 minutes later, when my heartbeat was still fast, but kind of leveled off, I was ecstatic and fell into asleep.
I imagined that I was carried, because I didn't walk, to a hammock.
And I woke up a couple of hours later and heard a conversation, thought someone was in the platform hut with me.
And in fact, I was alone.
And in fact, the conversation that I heard might have been 20 yards away, two people speaking in a normal voice.
And it occurred to me I could hear everything.
And suddenly I felt strong, and I felt big.
And actually, what had happened was I had been zapped with the most bioactive substance ever discovered on the planet.
Yeah, this is just the goo from a frog, gently scraped.
It's the actually kind of the protection that some tree, this particular tree frog had against constrictor snakes who might swallow it.
And the frog would, you know, get frightened and pass this material out, and the snake then presumably spits the frog out rather than crushing it.
And in the human body, almost, well there were 73 separate proteins that interact with the human body, and the human body deals with them as if they were produced by itself, including a naturally occurring opioid,
which is very similar to opium, from which morphine is derived, which now has hit the news last week with a similar sweat from a different frog, but a very, very similar frog, as a potential for an analgesic that would be much, much more potent than morphine.
If we have something that is as strong or stronger, if that's even possible to imagine, than morphine with none of the negative side effects, how will society as represented or not properly represented by government react to such a drug?
I mean, you know, if we're realistic human beings, somebody wants to try it, somebody has access to it, you can have it, whether it's bathtub, gin, you can buy whatever you like at liquor store now, and yet still people are, you know, distilling spirits here and there.
So somebody's going to put something like this on the market, but it's going to be for a very small crowd, and it's going to be for, you know, probably people who are into those experiments.
And those are the people who tend to get away with it anyway.
They're, you know, the money people, the privileged.
Sure.
But this is, no, this is certainly not something that's going to hit the streets.
I just can't imagine it.
And in fact, if you wanted to build up a clientele for a drug, one of the best ways to build it up is to supply a drug for which that clientele has a need tomorrow.
You wouldn't want to give them a drug for which they would say, never mind, that was terrific, and I don't need to do that again.
One other angle, and then we'll definitely go to the phones, and that is this.
There's a big battle going on in this country.
Medical doctors are loath to treat people who are in severe pain and or even dying with a fatal disease with sufficient amounts of narcotics that are presently available to keep them from pain.
In other words, we have thousands of people in this country who are dying very painful deaths when it need not be.
And it's because physicians are afraid of the DEA.
The DEA monitors what they write in terms of prescriptions.
And if it surpasses their little numbers that say, let's go investigate this guy, the doctor's in trouble.
The net result is a lot of people who are dying very painful deaths cannot get the drugs that they need, and that is a crime.
But I hope that this is a 10-year bump in the human heart as opposed to a permanent bump.
I hope that fear of an agency like that quickly de-escalates.
And I think that the doctors themselves, as well as patient groups around the country, have been vocal enough that it's certainly my hope, but it's almost my expectation that this will pass soon.
I'm just hoping that it's a glitch and that, you know, three more years down the line, we can put it behind us and let doctors be doctors.
They spend a lot of money, a lot of time, and we spend a lot of time subsidizing their medical schools to make sure they're intelligent about what they're doing.
And at some point, you've got to let go of the child's hand and say, we've trained you as best we can.
A quick plug, because for the first time, and probably the only time, I've agreed with a company, as long as I'm going to be in Proof for a couple of, for a year, I've been asked before, and I've always said no, but as long as I'm going to be there, okay, I'll take some people out for, you know, in and around Akitos.
And I think a terrific trip.
And for anybody who happens to be listening, I've got a couple of weeks in March, April, and then in August with a few slots open.
And the company's called Axiom, and they've got a free phone line at 888-777-5981.
Well, you know, I think the jungle is a fascinating spot, and I'm going to take them from Iquitos, smack in the middle of Peru's Amazon, out up the headwaters of the Amazon to a couple of lovely lakes for a few days, bring them back, let them clean up, take them out in a different direction for three or four nights of stomping through the jungle and setting up in the middle of nowhere where we can watch monkeys come overhead at night and go night fishing in canoes.
And then after we clean up, the third go-round, I'll take them out and teach them how to collect plants and how to, you know, some of the medical plants and potential medical plants, teach people how to do some collecting out there.
All right, well, all right, so for medical reasons.
unidentified
Medical reasons.
Anyway, it's a real complicated situation.
