Belladonna-like Substances (more deleriant), 585 Yohimbe (more speedy), 388 Kava-Kava (more inebriant), 588 Ketamine (more anesthetic), 392 Nitrous Oxide (more ineffable), 395

CHAPTER TEN

Contrasting Profiles

The nine compound-clusters described thus far, comprising more than a hundred botanicals and synthetics, are the main Psychedelics known to date. Other plants—at least 120 from the New World and twenty from the Old World—have suspected or confirmed psychoactivity (Schultes and Hof-mann inventory ninety-one, each representing a separate genus, in their 1979 Plants of the Gods), and substances isolated from these plants have prompted chemists to synthesize and test new compounds. This chemical work has been outlined in Psychotropic Substances and Related Compounds, edited by the late Daniel Efron, who was affiliated with Sandoz, Ciba, Hof-mann-La Roche and NIMH. In the first edition (1968), Efron showed 590 molecules and referenced their literature. In 1972, Efron enlarged this book to cover 1,555 compounds (including barbiturates and tranquilizers).

Nonetheless, few plants or compounds other than those in the nine compound-clusters seem eligible for classification as authentic Psychedelics. The five to be profiled here—three from plants and two synthetics—have sometimes been proposed as major facilitators of psychedelic experiences.

Belladonna-like Substances

The family Sotanaceae, made up of more than 2,400 species, is especially noteworthy. Many of its members contain the alkaloids atropine (dl-hyoscyamine) and scopolamine (hyoscine). Atropine shows up in mandrake root, henbane and thorn apple; it constitutes just over 4.5 percent of the asthmatic preparation called Asthmador. Schultes and Hofmann claim that there are no reports on the effects of atropine alone "which could explain the addition of belladonna as an ingredient of magic brews in medieval Europe." But Hoffer and Osmond recall several historical incidents that attest to its psychoactivity. One story involved a family of five who in 1963 ate tomato plants that had been grafted onto jimson weed, producing 6.36 mg. of atropine per tomato: "All five developed deliroid reactions of varying intensity and some had to be treated in the hospital several days. This seems to be the first known instance of hallucinogenic tomatoes."

The names atropine and belladona both relate to this drug complex's effects. The former is derived from Atropos—one of the three fates in Greek mythology—as a result of its being used as a poison during the Middle Ages. The latter refers to its ability to dilate the eyes of "beautiful ladies." Both are used nowadays in medicine as an antispasmodic, especially for parkinsonism, with an average dose of atropine being 0.5 mg. Users have survived dosages of more than a gram, but the effects appear toxic in most cases of 10 mg. or more.

385

Probably the more important chemical in most belladonna alkaloids is scopolamine. It appears not only in the already-mentioned sources but also in several tree barks used by natives that are known as Datura. Appreciated early on in both hemispheres, it has been used in the Near East to compound the effects of cannabinols and in the Andes to add to mescaline-like effects from the cactus Trichocereus pacbanoi. In asthmador, scopolamine constitutes 50.4 percent of the mixture. Tim Leary has been quoted as saying he never heard of a good belladonna trip; my own experience has been an exception.

Yohimbe

This "psychedelic stimulant" is derived primarily from the bark of a West African tree called Patisinystalia or Corynanthe yohimbe, although it is also present in other species of Corynanthe and in Aspidosperma quebran-choblanco and Mitragyna stipulosa. When this alkaloid is brewed as a tea and then drunk, its effects come on within forty-five minutes to an hour. The action is reportedly swifter if taken with 500 mg. vitamin C.

There is an increase in vasodilation and peripheral blood flow, along with stimulation of the spinal ganglia which control erectile tissue, followed by slight "hallucinogenic effects," that last for about two hours. Users may then go off to sleep quite easily.

J.H. of Vancouver, B.C. has written High Times to point out that yobimbe is a MAO-inhibitor, altering adrenal and other metabolic functions, and thus should be used with caution:

Anyone with diabetes, kidney or heart disease should not experiment with yohimbe. Moreover, yohimbe should not be used with mescaline, LSD, MDA, MMDA or amphetamines .... Avoid chocolate, cheeses, sherry, bananas, pineapples, sauerkraut and other foods containing tryptophans for 12 hours before and after use. The combination may trigger a dangerous rise in blood pressure combined with shortness of breath.

In case of adverse reaction, get medical help. Yohimbe is legal, so it's no bust to see a doctor. Sodium amytal is the best antidote for yohimbe poisoning, but let a physician do it. Self-ad ministration of barbs during a panic is mighty dangerous. Most people overdo it.

This bark is generally prepared by boiling so that psychoactive elements are leached out and starting material can be thrown away. Mental effects are fairly mild. Adam Gottlieb comments on yohimbe's propensity for producing sexual effects such as erections in males;

Other pleasurable effects are warm spinal shivers which are especially enjoyable during coitus and orgasm (bodies feel like they are melting into one another), psychic stimulations, mild perceptual changes without hallucinations, and heightening of emotional and sexual feeling ....

