Herbal Humor, Week Seven

Herbal Humor, Week Seven

So, this week the class was titled Addiction Free. I expected craziness, but I got a surprisingly serious class. So, I am giving you some normal Bridget stories. It’s about time we gave her some credit, right?

1. Before herb class, I had to run a few errands, and on my way out of the store, I had a woman running (literally) after me calling for me to stop. I turned, and she said, “Hey, I have to give you my card.” She pulled her business card out of her purse. “Have you ever had a psychic reading?”

“No,” I said, “but I’m okay. Thanks anyway.”

“But you really must have it.”

“No, thanks.”

I should have told her I was getting my dosha read tonight, and I can really only have one person at a time take glimpses into my psyche. But we went our separate ways. Still I thought it was a great start to herb night.

2. Bridget: “I am going to say something that I know a lot of you are going to find very outrageous, but I’m going to say it anyway. Many cultures around the world have rituals to initiate their adolescents into adult life. I find it extremely disappointing that we do not have any ritual like that in America, and I believe that is why so many teens create their own rituals. Because we do not take time to acknowledge their transition into adulthood with a strong public ritual, teens create rituals for themselves. Usually these rituals involve things like getting drunk and high and going to a music festival, for example. My daughter Sunny became a Grateful Dead groupie for a summer when she was a teenager as her ritual. These rituals our teens create for themselves are incredibly stupid. Drunkenness? Mixing substances? Going to places where they could easily lose their friends? Driving recklessly? We cannot entrust our teens to make their way into adulthood responsibly with this kind of behavior, and I really think we need to start creating rituals for our teenagers that acknowledge that we recognize their independence and adulthood. If we acknowledge it, maybe they wouldn’t act so recklessly to get us to notice it.” [Commentary: Out of all the things Bridget has said in class, I don’t think this is the one that needed the disclaimer of “outrageous.”]

3. For your information, there are 81 marijuana dispensaries in Boulder. To put this in perspective, Boulder is home to 293,161 people, 402 restaurants, and 44 coffee shops.

With that in mind, here are Bridget’s thoughts on marijuana: “I am not totally against marijuana when it is used for some chronic pain conditions. The unfortunate thing about drugs like marijuana is that we don’t use them properly. Marijuana, in its natural form, has some incredible healing and medicinal properties. Unfortunately, we are now hybridizing marijuana so that it is predominantly THC, which is the compound in pot that gets you high. In doing so, we are eliminating or minimizing some of the other wonderful medicinal compounds in it. Westerners are notorious for doing that.

“For example, South Americans used to chew on coca leaves, which are extremely nutritious. Europeans got their hands on them, and instead of using them for their nutritious properties, they refined them into cocaine, which is terrible for you. We see the same example with opium, which is a wonderful plant in its natural state for pain relief. We refine these drugs until they are no longer what they were intended to be, and they become dangerous and stupid.

“The Bible talks repeatedly about holy anointing oil, which was comprised of olive oil, frankincense, myrrh, cinnamon, and cannabis. The original translated texts were translated calamus instead of cannabis, but scholars no longer believe this is the correct translation. For one thing, calamus does not grow in the Middle East, so people in Egypt and Israel would not have access to it. They believe now that the correct translation is cannabis. Using cannabis in its original form in holy anointing oil would have had some healing and comforting properties for those anointed. I truly believe God meant what he said when he instructed us in Genesis that he gives us every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed on it for food. I just do not believe his intention was ever for us to isolate properties in these plants and use them as mind-altering drugs.

“I’m incredibly disappointed that Boulder, which is at the forefront of so many health and natural food movements, is idolizing marijuana the way that it is and making it into something it was never intended to be. We should be setting a good example for the rest of the country about how marijuana can be used responsibly and healthfully, and we are not doing that.”

4. Bridget: “I got a call one night from a hospital in Colorado Springs. The doctor said that they had four teenage boys hospitalized because they had eaten poison hemlock while hiking. Poison hemlock, as you may know, is what killed Romeo and Juliet. It looks a lot like wild carrot seed, and that is what the boys thought they were eating. The doctor said they had been able to save two of the boys, but they knew they would lose the other two within hours despite their best efforts. They were calling me as a last resort in the hope that I had some desperate measure they could try. I told them to have each boy drink ten cups of coffee quickly. Both boys survived with no lasting damage. The reason it worked is because poison hemlock slowly shuts down all your organs until nothing is functioning and you die, but coffee is a strong nervous system stimulant and encourages adrenaline production. It can be really hard on your adrenal glands, but if you have eaten poison hemlock and your systems are shutting down, coffee will work as a cardiac stimulant, forcing your organs to start operating again.”

5. Because there was not a whole lot of funny business in herb class, I made sure to take advantage of getting my dosha read by Tom after class. I’m still not 100% sure what a dosha is, but here’s part of mine.