But the bottom line of the situation is that without it, I was losing weight to the point where my lot, I mean, I'm 5'6 and I weigh 104 pounds and I was down to 85 pounds.
Okay, my question is the problem is obtaining the marijuana in the first place.
I mean, I don't know about Mystery Corners, but I'm 48 years old, and I don't have a lot of friends, and I don't have a lot of people that I know who have access to marijuana.
Well, despite at the moment there being kind of a political football out there with the medical marijuana buyers clubs in California, I would say that if this woman were to call San Francisco and call
up, if this woman were to look in the alternative papers in San Francisco or Mendocino County, she's going to find the address or specific names of anyone of near two dozen buyers clubs in
California, any of which can steer her to someone who might be supplying marijuana for medical purposes in her area.
She's lucky to be in California where that is possible.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Peter Gorman.
unidentified
I'm James from Wisconsin.
I'm calling to talk about what we can do to keep some of these smaller local governments from cracking down too hard on people.
One of my close friends was arrested about a year ago.
I lived with him and they rented our house.
Well, since then I've been like stopped almost every couple of weeks, someone coming to my door from the local police department asking to buy marijuana or something.
And my house has been rented twice since.
Do you have any ideas about what we could do to stop this kind of thing from happening?
I would say, you know, any social movement needs bodies and the bodies have to come from, you know, from all of us.
So if you're feeling isolated, I would recommend that you call up National Normal and find out if there's a normal chapter in your neck of the woods or any other activist chapter in your neck of the woods.
And if there isn't, you might find out how to start one.
And you might be very surprised those local police department might be visiting 20 people in your neighborhood every couple of weeks.
And if the 20 of you got together and began to say, this is not fair.
Whatever we, if we were arrested in the past, that's past.
So I'm probably more of a libertarian than I am anything else, to be honest with you.
I used to have fairly conservative leanings in some areas, socially pretty liberal, and then all of that sort of coalesced and I sort of became more cynical about the government, and that sort of turned me into a libertarian.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Peter Gorman.
Where are you, please?
unidentified
I'm in California.
Okay.
I was wanting to know what Peter's views on hallucinogens are and being as the strengths of them are going higher and higher and the ages of children using them are going lower and lower.
And I was also wondering about, I watch the news a lot and every time they talk about drug traffic, the word control comes up, the control of the drug traffic.
Do you think the government has anything to do with how much comes in and if they're making a profit off of it?
And we'll get back to him and try and lay pretty heavily into the phones this hour.
unidentified
The End Okay, so you've got Streamlink for full access to CoastToCoastAM.com.
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Here's what you missed on Coast to Coast AM with George Norrie.
Are you convinced that there are governments above governments?
Governments that we don't vote for.
Governments that are controlling presidents or prime ministers or leaders of other nations?
There's no doubt there were two governments.
There's the provisional government and the permanent government.
And that every once in a while you have a charade called an election.
Presidents come and go, but they're there, and they just keep on keeping on, as it were.
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 12th, 1998.
And I start to look like a real, you know, a real guy again, as opposed to somebody who's been sitting under fluorescence and answering phones for a while.
I'm going to be renting my sister-in-law's riverboat, one of the biggest riverboats in all of Peruvian Amazonia, about 120 feet long and 30 feet wide with three decks.
And, you know, I'm going to do some plant collecting out there and some fossil collecting and some artifact collecting and play with my kids.
No in that it's not a common name but best of my knowledge that's for essentially a name for bathtub PCP.
And yeah I mean if people start to include PCP or ketamine, you know these are I don't know I mean why anyone would take a horse you know something to put a horse to sleep and look for enlightenment in that.
Well, there is no enlightenment in that.
It just can't be, as opposed to communing with the natural world by eating a mushroom or two, given it's the right setting, that you're mentally prepared and that you're with the right person.
And I don't know that you actually get enlightenment from any of them, but I think you can glimpse some things that you can then, without the influence of any substance, work towards.
And I think glimpsing something that you can then work towards is a very healthy thing.
healthy thing for expanding your presence here on the planet in a gentle and meaningful way.
And if we had time, I'd debate you on short-term memory loss.
I think what's learned under the influence of cannabis is recalled under the influence of cannabis better.
So I would debate that point.
But I do think anybody who's been smoking since seventh grade ought to take a break, what the heck.
You know what I mean?
First.
And secondly, I think if you go to bed under the influence of anything and put yourself in a very deep sleep, you're going to have a difficult time recalling your dreams.
