Worlds of Pharmakopeia VII: Chocolate Delights, Slavery & Gluttony

In the strange, occult worlds of pharmacopeia, few drugs have escaped the repressive clutches of European sadists and madmen.

The reasons for non-prohibition often refer to a particular exotic drug’s negligible effects on the mind. If the drug causes havoc with the sinful body, and yet does not induce much of a mental change, then the elixir transforms into a good and marketable digestible. Such is the modern story of Chocolate, or as the Mexica-Aztecs referred to it, in their language of Nahuatl, Xocolatl.

The 1430s AD was a consequential decade for human civilization. In China, the Han Chinese, Ming Dynasty established a naval fleet in order to extend the economic influence of the Empire. Yet during the same period, agricultural disasters, famine and pestilence hit the Chinese rural valleys, and so the naval empire had to end. In Indochina, the Empire Ayutthaya, (modern Thailand or Siam), conquered the great empire of the Khmer at Angkor Wat (modern Cambodia).

In Europe, the religious wars and Crusades of the Catholic Papacy and Orthodox Christianity continued. First, they fought against the Muslim Turks, who surrounded the Second Rome, Constantinople, on both flanks, Asia Minor and Greece. The Teutonic knights maintained their violent forays into the northeast, against both Poland and Lithuania. The Catholic Holy Roman Emperor eventually defeated the Protestant Hussites, (influenced through Jan Hus), in the Czech lands.

In the southwest, the Spanish knights advanced their attacks against the Moors, or Muslims, in the region of Nasrid Granada. The Church continued its noxious insistence on the conversion of Europe’s Jews, whether through persuasion, legal harassment, or even the sword.

The French Royal forces began to push out the English Plantagenet royal armies from French territory, and a German, by the name of Johannes Gutenberg, developed the first printing press.

Italian artists finally moved away from the medieval, Byzantine-influenced figure painting of long faces and wide eyes, to more realistic portraits, using the ocular mirror-reflection method. The Venetian Empire possessed the most powerful naval army, and the most heinous slave trading, mass murder, sugar plantation system in the Mediterranean.

With the Pope’s mandate for the Christianization and enslavement of the pagans, the Portuguese Empire traded for gold in west Africa, and especially with the Mali Empire in Timbuktu. Due to this trade, this same Empire would later claim slave prisons and colonies on the western coast of sub-Saharan Africa, in a region referred to as Guinea. The Portuguese colonial navy initiated European Civilization’s most heinous mass murder scheme in human history: the Atlantic African Slave Trade. Europe’s invaders had yet to conquer the Western Hemisphere.

This decade also featured the political-military consolidation of the Mexica-Aztec Empire. The emperor, or Tlatloani, had the name of Izcoatl. Izcoatl was a great warrior and political leader who merged the military Triple Alliance of the three most powerful cities: Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, in central Mexico.

He also oversaw the construction of the great buildings inside the grand city of Tenochtitlan. The two pyramid apexes represented: the God of Agriculture and Water, Tlaloc, and the greater structure, the God of the Mexica: war, blood and fire, Huitzilopochtli.

His successors would continue conquer lands for imperial tribute – until the unfortunate death of Moctezuma II, during the Spanish invasion of the 1520s. One of the coveted lands for tribute, or for taxes, were the southern Mayan farms of cacao beans. When grounded, those cacao beans transformed into a dark and powerful, yet delicious, bitter drink, called Xocolatl.

Towards the end of his glorious reign, Izcoatl ordered the priests to consecrate the temples for the grand sacrifices and coming religious festivals. The emperor and the noblemen drank Xocolatl in the courts of the palace. They sipped Xocolatl cold with ice, inside of large, dark red ceramic bowls. The cooks mixed in cornmeal to make the froth thicker. The royal preparers also added honey to soften the bitter taste, and then the local spices of red chilies, annatto red color, and canella cinnamon, all of which gave the icy Xocolatl the appearance of human blood.

The Aztec priests had their long black hair drenched in red blood dye. The Jaguar skinned and Eagle feathered knights were in attendance, and they were all in the presence of the feathered serpent-god, Izcoatl-Quetzalcoatl emperor.

All of them gulped the blood-colored, darkened froth, which transformed the participants into a mental state of rapture. They sat around a large and low stone table, and continued to taste the bowls of delight, meanwhile royal musicians played military drums and flutes, and the priests burned pungent copal incense. All of the six human senses flourished under this military reign.

Emperor Xocolatl’s body was the blood and oil to the mental states of war bounty, the delight of death, and sacrificial festivities.

Through these intense royal Mexica rituals, Moctezuma I, the successor of Izcoatl, initiated the Flower Wars. Aztec knights engaged in noble combat-contests with their enemies, such as the Tlaxcaltecans, in order to increase their military courage and fighting abilities. The great market of Tenochtitlan even used cacao beans as currency. Xocolatl had finally united, both in body and spirit, or tonalli, with the drink of the Gods.

Xocolatl, or its Latin name, Theobroma Cacao, like other Western Hemisphere wonders, such as tomatoes, corn maize, squashes-zucchinis-pumpkins, potatoes, red-green chili peppers-paprika, coca, tobacco, avocados, annatto, amaranth, peanuts-cashews-pecans-sunflower seeds, papaya-guava-pineapple, wild berries, common bean legumes, and vanilla, would permanently transform European cuisine – and even world gastronomy.

These Western Hemisphere native, garden delights now find themselves at every world table: the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania. European colonialism has transformed Chocolate Cacao once again, and it has cut off its sacred origins from Mesoamerica.

The first methods represented the African killing centers or the Americas, or within its infamous slave plantations. Chocolate plantings coincided with tobacco, sugar and coffee crops, all of which functioned as export commodities on the Atlantic slave trade.

European investors would later add industrial concoctions into the chocolate mix, which gave the drug – from the once extinct Mesoamerican gods – a new identity. European food capitalists introduced the dark-thick cacao to ravenous sugar, silky cow’s milk, and the sweet tooth decadence of fruits and nuts.

Chocolate is not just a drink anymore; instead, consumers can purchase the drug in cakes, cookies, candies, bars, creamy spreads, chips, white and cream colors, powders while cooks have added it to fine dishes, such as the Mexican recipe of mole.

Chocolate has entered the fine drug Valhalla of vintage wines, sweet liqueurs, pungent tobacco cigars and expensive bottled spirits. This drug is also ubiquitous inside many processed GMO, sugary snacks, which destroy the fragile human body. For those gourmets of gluttony, the physical price leads to obesity and diabetes.

During the decade of the 1580s, in the Hispano-American lands, Spanish ecclesiastics and other elites began to partake in the leisurely enjoyment of the drink. In the seventeenth-century, the 1600s, Mercantile Capitalism exploded chocolate into the refined tastes and idle pleasures of European aristo parasites, representing the first two social estates, or classes, the nobles and the clergy.

Coffeehouses in London started to serve the hot chocolate brews, and in Paris, the first artisan workshops of chocolate emerged, calling themselves, chocolatiers. Those chocolate artisans sold a most expensive delight, called bons bons.

On the American continent, every single Euro-American colonial power: the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English ensured that their sugar, salt, coffee and tobacco slave plantations, had to leave a few grounds for the cultivation of chocolate beans. The European colonial monsters gave the African slaves more work to perform before their short, brutal lives, and even more cruel deaths.

Like Sugar and Coffee export commodities, Chocolate production also violated the horrible existences of kidnapped African chattel. The European aristo rage for hot chocolate, or hot cocoa, and exquisite chocolate candies, called pastilles, would not subside.

In the eighteenth-century, the 1700s, Europeans became so enamored with chocolate that inventors developed mechanisms in quickening the pulverization of beans into cocoa powder. The French and the English became quite adept at this grinding process. Thanks to the such technology, the European working classes began to partake in the ‘drink of the Gods.’