Kava-Kava

Kava-kava comes from the root pulp and tower stems of a tall perennial shrub native to the South Pacific islands. It was mentioned by a Swedish

botanist who accompanied Captain James Cook on his first voyage to the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands in 1768-1771. In 1886, Louis Lewin examined kava-kava in detail.

The plant (Piper methysticum) grows best near sea level in areas like the Solomon and Fiji Islands, Samoa, Tahiti and New Guinea. With sufficient sunlight, it can reach twenty feet. The psychic components reside within the root—which after three or four years attains a thickness of three to five inches. The roots in older plants become heavy and knotted, accumulating strength and flavor. After six years, such roots may weigh twenty pounds; after twenty years they may be as heavy as a hundred pounds.

When harvested, these roots are scraped and then cut into pieces, which are then either chewed (the Tonga method) or crushed between rocks (the Fiji method). In Norman Taylor's Narcotics, there appears a charming account of these preparations—which result in a grayish brown or whitish liquid that most find to be soapy, spicy and numbing to the mouth. In Hawaii, according to Hoffer and Osmond,

The nobles used it socially for pleasure, the priests ceremoniously and the working class for relaxation. It was given to mediums and seers to enhance their psychic powers. It was used to increase inspiration and to assist contemplation. It seems to have been employed in the way some investigators have tried to use LSD and psilocybin.

Pleasure/'Ceremony'/Relaxation 391

Interestingly, many people in the South Pacific have given up drinking alcohol after being introduced to kava-kava. All agree that it leaves no hangover and that it produces a carefree and happy state with no mental or physical excitation. According to Lewin, this is "a real euphoriant which in the beginning made speech more fluent and lively and increased sensitivity to subtle sounds. The subjects were never angry, aggressive or noisy." Kava-

332 Contrasting Profiles

kava taken in large amounts regularly has caused drinkers' legs to "become tired and weak, their muscles were controlled poorly; their gait unsteady, and they appeared to be drunk." But the mental changes are usually of a pleasant kind and, many feel, quite magical. A surprising large number of visitors to the Islands are said to have considered kava-kava superior to champagne.

If larger quantities are consumed, vision is disturbed, pupils are dilated and walking is difficult. There's a sort of scaling of the skin that develops if kava-kava is used frequently and in large amounts.

Kava-kava isn't illegal. It is available in many herb shops and through the mails, notably from advertisers in High Times. The fresher it is, the more potent.

Kava-kava's mental action is caused by at least six resinous alpha pyrones: kawain, dihydrokawain, methysticin, dihydromethysticin, yangonin and dihydroyangonin, none of which is water soluble. As a result, they must be emulsified into water or coconut milk, says Adam Gottlieb,

by prechewing the root as is done in the islands or by adding a little salad oil and lecithin and mixing it up in a blender. To do this mix one ounce of powdered kava-kava, ten ounces of water, two tablespoons of coconut or olive oil and one tablespoon of lecithin granules (available at health food stores) in a blender until it attains a milky appearance. This amount serves two to four persons.

Ketamine

Ketamine, a compound featured in Hitchcock's Family Plot, is a non-barbiturate anesthetic that's notable for its lack of harmful side-effects. It's also called Ketalar {ketamine hydrochloride) and has been used for the most part as a child's anesthetic, with intramuscular doses in the range of 9-13 mg./ kg, of body weight producing surgical anesthesia within three to four minutes and usually lasting twelve to twenty-five minutes. An intravenous dose of 2 mg./kg. of body weight generally brings about anesthesia within thirty seconds, with the effect lasting five to ten minutes.

When it was given to older people experimentally, some patients gave accounts that sounded like psychedelic experiences of some sort. Soon experimentation revealed that in dosages reduced to about a tenth of the usual amounts, Ketamine produced a "trip" lasting forty-five minutes to an hour. Many users have since testified that lying down quietly while under this drug can lead to a spiritual experience.

The manufacturer Parke-Davis notes that approximately 12 percent of more than 10,000 patients given this drug in 105 separate studies have had unpleasant "emergence reactions":

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MANIFESTATIONS VARY IN SEVERITY BETWEEN PLEASANT DREAM-LIKE STATES, VIVID IMAGES, HALLUCINATIONS, AND EMERGENCE DELIRIUM. IN SOME CASES THESE STATES HAVE BEEN ACCOMPANIED BY CONFUSION, EX CITEMENT, AND IRRATIONAL BEHAVIOR WHICH A FEW PATIENTS

An Anesthetic Route to spiritual Experience 393

RECALL AS AN UNPLEASANT EXPERIENCE. THE DURATION ORDINARILY LASTS NO MORE THAN A FEW HOURS; IN A FEW CASES HOWEVER, RECURRENCES HAVE TAKEN PLACE UP TO 24 HOURS POST-OPERATIVELY. NO RESIDUAL PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS ARE KNOWN TO HAVE RESULTED FROM USE OF KETALAR ....