So I think it's probably simply a product of your sleep is not quite as it's not being enforced as deeply.
Bob is asking CBC, for those who don't know, is a canvas buyers club.
And that basically, in California, it's become a popular term.
What it means is people are willing to risk going to jail to grow marijuana to be made available to people who need it medically.
And San Francisco has got the largest, but throughout California and in New York, and in fact, throughout the country, some growers are willing to make part of their harvest available free or inexpensively to people who need it for illnesses.
All anyone needs to do is be willing to go to jail for 20 years.
I mean, it's a horrible thing.
What would someone need to do to get one open?
The reality is, if you opened one, the minute you begin to distribute, the minute you begin to plant marijuana for distribution, you are subject to federal conspiracy laws.
You're subject to intent to distribute.
And in some states, that'll get your life imprisonment.
On the federal level, if they decide to nail you with it, they'll probably threaten you with it if they know it's for a legitimate buyer's club and then say, well, on the other hand, if you give us all the property you and everyone you know has, we won't put you in jail for the rest of your life.
And, of course, you're going to end up giving up your property.
So you've got to say it, but I don't recommend opening one.
And the attitude of most of the cops is, look, I have better things to do with my time.
If they want to do this down in the U.S. and they want to bust people and put a bunch of users and sellers into jail, fine, let them do it down there, but we're not going to do it up here.
And so far, that's the attitude.
Now, do you think that's going to hold, or do you think the Canadian government, federal government, is going to step in and squash this guy like a bug?
One, the fellows Mark Emery and he was also somebody who flaunted their bookselling laws.
There's not quite freedom of speech up there in that a magazine like High Times was illegal until three years ago or so.
Really?
He nonetheless would buy 500 of them every month and make sure they got distributed.
So he is somebody who is willing to put it on the line.
Now he was arrested two years ago at his store after a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal selling seeds and saying, I'm making a mint and I'm not being touched because I pay taxes.
Well, that was an embarrassment.
I mean, if you're going to embarrass the police, you're going to pay the price, even if they're being nice to you.
So they confiscated all of his books, all of his records, and all of his supplies, and maybe I would guess a quarter or a half million dollars, and he now still faces criminal trial at some point, up to 20 years in jail.
Nonetheless, he reopened and he reopened, among other things, a lovely cannabis cafe.
He doesn't sell marijuana in the cafe.
He does have the means to smoke it in the cafe.
And there probably are people nearby on the street who will make it available to you.
And in the cafe, he permits smoking, but he's not actually selling marijuana.
The police did not take any cannabis, but they did take, again, they took a great deal of grow lights and books, trying to, oh, I guess he had just shown up on one too many programs again, and a couple of front-page stories about his operation, and somebody gave the order, and, you know, the Royal Mountains came in and said, well, we're going to confiscate all your stuff.
But they only arrested people on previous warrants.
And that was one or two people in a public demonstration against the police action.
They did not arrest Mark for trafficking this time around.
Well, with few exceptions, the only country, I mean, you know, if we want to talk about some of Southeast Asia, Malaysia, for instance, where there are a lot of cut your head off, most of the countries around the world that I've visited really don't care.
I mean, in almost every country, there is a tradition of cannabis use among at least certain peoples.
You know, you think of India and you think of, you know, Hindu sects and Charis and Rashish.
This is part of the culture.
So if it weren't for the United States, it wouldn't be considered a problem anywhere.
And the Canadians, I think, fall into a category where there might not be traditional use, but it was never a problem.
They don't view it as a problem, and it's a problem only because there's the occasional elbow from the U.S. saying, come on, come on, don't embarrass us here.
Well, I was living in Alaska, Peter, actually broadcasting on KENI, my affiliate now in Anchorage, when the newswire went ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and Act 5 dings, I believe, and it was a bulletin, and the Alaskan Supreme Court had just legalized small amounts of marijuana for personal use, I think up to two ounces, and they legalized the growing of small amounts of marijuana for personal use.
Now, that lasted for a while until the big drug war years came along, and then a bunch of people from Washington went up to Alaska and convinced, with probably tremendous pressures that we can barely understand, the Alaskan legislature to turn it all around.
And they again made marijuana illegal.
But for quite a period of time, marijuana was quite legal to grow and to use, and very few people that I know of, in fact none, died, nor went crazy, nor raped, nillaged, nor plundered.
So it was a pretty good experiment while it lasted.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Peter Gorman.
