00 - Third Edition Update.htm

Key to Cover Photos:

1. cross-section of yage vine; 2. psilocybin mushrooms; 3. morning glory; 4. sinsemilla marijuana flower tops; 5. peyote cactus blossom; 6. Tabernanth iboga roots; 7, Amanita muscaria mushroom.

Rave Reviews of Psychedelics Encyclopedia

"Peter Stafford has an elephant's memory for what happened to Public Consciousness."

- Allen Ginsberg

"A delightful Rabelaisian social history of psychedelics in America."

- Whole Earth Review

"A look at the history, pharmacology, and effects of these drugs, based upon ... literature, folklore, and the author's personal experiences." -Library Journal

"Fascinating .. , consumer-oriented exposition details history, botany, synthesis, and use of LSD, pot, cactus, mushrooms, street, and ceremonial drugs popular in the '60s."

- American Library Association, Booklist

"A wealth of information on each of these mind-altering substances. Even those who disagree will find it an important resource."

- Drug Survival News

'There's no end to the great new things you'll learn about dope in Psychedelics Encyclopedia ,.. authoritative."

- High Times Magazine

"A fine reference book, always engaging and easy to read .. .1 have no hesitation in recommending it as a source of interesting and reliable information."

- Andrew Weil, M.D., co-author of From Chocolate to Morphine

"Stafford's Psychedelics Encyclopedia, clear and straightforward, describes the substances which have done much to alter consciousness and so introduce vast numbers of youth, along with a few of their elders, to the mystical depths of their psyches."

- The New Review of Books and Religion

"Psychedelics are the royal road to the unconscious, and I would advise anyone interested in these matters to read Peter Stafford's Psychedelics Encyclopedia - which will have to do until better brains come along."

- Timothy Leary, co-author of The Psychedelic Experience

"Stafford evaluates the psychedelic potential of a number of common and not so common drugs. The book is very well researched and the information is not tinged with moral admonitions or phony health scare tactics. You will be better informed if you read this book."

- Harvest Magazine

in- 2

Rave Reviews of Psychedelics Encyclopedia

"A wealth of information about one of the most controversial issues of modem times. It is written with clarity that will be appreciated by the general public, and so rich in content that even professionals in the field will find it a valuable source of data."

- Dr. Stanislav Grof, author of LSD Psychotherapy

"I strongly recommend this book to everyone with an interest in the human mind and its potential, as well as. .. culture, politics and the arts.

- Robert Masters, author of The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience

"The book has very pretty pictures of plants in it and contains some fascinating ethnographic and anthropological data."

- Los Angeles Touch

"If you were alive in the 60's, you may be wondering why you are now .. . Within the pages of this outrageously researched book, you may find some of the answers."

- William Burroughs, Jr., author of Speed

"I think it will become a landmark in the field-" -John Beresford, psychedelic pioneer

" Stafford has performed an immense service to the adept and novice alike ... No other single volume packs as much drug information."

- The Advocate

"If you were ever interested in the history of psychedelic drugs, this is your real chance to become an overnight scholar in this selected field."

- SSC Booknews

"Very well organized and fascinating to read ail the way through."

- Paul Williams, author of Das Energy

"Stafford writes with authority and charm, an unbeatable blend."

- Chester Anderson, author of The Butterfly Kid

"Psychedelics Encyclopedia by Peter Stafford offers the most thorough history to date of the modern-day use of psychedelic drugs. LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, cannabis, and a host of lesser-known and exotic psychotropic agents are discussed in this entertaining survey."

- New Age journal

"One of the most instructive, comprehensive surveys ... a sane, reasoned reference work in a controversial area where politics and criminal penalties have kept research and public knowledge at a minimum."

PSYCHEDELICS ENCYCLOPEDIA

Third Expanded Edition

by Peter Stafford

Technical editor Jeremy Bigwood

Ronin Publishing, Inc. Box 1035 Berkeley CA 94701

Psychedelics Encyclopedia, Third Expanded Edition

ISBN 0-914171-51-8

Published by Ronin Publishing, Inc.

Box 1035, Berkeley, CA 94701

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing by the publisher.

Editors; Sebastian Orfali, Dan Joy, Jeremy Bigwood, Karl Stull,

Nona Sanford, Bruce Eisner, Aiden Kelley, Ginger Ashworth Illustration consultants: Bob Barker, Michael Horowits, Michael Aldrich Molecular diagrams: Alexander Shulgin, Marlyn Amann Design and layout: Sebastian Orfali, Flack Studios, Michael Bass Cover design: Norman Mayell, Generic Typography

This book is derived from experiences and observations of

many dear friends. Extra special thanks to:

Barry Crombe, Robert Mashkin, Kim and Christopher Workdelay, Christopher Beaumont, R.U. Sirius, Deborah Robinson, Jeremy Tarcher,

Ed Rosenthal, Michael Stafford, Tom and Linda Lyttle, Joseph Anthony Helvink, Chuck Sylva, Bethezda Cervantes,

Patric Michael Slattery, Dr. Demento, VDT,

Bonnie Golightly, Richard Evans Schultes, Kat McKenna,

Michael Horowitz, Timothy Leary, the Santa Cruz Express,

Michael Starks, Chester Anderson, Illis Casteel, R. Gorden Wasson,

Stanislav Grof, Albert Hofmann, Sigrid Radulovic, Paul Williams,

David Luttrell, Michael Aldrich, John Beresford, Humphry Osmond,

Robert Connell Clarke, Sam Selgnij, Jonathan Ott, Sebastian Orfali,

Derek Gallagher, Oscar Janiger, John Patterson, Wayne and Margaret,

Robert Forte, Michael Shields, Roland Greenes, Dennis Williams,

Wrecks Rovang, Rojelio Alcorcha, Will Penna.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Stafford, Peter Psychedelics Encyclopedia. Bibliography: p. 407. Includes index.

1. Hallucinogenic drugs. 2. Drugs-Physiological effect. 3. Drug abuse-United States-History. 4. Drugs-Psychological aspects. I. Title HV5822.H25S74 1982 362.Z93 82-10482

Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 Third Expanded Edition

To Sasha, for future reference

Acknowledgements

The author has made every effort to trace the ownership of all copyright and quoted material presented. In the event of any question arising as to the use of a selection, he offers his apologies for any errors or omissions that may inadvertently have occurred, and will be pleased to make the necessary corrections in future editions of this book.

Acknowledgment and thanks are due the following authors, agents, photographers, illustrators, and publishers for permission to use their materials: Crawdaddy! Lou Watts Psychedelic Review

Harlan Reiders Claudio Naranjo Journal of Psychedelic Drugs Jack Call PharmChem Berkeley Bonaparte

NORML Carmen He listen Allen Ginsberg

R. Cobb David Hoye Steve Gladstone

B. Madden Arthur Brack Humphry Osmond

Frank Siteman Jonathan Oil Mel Frank And/Or Press Ed Rosenthal Michael Horowitz Paul Stamets Ronin Publishing Journal of Psychoactive Drugs

Burns &MacEachern,Ltd.,Psychfd^icEcstasy, ©!%7byW. Marshall&G.W.Taylor

His Highness, Art Kleps, Chief Boo Hoo, The Neo-American Church

"Pot Could Save His Sight" reprinted with permission from The National Observer,

Michael Valentine Smith, Psychedelic Chemistry, © Rip Off Press 1973 United Native Americans and the Print Mint Church of the Tree of Life The Healing journey: New Approaches to Consciousness, E 1973 Claudio Naranjo,

Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House,

Publishers, Inc., New York. Reprinted by permission of

Praeger Publishers, Inc., a Division of Holt, Rinehart and Winston Drugs From AtoZ,© 1974 Richard Lingemann, Used by permission of

McGraw-Hill Book Co. Vera Rubin and Lambros Comitas, Gatija in Jamaica,

Harvard University, Oxford St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138 R.E.L. Masters and Jean Houston, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience.

By permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston

Richard Heffern, Secrets of the Mind-Altering Plants of Mexico, Pyramid Books Marlene Dobkin de Rios, Visionary Vine

Ginsberg and Burroughs, the YAGE letters, City Lights Books Grieve, A Modern Herbal

D. Wallechinski, S. Salyer & M. Shedlin, Laughing Gas

Portions of the material prepared by Dan Joy for this book were adapted from articles by him originally appearing in High Times Magazine.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD HI -10

by Dr. Andrew Weil

Introduction to the First Edition III - 13

by Dr. John Beresford

Psychedelic Renaissance III - 21

by Dan Joy

Psychedelic Renaissance, III-21. Profiles, III - 26 . Pharmacology, III - 39. Themes and Trends, III - 44. Notes on Ketamine, III - 54. Organizations and Publications, III - 56.

MDMA Update III - 61

by Peter Stafford

MDMA's Historic Advance, III-61. Chemistry, III - 65. Physical Effects, III - 67. Mental Effects, III - 71. Forms, Sources and Preparation, III - 85.

Psychedelic Obituaries HI - 87

Index to new material in the Third Edition, HI - 88

PREVIEW 1

Cultural Context, page 1. Origin of the World Psychedelic, 4. Other Terms Proposed, 7. Varieties of "Psychedelics," 9. What are the Common Effects?, 11. What are the Benefits to Humanity?, 17. Countercultural Influences, 19. Questions about Purity and Other Complications, 21. Use and Misuse, 25. Dealing with Difficulties, 26. Drawbacks of Psychedelic Usage, 30. Future Directions, 31.

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

The LSD Family (the archetype) 34-101

History, 35-65. Chemistry, 66-68. Physical Effects, 68-74. Mental Effects, 74-89. Botanical Sources of Lysergic Acid Amides, 89-99. Forms and Preparations, 99-101.

CHAPTER TWO

Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro 102-155

History, 103-122. Botany, 122-130. Chemistry, 130-133. Physical Effects, 133-137. Mental Effects, 137-153. Forms and Preparations, 153-155.

CHAPTER THREE

Marijuana and Hashish 156-221

History, 157-178. Botany, 179-185. Chemistry, 185-188. Physical Effects, 188-200. Mental Effects, 200-208. Forms and

Preparations, 208-221.

CHAPTER FOUR

Psilocybian Mushrooms 224-279

History, 225-248. Botany, 248-262. Chemistry, 262-264. Physical Effects, 265-266. Mental Effects, 266-279. Forms and Preparations, 279.

CHAPTER FIVE

Nutmeg and MDA 280-307

History, 281-292. Chemistry, 292-295. Physical Effects, 295-297. Mental Effects, 297-306. Forms and Preparations, 306.

CHAPTER SIX

DMT, DET, DPT and Other Short-Acting Tryptamines 308-331

History, 309-316. Botany, 316-319. Chemistry, 319-320. Physical Effects, 320-325. Mental Effects, 325-330. Forms and Preparations, 330-331.

Table of Contents

HI- 9

CHAPTER SEVEN

Ayahuasca, Yage and Harmaline 332-357

History, 333-339. Botany, 339-343. Chemistry, 343-345, Physical Effects, 345-348. Mental Effects, 348-355. Forms and Preparations, 356-357.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Iboga and Ibogaine 358-367

History, 359-361. Botany, 361. Chemistry, 361-362. Physical Effects, 362-363. Mental Effects, 363-366. Forms and Preparations, 367.

CHAPTER NINE

Fly Agaric, Panther Caps and "Soma" 368-383

History, 369-374. Botany, 374-377. Chemistry, 378. Physical Effects, 379. Mental Effects, 379-383.

CHAPTER TEN

Contrasting Profiles, 384-399

Belladonna-like Substances, 385-388. Yohimbe, 388. Kava-Kava, 388-392. Ketamine, 392-395. Nitrous Oxide, 395-399.

Appendices

Notes on Purity Tests and Precursors, 401

Thoughts on Increasing Intelligence (by Francis Jeffrey), 405

Other Literature, 407

Index to the Second Edition Text, 409

Foreword

by Andrew Weil, M.D.

When Peter Stafford's Psychedelic Encyclopedia first appeared in 1977, it was a major addition to the literature on an important group of drugs affecting the mind. It provided detailed and straightforward accounts of LSD, mescaline, marijuana, and a host of other chemicals and plants. Stafford's information was accurate, balanced and uncontaminated by polemic. Clearly, he was sympathetic to intelligent experimentation with these agents, and, clearly, he was experienced with them personally, but his purpose was to present a logical selection of facts rather than to push his own views.

This new edition of the book, with its many revisions, additions and refinements, is a welcome appearance. Psychedelic* Encyclopedia should be in the collection of everyone interested in psychoactive drugs, in the experiences they can release, and in the controversies they have stirred in science, the media, government and the public at large. This is a fine reference book, always engaging and easy to read.

Stafford discusses a number of substances I do not consider psychedelics. In my view, the true psychedelics are the indoles (LSD, psilocybin, the tryptamines, harmaline, etc.) and the phenethylamines (mescaline, MDA, DOM, etc.). These drugs and the plants they come from constitute a distinct pharmacological group, all of which stimulate the central and sympathetic nervous systems and all of which affect serotonin or dopamine pathways (or both) in the brain. These drugs are also distinguished by great medical safety, particularly the indoles. They do not kill, injure or produce any serious physical toxicity even in large overdoses or chronic use over lifetimes. Despite much desire and activity on the part of some scientists, reporters and governmental agencies to come up with damning evidence of harm, the true psychedelics still look like the safest drugs known to medicine.

I refer to medical safety only. There are dangers of psychedelic plants and chemicals having to do with acute psychological toxicity— that is, bad trips. These reactions are more the products of set and setting than of pharmacology. Their probability of occurrence can be reduced to a minimum by careful attention to the purity of the substances, dosage, time and place of use, and availability of experienced guides. Employed intelligently, they are not only safe but sometimes highly beneficial, since they have the potential to produce dramatic cures of both mental and physical

Foreword by Andrew Weil

in- 11

problems as well as to provide experiences of great personal value to some persons. Finally, the abuse potential of the true psychedelics is quite low. They are almost never associated with dependence, and very few people use them in destructive ways. Stafford explains them fully and gives a good description of their positive potential.

The other drugs he includes are generally more toxic, less useful to most people, and more easily abused. Marijuana is somewhat more irritating than LSD or mescaline, capable of causing respiratory problems in those who smoke it excessively. I have yet to see good evidence of other ill effects on the body, but I have seen no end of cases of marijuana dependence. Compared to the true psychedelics, pot is insidious in lending itself to regular and frequent use, a pattern that easily turns into an unproductive and stubborn habit, providing few of the interesting effects that novice smokers experience.

The belladonna alkaloids are much more toxic than the indoles and phenethylamines. Furthermore, they are just plain dangerous, and the experiences they give are, at best, difficult to integrate with ordinary consciousness. Kava-kava seems to me more like alcohol than like the psychedelics, as does nitrous oxide, a general anesthetic with similar depressant qualities. PCP and ketamine are pharmacological curiosities, not related to other recreational drugs. Many users like the "dissociative"' states they provide, but few find them truly psychedelic. Their toxicity and abuse potential are significant.

Yet all of these drugs can be mind-manifesting for some individuals. That is the literal meaning of "psychedelic," and I suppose Peter Stafford has included them for that reason. Certainly, marijuana deserves a place here, both because it is commonly mind expanding for those who first try it or are new to it or who use it only infrequently, and also because it moves in the same circles as the true psychedelics.

I know that Stafford is most interested in the indoles and phenethylamines. He devotes much more space and attention to them than to the others and rightly makes them the focus of his encyclopedia. Like me, he finds them totally fascinating from many different perspectives, including those of botany, chemistry, psychology, anthropology, sociology, religion, politics and the law. More than most substances in our world, psychedelics touch on many vital areas of human life and so can teach us much about ourselves, whether we use them or not, promote them or crusade against them, study them or just like to read about them.

I am pleased to have a chance to write the foreword to this new edition of Psychedelics Encyclopedia. It is a good book. I have no hesitation m recommending it as a source of interesting and reliable information.

-Andrew Weil, M.D.

Big Sur, California

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Part of the problem may lie in the fact that it seems improbable if not impossible that anyone can go through this kind of thing without turning into a terrorized blob of babbling jelly. How can anyone stand it— or even enjoy it if the experience is as overwhelming and convincing as we say it is? The inexperienced reader, however sympathetic he was to start out with, begins to suspect either exaggeration or some kind of self-protective pose of bravado on the part of the author, and starts picking the thing apart rather than granting that willing suspension of disbelief which is so necessary if you want to really find out what it feels like to be someone else or to

understand an alien philosophy.

— Art Kleps

Introduction to First Edition

by John Beresford, M.D.

Peter Stafford has delved into the literature on psychedelic substances and produced an account of the properties attributed to them, how they are prepared and used, and the shifting social attitudes that have been displayed towards them over the past half-century. He has drawn as well on his personal experiences with the agents he discusses and the experiences of people he has known and talked to. The result of this twin-pronged attack on the most perplexing intellectual problem and the most pervasive moral problem of the day— intellectual because of the difficulty in framing an adequate theory of the effect of psychedelic substances, moral because of their widespread use in contravention of the law— is a book which stands in a class by itself.

Psychedelics Encyclopedia does not solve any intellectual or moral problem.but it does something else. It goes a long way to wards establishing what I think will be a dominant mode of looking at the effect of drugs like LSD and mescaline and even marijuana. It does so by virtue of the equal importance it attaches to the oral and the literary sources of information and the equal stress it puts on observation and experience. On this account I think it will become a landmark in the field.

The literature on these substances occupies a peculiar and seldom-examined place in the record of humanity's search for knowledge. To begin with, it is not clear exactly what it is about. To say it is about the effect of a class of drugs called "psychedelic" implies that what LSD and marijuana, for example, have in common has been defined, which is not true. Humphry Osmond coined "psychedelic" as a better way of saying what "hallucinogenic" and "psychotomimetic" had been used to say before. Unfortunately, the term "mind-manifesting" is at least as confusing as "hallucination" and "psychosis" are, to say nothing of a state which supposedly mimics psychosis. Calling something "psychedelic" merely suggests a similarity perceived by people who experience the effect of first one psychedelic drug and then another. That is a rather loose unifying principle. Then there is the literature's unusual scope. It embraces parts of neurochemistry, psychology, religion, clinical medicine, botany, and a variety of other topics which it has trouble housing under one roof-

The language it is written in can be inspiring or debased. Just who an expert is hard to tell. Some of the most aberrant thinking has been

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Introduction to the First Edition

III- 15

expressed in academic journals of the highest quality, and some of the sanest and most lucid in the underground street rags of the '60s. In fact, the scientific credentials of an author tend to ensure that a large proportion of what he or she writes will consist of nonsense— a factor contributing to the pall of disrespect which fell over science in the '60s. Again, the literature is notorious for the contradictions it contains. Hardly anything has been stated in it which has not been somewhere flatly contradicted. So it is no wonder that the literature and with it the psychedelic substances themselves have gained an unsavory reputation in academic circles and that by and large academic research with them has got nowhere, while startling findings are described by off-beat and fringe investigators. It is unnecessary to elaborate on the anomalous state of the literature. I have dwelt on it at some length in case Peter's book is criticized for being unscientific. Actually, given the current state of the literature, it is about as scientific as a book on psychedelic compounds can be at the present time.

This brings up a second difficulty. With few exceptions— Jean Houston is an outstanding one— the best research and the best writing in the field have been done by people who have more than once exposed themselves to the effect of the agents they are dealing with. This introduces a novel principle into pharmacology, i.e. that understanding the effect of the psychedelic class of drugs is conditional on personal experience with them. Naturally, it has been vigorously contested. A doctor does not need to experience the effect of insulin to understand and treat diabetes. A judge does not need to have been a plaintiff or a defendant to hand down a good judgement. But a special case is made out for psychedelics.

The argument goes approximately as follows. One way of explaining the effect of LSD or psilocybin is that the person who experiences it gains access to a range of information not normally available to him. The inrush of new knowledge so enhances his state of consciousness that his perception of people and objects in the world is no longer the same. The further outcome is a shift in his world-view, so that even after the normal conscious state has been restored the frame of reference he used to regard things in no longer seems comfortable or right. A new frame of reference has been acquired which does feel right, because it includes the old view-point within the new, more comprehensive one.