It was during the 1800s, in Europe and the Americas, and especially in Switzerland, where chocolate factories invented industrial schemes that transformed chocolate to the consumer product of today.

First, they used machines to remove the chocolate butter from both the beans and powder during the grinding down process. Second, the factories added sugars, fatty nuts, and whole white milk into the mix, all of which created a finer, creamier and more delicious chocolate, free from its bitter origins. Third, they created assembly lines that formed the butter, powder, sugar, nuts and milk into bite sized candies, called pralines.

Some of the more notable names of the European-American Chocolate capitalists included: Stollwerck, Berwaerts, Cadbury, Ghiradelli, Lindt, Tobler, Hershey and Nestle. All social classes enjoyed the chewing, eating and drinking of chocolate.

Nowadays, most of the worlds’ chocolate bean production occurs in west Africa. Apparently, the chocolate capitalists still treat and pay their workers like slaves.

Chocolate still lives among our innumerable products on the supermarket shelves, yet massive food corporations combine it with high amounts of sugar, and then mix it all with horrid GMOs, or genetically modified products. All of those carcinogens destroy the delicate human body. Chocolate is still delicious, yet it eventually leads to gluttony, fast weight gain, and if abused, obesity.

Chocolate was once the food of the gods – found in the secret halls of Mayan and Aztec royalty. Later in history, European colonials invaded the Americas, destroyed their grand cultures, and stole their wondrous products.

European mercantile capitalism then murdered millions of Africans in order to process American plants, inclusive of the other European addictions, such as sugar cane, coffee beans and tobacco leaves. Ultimately, European technology transformed Chocolate through the processes of industrial capitalism, so that it is extremely rich and tasty. This process will also destroy the tenuous human body.

In fin, the Chocolate drug, with its sordid history, exposes Modern European Civilization’s profound culture of avarice, luxury and gluttony.

 

 

Worlds of Pharmakopeia VI: Coffee and the Café, Stolen from Africa

Modern European civilization has cursed all of humanity. This curse now also includes all of the multiple autochthonous nations suffering inside of the European continent.

We all live as mental slaves to the petty hatreds, ego manias, sufferings and ignorance that first raped that same continent some two thousand years ago. Even worse is that we cannot turn back the historical clock: Earth’s humanity is moving on a clear and vile path to violent suicide.

Dinosaurs had their millions of years of glory, and soon the darkened farewell of time will arrive for us too. The putrid excrement and historical brutality surrounding the plant-drug of Coffea Arabica, or Coffee, proves such statements.

In Sao Paolo, Brazil, the regular people told tales about the murders that took place in late 1700s. Even with the expulsion of the Jesuits, their protected Guarani native nation, the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais, and the complete extermination of the coastal Tupamori native nation, the slave-plantation system in Portuguese colonial Brazil had recently transformed into a massive African Death Camp.

In northern Brazil, Bahia and Marañao, there weren’t any more Tupamori and Guarani native slaves to kidnap and work to death. Only pretos, or black victims, died en masse on the plantations, called Fazendas, deep in the red-hot blood pools of African flesh, mixed with dirty sea salt.

Some of the slave owners-traders-mass murderers dumped their weakened, useless slaves into the South Atlantic for shark feed. Other masters simply sardine packaged their slaves, in order to send them to the more sadistic fazendas in the south of the colony where the slave traffickers lived, called Paulistas. Sao Paolo is a now a Latin American megalopolis, but at one time, with Cartagena, Colombia, it was one of the slave trafficking centers of colonial Latin America.

Most of the slave fazendas produced sugar and manioc. But a new crop entered the evil world of African slavery in the Americas: coffee, or cafe. This plantation slave work was almost as brutal as sugar cane cutting and processing. The torturous labor required heavy hand work and bending of the body of the African in order to grab enough of the ripened red beans. The small factories later dried, heated and ground the beans down to a darkened hue resembling excrement and the African skin color. These small factories abused their African slave labor horribly. In southern colonial Brazil, the average lifespan working on a coffee slave plantation was around seven years.

There was one Portuguese white, or branco slave owner, arrayed in the pony tail, vest coat with tails, and knee breeches of late Eighteenth-century look, who used a peculiar method in maintaining control over his slaves. Some slaves escaped from the death-work infernos and became quilombos, or escaped slaves. This slave owner wanted complete labor control over his kidnapped African victims and the avoidance of any and all escapes.

He would usually purchase a sickly group of famished Africans recently off the slave ships. He then forced his slaves into a horizontal line on his plantation. None of them understood Portuguese, so he picked out the weakest of the bunch, often a young adult, skinny, almost dying African, and the owner then beat the kidnapped African to death, with the weapons of his choice, in front of the entire group. The shock of the murder would get the job done. This human monster never did any prison time for his mass murders. Most of this slave-owning class-criminals lived as respected white men within the black coffee-sugar white infernos of colonial Brazil.

Coffee production helped stabilize and augment the African slave plantation system in the Americas. Colonial Brazil was not the only place where such killing centers existed. During the late 1700s, the French also increased their African slave operations in Saint Domingue, (Haiti), Martinique and Guadeloupe, through the black gold of coffee. Sugar was the main export crop, but Coffee followed right behind it.

The British began coffee production in its colony of Ceylon, but soon switched to tea leaves. The Dutch also began coffee production on its colonial Malay islands of Java and Sumatra, (Indonesia). Unto this very day, Coffea Arabica maintains its associations with the most brutal conditions of capitalism: slavery, child labor, putting workers in debt to their owners, and murdering the poor through overwork. The irony regarding the massive kidnapping rings, ruthless slavery, and cruel murder system within colonial coffee, was that the coffee bean became another hostage from Africa.

Euro-Colonial thieves, kidnappers, mass murderers, and slave masters, with other elite arch criminals, have transformed the Coffee bean into the worldwide soft drug commodity of today.

The African elixir of coffee is the ultimate soft drug-stimulant with its high possession of caffeine. It doesn’t have any of the depressant effects of alcohol, nor does it contain the quick ego spikes of coca leaf. Because of its stimulant magic, coffee is now the prerequisite for billions of humans during their dreaded morning rituals, pathetic work schemes, and after meal snacks.

It has become the shared social sacrament for modern life’s rituals: friendly conversations, dating games, and hobby group meet ups. Coffee has even transcended into the drug pre-requisite for modern life, and the synthetic struggle against drowsiness in our modern times. The sleep of modern humanity has never been the same.

Coffee had its first cultivation in the highlands of Ethiopia, in the region of Kaffa. Legend has it that an Ethiopian farmer named Kaldi was the first human to successfully grow it. After the Islamic world culture took possession of most of Arabia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, North Africa and Iberia, Islamic merchants discovered the wondrous concoctions of this bean. They crushed the beans into a fine powder, and through boiling the grounds with water, created a liquid paradise.

The Koran, the Muslim holy scriptures, condemned the abuse of alcohol intoxicants, while this drug did not make people stupid, aggressive, nor act foolish. In fact, Coffee transformed its users into a more alert, intelligent and chatty group. Islam had found the sacred wine of spiritual elixir. Its center of trade was in Mocha, Yemen, where a great urban civilization existed, featuring the world’s first tall buildings and where almost every conceivable spice from Asia to Africa had its display vats in the merchants’ stalls.

Sufi mystics began to use coffee wine both during their orations of the sacred Koran and their worship ceremonies of dance, song, psalms and prayers. Coffee even joined with the magical herb of Hashish residues to become the drugs of choice across Islamic civilization, from the far east representing the Great Muslim Emirates of India to the far west, Al-Andalus in Modern Spain. Like farmers’ milk and beehive honey, Coffea Arabica mixed in good company with the toke of Cannabis Sativa.