Tom: “Lindsay, I can tell that what you need to know is that you’ve never made a mistake in your life. There are tons of people who live in dark, cold cave in the rainforest. You are one of them. Everyone in the cave is freezing to death or starving to death, and you look out on the rainforest and decide that you are going to try your luck in the rainforest. Everyone in the cave shuns you for this, and tells you that you are stupid for going into the rainforest, and you say, ‘So, my options are to die of cold and starvation in the cave or to head out into the rainforest and be eaten by a wild animal? Well, I guess I am going to take my chances and die the exciting way.’ So, you head out into the rainforest and you are so hungry and you see a mushroom and decide to eat it. The mushroom turns out to be poisonous, and you are sick and seek shelter in the cave. Everyone says, ‘I told you so.’ The next day, when you are feeling better, and so you head out into the rainforest again, and again you need to eat and notice a mushroom. You eat the mushroom, and this is a wonderful mushroom full of psychedelic properties. It gives you the ability to see more clearly, and you notice all the wonderful food that is in the rainforest for you to eat. You go back to the cave and show all the starving people in there all the wonderful food to eat. So, see? When you thought you were making mistakes, you were really making discoveries.” And then, as Tom is holding up a mirror to me after telling me my dosha, he says, “Do you even recognize this person in the mirror? Probably not. You probably don’t even recognize yourself anymore. I don’t recognize you either. People shape shift in front of me all the time.”

6. Bridget serves us tea each evening at her class. The tea Bridget served us in this class was kava kava tea. Halfway through my cup, she announced to drink our tea early and only drink one cup because kava kava is nicknamed “cannabis light.” (I did not get high off it, by the way, and nor did anyone else; I think you have to drink like thirty strong cups of it to be impacted.)

7. Bridget passed out a flyer for an organization called MAPS, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. “We believe that psychedelics when used responsibly can make a beneficial contribution to the individual and society,” the brochure announces.

“An excellent psychedelic drug is called iboga,” Bridget tells us. “It’s only legal in the Bahamas and Amsterdam, but right now several American pharmaceutical companies are doing research on it. The story of iboga I know is about a friend of mine in New York City who was addicted to heroin. He was looking for his next fix, but he couldn’t find any heroin, and finally someone told him to go get iboga. He did, and after ingesting it, he was on a major trip for about 48 hours. When he came off the trip, however, he no longer desired heroin. He was so impressed with how quickly this kicked his addiction that he brought it to ten people he knew who were addicted to heroin, and eight of them kicked the habit after one iboga trip. They are having a lot of success with this in clinical studies in Amsterdam, and I hope to one day go there and learn how to administer it. The drug is potent, and you can cause damage or death if you aren’t properly trained how to administer it to people. People report sitting by a stream of water and watching their ancestors float by. They are able to have conversations with them. This is the most commonly reported hallucination with iboga.

“Like I said, American pharmaceutical companies are studying it, and my prediction is that they will find a way to harness the healing power of iboga with a bunch of synthetic garbage added to a pill. And without all the fun of tripping, of course.”

8. When you are trying to stop an addition, journaling and prayer both help. Another exercise is to look in the mirror when you are indulging in your addiction. For example, one woman who ate a half-dozen donuts every morning came to Bridget, and Bridget told her to help quit her donut addiction, she should sit in front of a mirror and watch herself eat the donut. And she should chew each bite of the donut fifty times. The woman did so, and was able to stop eating donuts. “This works for all addictions,” Bridget tells us. “Shooting heroin, drinking alcohol, drinking coffee. Well, it really doesn’t work with shrooms. Yeah, definitely don’t stare at yourself in a mirror if you’ve ingested psychedelic shrooms.”

9. A journaling exercise to kick addictions is to write a letter to your addiction and have your addiction write back. You can start your letter ‘dear donuts’ or ‘dear blow.’ Whatever it is that you are addicted to.

10. Another suggestion is to designate a sum of money and write an encouraging letter to an organization you can’t stand. Give the money and the letter to a trusted friend or beloved, and tell them that if you have returned to your addiction after six months, they can send the letter and money to the organization, and if not, they can give it back to you. You can burn the letter and spend the money on something fun. An example of a letter would be, “Dear KKK, I am proud of the racial hatred your promote, and I’m sure you are lacking funding for white hoods and burning people at the stake. I don’t want these activities to have to cease for financial reasons, and so I’m sending you $50. Please use it to harass the minority of your choice.”

11. “If it comes to it, you can hold one of those things where everybody gets together and gangs up on the person and threatens them will all sorts of awful things,” Bridget says. “What do they call those?”

“An intervention,” Waldorf says.

“Yes, that’s right,” Bridget says. “An intervention.”

12. And last, Bridget’s farewell on this last class before Halloween, “Hippie Halloween! Toke or treat! I’m kidding, but I had to say it. You have to get your hippie fun when you come to my 60s museum house!”