Along this line of reasoning, a dispute between two investigators, one who has and one who has not personally encountered the effect of such a drug, soon makes the latter feel irritated and leads him to dismiss the statements of the "experienced" investigator as examples of woolly thinking. He may even go further and dub the other as a victim of bra in-washing, someone whose power of thinking critically has been injured by drug-use— this was the "toxic psychosis" thesis popular with psychiatrists in the early '60s. At the same time, the LSD or psilocybin-experienced investigator can

point to limitations in the observations of the inexperienced and in the conclusions he inevitably draws from them. I leave it to the reader to decide how sensible this argument is. My own view is that while the idea that you have to take a psychedelic drug to come to grips with its effect may sound far-fetched, there are solid grounds for conceding it, so that the credibility of a writer like Peter is enhanced by his wide experience with psychedelics, and definitely not lessened.

What else adds to this book's soundness? One attraction for me is the historical thread running through it. More than other writers, Peter saw the importance of recording the events that took place in the early days. No one else would do the job, so Peter took it on himself, as early as 1960, preserving anything in print, documenting events, taping interviews, and corresponding with anyone who would write back (the Stafford Collection is deposited in the library of Columbia University). Marijuana use was common in 1960, but few people had much as heard of LSD-25, as it was referred to then.

Well before I960 centers of LSD-activity were springing up everywhere. Oscar Janiger gave sessions in little cubicles in his office in Los Angeles. In Menlo Park Myron Stolaroff and his colleagues gave sessions under the grandiloquently yet after all aptly-named "International Institute for Advanced Studies." By 1963, 500 sessions using high-dose LSD had been completed and people were arriving at the doors of the center from all over the continent. In Regina Duncan Blewett and Nick Chwelos elucidated the course of the normal LSD session in their unjustly-neglected and now lost masterpiece "A Handbook for the Use of LSD in Psychotherapy." Such cases of research— a list is bound to be invidious— began to come to the attention of people tuned in to their significance and Peter sooner or later got to hear about them. A number of Peter's historical references are original in the sense that they are recollections of events he participated in or people or places he encountered.

I met Peter in New York near the end of 1966, when he was writing his first book on LSD with Bonnie Golightly. Since 1961 Chuck Bick had been the city's chief supplier. Chuck's customers included bankers, lawyers, doctors, teaching staff from New York and Columbia Universities, writers, musicians, painters, playboys, clergymen, prostitutes— as he related it the list seemed endless, though the number of purchasers was small. His method of obtaining LSD was simple. When stock ran low, Chuck phoned Sandoz in New Jersey and told the doctor there who handled LSD that this Was Dr. Bick with a request for an additional vial of 10 milligrams, and could his assistant stop by in the afternoon to pick it up? Sheila, Chuck's wife, drove over to the plant and collected it. Chuck had no problem getting LSD, and, as far as I could tell, his people had no trouble taking it. Through a friend of Chuck's I learned of the existence of a "mad Harvard professor"

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Introduction to the First Edition

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who would hang around Village bars on weekends and empty pocketfuls of psilocybin tablets on the counter with a cheery, " Here, try these!" Eric Loeb ran a store with an interesting window display on East 9th Street where four days a week he sold— openly— peyote buds shipped in from Arizona, Hoffmann-La Roche mescaline and Light & Co. harmaline and ibogaine. No one heard of Eric's customers getting into trouble either. Tony Cox, still a painter and not yet married to Yoko Ono, pioneered in the use of mescaline for draft-evasion. 400 milligrams taken before his own preinduction physical prompted an angry outburst as an orderly took a stab at his arm to draw blood. Tony roared, "What the fuck do you think you are doing?" and was led into the presence of a psychiatrist with whom he engaged in a protracted discussion of the merits of the New York school of abstract expressionist painting, all the while naked. Tony got his 4F classification, presumably on grounds of schizophrenia, and went on to counsel others liable to military service, using the same approach.

When 1 met Peter, he did not know these people, but we discovered that we knew people who knew each other, and a circle of friendships was formed with links continuing down to the present day. Considering how disturbing the whole question of LSD was to become, I find it instructive to recall how tranquil it was then. The expected attitude was casual and vaguely positive. LSD was looked on as a benign substance with a number of not-so-well-explored potential applications. The polemics which succeeded the Harvard furor in 1963 and 1964 were definitely absent.

1963 was the turning point. By mid-1963, Timothy Leary had emerged from obscurity and was about to turn the philanthropic idealism of the time into a scandalous debacle. Tim had a lot of good ideas— he was incapable of turning off the stream— which he was impatient to see work. There were prisoner projects, divinity student projects, projects for radicalizing the Psychology Department, for starting a journal, for flooding the world with propaganda extolling the power of the love pill. Bolstering Tim's fierce determination was his belief in his ability to create a political force which would overhaul the composition of the government of the United States. He would have accomplished this aim when enough people had experienced the effect of LSD and undergone the change of conscious state which would permanently affect their outlook for the better— prejudice giving way to brotherly concern, destructive ego trips to coexistence.

Tim's urgent priority was therefore to arrange for as many people to take LSD as possible. His sensibility was basically religious, though the direction he moved in was political. Tim was out to change the State, his strategy being confrontation and his weapon a chemical substance which he called a sacrament. He vowed that in ten years a million Americans would win "internal freedom" (the Fifth Freedom, freedom to control one's central nervous system).

But the chemical insurrection he so boldly planned produced an unavoidable reaction. Each escalation organized by Tim and the thousands, even millions, who eventually sympathized with him was faced with an equal and opposite response by the conservative forces in the country who watched what he was doing with mounting alarm. The more Tim praised LSD, the more they trounced it. Tim said it saved souls. They said it promoted suicide and murder.

A succession of LSD-inspired confrontations and counter-confrontations is discernable in the history of the '60s and early '70s. Jack Kennedy was on the Board of Regents of Harvard University when Dick Alpert got kicked out and Tim followed. If the game plan had been different, Jack might have been the first American President to take LSD, for his brother Robert is known to have been taking either LSD or psilocybin in the spring of 1963 and entertaining foreign dignitaries with it in his apartment in New York and probably thus to have been saying good things about the drug to Jack. But with the confrontation tactics coming out of Harvard, Jack had good reason to hesitate. And five years later, now with well over a million Americans thoroughly frightened and put off, President Johnson was singling LSD out for denunciation in his State of the Union message to Congress. Johnson's vow was to rid the nation of the menace he saw LSD to be. Conceivably, Johnson's intransigence in his policy over Vietnam was motivated by his fear or hatred of the voice of people who were vaunting LSD and psychedelic drugs in general.

At any rate, at a party in the East Village three weeks before Johnson addressed Congress a new escalation of the process of confrontation was shaping up. The celebration was for the New Year, 1968. The guests, who later were to claim a good deal of attention as the "Chicago Seven," were examining the possibility of doing something to stop the violence in Vietnam. The punch they drank contained not alcohol but LSD. The thoughts they entertained in consequence were far-reaching and ultra-practical. The manifesto coming out of that evening's work was the "Yippie Manifesto," and it set in motion the long train of events which exploded in the violence in Chicago, when Johnson lost the nomination and his Presidency.

But that was not the end. Under Nixon, Johnson's campaign to stamp out LSD was carried on to extreme lengths. There was talk of introducing the death penalty for persons convicted of possession. The climax of the U.S. Government's war on LSD was staged in Vienna with the signing of the International Convention abolishing its use. At home, a case can be made for the idea that Nixon's excesses were committed primarily against those with links to the pro-drug, anti-war movement— for these were two faces of the same desire. At length, some sort of naturally-occurring homeostasis seems to have restored a balance. Nixon and LSD both disappeared, each one having cancelled out the other.

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Introduction to the First Edition

Introduction to the First Edition

III- 19

I wanted to go into this not to make a point that Tim's obstinacy led to Nixon's downfall, which is true, nor to raise the question whether the use of LSD as a political instrument was justifiable, which is debatable, but to suggest that the price paid for the insurrection Tim devised was the interruption of supplies of LSD and in due course the flooding of the market with a variety of toxic substitutes labelled "acid." Which brings me back to Peter Stafford and my belief that the point of view he represents is the right one for now.

The time for confrontation is past, if it was ever present. Peter is made of softer, more ductile stuff than Tim. He poses no threat to anyone and is not about to get under anybody's skin. Tim has had his day and history will honor him for the heroic man he is. Peter epitomizes the unheroic plodder with no particular qualifications, and we feel more comfortable with him. In fact, there is something alien in confrontation to the whole ethos of LSD and its sister-substances. Non-confrontation is a cardinal feature of a well-run LSD session.

Confrontation is precisely what should be avoided when a person who has taken LSD shows signs of agitation or depression or in some other way is manifesting resistance to the natural flow of experience. What the person helping him can do then is search for or suggest an image or idea which complements the image or idea which acted as the springboard of resistance. Negative emotions are thereby not provoked but rather calmed. The resistance is undone and the normal flow of the session can proceed. The story told by Leary about Bill McGlothlin and repeated in this book is an example of the use of this sort of suggestion.

Last, there is a mythic element in the emergence of LSD and other psychedelic drugs which Peter's book exemplifies. Eileen Garrett told me a story which I have not found recorded in her writing and which 1 do not now recall the details of precisely. The gist of it is that she fell down in the bathroom of her apartment and imagined she was dying. In a trance she had a vision in which old Dr. Sandoz, patriarch of the firm in Basel, appeared and told her that a chemical substance with a power to bring great benefit to the world had been discovered in his laboratory. When Mrs. Garrett recovered from her trance, she recalled that Dr. Sandoz had been dead for seven years. (1 do not know the date of his death, but it could serve to pinpoint the date of his appearance in the vision.) As 1 remember her words, Mrs. Garrett did not then know what LSD was and it was only later, when she heard reports of LSD and the part played in its synthesis by Dr. Hofmann, that she understood the words heard in her trance. Be that as it may, the good, in some people's eyes, that LSD and members of the psychedelic family of drugs can help bring about is the revelation of the hidden depths of human consciousness. An instrument is now at hand which tells us things about ourselves which we may misguidedly think we do not want to know and would prefer to leave in the depth where for all

but a few individuals they have always been, but which in reality offer us the greatest help in broadening our understanding of and deepening our feeling for ourselves and the world around us.

Peter is on the side of those who are committed to what is now a world-wide trend, exploration of the structure and the function of human consciousness, a search of which the use of psychedelics is an integral part. He wants LSD back in the laboratory, the clinic, the place of meditation, on thestreet, wherever it belongs. Social controls will be needed for distribution of psychedelics. The details can be worked out. But we are not going to keep LSD and the rest of the conscious-revealing drugs on ice indefinitely. The thaw will come. That is the message I get from Psychedelics Encyclopedia.

— John Beresford, M.D. Ontario, Canada

Psychedelic Renaissance

by Dan Joy

The 1990s have brought several indications of a worldwide resurgence of interest in psychedelic drugs:

• The original British "rave" or "acid house" scene began spreading to the United States, as well as to such far flung locations as Ibiza, Spain and Goa, India. In 1991 and 1992 the phenomenon hit the West Coast of the United States with the force of a major earthquake. Raves are huge, ethnically mixed all night or weekend long dance parties fueled by MDMA, LSD, intense psychedelic light shows, mind-tech toys such as virtual reality machines, and the trance inducing propulsive rhythms of "acid house" music. Raves became a prominent and ongoing feature of the cultural landscape in San Francisco and Los Angeles, attracting the attention of major media. Sometimes taking place in aboveground nightclubs, but often held on beaches or in empty warehouses, these events were perceived by their enthusiasts as far more than mere parties. One writer in San Francisco Weekly stated that "the people throwing these parties believe that they are the vanguard of a new society" and quoted a prominent figure in the local rave scene as saying, "In the next decade there is going to be a total revolution of the mind."

• A reporter from Brazil phoned the United States to collect reactions to the burgeoning use of LSD in Sao Paulo among middle-aged, upper-middle-class professionals—doctors, lawyers, psychologists, psychiatrists, . and particularly academics and clergy.

• In Czechoslovakia, a new underground magazine began reprinting

some of Timothy Leary's recent writings, marking their author's first appearance in the Czechoslovakian language.

• The reunification of Germany was followed by reports of (he

spread of MDMA into areas formerly belonging to East Berlin, and a German magazine about psychedelia called Connections commenced publication

• In Spain a new magazine titled Mas Alia (roughly translated as "Further") appeared, featuring coverage of the emerging Spanish psychedelic

scene as well as new writings by Timothy Leary.

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• Reports of LSD use and "rave"-type MDMA parties began to trickle in from Tokyo. In private correspondence, a young independent Japanese entrepreneur described in nearly cataclysmic terms the emergence of a new Japanese counterculture, fueled at least in part by the ad vent of psychedelics: "Tokyo is in the midst of an evolutionary leap ... and immense changes are taking place. The speed and the size of this coming wave are beyond anyone's expectations." Only a few years before, Japanese visitors to the offices of the magazine Mondo 2000 had professed the belief that the use of psychedelics in Japanese culture was "impossible."

• The Oakland Tribune reported the confiscation by police of a large quantity of a new psychedelic called "bromo"—of which local legal forces had been previously unaware—from an underground lab in Oakland.

• American Health magazine ran an article titled "The Acid Quest" that quoted the prediction of UCLA professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology Daniel X. Freeman, M.D., that LSD will be sanctioned for human research in the United States within ten years.

• Penthouse ran a piece called "The Psychedelic Revolution" in which the author asserted that "every man and woman of my generation with the slightest interest in his or her own mind had taken LSD or some other psychedelic." The article speculated about the continuing impact of this fact on the lives of these individuals as well as society at large.

• The BBC aired a documentary on LSD titled 'The Beyond Within: The Rise and Fall of LSD" which featured British LSD researcher Ronald Sandison, M.D.

• Details magazine printed a piece called "The New Seekers: Inside the Psychedelic Underground" that quoted Terence McKenna as saying that "consciousness is what we're in great need of to avoid running off the cliff into Armageddon. If the claim that these drugs expand consciousness, promote empathy, and allow deeper insights into our problems has any validity at all, it should be explored very carefully and very thoroughly."

• A magazine called Arete published an article titled "Under the Influence" that focused on drugs and creativity and featured six pages about LSD.

• ID magazine, published in England, printed a piece titled "Altered States: The Mind Revolution." The pull-quote employed the terminology of

Resurgent interest in LSD

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John Lilly: "Each psychedelic drug is quite literally a different access code to a certain circuit of the human biocornputer."

• The French magazine Actuel featured a six-page article on MDMA.

• Newsweek magazine reported in its February 3,1992 issue that "acid is staging a serious comeback in the '90s, especially among affluent suburban teenagers." The rise in popularity is partially attributed to weaker doses, which result in fewer "bad trips" and are more likely to be taken at parties. Surveys conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuseand the University of Michigan showed that in 1991 LSD had overtaken cocaine in popularity among high school seniors for the first time since 1976.

Perhaps the most disturbing news came from three articles which appeared in The Washington Post. These reported the arrest of a six-person drug ring whose members were supplying LSD to the northern Virginia high school from which they had recently graduated, it was claimed that one sixteen-year-old student had shot and wounded a Fairfax County police officer while supposedly under the influence of the unusually powerful doses being provided.

The second article discussed a resurgence of LSD use among high achieving, upper middle-class high school students in suburban Maryland. Anonymous accounts of "LSD parties" indicated a total lack of experienced guidance; a paucity of accurate knowledge, creating a vacuum filled by misinformation about the drug and its effects; little attention to appropriate dosage, set, and setting; and unskilled and unsympathetic handling by peers of psychically difficult episodes, exacerbated by a competetive, sports-style approach to the use of LSD.

These reports could be taken as validation of concerns about the use of misinformation in the national anti-drug campaign. As UC Irvine Medical School professor and MDMA researcher Charles Grob has put it, "I am astounded and horrified as to the degree of misinformation that exists among young people today. I believe that this misinformation often leads to very tragic results."

Takenasa whole, these developments yield a picture of a widespread upswing of interest in psychedelics, and a concomitant increase in usage. The axiom that "those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it" seems poignantly relevant. If, as many believe, this phenomenon constitutes the beginnings of a trend that will continue through the coming decade, it becomes of paramount importance to prevent broad-scale recapitulation of the hysteria, misinformation, and real tragedies that characterized the late '60s and early '70s. If this task can be accomplished, the way may yet be cleared for some of the promise shown by early experimentation with

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psychedelics (perhaps best articulated by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception) to be fulfilled at last.

Such endeavors cannot succeed without ready access to accurate information for those on both sides of the debate over the potentialities of psychedelics. And in the nine years that have passed since the appearance in 1983 of the second edition of Psychedelics Encyclopedia, the already vast collage of data regarding the study of psychedelics has expanded greatly. In spite of a sociopolitical climate increasingly unfavorable to the use of pharmacological agents for exploring uncharted waters of the psyche, new compounds have been synthesized, tested, and distributed, both in scientific circles and within the psychedelic "underground." Many of those who figure prominently in these pages have continued to make history in one way or another, and new pioneers have appeared on the horizon and begun to make their mark. The number of living people who have used this special group of mind-changers for various purposes continues to increase, and is no doubt greater than at any other time in human history. In addition, the second edition of Psychedelics Encyclopedia has fallen out of print during this period. The time for a third, revised, and expanded edition is therefore ripe.

Many hours of research, contemplation, and discussion have been devoted to making this edition as thorough, useful, and attractive as possible. Although the catalog of available compounds has grown, our understanding of the chemistry, pharmacology, effects, and history of substances included in the previous edition has remained largely the same. For this reason the entire text of the prior edition has been included here without significant alteration.

In the years intervening since the last edition, ketamine hydro-chloride, which appears in Chapter Ten among "Contrasting Profiles," has come to be regarded by many of those involved in this area of study as a unique, significant, and bona fide—if somewhat hazardous—psychedelic. Therefore new front matter of additional information about this compound

appears in this volume.

Of the newer compounds, one in particular—MDMA or "Ecstasy"— has had a vast cultural impact both in the United States and abroad in the last decade. This substance was the first to direct the attention of much of psychedelic research toward the em pathogenic potential of psychopharma-cological agents. This new term signifies that MDMA has been observed to consistently catalyze a state of profound compassion and understanding or empathy, directed toward both the user's own self as well as others in his or her life. Because of this property, MDMA enjoyed in the early 1980s a promising if brief period of employment as a legal adjunct to psychotherapy. As of this writing it continues to be the recreational "drug of choice" among hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of individuals.

Contents of this edition

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Peter Stafford surveys these and related developments in the new information on MDMA written for this edition. This Introduction also features a brief overview of a few more of the literally hundreds of other new compounds that have been synthesized in psychochemical research laboratories in recent years. We have also added information about some of the organizations and publications that have recently appeared in response to continued interest in psychedelic driven consciousness change.

For many good reasons, entries in Psychedelics Encyclopedia are organized according to different classes of chemical compounds. However, the history of psychedelics is at least as much a human tale as a chemical one. It is only within the domain of the human psyche that the psychedelic —or "soul manifesting"—properties of a substance can emerge. And certain individuals have influenced the way that these chemicals have been used and understood as much as have the properties of the compounds themselves.

In order to lend greater weight to this human element of psychedelic history, we have included in this Introduction a series of profiles and biographic updates about individuals who have played important roles in the field. Featured here are pioneers who are frequently mentioned in the text of this book, as well as a few who have made their marks since the appearance of the second edition. Of these profiles, perhaps those of John Lilly and Terence McKenna are the most valuable for making this edition as truly complete a volume as possible. Peter Stafford often expressed regret that more of Lilly's seminal work was not covered in the previous edition. Today relative newcomer Terence McKenna is rapidly becoming one of the most influential figures on the contemporary psychedelic scene.

Additionally, in order to acknowledge some of the many contributors to this field who have died during the last decade. Peter Stafford has provided a roster of "Psychedelic Obituaries." To the many others, both living and dead, who do not appear in these pages but have nonetheless made unquestionably substantive contributions, we sincerely apologize. We hope we will someday be able to offer them berth on a fourth voyage of Psychedelics Encyclopedia.

In February 1991, many prominent contributors to the movement convened at Stanford University to discuss the results of recent research, possible future directions, and other aspects of psychedelic history and culture at an event called the Bridge Conference, the most noteworthy gathering of its kind in recent times. A brief report of the Bridge Conference is included in this Introduction and used as a springboard for discussing prevalent trends and themes in psychedelia.

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PROFILES

Albert Hofmann

In the decades following his invention of LSD, Sandoz Pharmaceuticals chemist Albert Hofmann, Ph.D., continued to synthesize many compounds of significance in medicine. Several of these (notably hydergine, used in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease and depression) have been derivatives of ergot, the same rye mold that provided the precursors for LSD Hofmann has summarized his life and work in LSD. My Problem Chid.