When the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, they became the Third Rome in competition with the Russian Czarist Empire and the Papal States in Italy. Under this great Turkish Islamic Civilization, the first ‘cafes’ opened. The cafe became an integral social space in a Muslim man’s life. After midday prayers at the mosque, Muslim men could gather at the cafe and enjoy fine, elevating conversation over some delicious Turkish coffee.

As Christendom, representing the Europeans, began to fight wars against Muslim Turkish Empire, called the Sultanate of the Sublime Port, they also discovered the wonders of the Coffee Drug. First, the Venetian Sea-Slave Empire, or La Serenissima, began to trade in the roasted black beans. Coffee became synonymous with wealth and upper class parasites, while having a ‘bitter, but good taste.’ The rest of Europe had to grab a piece of the blackened pie.

Europeans, always experts in the art of stealing and appropriating non-European cultures, and then proclaiming themselves the originators, tried to monopolize the cultivation and trade of coffee. We return to the evil system of African slavery in Brazil.

During the middle of the seventeenth-century, the 1600s, the first coffeehouses and cafes opened across Europe. Gentlemen across Europe visited the cafes, imbibed the brews, and discussed art, street philosophy – and politics. Women and royal authorities also became nervous about these contentious male spaces.

In Paris, the main cafe was right next to the Comédie Français. Did the royal emperor of France, Louis XIV, want French gentilehommes discussing politics and religion after seeing a work of Molière? The royal authorities in London closed down many of the coffeehouses, due to ‘issues of State.’

By the eighteenth-century, the 1700s, the British slavers and colonial murderers began to cultivate the beans on their sadistic slave plantations in Jamaica, as both the French did in Haiti and the Portuguese had earlier done in Brazil. The Spanish followed with their own coffee plantations stretching from the expropriated Mayan lands of Guatemala and Honduras, to the fields around Veracruz, Mexico and Cartagena, Colombia. They later planted coffee around the massive Sugar-African slave estates of Cuba. The Dutch joined the Coffee, Sugar, Slave triumvirate, which created extensive plantations in their American-Caribbean colonies of Bresil-Aruba-Curaçao-Suriname.

With Industrial Capitalism in full motion around Europe and North America, during the middle of the nineteenth-century, the 1800s, Coffee took the lead as the beverage of choice for factory laborers. Coffee also goes well with another herb drug, Nicotiana Tabacum, or Tobacco. The modern work ritual-habit had birthed. Better to have coffee-tobacco addicts than drunks.

By this historical epoch, the European corporate entities had overtaken the Arabs, Africans, Asians and Muslims as the premier sellers of the international brew. Coffee was a lot cheaper to consume. The owners loved it too: more work with cheaper wages and labor costs.

And so it continues to this very day, with special thanks to the coffee corporate chain of Starbucks, the price of Coffee has increased across the globe. Still, coffee consumption remains cheaper than spending money in local alcoholic dens with rude bartenders, (most of whom really aren’t trained bartenders anyway), and crazed, degraded customers who can’t handle their drinking. Coffee doesn’t turn you into a pathetic fool, although it does encourage excessive bowel movements, and it can make one ‘a little edgy.’

Unlike the European varieties, local cafes in the States, meaning coffee-house cafes, now often attract a motley clientage. The list includes bored-rebellious teenagers, pathetic hipsters, lonely, older male spinsters, unsuccessful folk guitarists, social cross sections of unemployable men, ex-drunks and junkies on their 12 step breaks, pseudo-Anarchist ranters, and other, assorted bizarre characters. As an unemployed PhD weirdo in the humanities, I unfortunately include myself in this group.

The article of this essay drinks at least three to four cups of coffee per day. I know some Anarchists that drink even more cups of coffee as a daily custom.

Coffee is a soft, wonder drug. It is the perfect stimulant for both the draining life of the wage slave and for encouraging the dying art of conversation. Coffee tastes great after a delicious home-made meal, while it often encourages a quick run to the toilet – and if one feels a need for an emergency work break.

European civilization has destroyed another sacred plant and bean, all in its desire to control the commodity under global monopoly capitalism. European colonials had first stolen and murdered millions of humans, animals and plants across the Western Hemisphere, or the Americas, as they named it.

They soon expropriated Tobacco, Chocolate and Coca Leaf. They have done the same across Asia, appropriating Tea, Sugar and Cannabis, and now comes Africa, the plundering of Coffee, Ivory, Gold, Diamonds, Scarce Metals, and most ominously – millions of kidnapped and murdered Africans, bought, sold, worked, murdered en masse.

European colonialism has thus murdered the African in order to process their own native African plant, while millions of native Africans have died horrendously across the foreign soils of the Americas. This peculiar genocide has yet to receive its Holocaust Museum.

Only the sickman of human civilization could have invented such nefarious history.

Worlds of Pharmakopeia V: Euro-Colonial Murder of the Coca Leaf

For most of human civilization, the earth’s natural bounty of plants, shrubs and trees have helped lift the spirits of the sad, hungry and sick. But in our modern world, infected with the double epidemics of European Judeo-Christianity and Savage Capitalism, there have been other plants who have attached themselves to some bizarre love-hate representations. Those plants have always maintained their beauty and potency; rather, the sickness resides inside of the Euro-Colonial mindset, which has manipulated and twisted the plant images.

Some unfortunate plants from the exotic Asia-Orient have received some strident Euro-controls throughout recent history, such as Cannabis Sativa, (THC-Hemp), Papaver Somniferum, (Opiates), Camellia Sinensis, (Tea), and Saccharum Officinarum, (Sugar Cane).

In the Americas, originally populated with savage ‘Indians,’ and later exterminated en masse through European Savage Colonialism, Euro-criminals have strenuously manipulated two particular plant varieties: Nicotiana Tabacum, (Nicotine), and Erythroxylum Coca, (Coca leaves-Cocaine).

What decade was it? On the Inca Tawantinsuyu Four Regions Cosmology or the Spanish Gregorian Christian Calendar? For us historians it was the decade of the 1630s – a cold and nasty one – and especially for the mitas. This mita group were all young men from the scattered regions of the Andes. These were peasant stock, farmer people, but they lost the war against the Spanish European invaders, back around the 1570s, so they had to supply a tributo, or tribute-tax. to the Spanish colonial state – and they had to give away their lives too.

There they stood on that cold and wet day in the early morning of summer; tired, forlorn and silent on a brownish-green patched, rocky ledge that overlooked the pit of evil, a city called Potosi, very high up in the clouds of the mountains. The gods looked down on the pathetic worker slaves that willingly ventured into the mountainous pit. Spanish royal fortunes totally relied on this one mine pit – filled with the silver lode.

The Kings of Spain needed the silver mint for their reales, or silver coinage, in order to finance the Habsburg wars across seventeenth-century Europe. The worker slaves knew that most of them would die inside of the mine monster.

Over the years, fewer native slave laborers showed up for the mita, and so the Spanish imported, kidnapped ‘royal slaves’ from Africa to do the nasty work. All of the miners, slave and non-slave, could grab a little silver for themselves, called a partida, but who could survive inside the belly of the tortured mountain? The mountain had to vomit frequently, and it often spewed the human meat of mitayo, or mita worker, African slave and the contracted miners of all ethnicities that risked it all for some pieces of silver.

The Spanish colonial authorities began to worry about fifty years previously. How do we get the native mitayos to work for their own bad deaths inside of the belly of the Potosi Monster? Catholicism couldn’t do it – but a local variety of plant might do the job.

The Catholic priests hated this plant, but a measly 30 pieces of silver would always trump Faith under the human condition. The Spanish noticed that the native Andean farmers functioned on the code of reciprocity. When a visitor entered a rural home, he or she often brought the infamous coca leaves as gifts. The Spanish often did the same when invited into another person’s house – except the Spanish brought wine.