I have, if I may, two quick opinions, one on Vietnam, one on marijuana, and one question.
Okay.
In Vietnam, we intervened in a civil war because of a popular belief that communism was a monolithic giant.
And I believe any empire will break up eventually if it gets too big.
Watch for Microsoft to do that.
And on the drugs, I do believe, along with you, that we should legalize the drugs and then try to control them and educate people about their use.
I disagree, though, that to say that marijuana is not a drug, because by definition, I believe any substance that alters the body chemistry is technically a drug, even tea or coffee, you know.
But anyway, here's my question.
Is anyone raising endangered frogs in tropical greenhouses stateside?
I know of a couple of clandestine operations, but not their locations.
In fact, the frog that I was involved with, the phylomedes of bicolor, was collected by a French firm and has reproduced very well over there.
So somebody in France is actively working on not the epibades, which you read about last week, but the phyllobates in France.
And I imagine that the pharmaceutical company working with Epibades is also, I'm guessing here, but that to ensure supply, that they are, you know, it's very expensive to send Peter Gorman out and say, can you get 10 of these?
So I imagine it's less expensive to say, let's pay once, Bring 20 back, we'll try to mate them.
And although I didn't read that they're doing that, I presume they are.
For most of the species in the world, frogs or otherwise, no.
Most species in the world that go extinct are going extinct from loss of habitat, which means it becomes very difficult to raise them in captivity with any great success.
Who wrote in the nation probably seven years ago now, and I don't want to swear the same sponsors are the same sponsors, but at the time, pharmaceutical houses, tobacco companies, and alcohol companies were among the primary sponsors.
Now all of these are drug producers.
So, you know, it's one drug dealer looking at cornering the market.
And I'll tell you, although I know I probably can't even say it over here, but if I were a care member, I know where I would invest my money to keep my profits up.
I've never heard that connected with them.
And listen, I'm not anti-education.
I wish we had legit education for everybody about these substances.
I don't believe drugs are for everybody.
Just the same way I don't believe caffeine or chocolate is for everybody.
It just isn't.
Some people can't handle chocolate.
They're going to get obese and die.
And some people are going to misuse heroin and die.
Some people are going to smoke marijuana at 5 o'clock in the morning and not learn a damn thing at school.
Real brief, I forgot to mention that when you asked before, what am I going to be doing down in the jungle?
One of the key things regarding the frogs, some of the Matzas Indians, the jungle, and the loss of jungle is going to be documented by terrific documentary filmmaker Larry Laval.
He's been with me twice down there.
He's walked across essentially 150 miles of jungle with me.
And he was with me the first time we ever collected the Phylamedusa frog.
And I've got him back.
I've got him making a film this time around.
So I feel terrific about it.
And it's certainly one of the things that we'll be doing.
Well, what's happened recently was, you know, when the law went into effect, it's been a lot of confusion out there in terms of what's a legitimate club, what's not a legitimate club, how do we monitor these clubs, if it's legal to be a caregiver for someone, is it still legal to be a caregiver for 50 people or 100 people that you don't know?
And so recently the feds have said that recently the feds have filed a civil suit to close down the buyers' clubs, but they are not going to actively arrest people.
So currently I think things are status quo with some bluster from the feds, and I won't be surprised if some of the clubs do actually get closed down just to test the waters on that.
On the other hand, I'd be very surprised if they come under too much fire or if they all come under some fire because I think the people of California spoke and I don't know that the federal government wants to get into a state versus federal law argument.
I thought that because it's a little politically sticky, I was just going to let it slide with the recrime in Alaska.
In fact, what happened was when the Alaskans voted for decriminalization and personal possession legality in Alaska, that became part of the state constitution.
When Dan Quayle went to Alaska, along with a lot of other federal bureaucrats to get it recriminalized, the legislature did that.
But it never did get changed in the Alaskan state constitution.
So that it remains federally illegal to even have small amounts in Alaska.
It's now a crime that you can get it confiscated.
And for buying and selling, obviously, you can get arrested.
But the personal possession is going to be another couple of years before a Supreme Court decision is reached, which would either change the law in the Constitution or stick with what they've got.
So you're in a gray area now where you've got overlapping laws and ordinances.
So I'm not surprised that for small personal amounts, people are losing their equipment and losing their products, but they're not getting arrested.
unidentified
So people need to get together and reunite and keep it real like it was.
I'll tell you what, I collected that for the American Museum of Natural History, and it's in permanent display over there in the beautiful new Hall of South American Peoples.
