History, 103-122

Mesoamerican Accounts, 103 Peyote Passes to the U.S., 106 Scientific Scrutiny and Diffusion

among Non-Indians, 109 A Decade Opening the

"Psychedelic Doors," 114

Discovery of Mescaline I

in Other Cacti, 117 Mescaline and Peyote

Go "Underground," 119 Native and Non-native Use

under The Bill of Rights, 120 Trekking Back to Peyote

Country, 121

Botany, 122-130

The Lophophora Genus, 126 Tricboceri, 129

Chemistry, 130-133

β -phenethylamines and

Tetrahydroisoquinolines, 130 Escaline, Proscaline and Similar Synthetic Compounds, 131

Physical Effects, 133-137

Taste and Nausea, 133 Coursing through the Body, 134 Medical and Health Aspects, 135

Mental Effects, 137-153 Similarities and Differences

with LSD, 137 Dosage and Timing, 140 Sacramental Aspects, 140 Visual Effects. 142 Auditory Effects, 145 Dimensions Outside Time

and Space, 147 Creative Potential, 149 Psychological Safety, 150 Psychotherapeutic Potential, 151

Forms and Preparations, 153-155

CHAPTER TWO

Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

The white man goes into his church house and talks about Jesus; the Indian goes into his tepee and talks to Jesus.

—Quanah Parker

HISTORY

Peyote, a slow-growing, unobtrusive and acrid-tasting cactus, appears to be native to two areas of northern Mexico, each with its own species. The yellow-green Lophophnra diffusa grows in a high desert in the state of Quere'taro, some three hundred miles south of Laredo, Texas. The green-blue lopbopbnra u'illiamsii inhabits approximately one hundred thousand square miles south of the Rio Grande.

In Lophophora diffuse, 90 percent of its alkaloids are in the form of "pellotine" and there are only trace amounts of mescaline (the first synthesized psychedelic compound). It has larger and whiter flowers than its more familiar relative L. •williamsii and appears to be an earlier evolutionary form. Its growing range is less than fifty miles in diameter, and it is relatively little-known and unavailable to most people.

Lophopbora williamsii contains a substantial amount of mescaline. Its rangeland, shaped something like a mushroom, extends as far south as Zacatecas, but the cactus is most plentiful in the central desert of northern Mexico.

Mesoamerican Accounts

Many people writing about the discovery of peyote suggest that someone lost and starving in the desert came upon this plant and ate it. Native accounts emphasize that the starving wayfarer heard a voice saying that this plant should be eaten. The plant was carried back as a divine gift to bring courage and peace to the user's tribe.

Archaeological evidence discovered recently in caves in Texas, including stores of still-psychoactive cacti, indicates that peyote was used ceremonially 3,000 or more years ago. When the Conquistadores wrote about its widespread use, they remarked mainly on the Chichimeca, Toltec and Aztec regions. However, many anthropologists think it was first used by the Tarahumaris, who live closer to its growing area

703

104 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

In his History of the Things of New Spain, also known as the Florentine Codex (circa 1560), the Spanish priest Bernardino de Sahagun estimated from events in Indian chronologies that peyote had been used at least 1,800 years earlier. Most Aztec records were destroyed by Cortez and his successors —especially Juan de Zumarraga, the first archbishop of Mexico. In the words of Edward F. Anderson, Zumarraga "searched throughout the former Aztec empire for manuscripts and other pieces of information about their civilization and, in an orgy of unparalleled destruction, burned thousands of Aztec documents and other items." Sahagun tried to recover and record the medical knowledge of Aztec and other priests.

Sahagun, a Jew converted to Catholicism, probably under duress, spent most of his adult life in Mexico and became a great collector of pre-Columbian cultural data. His informants, Aztec noblemen who also had been converted to Catholicism under threat of death, left us our best information about native life prior to the Conquest of the New World. Their manuscripts, filled with hundreds of drawings, are available now in an English translation of the Spanish by Arthur Anderson and Charles Dibble alongside the original Nahuatl language of die Aztecs in a twelve-volume set; a final 1982 volume offers background material and Sahagun's prologues and interpolations.

The Spaniards "discovered" such things as chocolate, potatoes, corn and tobacco in the New World, along with three psychoactive agents: mushrooms, morning glories and peyote. Peyote was associated by the Spanish with the bloody sacrificial rites of the Aztecs and condemned shortly thereafter as "Raiz diabolica" (the devil's root). An observation from 1591 (like many others) reported that under the influence of peyote the Indians would "lose their senses, see visions of terrifying sights like the devil and were able to prophesy the future." Once European notions of witchcraft came into play, the Holy Office of the Inquisition enacted the first drug laws in the New World. In 1620,use of peyote was formally denounced as an act of super-stition because it was for "purposes of detecting thefts, of divining other happenings and foretelling future events." As late as 1760, peyote was equated with cannibalism in a Catholic text

The Spaniards made very determined efforts to stamp out peyote practices. Over a period of two centuries, a great many Indians were flogged and sometimes killed when they persisted in using it. In one instance, an Accaxee's eyeballs were said to be gouged out after three days of torture; "then the Spaniards cut a crucifix pattern in his belly and turned ravenous dogs loose on his innards." With the breakup of the Mesoamerican civilizations and their extensive transportation and communication routes, peyote distribution was interrupted, and familiarity with the cactus receded to the Chihuahuan Desert.

Use of peyote continued among the rural Indians of north Mexico. Anthropologists believe that the peyote rites practiced today among the Huichol, Cora, Tepecano, Yaqui and Tarahumara tribes are close to those

Spanish Repression ,,,*

that existed in pre-Columbian times. In this tradition, peyote has been used for divination in shamanic rituals, in the treatment of ailments, in festivals and even in games (among the Tarahumaras, it has been used for endurance in twenty- and forty-mile foot races).

Among the Huichols, an annual pilgrimage for gathering peyote still occurs at the end of the rainy season in October or November. Representa rives of the tribe—now numbering approximately 25,000 people—undertake a sacred journey of over 300 miles to the desert regions where the peyote grows. In the past, the gatherers often used to be gone for over a month.

706 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

Today they are accompanied by automobiles and usually return in much less time. Reverence for the "hunt" remains unchanged and is marked by vows of fasting, of celibacy, and quite often of silence. The hunt involves certain purification rituals, such as a "confessional" the first night out, during which the pilgrims in turn recount their sexual history. Prayers offered during the search culminate in special ceremonies when the first plant is sighted Upon their return to the tribe, the pilgrims are greeted with dancing and many expressions of happiness. Preparations for drying the peyote begin, and fresh buttons are consumed. Peter Furst comments in his Hallucinogens and Culture on the intensity of the religious exuberance in the peyote country and in the Sierras: "Huichols will literally saturate themselves with peyote, chewing it incessantly for days and nights on end, getting little sleep and eating little normal food, until the entire social and natural environment and the individual's relationship to it take on a wholly mystical dimension."

Peyote Passes to the U.S.

Up until the time of the Civil War, there were few recorded instances of peyote use north of the Rio Grande. During the war, some white soldiers experienced the effects of this cactus, and several U.S. marshals, who were jailed once Texas went Confederate, got inebriated on this "green whiskey." After the war ended, contact between Indians north and south of the border increased. By the beginning of the 1870s, peyote had definitely begun to spread northward.

A peyote religion eventually developed throughout the entire United States as a result of proselytizing by Bert Crowlance, Mary Buffalojack Bear Track, Elk Hair, John Rave and many others. The Plains Indians especially valued "visions."

Much of the subsequent history of peyote in the U.S. was influenced by three exceptional men who were active at the time of crisis among Indians, when they were being herded onto reservations. The Indians had lost their buffalo and all hope that their lands would be restored by the Ghost Dance. This was the time of the Wounded Knee massacre.

The first of the three was a Caddo-Delaware-French individual named John Wilson, who had been renowned as a Ghost Dance leader. Having learned of peyote from a Comanche, Wilson went with his wife into the forest, where he consumed about fifteen buttons a day for two weeks. As Francis Speck described the effect in his "Notes on the Life of John Wilson, the Revealer of Peyote, as Recalled by his Nephew, George Anderson" (1933), "Wilson was continually translated in spirit to the sky realm where he was conducted by Peyote." He was shown the "road" that led "from Christ's grave to the Moon in the Sky which Christ had taken in his ascent." He was told to walk in this path for the rest of his life and to remain faithful to peyote's teachings. He was taught ceremonial details, such as how the face should be painted. He was also instructed on how to sing the songs that

Late Nineteenth Century Diffusion 107

were to form a principal pan of the worship ceremony (he knew more than two hundred of these). Wilson introduced many Christian elements into subsequent peyote practices.

A second figure influential in the spread of a Christian peyotism was the half-Comanche Quanah Parker, a chief who in 1884 became deathly ill.

108 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

When he failed to recover under the care of at least one white doctor, his aunt finally took Parker to a curandera, thought to have been a Tarahumara, who revived him with peyote tea in only a few days. That experience changed Parker's life. A militant before, he decided to turn his back on violence and to help spread peyotyl as a unifying force for a "pan-Indian movement." The third man was James Mooney, an anthropologist from the Smithsonian Institution. In 1891, he traveled into the still-dangerous Oklahoma territory, where he became a participant in peyote practices. He became convinced that the Indians ought to unite in a Native American Church (the name is thought to have been his suggestion) to protect their right to use peyote. Mooney called for a meeting of "Roadmen," peyotist representatives of the Great Spirit. In 1918 they incorporated and wrote the charter of the Native American Church.

The "peyote cult" had already developed among some Apaches and Tonkawas and then among the Comanches and Kiowas by the turn of the twentieth century. As time passed, use of this plant became common in more than fifty American tribes, including the Cheyenne, Shawnee, Pawnee, Arapaho, Chippewa, Blackfoot, Crow, Delaware and Sioux. Instead of the shamanism in the Mexican practices, these tribes emphasized a communal ceremony of chanting, meditation and prayer, blending Christian elements into their theology in most instances.

John Wilson and others emphasized that this form of Christianity did not include guilt for the crucifixion of Christ. In Wilson's view, Christ was given to the whites and they crucified Him. Indians were thus exempt on this score; they could receive religious influences directly and in person from God through "the Peyote Spirit." Many accounts exist of peyotists who have had visions relating to Christ. The anthropologist Weston La Barre has argued, however, that Christian elements—of great importance to many— are usually little more than an overlay on the pan-Indian elements, or at least have been subordinate.

By 1922, the number of ceremonial peyote users had grown to about 13,000. It has been said that at present more than half of all North American Indians belong to the Native American Church (about a quarter of a million peyotists altogether). Although there is a good deal of individual and group variation, peyote meetings regularly begin at sundown on Saturday night. Remarkably, there are few church buildings in this religion. Some wooden chapels have been built, and some groups have constructed cement altars, but ordinarily, peyote ceremonies are conducted at a hogan or in a tepee set up for the occasion. Most often, fewer than a score of people participate, gathering around a fire that lights a crescent-moon altar to "Father Peyote." They stay together until some time after sunrise. Then they join others in a large communal meal.