This coca leaf was truly a gift from the Gods. Natives also used the coca leaves during the religious festivals of the Incan Empire. What was it about this coca leaf that the local natives prized so much?

Coca Leaf when chewed or used as a tea infusion immediately imparted a swift zest of energy. The plant relieved hunger, and helped fight against minor physical and mental pains. Locals felt better after chewing on the leaves and it even aided in sexual relations when working as an aphrodisiac.

Coca also alleviated altitude sickness, depression, loose bowels, nausea, and improved one’s circulation. Native farmers often felt the second wind of work coming on after enjoying the coca tea.

The Spanish colonial authorities had realized that coca worked better than the imported sugar cane plant from Asia, and it functioned even better than the American mate plant found in Paraguay, also taken as a tea. Coca had transformed into the ultimate stimulant drug.

The King of Spain encouraged the growth of the coca plant. Coca plantations produced high volumes of those small green leaves. In order to entice the mitas to kill themselves for the Spanish King, the Spanish guards freely gave copious amounts of coca leaves to the worker slaves who entered the dark, cold, humid mines of Potosi. Even at the point of death through exhaustion, the mitayos kept chewing on the coca. The Spanish even discovered that with the higher altitude of cultivation, the more concentration of coca in the leaf. The Spanish had found a winner. And still to this day, the greatest number of European Cocaine users have been the Spanish.

The added chemicals of sulfuric acid and hydrochloride solution created the addictive solution, called Cocaine. The Coca plant has become the most powerful stimulant drug in the modern world, while no other global-cultivated plant even comes close to it, such as Sugar Cane, Chocolate beans, Nicotine leaves, Tea leaves or Coffee beans.

This plant has given new life to the hurting, confused and tired, and yet European colonialism transferred the coca plant into the cocaine concoction, all in order to transform themselves into Nietzschean super humans. At least their minds told them so.

High powered financial advisers, corporate attorneys, expensive doctors, intelligence operatives, rock musicians-music producers, Hollywood Industry-Media types and other ego maniacs have embraced this drug, while the poorer elements, or capitalist society’s losers, smoke the cheaper, real diluted stuff, called Crack, and who often end up homeless, pathetic, or slowly die in a prison cell.

This Euro-colonial monstrosity took off in the late nineteenth-century. From the 1850s to the 1900s, European colonial powers transferred the cultivation of this American plant across the globe, and especially in Africa and Asia. The Dutch colonials established massive plantations of coca leaf and coffee beans on the island of Java. The British established imperial plantations of coca and tea leaves on the island of Ceylon. German Pharmaceutical Companies, such as Merck, established the first marketing of Cocaine.. Even the Japanese colonial empire entered the coca game with coca plantations on the island of Formosa-Taiwan.

An Austrian chemist by the name of Neumann first used the term of Kokain with his mixtures of hydrochloric acid. In the 1870s, a Corsican businessman marketed the first Cocaine drink, a wine called Vin Mariani. Sigmund Freud, the great psychobabble intellectual, also lauded the drug as a great help for ‘psychologically damaged’ patients.

In the 1880s, the American Coca Cola Company, marketed a non-alcoholic beverage that mixed Cocaine, caffeine and sugar syrup, and today, fructose corn syrup. If a regular American citizen tries to re-enter the US with coca leaves, he or she will probably spend the rest of their lives in prison. But this is not true with the corporate conglomerate of Coca Cola, which still maintains its corporate privileges in importing coca leaves into the United States. The US pharmaceutical Parke-Davis also has corporate rights in using coca leaves.

Around 1900, the Eugenics movement grew exponentially, and so did the Anti-Drug US empire. The concern of course centered around lower class fiend use, especially Black Jazz musicians and Latino degenerates coming up from Latin America. The Amerikan Empire introduced the Harrison Act of 1915 that prohibited Opium-Heroin and Cocaine use. Due to this prohibition in the 1920s, a US pharmaceutical company introduced the synthetic substitute of Cocaine, called Novocaine.

After WW II, the Amerikan Empire moved into a greater offensive against the Coca Leaf, including the Nicotine Leaf, the Cannabis Leaf and the Poppy plant. The Empire even forced the United Nations to move against Coca in 1960s.

Yet the same Amerikan Empire forged a strange alliance during the 1980s. The US government wanted to desperately overthrow the Sandinista Leftist government in Nicaragua. The CIA set up the Contra terrorist network that murdered supposed Sandinista supporters in the countryside, but even this tactic did not work so well.

Congress cut off the funding, so the Reagan administration used the Iran-Contra network, to sell arms to a supposed enemy, Iran, in order to fund the Contra terrorists. Meanwhile, the US favored the other side of the Iran-Iraq War, representing Saddam Hussein. But there was another part of the evil plan. the Contra leaders also wanted some profits, so they began to deal in drugs, like the US supported Kuomintang terrorists during the 1950s, and the US supported, northern tribal terrorists in Indochina during the 1970s.

The Contra-narco drug lords produced a cheap substitute in place of the expensive Cocaine, called Crack. The user could smoke the stuff easily and the high was shorter than the Coke high, so the user had to use more of the stuff in order to feel the same ego high of ‘blow,’ or snorting Cocaine powder. By the late 1980s, the Crack explosion hit the streets. Young gangsta tough guys now tried to sell the magic smoke.

Those working class dealers failed to understand the depravity of the US government or the Amerikan Empire. Also at the end of the 1980s, Gorbachev dismantled the Soviet Union power base. The Berlin Wall came down. The Cold War was officially over.

One of the players in the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra scandal, the vice-president, Bush I, was running for president. The Amerikan Empire needed another enemy to exterminate after the Cold War. The generals and spies in the US Military-Spy-Industrial Complex were getting nervous. The vice president candidate thereby used the Drug War for the next round of destruction.

The domestic prison population grew exponentially, and especially among African-Americans and Latinos. Even tiny amounts of Crack could give some victim a ten-year mandatory minimum sentence in prison! This same sociopath would soon turn on their man in Iraq, Saddam, and start even another genocidal war in order to end, ‘the Vietnam Syndrome.’ His son, Bush II, would really finish the job in that region of the world.

The next president continued the repression of the Drug War against American citizens, and with even greater sanctions against Welfare recipients. African-American neighborhoods got hit brutally with this new US government financed war. With hardcore gentrification increasing in the 1990s, old Black neighborhoods began to rot from the inside out, and the American system shoved the displaced African-Americans between the Supermax prisons and the poorer suburbs. The luckier ones joined the US military.

This same president then instituted Plan Colombia, which used the same paramilitary tactics during the previous Contra War, but this time against the Leftists guerrillas in Colombia. The Amerikan Empire murdered over 30,000 Nicaraguans during its Contra War of the 1980s, but lately, the Amerikan Empire has murdered over 250,000 Colombians using the Colombian state and its paramilitary henchmen.

Another part of Plan Colombia forces the Colombian government to spray chemicals against coca plant fields inside the country. Strangely, cocaine production is still a very profitable business. The real agricultural murder has actually targeted native, Afro-Colombian and other Colombian farmers. Colombia now has the largest internal refugee population in the Americas. The Colombian-narco oligarchy wants their lands – for greater coca production – with the continued help of the sociopaths that run the Amerikan Empire.

Here we have the strange legacy of the coca leaf. At one time, it was the sacred herb for chewing, tea ceremonies, religious rites and community relations in the Andean world. Thanks to European colonialism and mass murder however, the sacred herb became the egotist drug of choice for the European invaders and manipulators.

The US government now uses the coca leaf as a decoy for its murderous foreign policy objectives. Meanwhile, millions of young people of color putrefy inside the Amerikan Imperial Prison-Gulag. They have lost their lives and their dignity due to dabbling with the powdered leaf. And finally, a protective class of coca users, mostly music and media artists, while sharing white skin privilege with money to burn, still enjoy the fine sniffs of concocting, cocaine-infused ego magic.