The equipment used to make it as well as to use it, as well as the snuff itself.
It's a very potent substance for communing with the spirit world, for let's say breaching the dimensional barrier, if you happen to believe there are some.
And if you don't, it's a very powerful tool for communing with deep parts of yourself.
But do I believe a flower's got some spirit or, you know what I mean?
Is it living?
Yeah.
And if it's living, I think it's got spirit.
And so if it's got spirit, I should be able to communicate with it.
I happen to be kind of an earthbound human.
I've got a lot of good things going for me, but I don't normally know how to do that communication.
So I think some of these things, some substances, particularly natural substances, seem to aid you to relaxing whatever it is that we hold up that helps us to be human and protect ourselves day to day, but also keep us from interacting on other levels with some of these things.
So I believe not only in different dimensions of a sort, but particularly in the potential accessing of the spirits of other living things.
John, listen, I'd rather not give out web addresses on the air unless I've checked them out first because I've had a couple of bad experiences with triple X stuff.
My feeling is, similar to getting action on AIDS, similar to ending the Vietnam War, you need a critical mass.
Politicians follow.
They don't lead, as a rule.
And I think they're going to have to be led by the nose, and we're going to finally have to say there are so many grandmas and moms and dads on the line, on those front lines, that the politicians say we'll risk more votes not going for it than we do by maintaining the status quo.
Whether we're close enough to that, whether we've educated enough people, I just don't know.
I mean, it seems like it's around the corner, but on the other hand, the corner seems sometimes like far, far away.
Peter, I'd like to know what Massachusetts' stand is on the legalization for marijuana and on the if somebody is a second question would be if somebody is clinically depressed and gets prescribed Prozac do you think this could help a person like that thank you well you're not a doctor
right no no no I'm not going to trust me on the initial point Massachusetts like everywhere else in the country with the exception of you know California and Arizona it you know cannabis remains illegal for any and all uses including medical on the other hand Massachusetts has a very active activist group called Mass Can they put on a big Boston rally that draws about 60,000
every fall and they are a terrific bunch of educators
so while it remains illegal if you want to hook up in your Massachusetts mass can is a knockout organization and somewhere in high times you'd find on a legalized page or re-legalized page you'd find an address to contact them on the other thing you know I mean if a doctor prescribes something and he's your doctor and you trust him I you know I'm not going to comment those high times review prescription drugs like Prozac and
others like that we've done stories but we we don't review them in that we're not a scientific or you know we're not part of the scientific literature out there on the other hand for instance if a drug a pharmaceutical company were to suddenly say we think 44 percent of all the children in America are out of hand and depressed so we're going to make chewable children's varieties
then we would certainly comment on that as a newsworthy you know I think we're a story I think I mean without naming names or a couple of these substances pharmaceuticals which are being marketed very heavily to children and whereas three years ago every ball of our kids seemed fairly normal now and in the next couple of years we're going to find out that they all should be on medication for life
unidentified
life which is going to make some pharmaceutical company a lot of money Wildcard line you're on the air with Peter Gorman hello where are you please how are you calling from KHVH Honolulu Honolulu yeah yeah and then there is this A ⁇ E program called I think it's the Curses of Cocaine Mummies they said this German toxologist looked into these mummies and found traces of tobacco, cocaine, and hashish in their hairs.
And then this was verified by Rosalie David of the Manchester Museum, keeper of Egyptology.
And so this sort of would be a good thing to know for your show since it mixes drugs with Egyptology.
Yeah, I mean, of course, you're not going to find it next to Better Home and Gardens and stuff, but it's not even next to Magazine.
I can imagine why a lot of supermarkets wouldn't want to carry it.
But my other question was, this might be hogwash, but I heard that Big Brother has a way of tracking who subscribes to your magazine, and if that's true, and does that have anything to do why you delivered in a big brown envelope?
Our list has never been accessed, but I could speak until I'm blue in the face, and a lot of people still wouldn't believe that.
But no, we do have free speech in this country, and it would be headlines if a governmental organization said, we want your subscriber list.
I mean, even the media that don't like us wouldn't stand for that.
As far as why do we deliver it in a round bag, if somebody prefers it in a see-through, that's fine.
But on the other hand, we know that in some communities, people would get singled out, or it would become the talk of the town, or a postman would point it out, and in other communities, you know, which might not be what somebody likes.
And in other communities, the postman would simply keep it and get a free sub that way.
