The Winter 1995/96 issue of Psychedelic Illuminations magazine has an interview with Richard Glen Boire, who has an advanced degree in law from Berkeley and specializes in appelate drug cases. After Dr Boire reflects upon the absurdity of the 1986 analogue provisions to the Controlled Substances Act, whereby we are all illegal because (a) DMT occurs naturally in our brains and, (b) under the interpretation used by prosecutors (according to which mushrooms can be "materials, mixtures or containers" which include a controlled substance, namely, psilocybin) , we are "materials, mixtures or containers" which include a controlled substance, namely, DMT.

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The interview ends thus:

Psychedelic Illuminations: Do you think entheogen use will ever be fully decriminalized? ...

Richard Glen Boire: Well, ultimately — in the long-long run — everything will be decriminalized. In the more immediate future, however ...

Currently there seems to be ... positive momentum in the Congress and state legislatures. But, change in those forums seems to be limited to a gradual chipping away of the status quo, so we could see a legalization of marijuana for medical use, followed by a general legalization of Cannabis, followed by a tightly controlled religious exemption for some entheogen use as well as an opening to permit some entheogens to be used medically and psychotherapeutically. Things could move step-by-step like that.

On the other hand, I have a stronger sense that we're in for discontinuous change on an unexpectedly large scale. Something could bump the social kaleidoscope and suddenly an entirely new social pattern will snap into place. In that model, we'll all find ourselves either sitting in small cinderblock prison cells, or living in an almost unimaginably nice place which embraces knowledgeable entheogen use.

Interestingly, I think that chaos theory and Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphogenetic fields support the idea that more people wisely using entheogens right now could be the catalyst or foundation for guiding us toward the latter pattern as opposed to the former.

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