Modern Alchemy: Interview with Ann and Sasha Shulgin
Modern Alchemy with Minds and Matter
An Interview with Ann & Sasha Shulgin
It was almost mid-day as Peter Stafford and I made our way up the hill to a small house with - on this clear December day - a stunning panoramic view of the east San Francisco Bay complete with bridges. It is a unique home because unlike most, it a laboratory in the back. The laboratory, filled with racks and glass and the smells of sharp-smelling chemicals is the place where the experiments in synthesis that Sasha Shulgin, one of the two subjects of this interview has conducted.
The compounds forged in this modern day alchemist's laboratory are also the starting points for the two books that Shulgin and his wife Ann have been recently published, lectures they have conducted around the world and of this interview.
We were greeted with warm and genial hospitality by the couple, who were just concluding a photography session with Cliff Scorso, our art director and photographer
Bruce Eisner: You started out your exploration of psychedelics with mescaline many years ago. Can you describe some of the changes that you have felt in your life - both positive and negative - that have been the consequences of these experiences of 20 or 30 years ago?
Sasha Shulgin: Actually, Ann and I both started with the same chemical - mine was in the form of the sulfate salt - at about the same time. We both had the same guide, but we didn't know one another. It was earlier than the late `60s.
And from my point of view, what it did was change the course of my curiosity and interests -- I was going into industrial chemistry and working for industry - into wanting to do research in my own way toward my own ends. It changed my course and I am very content with this change.
B: Sasha, until the publication of PIHKAL you walked a tightrope in which you both consulted with government officials and proponents of wider psychedelic use. With the publication of that book, it appeared to me, at least, that you veered off in a direction more toward the proponents. Can you say why you decided to do this?
S: I think the main reason and justification was the necessity of coming out of the closet. From being a person who was doing a lot of research but communicating only through the scientific literature - with occasional seminars and literature - into actually communicating with people who had a keen interest without the technical background to weather the storm of chemical structures and reactions. So primarily it was a way I hoped to get a lot of the research work I had done earlier - as right now with what I am currently working on - into the public domain in a way that can't be destroyed.
I think I mentioned in one of the two books the situation with Wilhelm Reich when he got a little weird toward the end - I guess we all get weird toward the end. Bringing down rain by shooting down clouds - that kind of thing. Orgone boxes got him in trouble with the FDA because he was making medical claims for a device and they had not approved the device. And so he ended up in jail because he wouldn't go into court to answer their charges, and he died in jail.
And so the authorities burned all of his notes.
And I think for me a very good catharsis was writing this book. And you have some of the same wishes to get your expressions out.
Ann Shulgin: I think that there were very few, if any, books out which gave factual information about various psychedelics - good and bad information about dosage levels, information that we hoped will be really useful and practical at such a time when somebody in the administration, you know, gets some common sense and changes the drug laws. The anti-drug voices are all around. What we hoped to do was to get information out on the dangers - if you do so and so, and so and so - and the benefits if you use these compounds properly. I think our books speak for the benefit of the proper and educated use of these things.
S: And also, another nice outcome was that Jonathan Ott's magnificent Pharmacotheon was sitting in the wings. He was not certain about publishing at all. And the occurrence of PIHKAL in essence instigated his bringing that book forth, which might have been the start of a number of similar books.
A: I think it was. I think several people got a little courage from the fact that we did that. Of course at that time no publisher was going to touch this kind of thing - not with the recipes. And we would not allow the book to be broken into two.
S: Yeah, there are some people who say the first half was really what should have been published and the second half ignored. An equal number said the second half should have been published and the first half ignored. So by putting them together, everyone's happy.
Peter Stafford: You are one of the few chemists who have their own lab at home -
S: Oh, for fully over 30 years. A lot of chemists have their own labs, but very often they are not out in the open air where they can be seen. But I know chemists around the world who work in the basements of pharmacies or in the quiet of their attic, just because they are curious and capable.
P: I remember looking at your storehouse, which you latched with a large spoon.
S: Oh, I have a lock on it now!
B: In TIHKAL and in public statements you have described the government's obtrusive search of your lab and home, and actions toward lifting your license. In light of the government's past actions toward psychedelic proponents, doesn't the government's behavior seem fairly consistent? In other words, you have been somewhat indignant about it, but it seems to me in a way that it was something you almost might have expected.
S: They had every right to come because I had a license, and they had the right to check compliance, the right to diversion inquiry. The license was on the wall, and the welcome mat is by definition out to regulate that license and make sure that it was not abused. On the other hand, they did not seize the license. I gave it back to them. So it's not a matter of confiscation or revocation, but one of yielding in exchange for -- I yielded the license and a fine in exchange for their assurance that they would not go into civil court on the basis of regulation violation.
That's the way we brought the entire thing to closure. I think they were unhappy because the implication was that my having a license for Schedule I drugs gave me their approval for doing research toward the creation of new psychedelic drugs. It did not. But that was the impression that they felt the book had given.
