There’s an important war going on and nothing less than the soul of America is at stake. I’m not talking about Iraq, but rather the undeclared civil war that’s been raging since the 1960s.

On one side are the good people of America who truly believe in peace, justice and liberty. This group is not limited to one political party. On the other side is the power elite who seek to dictate the terms of society — that the majority should spend the best years of their lives slaving away in a corporate rat race in order to enrich those atop the pyramid. They would have us believe that this paradigm is the pinnacle of human evolution.

I’m not against capitalism per se; people who work harder than others should obtain greater rewards. But when you start on a playing field that is far from level, you get a rigged contest.

There’s an insidious game of information warfare being waged to condition people to believe certain things on a systemic level, while other information is cleverly hidden or downright suppressed. Case in point: psychedelic drugs.

Few know that the CIA was once heavily invested in LSD research — Operation MK-ULTRA — because they thought it could be used as a truth drug. But once LSD hit the mainstream, the controllers quickly became frightened that too many minds were expanding, so it was criminalized in 1966.

Uncle Sam took this campaign so far as to declare former Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary “the most dangerous man in America,” since he was on a mission to tout the consciousness-expanding capabilities of psychedelics. Leary, also known as “the Galileo of Consciousness,” had produced some scientific evidence that LSD and psilocybin can actually help people. This wouldn’t aid the illusion of Uncle Sam’s rat race, so Sam renewed an age-old crackdown. Ever since Columbus set foot in the New World, indigenous shamans across North America have been persecuted for their knowledge of psychedelics, among other things.

Leary was arrested on trumped-up marijuana charges (a substance criminalized in 1937 for corporate profit motives) and jailed for several years.

What Leary and every shaman since the dawn of time knew is that psychedelics can indeed raise consciousness and open one up to the multi-dimensional nature of reality. Popularization of this knowledge scares the bejeezus out of Uncle Sam because he wants us all locked into our limited 3-D boxes.

Psychedelics are not for everyone. As Leary was adamant to note, the user’s personal mindset and setting are crucial to having a positive experience. Proper research and preparation are vital.

But the bottom line is that Uncle Sam does not wish you to know that “self-shamanism,” as late, great, ethnobotonist Terence McKenna explained, can contribute to positive personal and societal evolution.

The criminalization of psychedelics is just one more facet of The Big Lie. McKenna put it best when he said, “The concept of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ is enshrined in the documents upon which this nation of ours is supposedly founded. If the pursuit of happiness does not mean the right to experiment with your own state of mind, then those words aren’t worth the hemp they’re written on.”

Greg Schwartz is a graduate journalism student and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact him at [email protected].