The experience is presided over by a Roadman or Road Chief, who represents the Great Spirit and shows "the peyote road." At least three

Native American Practices 109

others officiate: the Fire Chief, who represents the Angelic Host.guards the door, tends the sick, and builds and stokes the fire; the Cedar Chief, representative of the Holy Ghost, who brings any disoriented participants back into communion with the others by waving cedar incense; and the Drum Chief, who represents Jesus and keeps up a beat all night long.

Usually, each participant in turn sings four peyote songs. A point of transition leading to a kind of "second wind" for the experience is reached at midnight, when the Roadman goes out of the tepee and blows a whistle "in the directions of the four corners of the earth." Another shift in mood occurs at the arrival of false dawn, when a woman representing "Peyote Woman" enters the tepee bearing water and simple food. Many observers agree with anthropologist J.S. Slotkin, who testified in congressional hearings in the late 1930s that he had "never been in any white man's house of worship where there is either as much religious feeling or decorum." John Wilson and others emphasized sobriety and the creation of better family lives in their teachings, and many testimonials since indicate that Indians have used this powerful mental drug in socially acceptable ways. "It is the only holy thing that I have become aware of in all my life," said the Winnebago Crashing Thunder when he was converted to peyotism by an experience with the cactus at age forty-five.

From the beginning of this century, zealous whites—and a few Indians— have attempted to outlaw use of this sacred cactus (generally in the name of "protecting" the peyotists). The first case seems to have been brought against three Kickapoos in 1907 in Oklahoma (who were found guilty and fined $25 each and court costs), and it was followed by many other efforts to ban the practice.

Legislation against peyote has been introduced at the federal level a number of times, succeeding only recently. But earlier laws banning peyote were passed in eleven states, mainly in the Southwest, In I960, Judge Yale McFate of Arizona handed down a definitive opinion overturning the state law and sanctioning peyote use by Native Americans under the Fourteenth and First Amendments' protection ensuring religious freedom. Since then, Indian peyotists appear to have had no further trouble with law enforcement agencies. The federal legislation banning the use or possession of peyote and mescaline contains a special exemption for the "nondrug use of peyote in bona fide religious ceremonies of the Native American Church."

Scientific Scrutiny and Diffusion among Non-Indians

Some people claim that Mrs. Anna B. Nickels, a resident of Laredo, initiated modern pharmacological and scientific studies of peyote in the early 1880s by sending samples to Parke, Davis and Co. and to other investigators in North America and Europe. The records are lost, however, and other historians declare that it wasn't until 1887 that Parke, Davis and Co. began

11O Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

distributing dried peyote, obtained from Dr. John Briggs of Dallas (who obtained it from his brother in Mexico).

Dr. Louis Lewin, a scientist and artist often called the "father of modern psychopharmacology," received some of this material, labeled "Muscale Button," in Germany in 1887. The next year, he traveled throughout the southwestern United States and took dried specimens back to Europe, where he soon isolated numerous alkaloids from peyote. He gave some of his samples to the botanist Paul Hennings of the Royal Botanical Museum in Berlin for study. In 1888, he stimulated other pharmacological investigations by publishing the first report on the cactus' chemistry.

The first account (by a white) of "peyote inebriation" was published in 1897 by the distinguished Philadelphia physician and novelist Weir Mitchell. Soon after, he sent "peyote buttons"—the part of the plant growing above-ground—to Havelock Ellis, a pioneer in psychological and sexual studies. Ellis had read Mitchell's narrative and soon published two influential accounts of his own experiments under the influence of peyote in the British Journal of Medicine.

The scientific examination of peyote stimulated by Lewin's enthusiasm resulted in the isolation of the principal psychoactive component in 1897 Arthur Heffter, Lewin's colleague and rival, made this identification by systematically ingesting a number of alkaloid "fractions" made from peyote; as in the case of psilocybin later, animal testing had been inconclusive as to their various psychoactivities. Heffter named the isolate compound "mezcalin" (which soon became "mescaline") and reported that "mescaline hydrochloride, 0.15 g, produces a pattern of symptoms which differs in only a few respects from the one obtained with the drug (peyote)."

Over time, scientific interest in mescaline—first synthesized in 1919 by Ernst Spath—supplanted further investigations of peyote. The last extensive study in this period of the cactus' mental effects was reported in 1927 by the French psychologist Alexandre Rouhier, who caused a stir with his accounts of the exotic "visions" experienced by his subjects.

Also in 1927, Lewin's colleague Dr. Kurt Beringer, a friend of Hermann Hesse and Carl Jung, issued a 315-page description of the effects of mescaline entitled Der Meskalinrausch (The Mescaline Inebriation), At the same time a short book by Heinrich Kluver took issue with Ellis' earlier opinion that the chief feature of mescaline "visions" was that they were "indescribable." Kluver tried to catalogue the visual forms of the "hallucinatory constants" induced by this mysterious substance as basically gridwork, spirals, cobwebs and runnels.

Through the first half of the twentieth century, peyote aroused very little interest m North America among non-Indians, aside from a few isolated instances. A "peyote meeting" held in an apartment in New York City in 1912, for example, was described by Mabel Dodge Luhan in her Movers and Shakers.

Early Attention Among Whites 113

Awareness of peyote was slow to develop even among the anthropologists studying native practices. Most of them were mainly interested in recording earlier Indian traditions and thus failed to notice the burgeoning religion of their time. Contemporary Indian practices began to draw attention only after a series of papers on Winnebago peyote rites were published by Paul Radin starting in 1914.

Weston La Barre's The Peyote Cult—a book that became something of a bible among members of the Native American Church—was based on field work undertaken during the summers of 1935 and 1936. The Peyote Religion by J.S. Slotkin—the next major anthropological study—wasn't

114 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

published until 1956. Slotkin spent a good deal of time among the Menomini and other Indian tribes; thanks to his defense of peyote in lawsuits, he became known affectionately as the "national secretary" of the Native American Church. David Aberle's The Peyote Religion Among the Navajo (1966) is an exhaustive study of how peyote spread to a tribe opposed to its use. The Navajos had had many objections to peyote; they didn't feel it was traditional. However, federal interference with their traditional but "unecological" methods of sheep grazing eventually brought many of the tribe into the pan-Indian movement and then into the Native American Church.

A Decade Opening the "Psychedelic Doors"

In the early 1950s, the story took a significant turn The British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond—along with Canadian associates John Smythies and Abram Hoffer—began to examine the properties of mescaline in connection with their research on psychosis and schizophrenia. In 1952, Osmond and Smythies published a six-page article about their findings in the Journal of Mental Science. Their provocative theories about the actions of brain chemicals attracted the attention of the novelist Aldous Huxley, who soon offered himself as a guinea pig for further experimentation. Thus it was that on a lovely May morning in 1953, in the Los Angeles hills, Huxley took mescaline sulfate—the first of ten psychedelic experiences. This event was to change the way many people look at the world today.

Being the center of controversy was nothing new to Huxley, a renowned author whose ideas expressed in thirty-nine previous books had been discussed at practically all levels in Western society. He had been honored for decades by the literary world after a series of novels whose "cynical" and "immoral" characters had shocked the sensibilities of many people. Still, he must have been surprised by the intensity of the enthusiasm and the antagonism with which his The Doors of Perception (1954) was received.

In this book of less than one hundred pages, written in a month, Huxley reported on his initial mescaline sulfate experience and speculated on the nature of such radical mental transformations. Many readers were outraged by his apparent embracing of an experience so alien to our culture— so "pagan" and "mystical." The book shone as an unexpected bright light through the gray complacency of technological civilization. Some of his literary followers didn't at all like his lead this time; they claimed that his thinking had become "mushy." R.C. Zaehner, a professor at Oxford specializing in the study of Eastern religions, took mescaline sulfate with the intention of testing Huxley's assertion that a profound "mystical state" had been induced by a drug. In Mysticism: Sacred and Profane, Zaehner described his experience as a minor "pre-mysticism" that reminded him mainly of Alice in Wonderland.

The interest in mescaline and peyote awakened by Huxley's book was greatly augmented by Robert DeRopp's popular Drugs and the Mind (1957)

Re-awakened Interest at Mid-Century }l$

and by David Ebin's The Drug Experience (1961). Both provided lengthy accounts of "classic" peyote and mescaline experiences. By the early 1960s, the media were definitely fascinated by these substances. Alice Marriott wrote about peyote in The New Yorker, John Wilcock in the newly established Village Voice and Allen Ginsberg in Birth. (Ginsberg's poem Howl was composed following a night on peyote walking through the streets of San Francisco.) Here is the text of a signed letter, to give another instance, sent to Life magazine after it published an account of the "sacred mushrooms" of Mexico in 1957:

716 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

Sirs: I've been having hallucinatory visions accompanied by space suspension and time destruction in my New York apartment for the past three years... produced by eating American-grown peyote cactus plants. I got my peyote from a company in Texas which makes COD. shipments all over the country for $8 per 100 "burtons."

Peyote could then be acquired by mail from Laredo and nearby areas simply by requesting it, and it soon became a fairly familiar object on many college campuses and in beatnik and artistic circles. In I960, one of the first peyote busts among whites occurred at the Dollar Sign Coffee House, an East Greenwich Village cafe that sold the ground up cactus over the counter in capsules. The proprietor, Barren Bruchlos, had mail ordered 310lbs. of this cactus, certified by the Agriculture Department to be without pests. His supply was confiscated, but he was never charged.

Huxley's book opened an era when a number of pioneers of the psychedelic movement first turned on. Robert Masters, who published the earliest account of its effects in the sexual realm in his Forbidden Sexual Behavior and Morality (Julian Press, 1962), had his first experience with peyote during the 1950s in Louisiana, In I960, Arthur Kleps wrote to Delta Chemicals Co. in New York for mescaline sulfate and tried 500 mg. The experience resulted in his leaving his job as a state prison psychologist, in addition to other considerable changes in his life. Here is how he described what occurred:

At that point I retired to the bedroom and closed my eyes (it having occurred to me that if I kept them open a monstrous gobbler from outer space might come around the corner any moment) and found myself watching a 3-dimen-sional color movie on the inside of whatever it is one looks at when there isn't anything there. All night, I alternated between eyes open terror and eyes closed astonishment. With eyelids shut 1 saw a succession of elaborate scenes which lasted a few seconds each before being replaced by the next in line. Extra-terrestrial civilizations. Jungles. Organic computer interiors. Animated cartoons. Abstract light shows. Temples and palaces of a decidedly pre-Colombian American type. There was no obvious narrative connection between scenes or aesthetic coherence to the whole. The most awesome and sublimely well executed spectacles, things that compared quire well with the best in Western art, alternated with gross caricatures. There was never any hint of a "technical" breakdown though—if something merely silly was being presented it was always dressed with all the slick perfection of a Walt Disney feature, plus all kinds of extra touches Disney could never have afforded Let's say that "despair" was being depicted in the form of the conventional cartoon castaway on a cartoon raft—a two-second thrownaway flash. Well, just for kicks why not add a transparent ocean, perfectly and variously tinted, in which bob a billion seahorses, singing and playing perfect tiny musical instruments? Certainly. Coming right up. That was the spirit of the thing. No job too large, no job too small. The difficult we do right away, and the impossible... we do right away too.