Well into his eighties and now retired, Hofmann nonetheless continues to be a major global spokesman for the use of LSD as "a material aid to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, more comprehensive reality." Many credit his influence with positively affecting Switzerland's recent decision to legalize the use of certain psychedelics in psychotherapy under specific conditions.

Robert Masters and Jean Houston

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Robert Masters and Jean Houston

In the mid-'60s, the husband-and-wife research team of Robert Masters, Ph.D., and Jean Houston, Ph.D., had a vast impact on the understanding of psychedelics through the publication of a popular book titled The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. This volume summarized the years of research they had conducted; these began with Masters' experiments with peyote in 1954, and eventually evolved into a systematic protocol of LSD psychotherapy. In the years since, the insights into human consciousness that Masters and Houston gained during their period of psychedelic investigation have borne fruit in several major contributions to the theory and practice of psychophysical healing.

Influenced by the work of Alexander, Feldenkrais, and Erikson, Robert Masters has developed a technique of neural and sensory reeducation known as the Masters Psychophysical Method, of which there are now approximately 130 certified practitioners. His major innovation has been the integration of trance states with body work. Masters has discovered that trances of up to seven or eight hours in duration can generate responses in the body and mind approximating those catalyzed by high doses of LSD. He feels that the heightened plasticity of the body and its receptivity to various therapeutic modalities under psychedelics makes the combination of bodywork and psychedelics a promising direction for possible future research.

Along with Masters, Jean Houston now heads the Foundation for Mind Research in New York State. She also guides two "mystery schools" of psychospiritual training and the more scientifically oriented Human Capacities Training program. Houston has become a major innovator of applied archetypal psychology in group contexts, a capacity in which she conducts seminars and consults with major corporations. She has also served as a consultant in human and cultural development to the governments of 35 different nations, a function in which she travels up to a quarter of a million miles annually.

The theory and practice of archetypal psychology developed by Houston have been expressed in over a dozen books. A selection of the most recent includes The Possible Human, The Search for the Beloved, Godseed, and The Hero and the Goddess: The Odyssey of Mystery and Initiation,

Alexander Shulgin

Leading-edge psychopharmacologist Alexander T. Shulgin, Ph.D., who receives more than a dozen mentions in the main text of this book, was coauthor of the first scientific paper published on MDMA in humans. As well, Shulgin has been the originator of 2CB and perhaps some hundred or more other psychoactive compounds. He currently continues private research in northern California.

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Shulgin has recently published The Controlled Substances Act, a thorough and accessible explication of contemporary Federal drug laws. In 1991 he issued the long-awaited P1HKAL: A Chemical Love Story through his own publishing company. Transform Press, Shulgin and his wife Ann devoted more than two years to the preparation of this scientific (and presumably autobiographical) magnum opus of nearly 1,000 pages. A milestone of psychopharmacological and psychedelic literature, PIHKAL (an acronym for Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved) contains a novelized account of decades of pioneering research and a catalog explaining the synthesis and effects of 179 mind-changing agents.

Stanislav Grof

In the last fifteen years, former LSD researcher Stanislav Grof, M.D., and his wife Christina, have developed a powerful and increasingly popular method of inducing psychedelic-like alternative states of consciousness. Known as Holotropic Breathwork, this technique does not involve the use of drugs, and is regarded by thousands of practitioners worldwide as an extraordinarily fast and effective psychotherapeutic modality.

The Grofs' research has also given rise to a new map of the psyche and a re-classification of certain mental states, previously diagnosed as "psychotic," as "spiritual emergencies," or junctures of crisis in the pychospiritual healing process. In the early '80s Christina Grof founded the Spiritual Emergence Network in order to provide various services to those

What Timothy Leary is up to now

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undergoing such disruptive but potentially very integrative psychic episodes. The Grofs' new paradigm of mental health and its practical application are expressed in their book The Stormy Search for the Self.

Timothy Leary

Once the person most closely linked with psychedelics in the public mind, today Timothy Leary, Ph.D., is a popular writer and lecturer who focuses on the humanistically motivated development of educational technology. In the last decade he has authored or participated in the development of eight pieces of educational computer software, including the commercially successful MindMirror, a tool for psychological self-analysis based on his classic '50s textbook The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality. Now 71, Leary maintains an arduous globe-spanning lecture circuit schedule, and recently has spent a great deal of time in Japan, the world's electronic frontier, where he is celebrated as a technological visionary.

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The year 1983 saw the publication of Leary's epic autobiography Flashbacks, now available in a second, expanded edition featuring an Introduction by noted literary innovator William Burroughs. A work of socio-cultural significance and literary excellence, Flashbacks, the most up-to-date and comprehensive of Leary's many autobiographical efforts, was received with nearly unanimous praise even by critics of a culturally and politically conservative bent. In the same year a wide-ranging annotated anthology of his most significant scientific and theoretical writings appeared under the title Changing My Mind, Among Others. In 1988 Archon Books issued An Annotated Bibliography of Timothy Leary compiled by Michael Horowitz, Karen Walls, and Billy Smith. This volume features a Foreword by Allen Ginsberg, a Preface by Leary, and an Introduction by Frank Barton. In 1990, Leary's classic late-'60s collection, The Politics of Ecstasy, returned to print. Many of the issues and viewpoints aired in the essays, talks, and interviews in this last volume are surprisingly fresh and relevant a quarter of a century after its original publication.

Richard Alpert

Leary's Harvard research partner Richard Alpert, Ph.D., continues as a major figure in the alternative spirituality movement in (he United States and abroad. His "karma yoga" now focuses on providing spiritual service to the dying, particularly AIDS patients, and to the bereaved. He is a founding member of the Seva Foundation, which takes its name from the Sanskrit word for "service." This organization implements a wide variety of social-service programs worldwide. In collaboration with Paul Gorman, Alpert has published a book on the subject of spiritually based service titled How Can i Help?

After adopting the Sanskrit title "Ram Dass" (or "Servant of God") in the early '70s—and then for several years being viewed as something akin to a spiritual guru by many Western seekers— Alpert now modestly asserts that he is "a holy man only half the time." Humorously calling himself a "Hin-Jew," he seeks to integrate his Jewish spiritual and cultural heritage with the Eastern forms of mysticism that he absorbed in his studies and travels after his early psychedelic experiences. Alpert still publicly acknowledges the role that psychedelics have played—and continue to play-in his spiritual development.

Robert Anton Wilson

Timothy Leary claims that Robert Anton Wilson, Ph.D., his occasional literary and theoretical collaborator, "has interpreted my rantings and ravings and droolings better than anyone else." Wilson's books Cosmic Trigger and Prometheus Rising are particularly noteworthy for their accessible treatments of Leary's eight-circuit model of the nervous system.

Richard Alpert, Robert Anton Wilson and Oscar Janiger

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Wilson is also well-known for a widely performed play titled Wilhelm Reich In Hell and his satirical fantasy novels, including The llluminatus Trilogy (co-authored by Robert Shea) and The Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy. Among his most recent books are Quantum Psychology, Cosmic Trigger II, and Reality is What You Can Get Away With.

In the last decade, Wilson has continued to shape popular conceptions of the psychedelic experience with his prolific output of erudite, psychologically astute, satirical, and occasionally mind-blowing literary-occult sleight-of-hand. After a few years of sojourn in Ireland, he now returns to a home in Santa Cruz during breaks in his vigorous schedule of public speaking. He is publisher and co-editor with wife Arlen of a quarterly futurist newsletter titled Trajectories.

Oscar Janiger

In 1954, Santa Monica, California psychiatrist Oscar Janiger, M.D., purified DMT with Perry Bivens, and the pair became the first to observe the effects of this compound in humans through self administration. Janiger is also remembered for his eight-year naturalistic study on the clinical effects of LSD and his classic investigations in the '50s and early '60s on the role of LSD in the creative process. This latter program is noted for having involved many of that era's most celebrated talents as volunteer experimental sub-

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Today Janiger channels much of his time and energy into his role as co-founder of the Albert Hofmann Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has recently opened an international library for the study of consciousness. Semi-retired from private practice, Janiger is also currently a professor emeritus at UC Irvine Medical School, and devotes himself to various projects including a soon to be published book titled Private Practice: The Changing Role of Physicians in Contemporary Society.

John Lilly

In the '40s and '50s, John Lilly, M.D., blazed a meteoric trail in his career as a medical researcher, performing important studies of the human organism's ability to withstand conditions of extreme stress, such as high altitudes and acceleration. As well, he applied the ham-radio experience of his youth to several significant electronic inventions used in monitoring brain function and other physiological processes.

Lilly's interest in the outer limits of human experience led him in the late '50s to invent the isolation tank, a coffin-like box in which one floats in warm water in a condition of silence, total darkness, and zero gravity. The aim of this invention was to provide a near-ideal environment for studying the human mind itself, removed from all outside influences. For a time his research in this area fell under the auspices of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Later his experiments with isolation loosely formed the basis for the popular book and movie Altered States.

John Lilly

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Lilly's studies of the human brain sparked his interest in the brains of other intelligent mammals, dolphins in particular. Lilly performed two long stretches of experiments in dolphin intelligence and human-dolphin communication, one series in the '60s and a second in the early '80s. These efforts bore fruit in ideas that were published in several books, notably Man and Dolphin, and that many believe to have influenced favorably the passage of the landmark Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Dr. Lilly was exposed to LSD in the early '60s and performed important research into this psychedelic as part of a team including Dr. Sandy Unger and Stanislav Grof at Spring Grove Mental Hospital in Maryland. Eventually he took his experiments with this mind-changer to the isolation tank, leading to influential theoretical elaborations contained in Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer. In the'70s and '80s, Lilly logged in several years of daring research with ketamine, which formed the climax of his "novel autobiography," The Scientist.

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All of this activity has led to a wealth of ideas and seminal literature about alternative states of consciousness, the brain, the mind, and the relationships among them. Now in his seventies, Lilly continues his research privately at his Malibu, California, ranch. An integrated and accessible summary of his life and work, coauthored with Francis Jeffrey, is available in the book John Lilly, So Far.

Stephen Gaskin

Amidst the fertile and volatile subculture that blossomed in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the late '60s, a former California State University at San Francisco English teacher named Stephen Gaskin began facilitating a weekly—and often psychedelically fueled—social, political, and spiritual discussion group known as "The Monday Night Class." Driven by various factors, including the decline of the Haight-Ashbury experiment and inspiration derived from Gaskin's cultural and spiritual vision, many of those who had gathered around The Monday Night Class assembled in a convoy of schoolbuses and began a meandering, cross-country trek in search of land on which to found a community whose purpose was to put into practice some of the new social models then emergent within the counterculture.

The result was "The Farm" in Tennessee, a uniquely successful and long-lived communitarian endeavor founded on principles derived in part

Stephen Gaskin and Ed Rosenthal

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from psychedelic experiences. Unlike most of the other communes that dotted the American landscape in the late '60s and early '70s, The Farm, whose residents once numbered one thousand, thrives to this day with a residency of two or three hundred people who channel much of their efforts toward various forms of social service in the United States and abroad.

Today, Stephen Gaskin is rapidly becoming an elder statesman of psychedelic culture, in which capacity he is sought after as a lecturer and public speaker. His classic personal account of the psychedelic heyday of the late '60s that later gave rise to The Farm has been recently reissued under the title Haight-Ashbury Flashbacks. Caskin's latest project is the Rocinante Health Center, an alternative residential community for the elderly adjoining The Farm.

Ed Rosenthal

Ed Rosenthal has been called "the Ann Landers of Pot" and the "Guru of Ganja" in recognition of his hugely popular monthly column "Ask Ed" in High Times Magazine. Ed is a leading researcher and writer on the subject of marijuana. He is a leading personality in the marijuana legalization movement and a frequent expert witness in support of the defense of marijuana cases.

Ed Rosenthal is the founder and principal author of Quick Trading Company, a small press in Oakland, California. He is best known for his books Deluxe Marijuana Growers Guide (co-authored with Mel Frank), Marijuana Growers Handbook, Ask Ed (adapted from the High Times column), and the recent bestseller Closet Cultivator.

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Terence McKenna

Unquestionably foremost among the new generation of public exponents of the potentialities of psychedelics is ethnobotanist Terence McKenna. With an academic background in art history and shamanism and several globe-spanning ethnobotanical expeditions now under his belt, McKenna is an extraordinarily eloquent and erudite writer, a bardic speaker with a rapidly growing audience. He focuses particularly on the experiences generated by psilocybin mushrooms and ayahuasca within a shamanic context. "My testimonial," McKenna tells his audiences, "is that magic is alive in hyperspace."

McKenna has recently authored two major books, a collection of talks, interviews, and essays titled The Archaic Revival, and Food of the Cods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, a landmark examination of the role of plants in human history. His classic theoretical exploration The Invisible Landscape, written in collaboration with psychopharmacologist-turned-ethnobotanist Dennis McKenna, Ph.D., is soon to be returned to print. Recent years have seen the growth of Botanical Dimensions, an organization devoted to the preservation and propagation of endangered plant species of ethnobotanical interest, of which McKenna and his wife Katherine are founding members.

McKenna, Doblin, Eisner and Harlow

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Rick Doblin

In the last decade, several younger investigators have made major contributions to the body of psychedelic knowledge through research into the empathogens, most notably MDMA. Perhaps foremost among this group is Rick Doblin, who made intensive efforts in the mid-'80s to preserve the legality of MDMA as an adjunct to psychotherapy.

More recently, Doblin has founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, which promotes and sponsors scientific research into psychedelics. As well, he has recently authored a follow-up study to Leary, Alpert, and Metzner's Good Friday Experiment, an early investigation into the relationship between psychedelic and religious experience.

Bruce Eisner

Another important contributor to our understanding of empathogens is the Santa Cruz-based writer-researcher Bruce Eisner, who over the last twenty years has published many articles about psychedelics. His landmark book Ecstasy: The MDMA Story is the only thorough book length survey of the history, chemistry, and usage of this prototypical empathogen. MDMA is a thoughtful and balanced overview, its depth reflecting both Eisner's extensive personal experience and his academic background in psychology.

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Eisner recently founded the Island Group, an association devoted to the development of a psychedelic culture, which co-sponsored 1991's landmark Bridge Conference and has recently begun publishing a newsletter called Island Views.

Deborah Harlow

In the early '80s, when MDMA was still legal for such purposes, Northern California psychotherapist and bodyworker Debby Harlow was a significant innovator in developing the application of this compound as an adjunct to psychosomatic therapies.

More recently Debby coauthored with Jerome Beck and others an important sociological study of MDMA users funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Harlow's wealth of knowledge regarding recent psychedelic research has cast her as an important resource to the psychedelic community, and she is in growing demand as a public speaker on the role of MDMA and related compounds in healing.

New psychedelic compounds

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PHARMACOLOGY

New Compounds

Just as many new personalities have come to play significant roles in the psychedelic arena in the last few decades, so have a plethora of new psychochemicals. In spite of the legal restrictions placed on their work, chemists and pharmacologists both underground and above-ground continue to synthesize and test new psychedelic compounds at the rate of perhaps dozens a year.

An entire encyclopedia equal in length to this volume could easily be devoted to full reportage of these developments. Here are offered merely some outstanding characteristics of a few of the more noteworthy of these compounds. The following examples are almost all from the phenethylamine category (which includes MDMA), a promising group of psychochemicals bearing structural relationship to mescaline. The information that follows has been derived from previously published scientific papers on each of these compounds as well as some additional anecdotal material. These summaries are necessarily quite tentative. Research with these psychoactives is still in the early stages; the topology of their reported characteristics will almost certainly change significantly as further evidence accumulates.

MDE

Known as "Eve," this compound, effective in the range of 50-200 mg., is an immediate homologue of MDMA. Its enthusiasts claim that it lacks the "rush" and many of the side effects {jaw clenching, nystagmus, sweating, and post-trip fatigue) characteristic of its popular chemical sibling—suggesting that it may have lower toxicity—and that its effects are somewhat longer-lasting, but can nonetheless be achieved at significantly lower dosages. They also report a less intensely empathogenic vector, but instead enhancement of cognitive, creative, and verbal capacities.

MDE.. sometimes called "Eve," is an immediate homologue of MDMA

In a poignant example of the subjectivity of pharmacological action—and of the need for more broadly based and legally approved research—some MDE studies offer conclusions diametrically contradictory to those reported above, which have been derived from groups who find the experience afforded by this substance favorable. It is also interesting to note

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that those research efforts experimenting with lower doses—in the range of 50-100 mg.—have tended to report more positive reactions, and those experimenting with higher doses—in the range of 100-200 mg.—have been largely responsible for the more negative assessments.

2CB

Known under a wide variety of "street" names including "Venus," "Spectrum," and "Bromo," this compound is effective in doses of 10-25 mg. and generates an experience of usually no more than six hours in duration. Its main arenas of action are somatic and sensory rather than mental, It is known for rich visual imagery, heightened bodily awareness and tactile receptivity, and enhancement of both sexual interest and sexual pleasure without disrupting related physiological functions.

Some users take 2CB a few hours after ingestion of MDMA to generate a synergy that some claim extends the duration of the MDMA experience and adds a desirable visual dimension. Various psychotherapists have used 2CB to help integrate insights gained from prior sessions with more psychically focused compounds.

2CE

2CE is effective in doses ranging from 10-25 mg., which result in a trip lasting 8-12 hours. This very visual compound has developed a reputation as an agent that can be used to explore and purge the "shadow" regions of the psyche and repressed traumatic memories.

This quality of 2CE often results in a trip that many users find difficult but nonetheless extremely valuable. A typical response is sometimes expressed in a statement like, 'This experience is not exactly pleasant—but I

DOB related to STP, MBDB similar to MDMA

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DOB

Effective in doses of 2-3 mg. that generate an experience of unusual duration (up to 24 hours in some users), this psychochemical bears a close structural relationship to DOM (or "STP") and was first synthesized in 1970. It is also notable for its potency, some 400 times that of mescaline. (DOB is mentioned in the main text of this book, but its specific effects are not described.)

DOB is purported to move the user's point of view to "the edge of reality." In other words, one's locus of identity tends to become detached and objective in a manner reminiscent to the "witness consciousness" described in various spiritual traditions. Some claim that in this condition unpleasant or "dark" aspects of one's, life and psyche can be examined especially closely, because although the pain associated with such observations maybe experienced intensely, the user does not necessarily lose his or her sense of self within the ensuing emotional miasma. This quality purportedly allows users to inspect these less-savory dimensions of their existence with a diminished sense of threat.

MBDB

Effective in doses of 180-210 mg, that result in a four- to six-hour trip, this highly empathogenic substance is often reported to cause an experience almost identical to that of MDMA.

However, MBDB usually lacks MDMA's euphoriant/stimulant properties and their attendant side effects, and is therefore suspected to have lower toxicity. Additionally, some users feel less inclined to verbalize during the trip than when on MDMA. Most reports rate the experience of MBDB as particularly favorable.

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Nootropics and Other "Intelligence Enhancers"

Of recently growing interest among the community of those involved with psychedelics is the emergence of a broad group of compounds, including a chemical category known as "nootropics," which are purported to enhance certain functions of intelligence. Various claims have been made that these different substances improve such cognitive properties as memory, concentration, and perceptual acuity. To some extent these compounds therefore seem to validate the prediction of Shulgin that pharmacological action will become increasingly refined and specifically targeted over time. These developments also recall Leary's mid-'70s forecasts regarding drugs that would increase intelligence.

Hydergine, piracetam, and vasopressin are among the most widely discussed substances in this field. Ward Dean, M.D., and John Morgenthaler have authored and published a book titled Smart Drugs & Nutrients that catalogues the effects of these and other allegedly intelligence-enhancing compounds. This volume's commercial success, along with significant mainstream press attention to this new field, attests to widespread interest.

Future Directions

One noteworthy aspect of the nootropics and some of the other "intelligence enhancers" is that several of these compounds apparently feature multiple vectors of pharmacological action. Among these chemicals we find at least two products used both in treating depression as well as age-related syndromes (specifically, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease). Different compounds falling under this rubric have also been credited with immune enhancing, life extending, and detoxifying properties. Some nootropics and other similarly employed drugs have low—if even measurable—toxicity, and a few even show "healthy side effects" such as increasing the flow of oxygen and nutrients to nervous tissue. (One official of the Food and Drug Administration recently claimed that the toxicity of piracetam is so low that this compound could in principle have no significant action— a fallacy based on a pharmacological axiom long rendered obsolete by observations of the relationship between the potency, effects, and as yet unestablished toxicity of LSD.) Such phenomena are beginning to blur the boundary between drugs—once widely understood as "poisons" of medicinal value in subtoxic doses—and nutrients.

