A Prescription for LSD from MLK
Today we celebrate civil rights activist Rev.Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Who worked endlessly for environmental and social justice and for all to be created equal. King didn't mean for his followers to drop a dose of the psychedelic Compound. King instead wants us all to ingest the idea that, to achieve greatness is to "Lead, Serve, and Don't Forget to Remember."
Psychedelics have been used in religious practices for hundreds or even thousands of years. By the 1960s psychedelics became mainstream in the hippie counterculture and the fight to end drug prohibition was just getting started. MLK delivered his famous "I Have a Dream speech" in 1963 and was awarded the Nobel peace prize shortly after in 1964. A few years later in 1968, we see the Nixon campaign and the Nixon White House in a fight against the antiwar liberals and minorities of color. The internal plan was to brainwash the public into associating hippies with cannabis and Blacks with heroin, then both demonizing and criminalizing the drugs with the declared "War on Drugs". The purpose was to disrupt black communities by raiding their homes, breaking up organize protests, and vilifying them day after day on the evening news. This sparked the creation of the DEA and the Rockefeller laws which impose the nation's first mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders. This allowed for the incarceration and devastation of African-American and low-income communities. Fast forward to the 80s and the DEA starts collaborating with local law enforcement to instate Operation Pipeline, a program that enables traffic stops and vehicle searches of black and brown people. Another way to allow systemic racial profiling of minorities in America. In a speech made by Martin Luther King Jr., "White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo." Minorities are directly affected by the drug war and racial injustice as we see Blacks and Latinos arrested almost 4 times more than whites for cannabis. Mentioning that people of color and whites use these drugs at the same rate. We must never forget where we came from and the sacrifices made by activists to create an equal and just world for everyone. We end with a statement made by King that rings true now more than ever, "We have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights, an area where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We have been in the reform movement but after so much in the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be the era of revolution. We must recognize that we can't solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power." Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis Tennessee on April 4, 1968. He would've been 99 years old on January 15, 2021.