So we think a plain wrapper is the simplest way to go.
It is adult material.
It's not meant for kids.
And, you know, most other adult material of any type is going to be sent in a brown bag, and we just follow that route.
Ayahuasca, made by the right person at the right time, in the right place, is, on the one hand, it's a purgative, a physical purgative, so it's a curative.
On the other hand, it is the shortest distance between here and any other planes that you need to access.
It is low-key in that you are not feeling out of control.
You never forget who you are.
You can open your eyes and say, hey, I'm just sitting here on somebody's platform.
But on the other hand, it allows very easy, you know, beginners can do, as I was surprised the first time I did it, do some astral projection and really go places with directive.
Like, I want to go see a friend.
I'm going to note what he's wearing, when he's wearing it, or she's wearing.
Write a notebook in the morning, and then when you get back to town, tell him, call your friend, and you'll be surprised how often, like, huh?
Wait, you were there doing that, wearing that.
That's what I wrote down, I saw you.
So, you know, that would be for the beginner, but for people in a place like the jungle where distances are great, and it might be days and days to access one friend or a relative, something like that has become a natural medicine for, well, I've got to talk to my sister, and, you know, she lives 600 miles away.
All right, folks, that's it in some markets back with an hour of open lines.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premiere Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 12, 1998.
Coast to Coast AM from January
12, 1998.
I've got to tell you I've been racking my brain Hoping to find a way out I've had enough of this continued rain Changes are coming, No doubt.
It's been a too long time.
With no peace of mind.
And I'm ready for the time to get back.
You seem to want from me what I cannot give.
I feel so lonesome at times.
I have
a dream here Radio Networks presents our bell somewhere inside the night's program originally aired January 12 1998 Good morning everybody It's been a too long time with no fears of mine And I'm ready for the time to give Yeah me too Okay,
so you've got stream link for full access to coasttocoastam.com.
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And each month, you can read very personal editorials from me, George Norrie, interviews which covers areas that you don't hear on the air, articles from guests which are not on the internet, and relevant news stories that don't always get covered by the mainstream.
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Now we take you back to the night of January 12, 1998, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Art Bell For the last four or now five days, I have been nearly catatonic with the flu.
After reporting on the flu so widely, and there is a pandemic of the flu going on now, in many or even most parts of the country, perhaps excepting the Northeast, hospitals are at capacity.
It is said 500 people in Los Angeles have died of this flu.
As a matter of fact, PNBC Channel 4 went and interviewed somebody who got very outraged at the county, you know, the county health people got outraged at that figure.
But it is being reported that 500 have died by the wire services in Southern California, and people are dying.
This is a very serious flu.
And I came down with it and had a temperature, very high temperature, on and off.
I took aspirin and I kept trying to knock it down.
You know, your body's natural reaction is to have a temperature, and it means it's fighting a virus or something.
And so you don't want to knock it down completely, but you also don't want it to get out of control.
So I was a very, very sick person for a few days.
Now, that let up on me.
I must tell you, it has lessened, and I'm a little bit better, and that's why I'm with you this morning.
However, earlier yesterday, my wife got sick, and I am so sorry, because for her, this sort of illness is life-threatening.
She is an asthmatic, and she's in the middle of a very serious asthma attack right now as a result of the flu and has a temperature as well.
So from the frying pan into the fire, I was the frying pan, and she is the fire.
And we're monitoring this very carefully.
Take care out there.
This is a very serious flu.
Some are saying it is an Australian flu.
Some are saying it's a type A flu.
Most are saying it's flu-like symptoms, and I don't think they know what the hell it is, frankly.
But I can tell you it is very, very serious.
And for several days, I couldn't and didn't eat.
I did not sleep, except pitfully for an hour or so, and then I'd wake up and be sick again, and just sort of sit there.
And all I could do is, you know, drink liquids and pray.
So I'm surprised I'm here, but I'm happy I'm here.
And if you have an extra prayer or two, you might say it for my wife, because she's very ill.
And so we will sort of take the week as it comes.
But this flu is what, you know, I'm calling it a flu.
I don't really know that's true.
Whatever it is, is very serious.
Take care, folks.
Here is a fax I just received.
Art, I'm a small-town cop in California.
And in fact, I'm on duty now listening to your show while on patrol, and as such, have not been able to quite follow everything that's been said or is being said.
The way I understand it is your current guest, editor of High Times, is advocating the legalization of marijuana and all drugs.