One compound occasionally used as an intelligence booster or "psychic energizer" is Selegiline hydrochloride, an MAO inhibitor of fairly recent origin. Used in Europe for Parkinson's disease and depression, and recently approved in the United States as a treatment for the former condition, Selegiline has been shown to quite significantly extend the lives of rats as well as enhance and rejuvenate their sexual function. Another MAO inhibitor— also an antidepressant—is showing signs of strong anti-

Paridigm shift in neurobiology

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viral properties in promising early research. Similarly, certain other MAO inhibitors, specifically the beta-carbolines found in Ayahuasca and Syrian rue, have a long history of folk usage as curatives as well as shamanic and visionary tools.

According to some cutting-edge psychopharmacologists, these developments taken as a gestalt may bear the seed of some as yet unforeseeable paradigm shift in neurobiology. A few researchers have even suggested that neurochemical states conducive to antidepressive, immune enhancing, intelligence increasing, life extending, and sexual potency functions may soon be understood as closely related or perhaps even identical. Such a possibility could eventually set the stage for the pharmacologically assisted application of psychoneuroimmunology (the new field of study examining the relationship of thoughts, moods, and emotions to health and immunity). Furthermore, the additional psychedelic properties of certain groups of compounds that have been credited with some of the properties mentioned above highlight as a promising area of possible future investigation the relationship of the visionary experience to various common medical and psychological goals. And, as the data presented here suggests, the MAO inhibitors provide the agents most likely to serve as the first molecular stepping-stones toward such ends.

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THEMES AND TRENDS IN PSYCHEDELIA

The Bridge Conference

"Linking the past, present, and future of psychedelics" was the agenda of the Bridge Conference, held on February 2 and 3,1991, on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. This gathering was serious and academic in tone, and so programming-intensive that many of the 550 attendees complained of difficulty choosing between the many simultaneously presented seminars, symposia, and panel discussions.

The guests of the Bridge Conference constituted a truly interdisciplinary cross-section, featuring representatives from such diverse fields as psychiatry, psychology, anthropology, medicine, psychopharmacology, ethnobotany, and the counterculture. Among the psychedelic luminaries present were Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson, who provided the keynote addresses. Featured also were John Lilly, Ralph Metzner, Ph.D., Stephen Gaskin, Bruce Eisner, Debby Harlow, Charles Grob, M.D., Richard Yensen, Ph.D., David Nichols, Ph.D., Jerome Beck, Ph.D., Joseph Downing, M.D., Rick Doblin, and about fifteen others.

The programming, informal discussion, and general milieu of the Bridge Conference offered a unique hologram of current trends and concerns in the field of psychedelics. These included: present and future research; the relationship between the psychedelic experience and cutting-edge science and technology; the debate between proponents of organic and synthetic psychedelics; the role of women in the history of psychedelics; and the future of psychedelic endeavors.

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Research

The increasingly labyrinthine obstacle course stretching between the researcher and his or her license to use legally scheduled substances in scientific investigation was a frequent subject of discussion at the Bridge Conference. With a handful of rather limited protocols approved and underway, and a few more in development, formal scientific investigation in this area is today nearly extinct. This dearth of research emerged as the central theme of the Conference's final panel discussion on the future of pyschedelics. Here Charles Grob succinctly summed up the situation: "Research was shut down in the late '60s and has been absolutely moribund since then, except for what goes on in cat retina or salamander reflex."

Several of the panelists issued persuasive and impassioned pleas that those present at the Conference work together to change the state of affairs regarding licensed research. Purdue University Professor of Medicinal Chemistry David Nichols expressed his conviction that psychedelics constitute "a totally fascinating class of psychoactive agents. They relate to the processes of dreaming, consciousness, and spiritual revelation, and how we perceive the environment that we live in and who we are—the basic question of 'what is man?' These facts alone ought to stimulate someone to do research in this area." Nichols urged those in the audience interested in performing research to pursue formal education in areas such as psychology, organic and medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, and related fields.

In the course of the same discussion, veteran LSD-researcher Richard Yensen spoke of the difficulties for legitimate researchers posed by the existence of a psychedelic counterculture and the precariousness of the position of those who straddle the counterculture/establishment fence. He concluded, "We really need some kind of standard for what represents ethical use of psychedelic substances, and some summary of what's been learned from our history as to what represents real positive uses."

Grob extolled the desirability of "using these substances in sanctioned, approved clinical settings." He emphasized that the development of research protocols for the use of psychedelics with individuals suffering from extremely refractory conditions—such as post-traumatic stress syndrome, terminal illness, and severe alcoholism—offers the most likely route toward eventually opening the door to more broadly based research.

Psychedelics, High Technology, and Chaos

As one observer at the Bridge Conference commented, "These days, it's hard to have a psychedelics conference that doesn't turn into a virtual reality conference."Indeed.the event was pervaded by an enthusiasm for high technology, computers, and particularly virtual reality. This atmosphere was generated in part by the presence of several prominent speakers with a strong current interest in this new form of human-computer

Psychedelic Renaissance

interface, among them Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, Richard Yensen, and Bruce Eisner. In attendance were also several staffers from Mondo 2000, a magazine epitomizing the intersection between psychedelics and electronics by regularly featuring articles discussing psychochemicals side-by-side with computer hacking, virtual reality, and so-called "brain-machines"—the new smorgasbord of personal hardware devices that are purported to alter consciousness in various beneficial ways.

The alliance of high technology and psychedelics might seem odd to those who remember the psychedelic culture of the late '60s, often characterized by an antitechnological "back to the land" philosophy and an attempt to return to tribally rooted lifestyles. The retrospective approach persists as an unmistakable thread in the increasingly varicolored tapestry of contemporary psychedelia, weaving images borne of widespread fascination with shamanic practices, organic psychedelics, and goddess-oriented post-feminist spirituality. But this revivalist strand is interwoven with an enthusiastic embrace of the scintillating electron web of the emerging digital culture.

Although the affinity between psychedelics and consciousness-changing "brain machines" is fairly obvious, the factors driving so many psychedelic enthusiasts' fascination with virtual reality may be less easily discerned. When asked to speculate on why developments in virtual-reality technology so consistently rivet the attention of psychedelically oriented people, several prominent figures present at the Bridge Conference suggested a resonance between the "multiple realties" experienced in psychedelic states and the "multiple realities" that are expected to become available to the skilled pilot of virtual-reality equipment sometime in the near future.

Many psychedelic voyagers have expressed the belief that the realities revealed to psychedelically enhanced perception are to a greater or lesser degree the creation of the user's consciousness—and by extension, so may be the realities evident to "consensus" or "everyday" awareness. Virtual-reality technology allows its pilot to bathe the sensorium in a pool of information designed according to his or her own specifications, thereby providing "a way to experience this alteration of reality in a much more organized fashion," as Bruce Eisner put it- Mondo 2000 Editor-in-Chief R. U. Sirius does not view this technotropic trend in psychedelic culture as being of particularly recent origin. He explains:

There have always been two strands in psychedelic culture and counterculture. A majority strand of people felt overwhelmed by the ugliness of Western civilization and wanted to get as much distance from it as possible. But about ten percent always consisted of "sci-fi" types. For instance, Digger manifestoes of '67 and '68 anticipated "machines of loving grace" that would usher in a post-scarcity culture.

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Virtual reality is a manifestation of the increased blurring of the distinction between "solid reality" and the stuff of dreams, thoughts, and the mind. The malleable, rapidly transmuting world into which we're moving is one in which acidheads should have a distinct type of advantage, having already experienced the plasticity and variability of the realities of the mind.

The growing trend towards technology is an inevitable recognition on the part of intelligent people that something interesting is happening and there's something quite irresistible about it. Electronic technology is bringing about a realization of the kinds of visions you have on psychedelics of a global brain or nervous system. This link-up is happening naturally and technology is one of the ways we're getting there.

Terence McKenna, who's on the green side as far as ecology is concerned—but isn't technophobic—incorporates both sides of the equation. He says that by the year 2012 whatever you envision will actually come to be. This kind of technology is literally moving towards that. When the day comes that what you see is what you get, we'd all better make damn sure that what we're seeing is worth getting.

Eisner and Yensen have expressed more refined visions of the possibilities latent within the intersection of electronics and alternative states of consciousness. Eisner explains, "I view psychedelics and virtual

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reality as potentially highly synergistic. Virtual reality could become the ultimate programmer of the psychedelic experience. Set and setting could be created from scratch, using computer-human interface."

At the Bridge Conference, Yensen advanced an even more intriguing prospect;

I feel that it is inevitable that in the future, the pharmacology we have learned from ingesting plants is going to blur with a better understanding of the pharmacology of experiences. As we develop virtual-reality devices of such high resolution that you can put on a piece of equipment and enter a reality as convincingly real as this one, one of the possibilities is to actually monitor neurotransmitter release at the synaptic level, and relate that to the sequences of experiences that are presented. And through that process it's possible to develop sequences of experiences that produce certain neurotransmitter release patterns across individuals. So you have an experience that produces a change in the brain the way that a drug might produce a change in the brain. You begin to develop a non-drug pharmacology.

At a recent talk in San Francisco, Timothy Leary qualified and revised his perspective on technology—particularly virtual reality, which has been a major theme in his public appearances in the last few years. Pointing out that most funding for virtual-reality research and development can be traced to the military, he argued that the goal of technological endeavor sponsored by governments and large corporations usually is to create rigidly controllable and predictable systems by "taking the human being out of the loop."

In light of this viewpoint, according to Leary, the project of developing "artificial intelligence" becomes one of duplicating or exceeding certain human capacities with machines, while eliminating the unpredictability of human intuition, creativity, free will, and whim— factors that have been responsible for many of the truly revolutionary advances in science and technology. Leary pointed out that artificial-intelligence endeavors have utterly failed to approximate the responsiveness, sensitivity, subtlety, and complexity of the human brain. He summed up this perspective by referring to the phrase "artificial intelligence" as "an oxymoron."

As to virtual reality, Leary noted that current "goggle-and-glove" rigs of any sophistication require centralized systems so expensive that it will be years before they are available to the common consumer, and until then such technologies cannot empower the individual to create his or her own realities. He even stated that from the point of view of his individual-

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istic/humanistic agenda, this type of "virtual reality is one of the biggest frauds and scams around."

Leary explained his interest in digital-imagery technology by citing "the power of visual signals to re-imprint the brain." He continued, "The eyes are the windows of the brain. The rods and cones of the visual apparatus are made of nervous tissue; they are actually extensions of the brain itself. The brain starts with dilated pupils." He now favors the development of "personalized, hand-held digital-imagery devices that will empower the individual to control her own visual imprinting process."

Leary concluded, "The human brain is where the real power is. The value of electronic communication technologies is that they can link up human brains."

Aside from digital technology, another cutting-edge scientific arena that has sparked tremendous fascination within psychedelic culture is that of Chaos Dynamics. This new theory is being fruitfully applied to a vast array of natural, social, historical, and even psychological phenomena. The argot of this scientific paradigm and its computer-generated fractal images (visual expressions of the mathematical equations that constitute chaos theory) were ubiquitous at the Bridge Conference, as they have been increasingly at most gatherings of the psychedelically minded.

UC Santa Cruz professor and Bridge Conference guest Ralph Abraham, Ph.D., perhaps the foremost pioneer of chaos mathematics, has publicly acknowledged LSD as a major tool and source of inspiration in his work. Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that many experienced psychedelic voyagers attest to the fact that fractal graphics bear an uncanny resemblance to the visual imagery observed under high doses of LSD and other psychedelics.

The visual resonance between fractal and psychedelic imagery may be contributing to the psychedelic culture's embrace of the paradigm of chaos in very subtle ways. One Bridge Conference attendee offered the following suggestion;

Fractal imagery may be providing psychedelic people with an affirmation of the validity and relevance of the psychedelic experience. Fractals have been found to be accurate representations of many phenomena and processes in nature. Thus, fractals tend to confirm the intuition of many psychedelic users that they're not "hallucinating," but observing something significant and real.

Consciousness is a natural phenomenon as well. At least some of the processes occurring in consciousness may also someday be successfully modeled by fractal equations. This supports the idea that much of the psychedelic experience may be a matter of consciousness observing itself.

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Organic and Synthetic Psychedelics

The pro- and anti-technological strands of psychedelic culture generate the most evident friction around an issue known as "the organic/ synthetic debate." Certain writers, including Ralph Metzner, Andrew Weil, and Terence McKenna, tend to encourage use of organic as opposed to synthetic psychedelics for a number of reasons. Some suggest that psychedelic plants can be used more beneficially because the wisdom derived from millennia of involvement with such species has accumulated in the form of shamanic traditions of safe and conscientious usage. They assert that these ancient modalities can serve as valuable paradigms for the use of psychedelics in contemporary Western culture that currently lacks established containers for such practices.

The proponents of the organic viewpoint also hold that, since laboratory extracts and synthetic analogues have greater potency than natural sources, they may also present greater risks. It is argued that the long history of usage of certain psychoactive plants, on the other hand, has convincingly established their physiological and psychic compatibility with the human organism—and possibly has even evolved into a harmonious relationship between human beings and the sentient fields of energy or "plant devas" that many believe permeate the traditional psychedelic botanicals.

Those on the other side of the fence, including Bruce Eisner, Dennis McKenna, and Alexander Shulgin, do not generally advocate the use of synthetics over organics. Rather, they usually argue that the distinction between the two is not particularly meaningful on a practical level. For instance, many well-known poisons are found in plants, and some of them appear in significant concentrations in certain traditional organic psychedelics. The resultant argument is succinctly summarized by an underground chemist in the pages of Psychedelic Monographs and Essays: "A molecule is the same whether it is created in a plant or animal or in laboratory glassware. LSD is semi-synthetic, and strychnine is natural. Does that mean that LSD is bad and strychnine is good?"

Some suggest that any effective synthetic psychoactive probably owes its psychopharmacological activity either to the presence in the nervous system of a close endogenous analogue or to a similar psychoactive compound occurring in the plant kingdom that has not yet been isolated. Two major psychopharmacologists have even put forth largely similar arguments that such "synthetics" are necessarily "natural."

The recent notoriety of Terence McKenna suggests that the organic argument may have struck a resonant chord. There is a discernibly growing interest in organic psychedelics. The editor of a British magazine of "psychedelic rock" reports that psilocybin mushrooms "have always been the most popular psychedelic in the UK, and are becoming even more popular." (Nonetheless, he cites not a desire for organics per se, but easy access to the mushrooms, "which grow wild all over Britain.") Among the youngest

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generation of users in the United States—those currently around college age—there seems to be emerging a marked preference for mushrooms, perhaps cross-fertilizing in some way with this group's interest in ecological issues.

However, the organic/synthetic debate is largely limited to acadernic and professional circles; such distinctions seem rarely discussed among users at large. MDMA is still widespread, and LSD probably continues to be the most commonly ingested psychedelic. Among most users, the choice between organics and synthetics for a particular session frequently seems to depend on which compound is deemed most useful for a given purpose. One veteran explorer, who has observed first-hand patterns among both the older and the younger generations of psychedelic enthusiasts, bases his explanation of the preference for mushrooms among younger users on this kind of distinction:

In the early '60s, we were Earth-bound, but not Earth-connected. We were shackled to the illusion of the Earth as nothing but a dirtball, and of ourselves as tiny ants crawling on its surface jostling with each other for domination. LSD broke us out of that mode. Acid is a sky-energy psychedelic; it rips you from your conceptual moorings and allows you to float or fly and get a bird's-eye view of the things you've been attached or committed to.

So in those days, LSD was just what we needed. We had to be broken free of our bondage to the illusion of the dirtball-planet and get a good look at everything around, so we could then consciously choose what we wanted to align ourselves with on the being level. And some of us saw a living, breathing, wounded Mother Earth, and chose to commit ourselves to that.

Many of the younger generation are more advanced than we were. Ecstasy has bonded them to each other, so they already have that piece of work out of the way. And because of the accelerated pace of change in the world in which they grew up, they're not really stuck to any dogmas or ideas. They're already cut loose and flying, so they don't need LSD to help them make that break. Instead, they need to ground themselves in something.

In some ways this new generation is awesomely wise: at an age when we were just beginning to explore, they already know what they want and what they need. It's what we all need in order to save the planet: to bond with the Earth. So developing their Earth-connection through the medium of the mushroom—the Earth's sacred, time-honored offering to the human brain— makes much more sense to them than sky-flying with LSD.

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Women in Psychedelics

Another manifestation of receptive, Earth-oriented, feminine-centered qualities in psychedelic culture is the growing interest in "neo-pagan," pantheistic, Wiccan, and Goddess-focused ways of life (a trend also highly visible in the post-feminist and alternative spirituality movements). Many of these belief systems place high value on the feminine, receptive, and healing qualities of the shaman who played an important role in archaic cultures now thought by many to have been largely matriarchal or "partnership"-based in social structure. (It is worth noting in this context that in many traditional societies, the shaman, though usually male, was often androgynous in appearance and sometimes participated in a ritualized kind of cross-dressing.)

Much as in other arenas of Western culture, the exploration of psychedelic consciousness has been largely dominated by men—or so it would appear from the manner in which the movement has usually been documented. In an effort to encourage the recognition of the roles of the field's many female pioneers, the Bridge Conference programming offered a panel titled "Women in Psychedelics." This event featured Botanical Dimensions founder Kat McKenna, anthropologist and author of The Visionary Vine Marlene Dobkin de Rios, Ph.D., archivist Cynthia Palmer, MDMA researcher Debby Harlow, and '60s Leary colleague Nina Graboi, whose newiy published psychedelic autobiography One Foot in the Future has been warmly received by the psychedelic community.

Glimmerings of a Brighter Future

In spite of the political and social conditions of the early '90s— which at times seem almost monolithically opposed to the exploration of consciousness through the agency of chemical catalysts—the atmosphere of the Bridge Conference reflected an optimism that can be observed also among today's psychedelic community at large. The gathering clearly demonstrated that many people continue to view psychedelics as important agents of personal, psychological, cultural, and social change. Even in the face of enormous cultural tides in which they can now cause barely a ripple, these individuals steadfastly devote their energies, resources, and even their lives to the investigation and propagation of the mysterious powers of these substances.

Mainstream culture has recently provided such intrepid psychedelic optimists with at least a faint glimmering of hope that the tides may soon turn in a more favorable direction for their endeavors. The July 1991 issue of Gentleman's Quarterly featured a lengthy article on the prominent role of psychedelically fuelled inspiration among Silicon Valley's high tech pioneers. Perhaps the most favorable mainstream press the psychedelic issue has received in a quarter of a century, the article concluded:

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Part of the recipe for [creative] abundance is chemical. How should we react to this? ... as tolerantly and calmly as possible. As ever,the pioneers will continue to pioneer, assuming whatever risks they deem necessary. Judge them not by the trips they take but by the gifts they bring back.

For many of these pioneers, the right to self-administer intelligently and responsibly with psychochemical agents for a wide range of explorative and therapeutic purposes is plainly and simply a requisite freedom. It is a freedom that many persist in exercising despite awesome barricades of opposition—and a freedom whose fruits they continue to offer to those who oppose them. And so I close with an invocation offered by the author of the unique volume you now hold in your hands: "There is no synonym for freedom."

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NOTES ON KETAMINE

In the last decade, further research and anecdotal evidence have accumulated to suggest that the mental effects of ketamine can be grouped into six broad categories: (1) dissociation, resulting in an almost totally dispassionate perspective, and classic dissociative phenomena such as "out-of-body," "astral travel," and "near-death"-type experiences; (2) entry into "information networks" in a kind of "cyberspace" specific to this compound; (3) contact with and participation in "alternative realities"; (4) communication with "extraterrestrials" or "disembodied entities"; (5) Tantra-like enhancement of sexual activity; and (6) assistance in personal and creative problem solving.

Category #1, dissociation, has been discussed in the section on ketamine in the "Contrasting Profiles" chapter of this book. Offered here are brief descriptions of the other five categories.