Psychedelic Movement Pioneers Turn On \\j

But I have exposed the conclusions I arrived at later in the terms of my description. What 1 was seeing was a kind of language of the gods, the ultimate vocabulary of the mind, which was, naturally, much more than just a collection of nouns, I didn't think it through until later, but at the time the tip-off was a radio discussion I turned on in a vain attempt to make the visions stop. Every single word emanated from the radio got a magnificent image to go with it, as if the trivia being spoken had been the life's work of generations of media technicians on planets given over to the production of such artistic wonders— all for the purpose of this one showing in Art Kleps' one man screening room....

Discovery of Mescaline in Other Cacti

The scientific discovery of mescaline and related molecules in cacti other than peyote began in 1945 with the first report that the San Pedro cactus (Trichocent; pachanoi) was used in rituals by the Indians of Andean Ecuador. These shamanic practices were quite similar to rituals developed in Mexico for peyote. By 1950, it was established that mescaline constitutes about 1-2 percent of the San Pedro cactus when dried, about 0.12 percent of the fresh plant.

Mescaline Found Elsewhere 119

This columnar cactus attains from nine to twenty feet in height in part of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, mainly at elevations between 6,000 and 9,000 feet but occasionally as low as sea level. Some U.S. commercial cactus outlets carry it for sale, and it seems to grow easily anywhere if given plenty of sunlight-Archaeological evidence relating to the San Pedro cactus goes back well

over 3,000 years. A Chavin stone carving from a temple in northern Peru, which shows the principal diety holding the San Pedro, dates from 1,300 B.C; almost equally ancient textiles from this region depict the cactus with jaguar and hummingbird figures. Ceramics made between 1,000 and 700 B.C show the plant associated with deer. Other pottery of a somewhat later date exhibits the plant in conjunction with the jaguar again and with spirals, thought to represent the cactus' mental effects.

After the discovery of mescaline in the San Pedro cactus, it was soon found in other tall, columnar Trichoceri as well as in a Stetsonia species from South America, in Cereia jamacaru from Brazil, and in the giant Pachycereits pecten-aboriginum of Mexico, (the Mexican cactus contains another psycho-active compound—pectenine—which also appears in the Carnegiea giganlea of the U.S. Southwest, where it is called "carnegine."

In 1972, mescaline was identified in a cactus native to the U.S.— Pelecyphora aselliformis. This "hatchet cactus" has traditionally been used in native rituals but has been assayed for mescaline content at less than 0.00002 percent of the dried cactus' weight. Alexander Shulgin calculated that one would "need about 100,000 cacti to achieve an effective dose of mescaline."

The San Pedro cactus in the fresh form has about 0.01 percent mescaline, which is a fairly typical percentage for nine of the ten Trichoceri known to contain mescaline. Trichocerus periuvianus, however, is at least ten times as potent as the others. This branching, candelabra type of cactus, originally collected in Peru, has a mescaline content equal or superior to that in peyote. Jeremy Bigwood comments that it would not be all that surprising to find that this cactus has been used in Andean shamanistic rituals, although no archeological evidence has been presented to date.

Mescaline and Peyote Go "Underground"

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, mescaline could be purchased from several chemical supply houses in the form of sulfate or hydrochloride crystals. In 1970, mescaline and peyote were "scheduled" as part of a Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, which established penalties for possession, manufacture or distribution: "a term of imprisonment of not more than 15 years, a fine of not more than $25,000, or both." Title21pro-scribes possession of "all parts of the plant presently classified as Lophophora williamsii, whether growing or not, the seeds thereof, any extract from any part of such a plant, every compound, salt, derivative, mixture or preparation of such a plant, its seeds or extracts."

120 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

Various forms of mescaline have continued to appear over the last dozen years but generally only in small amounts made for a few people in the counterculture. Other U.S. citizens wishing 10 have a mescaline experience have therefore traveled to the Chihuahua Desert of northern Mexico to get peyote. Many of these have taken large quantities back home with them. Because of the law against possession of peyote and its constituents, recent mescaline use has been mostly sporadic and thus unritualized, exploratory

and recreational.

Indian peyotists provide the main contemporary example of mescaline and peyote used as a means of psychic exploration. A quarter million practitioners have taken this potent psychedelic—often quite frequently, often for years, often in large amounts without significant physical, psychological or social problems. The exemption provided in the law for members of the Native American Church has in fact fostered a tradition of spiritual growth and communal interaction.

The Church of the Tree of Life, centered in the San Francisco Bay area, tried for years to develop a ritual somewhere between that of the Native American Church and that followed by the Huichol Indians of Mexico. Some members felt that the Native American example was too constricted and focused; they desired a non-denominational ritual encompassing greater possibilities for expression and introspection. ("The NAC," commented one, "hasn't produced the marvelous, artistic, creative explosion seen among the Huichols.") Although the attempt to find a middle ground was pursued seriously, the results were unsatisfactory—or "somewhat hokey."

Native and Non-Native Use under The Bill of Rights

The Church of the Tree of Life attempted to obtain the legal exemption allowed to Indian practitioners. So did the Church of the Awakening, an Arizona-based group founded by John and Louisa Aiken after the deaths of their two sons in the 1950s. Claiming peyote as one of its sacraments, the Church of the Awakening took its case up to the Supreme Court. Years later. the justices refused to hear the appeal. Only in regulations relating to the use of peyote does the government curtail religious freedom and actively discriminate on the basis of skin color.

A recent case testing this law involves the Native American Church of New York, which has met regularly and openly in East Greenwich Village since the early 1970s. This group is particularly interesting because of the legal conundrums that have resulted from its religious use of Psychedelics.

In the mid-1970s, this church was granted legal status under the authority of the New York State Health Commissioner's discretionary power to grant exemptions to the drug laws. The group then wrote the Drug Enforcement Administration requesting federal certification as bona fide peyotists. Exemption from the law banning peyote was denied. An appeal went to the 2nd District Court.

Discrimination on Basis of Skin Color 121

Meanwhile, the church went on buying and selling peyote, in many instances from vendors licensed by the government who weren't themselves peyotists. Receipts went to the DEA and to the Department of Public Safety in Texas. Alan Birnbaum, a leader in this church, began a correspondence with the Commissioner of the Department of Narcotics in Albany, New York. He asked to be licensed as a distributor of peyote and made the commissioner aware that he had been receiving shipments of peyote for several years.

The results of the 2nd District Court trial were perplexing. Judge Milton Pollack ruled that the church was not bona fide because it was jelling peyote. On the other hand, he declared that Birnbaum—although he, too, was selling peyote—was bona fide because he sincerely believed that "peyote was God."

New York state police came to the church on a separate matter, and Bimbaum showed them receipts of purchase for the 20,000 peyote buttons on the premises. Remarkably, the police left without confiscating any. However, new "Rockefeller drug laws," which limited the Health Commissioner's power to grant exemptions to Schedule III drugs, soon brought the police back. They said they didn't want to arrest Birnbaum. But they did want to take the 20,000 peyote buttons, and the only way they could do that was by arresting him.

judge Pollack's ruling that the church was not bona fide was appealed on constitutional grounds and denied because in the opinion of the new judge Birnbaum hadn't been found bona fide! He also declared that if anyone were to be accepted as bona fide, then peyote could be used in worship by everyone in the jurisdiction of the 2nd District Court, which includes Vermont, Connecticut and New York.

An appeal that the Birnbaum case be dismissed "in the interest of justice" has been denied. Birnbaum is now facing a sentence of fifteen years to life.

While generating all these complications, the judicial system has lost sight of the principle at issue, articulated very simply by Alice Marriott and Carol Rachlin in a comment on the NAC as a whole: "That the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution grants each man his right to worship God in his own fashion is incontrovertible."'

Trekking Back to Peyote Country

Several books—such as Fernando Benitz's In the Magic Land of Peyote, Barbara Myerhoff's Peyote Hunt and Joan Halifax's Shamanic Voices— along with shorter accounts from Peter Furst, Michael Harner and others describe the Huichol Indians' annual trip to gather peyote. These reports have encouraged many Americans to make similar journeys.

Prem Das, a white who apprenticed himself for five years to Huichol shamans Ramon Medina Silva and Matsuwa recently led a group from the Esalen Institute in Big Sur to peyote's native area. The Mexican doctor

122 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

Salvador Roquet is another who has taken people to the home of hikuli (peyote). An author from the Harvard Divinity School has even written an account of experiencing peyote sixty paces from the Huichols. Not being Huichols, he explains, whites don't go to exactly the sacred spots. After ingesting peyote, they may "learn how to be a Huichol" by watching them from a respectful distance.

Much of the peyote growing in the more accessible parts of the Chihuahua Desert has been picked by people without the sense to leave the root. It can still be found in remote areas but is in danger of extinction.

BOTANY

In their four-volume The Cactaceae, written at the turn of the century, Britten and Rose describe 1,235 species of cacti; the number of clearly identified species has since gone well beyond 3,000. Peyote is unusual among cacti, displaying spines only as a seedling. It has been found to produce more than sixty separate alkaloids and is thus, as Richard Evans Schultes described the plant, "a veritable chemical factory." In Peyote—The Divine Cactus, Edward

Oddities about Peyote ;2?

Anderson presented the results of twenty-five years of study of its botanical aspects, concluding that "Lophophora seems to stand by itself in possessing a particular combination of morphological characters unlike any other group of cacti."

The root of peyote, which is quite large in relation to the portion above ground, looks like a turnip or carrot and is topped by the "button," which resembles 3 dull bluish- or grayish-green pincushion with a bit of fluff in its center. This wool-like fluff may have given peyote its name, which is thought to be derived from a word in the Nahuatl language meaning "cocoon-silk" or "caterpillar's cocoon." The flowers and the black, "warty" seeds emerge from this fluffy center.

Richard Heffern, in his Secrets of the Mind-Altering Plants of Mexico, describes some characteristics of this plant:

Instead of thorns, the peyote cactus has small, short tufts of a cotton like material. Buried in the center of each tuft is a tiny, thin-walled, fleshy pod containing several very tiny black seeds. The plant grows outward and downward from

124 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

the center. Each tuft was originally at the top center of the cactus. Each time a flower appears at the top of the plant, it is fertilized and is followed by the appearance of the furry tuft encasing the seeds. The furry tuft then moves outward and downward; another flower appears and begins the cycle all over again.

It is interesting to note that peyote is one of the slowest-growing plants in existence. The period from the time a seed germinates until the plant is large enough to bloom for the first time is approximately thirteen years. When peyote was sold in the United Stares cactus nurseries up until a few years ago, the problem of stow growth was partially overcome by grafting the peyote cactus to the root of a very fast-growing Opuntia cactus. This technique greatly accelerated the growth of the peyote cactus. Regardless of what method is used, however, the plant will never grow to more than about four inches in diameter. Instead, new plants appear at the base of the old ones, forming the characteristic peyote clusters.