Only Euro-Colonial, Imperial Evil could do so much damage to a nifty little plant found in the Andean mountains.

 

Worlds of Pharmakopeia IV: Tobacco, Euro-Colonialism Murders another Native Plant

 

Only in our evil, modern world do native flora varieties arouse such enduring hatreds.

There still exist the sick hatreds against cannabis sativa, psilocybe semilanceata, erythroxylum coca, and there is one plant that receives the coveted prize in pure hate, nicotiana tabacum.

What is so strange about this hatred is that this same plant was integrally important for European colonialism and industrial capitalism in world history. European and Euro-American civilizations could not have progressed as they did without the native american gift of tobacco plantations, working slave labor to death, and then, the tobacco processing, factory work, building even larger ships, international marketing and sophisticated advertising.

How did such an enjoyable American plant associated with native community peace, and smoked through pastes, leaves, hand-made pipes and even chewed, transform into such a European commodity fetish under global capitalism?

Nicotiana tabacum was once a naturally growing, medicinal and spiritual plant for America’s native nations. European colonial invaders, investors, and murderers transformed the plant into an export drug of commodity for elite consumption under the inexhaustible profit-making schemes of capitalism.

Columbus and his invading men did not just murder, imprison and sell native slaves on the island of Cuba during the 1490s. They also spotted some, ‘naked’ Carib natives smoking a herb placed in some leaves. The scent was quite intoxicating and the natives seemed to enjoy the community based smoke. They did not inhale, yet the effect of the plant was calming after they had eaten some fresh, delicious food, and the herb even had a sensual effect on the smokers. The European imperial-colonial invaders found another gift.

They stole the native plants from the Caribbean islands and transported them to Europe. The Europeans took a peculiar liking to them. In the 1500s, the Portuguese colonial invaders in the Americas, called Bresil, began to cultivate the native crop. It seemed to grow well in sub-tropical and tropical climates. When introduced into European aristocratic, social-parasite gardens inside of the great landed estates, tobacco plants sprouted quite well. Tobacco could also grow in mild, temperate, oceanic climates. The European elites were on to something.

During the seventeenth-century, some monarchs, political thugs and tyrants began to hate the plant. King James Stuart of England, Sultan Ammurath IV of Ottoman Turkey, and Czar Mikhail Romanov of Russia, represented some of the anti-tobacco elite crowd, while Pope Urban VIII actually had a papal bull written against the plant in the 1640s.

Yet the European colonial empires of Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal had succumbed to the gods of capital. Each empire set up their own royal monopolies for the plant. The annoying question was where to grab the labor in order to work long hours in the hot sun: picking, drying, curing and transporting the leaves. The Europeans had made themselves the self-proclaimed owners of nicotine tabacum, so at first, they used local penal labor to work them to death in order to enrich the tobacco lords or planters. Where could one find a continual supply of slave labor?

An even greater economic windfall emerged through such an American cultivation – the theft of human chattel, or the kidnapping, murder, transporting and working to death of African slaves.

The Portuguese had first established their monopoly of the Blackened Brown Gold during the late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century, (about 1560-1660). Due to the importance of such American export plantation crops, such as tobacco, the English, Dutch, (the Netherlands), and the French established their own ‘African’ slave monopolies. A plant associated with community peace and enjoyment, took on the ominous tones of legal crime, kidnapping, imprisonment, mass murder, genocide and working people to death. Tobacco actually helped birth mercantile capitalism.

Mercantile Capitalism implied royal European controls of an export commodity, such as tobacco, sugar, coffee, tea, chocolate, salt and kidnapped African slaves, while it established permanent credit to slave plantation owners in order for them to purchase a continual supply of Africans and other penal slaves, (the European looking, or white ones). The American plantation-slave owners and European tobacco traders-ship investors made their profits through inflated price sales in the home or European metropolitan markets.

Meanwhile, European navies and missionaries tried to open greater markets for the American products in the Asian continents. Slowly, nicotine snuff and tobacco smoking had spread into the Islamic world culture, then Persia-Iran, the Indian sub-continent, Central Asia and ultimately into the Far East, China and even Japan.

In the eighteenth-century, the European tobacco manufacturers developed the smaller ‘cigarette’ varieties, and for those that preferred to chew, snuff boxes. All of this cigarette finery was for elite European consumption.

Elaborate, silver inlaid snuff boxes entered the world of fashion conscious, French aristocratic-parasite bums. In Britain, gentlemen established new cultural activities, fashions and spaces besides fencing, hunting, dances, card games, tea and reading – the smoking parlor with the smoking jacket.

A good tobacco smoke was always perfect after a good meal, with some intoxicating liquor or with some fine coffee. European grifters-Latin lovers, such as the Venetian, Giacomo Casanova, also took up the habit, and so tobacco grabbed some important cultural associations within European culture: sensuality, refinement, power and a coolness under pressure.

Most importantly, King Tobacco had changed the colonial-metropolitan relationships. The Scottish Tobacco Lords transformed the city of Glasgow into the premier tobacco import-export port. These same ‘lords’ would build their mini castles along Jamaica and Virginia Streets.

Those same streets had the infamous names of the most infernal, African slave killing centers in world history.

Virginia, once a colonial outpost of disease and hardship, had become the British Empire’s premier, tobacco plantation colony on the Tidewater during the 1700s. Is it any wonder that most of America’s revolutionary founders came from this proud plantation region made rich through the marvelous drug of tobacco?

During the same eighteenth-century, the Spanish colonial authorities had established the first urban factory for cigar-cigarette paper rolling and export packaging in Mexico City. Earlier, the Spanish had established the city of Seville as the premier processing center for cigars. For over a century in colonial Spanish America, and well before Metropolitan Europe, both men and women had been openly smoking tobacco cigarettes on the public streets. American fashion and prominence had come to Europe – mainly through the marvelous and medicinal herb of nicotiana tabacum.

Throughout the nineteenth-century, the 1800s, tobacco manufacturers had developed better technology in curing and rolling for three particular products: cigars, cigarettes, (blond and black versions), and chewable snuff.

The first tobacco companies consolidated themselves, while they competed with each other for the monopoly share of the smokers and chewers’ markets. This modern tobacco industry also encouraged the adulteration of tobacco through chemical engineering in order to hold their monopolies. Tobacco products even had molasses, rum, opium or honey mixed into the final product.

Tobacco eventually became part of modern, European and Euro-American cultural life. Royalty, lazy aristos, middle class-respectable clerks, and working class dock workers took up the smoking habit. The problem was that many of the men inhaled the nicotine fumes. Certain political-economic elites, Women Christian Temperance clubs and health workers noticed the persistent coughs of regular smokers. The modern anti-smoking movement had begun.

Meanwhile, tobacco shops and kiosks became one of the standard sights found on most city streets around the world, and where they also featured other items for sale, such as newspapers, books, shaving kits, pipes, rolling papers, pen knives, board games and playing cards.

In the twentieth-century, the 1900s, the tobacco industry transformed the world of advertising and mass marketing. A few tobacco monopolies had controlled the sale of ‘cigarette packs” and they made fortunes on the drug.

Smoking found associations with soldiers during World War I and for most wars afterwards. In the 1920s, cigarette companies targeted their advertising to the ‘new woman,’ thanks to the propaganda genius of the Austrian-American, Edward Bernays. Hollywood’s golden age featured most of their stars regularly smoking the sacred plant. Can anyone forget the famous pictures of Humphrey Bogart and James Dean without cigarettes dangling from their mouths?

While tobacco use seemed to sell exponentially – and especially in Asia, the anti-smoking forces mercilessly attacked the drug. Medical experts exposed the correlations between nicotine use and cancer, emphysema and other incurable maladies.

