Why Mandatory Drug Testing Is Corporate Mind Control

The discovery of a drug capable of increasing the average individual's psychic energy, and its wide distribution throughout the U.S.S.R. would probably mean the end of Russia's form of government. Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful conditions of effective democracy.

Aldous Huxley

author of Brave New World

Government contracts should not be awarded to companies that fail to implement drug programs, including suitable drug testing.

final report of President Reagan's

Commission on Organized Crime

Certain psychedelic chemicals have the ability to produce in the user a state of mind similar to that sometimes achieved by religious mystics. President Ronald Reagan's government has stooped to dishonest tactics reminiscent of the Watergate era of Republican corruption in order to enforce universal mandatory corporate drug testing. These plans, if implemented, would amount to universal mind control regulations prohibiting the use of drugs capable of leading to states of mind not approved by the State and its corporations.

The portion of the Final Report of the President's Commission on Organized Crime which was released on March 3, 1986, called for universal mandatory drug testing to be implemented by all corporations and government agencies in the United States. However, this recommendation was never approved by the Commission.

In fact, the President's Commission never even saw the version of the report which included the statement quoted in the box until after the report was released. In a front page article on Thursday, March 6, 1986, the New York Times revealed that several members of the commission never approved of, or were ever informed of, the section on drug testing which was published by the White House as their "final report."

One conservative panel member, Readers Digest Senior Editor Eugene Methvin of McClean, Virginia, said that he and the other members of the commission never saw the final version of the report and never met to discuss t. He said that the White House had not acted on commission member's requests that they be permitted to meet and discuss the report and others to be issued in the name of the commission.

Commission members were told by the White House that there was no more money available for them to meet and discuss the report which was to be issued in their name. Methvin was quoted by the New York Times as saying that he had been told that "they didn't have enough money" to pay the travel expenses for the commission members to meet. The "poor financial planning and mismanagement" was "unforgivable," Methvin said.

Thomas McBride, Associate Dean of the Stanford Law School and member of the commission, said, "I found that two key phrases had been inserted in the final version that I had not seen." He added that the two phrases were the ones referring to the drug testing proposal.

Charles H. Rogovin, a commission member who is Professor of Law at Temple University in Philadelphia, said that, in addition to the quote from the commission report at the beginning of this article, the following language had been inserted into the report without the knowledge or approval of the commissioners: "The President should direct the heads of all Federal Agencies to formulate immediately clear policy statements, with implementing guidelines, including suitable drug testing programs."

Thus, a falsified document issued in the name of a blue ribbon "panel of experts" has been used to manipulate the President, the Congress, and the people of the United States into supporting universal mandatory drug testing as a part of the "war on drugs."

The most controversial element of the commission's report, which dealt with drug testing, was never approved, or even seen, by all of the members of the commission n whose name it was issued. But is the proposal a good idea?

Many drugs which affect the mind, such as caffeine, alcohol, and Valium, are legal. It is primarily those psychedelic drugs which may lead to the experience of "illumination" or "enlightenment", which are discouraged. While it is certainly true that drugs such as psilocybin and LSD have profound effects, there is no clear evidence that they are more harmful or addictive than alcohol or cigarettes. These drugs are banned because of their ability to produce states of mind which are forbidden by the State, at least when they are achieved with the help of drugs.

"LSD . . . lowers the barrier between conscious and subconscious and permits the patient to look more deeply and understandingly into the recesses of his own mind," wrote philosopher and author Aldous Huxley. "The deepening of self-knowledge takes place against a background of visionary or even mystical experience. Thus a person who takes LSD or mescaline may suddenly understand–not only intellectually but organically, experientially–the meaning of such tremendous religious affirmations as 'God is love' ... It goes without saying that this kind of temporary transcendence is no guarantee of permanent enlightenment or a lasting improvement of conduct."

Such experiences lead one to question the official versions of reality that one is taught by the church, corporate advertising and the state-run school system. Why buy a Buick when trips to other worlds and states of consciousness cost only a few dollars? Why tune into Pat Robertson and his fellow bigoted perverters of Christianity when God can talk to you in your own brain?

"It will sometimes happen that your individual identity will disappear," wrote the French poet Baudelaire in 1858, "and the objectivity characteristic of the pantheistic poet will develop so unusually within you, that the mere contemplation of external objects will cause you to soon forget your own existence, and become inextricably fused with theirs. Your eye fastens upon a tree as it is bent by the wind; in a few seconds, something that would be a most natural comparison in the poet's mind, will become a reality in yours." (from the Poem of Hashish, in Artificial Paradise, 1860.)

It is undeniable that there are dangers in experimenting with altered states of consciousness. But there can also be great benefits. Shouldn't the decision of whether or not to use psychotropic plants or psychedelic chemicals be left up to the individual and not to the whim of the State and the corporations?

We are willing as a nation to risk the lives of our astronauts and teachers in the quest for knowledge of outer space. Should we not

(see Drug Testing, page 30)

Drug Testing

(cont. from page 18)

also encourage the exploration of inner space as well, despite the dangers?

Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal consciousness, our waking consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all around it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question–for they are so discontinuous with ordinary states of consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.

William James

The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902