800 Milligrams

inks on found index card divider / 2008

"Remedy" is the theme for this week on Illustration Friday.  There really were a lot of works to pick from today to suit this posting.  I grew up and live in a society with a deep-rooted drug culture.  Being a midnight toker, I am often inspired by this facet of our carnival of life through cognitively altering my consciousness via the few relatively safe substances I'm willing to use.  These experiences and the drugs themselves do surface in my work from time to time.

There is a remedy for every malady in the circus we call America- and you can have them all.  For 40 years, our country has waged a world-wide War on Drugs, hemorrhaging over $1,000,000,000,000 (yes- that's trillion) in a grossly failed attempt to stop drug trafficking.  All of this money, time, resources, and human life were squandered on battling the importation of natural substances such as cocaine and marijuana.  How much of that money was spent of drug education and drug treatment?  A very small fraction- we got Just Say No and D.A.R.E.

The truly frightening statistics with drug-related deaths and illnesses aren't found in the shady world of street trafficking, but right in front of our faces.  We are exposed on a daily basis to a LEGAL drug industry which makes far more money than the ILLEGAL one with Big Business and their pharmaceuticals. While 10,000 people die from Illegal Drug Use per year in our country, a whopping 100,000 die from legal prescription drugs which were pushed by Doctors, Television Ads, Clinics and anyone else getting their pocket lined by Drug companies.  These manufacturers hire lobbyists to corrupt Washington AND the FDA into not holding them accountable for these preventative deaths.  Pharmaceuticals are the #1 cause of death in the United States annually and are statistically 10x more lethal than all street drugs combined.

An American is arrested every 30 seconds for violating Marijuana laws.  $500 is spent by our government EVERY second to fight such illegal drugs.  Marijuana has NEVER killed a single person throughout thousands of years of medicinal, holistic, and cognitive use.  The Top 20 Big Pharma drug manufacturers average nearly $25 Billion in revenue EACH...and caused 1 MILLION deaths in the past decade.

Illustration Friday: Fruit of the Earth

Inks on Paper / 2005

"Cultivate" is the theme for Illustration Friday this week.  Being one of the breadbaskets of the world, we work our land to produce a variety of different foods in our country to supply not only our own needs but other areas of the world as well.  Of all the works I have involving food, I found the most interesting to be that of the magic mushroom in this early illustration from 2005 which is included in my book, Dip and Trip .45.

Dating back as far as we know of human history, man has ingested certain natural plants for a deeper purpose than their nutritional value.  Plants we label with stigmatic names like narcotics and drugs, early cultures used  in religious ceremonies and spiritual quests.  Such substances include coca leaves, peyote, marijuana, and psilocybin mushrooms. There are over 190 species of mushrooms on our planet which can be ingested and induce a state of hallucination.  Shamanic uses of mushrooms have been documented to date back as far as a million years (discovered in ancient African cave art.)  The magic mushroom is a unique drug in the facet that it doesn't cause a buzz or intoxication to the user.  Psilocybin lifts the curtain on reality to expose what's been there the entire time and returns it's host to the wonderment of childhood when everything was new and interesting.  This unique drug experience really sobers one up to reality as opposed to drawing them away from it.

Educate yourself before you seek out and experiment with any drug.  Click HERE for a plethora of information on Magic Mushrooms from The Vaults of Erowid.

It is your right to choose to alter your consciousness through substances such as psilocybin.  Visit The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics for more informational material on drug use and freedom of thought.

(Click here to see all my Illustration Friday weekly entries)

Illustration Friday: Bad Pig, No Donut

Inks on Bristol / 2009

"Warning" is the theme for this week's Illustration Friday entries- something I wish more coppers would do in our police state.  In a capitalist country, nothing is free and everyone has a quota including our police forces town to town and state to state.  "I'll let you off with a warning," is a phrase which has practically disappeared over the past couple of decades.  It's all about the money, kids.  Lawyers, court fees, fines, probation fees, even racking up a daily tab by being imprisoned by the state are all forms of government fund raising. 