An anti-smoking coalition emerged. This motley prohibitionist group included family survivors of smokers who had died bad deaths, medical professionals, public education school administrators, and Christian religious groups,. Political-economic elites also joined their ranks, since they wanted better workers not taking so many smoking breaks, inclusive of less corporate health care costs.

Tobacco prohibitionists began to push for greater anti-smoking legislation. By the 1980s, they had succeeded in seizing the State.

In some urban cities in the United States, smoking is highly expensive, heavily taxed, and there are petty, minute federal, state and municipal laws that dictate where a person can or cannot smoke in public. Any street vendor trying to sell cheap cigarettes from another state, now has the felon tag of a ‘contrabandist,’ and can end up in prison or even have the cops murder him. The US government has a well-armed regulatory agency against tobacco, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, or the ATF, and so the US government has declared another war – this time against tobacco.

Yet, millions of young women, and especially models, smoke tobacco in order to help them not gain weight. Rock artists, punk musicians and other fringe artists regularly flaunt the burning cigarette in the mouth while they play their guitars brutally. Even some right-wing political activists have proudly taken the puff. The cigarette has its own sexual fetishes, and due to the US government’s war against it, now has associations with rebellion and freedom.

The history of nicotiana tabacum shows us once again, the absurdity of the human condition under civilization. A plant that once helped natives in the Americas ensure community peace and unions through the spiritual worlds, has undergone a terrible and irreversible chemical-medical-industrial-state regulated surgery.

European colonial elites had imposed this condition. They did this without the consent of the native victims of their genocides. The addictive desires for naked profits enabled another genocide against kidnapped Africans.

Most assiduously, certain corporations have claimed their own patents or imposed ‘ownership,’ on this natural plant, while they have mixed harmful chemicals into the industrial melting pot, creating a type of fuming poison. Finally, the contemporary State, ruled and administered by shameless sociopaths, constantly devises sinister means in punishing the working class smokers of the drug.

Tobacco was never the original enemy to stamp out. The sinister legacies of our European colonial settler states, once again, carry all the historical blame.

 

 

 

 

 

 

True and Authentic Revolutionaries: Armed Gender Outlaws

Authentic rebellion exists and it truly is the real thing. Many Anarchists consider themselves the forefront of such rebellion. Crust oogle travelers also consider themselves the true and actual punks that can survive inside the capitalist-fascist police state. But there is one group that have lived, survived and died horribly within the monster. They are a small insignificant group – but they still live, breathe, and they are giving the real middle finger to the entire culture and society that feeds on the scraps of hypocrisy and lies. They are the armed gender benders, gun carrying or martially arts trained, trans gendered outlaws. These people are today’s true desperadoes.

Why is this? Because these outlaws have refused to sit within one gender assignment from birth. They want to move back and forth between gendered appearances. They change themselves into more feminine or masculine attributes depending on their spirit or will. They know that gendered boundaries change culturally, while these boundaries have moved considerably throughout human history.

They want to express themselves the way they want, the way they ought to live, and the way their bodies naturally move and act in the public sphere. These true revolutionaries do not just masturbate to their private fantasies. Instead, they walk the public streets showing off their sensual powers. They live in both the actuality and in the fantasy. And these rebels, in the true sense of the word, are ready to fight back, either with guns or with some good training in self-defense techniques.

This final part is unfortunately necessary because the gender benders, the sensual transgendered outlaws, do walk the walk. They are public, open, and not ashamed of their hybrid, trans-sexual natures. They have no place to hide and they refuse to hide. They will react, if attacked.

Of the most heinous and wanton murders committed on the public streets, the willful murder of transgendered people is unfortunately quite common. Throughout the year, stories emerge on the news concerning a brutal murder of a transgendered person, often found lying tortured to death on a road or a street somewhere.

The criminal perpetrators are always men between the ages of 15 and 55. They often commit the murders within groups of two to five people. They find a transgendered freak walking alone, along a road or street, and so they know that they have an advantage. Unfortunately, they commonly do have the advantages in both numbers and in physical murder potential.

The male perpetrators are usually violent, petty criminal types from low social class backgrounds. Most of them have some type of violent criminal history. What is even more hideous is that some of the murderers have gotten away with their sociopathic crimes. There is always a witness to a murder, no matter how furtive or secretive the act. Apparently, there are cowards that believe the gender outlaw deserved the fate of the bad death.

Their attraction to torture and murder leaves them limited options. Sometimes, their families completely reject them and cut them off permanently. The gender revolutionaries routinely have to live in more ‘tolerant’ and ‘marginalized, urban communities. They have to share their metropolis abodes with the other outcasts from capitalist-authoritarian society: incorrigible drug addicts, the home bums, the rough vagabonds, the permanently scarred drifters and street prostitutes. In many instances, the gender desperadoes also fall into hard drug addiction and street prostitution in order to survive economically – all within a dreadful modern society that already detests them.

Within such urban decaying zones of limited autonomy, the upper class-white skin-privileged gentrifiers, meaning coalitions of urban property pimps, local political hacks and bank executive bosses, regularly target them and their neighborhoods for ‘revitalization.’ This means that they want the gender outlaws forced out of their newly created, resettlement zones of urban gentrification. ‘Artists’ and ‘professionals’ with white skin privilege and money, yes; but the homeless and poor, gender outlaw-junkie-beggar-prostitutes – no way.

Why do these heroes attract such hatred, venom and violence? The reasons are because the haters and murderers of such people secretly feel threatened, they fear such public boundary crossings, or they are sociopaths always ready to pursue the easy kill. The person that hates on such outlaws is either a secret gender bender and public coward, or the person is a sociopath that received beatings and tortures in the past, and he simply wants to take out his aggression on the lesser beings, easier marks – and hopefully not do any prison time. When it comes to the rich and powerful, they represent the ‘respectable sociopaths’ who have always come clean from their crimes. They can legally mandate other murderers to do their bidding: slumlords, cops, state attorneys or prosecutors, and prison officials.

Another unfortunate scenario for the gender transcendent is that they live in urban cities with strict laws against carrying and using weapons, and especially guns. These criminal statutes leave the transgendered warriors easier prey for the lower class sociopaths that sometimes cruise the city streets looking for potential victims. For the pangender outlaw, the only two routes available are a young and lonely death, or if they have good fortune on their side – celebrity status in the respectable world of entertainment arts.

We have the cinema-music examples of Ru Paul, Laverne Cox, Divine and Alexis Arquette. David Bowie took on the white, male, hard rock guitarist reputation with his Ziggy Stardust-Spiders from Mars image of an androgynous, drug addicted rock star in the early 1970s. This gender floating act defined Glam Rock, and later influenced the Punk movement in Britain. It is noticeable that most of the accepted third genders in public entertainment and the arts are the male crossovers to female set with full surgical operations and massive doses of hormones, which have actually transformed themselves into superficial women with breasts and vaginas. Looking at their photos decked out in luxurious dresses and professional makeup work – they have become women of affectation in spite of their births.

Reality floats back to the androgynous, pangender, third gender outlaws that have to live and survive with the rest of the modern world. They don’t have a tight entertainment subculture or talent connections that tolerates them for ‘transgender roles,’ nor do they have the money to buy a large house and thereby escape the day-to-day hassles of urban living – or even to afford sex change surgery.

Instead, they daily fight for survival, party hard, and walk the public streets in full pangender glory. Within the transgender group, the full-on outlaws will defend themselves from any or all physical attacks. The old outlaw is long gone – except for these courageous ones. They are the last survivors, and will not bow nor swear allegiance to any false ideology of natural order, murderous institution, or any societal imposed prison. They live in constant danger, and yet they are truly free to display themselves – as they prefer to display themselves.

