The real gift of the Magi

There’s a tremendous amount of disinfo in play regarding the Biblical story of the three Magi and how it relates to Horus, the Egyptian sky god, who incorporated the sun, moon and stars into one supreme supernatural entity long before the arrival of the Christian mythology.

The Jesus story was built on top of an earlier Mithras myth, and both have their origins in Persian astrology, which is why three Zoroastrian priests attend the birth of Jesus. When this myth was forged, everyone believed the earth was flat and at the center of the universe. Now we know better. But our mythologies remain clouded by past beliefs.

On the winter solstice, the sun reaches its most southern point in the sky and strangely hovers for three three days in the exact same trajectory before veering back to the north, a voyage that will end on the summer solstice (which is also the day Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, becomes visible above the horizon).

The story of the Magi as handed down in the Bible has been tinkered with, but I can interpret the real story using common sense as my guide. According to the Bible, the Magi brought gold, frankincense and myrrh to celebrate the birth of the son. This seems unlikely, and I’d suggest the Zoroastrian priests from the East brought the three greatest medicines of their time, cannabis, frankincense and myrrh, the most fragrant terpene-rich plant oils, although opium seems like a possible replacement for myrrh. Someday the real medicinal value of these plants will re-emerge.

According to Plutarch, the Temple of Isis burned three different incenses, one at dawn, one at noon, and one at sunset. He identified these as: frankincense, myrrh and kyphi. Doesn’t it seem reasonable to assume these are the gifts brought by the Three Kings to celebrate the birth of the son? So not only do they switch kyphi with gold, but then they bury the identity of kyphi. I say kyphi is cannabis, and maybe even an early version of wax and/or shatter.

Rather than keep our major religions clouded by dogma and superstition, I prefer to help them evolve and grow into the new millennium. Cannabis played a major role in the development of Christianity and most other religions, but was strangely removed as a sacrament and replaced with alcohol along the way. This terrible injustice needs to be rectified. We can honor the rituals, ceremonies and myths of fundamentalist religion, while rejecting their dogmas and superstitions, and fixing their problems.

Would legal opium have saved Philip Seymour Hoffman?

Philip-Seymour-Hoffman-Best-MoviesQuite a tragedy to lose such a great talent in his prime, and sadder still to know he left three traumatized kids behind. A slew of overdose deaths are being blamed on a synthetic opiate similar to Oxycontin, used as an additive to pep up the cut, although turns out this was apparently not the culprit in Hoffman’s case.
Reality is, if poppies and their essential oils were legal like they should be, few, if any, of these overdose deaths would be occurring.
But the most disturbing thing in this case is that Hoffman’s death is being used by law enforcement and the media to conduct a witch-hunt on heroin users in the New York underground scene? Since over 50 percent of the country now believes cannabis should be legal for adults, I wonder how long we’ll have to wait for the same logic to start applying to the poppy plant?

My Plan for Legalization of All Drugs

Stopping substance use is a failed concept, and 80 years of the most intensive war in history—the war-on-plants—has been a miserable failure. While criminalizing users and treating drug use primarily as a law enforcement issue, we’ve exploded the prison population, created an out-of-control prison-industrial-piss-test-complex, and done little to stop real drug abuse.

Meanwhile, the most dangerous drugs in the world, prescription medicines, have been handed out like M&M’s to almost every child in America. One shudders to consider the long-term, negative fall-out from the over-drugging of our kids, a significant portion of whom have already been subjected to the tortures of privatized-prisons, which scarred them for life.

Marijuana, opium and coca leaf are the world’s greatest medicines, and you can probably treat almost any medical issue those three in your medicine chest. With great medicines, however, come great responsibilities. All medicines can be abused, and the line between use and abuse is often difficult to chart. But the most serious crime is that we have lost control over the world’s three greatest medicines, not to protect us, but to protect the interests of the chemical cartel that holds the strings of real power.

My plan is to immediately legalize all three plants and allow any person to grow marijuana, coca leaf and/or poppies. However, home cultivation would be limited to family-use and it would remain illegal to concentrate plants into white powder drugs. Any violation would simply mean confiscation of the white powder substances with no further penalties. Any money exchanging hands with white-powder black-market sales would also be subject to confiscation.

I ‘d encourage the creation and sale of products containing marijuana, opium and/or coca leaf, and also permit the commercial cultivation necessary to sustain such products, all to be regulated closely. Please put the coca-leaf back into coca-cola! It’s a far better stimulant than its caffeine replacement. All products containing these three plants would be available only through liquor stores and would require ID, age to be determined at the community level, not the one-policy-fits-all approach we have now.

Of course, legal drug recreational products would be taxed. But all three medicines would be available by prescription from an MD. In this form it would not be taxed, so if you show your prescription at the cash register—no tax, baby! Taxes on all legal recreational drugs should annually be determined by the cost of all down-stream negative fallout. Cigarette tax would cover the mouth, throat and lung cancer. Alcohol tax would cover the liver diseases. If you can find any health issues with long-term use of the main three medicines, though, then any problems from increased use would be covered by the tax, which would undoubtedly remain a fraction of the tax on tobacco and alcohol.