The war on drugs will be seen as the Dark Ages of human medical and scientific development. Illustration: Edd Aragon

The legislation leaves it up to the server. But governments are never to be trusted. When US president Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act and declared "war on drugs", he started another small war, one that could, by definition, never be just one. It was the victory of ignorance over experience, ignorance of nature's abundance over the experience of the world's aboriginal populations. In one schedule, countries followed Nixon's War and criminalised most psychedelics, even for research purposes. The aboriginal and tribal experiences of South Americans, native Americans and Mexicans were treated like the false gods and idols in the Bible.

Under Nixonian laws, the humble pot plant was treated with the same indignity as the poppy plant. Mushrooms were toadstools all. Everything that grows or begins in a natural environment, that makes you feel good or better, is evil. Everything but alcohol and tobacco, which governments and corporations control. It was only when the lungs of our parents and grandparents collapsed and died, when their livers and other organs gave up their alcoholic ghosts, did we realise that governments and corporations may not have our best interests at heart.

It is no accident that the reverse tsunami of pot decriminalisation is what growth industry ethical investors want to put their money into. Cannabis saved my brother's life. It was illegal for him to eat hash cookies but when he was 40 kilograms, skinny as a rake, white as his bedsheets, did someone in the gay medical community prescribe him cannabis which gave him an appetite. Despite the rages of AIDS throughout every fibre of his body, only then did he slowly, gram by gram, come back to life.

The war on drugs will be seen as the Dark Ages of human medical and scientific development. If you want the truth from your government, look the opposite way to where they are pointing. What a tragic fiasco the war on narcotics turned out to be for Mexicans and other South American countries. Beheadings are as common in rural Mexico as they are in the Middle East; the common denominator is America's war on drugs and terror. A war that starts with an invasion does not appear to be a good idea. A blanket ban on herbs and psychedelics that indigenous peoples had been using for thousands of years does not sound like a good idea.