There are problems of nomenclature confusion that are worth sorting out. Much of the muddle stems from confusion of the name mescaline (which Heffter derived from the Mescalero Indians) with the mescal bean, which is highly toxic, or with the mescal plant, which is a maguey and the source of a famous Mexican fermented liquor known as "pulque." Confusion with the bean is particularly interesting in that the tree it comes from— Sophora secundiflora—is often found together with peyote. About the only thing aside from cacti that blooms on the desert, growing up to thirty-five

Nomenclature Confusions 175

feet with flamboyant, large violet-blue and scarlet, highly fragrant flowers somewhat reminiscent of wisteria, the presence of the mescal been tree is often taken as a clue to peyotes location. There is evidence that its bean was used as an oracular medium as far back as 10,000 years ago. It is still honored

peyote. Mescaline and San Pedro

and worn by peyotists. The mescal bean, however, is highly poisonous and can produce death, reportedly even if as little as a half of a single seed is ingested. .

A great deal of botanical pother about the peyote plant results from its having been classified first by Lemaire in 1845 as Echinocactus williamsii, then by Voss in 1872 as Anhalomum williamsii and then by Coulter in 1891 as belonging to the Mammutaria genus. By the end of the nineteenth century, botanists had placed it in five separate genera. It was only in 1894 that it began to be known by its present name Lophophora. The name Lophophora derives from that tuft in the center; it means "crest-bearer.

The Lophophora Genus

For 3 long time after the adoption of the designation of Lophophora, debate continued as to whether there were actually two variants - the williamsii and the lewinii. This controversy was ended in the late 1930s when Richard Evans Schultes displayed a photo of a single plant bearing the characteristics of both. Since then, L williamsii has become the standard designation. Those who saw a difference between the williamsii and lewinii types were actually seeing a difference between an early stage of the plant and a later stage, A greater concentration of mescaline appears as the plant gets older The oldest plants are revered by the Indians and kept as personal amulets or placed on the crescent altar to represent "Father Peyote..

In 1967 a botanical description of another Lophophora species was proposed: Lophophora diffusa. The plant in question appears to be restricted to a tiny area in the state of Queretaro in central Mexico. Yellow-green rather than blue-green in color and lacking ribs, L diffusa seems to have a considerably different chemical makeup, and some botanists now think it is an earlier evolutionary form of the more familiar L William.

Since the designation and acceptance of the L diffusa species, Swedish investigators have re-examined the plant material used in Germany by Lewin and his associates. They found that it was composed of both L William and L diffusa species, which look somewhat similar. However, 90 percent of the alkaloids in L diffusa are in the form of a sedative called "pellotine", with only trace amounts of mescaline present, so it's understandable that the initial studies came to different, contradictory conclusions. (Anderson recounts the complexities wrought by this error on page 136 of his authoritative Peyote—The Divine Cactus.)

In the mid-1970s, two Czechoslovakian botanists proposed two more-species in the Lophophora genus, L fricii was reported to have been first collected in 1931 and then again in 1974 from the vicinity of San Pedro in Coahuila, Mexico. It was to be differentiated from L William by a grayer skin by the shape of its ribs and seeds, and by its "carmine-red flowers. L. jourdaniana was described in 1975 as having come from an unknown location in Mexico; i. was said.to differ from other Lophophora in having

128 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

"rose-violet" flowers and in being impossible to fertilize with the pollen of the other species. The specimens chosen to typify these proposed species— the "holotypes"—reside in an herbarium at a university in Pilzen, Czechoslovakia.

More than five years have passed since division of the Lophophora genus to include these possibly new species was proposed (detailed morphological descriptions can be found in The Journal of Ethnopharmacacology #1 and in Anderson's book). To date, botanists seem skeptical, although few have done relevant field work. Schultes comments that he hasn't seen the plants in question but doubts that there are significant differences. Anderson severely criticizes the descriptions provided by the collectors and says about (he chemical reports issued in 1977 and 1978 that they "do not clarify the status of these taxa, especially when L fricii from Coahuila and within the

"False Peyote" 129

center of distribution of L William is reported to have an alkaloid constitution similar to that of L diffuse from Quere'taro."

High Times has on occasion run ads offering Ariocarpus fissuratus— often called "living rock" or "peyote cimarron" cactus—and Ariocarpus retusus for sale as a kind of "peyote." These horny, triangular-leafed cacti are known among the Tarahumaris and Huichok as tsuwiri and sunami, "false peyote." Although they contain alkaloids similar to mescaline, the Indians regard them as "an evil," dangerous because they are somewhat stronger than peyote and "will drive people mad" when ingested. They are not recommended.

Tricboceri

Ten species of Trichoceri are known to contain mescaline: T. pachanoi, T. bridgesii, T. macrogonus, T. terscheckii, T. werdermanniantts, T. cuzco-ensis, T. fulvinanus, T. taquimbalensis, T. validui and T. pervvianus. These

1^0 Peyote. Mescaline and San Pedro

cacti are the next richest botanical source of mescaline after Lophophora William—T. peruvianus containing about equal concentrations, the other nine with less than a tenth of peyote's psychoactive strength.

Trichoceri grow much faster than peyote—which may take five years when grown from seeds to reach a '-4-inch diameter—and they contain only a few alkaloids in addition to mescaline. When planted in shallow soil, half-inch slices from the cactus root easily. A two-foot-high San Pedro grows an additional four inches or so in about half a year.

CHEMISTRY

8 -Phenethylamines and Tetrahydroisoquinolines

The sixty or so alkaloids in Lophophora William fall mainly into two groups: the ß-phenethylamines, to which mescaline belongs, and a larger assortment of tetrahydroisoquinolines. Both kinds differ from LSD and most other compounds regarded as Psychedelics in that they don't have a full indole structure.

Most of the alkaloids found in peyote have never been tried on humans in pure form. Only four of these besides mescaline have been described subjectively. Much of this work was done by Arthur Heffter, who identified mescaline back in 1897. Inl977, Alexander Shulgin summarized the human tests at a conference in San Francisco:

Anhalonodine leads to sedation at levels of 100-250 mg. in man—a slightly quieted state, but absolutely no central [nervous system] effects of any type whatsoever.

Pellotine has actually been the most explored, and has actually been introduced as a drug—in Germany in the 1920s, as a possible sedative. And, indeed, in 15-30 mg. doses in man taken orally, there is a sedation, a quieting. At levels of 50 mg. subcutaneously, a person is led very gently into a quiet sleep, with no after-effects and no hangover. It appears to be a very effective sedative Heffter ran it up to240mg.—at which point, he achieved a state of dizziness, a state of gastric upset, but apparently nothing beyond sedation as being some direct effect upon consciousness.

The third compound, anhalonine, is one of the methylene-dioxy groups that has been evaluated It has been evaluated at 100 mg., with no central effects whatsoever.

The fourth compound—the most toxic—is lophopherine, which is extremely toxic to cold-blooded animals, and was approached very cautiously by Heffter in his evaluations. At 20 mg., he had quite a radical vaso-dilation and an immediate headache. He pursued it religiously up to 50 mg.—at which there was quite a drop in heart rate and a compensatory increase in blood pressure, but no mescaline-like central effects whatsoever, no visual effects and no interpretative effects akin to mescaline.

Shulgin's conclusion, after three decades of interest in the chemistry of peyote, is that "the tetrahydroisoquinolines have to be more or less discarded as being major contributors" to this cactus' ability to affect mental states. He

The Alkaloids in Peyote j^;

feels that these compounds may have secondary effects and may augment or interact with mescaline. "But for a first approximation, mescaline itself has to be considered as the principle component of the peyote that is active."

Escaline, Proscaline and Similar Synthetic Compounds

The mescaline molecule is the simplest of the ß-phenethylamines. Hundreds, if not thousands, of similar compounds have been synthesized in

132 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

laboratories. These compounds bear a chemical structure that resembles ephedrine, which in the 1920s was "the primary reference standard" for stimulatory action in the central nervous system.

Gordon Alles, a pharmacologist associated with the Medical School of the University of California in Los Angeles and the initial sponsor of Edward Anderson's peyote studies, was very interested in this area of chemistry and eventually synthesized a number of psychoactive compounds that have chemical structures similar to that of mescaline. The best known of these are amphetamine and MDA. His discoveries inspired further investigations that led to the creation of quite a number of "one-ring" substituted phenyl-isopropylamines, which look much like mescaline on the molecular level but so far rarely have been found in the natural world. Many of these compounds will be discussed in Chapter Five.

Five compounds are identical to mescaline except for modification at one point on the molecule's ring, but these are expensive to make and so far have been experienced by only a few people.

Escaline and proscaline are the best known of these analogues and differ from mescaline only in that the methyl group in the 4-position on the ring has been replaced by an ethyl or by a propyl group. Both compounds, in Shulgin's words, "appear to be qualitatively indistinguishable from mescaline in their action." There are two main differences: these "substituted" compounds cause less nausea than mescaline and are active in dosages of 40-80 mg., and thus exhibit about a five-fold increase in potency.

Also synthesized are 2-6-dichloral-TMPEA (trimethoxy- ß -phen-emylamine) and 2-chloral-TMPEA—these are the 2,6-dichloral and 2-chloral analogues of mescaline—and 4-thiomescaline, a compound in which a sulfur atom replaces oxygen in the 4-position. The last has been found to affect the central nervous system. In the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs for January-June

Analogue! Close to Mescaline 133

1979, Shulgin discusses escaline and proscaline, and makes this important note on the sulfurated variant:

It is active in humans at 10-25 mg so it represents a 12-fold increase in potency over mescaline. Of all the compounds mentioned in this review, it comes most closely to being what should properly be called a psychotomimetic It produces a very intense and disorganized psychotic state that has some aspects of visual distortion but primarily disrupts the mental integrity.

PHYSICAL EFFECTS Taste and Nausea

Peyote has a bitter taste and causes many users to feel nauseous. Referring to ingestion, Indians have often said that peyote is "a hard road." San Pedro has a similar taste, but among those who have tried both cacti it is generally considered easier to swallow and keep down Crystals of mescaline, while lacking the acrid taste, may also cause nausea in a substantial number of people. Discussing this aspect of the mescaline experience, Robert DeRopp has commented that use of peyote "is about as unpromising a passport to an artificial paradise as can be imagined."

For some people, the nausea is an insurmountable barrier. William James had perhaps the most extreme reaction on record: eating just one burton, which wouldn't be enough to prompt mental activity, caused him to be "violently sick" for twenty-four hours.

Nausea and gagging occur sufficiently often in Native American Church practices that there is usually an official, aside from those already described, who is designated as the "shovel man." He is prepared with a tin can to deal with any such difficulties.

Many of the Huichols and North American peyotists claim that when one eats peyote, one is "tasting oneself": if the user is pure, this cactus is "sweet." Barbara Myerhoff, accompanying the Huichols during their 1965 and 1966 hunts, recorded that they urge new participants to "Chew it well. It is sweet, like tortillas." No one vomited, but no one savored it either:

Huichols eating it look like anyone else with a mouthful of peyote: they grimace, sucking in their cheeks and moving their eyebrows up and down in a most characteristic manner—a reaction to the shockingly sour taste of the cactus.

