Snow-do
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, then a short essay, then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner, Wayno. Don’t miss Wayno’s weekly blog post. I highly recommend it.
Here’s the ANSWER KEY to this week’s Sunday comic, above.
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Hello and welcome. Today’s essay is about my interest in psychedelic substances.
I’ve lost track of how many years I’ve been writing these weekly blog posts about my cartoons. The earlier ones are forever lost to changing websites and such so I can’t go back and check. I’m guessing it’s been at least 18 years.
Each week, I approach these short essays with nothing in mind. I look at that week’s Sunday cartoon (above) and see if it inspires something. Whether it does or not, I just start typing with no idea where I’m going and find out where it leads. That explains the rambling incongruity of so many of these posts. This one became about psychedelics.
I’ve been reading a lot of books about the topic recently—their effects, their socio-political-religious history, how they influenced the course of human events, and their therapeutic and spiritual potential—and it’s a rabbit hole that I’ve enjoyed thoroughly. To call it “fascinating” doesn’t even begin to cover it.
After a delay of more than half a century, psychedelics are systematically being accepted by governments as valuable therapeutic tools again, and that’s a blessing we’ll all come to see in the near future if we don’t drive our species to extinction first. It was an enormous mistake—perhaps a fatal one—to summarily outlaw research on these substances back in the sixties, 54 years ago tomorrow, in fact.
Now here’s something interesting about psychedelics. I had no intention of writing about the topic this morning, but as I began that last paragraph, I decided to look up the year they were outlawed in the USA by the U.S. federal government. To my mild surprise, the exact date was 54 years ago tomorrow! I say “mild” surprise because this kind of coincidence is absurdly common in the world of psychedelics. Humans are not the only form of higher intelligence. Hallucinogens (or the dimension or beings that use them to communicate with us) know what we’re doing.
You may think that’s crazy and that’s fine. My limited experience with psychedelics has taught me how little that matters. I strongly suspect that the benefits of psychedelics will be like climate change; there will come a time sooner than later when only a stubborn fool or a complete moron will continue to deny the evidence.
To be clear, historically, I’m not a big drug taker. I use cannabis (not a hallucinogen) on a daily basis, but I came to it very late in life because of a medical situation, and have taken psychedelic drugs only a small handful of times in my life, mostly in the past five years. And I’ve never taken them twice in a year’s time. But very small exposure under the right circumstances is all you need to be convinced of their life-changing and sometimes life-saving capabilities.
My graphic novel is called Peyote Cowboy but I’d not begun experimenting with psychedelics when I wrote and titled it. To this day, I’ve still not taken a trip with peyote. But in some ways, it was my experience with writing Peyote Cowboy that led me to look into them.
The story began coming to me while I was working on Bizarro cartoons some years ago. Completely sober, sitting at my desk in the middle of a weekday afternoon, the story began flooding my mental space like a horde of Walmart shoppers on Black Friday. Over time, I became convinced I was not writing the story, I was only typing it. The complete tale of how it came to me is too long to share here but the experience led me to look further into mystical experiences and some years later, here I am.
I’m dead serious when I say that substances like psilocybin (mushrooms), LSD, DMT, and MDMA may save the world, and may save humanity from itself regarding both climate change and growing authoritarianism. I don’t recommend you run out and grab a 12-pack of magic mushrooms and start tripping, but I do recommend you look into the science behind and the recent studies done on these mostly naturally-occurring drugs. A great place to start is by watching the documentaries or reading the books listed below.
Documentaries:
Fantastic Fungi (Netflix, or here)
Nova: Psychedelics as Medicine (PBS, or here)
How to Change Your Mind (Netflix)
Books:
How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman, M.D.
The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman, M.D.
By no means is this a complete list! If you have favorite books or documentaries on this topic that you’d like to share, please do so in the comments.
Time now to enjoy the non-psychedelic-assisted Bizarro cartoons Wayno devised for us this week…
C’mon. Nobody forgets $500 worth of groceries.
She might just be after the alcohol in his blood.
Pillars of the cater world getting jiggy with it.
It breaks my heart to see them ruin a cool van like that.
I love the thematic Secret Symbols.
Meanwhile, who’s minding the rock?
That signals the end of our cartoon symposium, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for sticking around until the togas cooled. If you like that we offer our work free of charge with no ads or clickbait, please consider helping us keep it that way by visiting one of the links below. We’ll thank you mightily.
Until next post, next time you just don’t feel like yourself, try feeling like someone else.
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