It amuses me, as a long-time street cop, hearing people wanting to legalize drugs.
They obviously have not encountered someone who's been up for two or three days on speed or crank or some sort of methamphetamine.
The majority of people have no idea how dangerous people under the influence of these drugs can be.
Regarding the issue of the legalization of marijuana and the California initiative, the voters of California did vote for it.
However, it goes against federal law.
You can just imagine the chaos which would ensue if state laws could go against federal laws.
As far as explaining it to your children, the simple fact that it is illegal is a more than adequate explanation.
The fact that you disagree with a certain law does not give one license to break it.
It's illegal now for physicians to prescribe marijuana for medicinal reasons.
However, they will not do so for fear of losing their license to prescribe drugs.
I think if people are sincere about the medicinal use of marijuana, that is the area that needs changing.
Dan in California, and Dan, I agree with you.
I think that marijuana is the area that should be worked on, and I have severe reservations about the legalization of other drugs, but that was the position of Peter Gorman, and that's just fine.
There are many who share his view.
It is an ongoing argument in this country of ours.
And from a doctor that I respect, Art, with regard to pain and drugs for same, I hear you and hear here for you.
You know how I feel about this from past discussions as far as I am concerned.
If your patient requires it, you prescribe it and defend your legal position if it becomes necessary.
We as MDs are supposed to help our patients.
At least that's what my oath, my brain, and my heart tell me.
Sorry, Ramona is suffering.
Hope the attack resolves quickly.
And I agree, Doctor, with you, of course.
And then one other item.
Yes, I do note, Art, did you see CNN's report on Monday regarding the freak snowstorm in the Middle East?
Reportedly, up to one foot of snow fell in Jordan and amounts in Israel that have not been seen since the beginning of the decade.
Not to mention the freezing rain problems in central Canada and the northeastern states of the U.S. and at 1.3 million people here without power in the province of Quebec.
There is no question the quickening is well underway.
I could not agree more, and there are other things to be said about freak snowstorms in Israel.
I will not say them now.
East of the Rockies, you are on the air.
Good morning.
unidentified
Yes.
Hi, Art.
Anyway, this is Kathy in Oklahoma City.
And I emailed you with this month ago, but I don't know if you ever saw it since you get so much email.
There is a treatment that they're working on.
Several places are using it for asthma to supposedly with real good results.
It's something like 80% helium and 20% oxygen that's supposed to knock an asthma attack almost to nothing in a very short amount of time.
You know, when it rains, it pours, waiting for the times to get better, huh?
I see that Iraq is vowing to block UN weapons inspectors led by an American it says is a spy, but that other UN inspection teams can continue their work.
It's an ex-Marine here, Captain Scott Ritter, who is being questioned.
And so we're eventually going to get to the point where no doubt the UN is going to leave and we're going to attack Iraq.
I think we're just biding our time.
I don't know the resolution of the, I haven't been keeping track, but a gunman did enter the Tokyo Stock Exchange and he took hostages, halting for a time, I guess, trading.
And I don't know the status of that story.
Back to open lines, and let's go to the first time caller line.
And I guess that just occurred tonight or this morning.
unidentified
Yes.
I actually lived in Arizona three months ago and I couldn't find, I used to listen to you all the time, couldn't find out where you were until two days ago.
And so I've just been ecstatic, you know, finding you on the other station.
The question I had was, back in September, you had a call, and I remember I was laying in bed when you had a guy, you had the Area 51 line on.
And I was wondering a little bit if you had ever heard what happened to that guy who, where you're, I don't know whether it was your station that went down or exactly what occurred after that.
And I was talking to him about that, and he said it's very possible that he worked with aircraft mechanics and so forth.
But he said that it's very possible that something very strange could happen because we were talking the other night about how you had a I forgot who your guest was on, but he was talking about a mother ship that he predicted that we'd see during the daylight.
And we were talking about that and my roommate said that they actually he's actually seen plans for it's a marine type ship or something, but it actually can levitate and move backwards that could be mistaken for a very large aircraft.
I just don't know that I am prepared to suggest the legalization of all drugs is a good idea.
Here's a quick facts.
Well, Art, congratulations on the Packer win.
I was at the game pulling for the Niners, but yes, we were outplayed.
I really knew it was all over at halftime when they started playing all right, and it's coming on, and we've got to get right back to where we started from.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Turkey AM from January 12th, 1998.