The Indians generally fast before using peyote to diminish the potential for nausea; consumption of food and especially alcohol prior to peyote ingestion greatly increases the chances of vomiting. Sometimes the gag reflex is triggered purposely, as when they are trying a cure.

The Indians are interested in the mental and healing effects brought about by peyote, so they consider the initial problem of taste and nausea as inconsequential. Certainly, it is much less trying to the physical organism than other traditional methods used to achieve "visions" of the Great Spirit. Though peyote may be a shock to the stomach, its brief stress hardly compares with

134 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

going out into the wilderness alone for a fortnight, carrying along just moccasins and a loin cloth, much less with some of the other ordeals endured to raise altered states of consciousness—one extreme example being that of swinging by ropes inserted around muscles in the chest.

It's interesting that some of those who wrote about their use of peyote during the 1950s and 1960s were able to reconcile themselves to peyote's gagging effect as basically compensatory. Beringer earlier had described this experience as one in which the user gets the hangover first, then the inebriation. More than a few people believe at some level that they may not have a profound or even enjoyable experience without having to pay for it.

A surprising effect noticed among many who have gagged after ingesting peyote is that this frequently results in their getting enormously "high." Even when it seemed that nothing could have been kept down, results can be profound. After nausea has conferred a certain seriousness on the experience, there is probably some psychological release felt at the point of vomiting that propels these people immediately into a psychedelicized state.

A myth that purports to explain the bitterness and nausea associated with the psychedelic cacti has gained some currency. Some people believe that the tufts and center of the peyote button contain strychnine; others have made the same assumption about the core of the San Pedro. Strychnine is absent in both cases.

The tufts in peyote are inert, and in at least one experiment a whole handful of this hairy material was ingested without producing any effect. The Huichols always eat these "eyebrows of the peyote." Some people prefer to remove this non-psychoactive section, but it is a personal preference, like not eating the inner "choke" of an artichoke. As to the San Pedro core, the Indians of the Andes slice up and then boil the entire cactus when they art-preparing their psychoactive concoction.

One might well ask: "If there is nausea and vomiting, then doesn't it mean the plant must be toxic?" Masters and Houston answer in their The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience that "although toxic elements are present, the margin of safety is very great and serious poisoning is virtually unheard of."

Coursing through the Body

Following the consumption of mescaline or peyote, there's often a slight increase in pulse rate and blood pressure accompanied by sweating, salivation and possibly a small rise in body temperature. The most prominent visible alteration is dilation of the pupils. As with amphetamine and LSD, mescaline may later leave the user feeling ravenous. Like pot, it frequently also brings on a desire for sweets.

Peyote and mescaline are often thought to be spectacular mental drugs because they produce visual and other cerebral sensations. Curiously, little more than about 2 percent of ingested mescaline ever penetrates the blood-brain barrier. When mescaline was tagged with radioactive molecules of

"Empeyotizarse" Means to Self-Medicate l^

carbon, investigators were surprised to observe that nearly all of it went to the liver. From there it goes to the kidneys and is expelled within six to eight hours.

Because mescaline lodges for the most part in the liver, some concern has been expressed about its use by those with liver ailments. It is worth noting that during the 1950s and 1960s this drug was given to a number of alcoholic mental patients, many of whom had severely diseased livers, with little untoward effect.

Medical and Health Aspects

There is a long list of ailments that this psychedelic is said to be useful in treating. Indians have employed it for everything from dandruff to wounds to cancer, including TB, VD, diabetes, flu, cramps, pneumonia, rheumatism and toothache Even among Indians opposed to using it in religious rites, there's great respect for its medical efficacy.

Indians use peyote as much for the maintenance of good health as for religious worship. Frank Takes Gun, often referred to as the national president of the Native American Church, comments:

At fourteen, I first used Father Peyote. This was on the Crow Reservation in Montana, and I was proud to know that my people had a medicine that was God-powerful. Listen to me, peyote does have many amazing powers. I have seen a blind boy regain his sight from taking it. Indians with ailments that hospital doctors couldn't cure have become healthy again after peyote prayer meeting. Once a Crow boy was to have his infected leg cut off by reservation doctors. After a peyote ceremony, it grew well again.

Western notions of physiology and healing tempt us to dismiss such reports as nothing more than exuberant "witch doctor talk." However, it is a matter of record that these economically deprived people generally enjoy better-than-average health, and reliable observers have confirmed that when they do become sick and turn to peyote, the cactus seems to help them. Louise Spindler, an anthropologist who studied the Menomini tribe, was among the earliest to notice these effects, describing how women peyotists often kept a can of ground peyote for brewing tea, used in "an informal fashion for such things as childbirth, earaches, or for inspiration for beadwork patterns." Edward Anderson points out that in some Indian languages the word for peyote is the same as for medicine—azee (Navajo), biising (Delaware), puakit (Comanche), makan (Omaha), o-jay-bee-kee (Shawnee), walena (Taos) and nau'-tat-no kee (Kickapoo). R.E Schultes has commented that peyote use for medicinal purposes is so well known that it was made into a verb by rural Mexicans: empeyotizane means to self-medicate.

Dr. T.T. Peck of the San Jacinto Memorial Hospital in Baytown, Texas, made similar observations. He first became interested in LSD as a result of having seen the effects of peyote:

136 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

When 1 went into general practice as a country doctor in Texas, I was very impressed thai some of our Latin American patients, despite their poverty and living conditions, were extremely healthy. One day, I asked one of my patients how he stayed so healthy, and he told me that he chewed peyote buttons .. .then I became interested in these drugs that could promise physical as well as mental health.

In the late nineteenth century, American medical professionals became aware of peyote's health benefits after observing its effects among Indians. Once he became familiar with use of the cactus in treating illnesses, James Mooney recommended it to Dr. D.W. Premiss and Dr. Francis P. Morgan, the latter a noted pharmacologist, and they decided to undertake tests with the peyote buttons Mooney supplied.

Their subjects were suffering from a variety of physical complaints— chronic bronchitis with asthmatic attacks; neurasthenia; nervous prostration; chronic phthisis with facial neuralgia and catarrh; persistent cough; and even "softening of the brain." A report by Premiss and Morgan appeared in the August 22,1896 Medical Record, proclaiming that the "effect of the drug was little less than marvelous" in one case; they sang the praises of peyote with almost equal gusto in others. They recommended it for use as an anti-spasmodic and for treatment of general "nervousness," insomnia and colorblindness. One example:

Gentleman, aged fifty-five years. Chronic bronchitis with asthmatic attacks. Much distressed by an irritative cough which kept him from sleeping — In a letter received from him recently he states that he has improved very much, being able to sleep all night without rising, which he has not been able to do for two years; and that, although he has no need of it upon some days, he carries a piece of a burton in his pocket constantly, as its use relieves the tickling in his throat at once and gives better relief than any other remedy which he has ever tried.

Westerners tend to maintain a distinction between peyote as a vision-producer and peyote as a medicine. Among Indians, these qualities are regarded as being much the same: peyote is thought to put them in contact with the spirit world from which illness is derived. From their point of view, Western medicine is based on human intervention. Peyote visions, being a kind of divine intervention, are thus more powerful and provide a surer means by which to learn how to cure ailments.

One would think that by now questions about the medicinal efficacy of peyote and mescaline would be settled, but so far there haven't been good controlled studies of comprehensive scope. One constituent in peyote— peyocactin, which is also called hordonine—has been shown by James McCleary and his colleagues at California State University, Fullerton, to be an antibiotic active against a wide spectrum of bacteria, having an inhibitory action against at least eighteen strains of penicillin-resistant Staphylococcus

Comparison with LSD 737

aureus. This antibacterial characteristic may account in part for its healing effects when applied to wounds.

Another area that should be probed further is peyote's effect upon eyesight. The peyote literature includes many reports of restoration of vision, to which I might add my own report: having worn glasses since the age of three because of astigmatism and near-sightedness, I gave them up after taking a fair amount of peyote. In the absence of clinical data, all we have to go by is a large amount of individual testimony. Much of this is of a remarkable sort.

MENTAL EFFECTS

Similarities and Differences with LSD

LSD and mescaline cause dramatic changes in the web-spinning activities of spiders. Moreover, we can easily distinguish between the two substances by observing the webs constructed under the influence of one or the other psychedelic. The web is more regular or "perfect" under LSD and more abstract and irregular under mescaline. This difference is especially interesting because most "blind" studies of mental effects have shown that human volunteers are unable to differentiate between these two compounds.

In much of the writing about Psychedelics, little effort has been made to clarify the differences between LSD and mescaline effects. In The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, for example, Masters and Houston specify the agent ingested by their 206 subjects (of whom 89 received mescaline) but then seem to take it for granted that stages and characteristics of mescaline experience will be the same as those under LSD. They noted no great differences between the effects of LSD and mescaline in the creativity studies cited in Chapter One. Aldous Huxley, writing to Humphry Osmond in December of 1955 about his first experience with LSD (75 meg.), emphasized the resemblances (and re-emphasized them later after more experiences with LSD):

The psychological effects, in my case, were identical with those of mescaline, and I had the same kind of experience as I had on the previous occasion— transformation of the external world, and the understanding through a realization involving the whole man, that Love is the One .... I had no visions with my eyes shut—even less than I had on the first occasion with mescaline, when the moving geometries were highly organized and, at moments, very

beautiful and significant (though at others, very trivial)___ Evidently, if you

are not a congenital or habitual visualizer, you do not get internal visions under mescaline or LSD—only external transfiguration ....

Some people more experienced with both Psychedelics have reported noteworthy differences in their responses to LSD and mescaline. They generally indicate that peyote and mescaline are "warmer" and "more earthy" than LSD, which is usually seen as being more "cerebral." The mescaline present in the cactus appears to increase considerably a feeling of fellowship

138 Peyote. Mescaline and San Pedro

that is only sometimes prompted by LSD. Shulgin remarks that under mescaline "There is a benign empathy shown to both inanimate and living things, especially to small things." Allen Ginsberg and others have suggested that mescaline—more than other Psychedelics—produces a state of mind very receptive to the complex of benevolent attitudes expressed in Wordsworth's nature poems.

There haven't yet been any studies comparing effects from mescaline with those from peyote. The Church of the Awakening used both fairly extensively and characterized mescaline effects as "identical with those we had obtained through the use of peyote itself (in John Aiken's words).

There are many reports about the effects of peyote and mescaline coming from people who have used these substances in remarkably different ways and in a multitude of settings: from use in experimental laboratories to

140 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

recreational use to use as part of a meditative regimen. These reports emphasize a variety of major effects, which will be illustrated under the following categories: sacramental aspects, visual effects, auditory effects, dimensions outside time and space, creative potential, psychological safety and psycho-therapeutic potential Several may occur within a single experience. In his studies, Beringer found that he was unable to predict what would come up in any particular mescaline session, even if he knew the experiencer well. Prem Das, writing in Aft of the Huichol Indians, agrees that the "spirits" in peyote don't do "what one expects."