Of course, I don't need a license for creating new things. And if they turned out to be convulsants or antidepressants, that's fine. Of course it couldn't be psychedelics - that would startle them.
B: So actually most of the things you mentioned in PIHKAL were done prior to the Analogs Act?
S: Oh yes!
A: Also, if you read that chapter "Invasion" carefully, you will note that I think I went out of my way to be as fair to the invaders as I possibly could. They could have really messed up this place and us, and they didn't. The only thing that became terribly obvious was that despite everything that they said, this was not about regulations. This was about a book. But it could not be legally and obviously about a book, because we're protected by the First Amendment. But that's what it was about. And that was not apparent to me for quite some time.
It just became more apparent as time went on because there were some references here and there like, "Where are your phenethylamines?"
Yeah, exactly.
I think that Washington probably discovered the book a bit late and said, "Jeez, we can't be associated with the author of this thing!" and acted accordingly.
But they were extremely polite. They were very, very well mannered. They did not go into any room that had not been already named by Sasha as a room containing drugs. They didn't even step into them. So I think they were being extremely careful - not because they were necessarily of good hat, but because I think there had been some agreement ahead of time that they would go only so far. I think that they had been told to be cautious.
We found out later through our lawyer that they were under orders to be careful.
And I think some of it was because of the now rather high profile. It's like there's a certain Nobel Prize winner who is totally open and frank about his use of psychedelics, and he hasn't been touched. They don't want that kind of trouble. But they also didn't want a court case.
B: What do you believe is the real reason behind the government's War on Drugs? What do you think are the real motives?
S: Oh, I think it is unmistakable. There's money, power and control.
B: Would you elaborate on that a little bit?
S: Sure. If you were benefiting personally from a 500 billion-dollar industry, would you yield your aspects of interaction with that industry because of somebody saying this is not a moral thing to do?
It's a monster industry. Do people think - well, how much money is spent on illegal drugs? It's a trivial detail in what is really a monster industry. Everything from the State Department to the manufacturers of things like instruments to the establishment of international trade - all these people benefit immensely from the War on Drugs. And you ask any one of them, "If you had a choice, would you dissolve the law - repeal the law --that made these materials illegal?"
And they say, "We can't afford to." They immediately start mentioning the words "child" and "children" in the following sentence. But what it is that they have lost their source of income. They have lost their source of control.
P: When Timothy Leary went in to show the warden how the rates of recidivism had dropped [due to psilocybin usage], he was taken over to the wall and the warden showed him this blueprint of this enormous new prison which was about to be constructed!
S: There are many private industries that are coming up. From prison-building industries to - what was the term that was used for policemen who are not policemen but rather private …
A: Private security.
S: There would not be any way of being beholden to any Constitutional restraint. The concept of the military getting more and more involved. There's an immense amount of the money in the military budget --the percentage of the military budget - that is involved in the War on Drugs. Because of present statements that have, in effect, revoked the applicability of the Posse Comitatus contract, which prohibits the military from involving itself in accordance with civil law. The military has no place on borders to intercept drug runners. The military has no place being on the high seas and using nuclear submarines to follow cocaine trawlers. But they do. So there's a very subtle involvement.
B: Well, the way that drugs are scheduled also seems to me to be a violation of original Constitutional principles. The fact that the government agency can actually name the drugs that it is after, and actually describe and issue an edict.
S: It's a very hazardous thing when law enforcement is in the position of writing the text of laws. The returns go from law enforcement through the Department of Justice, through Congress.
Congress modifies it according to its own needs, and amends it according to its own wonts. It gets passed, goes back to the Department of Justice, and they have a little party in the DEA. "We did it again!"
This has been proved time and time again.
B: And the Analogs Act is about as screwy as you can get.
S: Have you read it carefully?
B: Yeah. I wrote an article about it, if you remember. So I read it very carefully. With its "substantially similars" and all the different possibilities of regulating consciousness by almost anything.
In your book you have one section that I think you call "Three
Portraits" or "Three Photographs." Now you have placed yourself in that last photograph - where you are looking at all the younger people and the people who are in the prime of their lives and so forth. In a way the psychedelic world has come to that as well.
We see people bowing off the scene. The Learys. The Ram Dasses, the Grofs. Even the Shulgins are receding into the past. Who do you think are going to be the new people to replace these types of people?
A: The last thing you would want to do is name them!
S: I don't think it is a matter of replacement. I think it is a matter of a continuum. So it is not that A drops off and B takes A's role. The entire structure is a very, very strong, very dedicated minority of people, and it is a community --, as you know better than most. And that community will persist. Some will age and drop away, and the youngsters will wonder what it is, and knock at the door and stick their head in. But the community is an entity. And I believe that is very, very valuable.
A: And this kind of search has been going on for over 30,000 years. It's not about to stop now.