My illustration for this week is "Bad Pig, No Donut," which comes from a small series I made for the 2009 Southern Low Brow Extravaganza show [click here for more about the show.]

The US has incarcerated over 1/2 Million more of it's citizens every decade since 1980 and the rolling out of the War on Drugs.

Happy 100th Gipper!

"Cold War Hollywood" inks on bristol / 2009

Today marks the 100th birthday of former President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.


In the early 1940's, Reagan (then an actor and Democrat) became a board member and eventually president of the Screen Actors Guild where he began his life-long mission to rid the world of Communist scum.  In the heat of the "red scare" later that decade, he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee with a vehement defense of Democracy and denouncement of all things Socialist and Communist.  As an act of his own patriotism, Reagan even served as a Hollywood informant for the FBI, providing them with names of actors whom he believed to be Communist sympathizers.  In effect he helped author the infamous Hollywood Blacklist.  


Reagan's film and television career began it's decline in the late 1950's.  He flipped sides of the isle in the 60's after endorsing Eisenhower and then Nixon for their presidential bids.  He famously stated that "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The party left me."  After giving his famous, "Time for Choosing" speech in 1964 in support of Barry Goldwater's presidential run where he stressed the importance of limiting the government's role in the economy, Reagan earned the admiration of much of the public as a well-spoken political figure.  This catapulted him into the limelight for which he was nominated and elected Governor of California in 1967 and served as such for eight years.  In 1976, he attempted to dethrone incumbent candidate Gerald Ford for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party.  In 1980, he succeeded in gaining his party's support and was elected President, also serving in office at the White House for eight years.


Reagan never lost sight of his hatred for all things Communist.  In 1982, he said, "the forward march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history."  One year later in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, he called the USSR an "evil empire," coining a phrase which has stood to this day.  He also stated, "Communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written." Over the next few years, he would go on to fund anti-communist efforts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  He also deployed the CIA to train and arm groups of militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan to help fight off occupying Soviet troops.  This Covert Action program is credited for ending the Soviet occupation of the Middle East and at the same time creating the resistance movements which we ironically still fight and lose American soldiers' lives and limbs to on a daily basis today in the midst of our own 10 year occupation of Middle Eastern countries. With the Revolutions of 1989, communism fell in many European countries and Russia followed suit in 1991, just a couple of years after Reagan's presidency.  


Another staple of the Reagan Years (and the inspiration behind an element in my illustration) was his contribution to the War on Drugs (began by Nixon in 1971, who The Gipp supported.)  In 1986, he kicked the program into high gear by signing a $1.7 Billion drug enforcement bill, which also created a mandatory minimum sentence for drug charges.  This bill led to the overcrowding of American prisons and was criticized for creating racial disparities among inmate populations..  Drug trafficking in America and street sales only increased along with the inmate tolls nation-wide.  Nancy Reagan championed her husband's effort by creating the Just Say No campaign to attempt to educate America's youth about the dangers of experimenting with narcotics.  She appeared everywhere from Dynasty to Diff'rent Strokes to Good Morning America to music videos on MTV to campaign her cause.  In the end, a catch phrase had as insignificant of an effect on drug use as throwing money at the "problem."


During his terms as President, Reagan quadrupled the national debt while seeing through a peaceful end to the Cold War (mainly due to the eventual collapse of the USSR, not from "winning" the Cold War.)  He created "Reaganomics," changing tax brackets and policies nearly every year of his presidency.  The American taxpayer was footed with the bill to fund a bulging defense budget and combat drug use among our youth.  We created the largest weapons arsenal in human history and then signed a bill to curb those numbers and destroy a portion of the weapons we paid to manufacture.  All of this, after building a career around the idea of limiting the government's role in our finances and economy.  Reagan passed away on June 5, 2004 at his home in California.  His body was moved to Washington D.C. where nearly 105,000 people filed through his viewing. 

My portrait, "Cold War Hollywood" is available in my Print Shop! 

And now for the star-studded music video your tax dollars from the mid-80's paid for....