(2) Many users talk about entering cybernetic-like information spaces, what one aficionado calls "metaconnection networks." In this regard John Lily discusses his communications under the influence of ketamine with "ECCO" (Earth Coincidence Control Office), a hierarchy of entities who manage coincidences in a fashion intended to accelerate the motion of human beings along their psychospiritual evolutionary pathways (see The Scientist).

(3) Many ketamine users report that they can actually enter and participate in the alternative realities they perceive when using this compound. After repeated experiences of this sort, some users discover that they can consciously create, construct, control, and alter these worlds. As one investigator explains, "It's as if you've got a reality-synthesizer inside your head. You're in front of a holographic TV screen with no need of a remote control, because with your thoughts alone you can design your own program, enter the screen, and participate as both actor and director."

4) The works of John Lilly (particularly The Scientist and John Lilly, So far. ..) provide the most vivid and detailed personal accounts of contact with "extraterrestrials" or "disembodied entities." A prominent California transpersonal psychiatrist and his wife have also privately attested to experiences of this sort which they describe as "very convincing,"

(5) The minority of ketamine users who maintain sexual interest under this compound's influence have found the experience worthwhile.

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One user reports that "the best place to take ketamine is in bed with someone you love. The mingling of energy fields is terrific. Ketamine can be a lesson in Tantra."

(6) Many have found ketamine a useful agent for creative and personal problem solving, an application engendered in part by the state of objectivity integral to the compound's dissociative effects. One user claims to have dissolved a long-term writer's block with the aid of ketamine; another reports a battle while under the effects of this psychedelic with persistent anal bleeding, the result being a two-month remission of the condition.

Interest in ketamine has recently grown within the psychedelic and alternative spirituality movements as well as in "recreational" contexts (one user claims that small intranasal doses have become "as popular in Los Angeles dance clubs as cocaine was a few years ago"). One result has been an alarming increase in reports of a pattern of compulsive consumption which Lilly describes as the "repeated use trap." Although sudden termination of this kind of usage has not been observed to entail physiological withdrawal, ketamine has nonetheless earned a reputation as something of a "psychedelic heroin" in spite of its apparent positive potentialities. In some cases, long-term frequent use has generated a chronic state of dissociation characterized by schizoid qualities, including grandiose and paranoid delusions, a condition that has created consequences ranging from embarrassment to injury and even a few deaths. This state disappears rapidly once usage ceases.

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Organizations and Publications

ORGANIZATIONS

The Albert Hofmann Foundation

"The purpose of the Albert Hofmann Foundation is to maintain a library and world information center dedicated to the scientific study of human consciousness. Our library, art gallery and conference center house an extensive collection of books, journals, research reports, and art, and are open to scholars and the public. The inauguration of the Albert Hofmann Foundation in 1988 marked the 50th anniversary year of the first synthesis of LSD by Dr. Hofmann at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals."

The Foundation began leasing a building for the purposes described above on April 1,1991. It publishes a newsletter; offers a catalog of books, audiocassettes, and videotapes; and has an on-line computer bulletin-board service featuring psychedelically oriented material. The bulletin board number is (310) 315-0484. Participants may enter their own contributions.

Founded by Oscar Janiger, M.D., and psychotherapist Robert Zanger, the Hofmann Foundation has sponsored many noteworthy public gatherings and lecture events in the Los Angeles area.

The Albert Hofmann Foundation

1725 21st St.

Santa Monica, CA 90401

Botanical Dimensions

Botanical Dimensions is a nonprofit organization dedicated to collecting living plants and surviving plant lore from cultures practicing folk medicine in the tropics worldwide. Founded by Terence and Kat McKenna, Botanical Dimensions maintains a ten-acre sanctuary in Hawaii for endangered species of ethnobotanically and ethnomedically valuable plants. Their collection includes samples from Amazonian, Asian, Pacific, and African sites. The organization offers an irregular newsletter titled PlantWise.

Botanical Dimensions

Box 807

Occidental, CA 95465

Island Group and MAPS

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The Island Group

Founder Bruce Eisner describes the Island Group (which takes its name from Island, Aldous Huxley's novel of psychedelic Utopia), as "a free association of individuals dedicated to the creation of a psychedelic culture." Inaugurated in July 1991, the Island Group's short-term goalsare "the creation of discussion salons in major areas all over the country, and the creation of a nonprofit foundation that will give grants to researchers in consciousness transformation." Its long-term goal is "the establishment of a psychedelic community somewhere in the world that will provide new models for how people can relate to one another." The Island Group holds weekly meetings in Santa Cruz and has begun publishing a newsletter entitled Island Views.

Island Group

1803 Mission Street, Suite 175

Santa Cruz, CA 95060

(408) 427-1942

Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)

Founded by MDMA-advocate Rick Doblin, MAPS actively funds MDMA research, serves as an information center, and seeks to assist "the gradual medicalization and legalization of psychedelics and the states of mind they engender," MAPS has sponsored two major events; a conference entitled "Psychedelics in the 1990s: Regulation or Prohibition" in Berkeley, California, in February of 1990, and an international conference in Bern, Switzerland, on pharmacologically assisted psychotherapy in November and December of the same year. MAPS publishes a newsletter and offers copies of hard-to-obtain research papers and theses,

MAPS

1801 Tippah Lane

Charlotte, NC 28205

(704) Psychedelic Renaissance358-9830

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PUBLICATIONS

Mondo 2000

Originally High Frontiers, then Reality Hackers, now Mondo 2000, this magazine—having recently published its tenth issue, and achieving a circulation of more than 25,000—features an ever-broadening array of topics dealing with "the enhancement of human life: ways that people can change the nature of their relationship to existence," according to Editor-in-Chief R. U. Sirius. "Psychedelics have always been one of the favored and most interesting ways of doing that," he continues. "I think we'll always be interested in new information on psychedelics."

Whereas early issues focused largely on psychedelics, recent ones have included music, fashion, art, computers, virtual reality, life extension, intelligence enhancement, nutrition, and other subjects. Mondo 2000 is hefty, unique, slick, visually stunning, and often wry and iconoclastic in tone.

Subscriptions and business:

Fun City Mega Media/ Mondo 2000

Box 10171, Berkeley, CA 94709-5171

Correspondence: Box 40271 Berkeley, CA 94704

Psychedelic Monographs and Essays (PM&E)

An outgrowth of a 200-circulation mimeographed newsletter originally published in 1983, PM&E is an annually issued trade paperback anthology with a circulation of over 10,000, now in its sixth issue. Publisher and editor Thomas Lyttle describes the content as ranging from "the extreme underground to the highly scientific and technical, from the very personal to objective journalistic reports." He elaborates, "We provide an open forum for anyone with a clear voice, laying no editorial judgement as to whether these substances are helping people or driving them crazy." With recent issues PM&E has become increasingly literate, sophisticated, and substantial, and now features contributions from many major figures in the field, as well as fairly high production values.

Psychedelic Monographs & Essays

Box 4465

Boynton Beach, FL 33424

Psychedelic Illuminations

The Summer 1990 debut issue describes this new journal as a "quarterly paper trip into visionary consciousness and the exploration of psychedelic/cyberdelic society. We seek to provide a rich and diverse

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sampling of ways mapped and unmapped, diverging and converging. From original shamanic traditions to cyberdelia to extropy... one of our important tasks is to explore the value of plants as teachers... We are dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the support of those who pursue truth. We neither discourage nor advocate the use of illegal drugs as this is an individual decision. Our aim is to provide a forum for ideas and information so that those who choose to alter their own body and brain states may be as well-informed as possible."

Attractively printed on a rainbow of colored paper, the first issue features the edited transcript of a previously unpublished talk by Terence McKenna titled "Understanding in the Light of Nature."

Psychedelic Illuminations

Box 3186

Fullerton, CA 93634

bOING-bOING

Now in its sixth issue, this graphically innovative and beautifully illustrated magazine focuses on psychedelics and other technologies of consciousness change, along with related psychospiritual, social, political, and cultural concerns. Ranging in content from the fairly serious to the intentionally absurd—including comic strips—this literate and original magazine is characterized by what one can only call "attitude." Probably the most cutting-edge, well-conceived, and refined in execution of the current crop of similarly oriented journals for the lay audience.

bOING-bOING

Box 12311

Boulder, CO 80303

Trajectories

This quarterly newsletter, now in its seventh issue, features a futurist orientation and covers a range of issues reflecting the concerns of publisher and co-editor Robert Anton Wilson. Regularly discussed are conspiracy theories; anomalies such as UFOs and crop circles; the debate over drug legalization and other aspects of politics and current events; and consciousness technology, as well as other leading-edge scientific subjects such as the "new physics." Trajectories regularly runs new writings by Wilson, book reviews, and poetry. Articles are generally concise, incisive, and "heretical" in viewpoint.

Trajectories

The Permanent Press

Box 700305

San Jose, CA 95170

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Psychedelic Renaissance

High Times

Entering its 18th year of publication, this popular journal of the drug counterculture is once again becoming attractive to those interested in psychedelics other than marijuana. In the last two years High Times has printed lengthy articles covering ketamine hydrochloride, the Bridge Conference, and other topics falling under the rubric of the "neuro consciousness frontier." The November 1991, for instance, issue featured material on the intersection of virtual reality and psychedelia, an article on MAO inhibition by Terence McKenna, and an interview with "Captain" Al Hubbard.

High Times Magazine

235 Park Ave. South

New York, NY 10003

If 800) 435-0715

Subscriptions: $29.95/year

High Times, Box 410, Mt. Morris, 11 61054

Books

Of the plethora of relevant books that have been published over the last decade, two of the most noteworthy are outstanding sociocultural histories of LSD in the United States. In 1985 Grove Press published Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion by journalists Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain. This volume focuses on how federally funded research in mind control during the height of the Cold War played an important role in the early dissemination of LSD. (Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg, for instance, were first exposed to the drug through such programs.)

In 1987 Atlantic Monthly Press issued Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream by New England-based journalist Jay Stevens. Storming Heaven is a wide-ranging, thoughtful, and extraordinarily well-written account of the spread of LSD in the United States. The Epilogue discusses new compounds and other recent developments in the field of psychedelics.

The best selection of books about psychoactive drugs is available from Books-by-Phone. Many of the books mentioned in this volume may be purchased from them. They will send you a free 32 page catalog if you call or write them at:

Books by Phone

Box 522

Berkeley, CA 94701

(510) 548-2124

(800) 858-2665

MDMA Update

by Peter Stafford

The major area where exciting developments have occurred since the appearance in 1983 of the second edition of Psychedelics Encyclopedia has been among the MDA family of psychedelics, especially regarding MDMA, also known as "M," "MDM," "Adam," "X," and "Ecstasy" ("XTC"). In the second edition, this molecule was mentioned only three times: concerning its patenting in 1914, U.S. Army tests on its toxicology in 1953, and its effects in comparison to those of MDA. MDMA, however, was soon thereafter to ride the crest of yet another wave of psychedelic enthusiasm.

MDMA's Historic Advance

The course of MDMA's history has recapitulated to a considerable degree that of LSD. The "turn-on" this time began among chemists and psychiatrists after a preliminary announcement from the team of Shulgin and Nichols in 1978 in a volume titled The Psychopharmacology of Hallucinogens. There followed a chain-reaction of growth in its distribution, which, in this instance, even manifested in a Tupperware party like pyramid scheme for sales.

In April 1985 Newsweek magazine became the first of the major media to report on the phenomenon, declaring that "This was the drug that LSD was supposed to be, coming 20 years too late to change the world." During mid-summer 1985, MDMA became a subject of fascination for the media, eliciting comments in several nationally distributed magazines and newspapers, as well as in other periodicals, television, and radio. The sluice-gates were opened to an enormous amount of attention, with articles on the subject generally starting off with a remark from a respectably presented user to the effect that he or she was career-oriented and did not favor drug use in general, but had found MDMA to be of significant value. Reports centered on "New Age," "Yuppie," and student interest; dissolution of the effects of various kinds of trauma; successes in couples' counseling; and shortening of the duration of psychotherapy. But attention soon came to focus on use among the young, epitomized in the comment made by "Uncle Duke" of the syndicated comic strip Doonesbury: "Shrinks have been using it for years. But the kids, as usual, ruined it for everyone. They turned MDMA into a damn party drug."

As had previously been the case with LSD, it was at this point of wildfire-like spread that the tide turned.

The previous October, Congress had enacted a law granting the

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DEA Administrator the option of a one year curb for any drug on an "emergency" basis, after Alpha-methyl fentanyl ("China White," a so-called "designer drug" akin to morphine), had caused rapid onset of symptoms of Parkinson's disease in at least one user. At the end of June 1985, MDMA was banned by the Drug Enforcement Administration on an "emergency" basis, the first compound to be restricted in this manner. Acting DEA Director John Lawn placed MDMA into the most restrictive drug schedule of all. To a considerable degree it became confused in public discourse with this Parkinsonism issue, even though it has no such effects.

This proscription against its use, however, was then fought by a group of psychiatric and psychological professionals who hoped to be allowed continued access to MDMA in their work. Soon thereafter, Science magazine published a report claiming that MDA injected repeatedly in large amounts — about 150 times the human dose, by weight—into rats had caused neurotoxicity. Although the study involved a different drug and massive injections given consecutively to a different species, an alleged tie-in to MDMA became an important supportive justification for the just-announced "emergency" ban.

Subsequent investigations did duplicate the new charge, in doses not that much greater than the therapeutic dose. Tremendous fear was generated. Other factors also contributed heavily to the DEA's crackdown on MDMA: indiscreet usage, primarily in Texas and California; and the well meaning efforts on the part of UCLA psychologist Ron Siege! and Sarasota, Florida, student Rick Doblin.

In Dallas and Fort Worth, burgeoning usage of MDMA had led to over-the-counter sales at bars. A Texas laboratory was producing something like 200,000 tablets a month, and there were even strippers in Dallas nightclubs who had become involved with MDMA. This latter development was apparently of immense concern to the DEA, which mentioned strippers at the outset of its deposition in hearings to determine if MDMA ought to be banned.

After a few profound experiences catalyzed by MDMA, Rick Doblin soon after proposed the good-faith strategy of "telling all" — and went to the trouble of contacting Carlton Turner, Reagan's "drug czar," and various other regulatory officials, and even the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth to inform them of what in his view were the positive potentialities of MDMA and other psychedelics. Doblin's hope was to pre-empt these organizations' possible subsequent sources of information by providing a positive first impression of the new substance. The result, however, was that these groups became more alerted to the presence of a drug of which they had largely been previously unaware. Many users afterwards reproached Doblin for his innocence and openness. Most had been doing their best to keep information about MDMA under wraps,

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fearing that if the truth were known this compound would be outlawed.

(A central figure in the formation of the foundation that raised funds so that psychiatrists might be heard in MDMA hearings, Doblin has since set up the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which,among other activities, has financed the examination at Stanford and Johns Hopkins of the cerebrospinal fluid of past MDMA users. Unfortunately, some of the advertising for this program, featuring the ostensibly humorous headline "This is spinal tap!" may have unintentionally inspired greater fear.)

Ronald Siegel, Ph.D., appeared repeatedly as an "expert witness" on the subject of MDMA. In widely distributed quotations, Siegel warned of possible dangerous results of MDMA usage, comparing it to PCP ("Remember what they used to call that? The 'Peace Pill' "), and exaggerating its toxicity. In a barrage of articles, he focused on vexatious but minor side-effects, and insistently reminded readers of "a psychotherapist who took it, disappeared, and turned up a week later directing traffic in Chicago."

All of these influences, along with many lesser ones, came to a head in a set of hearings held in Washington, D.C., Kansas City, Missouri, and Los Angeles. Eventually, testimony from 34 witnesses, including many psychiatric and psychological professionals, was archived in 10 volumes.

After an unusually long wait, the DEA's Administrative Law Judge Francis Young, in a 90-page opinion that presented 100 "findings," found in favor of the psychiatrists. He ruled that MDMA should be placed in Schedule III, where restrictions for continuing research were considerably less stringent than the DEA Administrator desired.

However, the decision was not binding on the Administrator, who quickly restated his earlier arguments and reinstated his original ban on MDMA.

Contested again, the DEA categorization was overruled by the First District Circuit Court of Appeals, but then reinstated a second time. These contests were expensive and time-consuming, and thus another attempt at reclassifying MDMA is not presently on the horizon. In March 1986, MDMA was permanently placed in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, meaning that it was declared to be of "no medical value" and of "high abuse potential." A Schedule I rating presents significant impediments even to scientific research. The consequences of an iron-clad ban on the use of MDMA, and additional claims that it promotes neurotoxicity in humans quickly led to a falling off of usage and interest for a few years. In the underground market, it has led, as had been predicted, to an increase in more suspect products. It is still, however, produced and consumed in considerable quantities. Doblin has estimated sales at over 100,000 doses a month — both in the U.S. and more recently in Europe.

The most noted increase in enthusiasm has probably occurred in England, where a large number of clubs began to cater to what soon came

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to be known as "Acid House" music. The phenomenon has been chronicled primarily by the English magazines The Face and ID., with commentary elsewhere often to the effect that "Youth is once again out having fun!" as one writer put it. A symbol taken up by this new social crowd was "the Happy Face" — a circular, yellow, button-eyed rendition of a smiling visage — along with such slogans as "A + E = MC^2" (meaning "Acid" plus "Ecstasy" amounts to tremendous energy).

In the first journalistic effort at a comprehensive discussion of MDMA, Ecstasy: The MDMA Story (Ronin Books, Berkeley, CA, $17.95), Bruce Eisner does a fine jobof recapitulating the fervor of initial enthusiasms, the varieties of effects, and MDMA's tangled, ping-pong ball history. His fifth chapter provides "A Guide for Users." Two appendices are worthy of special attention. In one, Rick Doblin discusses the issues of neurotoxicity; in the other, Alexander Shulgin annotates 258 references from the MDMA scientific literature. The latter (53 pages long) is presented in 11 sections that are virtually complete through October 1988. Readers who are curious about any aspect of these studies can pursue their interest under the categories of chemistry (8 entries), in vitro studies (10), biochemistry (9), pharmacology (29), neurochemistry (51), toxicology (18), clinical studies (10), analysis (19), reviews and commentaries (71), quotations from reviews in which MDMA has been noted (8), and legal history (25).

Chemistry of MDMA

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At the end of 1989, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) published an investigation into the attitudes and experiences of 100 MDMA subjects. This study, authored by Jerome Beck, Deborah Harlow, et al., attempted to obtain a representative sociological cross-section that would reveal patterns of usage. "Bingers," which particularly troubled NIDA, turned out to be far less dangerously affected than had been anticipated. Given the small observed incidence of complications and the consistent benefits most users reported, the authors recommended "Re-examining the scheduling criteria for potential therapeutic adjuncts such as MDMA."

Chemistry of MDMA

The full name of MDMA is N-methyl-3,4-methylenedioxyphenylisopropylamine.

Each of these weighty syllables relates to an important aspect of this substance's makeup. Roughly translated, MDMA's formal description means something like this:

N-methyl = a totally saturated carbon atom (with three hydrogen atoms, to form a methyl group) is affixed to a nitrous compound

3,4-methylene = a bridge is attached at the 3 and 4 positions in a benzene ring

dioxy = two oxygen atoms are part of this bridge

phenyl = designating the presence of a substituted benzene ring

iso = an abbreviation for the term "isomer," here used as an isomer of propane (i.e., isopropyl)

propyl = a hydrocarbon having a total of three carbon atoms and eight hydrogen atoms aligned in sequence and having a terminal chain that is straight

amine = an amino grouping of a nitrogen and two hydrogen atoms is attached to the isopropyl cluster

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MDMA Update

Like other members of the MDA Family, MDMA has a much simpler skeleton structure than that of the classic psychedelics LSD, harma-line, ibogaine and psilocybin. It and other "phenylisopropylamines" have as their basic structure a six-sided carbon ring attached to a pentagon formed by two oxygen atoms that come off the ring and bridge to a methylene (a carbon plus two hydrogen atoms). There is also a side-chain linked to the carbon ring, composed of carbons, hydrogens, and a nitrogen atom. There are thus three main clusters involved in the formation of members of this family: a carbon ring of six atoms, an attached five-sided structure created by the methylene and twooxygen atoms, and a side-chain of a dozen-plus atoms — along with assorted other atoms that can otherwise fit in.

In addition, the five-sided bridge can be attached to the carbon ring in three different ways. The resulting molecules come in two versions that are mirror images of each other and are referred to as "stereoisomers." One bends a polarized beam of light to the left (the levorotary form), while the other does so to the same degree but to the right (the dextrorotary isomer). These are of different psychoactive strengths, but usually come together in what is called the racemate (an optically neutral mixture of the two isomers).

