In which Disney Gets on the Bus
We've now reached the point in which the Disney company is reaching for some of the cultural cachet perceived to be held by psychedelic drugs.
This week on Disney+, the second episode of the latest Star Wars spinoff, The Book of Boba Fett was released. In it, we got some back story of how the iconic bounty hunter survived his tumble into the Sarlac pit in The Return of the Jedi, and was transformed into a benevolent freedom-fighting crime boss.
In episode 2, the Tusken raiders, formerly just desert pests, scurrying in the background and making trouble for the series' headliners, rise to prominence as indigenous tribesmen struggling against occupying imperial forces. After capturing an injured and vulnerable Fett, stripped of his armor and left for dead, he is brought into the tribe as a bound captive. Over the course of the episode, he demonstrates his mettle by stealing technology from the corporate occupiers, teaching the tribesmen how to use it to overthrow their tormentors. In gratitude, he is initiated into the tribe, replete with black robes and a really cool homemade stick.
Before being granted his robes and stick, however, he is subject to an initiation ritual. The ritual begins in a tent, around a fire with the solemn warrior elders of the tribe. He is presented a small lizard. Quite surprisingly, the lizard leaps at Fett and grotesquely burrows into his face via his nasal cavity. Fett is then reassured that the lizard will be his guide- from inside his own head.
What follows is a vaguely trippy montage of a disoriented Fett in a dingy white bodysuit struggling against a tree in the desert. With his Mandalorian-trained might, the former bounty hunter culminates his journey by snapping a very thick branch from the psychic/real desert tree of knowledge. Next we see the returning hero staggering in from the deep desert, to the excitement and anticipation of the tribesmen, holding his hard won stick. Immediately afterwards, we are presented with another montage of Fett being mentored in the preparation of his own staff, using drawknife and chisel to craft his magic trip-stick into a potent combat weapon. In a world of laser guns, star destroyers, and plasma swords, never underestimate the value of an intentionally crafted wooden staff.
Then finally, after proving his loyalty, his virality, and his spiritual fitness, he is solemnly welcomed into the tribe, and they all dance around the campfire. Really.
The entire ordeal is filled with meaningful head nods, serious faces and pantomimed tribal rites. It's like someone read some Joseph Campbell and Carlos Castaneda, took an ayahuasca ceremony with a bunch of white people waving eagle feathers and incense, and tried to write Star Wars on acid.
This is a perfect opportunity to talk about cultural appropriation and ecological exploitation in psychedelic spaces. Disney, the world's leading cultural imperialists, have presented us with their latest trophy of cross-cultural curiosity, flattened, stereotyped and homogenized for popular consumption.
The drug experience itself is a pretty straightforward riff on "the Toad", a Sonoran desert species of toad known as "incilius alverius". The secretions of the toad contain an extremely powerful psychedelic, 5-MeO-DMT. While no one snorts the living toad up their nose, the toad may be milked and the secretions smoked for an extremely potent psychedelic experience. This, unsurprisingly, is very stressful on the poor toad, and it is likely that the popularity of toad milking presents the species, already suffering massive habitat incursion, another obstacle to continued survival. Learn more about "the Toad" here: Chacruna- Toad Conservation. It's also important to point out that toads are not required for the procurement of 5-MeO DMT.
Sidebar: 5-MeO DMT and DMT are not the same drug. DMT, or N,N-DMT, another short acting psychedelic, is chemically similar but less potent by weight.
DMT is extracted from a variety of plant sources and can be smoked as well. It is, like 5-MeO-DMT, known for an extremely rapid onset and a very intense, often disorienting experience. DMT also makes up part of the famous Amazonian brew ayahuasca. In the brew, DMT containing plants, which are more or less inert when taken orally, are cooked with the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, known sometimes as the vine of the dead. The active ingredient in the vine is a monoamine-oxidase inhibitor, or an MAOI. Monoamine Oxidase is an enzyme in the gut that breaks down DMT, rendering it inactive. When this enzyme is inhibited, the body does not immediately break down the DMT, and it remains active. Because the drug is taken orally, the onset is slower and the experience is longer than smoked DMT, typically a few hours or so.
For accurate and interesting information about drugs, you must bookmark the vaults of Erowid. It’s an invaluable resource.