Dosage and Timing

Some prefatory comments about dosage and timing are in order. Generally speaking, three fairly large peyote buttons—each perhaps 1 1/2" across— are required to achieve any marked effect upon feelings, intellect and cognition. Peyotists in the Native American Church often take thirty to forty over a single night. (James Mooney recorded having heard of someone who took ninety!)

The Huichols often use one to four buttons for lesser effects, inhibiting "hunger, thirst, fatigue, and sexual desire" (according to Kal Muller, who lived for two years among these Indians). During their annual pilgrimage, peyote hunters consume many more, which are further potentiated by fasting and sleeplessness to produce "visions" and "communication with deities." Hoffer and Osmond assess an average peyote button as containing less than 25 mg. of mescaline.

Early studies of mescaline, detailed in Kluver's book, generally involved doses of a fifth to a half of a gram. Shulgin puts the average dosage used in experimental investigations at between "300 and 500 mg of the sulfate salt, which is equivalent to 225-375 mg of the hydrochloride."

When mescaline or peyote is swallowed, mental changes usually begin to occur within an hour; injection of mescaline brings them on more quickly. Sometimes, however, the effects don't come on until the passing of another hour, and sometimes not until after another two or three hours. Over this interval, most of the physically distressing effects disappear, and the user then is in good humor and "at languid ease" (as Weir Mitchell expressed the transition).

Over the next two to four hours, the experience flows to a peak ami then descends over another four to six hours, if the mescaline was taken all at once. The sedative, possibly jaw-tightening effects from lophophorine and other alkaloids wear off fairly quickly. If peyote is taken over an entire night, as is usual among many Indians, the state of being "high" is extended, of course, as are some anesthetic effects (so that one can sit for twelve to fourteen hours without feeling much pain).

Sacramental Aspects

Peyote and mescaline 'are "psychedelic," which for many users connotes an experience that is "mystical," "sacred" or "blissful" (even if there are diffi-

Modifications in the Spiritual life 74;

culties along the way). The psychedelic state of mind can range from the philosophical to the personal and usually includes a lucid recognition to the effect that "I have seen so many things in myself that need changing." The mescaline experience almost always permits excellent recall of such perceptions, and Indians have said that peyote has brought about a better life for many of its users.

Louis Lewin went to the heart of this matter when he sorted through the many extraordinary aspects of the mescaline experience and declared the most important one to be "modifications of the spitirual life which are peculiar in that they are felt as gladness of soul." Huxley called it "without question the most extraordinary and significant experience this side of the Beatific Vision";

Words like Grace and Transfiguration came to my mind, and this of course was what, among other things, they stood for .... The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Be ing-Awareness-Bliss—for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to.

Among Tahamaris, Huichols and Native American peyotists, the cactus is valued as a medium for revelations from deities or their representatives or from peyote itself. Most Huichol children are brought up in an environment of reverence for peyote; its centrality in their culture is illustrated by the fact that nursing mothers are especially encouraged to take peyote. About two-thirds of Huichol young men are peyotists, taking the cactus on many occasions during the year and making extensive preparations for their "sacred hunt." To fill in the details of how fully peyote use organizes Huichol culture, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's book An of the Huichol Indians observes that the cactus "is used for controlling the rain, for curing, for blessing the people, for locating the deer and planning the sacred deer hunts, in the election of Huichol governing officials, and in many other ways." Of all accounts of peyote's effects among North American Indians, the most sympathetic possibly comes from Humphry Osmond, who joined in the ceremonies of a peyote group in North Battlefield, Saskatoon, Canada (reprinted in his Psychedelics).

In the early 1950s, J.S. Slotkin was invited by Native American Church leaders to live among them in order to report on their peyote practices. He observed many peyotists who had "religious" experiences—intimations of God taking care of them and visions of the "Great Spirit." Jesus appeared before one woman and comforted her after the death of her son. Slotkin mentions a couple of instances involving Indians who were atheists until taking peyote. John Aiken cites a similar response.

Arnold Mandell, the founding chairman of the Psychiatry Department at the University of California at San Diego, noted that despite much emphasis on the "visuals" aroused by peyote, both Weir Mitchell and Have-lock Ellis had metaphysical experiences under its influence. Ellis described a "detached yet acutely aware brain state" and characterized his experience in

142 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

terms of the "majesty of its impersonal nature." Mitchell told the American Neurological Society in 1896 that peyote use revealed "a certain sense of the things about me as having a more positive existence than usual."

From people most sensitive to religious matters come still more impressive reports. John Blofeld, who was especially interested in Buddhism, had great doubts about Huxley's claim that mescaline could induce yogic experiences of a high order (see Ralph Metzner's The Ecstatic Adventure). After taking a quarter of a gram of mescaline, he began to contemplate the patterns that embellish sacred buildings, and "for the first time, I saw them as not arbitrary decorations but profoundly meaningful." His first mescaline experience wasn't painless: it started with a sense of "appalling mental torture." Eventually Blofeld made a "total surrender" and "ceased to cling ... to self, loved ones, sanity, madness, life or death." The experience was transforming:

From hellish torment, I was plunged into ecstasy—an ecstasy infinitely exceeding anything describable or anything I had imagined from what the world's accomplished mystics have struggled to describe. Suddenly there dawned full awareness of three great truths which I had long accepted intellectually but never, until that moment, experienced as being fully self-evident.

These were: (1) an awareness of undifferentiated unity, (2) an awareness of unutterable bliss ("so intense as to make it seem likely that body and mind would be burnt up in a flash") and (3) an awareness "of all that is implied by the Buddhist doctrine of 'dharmas,' namely, that all things, whether objects of mental or of sensory perception, are alike devoid of own-being, mere transitory combinations of an infinite number of impulses." Blofeld comments that these "impulses" are analogous to electrical charges, and "This was as fully apparent as are the individual bricks to someone staring at an unplastered wall. I actually experienced the momentary rising of each impulse and the thrill of culmination with which it immediately ceased to be."

This kind of report is fairly typical among people coming to mescaline from a background of religious study. Houston Smith commented that when he took mescaline he felt as if some five layers of consciousness were perceptible ("I was to some degree aware of them all simultaneously"). He wrote that

the emanation theory and elaborately delineated layers of Indian cosmology and psychology had hitherto been concepts and inferences. Now they were objects of direct, immediate perception ....

It should not be taken from what I have written that the experience was pleasurable. The accurate words are significance and terror—or awe, in Rudolf Otto's understanding of a peculiar blend of fear and fascination.

Visual Effects

Heinrich Kliiver said of the "mescal" experience that the visual effects were its primary aspect, and he attempted to describe them using a limited number of "form-constants." for instance,grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb or chessboard, designs represented one form-constant. Closely

Visual-Enhancing Qualities 143

related were cobweb figures. Kliiver also noted spirals, and images "designated by terms such as tunnel, funnel, alley, cone or vessel"

This schematization of images seems to be only a crude description of the visual experience apparent from most mescaline reports. One of Beringer's subjects, a physician, saw "fretwork" constantly but also felt himself become part of it. Hoffer and Osmond comment that one of their subjects had similar

crystalline perceptions: "He saw a square screen or lattice before him__At

each node on the screen there was a nude girl dancing in time to the music." Kliiver classified other visual aspects of the mescaline experience, notably increase of dimensionality (often involving perception of a shift from two to three dimensions), increase of vividness and variation in perception of size. Zaehner presents an illustration of increased dimensionality: when he looked at pictures in books, the "things depicted seemed to be try-ing to escape from the material in which they were depicted." Illustrating the increase in vividness, Ellis said that as he ate a piece of biscuit

it suddenly streamed out into blue flame. For an instant 1 held the biscuit close to my leg- Immediately my trousers caught alight, and then the whole of the right side of my body, from the foot to the shoulder, was enveloped in waving blue flame. It was a sight of wonderful beauty. But this was not all. As 1 placed the biscuit in my mouth it burst out again into the same colored fire and illuminated the interior of my mouth, casting a blue reflection on the roof. The light in the Blue Grotto at Capri, I am able to affirm, is not nearly as blue as seemed for a short space of time the interior of my mouth.

An example of changes in size occurred during Osmond's first experience with mescaline:

At one moment I would be a giant in a tiny cupboard, and the next, a dwarf in a huge hall. It is difficult enough to explain what it feels like to have been Gulliver, or Alice in Wonderland, in the space of a few minutes, but it is nearly impossible to communicate an experience which amounts to having been uncertain whether one was in Brobdingnag or Lilliput.

Indians have been fairly reticent to outsiders about describing their peyote visions, perhaps regarding them as private. Many apparently consider the visual effects to be of minor importance, although Slotkin's The Peyote Religion (excerpted in Ebin's The Drug Experience) frequently mentions visions of Christ, the Great Spirit or a personal totem.

Kal Muller, in Art of the Huichol Indians, describes an impressive instance of "visuals" from a peyote pilgrimage undertaken by an Indian seeking to determine if he should become a shaman:

The father of a Huichol friend of mine, a middle-aged shaman, told me that he had gone to Wirikuta as a young man and had eaten thirty-five peyote buttons at one sitting. Two unknown old men appeared at his side, just like the assistants of the tsauririka. One told him to look into the (ire, where he saw a typewriter, writing by itself. The other told him to pull the sheets out of the typewriter and read what was on them. He did, even though he cannot read. The

144 Peyote. Mescaline and San Pedro

sheets kept coming out of the typewriter all night, and he kept "reading" and chanting what he saw. The next day the other pilgrims told him that during the whole night he had performed as a tsauririka, singing in a complicated ritual, and that surely the gods wanted him to become a shaman.

The earliest reports among whites were by skilled literary men—Weir Mitchell and Havelock Ellis. Writing toward the end of the nineteenth century, both emphasized the visual qualities of peyote:

Mitchell: The display which for an enchanted two hours followed was such as I find it hopeless to describe in language which shall convey to others the beauty and splendor of what 1 saw. Stars, delicate floating films of color, then an abrupt rush of countless points of white light swept across the field of view. as if the unseen millions of the Milky Way were to flow in a sparkling river before my eyes... zigzag lines of very bright colors ... the wonderful loveliness

of swelling clouds of more vivid colors gone before I could name them___All

the colors I have ever beheld are dull in comparison to these ....

Ellis: At first there was merely a vague play of light and shade which suggested pictures, but never made them. Then the pictures became more definite, but too confused and crowded to be described, beyond saying that they were of the same character as the images of the kaleidoscope, symmetrical groupings of spiked objects. Then in the course of the evening, they became distinct, but still indescribable—mostly a vast field of golden jewels, studded with red and

green stones, ever changing___The visions never resembled familiar objects:

they were extremely definite, but yet always novel; they were constantly approaching, and yet constantly eluding, the semblance of known things. I would see thick, glorious fields of jewels, solitary or clustered, sometimes brilliant and sparkling, sometimes with a dull rich glow. Then they would spring up into flower-like shapes beneath my gaze, and then seem to turn into gorgeous butterfly forms or endless folds of glistening, iridescent, fibrous wings of wonderful insects ....