In contrast to classic psychedelics, it is the right-handed isomer of MDMA that is much more active than the left-handed form. This reversal is almost unique among such agents, and is thought by some researchers to indicate that MDMA belongs to an entirely different category of psychoactives. (The compound MBDB is the other similar example recently described in the related literature.)

This was one of the issues raised at the scheduling hearings, where the DEA tried to argue that MDMA was simply a variation of MDA, and that since that compound had been outlawed, so should MDMA. The latter was presented as a "designer drug" — a slight molecular variation of MDA created to get around the requirements of the drug laws — even though it actually was patented more than three-quarters of a century ago. (As it happens, the over-the-counter allergy preparation Sudafed has as close a chemical structure to MDA as does MDMA, though there have been no calls

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for banning it as well. The pharmacologic action of MDMA, furthermore, is quite unlike MDA and other well-known psychedelics. MDMA also shows no cross-tolerance with MDA.)

In its submission stating the case for placing MDMA in Schedule 1, the DEA acknowledged that the effective dose of the left-handed isomer is approximately 300 milligrams, in contrast to 80-120 milligrams for the right-handed one. "This reversal of the activity of the optical isomers of MDA and MDMA suggests that MDMA does not act by demethylation to MDA," it declared, along with indicating that the brain activity involved was likely quite different. These were important distinctions to acknowledge — but they were then ignored in the rest of the DEA's case for scheduling.

The difference in the structures of MDA and MDMA is the attachment of a methyl group (a carbon and three hydrogen atoms) to the nitrogen atom at the tail of each molecule. This is the same structural difference as that between amphetamine and methamphetamine, and has the effect of reducing both the length of the resulting experience and the physical side-effects. Just as altering the psychoactive oils in nutmeg by aminizing them (attaching an amine ring) has the effect of removing such consequences as dryness of the mouth and aching joints and increases the lucidity of the experience, so methylating the semi-synthetic MDA at the nitrogen position brings about a far less exhausting and less lengthy trip for those sensitive to amphetamine-like compounds.

MDMA requires about a thousand times the weight of a single dose of LSD if it is to be effective. This substance is measured in milligrams, with 100-125 milligrams the usual dosage (compared to 100-125 micrograms used in the average contemporary dose of LSD). Since about a thousand times the quantity of the precursors are needed for the concoction of MDMA, its "street cost" per dose is typically five to ten times that of LSD — even though it involves a much simpler process, much like that used in making amphetamine, which does not require construction of the complex chemical skeleton that characterizes the lysergic acid amides.

Physical Effects of MDMA

In the scheduling hearings regarding MDMA, the DEA set out to establish that this substance had what it called a "high potential for abuse." The only evidence presented, however, consisted of eight admissions to emergency wards cited by DAWN (the Drug Abuse Warning Network) over a six-year period, which was followed by, four more years with no admissions at all. If anything, given the enormous amount of MDMA that had been consumed by this time, these figures suggest reassurance that its abuse potential and dangers are quite low.

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The DEA called Daryl Inaba, a medical director at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in San Francisco, as an expert witness who might paint a picture of abuse by street persons who were said to be taking MDMA in alarming amounts, resulting in serious problems.

A confrontation resulted in which two doctors from the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic were questioned, one representing each side in the dispute, who eventually agreed that the incidence of abuse that they had seen was very slight — less than 1 % of those coming in for help. They also stated that most who were having difficulties simply needed a supportive environment and tended to become reoriented as soon as the drug was metabolized.

Administrative Law Judge Francis Young summed up his "Conclusion" in this matter with the following remarks:

The evidence of record does not establish that.. . MDMA has a "high potential for abuse." Accordingly, it cannot be placed in Schedule II. (We have already seen that it cannot be placed in Schedule I, because it does have "a currently accepted medical use in treatment" and it does not "lack -.. accepted safety for use ... under medical supervision."}

No one has argued here that the evidence establishes that MDMA "may lead to severe psychological or physical dependence," another requirement for Schedule II placement. The evidence does not so establish. For this reason, also, MDMA cannot be placed in Schedule II.

,,, Drs. Grinspoon, et al, argue that sufficient evidence of abuse potential has been shown to warrant placing of MDMA in Schedule III.

The Administrative Law Judge agrees, concluding that the evidence does establish MDMA to have "potential for abuse less than the drugs or other substances in Schedules I and II," and to establish that abuse of MDMA "may lead to moderate or low physical dependence or high psychological dependence."

The administrative law judge concludes that the evidence of record requires MDMA to be placed in Schedule III.

The main reason MDMA has little abuse potential is that it exhibits tachyphylaxis —a rapid buildup of tolerance so that repeated usage within a short space of time leads to the loss of desired effects. In contrast to its "heart-opening" and stress-reducing qualities, this substance, if taken within a few days of a prior ingestion, tends paradoxically to produce an increase in stress and many of the least desirable characteristics of amphetamine overdosage. Very few people are attracted to such effects, and even those who are could achieve them more cheaply via other substances.

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MDMA does, however, exhibit an unusually high ratio between the amount needed to get minimum effects and that which may be dangerous due to a temporary rise in blood pressure. For most users, 50-75 milligrams is required to be effectively perceived, while 200-250 milligrams (a fifth to a quarter of a gram) is an amount verging on overdosage. Such a narrow window for the proper dosage range is uncommon with psychedelics in general, but is an important consideration in regard to the MDA family. People suffering from hypertension or heart problems, who are using MAO inhibitors, or who are epileptic or pregnant, are not considered to be good candidates for experimentation with MDMA or MDA, and most informed sources caution that no more than a quarter of a gram of either substance be taken over a short space of time. Carelessness and human nature being what they are, on occasion some individuals have ingested larger amounts and survived. In his appendix to Ecstasy: The MDMA Story, Alexander Shulgin cites several papers about such incidences for the reader who is curious.

In discussing MDA and MMDA, psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo points out that a tiny percentage of the population is intensely sensitive to one-ring substituted amphetamines. Such persons may exhibit extreme reactions including sweating and hypertension as sometimes occurs with other amphetamine-like compounds. His recommendation is that an initial experience be of a low dosage.

There also have been a few incidents of apparent allergic reactions that required medical intervention. The clearest of these was presented at an MDMA conference in 1986 in Oakland and appears to have involved only a moderate dose of pure MDMA. An abbreviated version of this report was published in the October-December 1986 Journal of Psychoactive Drugs.

The kinds of reactions reported here, while of great concern when they do occur, are nonetheless very uncommon. Psychiatrists Joseph Downing and Philip Wolfson, presenting results of a toxicity study of 21 subjects, offer typical conclusions: "Other than a brief and moderate rise in pulse and blood pressure, the researchers found no significant abnormalities ... up to 24 hours after [ingestion]."

In healthy individuals who do not take it to excess, MDMA has a reliable record of producing its desired effects. Most probably, under 2-3% of those who have tried it have not placed a positive value on the experience. Those who find it problematic generally complain of the symptomatology associated with unusual amphetamine reactions — a vague but pervasive discomfort, chills, excessive sweating, or lack of lucidity. Even some who do enjoy the experience find that they feel somewhat languid during its initial phase, or a bit drained and tired the next day. These effects are not nearly as pronounced as with MDA, but they can be troublesome. They can be reduced considerably by taking magnesium, potassium, zinc, and tyrosine supplements either concurrently with ingestion of MDMA or before going to sleep after the "trip" has run its course. Some users are also both-

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ered by quirky eye movements, jaw clenching, and may feel somewhat nervous or irritable when "coming down." These again art common amphetamine-like reactions.

The "eye-wiggle," known medically as "nystagmus," usually passes quickly, and jaw tension can often be ameliorated by chewing gum or by use of the prescription drug propanolol {which has been given by a number of psychiatrists for this purpose) or 5 milligrams Valium. As for the harshness of the "come down" for especially sensitive individuals, some who are quite experienced have suggested that a glass of wine or a small amount of marijuana will often take this edge off the experience.

In spite of these occasional vicissitudes, the normal course of an MDMA trip generally provides the user with a pronounced sense of physical well-being, heightened balance and agility, and a sense of being "well-oiled" in bodily movement. Often this feeling results in the kind of free-flowing dancing observed at "Acid House" events and social gatherings at which MDMA is in use. As well, many practitioners of yoga and related disciplines have asserted that they can perform considerably better under the influence of XTC.

In the two books already on the market about MDMA — Through the Gateway of the Hear! by Sophia Adarnson (Four Trees Publications, Box 31220, San Francisco, CA 94131, S15.50) and Ecstasy: The MDMA Story by Bruce Eisner (ibid.) — quite a number of accounts are given by individuals who not only felt their bodies releasing "character armor" and other physical stress, but who actually came to feel that MDMA sessions had attenuated arthritic or skeletal problems. This action is not well understood as of yet, but the testimony is quite persuasive.

Alfred Scopp, a psychologist, notes that MDMA is analgesic and that "The effect of MDMA is to relax the muscular armoring. This results in the bringing to the surface of associated psychological trauma, defense or mental pain, which is then easily released."

Commenting on one of their subjects, George Greer and Requa Tolbert have this to say:

John had four MDMA sessions spaced over the course of nine months; each time he achieved relief from his previously irremediable, intense physical pain, and had greater success in controlling painful episodes in the interim by returning himself to an approximation of the MDMA state. He noted in particular that the reelings of cosmic love, and especially forgiveness of himself and others, would usually precede the relief of physical pain.

Reports in Science magazine and The journal of the American Medical Association have raised the greater fear that MDMA use necessarily causes neurotoxicity. As might have been expected, this possibility has been highly

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trumpeted in the press. Those studies, however, have been based on immense amounts of MDMA given repeatedly to laboratory animals, and have usually been accompanied by the qualification that the results may not apply to ordinary human usage. Over the last four years, more careful examinations preliminarily indicate that there is no such risk at the human dose level, and no negative behavioral or functional effects are as yet associated with MDMA.

Extensive animal testing as well as examination of human spinal fluid of MDMA users has been and is currently taking place. The results are discussed by Rick Doblin in Appendix II of Ecstasy: The MDMA Story.

Mental Effects of MDMA

It is in the realm of consciousness — the psyche, the mind, and the soul — where the results so far seen from MDMA make it one of the most fascinating, mysterious molecules discovered during this century. Its actions are little understood as yet. But it is clear that it has an extraordinary and unprecedented heart-opening or empathy-generating effect, that it can reduce stress, and that insights from the experience can have lasting effect — without, as is often the case with the classic psychedelics, either frightening or "playing tricks" on the user.

A large body of literature has by now been published that shows both the richness of MDMA's effects and the difficulty in summarizing, explaining, or analyzing them. Outstanding characteristics of the substance have been observed in relation to psychotherapy, sexuality, amelioration of the effects of trauma and depression, and spiritual development.

MDMA's Power and Subtlety. Compared with previously known psychedelics, MDMA is a remarkably subtle agent. LSD and psilocybin are somewhat coercive and uncontrollable to many who have used them, often leading them into areas of experience where they were reluctant to go. This is why LSD had enormous impact in certain subcultures, but was essentially rejected by most of the American public.

MDMA, however, works in quite a different way. It is mild in its action, but somehow quite frequently generates similarly life-changing results. For all its gentle nature, it is powerful. It has brought people to crossroads; often only later do they recognize that they have gotten onto a different path. An account from Peter Nasmyth of London expresses this quality:

Some time later I looked at my watch. Forty minutes had passed. I looked at my friend. Was she any different? Could I see into her soul as had been promised? Was I feeling great empathy and love?

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No, in fact we were having an argument. Tired of the park, she wanted us to go home, while I preferred to stay there with the hilltop view of London. My heart was beating a little faster, but I put it down to anxiety.

Another twenty minutes passed. SHU nothing. Perhaps the drug was just too subtle for me. Disappointed, I gave in to her wish to go home. We started down the hill. But by the time we reached the bottom I'd forgotten how to be angry. We were having a new conversation, examining our goals in life. What had we done so far? Had we really followed those vows of adolescence? Did either of us know what it was like to be close to another human being? For the first time in years I confessed my childhood yearnings to become a Marine; she told me she'd wanted to marry Woody Allen. Defenses were dropping at a rate it normally took people months to achieve. Suddenly I knew I could trust her with my closest secrets... strange because not half an hour before I wouldn't have cared if I never saw her again in my life. I told her this and we both laughed.

Predictability and Reliability. With the classic psychedelics, there is almost always a substantial element of unpredictability. While the experience of MDMA is somewhat affected by circumstance, it is remarkably consistent. Bruce Eisner, in introducing his study of MDMA, had this to say about its reliability:

As a result of these differences between MDMA and its predecessors [MDA and LSD], the experiences catalyzed by MDMA are nearly always positive. The set (expectations of the user) and the setting (the environment in which the drug is taken) have much less influence on the outcome of the MDMA experience than is true for LSD. The depersonalizing, hallucinatory experience of LSD requires much more preparation and structuring than MDMA does to produce a favorable outcome. And even with the most careful planning and environment, the dramatic consciousness changes produced by LSD can be frightening or even shattering for some people.

Here are comments from three other inner-world veterans who have been concerned about this point:

(1) 1 have given it to ... 300 or so people over the past five years, in quasi-clinical ways but also recreationally, and in rituals. And I've seen almost nothing but really positive experiences people have. Again, with varying long-term effects.

I think there is a remarkable commonality across the experiences with this drug. I would say that you could easily do a study

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on it. You could get 50 people, and you would have 50 really, really similar reports about what their experience was. It's remarkably consistent. Much more consistent than any other drug that I know of that's a psychedelic.

(2) A lot of philosophic and theological systems talk about unconditional love and acceptance, and I have certainly been at times in these states myself — but they're somewhat unpredictable about how and when you can get in them, and they're somewhat uncontrollable. But on M, for me, the whole context of the experience is one of just total, unconditional love toward other people, toward what I would ordinarily call my "enemies," toward any aspects of my own character that I'm not totally satisfied with or whatever. So the nickname for M — "the love drug" — has always been my experience of it.

I've never gotten — that I can remember — into a paranoid state on M. Uniformly, every experience is pretty much unconditional love toward pretty much everything and everyone.

(3)It|MDMA].. .takes away all the silly things that we do to ourselves, and lets us act freely and love ourselves. And when we do that, we love everyone else and everything.

Another interesting thing about it — for a long time I thought you really had to take it intelligently and have a big briefing beforehand and think real hard about it, you know? Then I came into contact with a bunch of people who had just taken it with no knowledge whatsoever of any of the philosophical things, And 1 asked them about it, and they told me the same intellectual things about it as I would have said to them. They figured it out for themselves, which I thought was pretty interesting. I mean, they talked about easier communication.

I've never really seen a failure story, nor people who have felt disappointed. Well, actually, I know two guys who took it thinking that it was a hallucinogen—and so they were disappointed at first, but then after a few minutes they decided they liked it better than that anyway. I haven't really seen anything negative.

Another thing that's good about MDM is that it's not so wild—or it allows people to access mystical areas within themselves because its not so scary ... as the major psychedelics like LSD. I think that's why more people will take it — because it's a lot more accessible than normal, and it helps people overcome their fear of exploring the mysticism within themselves .. .

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General Comments on Psychothcrapeutic Use. MDMA was originally presented in a therapeutic context, even though there had been underground usage as far back as the early '70s. It spread to a small core of psychologists and psychiatrists who were impressed with the unprecedented opportunities it offered for their field. Their excitement was not unlike that generated in similar professional circles by the challenges presented by LSD in the '50s. Once they had experienced how powerfully MDMA reduced the barriers between themselves and their clients, advanced the processes of diagnosis, and got to the core of the problems that had brought their patients to them, almost all of them thought of MDMA primarily as a "medicine" or "sacrament"; they were offended and troubled by any suggestion that MDMA might be used indiscriminately, without thoughtful intentionally, or even "recreationally."

They had become privy to a tool that, in the words of Claudio Naranjo, gave their troubled clients "a brief, fleeting moment of sanity." This was not to be taken lightly. Theirs was the challenge to use it responsibly. The first major early study was performed by the husband-wife team of Greer and Talbot, who wrote several papers on the subject but didn't publish them for quite a long time out of fear that if such knowledge were to spread beyond a small group, the usage of this potent "medicine" would consequently become degraded. Thus the initial awareness of MDMA was kept to a core group of a few hundred psychotherapists, mainly in the San Francisco Bay area.

In March of 1985,35 people who were concerned about the future of MDMA met for a week at the Esalen Institute's grounds, just south of Big Sur, California, to exchange views about what had developed so far. On the fourth day, 13 participants took MDMA and were monitored by a physician and/or psychiatrist. The serious tone of these proceedings is indicated by George Greer's report soon after that appeared in Advances: journal for the Institute for the Advancement of Health;

Among the professionals present, the combined clinical experience in using MDMA during the past several years totaled over a thousand sessions .. .

The reports on the benefits of MDMA, although anecdotal, were uniformly positive. In the discussion of MDMA's effects, the clinicians using it felt it possessed a unique action that enhanced communication, especially in couples in therapy. The drug reduced defensiveness and fear of emotional injury, thereby facilitating more direct expression of feelings .. .

Reports of MDMA's facilitation of individual psychotherapy were also favorable. Many subjects experienced the classic retrieval of lost traumatic memories, followed by the relief of

Psychotherapeutic Use of MDMA

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emotional symptoms. Victims of child abuse and sexual attack experienced the most dramatic benefits. [Philip] Wolfson also reported having multiple MDMA sessions with psychotic individuals and their natal families, leading to improvements in the patient's functioning and ego integration ...

Another example of the seriousness that flavored the early years of MDMA investigation can be found in Through the Gateway of the Heart, which consists of transcriptions from the recollections of 44 individuals and 10 group experiences. The importance of intentionality is emphasized heavily, as is "real work" on oneself.

It was at this point when knowledge about MDMA went public, and the situation suddenly changed.

All at once, those who had used this new adjunct to psychotherapy found themselves on the defensive. And so there began the DEA hearings before administrative-law judge Francis Young, in which professionals who had used MDMA would have to convince an anti-drug agency — which didn't even know- of their existence —• that this substance both had (1) a "recognized medical use" — which is defined in law quite differently than a psychotherapeutic use — and (2) that it didn't have a "high abuse potential" if their research with and use of MDMA were to continue.

One major problem they faced, of course, was that they not only had to couch their case in "medical" terms, but also were required to show that their work was "recognized" by their colleagues. This was difficult primarily on two grounds. In the first place, they had been "playing their cards close to the chest," and secondly, the nature of their work with MDMA was by its very novelty basically offensive to most members in their field.

Stanley Krippner discusses that second "uphill battle" in his foreword to Eisner's Ecstasy: The MDMA Story. His explanation of objections on the part of his colleagues can be summarized in seven key points:

(1) Most psychiatrists will use drugs that inhibit hallucinations, block disordered thought patterns, or halt repetitive verbalizations. But they find it difficult to justify using substances that can produce novel ways of conceiving reality, and unusual ways of being in the world.

(2) The ordinary problems of transference, counter-transference, and projection produce so many complications in psychotherapy that few practitioners would want to risk augmenting this predicament.

(3) The use of MDMA violates the structure of psychoana-lytically oriented psychotherapy which is geared toward a 50-

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minute hour, not the three- or four-hour session that the proper use of MDMA demands.

(4) Most of those psychologists who practice behavior modification are wary of MDMA not only because of the time factor but because it admits to the possibility of quick "insights" and "breakthroughs," not the step-by-step learning and relearning that characterizes most behavioral approaches.

(5) When a psychotherapist is trained to use MDMA, part of one's apprenticeship involves taking the drug oneself.

(6) The ecstatic effects of MDMA are looked upon as "pathological" or "dysfunctional" by many psychotherapists.

(7) Psychotherapists who use MDMA often have abandoned the medical model that permeates most of contemporary psychiatry. The goal of these divergent therapists is sometimes described as facilitating the development of "fully functioning human beings" and in going "beyond adjustment" in the enhancement of "human capacities" and the "human potential." These terms are suspect to a psychiatrist trained to look at his or her clients from the model of disease, or a psychologist whose education has emphasized faulty learning as the cause of a client's maladaptive behavior.

