Psychedelics, in fact drugs in general are no longer underground, since the first big acid raves reappeared in 1987 drug references have become common parlance in the media and the press. You knew the drug movement was mainstream when you first heard "E's are good, e's are good, he's ebenezer goode." at number one in the charts and saw gangs of teens wearing Mitzubishi and Dove T-Shirts screaming aciiiiiiid at the top of their lungs. In the interim we learnt that drugs don't make you wild, interesting or intelligent, they will not grant you a personality, and if you endlessly go on about them you bore the arse off everyone around you.
We are not the children of the hippies, they sold out or fucked up, babbling their new age psycho shite, to an increasingly neurotic and middle classed audience. The only psychedelic movement that counts would be one that had gone beyond drug use, after all drugs are merely a form of sensual and social knowledge, it's what you do with that knowledge that makes the difference, just needing to do it again and again so that you feel like life's exhilarating and astounding rather than drowning in its own torpor will never be enough. What have any of you really and honestly learnt from psychedelics in terms of knowledge that still exists when you're sober. Drug movements fail because they fall apart when the drugs wear off. The reason drugs feel so good is that they allow us to experience often half articulated desires and more controversially they allow us to feel many of the ideas that are bandied around in western culture but which lie outside of our grasp in terms of being able to seize them. We are told that western culture prides itself on its democracy, its individualism, its creativity but in reality it will make every effort to erase them from your flesh. If you want to start the revolution put the drugs down for a moment and simply demand the right to walk naked in the streets, to paint yourself green, to create your own symbols rather than having to purchase them, to create your own communities, to be allowed to live. Refuse to bow down to their dreams and be judged by them. Disembowel the traitorous conformity of your own bodies and emotions, that trap you within endless cycles of thought and action. The politicians have us by the balls, we can not change them, but we can change ourselves and the very fabric of our social world.