THESE | EMERGENCE | REACTIONS MAY BE REDUCED IF VERBAL, TACTILE. AND VISUAL STIMULATION OF THE PATIENT IS MINIMIZED DURING THE RECOVERY PERIOD ....

People trying low dosages report feeling disconnected from normal, everyday realities. Blood pressure and pulse are often elevated; hypotension and bradycardia have been observed. "Ketamine has a wide margin of safety," observes Parke-Davis' brochure: "several instances of unintentional administration of overdoses of Ketalar (up to ten times that usually required) have been followed by prolonged but complete recovery."

Reactions to low doses are illustrated here by the comments of a friend:

On the way up, there was this music experience. Since I am a musician, he chose the music knowing that 1 was—and that part of it was incredible. It was OK to keep my eyes open or closed, since it didn't matter. To close my eyes felt better. My perceptions were getting disoriented, and when I closed my eyes a bit of information started to happen. Colors, patterns, cross-connections in sensory perception. Sounds and inner visions got confused.

394 Contrasting Profiles

I got deeper and deeper into this state, until at one point the world disappeared. I was no longer in my body. I didn't have a body.

I reached a point at which I knew 1 was going to die. There was no question about it, no "maybe I will" or "perhaps I will," and what incredible feelings that evoked!

Then I reached a point at which I felt ready to die. It wasn't a question of choice, it was just a wave that carried me higher and higher, at the same time that I was having what in my normal state I would call the horror of death. It became obvious to me that it was not at all what I had anticipated death to be. Except, I knew it was death, that something was dying.

1 reached a point at which I gave it all away. 1 just yielded, and then 1 entered a space in which there aren't any words. The words that have been used have been used a thousand times—starting with Buddha. I mean,at-one-with-the-universe, recognizing-your-godhead—all those words I later used to explore what 1 had experienced.

The feeling was that I was "home." I didn't want to go anywhere, and I didn't need to go anywhere. It was a bliss state of a kind I never experienced before. I hung out there awhile, and then I came back. I didn't want to come back. The deep state was no longer than half an hour.

When I talked about it to my guide, and shared some words about the experience, he said: " Yeah, what happened and happens to others is that you finally get rid of that heartbreak feeling that we carry from childhood. Finally, that's expunged somehow." That was the feeling I was rid of my heartbreak. My heart was no longer broken. It was like, "Whew!!!" That was the long-lasting effect—what really lasts and gets supported by similar experiences— not necessarily on any drug at all. That floats, and stays. In 1978, Marcia Moore and Howard Alltounian published a book about Ketamine, Journeys into the Bright World. Another positive account appears in John Lilly's novel-autobiography The Scientist, where this compound is referred to as "K." Some users have been highly enthusiastic; a few have been disappointed. Here's a response from someone who saw his Ket-amine experience as quite distinct from those induced by other Psychedelics:

In regard to my Ketamine experience, I'm not sure—indeed I doubt that anyone could be sure—how to describe it. It has much the same flavor as those described by John Lilly in his autobiographical novel, The Scientist, i.e., contact with Beings who seem to be running things here on earth. (I had not read John's book when I took Ketamine and went into that experience without any expectations of the kind of experience it turned out to be. If anything, 1 anticipated something similar to the effect of other psychoactive substances.) The Beings aspect of the experience was less interesting for me than the total loss of an observer consciousness Even in my most profound experiences with LSD and mushrooms I retained some kind of ego structure. There was an element of annihilation of the self so total that that which is joined to the One in mystical experience simply disappeared.

Surprisingly, I found myself better able to remember the details of the experience than those I've had with LSD and mushrooms, it was almost as if I had been to the movies. There was story more than concept. Plot is easier to

Loss of the "Ego Structure" 395

retain than insight. With LSD and mushrooms I have always been able to talk and felt that I might even write if I wanted to, but with Ketamine there was no eye, no writing hand, no world in which such an act could take place.

Ketamine is the only drug that made me sick. I threw up for ten minutes on coming out of it and immediately swore that I would never do it again. Of course, I will.

My experience indicates that it is the most hallucinogenic of the drugs I have taken. It feels like it is giving me access to something more personal and significantly less meaningful than the Ground of Being.

