Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (62 page)

“It is better to be infirm and sick than to be made healthy through magic. If you go to witches, you will have forsaken God the Father.”

—G
EILER VON
K
AYSERSBERG,
F
ASTENPREDIGT
[L
ENT SERMON
] (1508)

The current drug laws are like a modern version of the Hexenhammer (
Malleus Maleficarum,
or Hammer of the Witches). Just as the Hexenhammer paved the way for the murder of millions of people, drug laws have made it possible to place certain undesirable people within a society under surveillance and to suppress an individual’s freedom to use healing remedies as he or she sees fit. Because of drug laws the sensible and medically valuable use of some of the best and most successful medicinal plants that humans have discovered has become a punishable offense. As the Bible forbade eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, the Church forbade witches the use of their “traveling mediums”—and modern humans have been forbidden to use consciousness-altering substances (the so-called drugs
¹
) in the same way. The organic chemist Jonathan Ott, in his own right a brilliant authority on psychoactive plants and substances, calls this the “pharmacratic Inquisition” (Ott, 1996). Even inebriation in and of itself—regardless of what caused it—has been repeatedly demonized.
²
At the same time, the desiring toward inebriation is one of the basic characteristics of our nervous system. It is possible that there is even an instinct that drives us to inebriation—similar to the instinct that pushes us to eat, drink, have sex, and survive.

If we cast our eyes back upon the history of the plants and plant constituents that have been forbidden by drug laws, the Western obsession with conducting witch trials against unpopular people becomes readily apparent. The egocentric and selfish Catholic religion was the driving force behind the witch trials. Brimming with Christian spirituality, the
Malleus Maleficarum,
the infamous Hammer of the Witches, struck a devastating blow to society. The current drug laws are filled with the same ideology. The arrogant presumptuousness of Christianity, that it has the one and only true God who “justifies” every legal and moral caprice, forms the spiritual foundation of the drug laws. It should also not be forgotten that modern drug laws were written mainly by Christian politicians and Church leaders. What Pope Innocent VIII began when he forbade the use of cannabis in his “witches’ bull” of 1484 (Amrein, 1997) was set forth by a Dutch bishop:

Within the framework of the First International Opium Agreement (IOA) of 23 January 1912 in The Hague (The Hague Agreement) and under the chairmanship of Bishop Brent, opium, cocaine, and morphine were outlawed and the foundation for drug prohibition in the twentieth century was laid (Körner, 1994: 3).

As a result of the Second Geneva Conference on Opium in 1925, the opium laws were introduced in 1929 in the German Reich. In 1949, after the Second World War, the laws were declared still valid by the Christian-Democrat regime.

When the American establishment, consisting mainly of puritanical and fundamentalist Christians, grew frightened and bewildered when faced with the germinating hippie movement, it reacted by instituting paranoid drug laws. The laws were used to legitimize the suppression of consciouness-expanding experiences and the creation of a new way of life. The drug laws also served as tools for persecuting social outcasts and undesirables.

Hippies were accused of the same things as witches before them: drug abuse, promiscuity, and immoral attitudes toward the Christian ethic (Golowin, 1977). The hippies were blamed for Satanism, which included Black Mass and ritual murder. As “proof,” Charles Manson and his family were trotted out. Although this crazy man and his murderous band saw themselves as new Christians, and their followers worshipped Manson as Christ and savior, they were not hippies.
³
After all, liberation from Christian feelings of guilt and duty was part of the ideology of the hippies. Besides, they had eaten again from the tree of knowledge and discovered the Divine in and of itself—not in the words of a priest.

In 1971, because of an international treaty concerning psychotropic substances that was pushed through by the United States, the opium laws, which had been valid up to that point in West Germany, were amended and became the
Gesetz über den Verkehr mit Betaübungsmitteln
(Regulations of the Drug Trade). The establishment of an office in the German federal government read like a broadside from the time of the Inquisition:

The misuse of intoxicating substances that are designated as drugs in the opium laws threatens to reach a dangerous level. This phenomenon can no longer be considered a passing trend and consequently dismissed. Like a plague it spreads more and more throughout the Federal Republic of Germany. In ever-broadening circles the citizens are caught in its current. The youth in particular are at risk, often already in danger by puberty. The number of young people who consummate their entrance into the drug world is increasing. At the same time it has been demonstrated that the average age at which the entrance occurs has lowered. Even the children have not been spared. The seriousness of the situation must be emphatically underscored by the incidents of death that have occurred in recent times, in particular among the youth. …