In all my travels around the world, I have only seen one world culture that has tolerated third genders, and that was pagan-Hindu India. They had the name of ‘hijras’; although, they lived marginal existences in the Indian society.

Before the ideologies of monotheism, such as Judaism and Christianity, imposed their order on the world, most world cultures, such as Africa, Asia, Australia, the Western Hemispheres and Europe, respected the divine artistic and creative powers of intersexed deities and spirits. Those deities found artistic representations in crossover female-male bodies and third gender symbols.

In ancient Hellenic Greek and Roman civilizations, the ‘hermaphrodite’ shared divine characteristics with the pantheon of gods, and especially with the gods of love: Aphrodite-Venus, Eros-Cupid, Peitho-Suadela, and the erect penis gods of Satyrs and Priapus. Before the European invasions of North America, the natives fully included third gender people, called ‘berdaches’ within their proto-Anarchist communities.

Unfortunately for all of us living humans, monotheism, except for Gnostic Manichaeism, with our modern ideologies of control and power, have fully taken their intellectual dominance. The third gender has become an outlaw and a target for violence.

But even with all the repression against our bodies and the act of love, now called ‘sexuality,’ there have always existed the exceptions. During the Baroque period in Europe, (around 1630-1730), many aristocratic, European men wore tights, makeup, high heels, powdered wigs of long hair, dimples, long jackets and frilled shirts. These men had the name of ‘mignons.’ while the local theater regularly featured comedic farces of cross dressing characters, referred to back then, as ‘commedia dell’arte.’

Our third gender, pansexual paladins live on modern society’s fringes. Most are not armed and so they live exposed to the whims of the sociopaths. But there are those few transgendered outlaws who are also proficient in the martial arts, and even better, carry guns for any deadly encounter. These are the last holdouts of the outlaws, and they are the true and authentic revolutionaries who will never sold out.

 

Worlds of Pharmakopeia III: Opiates, Drugs of the Sweet Death

Our English word for drug comes from the French word, ‘drogue.’ La drogue signified merchandise, but not just any merchandise commonly found in the markets of seventeenth-century Marseilles, France. This merchandise, like the other dangerous concoctions around the world, came from the Orient, or Asia. ‘Epiciers,’ or the spice sellers, legally sold this occult, hard stuff.

This drogue was a peculiarly special medicine, and not just for the ailing. It was really for those unfortunate, bedridden sick, dying from terrible and unknown pains. La drogue always sat ready for its desperate takers. It willfully took flight with its sacrificial victims onto the sweet ride of death.

Writing of death, the decade of the 1830s was an exceptional period for the ruthless scavenger cloaked in the monk’s robe, sporting the skull face and carrying the European peasant’s scythe. But this look of death was a bit more distinct and sensual. It didn’t fume the rancid Euro-sailor reek that made most foreigners almost vomit. It smelled more like a long pipe of sweet-smelling tar mixed with tobacco, or even cannabis. Accompanying this drug of the sweet death, was a deep aroma of British gunpowder and the bad death.

The greatest drug dealers in human history have not been the Colombian or Mexican narcos-cartels, nor the Afghan poppy bosses of the Golden Crescent, nor even the Kuomintang plant lords of the Golden Triangle; instead, the greatest drug dealers in human history have been two humongous Empires found in world history: the Second British Empire, (1783-1956), and the current Amerikan Empire, (the USA), with special emphases on its intelligence services, both the CIA and the DEA, or the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Within the dens and markets on the dirty South Pacific sea, off the coast of China, such as Hong Kong, existed the Imperial Trade. The time was around the 1830s. The British ran the Trade and controlled most the monopolies on the Trade. Other Europeans and European-colonials also participated in the madness, and just like the days of African slavery.

That sinister trade in humans meant the Black Gold kidnapped on the ‘dark continent,’ and then murdered en mass on the American continents during the 1700s. But this latter trade flourished under a stickier commodity.

The Qing Dynasty in China could not tolerate such attacks to its honor and dignity. The Europeans had slowly moved into the ports and cities, like Shanghai. Not only did the smelly and untrustworthy Europeans move in, but they stayed and demanded special ‘rights,’ or legal privileges for their dopey merchants.

The Euros also commanded special monopolies on their sacred commodities. The British, French, Dutch, Americans, Germans, Italians, Russians, and other flush faced monstrosities walked the ancient streets of the Chinese Emperor like demons on parade. The other devious interlopers were Japanese merchants.

The Qing Emperor decided to act and demanded that the British respect his law banning the importation of this other Black Gold, opium, and this time cultivated in Iran, Afghanistan and India. This Black Gold of the nineteenth-century had the infamous name of the Opium Trade.

Like other European colonial thugs before and after, the British East India Company refused to respect the Chinese law in the land of China. Did the British East India Company respect the Americans’ anti-Tea tax rebellions during the Revolutionary War in 1776?

The British already had the tea, and very soon, tea drinking became part of British middle class culture, with creamy milk added, and which is still widely popular in Britain today. But what about the millions of Chinese addicts visiting the dirty dens infested with bed bugs, so they could the smoke the magical pipe and hopefully – die the sweet death?

Britain weighed its options carefully, and decided that it could defeat the once great Chinese Qing Emperor. They were right. The British fought at least two full-scale wars against the corrupt and decadent, Chinese imperial court, murdering 50,000 Chinese anti-opium fighters with British rifle musket fire. The evil joke was on the Chinese, since they had first invented gunpowder about a thousand years ago! The British monopolists also took the port island city of Hong Kong, which they would not return to China until 1997.

China meanwhile began to drown within its own loss of face. The Taiping Rebellion would burst against the hated and dishonest European ‘buyers and sellers.’ Even with that defeat, the Chinese organized themselves into even more powerful secret societies, such as the Boxers, which also led to a full-on rebellion – and later, the Chinese Nationalist Revolution. With the Communist victory of 1949, the Chinese finally instituted real land reforms and ousted the European invaders from its territories – except for the cities of Hong Kong and Macao.

The worst slap in the face for China were the millions of pathetic addicts that lost their wills to live. How many lives and dignities snuffed themselves out for the light smoke of the sweet death?

But the colonial murderers and liars had the last laughs pitted against them. The Chinese opium den culture spread throughout the world’s cultures. Chinatowns opened up flea bag hotels for desperate Chinese workers trying to make some capital through slave wage work across the globe. Within these ‘Chinatowns,’ opium dens flourished, from Lima, Peru to San Francisco, California, from London to Penang, from Paris to Bangkok. A new class of ‘druggie’ entered the darkened smoking lairs.

In the late nineteenth-century, the rooms reeked of the strange blackened tar smoke, the interior decor was of dreary stained long mirrors, red burgundy-brown sienna peeling rice paper, and on the floor red burgundy, phony silk pillows and cushions. If the place had more ‘class,’ then they added dressing partitions and fans for the customers.

The customers were often Europeans, of both sexes, and many came from good class backgrounds and education. Some of them seemed to have that ‘bohemian’ look on them. What attracted those Euro-bohemians to the smoky dens once found in the rat and bug infested holes of Hong Kong?

Opium attracted them – and those sensual Chinese dens were only a small part of the Oriental exotic ambience. Opium, Morphine, Heroin and opium’s hundreds of both illegitimate and legitimate offspring, have offered to the world the peaceful nodding sleep, the deliverance from acute human suffering, both physical and mental, and the sweet death for the melancholic and hard life. The ultimate narcotic is for the dying, for those that desperately want to die, and for those that want to explore their own marvelous and sensual deaths.

For the evil empires of our modern world, and especially for the Amerikan Empire of Sociopaths, opium and its derivatives, with the refined genius of the permanently illegal Heroin, have become golden weapons in the marked arms of intelligence agencies. They are the finest weapons in the subduing of armies, of entire dangerous populations – and they have worked properly every single time – and still do until this very day.