Love with me, and with me.
and make you better take your home with me Dalla tu cuerpo alegria macarena Que tu cuerpo pa mar la alegria y cosa buena Dalla tu cuerpo alegria macarena Eeeh macarena Aaaaah Dalla tu cuerpo alegria macarena Que tu cuerpo pa mar la alegria y cosa buena Dalla tu cuerpo alegria macarena Eeeh macarena Aaaaah Now don't you ever I'm a boyfriend The boy's name is Vitorino
I don't want him to ban him, even though he's so high.
Hey-oh!
AI.
AIO.
You're listening to Art Bell Submarine 5, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 12th, 1998.
Robert O. Dean, I thought, went pretty far the other day.
As far as you could expect anybody to go.
I thought he really laid it out, and I guess I'm on his list, and one day I'm going to have a packet of documents arrive, and then it'll be my dilemma, won't it?
I know a friend of mine at work that I work with told me all about your show, and while he doesn't have a computer, and I do, I've logged on and looked at your website numerous amount of times.
But I found it interesting about, I don't know how many months ago, maybe five months ago, you had a person on a guest that talked about Mono Lake and the possible eruption at Mono Lake.
They had a whole thing on it at night about possible volcanic eruptions on Mono Lake and everything.
They're the only ones that have done this in the Bay Area talked about it.
And this is just, like I said, Saturday.
And I found it kind of interesting here.
You did it like about six, seven months ago.
Now, finally, the local media, just one channel, is talking about how they went up there and it looks like possible eruptions and all the catastrophic things that could happen and about what happened in 1980 up in, you know, near Seattle and Washington and all that.
And I really found it kind of interesting that...
So I just found that.
I just thought I'd let you know that they finally got around to talking about that around here.
And most things that I bring up and talk about, people send me email or mail and say I'm crazy as a loon.
And for a few months it looks as though I am and then suddenly, whoosh.
It's like my book, The Quickening, which, by the way, you can get nationally now in any bookstore.
Bear in mind now, when you read The Quickening Now, the economic chapters, the environmental chapters, the chapters on the weather, bear in mind I wrote that one year ago now.
Wrote it one year ago.
And as you read it, a lot of it is going to be like reading current headlines.
Usually we wait an appropriate amount of time before we begin revising.
However, in the case of UFOs, we do immediate revision.
unidentified
Absolutely.
In the crash retrieval case, too.
There was also residents that I've even had people who are in logging companies now who were loggers back then and executives now who claim to have almost gotten into fistfights with soldiers on the logging roads, not because they cared one bit about UFOs, but they wanted to go into the area to work and they were denied access.
Well, it was active in the early 90s for a period of activity.
unidentified
Right.
Actually, I was involved in the when it erupted in 92.
We ran, I was in a squadron HC-4, and we ran like, not rescue, well, it was kind of rescue, but it was like what we did was we took like huge cement blocks and we dropped them in the path of the lava.
I just got a call from Keith Rowland, my webmaster, and he said, Art, you're not going to believe it, but it looks as though the website that I found, which has a live cam looking at Aetna, has shut off all foreign or at least U.S. internet people.
They have actually removed our access from the U.S. and it looks as though we did it, probably bringing their server to its knees over there.
So they literally locked us out.
Can you believe it?
Fortunately, before that occurred, we recovered quite a number of photographs of Aetna yesterday, during the day, and then into the evening and nighttime hours.
And we've got the photographic proof on the website.
So even though they apparently have, within the last hour, locked all U.S. internet people out because of us.
Sorry about that.
We did preserve the photographs in question, and they are on my website now.
So I strongly suggest you go take a look.
It's at www.artbell.com.
And you can look at Aetna yesterday during the day and then into the evening hours, and you will see, as you get into the nighttime hours, vertical displays of lava blown into the air, three streams of lava coming down three separate sides of Aetna.
And we caught all of that before they removed access.
So even though you cannot directly go to the site any longer because we caused them trouble, you can still see the photographs.
although that's so cool i mean what you're going to should you do so the wolf one hundred shoot killer put it out of it Well, that's what they make night vision for.
unidentified
Oh, Art.
You know, you're a very intelligent man, but you try with night vision and try and find a wolf in thick timber.
Now, you know, the way they used to trap wolves is, in my opinion, cruel as hell.
And I'm going to be, you're going to have to convince me of the harm that wolves are doing before I say it's a good idea and then if it is and if they need to be pinned then they ought to be killed humanely not left to try and chew their leg off before somebody can get to them the next day.