One of the measures the [German] federal government is preparing is a cohesive plan of action in the fight against drug addiction. The law is in service of the goal to stop the drug trend in the Federal Republic of Germany and to avert great danger from the individual and the general public. It has to do with protecting the individual people, in particular the youth, from grave and often irreparable harm to their health and a disturbance of their personality, their freedom, and their existence. It has to do with protecting the families from the tragedy which threatens them when a member has fallen into the grips of drug addiction. It has to do with sparing the general public from falling victim to the high price of an unchecked wave of drug use. And finally, it has to do with not allowing it to affect the ability of society to function properly. …

A particular sign of the drug wave has been the considerable increase in the use of the Indian hemp
(Cannabis sativa)
and the resin from it (hashish). In this regard we are talking about a hallucinogen that, according to the predominant opinion of medical science, with consistent use can cause a change in consciousness and lead to psychological addiction. … Apparently no withdrawal symptoms manifest with the drug and there is only a small tendency to increase the dose. The move to harder drugs is shown in particular among the younger people. With great probability it can be concluded that the drug serves an introductory function. In practical terms, the youth complete their entrance into the world of drugs with hemp (BT-Drs 665/70, quoted from Körner, 1994: 5f.).

In this example the witches’ salve of the Inquisition has been replaced by hemp, which had been thoroughly demonized by Pope Innocent VIII as well as by Henry Anslinger, the anti-marijuana crusader and original mastermind behind the war on drugs.
⁴
The motivation behind the government’s drug laws are just as transparent as were the justifications for the witch hunts. Both stem from the imagination of the rulers. There is still an “inquisitor” employed by the current government; he is called a drug commissioner. It came as no surprise that when a Social Democrat politician presented a model for a pharmacy that would openly sell hashish and marijuana, the idea crumbled when it encountered the Christian Social Union (CSU) politician Eduard Lintner, who was backed by the likewise Christian-Socialist minister of health—in other words, the “chief inquisitor.” It remains to be seen when they will set the funeral pyre for Heide Moser
⁵
on fire.

But, surprisingly, there are also government officials who want to bring the demonization of the hemp plant to an end. The Social Democratic senator Horst Bossung spoke in this regard:

The drug problem … can be spoken of in terms of when someone has problems obtaining their preferred or medicinally necessary drugs. More precisely, they have drug problems when they have problems obtaining the drugs … For the hedonic consumers, in other words those who consume drugs for pleasure, this is highly irritating—for the sick who require cannabis for medical purposes, this is often extremely painful. For example some cancer patients, AIDS patients, and people with other illnesses, a permanent drug problem consists only of the fact that they are not able to get the medicinal cannabis that they need. These are the real, true drug problems (Bossung, 1995: 13).

These “true drug problems” are produced by the drug laws:

The current problems that are connected to the illegal status of cannabis undoubtedly represent the biggest side-effects of the medicinal use of cannabinoids. There are many sedatives and remedies for sleep and pain with a far greater potential for addiction than cannabis that physicians are permitted to write a normal prescription for. The classification of cannabis as a prohibited drug is therefore no longer sensible today. A doctor should be able to prescribe cannabis preparations of defined quality like any other medicine (Grotenhermen and Huppertz, 1997: 9f.).

For more than six thousand years hemp has been used as a medicine everywhere it grows in the vicinity of humans. During my ethnomedicinal study
(Marijuana Medicine)
it came to light that the medicinal use of hemp is even more multifaceted than the possible uses of the entire plant. Over the course of history different cultures and various healing systems have used hemp to treat far more than a hundred indications. In other words, hemp is one of the most versatile medicinal plants of all! In the meantime its use in ethno- and folk medicine for numerous indications has been pharmacologically confirmed (see Rätsch, 1992; Grotenhermen and Huppertz, 1997). But like every good medicine, hemp is federally controlled: “Forbidden is the use of cannabis plants for the production of cannabis cigarettes, for making medications and cannabis tinctures (i.e., as a cough syrup, sleeping remedy, asthma and migraine medicine). Dealing with cannabis is forbidden and punishable, regardless if the cannabis plants and the cannabis products demonstrate enough THC contents for the consumer” (Körner, 1994: 56 f.).