Disinformation: Right, that's exactly how it started. It was a widely accepted social sacrament, I have photos in the book Drug War of Chinese people very graciously offering a pipe of opium as a social gesture and meditative sacrement.

But when the British took control in the Opium wars, over major Chinese ports and held total control of India, they ended up in control of the world's opium trade. This saw the Chinese lose control of China. They lost control of the major trade.

This was just before the great Industrial Revolution. It was worth a damn fortune, a geopolitical fortune, which caused the Chinese government to demonize smoking opium, because the money was going into the hands of the British.

Addiction became low-rent treason. The American, French and Germans, and the other colonial slave states, found it convenient to back this because on the one hand it forced the British to give up or share an important leg of their power.

On the other hand it gave the French in Indo-China, and of course the British in Hong Kong, the ability to legally and governmentally monopolize the trade.

Disinformation: Which is what is happening now in the United States.

Dan Russell: On a covert level, yeah. That is what is happening.

Disinformation: Have anything you would like to say about the US spraying Fusarium Oxysporum on the campesinos of Colombia at the current time?

Dan Russell: An old childhood friend of mine, who has been living in the Upper-Putomayo valley since 1977, a journalist, and Ayahuasquero shaman.

He's looking at it from the point of view of a guy whose been living there the past 24 years, immersed in the culture. Much more interested in Yage than warfare. He has pictures, which will be up soon at Shamanshop.net, showing very peaceful people, very gentle people, these are the people being bombed with Agent Green. Agent Green is an agriculture destroyer. It is the exact opposite of species-specific. It is well known to be a powerful, and uncontrollable mutigant, and they are dumping it on the poor, to take control of the land. The motherfuckers growing 95 percent of the coca crops, consequently, are not being touched, because they are in government-held territory. Agent Green is wrecking the world these people live in.

Disinformation: Aren't they concerned it will spread to their own crops?

Dan Russell: Oxisporum is not mobile, it must be moved around. The cure for land that is poisoned by Fusarium Oxysporum is Agri-biz. What you do is plow in expensive chemical anti-fungal agents, then plant crops that have been bred to be resistant to fungicide, so what you have is land that's been converted from being highly productive land into what can only be used by Agri-biz. These people are very Frankensteinian.

Disinformation: What is your answer to the War, your replacement model for the War on Some Drugs?

Dan Russell: My answer to the Drug War has a lot of political support in police agencies as well as among hippies: Legalize the traditional herbs, and medicalize the alkoloids.

You can argue about permutations of that, well, everything should be legal, but in America with the prescription system, that is an idiotic pipe dream that will never fly.

If you want something that can really fly in the real word is the legalization of all traditional herbs, because they are not drugs, they are herbs, and medicalization of all refined concentrates, so doctors can prescribe as they see fit. This is basically what they have now in Holland, and it works.

Disinformation: So what about those people who want to start drugs, the people who have an interest in heroin, should they be able to go to the doctor and say, "I'm interested in trying heroin," and get a perscription? Should it be that simple?

Dan Russell: The doctor, if they are any kind of doctor, would suggest smoking opium.

That would be the standard medical responce, if you are asking me if I think refined concentrates ought to be prescribed. The answer is medical, not legal. It is not the business of the law what a doctor thinks, but the proper medical approach from what I know is that the doctor would recommend, on medical grounds, smoking opium instead.

In places where smoking opium has been traditional, Iran for instance, you don't have a heroin problem. They look at alcohol as we look at opium. This is the conclusion of Dr. Marie Nyswynder, the woman who really pushed methadone treatment. She looked into it, and said that cultures that traditionally use opium correctly just don't have a problem with it.

In cultures that teach without ostracizing the use of alcohol, that use it sacramentally, that allow the kids to try it, that incorporate it into the social scene, abuse problems rarely arise. I mean, the difference in the rate of addiction between the Jewish-American culture, and the Irish-American culture was once spectacular, like 50 to one, but this might be fading in our generation.

In the mid-1940s, sociologists at CCNY were astonished by statistics coming out of New York City hospitals. They noticed that less than one half of a percent of those admitted for alcohol-related problems were of Jewish descent, and 25 percent, 50 times as many admissions, were of Irish descent.

They couldn't figure out why there were so many more Irish than Jewish admissions. When they looked back by other measures, the same proportions held true. There was in fact empirically 50 times more alcoholism among Irish-Americans than among Jewish-Americans. There isn't any physical difference between the two people. Jews are not less neurotic than Irish. There isn't a particularly lower divorce rate.

The only thing that would explain it is the attitude of the cultures and how they use alcohol. Jews share alcohol. I was given wine at Passover Seder. Nobody blinked an eye. I was also made to understand as a kid that, OK, you are a little stoned. That doesn't mean you can act like an asshole. You are still part of the group, not ostracized. The Irish have exactly the opposite reaction. They can be violent with kids about alcohol, and in religious ceremonies only the priest is allowed to imbibe. They don't share the wine, supposedly the great sacrament. Only the priest is allowed to taste it.

This is a really Roman kind of thing, where people aren't allowed to share in the sacrament. I talk about this historically in my book, Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda (Camden NY: Kalyx, 1998). That is, what you're dealing with is a kind of psychology of group manipulation, masquerading as religion.

The religions that are actually sacramental, and the Jews come closer than do Christians, although they have their own problems with sacramentalism, but in relation to wine, this is also true to other groups that have no connection to any European group.

From South American Indians you can show there are groups that use alcohol all the time, yet have almost no alcoholism. This is empirical proof that the problem of alcohol has nothing to do the pharmacology of alcohol.

Disinformation: So why do we have 150,000 alcohol-related deaths in the US every year?