FINDING FREEDOM

My mission is to use plant medicine to heal a nation in mental and physical pain.

In the United States, we need a new set of rules. We need to make a radical difference in how we look at our health and our priorities for making ourselves well.

The US spends $3.3 trillion on health care per year, and, as we now know, an enormous amount of our disease is directly caused by the pharmaceuticals and food chemicals we put in our bodies. Safe and often far more effective plant medicines should be displacing a large amount of the dangerous, side-effect-laden Big Pharma products. We need to prioritize individual health education. For those worried about their personal health and lifespan, this education and the resulting changes to how we live will result in a profoundly better life with less disease and longer lives. There is no higher calling than helping to alleviate our mental and physical disease state.

The first time that we heard about CBD in the mass media may have been when Janie Maedler’s daughter Rylie’s bone cancer reached the evening news. Even the story of Charlotte Figi, who was having 300 grand mal seizures a week, didn’t permeate the media stratosphere until very recently. It took these children, however, to ensure that the message about CBD began to take hold.

Given the strain that we put ourselves under, I’m not proud to be an American sometimes, but I am grateful to be an American. I support our democracy, but I also need to argue that democracy and capitalism are not the same thing, and I believe that, when it comes to our health, these doctrines have become conflated. It would be easy for someone who confuses those two terms to accuse me of being anti-American or anti-democratic, but I believe that we benefit from our freedom to make choices that result in our health and wealth. While there are dogmatic practitioners of medicines on both sides of the herbology and allopathic medicine spectrum, patients and health consumers have long been being victims of the exaggerated hype presented as fact from both sides. I’m grateful to be a part of this nation because, like all of us, I think we can do better.

I think we can achieve the health and wellness we deserve as human beings, and I think that we can achieve this with the mentally and physically soothing qualities provided by CBD.

But that’s the thing: I think we’re already doing it.

The world is maturing ethically as we shift from me to we, although sometimes it seems like that change is not happening fast enough. The thing about exponential change is that it sneaks up on you. We already know that the health landscape will change far faster than one can anticipate by looking at the last few years of research into CBD and its effects. The reason that we know we’re at this tipping point is because we can see the critical mass shifting the status quo in the medical, research, social and even the political realms of our lives. Exponential change looks linear for a while, but we’ve recently entered into the inflection point, where an exponential curve shows its true colors of radical and nearly overnight sweeping change.

We talked about punctuation events earlier in this book. Remember, we’re literally built to change our behaviors and our minds when we’re exposed to a massive change in our world. But here’s the amazing thing. Once we started on this pathway of change, the sharing of information between everyone on the planet, and their new needs and interests, is creating exponential growth of connection and consideration of plant medicine.

Consider this example.

You’re deciding where to put nametags at each of the sixteen seats at a circular table for the immediate family members of a bride and groom at a wedding banquet. You play around with different combinations to make sure that the dinner conversation is as lively as possible. You may try one combination where you sit your mother next to your mother-in-law and decide that that doesn’t work. But how many possible ways can you arrange these people around the table? Exponential combinatorics tells us that there are about 21 trillion ways to position the people. Adding only one additional person to increase the table numbers to seventeen people increases the number of possibilities by 334,764,638,208,000 more than the original 21 trillion.

As we think about how the quantity of species and resulting complexity of a biosphere increases, the complexity of decision-making and information sharing in our world increases. As we add new websites and knowledge and humans exchanging information on the internet, the emergent flows of information, which are in no way the sum of the individual parts, grow at a rate so exponentially fast that all of the world’s supercomputers could not possibly compute it or model it even if given a computation time equal to the age of the universe.

And it is this mysterious and non-computable form of emergent information, almost an intelligence, that is strongly guiding the evolution of this mind-like neural network formed by the unprecedented connectivity between members of the human species.

In this new punctuation event context, the appropriate role of government is not to enforce certain standards of morality through the restriction of medicines to a specific corporate-driven space. What the history of Prohibition has shown us is that the broad application of moral standards to a diverse population is likely to have deleterious effects, especially in a country where personal freedoms are highly valued. A moral high ground is not possible when people do not all share the same beliefs, and, in fact, historical evidence shows that imposing values and ideals fails because it makes a population question why that imposition is necessary. The reality of our collective psychology is that we, as human beings, want to push back against such controls. Instead, the government needs to act as a social structure that is the ultimate safety net when things go wrong. Through preventative and reactive health care, those few who need help could be served without dampening the ability of the individual to choose their own life pathway.

Why is it that we are more mentally and physically sick then the rest of the world if our medical technology and our pharmaceutical solutions are supposed to be world-leading? Social beliefs have an impact on our physical and mental health, and money-driven corporations are allowed unprecedented freedom to profoundly influence the dietary behavior of an entire nation.

We need healing at a mass population scale, and we need it fast. We’ve let corporations take control of our health. We’ve taken drugs that cause depression, delusion and paranoia on a broad scale. We’ve eaten things we shouldn’t. We have lived a life of self-inflicted trauma because of bigotry and sexism.

Even worse, we continue to feed the beast. We’re sick, stressed and all fucked up. People are prematurely dying after living lives full of mental and physical pain. Our bipartisan, divided government isn’t about to fix the health care crisis. Big Pharma and Big Food, which helped get us into this state of dire sickness, are entrenched in their do-harm-for-profit model. We constantly remind ourselves of the danger and fear out there, and now we’re stuck with such a high level of subthreshold PTSD that our nervous systems are telling us there’s constant danger out there. We feed off these processes more than most nations in the world. Our needs have not been met, and we don’t know how to get out of the fearful place we’re in.

As inarguable data shows, in large part, we Americans are wasting our health and enjoyment of life simply by virtue of what we put in our bodies. The problem is pandemic in this country. And the deep question is “Why?” If the science and statistics are truly as clear as they are, how is it that our state and federal governments, doctors and nonprofit health organizations are not attacking the problem? How is it, in a democracy, that food and drug corporations can get away with preventing facts from being clearly communicated by health agencies and doctors there to protect us? We place too much authority over our health in the hands of doctors. If we’re dying of diabetes or heart disease or suffering from depression, we typically see them for a few minutes to get prescription to a drug with serious side effects. Then we see them again until it’s time for surgery or a harsher drug “upgrade.”

I know that we’re not going to solve these problems easily. The public should support the efforts of the lobbyists trying to do the right thing to change our laws. But as health consumers, we deserve better. As members of a democracy, we deserve better.