The Ketamine molecule is very similar to that of PCP, an analgesic-anesthetic usually employed in veterinary medicine. PCP is known chemically as phencyclidine or benactazine and has been marketed by Parke-Davis as Sernylan. It has been represented as THC under the name "Hog," "green" and "the Peace Pill." In smoking mixtures, it is often called "Angel Dust." Taken very frequently, PCP sometimes provokes "scattering" or "schizy" effects—and is not recommended. The best reports in the scientific literature come from Domino, Luby and Kovacic (see the extensive bibliography in PCP, edited by Ronald Linder). The January-June 1978 issue of the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs which is entirely devoted to PCP, presents a dozen views

Nitrous Oxide

This uncomplicated molecule (N;O) was produced for the first time two centuries ago—in 1772—by the chemist and political refugee Sir Joseph Priestly. He was also the first person to isolate oxygen. As Priestly tried to determine whether dry carbon dioxide would dissolve iron, he prepared a gas that he named "Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air." He experimented with this gas, soon to be known as nitrous oxide, but never inhaled it.

In 1779, another chemist and social reformer, Thomas Beddoes, opened a Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, England. He hired Humphry Davy (who was later knighted) as his assistant and encouraged him to pursue experiments with NXD. Davy exposed nitrous peroxide (N2O4) to iron, thereby removing three of the four oxygen atoms. The results appeared in Davy's 600-page book, Researches Chemical and Philosophical, chiefly concerning Nitrous Oxide and its Respiration. In this, Beddoes described effects:

there seems to be quick and strong alteration in the degree of illumination of all surrounding objects; and 1 felt as if composed of finely vibrating strings .. immediately afterwards I have often caught myself walking in hurried step and busy in soliloquoy ....

Davy, who experimented extensively upon himself with N2O, introduced it to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, James Watt (inventor of the steamboat), Peter Mark Roget (author of the famous Thesaurus), the potter Josiah Wedgwood (also later knighted) and other luminaries. Before long, patients were flocking to the Pneumatic Institution to be treated with

396 Contrasting Profiles

this "gas of paradise." Public feeling about all this ran high as rumors of "strange sexual laboratory procedures and chlorinated Africans pervaded the bustling English seaport." After Davy turned his attention to other things, the Institute deteriorated and soon it closed. Use was confined to "exuberant medical students."

In 1799, having noticed that pain vanished under the influence of this gas, Davy suggested that it be used in surgical operations. This lead was not pursued for another forty-five years. In the 1840s, "laughing gas" appeared in the United States as a form of entertainment. A young dentist named Horace Wells attended a demonstration in Hartford Connecticut in late 1844. The 25C admission bought a dose of N2O, and during the proceedings one of the nitrous oxide sniffers tripped and fell, gashing his leg in the process. To the victim's astonishment, he felt no pain.

Upon questioning the man, Wells was so impressed that he had one of his teeth extracted the next day while under the influence of the gas. He exclaimed: "A new era in tooth-pulling!" Wells was later urged by friends to patent his discovery, but he refused—"No! Let it be as free as the air we breathe!"

Soon the gas was used as an anesthetic in tooth extractions, in childbirth and to some extent in surgery. But it wasn't until the late 1860s that N;O caught on as a painkiller and use for this purpose spread widely.

At the beginning of this century, attention of a more philosophical nature was directed to this simple compound when William James undertook examination of its properties at Harvard University, Commenting on this nitrous oxide experimentation, James concluded in a much-quoted

passage that normal, waking consciousness is but one special kind of consciousness—"parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different." James announced it as his "unshakeable conviction" that with application of "the requisite stimulus," other forms of consciousness "are there in all their completeness.... At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality."

Even today, no one knows how this molecule of only three atoms causes its anesthetic effect, its hilarity or other more profound effects. For many users, there's no doubt it facilitates access to the "unconscious." Some feel that it also gives access to a state of recognition described by Andre" Breton in Manifestoes of Surrealism:

There is a certain point of the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and incommunicable, the high and low, cease being perceived as contradictions.

Potential forms of Consciousness 399

The sniffer can adjust nitrous oxide dosage easily to whatever level is desired. After stopping sniffing, the effects dissipate rapidly; the gas is removed from the system within five to ten minutes. In contrast to Psychedelics described earlier, the effects resist later description. Users retain an impression of the experience rather than a sharp memory,

Danger occurs—as dental experience has established—when users are foolish enough not to breathe oxygen when inhaling nitrous oxide. Earlier in this century, dentists often gave their patients straight N2O, trying to bring them under it until skin color turned what was known as "Philadelphia blue." The brain, deprived of oxygen too long, can become vegetable. It is a good idea to remember to breathe oxygen regularly. Probably the best practice is to alternate breaths from a nitrous oxide balloon with air.

Users should also avoid inhaling directly from a nitrous oxide aerosol can. Some users have died as a consequence of freezing the throat area because the heat is absorbed as the gas expands. Freon, a similar molecule used as an aerosol propellant, does not have nitrous oxide effects.