Havelock Ellis gave a small amount of his peyote to the poet William Butler Yeats, who wrote back to Ellis about the impressive "visuals":

1 have never seen a succession of absolutely pictorial visions with such precision and such unaccountability. It seemed as if a series of dissolving views were carried swiftly before me, all going from right to left, none corresponding with any seen reality. For instance, I saw me most delightful dragons, puffing out their breath straight in front of them like rigid lines of steam, and balancing white balls at the end of their breath! When I tried to fix my mind on real things, I could generally call them up, but always with some inexplicable change. ... in the evening I went out on the Embankment and was absolutely fascinated by an advertisement of "Bovrin," which went and came in letters of lighten the other side of the river. lean not tell you the intense pleasure this moving light gave me and how dazzling it seemed to me. Several investigators have since argued that the early emphasis on peyote's aesthetic appeal probably slowed scientific study. It may well be, as Lewin felt, that visuals are not the most important part of the experience.

Mitchell/Ellis/ Yeats/Huxley 145

Nonetheless, heightened color and luminescence are transformations in consciousness experienced by most users and must to some extent be acknowledged as hallmarks of this chemical.

Colors appearing most commonly in Indian experiences are said to be yellow, blue, green and red, inspired perhaps by the colors in fire and on the tepee or hogan walls. In the experiments carried out by Ellis and others, the color emphasis was on blue or violet, though Heinrich Kliiver found no color to be excluded.

Writing about colors and visions seen under a psychedelic, Huxley addressed himself to the central questions. Once blinded, and thus especially appreciative, he reported that visual transformations can have resonance on other levels. He had expected to enter into 'the kind of inner world described by Blake and A.E. [George William Russell]." That wasn't what happened:

The change which actually took place in that world was in no sense revolutionary ... at no time were there faces or forms of men or animals. I saw no enormous spaces, no magical growth and metamorphosis of buildings, nothing remotely like a drama or a parable.

But,

1 was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence ....

The books, for example, with which my study walls were lined. Like the flowers, they glowed, when I looked at them, with brighter colors, a profounder significance. Red books, like rubies; emerald books; books bound in white jade; books of agate; of aquamarine,of yellow topaz; lapis lazuli books whose color was so intense, so intrinsically meaningful, that they seemed to be on the point of leaving the shelves to thrust themselves more insistently on my attention ....

A rose is a rose is a rose. But these chair legs were chair legs were St. Michael and all angels .... Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgment—or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgment which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty", I recognized as a chair—I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance----

Huxley brought to bear a great deal of erudition in art, philosophy, mysticism, history and psychology. There is probably no better discussion of color transformation and the Psychedelics' ability to transport the user to what Huxley called "the Other World" than in the book he published in 1955 entitled Heaven and Hell.

Auditory Effects

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Indian myths concerning the discovery of peyote generally involve a voice. A prominent auditory

146 Peyote. Mescaline and San Pedro

component also distinguishes peyote and mescaline from other Psychedelics. Don Juan, the Yaqui shaman-teacher in the books by Carlos Castaneda, described Datura and mushrooms as powers or allies, as opposed to peyote, which he described as a teacher. Indians have generally been quite clear in maintaining that peyote provides them with their songs. Peyotists often "hear" where they should look for this cactus. Some Indians even complain that they can't sleep near peyote because there was so much noise at night! Peyote seems to bring on synesthesia, a mixing and reciprocal action among the five senses, so that the drumbeat maintained throughout the ceremony evokes pictures in the head as it heightens aural sensations (see Osmond's description of drumming and his reaction in Psychedelics).

Discrimination of tones under the influence of mescaline can become acute. To quote Lewin and a physician to whom he gave mescaline, music was sensed as "sweet and harmonious" and as coming "from infinity, the music of the spheres." When Slotkin first took peyote, he was greatly impressed with his altered auditory responses:

It was about an hour before I began to notice any sensory effects. The drumming remained constant to me, but the singing wavered from high to low pitch in 3 way that no singer could ever do. Then the song seemed to come from all over the tipi, rather than just from the singer, and for a while it seemed to come from the top of the tipi. If I closed my eyes, I had no idea of where the musk was coming from—even when the singer was the man next to me.

At a later meeting, Slotkin noted that under peyote's influence he could hear whispers from some distance away.

The Spiritual Flight 147

Dimensions Outside Time and Space

As with other Psychedelics, "out-of-body" experiences occur in many peyote and mescaline trips. Users have often felt weightless and had a sense of "flying." More than a few have reported seeing their body become "luminescent" or "transparent" as they looked on from some distance away. One of Ellis' subjects felt a blue flame wafting from the back of his head, then found himself becoming transparent like a Chinese lantern-Out-of-body experiences associated with the San Pedro cactus are discussed in Douglas Sharon's Wizard of the Four Winds—the story of Eduardo Palomino, a Peruvian sculptor, teacher, fisherman and shaman. Asked about the cactus' effects, Eduardo told Sharon that first there is

a slight dizziness that one hardly notices. And then a great "vision," a clearing of all the faculties of the individual. It produces a light numbness in the body and afterward a tranquility. And then comes a detachment, a type of visual force in the individual inclusive of all the senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, et cetera—all the senses, including the sixth sense, the telepathic sense of transmitting oneself across time and matter .... It develops the power of perception ... in the sense that when one wants to see something far away ... he can distinguish powers or problems or disturbances at great distance, so as to deal with them___Then the individual, sometimes by himself,

can visualize his past or ... the present, or an immediate future.

By means of the magical plants, and the chants and the search for the roots of the problem, the subconscious of the individual is opened up like a flower, and it releases these blockages. All by itself it tells things.

Sharon spent four years with Eduardo, eventually becoming his apprentice and helping in nine curing sessions. At first he had been skeptical about Eduardo's claim that he could see events and people at a great distance. Eduardo tried to explain:

The flight is spiritual___One invokes, and his spirit soars to those haunts.

One asks for the lagoon, invokes, and then the spirit makes the trip. The journey of the spirit also causes one to visualize the lagoon in ... an almost objective manner .... Spiritually one is there and one sees it up close.

Q: Does your being actually arrive there?

My material being, no. My spiritual being arrives, yes; and 1 perceive in an objective fashion, as if I were in the place.

As for changes in time perception, consider an extreme example, the experience of Christopher Mayhew, a Member of Parliament during the 1950s who offered to take mescaline under the supervision of Humphry Osmond and before BBC cameras—surely one of the best-documented trips ever.

Although many people under the influence of Psychedelics have seen "trails"—the simultaneous perception of several discrete moments, like the arc of a lighted cigarette in a dark room—Mayhew experienced this phenomenon to an unusual degree. For the London Observer he described his experience as an "Excursion Out of Time":

148 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

What happened to me between 12:30 and 4 o'clock on Friday, December 2, 1955? After brooding about it for several months, I still think my first, astonishing conviction was right—that on many occasions that afternoon I existed

outside time.

I don't mean this metaphorically, but literally. I mean that the essential

part of me... had an existence, quite conscious of itself... in a timeless order

of reality outside the world as we know it.

Mayhew's experience began with color hallucinations but soon led to a preoccupation with the very strange "behavior" of time. Time kept slipping out of sequence—he would see a cup at his lips before he actually removed it from the table—and he couldn't tell how far along he was in the experience. Even his watch did not help. Although his eyes registered various clock times, the hours were not in proper sequence, and he would see two-thirty after he had seen three o'clock. Finally, it was the arrival of a tea-tray that enabled him to judge that the duration of the drug would soon be coming to

an end.

Time worked even more extravagant magic when it sent him into another dimension, where "I would be aware of a pervasive bright pure light, like a kind of invisible sunlit snow":

I would become unaware of my surroundings, and copy an existence conscious of myself, in a state of breathless wonderment and complete bliss, for a period of time which—for me—simply did not end at all. It did not last for minutes or hours, but apparently for years.

For several days afterward, I remembered the afternoon of December 2 not as so many hours spent in my drawing-room interrupted by these strange "excursions," but as countless years of complete bliss interrupted by short spells in the drawing-room ....

On the first occasion when I "came back" in this way from an excursion 1 assumed that a vast period of time had elapsed and exclaimed, in astonishment, to the film team: "Are you still there?" Their patience in waiting seemed extra-ordinary; but in fact, of course, no time had elapsed, and they had not been waiting at all....

These "time phenomena," contrary to everyday consciousness, seemed totally convincing—not hallucinations but another part of reality. Mayhew is definite on this:

The common-sense explanation is that since events in our drawing-room actually happened in a normal sequence (with plenty of witnesses, including the camera, to prove it), I just couldn't have experienced them in some other order, so I must have merely thought I did—I was deluded,

For anyone else than myself, this must be easy to believe; but for me, it is impossible. 1 am not—I repeat—saying that events happened in the wrong order, only that 1 experienced them in the wrong order. And on this point I cannot doubt my own judgment.

Directing Visions into Useful Forms 149

Creative Potential

Ellis thought that peyote would never appeal to most people because it was so predominantly an intellectual experience, promoting what he called a "detached but acute brain state." Lewin called it "purely intellectual" and noted many instances of "disorders of location." These observations are fascinating in themselves, but we should note that many users have been able to direct the peyote or mescaline experience into creative channels.

Arnold Mandell, speaking of the "unapologetic belief in symbols" among Huichols, suggests that peyote enables them to be restored to a state of naivete¹—often a prerequisite for creativity. An of the Huichol Indians amply illustrates how visions seen during peyote ceremonies find expression in tribal art forms. Alice Marriott and Carol Rachlin devote a chapter of their small book Peyote to Native American artists working with paint, metal and beads, especially Carol Sweezy of the Arapaho and Ernest Spybuck of the Shawnee:

Most of the leading Indian easel artists and metal craftsmen of (he twentieth century are or were (for some are dead now) peyotists. Monroe Tsatokee's "Fire Bird," reproduced again and again in books on Indian art, is probably the best-known modern Indian painting in existence.

The optimal condition for prompting creativity is to have a defined problem in mind that is stated in familiar terms—at least this was the assumption made at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Menlo Park, where qualifying volunteers were given mescaline. The results were that many of the subjects were able to solve artistic and technical problems after a single session.

The case of architect Eric Clough is illustrative: he needed a design for an arts and crafts shopping center in a resort-university community. In Metzner's The Ecstatic Adventure, Clough describes receiving the mescaline in the morning and then, blindfolded, traveling in his mind through jungle terrain and scenes from pre-Columbian civilizations. About an hour after a small lunch, Clough was asked to concentrate on his design problem:

I looked at the paper I was to draw on. I was completely blank. I knew that I would work with a property 300' square. I drew the property lines (at a scale of 1" = 40') and I looked at the outlines. I was blank.

Suddenly 1 saw the finished project. I did some quick calculations ... it would fit on the property and not only that ... it would meet the cost and income requirements. It was contemporary architecture with the richness of a cultural heritage ... it used history and experience but did not copy it.

I began to draw... my senses could not keep up with my images... my hand

was not fast enough___1 was impatient to record the picture (it had not faded

one particle). I worked at a pace I would not have thought I was capable of.