Exploitation of resources is a common theme in the modern history of psychedelia. Many plants, animals and fungi contain psychedelic compounds, and when “discovered” by westerners, have set off a rush of interest in the procurement of the drugs from their natural sources, frequently damaging the often fragile ecosystems from which they come. In addition to the toad, another important example is the peyote cactus, the only naturally occurring source of the much sought after mescaline, in North America. If you would like to learn more about peyote conservation and/or to support that work, visit the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative.
If you’d like to take a deeper dive into the history of mescaline, Mike Jay’s book Mescaline is a wonderful resource.
Cultures throughout time and across the globe have learned at times ingenious ways to process various plants, animals and fungi into powerful psychoactive drugs. The procurement, processing and usage of these drugs have been highly bound to their specific culture. In other words, the meanings of the rituals and experiences evoked by the interface with these substances form a tight contextual container.
What happens when a single aspect (the active drug ingredient) is ripped away from its context and used in a completely different manner? It is no longer the same thing. Stripped of the meaning and the container which held the experience, the consequences often rebound to the detriment of the original practitioner.
The consequences to the community from which the substance is taken can be truly devastating. A prime example is the story of Mexican curandero Marina Sabina. Approached in 1955 by amateur mycologist and investment banker R. Gordon Wasson, she agreed to allow him to participate in a mushroom ceremony. He became the first westerner to participate in a Mazatec ceremony, and chronicled his experiences in what would become a very popular article in Life magazine in 1957.
Following the article numerous interested seekers began to visit the village, seeking mushrooms and knowledge of the mushroom. As the next decade unleashed potent countercultural energies, the trickle of visitors become a flood, and Sabina’s life was more or less ruined as she was blamed by her community for the disruption.
The western appetite for novel experience at times seems insatiable. But there are even darker currents at play. Unbeknownst to Wasson, his trip was funded in part by the CIA, curious to learn more about this “new” class of drugs that were fast gaining notoriety. The CIA would develop the notorious “MK-ULTRA” program, a secret project that specifically studied psychedelic drugs in an attempt to weaponize them as tools for mind control.
At the same time that unwanted visitors were flooding Sabina’s hometown and CIA psychopaths were trying to learn how to control minds, LSD was wreaking havoc throughout the western world. Unbound by context and unleashed in a repressed population embroiled in the torment of an unjust war and ongoing racial terrorism, psychedelics seemed to many capable of pushing the west into madness. The backlash was swift and is well-documented. The drugs were made against the law, the drug war was initiated in earnest, and the United States used every tool at its disposal to export its drug control regime to every corner of the earth.
Thus the appropriation was complete- from invited ceremonial guest to exploitation to attempt to redefine the experience itself to a full-out global war to control its use. A similar process had already played out in miniature a half century or so earlier as American officials, perplexed and concerned by peyote and its effect on the plains Indians as well on God-fearing Christian folk, had attempted to prohibit its use. That is also a long and interesting story, well detailed in the aforementioned book by Mike Jay, as well as the fascinating book Empire of the Summer Moon, which details the rise and fall of the Comanche tribe on the great plains. This same process continues to play out as new drugs are discovered, popularized, and then demonized.
Continually, western users fetishize indigenous practices without honoring the cultures of origin and the autonomy those cultures struggle to maintain. It is far too simplistic to suggest that the modern west “stole” psychedelics- LSD, the mother of all western psychedelics, was created in a Swiss lab, after all. Rather, it’s the commodifying manner of behaving as if nothing is sacred, and the willingness to defile what is sacred to others if it can bring us closer to our own desires. Perhaps the best way to honor other cultural traditions is simply to leave them the fuck alone.
Anyway, I doubt very much that the most useful cultural context for psychedelic use is a disembodied, displaced ceremony from a place and time that most western users have no experiential relationship to.
We are on our own, friends. For many who recoil from the cold, white lab coat and clipboard images of psychedelic science, or the medicalized promise of credentialism, inflated pricing and risk aversion, the primal stereotype of a campfire ritual is appealing. And by all means, trip by a campfire if you like! We don’t have our own generally accepted cultural contexts, and we can’t simply leave it to someone else. So if you want to get involved, get involved. The more of us who co-create whatever this is becoming, the less likely it will be exploitative and derivative from another place and time, or controlled from the top by overeager bureaucrats, lawyers and capitalists. Because while practices and processes may belong to those who have developed and honed them with care and precision, psychedelic drugs do not belong to anyone.