The psychotherapists that testified at the DEA hearings on MDMA made an impressive case. Robert Lynch presented his belief that "MDMA is potentially the most important mind-exploring substance that had become available during the preceding 20 years," and that during an MDMA experience "the user's own higher mind acts as the therapist" and that the experience could be very motivational. Joseph Downing discussed his treatment of a 40-year-old "highly successful entrepreneur" suffering from depressive symptoms, a moderate stress syndrome, and the recurrent, obsessive thought that he "would do away with himself at age 43 as had his father, also a depressive," who wished to use MDMA as part of his therapy:

... We arranged a day-long session, which produced a flood of repressed material that emerged into consciousness; he and his sister were very badly battered and traumatized for many years by their father who was repeatedly jailed, placed in psychiatric hospitals, then returned home until he repeated his psychotic behavior. The tragic cycle ended only when the father ended his life with carbon monoxide when the boy was seven. I have rarely heard more vicious details from persons who have survived physically

Support for further MDMA research

III-

intact and sane. The man is still in treatment, making good progress with the prospect of having a normal emotional life in a few years. I can say, and I firmly believe, that this absolutely central historical material would never have emerged without the use of MDMA in a proper setting, with a therapist he trusted; and with the effect of MDMA, he was able to acknowledge this previously repressed history of abuse ...

Philip Wolfson reported on his treatment of "a 27-year-old male whom I would describe as a 'flagrant' borderline individual with long bouts of psychoses beginning in his 25th year," when he was hospitalized with "symptoms of frank delusions, hallucinations, extreme paranoia, negativism, homophobia, and a fixed persecutory set of delusions centered on an entity called the 'force' ":

. . . The first session was profound in the change in this individual's sense of self. Connections of an affectional nature were made with his parents and myself and the openings of trust experience began. For the first time in two years, he experienced a glimpse of a positive self-image and loving feelings that did not panic him. The afterglow of this session lasted several days with intensity, but recognition of that positive self-image has lasted permanently. A second session ten days later consolidated his sense of difference, increased his ability to cope with the delusions that he continued to experience, and enabled him to view himself as potentially redeemable from the "ape" image that he carried of himself...

Such were some of the highlights from those urging the government to allow them to continue the exploration of MDMA's potential. But support came as well from some of those the DEA had lined up, presumably in opposition. Eisner relates one such instance:

... one of the government's chief witnesses, John Docherty, former chief of the Psychosocial Treatment Branch of NIMH, told the court that he supported further MDMA research and that "MDMA is at the confluence of two great trends in psychiatry: psychotherapy and pharmacology," because it had been shown to enhance rapport between therapists and their clients. Studies have demonstrated that rapport is one of the few factors reliably significant in psychiatry.

As it turned out, Judge Young, after an unusually long evaluation of the evidence presented, agreed that MDMA had an accepted "medical

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Personal accounts of MDMA experiences

III - 79

use" - but then his finding was ignored, and MDMA was placed in Schedule I rather than his recommended Schedule III, making it vastly more difficult for even recognized professionals to conduct research or further explorations.

Rape, Childhood Abuse, and Post-War Stress Syndromes. The efficacy of MDMA in these areas has already been mentioned. What follows are several examples.

Kathy Tamm, a San Francisco marriage and family counselor, was featured in a front-page article in the Los Angeles Times. She had earlier been

walking to her car folio wing a meditation class in Menlo Park when she was abducted, taken to a wooded area, tied up, beaten and then tortured for several hours. For six months after the incident she underwent intensive therapy, but she showed little progress.

She had terrible nightmares. She was terrified to leave the house. Every unexpected noise, every shadow assaulted her senses and brought back visions of the attack.

Tamm, as a result, felt "suicidal, at the end of my rope." As a last resort, however, she and her psychiatrist decided to try treatment with the aid of MDMA:

"I've taken it several times, and each time I felt a little less fearful," Tamm said. "The drug helped me regain some measure of serenity and peace of mind and enabled me to begin living a normal life again.

"For the first time, I was able to face the experience, go back and piece together what had happened. By facing it, instead of always burying it, I was able to sort of slowly discharge a lot of horror."

In Through the Gateway of the Heart appears the story of a graduate student and systems designer, 37, who took 150 milligrams of MDMA with a therapist, and then a 50 milligram booster dose:

... What is the source of my arthritis? Blocked energies. I need to get in touch with what I want, and let the knowledge lubricate my joints; no more stoppage of anger or love. Let it all flow through!

. . . Material about a sexual molestation incident — first reported during a hypnosis session several weeks ago — has had

much more meaning for me since I heard the tape of the Adam session. In it I sounded like I was seven years old. The impact comes from the deep recognition of how many ways the event molded my responses to the world around me, in part because of the distrust of my parents that was focused by the incident. Reliving this incident helped to free up my energy and emotions in a number of ways; it feels like this process will be ongoing for some time to come. The understanding and resolving of this incident is not only helpful to me personally; it can be a vehicle for my reaching out to others with similar experiences....

Another fragment from the same book, this time a male graduate student, 33, who took the same dosage in the company of another participant and two guides:

I went into the experience seeking greater empathy for the child I once was and still am, and to know my own emotional needs well enough that I could begin clearly to distinguish my needs from those of others ...

The issues of emotional differentiation from my mother and of financial solvency/independence are very closely related. The connection was and is a major issue for me to explore.

For the first twenty minutes or so of the experience I felt considerable fear. I felt myself lowering down into a softer and more vulnerable place. I could feel the layers of fear peeling off of my torso and moving away into space. I felt immersed in fear for a time. Soon after ingesting the second capsule, I dropped below the fear and contacted a warm and supportive baseline feeling, a space of support that was totally without fear. This gave me my first sense of what it is like to not be a paranoid, to be like other people.

And finally:

I have seen only two anxiety reactions as a result of Ecstasy. Both of them were very therapeutic. Afterward, the people involved were very glad the way it happened.

One was a German pilot who was a prisoner of war in Russia for five years. On his first Ecstasy experience, he went into all of the horrors of his P.O.W. camp. After about two or three hours he came out of this, and felt as free as a new-bom child, and literally danced with joy. Anytime thereafter that he took Ecstasy, he didn't experience the horrors again, as it was something that was locked in him and he needed to go through it in order to release it; and release it he did, forever.

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MDMA Update

MDMA treatment for depression

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Another anxiety reaction I saw was with a fourteen-year-old child who released all of the pain of her childhood, when her mother and father used to beat her. After sobbing and crying for several hours, she became very relaxed and very happy and, again, nevermore after that experience did she go through it again ,..

Couples in Therapy. The other outstanding area in psychotherapy where MDMA has demonstrated extraordinary power is in the counseling of estranged partners. While it "is not a panacea," as those who have used it this way readily admit, this substance has worked a kind of "magic" in many instances where the prognosis before its use was dim at best.

"It is our general conclusion," wrote George Greer and Requa Tolbert, the team that has published the most about MDMA psychotherapy (in this case, in the October-December 1986 journal of Psychoactive Drugs):

that the single best use of MDMA is to facilitate more direct communication between people involved in a significant emotional relationship.

Not only is communication enhanced during the session but afterwards as well. Once a therapeutically motivated person has experienced the lack of true risk involved in direct and open communication, it can be practiced without the assistance of MDMA. This ability can not only help resolve existing conflicts but also prevent future ones from occurring due to unexpressed fears or misunderstandings.

Regardless of the mechanism, most subjects expressed a greater ease in relating to their partners, friends, and coworkers ...

These paragraphs relate the finding that has generated probably the greatest consensus among therapists experienced with MDMA. In general, this substance seems to have an uncanny ability to separate out "the barriers people normally interpose between themselves and others," as B. Van Alstyne has put it,

and thereby allows the true feelings present at the heart level to manifest themselves .. .There is a sense of incredible beauty and perfection in your perception of the other person, and a feeling of absolutely unconditional love ... Communication becomes effortless, even when worries or differing feelings are expressed.

"Usually people just begin to talk," comments a therapist who has seen an extensive amount of such interactions occur, "but sometimes I have to take a more active role. With couples especially, sometimes they'll just

want to sit there hugging or rocking back and forth, and I'll have to say, Listen, folks, let's get down to the business at hand"

Some therapists have found better results when the drug has been given individually, rather than to the pair both at once. And in some cases, estrangement has progressed past the point where MDMA can be of any help.

Depression. The main theme running throughout almost every MDMA account has to do with acceptance — of the world and of one's place in it. This substance somehow provides a lucid, "centered" moment for its user, in which he or she is not weighed down with feelings of guilt, with fears of the unforeseen, overwhelmed by a need to be "on guard," burdened by sensations of inadequacy, grief, illness, and soon. Chronic stress temporarily attenuates. The user typically feels the heaviness of the past lifted, so that rather than dwelling on hurts and resentments, he or she can calmly accept them and focus instead on "where to go from here and now."

The brutal facts of the past are not forgotten; they may, in fact, become especially clear. Depression and other troubles do not entirely disappear; but one is allowed a kind of "breathing space" in which one may "get in touch with feelings which are not ordinarily available" or see the "purpose and potential" in their lives. Here is how Joseph Downing described this state of consciousness in his testimony about MDMA:

During the rime of acute effect, about four or six hours, feelings of fear and anxiety lift. One feels that one can examine both one's motives and actions, and those of others, calmly and objectively, with acceptance and compassion. Affection and acceptance temporarily replace one's fears. The dominant experience is one of calm and understanding. Depending on the material contained in the unconscious, the patient will deal with any situation, from childhood traumas, to long-felt adult insecurities, to deeply repressed emotions....

Claudio Naranjo suggests how this change in orientation might be applied:

The MDMA experience is something like artificial sanity, a temporary anesthesia of the neurotic self. I mostly use MDMA as an "opener" at some point in psychotherapy, not only for the wealth of the material gained during the session but for how it facilitates therapeutic work in the aftermath.

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MDMA and spiritual development

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In cases of depression and low self-esteem, the action of MDMA is thus very different from pharmacological approaches normally used in therapy. June Riedlinger gave "A Pharmacist's Perspective" on this matter in the July-September 1985 journal of Psychoactive Drugs:

It seems that no other drug is available that has these same effects. There are drugs that are used as a supplement to guided psychotherapy (i.e., anti-depressants and tranquilizers), but none that can be used, like MDMA, as an adjunct to such therapy in order to facilitate the process of communication. .. its short duration of effect would seem to indicate that MDMA is both effective and efficient as a drug for the medical treatment of depression. It works in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks and is effective when administered infrequently (e.g., in weekly or monthly dosing intervals), thus reducing the potential for troublesome side effects. This compares favorably to the multiple daily dosing required for all of the currently available legal drugs that can be prescribed for treating depression... which often take several days or even weeks to produce antidepressant effects and frequently cause lasting troublesome side effects.

Robert Masters, coauthor of The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience and Psychedelic Art, is a therapist who has been impressed with MDMA's efficacy in treating severe depression. He has discussed this in correspondence with Bruce Eisner, who summarized Masters' position:

As he has observed it, the tendency of MDMA to eliminate negative ideations and emotions extends to even near-suicidally depressed patients. The breaking up of emotional and ideational patterns — also muscular ones — provides the "crack in the iceberg" which then allows the syndrome to dissipate—sometimes altogether and even permanently after just a single session. When only temporary relief is a result, then a second or third session with the drug might be warranted. As with most other clinical applications, a good deal more evidence is needed to allow anyone to state that this approach is always without hazards. However, limited experience suggests, Masters says, that there may be no better therapy available when the depression is extreme to the point of causing great suffering or even endangering a patient's life.

The therapeutic use of MDMA is not always without com plications. As many of the previous examples indicate, difficulties of a somewhat traumatic nature can be encountered in the course of an MDMA session. What is at issue here is not whether a session is "good" or "bad," but the way in which it is managed.

George Greer offers the following guidelines on this issue:

People may experience a recurrence of any psychological problems they have ever had in the past. Those with a history of panic attacks have had recurrences both during and after sessions. For this reason, MDMA is not recommended for people who have ever been unable to function socially or vocationally due to psychological problems unless 24-hour care by trained people is available. The person should also be fully willing to experience whatever may happen during or after sessions. This is the most important factor in screening clients. People who are not ready for anything to happen should not take MDMA because that mental set predisposes one to having a difficult time without benefitting from the experience.

A similar view was put forth in a four-page pamphlet ("General Information: MDMA") circulated among professionals using MDMA during the mid-'80s:

It is important to say the following: Although MDMA is usually free of effects often associated with alteration of perceptions, or consciousness-alteration, such as changes in the visual field, "stoned" feelings, loss of coordination, among others, there are exceptions and individual variations. Negative and unexpectedly difficult experiences must be allowed for, and prepared for, even though they may be unusual. To give only one example, we know of an eventually fruitful and rewarding experience involving a young man who underwent a classic identity crisis. It was necessary for the leader of the session to devote the two days following the experience to the working through of this crisis with the client. Unexpected insight can be acutely disturbing to a person of any age or experience, and, again, this must be allowed for.

Spiritual Development. MDMA provides users with a "Time Out" during which they can often see the possibilities and direction of their lives more clearly than under ordinary circumstances. This experience has led many people to recognize their "underlying mysticism," to become more interested in spirituality than before. Accounts in Through the Gateway of the Heart illuminate this shift. Robert Lynch, as summarized by Richard Seymour in his MDMA (Haight-Ashbury Publications, 409 Clayton St., San Francisco, CA 94117), concludes that "what is produced is a motivational experience that involves a greater understanding by the subject of his or her purpose and potential in life."

MDMA can, for whatever reasons, function as an efficacious "access code" to spiritual states. Newsweek, in the earliest national media

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forms, sources and preparations of MDMA

III- 85

roundup on MDMA, made this point clearly: "A Benedictine monk from Big Sur, Brother David Steindl-Rast, says 'a monk spends his whole lift-cultivating the same awakened attitude it gives you.' "

Here are some comments from one subject who discovered that MDMA can operate in this way:

The first MDM trip I ever had — when I felt I was in the presence of God, even though I was an atheist — was pretty amazing. I was an atheist at the time. I was a college teacher of philosophy, and .. . the first college course I ever designed and taught myself was called "Atheism — The Case Against God." So I was pretty dogmatic about it, to say the least.

And yet this overwhelming energy came upon me that I would in retrospect call the "holy spirit," to use Christian terminology. At the time it was coming on, I was sitting next to my wife and I looked at her and I said, "If I didn't know better, I would say I was in the presence of God!" It was such an obvious way to describe it. So in some ways that was the most clear experience of the presence of God I've ever had ....

Ralph Metzner adds that many MDMA users have found that this substance constitutes a fine adjunct to a wide variety of spiritual disciplines, often leading the user to see what the practice was all about — and often for the first time,

Sensuality and Sexuality. MDMA, often called a "hug drug," has a deserved reputation in this arena. It increases intimacy,but in most instances tends to reduce genital sexuality. The standard finding about this substance was expressed by John Buffum and Charles Moser in the October 1985 journal of Psychoactive Drugs when they reported on the first survey of MDMA's effects on human sexuality. "It appears that MDMA does not increase sexual excitation or sexual desire in a majority of individuals," they wrote^

even though it increases feelings of emotional closeness and sensuality ... Almost half of the males and a third of the females indicated that they felt more receptive to being sexual while under the influence of MDMA, but this effect was not paralleled by an increased interest in initiating sexual activity in either the men or the women.

These findings do not conform to society's usual notions regarding aphrodisiacs. "It is curious," concluded this team of investigators, "that a

drug, which can increase emotional closeness, enhance receptivity to being sexual and that would be chosen as a sexual enhancer, does not increase the desire to initiate sex."

The question of the difficulty of maintaining male erection has been answered differently by different people. One man offers a statement that differs from the majority finding:

I have been told that 9 out of 10 men don't have intercourse on MDMA. That's perhaps their psychology; we [my partner and I) always have intercourse. I find males can sustain their erection for the full trip if they wish — but neither sex has orgasms (the male doesn't ejaculate), so the male can continue. Skin tactile sense is 3 to 4 times more sensitive and wonderful — and after several trips one learns to recreate that enhanced tactile sense at will, without tripping.

Forms, Sources and Preparations

MDMA generally appears as a white crystal, but it is sometimes pressed into a small pill. Usually, about half of such a tablet is actually MDMA, and the rest is filler. MDMA crystals are fairly small, about 1 /8" in length. Pure MDMA is whitish; a more brownish tint indicates that synthesis may have been incomplete. Failure to wash this product completely, and exposure to light, air, or water, all increase brownish coloration. The early testing by PharmChem found that about half of samples submitted were MDMA, while the rest either featured only some percentage or consisted of other substances entirely. When MDMA is packaged in tablet form,

it sometimes includes vitamins, aminoacids,and minerals that are designed

to attenuate side effects for sensitive users. One of the first such products was called "Sassyfras," which was packaged with 100 doses to a bottle.

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MDMA Update

Sometimes MDMA is taken along with other psychedelic substances, such as LSD and 2-C8.

The process for manufacturing this compound is relatively easy, but the chemicals needed for its concoction are "watched" by the DEA — one of the reasons the product is fairly expensive.

In its statement of the case for placing MDMA in Schedule 1, the DEA in March 1984 noted some of the production routes:

The first reported synthesis of MDMA was from safrole by converting it to its bromo derivative followed by reaction with meth-ylamine (Biniecki et al., 1960). Bailey et al describe the synthesis of MDMA from 3,4-methylenedioxyphenylacetone using a Leuckart reaction with N-methylformamide and hydrolysis of the N-formyl derivative (Bailey el al., 1975). A third synthesis for MDMA described in the literature starts with peperonal which is reacted with nitroethane, ammonium acetate, and acetic acid to form a nitrostyrene derivative that is reduced to the ketone and then reacted with methylamine to form MDMA (Rabjohns, 1963). Using the method of Borch et al, MDMA can be synthesized by the reductive amination of the appropriate ketone in the presence of sodium cyanoborohydride (Borch et al., 1971). The MDMA syntheses used in clandestine laboratories are analogous ....

A roundup of methods used since appears in a paper cited by Shulgin in his annotated MDMA bibliography.

Generally, underground production begins with seemingly innocuous materials, such as Heliotrope or some residues from camphor production.

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Psychedelic Obituaries

The following psychedelic pioneers are recently deceased:

* Sidney Cohen, one of the first to receive LSD in the Los Angeles area, who, according to Oscar Janiger, was instrumental in introducing the social use of LSD. Cohen produced an important early work on LSD, The Beyond Within, along with another that was quite influential, LSD, in which he and Richard Alpert addressed some 40 central questions raised by psychedelics.

" Al Hubbard, who purchased 6,000 bottles of Sandoz LSD, and then distributed them along the west coast of the U.S. and across Canada. It was largely due to his influence that large-dosage psychedelic therapy was initiated "If you don't believe LSD works," he liked to say, "just try it."

* Michael Hollingshead, one of the main distributors of perhaps the most significant grain of LSD — labelled "H-OOU47" — that passed eventually into the systems of Donovan, Paul McCartney, Keith Richard, Paul Krassner, Frank Barron, Huston Smith, Paul Lee, Richard Katz, Pete La Roca,Charlie Mingus,Saul Steinberg, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner, Alan Watts, Jean Houston and perhaps a thousand others. "There is some possibility," he once commented, "that my friends and I have illuminated more people than anyone else in history."

" Ron Stark, a figure of importance in psychedelic history with as mysterious and even more notorious a background than that of Al Hubbard. Stark was responsible for bringing in 17 million doses of Orange Sunshine acid to the United States. (His story.along with that of Hubbard, is most fully covered in Marty Lee and Bruce Shlain's Acid Dreams.)

* Abbie Hoffman, one of those turned on to LSD by the CIA, who became the archetypal activist of the '60s due to being a cofounder of the Yippies, an architect of the "Levitation of the Pentagon," and one of the "Chicago Seven" tried in connection with the police riot at the Democratic Convention of 1968.

"John Allegro, a leading Dead Sea Scroll scholar and author of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, a daring volume of speculation about the origins of religion.

" Leo Zeff, a Berkeley psychiatrist who perhaps acquainted more people with the therapeutic use of MDMA than any other single individual.

* Timothy Plowman, heir-designate of Richard Evans Schultes, who was one of the great Amazonian plant collectors and an expert on Coca and the Brunmansia and Brunfelsia families.

* Norman Zinberg, who launched the first scientific examination of marijuana, and published extensively on drug studies (Drug, Set & Setting}.

* R. D. Laing, a cultural hero specializing in controversial theories about schizophrenia and family life which were put into practice at Kingsley Hall in England, who wrote The Politic* of Experience, The Divided Self, and Knots.