I completed four sheets of fairly comprehensive sketches. I was not tired

150 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

but I was satisfied that I had caught the essence of the image. I stopped working. I ace fruit ... 1 drank coffee ... it was a magnificent day.

While making drawings two weeks later, Clough found that his image of the shopping center remained sharp and that he was able to complete the drawings without referring to his original sketches. He also discovered he could view the project from different angles and examine minute construction details. His design was subsequently accepted, and since then he has been able to design other projects in the same way. Interviewed by Progressive Architecture about his use of mescaline, Clough suggested that "All architects ought to have this experience." He also confirmed that this faster, sharper and clearer procedure of "imaging" projects remained with him.

Psychological Safety

A 1971 report to the American Psychological Association by Dr. Robert

L. Bergman, chief of the U.S. Public Health Service's mental health program on the Navajo Reservation, should be of interest to those concerned about the possibility of psychological damage from peyote and mescaline:

For a period of four years, we have followed up every report of psychotic or other psychiatric episodes said 10 arise from Peyote use. There have been forty or fifty such reports. The vast majority have been hearsay that could never be traced to a particular case. Some have been based on a physician's belief that Navajo people use Peyote and if a particular person became disturbed it must be for this reason.

The study found "one relatively clearcut case of acute psychosis and four cases that are difficult to interpret." The clearcut case involved a Navajo who attended a peyote meeting after having had several drinks. "Ordinarily, no one is allowed to participate if he has been drinking, but the road man did not realize that this person had been." The Navajo became panicky and disoriented, then violent, but recovered within twenty-four hours and was reported to have remained well at a follow-up six months later. "It is noteworthy," Bergman adds, "that members of the church warn that the combination of alcohol and Peyote is very dangerous." Reactions in the other four cases were minor, and their relationship with peyote was doubtful.

There is only very rare evidence for serious psychological problems arising from use of peyote or mescaline. In John Aiken's analysis, mescaline experiences can be unpleasant but not harmful. Hoffer and Osmond cite three instances of prolonged reactions, which are about the only such citations in the literature.

Bergman's summary of how Native Americans minimize potential hazards can be generalized to other users. The crucial factors seem to be a positive expectation held by Peyotists, an emphasis on the real interpersonal world rather than the world within the individual, an emphasis on communion rather than withdrawal during the drug experience, an emphasis on adherence to the standards of society rather than on the freeing of impulses . . .

Minimizing Dangers 151

The whole spirit of the religion seems best characterized as communion— with God and with other men. Meetings are experienced as a time of being close and growing closer to one another. Distortions of time sense are counteracted by the various events of the service which take place at precisely defined times of the night ....

Road men are trained to look after people who become excessively withdrawn. If a participant begins to stare into the fire fixedly and seems unaware of the others in the meeting, the road man will speak to him, and if necessary go to him to pray with him. In the process of praying with such a person, he may fan him with an eagle feather fan, splash drops of water on him and fan cedar incense over him. All of these processes are regarded as sacred and helpful, and it appears tome they provide stimulation in several sense modalities to draw one back to the interpersonal world. Another safeguard is the custom that no one is to leave the meeting. Considerable efforts are made if necessary to prevent someone who has been eating Peyote from going off into the night alone. This factor is probably important too, in the customary activities of the morning after the meeting. Everyone stays together and socializes until well after the time the drug effect is over.

Psychotherapeutic Potential

The direct experience of mental health professionals with peyote and mescaline was an early benefit from clinical investigations, significantly changing some treatment directions. In Psychedelics, E. Robert Sinnett recounts how taking 200 mg. of mescaline sulfate with three "psychiatric residents" enlarged his sensitivity:

Although I had had much clinical experience working with schizophrenics as well as academic preparation in clinical psychology and two years of psycho-analytically oriented psychotherapy, new vistas and understandings were made available to me.... It seemed to me that the implications for doing rehabilitation and psychotherapy with psychotic patients are far-reaching .... I had not been able to intuitively understand the silly laughter of the hebephrenic or inappropriate affect until this time. Also, 1 was unaware of the social plight of the schizophrenic, who must receive feedback of his strangeness even from highly trained professional staff___I look on the mescaline

experience as having been a provocative, rich source of data for speculation— richer, I am embarrassed to say, than much of my formal scientific research and study.

Few studies have involved giving mescaline to mental patients, although Hoffer and Osmond discuss some from the 1950s in The Hallucinogens (pp. 38-39). Results indicated that larger than usual dosages were needed for schizophrenics, who generally responded with accentuation of their symptoms. In the early 1960s, Charles Savage and associates gave a single high-dose combination of LSD and mescaline to seventy-four chronic neurotics and reported that psychological tests before and six months after their sessions showed "marked improvement in twelve, some improvement in twenty-two, and slight improvement in twenty-six."

152 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

In my book Psychedelic Baby Reaches Puberty, a friend described how he benefited psychologically from his use of mescaline. His account indicates some of the psychological possibilities in mescaline visions:

I sensed that something very strange was about to happen. We were sitting in Frank's apartment, doing nothing, when suddenly I found I had a strong urge to read. I picked up Hamlet—which was lying around—and started reading aloud the speech "To be or not to be." After I was well into it, Frank surprised me by saying to his roommate something like, "Doesn't he read thai just like a radio announcer, just perfectly delivered?" Well, I've never been able to read anything perfectly in my life. "No, no, no," I said, even though I sensed that something somehow was up, because I had read it without stuttering or stumbling. In fact, after I thought about it, I decided that it was indeed a pretty good performance of "To be or not to be," perhaps better than any I had ever heard.

During ail this, by the way, my voice became lower, and since then it has remained lowered. It has become relaxed I don't understand what happened as I read, but there is no doubt that my voice has changed I still feel a slight catch in my throat, though, and, as I'll indicate shortly, I have an idea why. About this time I started getting dizzy. Frank had prepared a darkened room for me with a couch. He asked me to sit there quietly for a while . .. After I had been in the dark for five or ten minutes, suddenly weird things began to happen. I started feeling that I was really crawling into the womb Then other fantasies began, I would find myself making out—just all kinds of sexual passion. Then I discovered I was sucking my mother's nipple and biting the pillow and other odd sex things.

I started feeling pains in my legs. I was in the fetal position, and I felt myself being pulled; it felt as though I was coming out for the first time from my mother's womb. This really shook me. But then it occurred to me that, by God, when I was born I was born feet first. I also felt for a while that I was strangling, and I remember being told that I was almost choked to death by the umbilical cord. This had something to do with my difficulty in speaking.

After seeing many images relating to childhood, Frank told my friend that he thought he was simply enjoying the fantasies, and wanted him to concentrate on his soured relationship with his girlfriend. He said he would return in five or ten minutes, when he would want my friend to tell his life story. He then left, and my friend began to get terribly cold. When Frank returned, he

asked me what I was doing and I told him to go away. 'I'm freezing," I said, "and I want to be left alone." I added that there wasn't any reason for him to pry into my life story. He immediately replied that if I didn't crawl down toward the other end and flatten out on the couch, he would force me to. I refused, and he then began yanking on my feet. This symbol of birth feet first was so vivid I almost laughed, but at the same time I simply did not want to leave my end of the couch. It was just too painful

Frank continued pulling, and gradually I began slipping out flat. And then all of a sudden I had another remarkable insight. It suddenly came to me that

Psychological Possibilities 153

it was up to me to save myself if I was going to be saved at all. At the moment that Frank was pulling on me, I suddenly became aware that it takes a lot of energy to survive in the world, and that up till then this was effort I had been unwilling to expend ....

But during the moment Frank was pulling me out flat on the couch, I knew without question that I needed to exert my will. I knew I had to do things myself. So 1 said, "All right, I won't be cold any more!" And I threw off the blankets, and it wasn't cold. I no longer felt cold.

All of a sudden I knew I could ignore my fears of my subconscious mind. The fears of my subconscious are real, but I knew I could ignore them. I could conquer the fears. All at once I felt as though I could remember anything and do anything. Problems suddenly seemed to disappear and I had a great feeling of relief.

I turned to Frank and told him that I'd solved everything and that I might as well go home. "Go home?" he asked. "Man, you're really under it." He insisted that I stay, and finally I agreed. But since all my problems seemed solved, since I no longer was preoccupied by the psychological aspects of the experience, I began paying attention to music and colors and had a very pleasant time.

FORMS AND PREPARATIONS

Peyote can be eaten fresh or in its dried state, or it can be made into a tea by boiling. It can be extracted from the dried or fresh state and made into a tar that can be taken in capsule form by boiling the ground or blended material and filtering away the roughage. A coffee filter or even a stocking can be used, with the liquid being evaporated afterward. Mescaline is soluable in chloroform; it is one of the few freebase compounds that isn't soluable in ether.

Shipments of the cactus to Indians are still made by truck from Laredo, though the cactus ranches selling to whites closed down long ago. However, San Pedro can be purchased from Mr. Pedro, Box 4611, Berkeley, CA 94704

!54 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

or from other advertisers in High Times. It is usually sliced up and boiled for six to eight hours. A portion 6 to 10" long and 2 to 3" in diameter constitutes a normal dose.

Many ingenious techniques have been used to make peyote and San Pedro more palatable-—to facilitate absorption of the psychoactive molecules with-out triggering the gag reflex. In most Native American Church rituals, the peyotists simply put a dried button in the mouth until it is soft enough to be chewed and swallowed. That takes some time. They pass around milk and may smoke. When peyote is ingested in this fashion, its cactus' soapy, bitter taste is soon displaced substantially by a numbness.

The next most popular method seems to be grinding peyote up and swallowing it inside gelatin capsules. Probably the most efficient method is to take it as a suppository or douche, which would cause it to be absorbed better. In been down so long it feels tike up to me, Richard Farina suggests mixing cream, ice and turn in a blender, dropping in sliced bits of peyote and quickly swallowing the whole thing: the theory being that the rum is for taste and for anesthetizing the stomach while the cream lines the stomach and passes the peyote bits quickly to the intestines.

With fresh peyote, a good procedure is to chew it with the front teeth, then toss it in small bits to the back of the mouth and swallow immediately. Most efforts to cover up taste don't really work.

Peyote will burn if it is dried and powdered, and it can be smoked with grass. Many adherents of Indian practices will not use it this way. This com-bination intensifies the effects of marijuana; it gives a lovely, light high that sharpens vision without sending one on a major trip.

Mescaline usually appears as a clear crystal in the form of a sulfate or hydrochloride. The crystals are up to ¹A" (1/3 cm.) long. Shulgin puts the usual dosage of the sulfate salt at 300-500 mg., which is equivalent to 22V 375 mg. of the hydrochloride. He adds that this dose is often administered in two installments about an hour apart in order to minimize nausea,

In the 1960s and 1970s, much that was sold as mescaline wasn't mescaline. The size of a capsule can be a helpful indicator, since at least a third of a gram is needed if the compound is to manifest psychoactive effects. Pharm-Chem indicated at one point that the chances were only one in fifty that a capsule sold as mescaline was the genuine product. Nowadays, however, most of what passes as mescaline is authentic.