Heroin still retains its status as the artist, traveler and outlaw drug in the Euro-American world of bohemians and rebels. For most of Heroin’s history, most addicts were often men. Yet recently, thousands of attractive young women, and often in their teens, have discovered the occult power of heroin in successfully controlling body weight. Only heroin can offer the female desire for the eating of sweets while retaining the skinny body frame. The sight of a woman’s dark and scrawny heroin body, or ‘heroin chic,’ offers the most profound sensual attraction of the dangerous ‘fashion model.’ Such is the strange and long history of the poppy plant first cultivated and traded in Mesopotamian Asia about 5,000 years ago.

The Sumerians traders referred to the poppies as the joy plants. Their brisk trade in joy, and the sweet death, made them welcome commodities in Ancient Egypt, the Phoenician coastal cities, and within the Greek city states. The ancient medical writer and philosopher, Hippocrates, referred to this plant as a good medicinal herb against pain, internal disorders and acute diarrhea.

Islamic merchants controlled the first opium monopoly during the medieval period, (800-1600 A.D.). Meanwhile, Europeans feared the drug’s ‘oriental’ powers. Opium growing spread to the Mediterranean climate, and especially into Egypt and Turkey, with another lethal commoditized drug, sugar.

Things changed swiftly during the Renaissance period, when the Portuguese traders, and later Dutch merchants, started to cut into the great Muslim traders’ monopoly of the plant. The Dutch even invented the offshoot of Opium, Laudanum, which mixed the poppies in liquor in order to deaden the bitter taste.

In the 1800s, a German doctor manufactured another derivative of Opium, called Morphine, named after the Greek God of sleep, Morpheus. Official medical doctors still legally use this drug as the last medicine for the dying. At the end of the nineteenth-century, a scientist working for the Bayer Company, would find the most powerful derivative of Morphine, called Heroin. In the early 1900s, when the Eugenics ideology moved into center stage, European and American governments banned the opiate serums.

Heroin has lately become the weapon exemplar for intelligence agencies, and especially in the US. After the loss of China in 1949, the western Kuomintang, or the KMT, helped by the CIA, fled into the Golden Triangle zone, (northern Thailand, Burma and Laos), and began to fund their terrorism against Communist China with Heroin profits. The eastern KMT took over the island of Formosa. The KMT thugs renamed it Taiwan, and established a notorious dictatorship continually supported by the Amerikan Empire as a cheap manufacturing base, and which still survives today.

What to do with all the Heroin production in the 1950s? The Amerikan Empire intelligence complex flooded African-American poor, urban neighborhoods with the dope, in order to destroy the growing militancy in the ghettos, such as the Copts and the Nation of Islam.

The CIA did not stop here. During the Amerikan Imperial invasion of Indochina, (1961-1975), the intelligence assets began the Air America scheme to transport Heroin from the Golden Triangle region and make some incredible profits. Where did they drop the dope in late 60s and early 70s? Again, they hit the African-American, poor urban areas hard and the urban Latino communities. The Black Panthers tried to fight back, but the FBI had them exterminated. The dope also found its street cred among radicalized returning US veterans and in the countercultural, hipster zones, such as the Lower East Side, NYC, and in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. LSD-Acid had its days, and so the dope killed the fun.

In the 1980s, while the CIA and NSA worked with major Crack-Cocaine importers from Latin America, they helped restart the Golden Crescent zone of Afghanistan and Pakistan, in order to debilitate the Russian armies fighting the Mujahedeen fighters.

And now, with the Amerikan imperial invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Heroin is showing up everywhere. The Amerikan Empire’s intelligence agencies are dumping the stuff across the small remaining outposts of middle class, ‘white skin privilege’ Amerika. They don’t care where it goes anymore.

Of course, they are still getting help from their narco brothers across the southern border, and from every Mafia group found inside and outside of the US, including ‘the Kosovo Liberation Army,’ the same group of hired thugs the Amerikan Empire supported against Serbia in the 1990s. Joy to the imperial state and mafia criminals!

Other European intelligence agencies have also used the secretive dope weapon. When Italy and Germany began to heat up with youth resistance in the 1970s, such as the RAF, or the Red Army Faction, and the Red Brigades, all of sudden, cheap dope hit the youth scene. When nationalist youth fought furiously in Northern Ireland and in the Basque Country in the 1980s, the IRA and ETA nationalist fighting wings had to start hunting the dope pushers. Greece is the most youth radicalized country in Europe, and there, copious amounts of cheap dope flood the urban streets of Athens.

Why are rebellious youth attracted to the product in the first place? The answers lie in the sensuality of the sweet death, eternal sleep, permanent illegality of the most potent narcotic, and the heroin chic montage of eternal skinniness and authentic cool rebellion.

From the nineteenth-century, European Bohemia began to dabble inside the Opium dens. Some became rabid smokers, while others became ‘opium eaters.’ Oscar Wilde vividly described a literary scene where the eternally young, Dorian Gray, regularly visited the ‘London clubs.’ The French Romantic poet, Charles Baudelaire, fell into a severe Opium addiction while living in decadent Paris. He mellowed out his withdrawals with copious Hashish smoking. Other romantic Opiate dabblers were Thomas de Quincey, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

In the twentieth-century, when music took hold of European and American youth imagination with jazz, rock and its subgenres of metal, grunge and punk, Heroin embraced its newfound artist friends. Almost the entirety of America’s great jazz musicians got hooked into the Heroin miasma, such as Coltrane, Parker, Baker, Monk, Davis, Charles and Holliday. With Rock it has been about the same, and it is still this way. Some of the tragic deaths of numerous rock stars have had their connections to the Opiate serum. Even Hollywood actors have taken the Heroin plunge, such as Alma Rubens, Wallace Reid, Bela Lugosi, Montgomery Clift, John Belushi, Robert Pastorelli, River Phoenix, Chris Farley and Phillip Seymour.

Writing about the movies, an entire subgenre of cinema has explored the cool, pretty junkie, illegal drug, heroin subculture of squatters, traveling addicts, outlaws and tramps, such as ‘Trainspotting, Sid and Nancy, Candy, The Panic in Needle Park, Jesus’ Son, Requiem for a Dream, Gia, Christiana F, Gridlock’d, Basketball Diaries, Permanent Midnight,’ and ‘Drugstore Cowboy.’

Most importantly, Heroin has recently found another home among female models and handsome young women that don’t want to deal with the contemporary mental and physical pains of having to continually losing weight and staying thin. They have discovered that regular yoga workouts and vegetarian fad diets require enormous amounts of personal discipline and struggle. They are too sensitive for such fighting, so they have uncovered another secret weapon to keeping thin – the romantic life of the fringe drug addict. Heroin chic truly is chic, and in our modern world, it is here to stay.

And so here is the strange and fascinating history of the Opium drug. Across the globe millions of working class addicts have to struggle daily in order to feed their brutal habits and avoid the horrible withdrawals. Wealthy addicts have their stable connects, can simply shoot the medicine in their rooms, and die peacefully in their homes. Official doctors can prescribe various ‘legal opiates,’ such as Codeine, Vicodin, Fentanyl, Demerol, Suboxone, Percodan, Oxycontin and Dilaudid; while some unfortunate street peddlers now rot in the Amerikan gulag.

Its origins, like Cannabis, come from the exotic, mystical and occult Orient. At present, Heroin flourishes everywhere on the planet. A strange social concoction of artists, intelligence agents, musicians, disreputable politicians, poets, mafiosi and models have fallen in love with the poppy plant, yet Heroin offers the deep mental-physical release to all that use it. This utopia mixed with exaltation ultimately explains its rampant popularity worldwide. And finally, it relieves all physical and mental suffering – leading us all to the sweet death.