* R. Gordon Wasson, the father of ethnopharmacology who revealed the presence of psilocybin to the late 20th century. His story is touched on ahead (229 ff.), and is described as well in The Magic Mushroom Seeker, Dioscorides Press, in which We get an intimate portrait of this banker-scholar from his daughter, friends, and colleagues.

" Maria Sabina, the curandera who demons (rated to the Wassons how much to use of the psychoactive mushrooms they had collected over the previous couple of years, as well as how they were used ritually. R. Gordon Wasson claimed his greatest achievement was transcription of one of her veladas.

Index Third Edition

(for pages numbered III -1 through III - 91)

2CB, 27, 40, 86 2CE, 40

Abraham, Ralph, 49

abuse, 11,67-68

abuse potential, 11,63,67,69,75

acceptance, 81

access codes, 23,83 "acid," 18, 51,87

Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and

the Sixties Rebellion, 60,87

acidheads, 47

"acid house," 21,54.70

"Acid Quest," 22

Actuel, 23

"Adam," 61, 79

Adamson, Sophia, 70

Advances: Journal for the

Institute for the Advancement of

Health, 74

AIDS, 30

Albert Hofmann Foundtn, 32, 56

alcohol, 11,17

alcoholism, 45

Allegro, John. 87

Allen, Woody, 72

allergic reactions, 69

Alpert, Richard, 17,30,37,87

alpha-methyl fentanyl, 62

altered states, 32

"alternative realities," 54

Alzheimer's disease, 26,42

American Health, 22

amine, 65,67

ami no acids, 85 amphetamine, 67-70 anal bleeding, 55 androgynous, 52 anesthetics, 11 animal testing, 71 Annotated Bibliography of Timothy Leary, 30 anti-depressant, 42-43,82 anti-viral properties, 42-43 anti-war, 17 anxiety reactions, 79-81 aphrodisiacs, 84 Archaic Revival, 36, 52 art, 31,36, 56,58 arthritis, 70. 78 "artificial intelligence," 48 "Ask Ed." 35 "astral travel," 54 "Atheism—The Case Against God," 84 atheist, 84

awakened attitude, 84 Ayahuasca, 36,43

bad trips, 10 Barron, Prank. 30,87 BBC, 22 Beck, Jerome, 38,44,65

behavior modification, 76

belladonna, 11

Beresford, John, 13-19

beta-carbolines, 43

Beyond Within, 87

"Beyond Within: The Rise and

Fall of LSD," 22

Bick, Chuck, 15

"bingers," 65

biochemistry, 64

Bivens, Perry, 31

Blewett, Duncan, 1^

blood pressure, 69

bOING-bOING. 59

Books-by-Phone, 60

Botanical Dimensions, 36,52,56

brain, 48-49,51,67

brain function, 32-33

brain machines, 46

brainwashing, 14

Bray, Faustian, 33

Brazil, 21

"breakthroughs," 76

Bridge Conference, 25,38,44-46,

48-49, 52,60

"Bromo," 22. 40

Brunfelsia, 88

Brunmansia, 88

Buffum, John, 84

Burroughs, William, 30

Bush, George, 12

camphor, 86

Carr, Kathy Thurmond, 36 cat retina, 45

cerebrospinal fluid, 63,71 Changing My Mind, Among Others, 30

Chaos Dynamics, 45,49 "character armor," 70 chemistry, 64-67 "Chicago Seven," 17,87 child abuse, 75-76, 78-81 "China White," 62 chronic use, 10 Chwelos, Nick, 15 CIA, 60,87

clandestine laboratories, 86 clinical studies, 64,74 Close! Cultivator, 35 Coca, 88 cocaine, 23,55 Cohen, Sidney, 87 Cold War, 60' Columbia University, 15 comics, 59 coming down, 70 computers, 45-46,48-49,56,58 confrontation (and non-confrontation), 18 Congress, 61 Connections, 21 consciousness. 45-46, 49, 52, 56,

conspiracy theories, 59 Controlled Substances Aii Controlled Substances Ait, cosmic love, 70 Cosmic Trigger, 30 Cosmic Trigger II, 31 counterculture, 45-46, 60 counter-transference, 75 couples' counseling, 61, 74,. Cox, Tony, 16 creativity, 22, 31 -32,39, 4N, = Crombe, William, 12 crop circles, 59 cross-dressing, 52 cross-tolerance, 67 curandera, 88 curatives, 43 cyberdetic, 58 "cyberspace," 54 Czechoslovakia, 21

DAWN, 67

DEA, 62-63, 66-68, 75-77, 86

Dead Sea Scrolls, 87

Dean, Ward, 42

death penalty, 17

delusions, 77

Deluxe Marijuania Growers

Guide, 35

Democratic Conventn of 1%'

dependence, 11,68

depersonalizing experience,

depression, 26,76,81-82

de Rios, Marlene Dobkin, 52

"designer drugs," 62,66

Details, 72

detoxifying properties, 42

dextrorowrv. 66-67 diagnosis, /4 difficult experiences, 83 Digger manifestoes, 46

"disembodied entities," 54

dissociation, 54-55

dissociative states, 11, 71

Divided Self, 88

divinity student projects, 16

DMT, 31

DOB, 41

Doblin, Rick, 37, 44,57,62-^

Docherty, John, 77

dolphins, 32

DOM, 10,41

Donovan, 87

Doonesbury, 61

Doors of Perception, 21

Downing, Joseph, 44,69,7f>.'

draft-evasion, 16

dreaming, 45

Drug Abuse Warning Ntwi*

"drug czar." 62

Drug Enforcement Admlr-^'

drug legalisation, 59

Drug, Set If Setting, 88

Index to Third Edition

Earth, 51-52

garth Coincidence Control, 54 Eastern mysticism, 30 •ECCO," 54 ecology, 47,51 •Ecstasy-" 24, 51,61,79 Ecstasy: The MDMA Story, 37, (A, 69-71,75 ecstatic effects, 76 ego integration, 75 eight-circuit nervous system, 30 Eisner, Bruce, 37-38,44,46-47, .SO, 57,64,70,72,75,77,82 electronics, 46-47 emotional closeness, 84-85 empathogens, 37-39,41 empathy, 22,71,79 endangered species, 56 epilepsy, 69 erections, 85 Esalen Institute, 74 ethical use, 45 emnopharmacology, 88 euphoriant properties, 41 "Eve," 39 evolution. 54 'extraterrestrials," 54 eye movements, 70

Face, The, 64

•Farm" 34-35

fashion, 58

fear, 81

feminine, 52

First District Circuit Court of

Appeals, 63

Fitzwater, Thorn, 5

Flashbacks, 30

Food and Drug Administrn, 42

Pood of the Gods: Search for the

Original Tree of Knowledge, 36

forgiveness, 70

forms of MDMA, 85

fractal images, 49

Frank, Mel. 35

Freeman, Daniel X.. 22

pnja,35

Gwrett, Eileen, 18 C«skin, Stephen, 34-35, 44 "General Informatn: MDMA," S3 Gentleman's Quarterly, 52 Germany, 21 Ginsberg, Allen, 30,60 God. 84 goddess, 46,52 Gofightly, Bonnie, 15 Good Friday Experiment. 37 Gorman, Paul, 30 Graboi, Nina, 52 Greenwich Village, 16-17 Greer, George. 70,74,80,83 Grinspoon, Lester. 68

Grob, Charles, 23, 44-45 Groi, Christina, 2H Grof, Stanislav, 28-29. 33 guides, 10, 18 gurus, 35

Haight-Ashbury, 34

Haight-Ashbury Flashbacks. 35

Haight Ashbury Free Medical

Clinic, 68

hallucinations, 73,75,77

"hallucinogenics," 13

"Handbook for the Use of LSD in

Psychotherapy," 15

Harlow, Deborah, 38, 44, 52, 65

harmalme, 10,16

Harvard University, 16-17, 66

healing, 38, 52

hearings, 62-63,66-67,75-77

heart-opening function, 71

Heliotrope, 86

heroin, 55

"high abuse potential," 63.67-68,

High Frontiers, 58

High Times Magazine, 35,60

Hoffman, Abbie, 87

Hoffmann-La Roche, 16

Hofmann, Albert, 18, 20, 26. 56

Hofmann Foundation, 32,56

Hollingshead, Michael, 87

Holotropic Breathwork, 28

"holy spirit," 84

homophobia, 77

Horowitz, Michael, 19,30

Houston, Jean, 14,27,87

How Can 1 Help?, 30

Hubbard, Al, 60,87

Huxley. Aldous, 24, 57

hydergine, 26, 42

hypers pace, 36

hypertension, 69

hypnosis, 78

ibogaine, 16,66

I.D., 22, 64

identity crisis, 83

Illuminatus Trilogy, 31

immune-enhancing properties,

4243

imprinting, 49

Inaba, Daryl, 68

India, 21

indoles, 10,11

"information networks," 54

inspiration, 49

"intelligence enhancers," 42-43

intercourse, 85

International Convention of

Vienna, 17

International Institute for

Advanced Studies, 15

Interpersonal Diagnosis of

III- 89

Personality, 29 intimacy, 84 Invisible Landscape, 36 in vitro studies, 64 Island, 57

Island Group, 38, 56 Island Views, 38,57 isolation tank, 32

Janiger, Oscar, 15, 31-32, 56, 87

Japan, 22, 29

}aw-clench ing, 39, 70

Jeffrey, Francis, 34

Johnson, Lyndon. 17

Journal of the American Medical

Association, 70

Journal of Psychoactive Drugs,

69,80,82,84

Joy, Dan, 21-60

"karma yoga," 30 Katz, Richard, 87 kava-kava, 11 Kennedy, Jack, 17 Kennedy, Robert, 17 Kesey, Ken, 60 ketamine, 11, 24, 33, 54, 60 Kleps, Art, 12 Knots, 88 Krassner, Paul, 87 Krippner, Stanley, 75

Laing, R.D., 88

Landers, Ann, 35

La Roca, Pete, 87

Law, Lisa, 32

Lawn, John, 62

Leary, Timothy, 16,18,21,29-30,

44. 46. 48-49, 52, 87

Lee, Martin, 60,87

Lee, Paul, 87

legal history, 64

legalization, 27

"Levitation of the Pentagon," 87

levorotary, 66-67

life-extending properts, 42-43,58

Light and Co., 16

light shows, 21

Lilly, John, 23, 25, 32-34,44, 54-

[ohn Lilly, So Far....34. 54

Loeb, Eric, 16

Los Angeles Times, 78

love, 71,73,77-79

LSD, 10-11,13-14, 16-19, 21-23,

31,37,42,45,49-51,56,60-61, 66-

67,71-74,86-87

LSD-25, 15

LSD, 87

LSD: My Problem Child, 26

Lynch, Robert, 76, 83

lysergic acid amines, 67

Lyttle, Thomas, 58

Ill- 90

Index to Third Edition

Index to Third Edition

IIJ- 91

* _;

"M," 61, 73

Magic Mushroom Seeker, 88 magnesium. 69 Man and Dolphin, 33 manufacturing processes, 86 MAO inhibition, 42-43,60,69 MAPS, 37, 57,63 marijuana, 10-11,35,60, 70, 88 marijuana abuse, 11 marijuana dependence, 11 Marijuana Growers Hndbk, 35 marijuana legalization movement, 35

marijuana, novice smokers, 11 marijuana, respiratory problems. 11

Marine Mammal Protectn Act- 33 Mas Ala, 21 Masters, Robert, 27, 82 MBDB, 41, 66 McCartney, Paul, 87 McGlothlin, Bill, 18 McKerma, Dennis, 36, 50 McKenna, Katherine, 36,52, 56 McKenna, Terence, 20,22,25, 36, 44, 46-47, 50, 56, 59-60 MDA, 61-62, 66-67,69,72 MDB, 39-40 "MDM." 61

MDMA, 10,21-25,27,37-41, 51, 57, 61-86,88 MDMA, 83 MDMA crystals, 85 medical safety, 10 memory, 42

mental effects of MDMA, 71-84 mescaline, 10, 11,13, 16-17,39,41 meth amphetamine, 67 methyl group, 67 Metzner, Ralph, 37, 44, 50, 84, 87 Miller, M., 35 mind control, 60 "mind-manifesting," 11,13 MindMirror, 29 minerals, 85 Mingus, Charlie, 87 "Monday Night Class," 34 Mondo 2000,22,46, 58 Morgenthaller, [ohn, 42 morphine, 62 Moms, Mark, 5 Moser, Charles, 84 Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 37, 57,63 "multiple realities," 46 mushrooms, 50-51, 88 music, 58 mysticism, 73, 83

Naranjo, Claudio, 69,74,81 Nasmyth, Peter, 71 National Federation of Parents (or Drug-Free Youth, 62

National Institute of Mental

Health, 32

National Institute on Drug

Abuse, 23,38,65

"near death "-type experiences,

"neo-pagan," 52

neurobioiogy, 43

neurochemishy, 64

neuroconsciousness frontier, 60

neurotoxicity, 62-64, 70

neurotransm otters, 48

"New Age," 61

new compounds, 24, 39-43, 60

"new physics," 59

"New Seekers: Inside the

Psychedelic Underground." 22

Newsweek, 23, 61,83

Nichols, David, 44-45,61

N1DA, 65

NIMH, 77

nitrous oxide, 11

Nixon, Richard, 17-18

nootropics, 42

nutmeg, 67

nutrients, 42

nutrition, 58

nystagmus, 39,7(1

Oakland Tribune, 22

obituaries, 87-88

One Foot in the Future, 52

Ono, Yoko, 16

Orange Sunshine, 87

organic psychedelics, 44, 46, 50-

organizations, 56-57

orgasms, 85

Osmond, Humphry, 13

"out-of-body" experiences, 54

overdoses, 10, 69

Palmer, Cynthia, 52

panic attacks, 83

pantheistic, 52

paradigm shift, 43,49

paranoia, 73,76-77

Parkinson's disease, 42,62

pathology, 76

PCP,11,63

"Peace Pill," 63

Penthouse, 22

peyote, 16

"Pharmacist's Perspective," 82

pharmacology, 39-43,48. 50, 64,

66-67,77

PharmChem, 85

phenethylamines, 10,11

phenylisopropylamines, 65-66

physical effects of MDMA, 67-71

PIHKAL: A Chemical Love

Story, 28

Pilosof, Victor, 29

piracetam, 42 "plant devas," 50 PlantWise, 56 Plowman, Timothy, 88 PM&E, 58 "poisons," 42,50 politics, 16 Politics of Ecstasy, 30 Politics of Experience, 88 post-traumatic stress syndrome 45,78 pot, 35

potassium. 69 potentiation, 48,86 precursors, 67 predictability. 72 pregnancy, 69 prisoner of war, 79 prisoner projects, 16 Private Practice: The Changing Role of Physicians in Contemporary Society, 32 Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, 33 Prometheus Rising, 30 propanolol, 70

psilocybin, 10, 14. 16-17,36,50, 66, 71,88 psyche, 40, 71 "psychedelic," 25 Psychedelic Art, 82 Psychedelic Illuminations, 58-59 Psychedelic Monographs and Essays, 50,58

"Psychedelic Renaissance," 21-53

"Psychedelic Revolution," 22 psychedelics, 10-11,13,25 Psychedelics Encyclopedia, 10-11,13,18,24-25,44,61,87 "Psychedelics in the 1990s: Regulation or Prohibition," 57 psychiatry, 75-77 "psychic energizer," 42 psychochemicals, 39,46,53 psychoneuralimmunology, 43 Psychopharmacology of Hallucinogens, 61 "psychosis," 13

Psychosocial Treatment Brant'li of NIMH, 77

psychosomatic therapies, 3H psychotherapy, 37,40,57,61, 74-83,87-88 "psychotomimetic," 13 publications, 58-60 pulse, 69 purity, 10

Quantum Psychology, 31 Quick Trading Company, 35

racemate, 66 KaHiDass, 30

rap*-⁷⁸ — rapport, 77

i*«.62

Ratsch, Christian, 26

tame, 21-22

Reality Hackers, 58

Reality is What You Can Get

Away With, 31

recreational drugs, 11

'recreational" experiences, 55,

reliability. 72-73

refigiou» experience, 37

repressed material, 76-77, SI

re»e«rch,45,63,78

respiratory problems, 11

Richard, Keith, 87

Riedlinger, June, 82

riluals,52

Rotinante Health Center, 35

Roeenthal, Ed, 35

"rush," 39

Sabina, Maria, 88

Sacred Mushroom and the

Crow, 88

safrole,86

salamander reflex, 45

Sandison, Ronald, 22

Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, 15,18,

56,87

San Francisco Weekly, 21

suiity, 74,81

"Sawyfras," 85

seheduling laws, 62-63,65-68,

78,86

schizophrenia, 16,88

Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, 31

Schultes, Richard Evans, 88

Sdence, 62,70

Scientist, The, 33,54

"Sci-fi," 46

Scopp, Alfred, 70

icraening cliente, 83

Sdegjline hydrochloride, 42

•elf-esteem, 83

iensuality, 84-85

•erotonin, 10

W, 10,48,72,83

•ettine, 10,48, 72

Seva Foundahon, 30

•exual attack, 75, 78

•ttuality, 40,42-13,54,84-85

Seymour, Richard, 83

*amanism, 36,43,46,52,59

Shea, Robert, 31

Shlain, Bruce, 60,87

Shulgin, Alexander, 27-28, 42,

50,61,64,69,86

Siegel, Ron, 62-63

Silicon Valley, 53

Sinus, R.U, 46-47, 58

skeletal problems, 70

Smart Drugs & Nutrients, 42

Smith, Billy, 30

Smith, Huston, 87

soul, 71

sources of MDMA, 85-86

Spain, 21

"Spectrum," 40

spinal fluid, 71

Spiritual Emergency Network, 28

spirituality, 30,41,45-46, 52, 55,

83-84

Spring Grove Hospital, 33

Stafford collection, 15

Stafford, Peter, 44

Stark, Ron, 87

Steinberg, Saul, 87

Steindl-Rast, David, 84

stereoisomers, 66

Stevens, Jay, 60

stimulant properties, 41

Stolaroff, Myron, 15,20

Storming Heaven: LSD and the

American Dream, 60

Stormy Search for the Self, 29

stress reduction, 68, 71, 76, 81

striychnine, 50

strippers, 62

Sudafed, 66

suicide, 76,78,82

Sunshine acid, 87

sweating, 69

synapses, 48

synergies, 48,86

synthesis of MDMA, H6

synthetic psychedelics, 44,50

Syrian rue, 43

tachyphylaxis, 68

tactile sense, 85

Tamm, Kathy, 78

Tantra, 54-55

terminal illness, 45

Thomas, Clarence, 12

Through the Gateway of the

Heart, 70, 75, 78-79,83

Tokyo, 22

Tolbert, Requa, 70, 74,80

tolerance, 68

toxicity. 10-11,14,39,42,61,63-

64,69

Trajectories, 31,59

tranquil izers, 82

transference, 75

trauma, 40, 61,70,74,76, 78,81-

trypta mines, 10

Turner, Carlton, 62

tyrosme, 69

UFOs, 59 "Uncle Duke," 61 unconditional love, 73, 80 "Understanding in the Light of Nature," 59 Unger, Sandy, 33 University of Michigan, 23 U.S. Army tests, 61

valium, 70

Van Alstyne, B., 80

Varieties of Psychedelic

Experience, 27, 82

vasopressin, 42

veladas, 88

"Venus," 40

Vietnam, 17

virtual reality, 21, 45-49, 58, 60

visionary experience, 40,43, 58

Visionary Vine, 52

vitamins, 85

Walls, Karen, 30

Washington Post, 23

Wasson, R. Cordon, K8

Watts, Alan, 87

Weil, Andrew, 10-11,50

Wiccan, 52

Wilhelm Reich in Hell. 31

Wilson, Arlen, 31

Wilson, Robert Anton, 30,44,59

wine, 70

"witness consciousness," 41

Wolfson, Philip, 69,75,77

women, 44, 46, 52

"Women in Psychedelics," 52

writer's block, 55

"X," 61 "XTC,"61,70

Yensen, Richard, 44-48 "Yippie Manifesto," 17 yoga, 70

Young, Francis, 63, 68,75,77 "Yuppies," 61, 87

Zanger, Robert, 56 Zeff, Leo, 88 zero gravity, 32 Zinberg, Norman, 88 zinc, 69