P: Psychedelics are definitely "winners!"
To shift the topic a bit, how many people would you guess you've taught chemistry to?
S: Many, many hundreds. I go to a meeting - this happens in Europe, in Germany, in Spain, in Austria. Wherever I happen to be.
There I'll be at the meeting and the next thing you know, after the talk is over at the side with a cup of coffee - I think one of the most common phrases I hear is, "Can I ask you a couple of questions?" The next thing you know, they're having trouble with this or with that, and they are looking around to make sure that they are not being overheard.
They might say "The difficulty is that this spontaneously turned to oil rather than solids." There is this and that. And I might say "Well, as a matter of fact, that's a decent idea." But in every country where I go, these interactions are there, and I know personally of several very active researchers who are not openly public.
A: Which is a terribly sad thing, because the information will be lost. It should be published. That's the tragedy of it.
S: Well, publishing that kind of information is seen by many as being a form of confession. That's why a lot of information that I have been told I put anonymously in these books.
B: There's quite a bit of information appearing on the Internet now. For instance, there's one repository that's put out by the Drug
Policy Foundation - they have something like twenty-five books on-line, and tremendous amounts of anecdotal stuff. You know, the Lycaeum and other places. So there is quite a bit of digitizing -
S: Oh yes! Remember, of course, that every word that appears on the Internet is recorded in the archives forever.
B: Yeah, so you have to be very careful what you say.
S: A lot of people have said, "A friend of a friend of mine, or a friend of mine, was over in Hoboken last night, and we all turned on."
That's all public information. The Internet is an open postcard.
B: Right. I understand that completely. Even more than most.
In psychology there's been a debate between the old school - which is interested in studying dysfunctional people, and which focused on the disease/treatment model - and the newer humanistic and transpersonal movements, which focus on exceptional people, highly creative people, the more productive and spiritual individuals. In descriptions of your work with your research group, and in your writings, there seems always to be an assumption of the illness/treatment/therapy model. In other words, it's always couched in terms of therapy.
If you add recreational to the self-actualization, spiritual, creativity-enhancement and therapy, you get most of the major reasons people give for the use of psychedelics. Could you first comment on your use of the therapy model, and also could you talk about the possible need for a new paradigm or model that goes beyond or is different in some way than the models that have been used so far?
A: Let me answer with "the general music of it," as Sasha would
say.
One of the reasons that I have used the psychotherapy model is because - especially in the case of MDMA - I feel that this is one of the most valuable uses of these drugs. Now most psychedelics have a duration which is just simply too long for a therapist and a patient. I mean you don't want to have a ten- to twelve-hour therapy day. But a drug such as 2-CB is only five or six hours, and that could be very valuable.
It could have been very valuable for psychotherapy. I'm not just trying to make psychedelics appear to be in the mainstream of science or medical practice because they never were accepted by the average physician. But I did practice therapy, as a layman - I trained myself for a year, learned a great deal, and then I worked with someone else who was a very skilled hypnotherapist and we worked as a team. For two years.
The first thing I learned was that hypnotherapy is fully as effective a tool as any psychedelic. But you can use both the trance state, with MDMA in particular, to uncover buried memories, traumatic memories, or in some cases the deeper parts of the psyche which I call The Beast, or The Monster, or The Dark Side, or The Shadow. In fact, most of the work I did eventually was work with The Shadow. To me, that was the most exciting journey I have ever been on.
I don't think you would call it so much therapy as spiritual experience. Spiritual birth. The fact that it does become that makes it a very difficult thing for the average scientifically trained physician to accept, with some exceptions.
As far as recreational use is concerned, I think it is tremendously valuable. I think that the young people who go to raves all over the world tend usually to be people who are growing up in very big cities. Their usual way of surviving on the big city streets is to be paranoid, defensive, even over-cautious. They do not meet the stranger's eyes - we all know that one.
Now at a rave, they might take a low level of MDMA, or a very low level of LSD - which is what's happening now. They might take nothing at all. But the trance induced by the particular kind of music that is used at raves is also very effective.
What happens at a rave, it seems to me, is that they are able to drop that caution or paranoia. They are able to connect with strangers, feeling a remarkable degree of trust. And the entire community of people at the rave is experiencing the same thing.
They are experiencing the opening of the heart, if you want to put it that way, and a dropping of the defenses. I think that is tremendously valuable, especially for those people brought up in the big cities, which are collections of dark and dreadful energies right now most of the time. So I think all these uses are valuable, with the understanding that they must know what they are doing, and they must have information on the proper use of these things. They must be educated in one way or another - either by a pamphlet or by going to a course. I think the uneducated, uninformed use of these compounds is very dangerous, or is potentially very dangerous. And I think that if we get to the point where they are legalized or allowed, I believe that there has to be education along with that.
B: In my book I talk about raves a desire for a rite of passage. In other cultures we have this rite of passage when youth turns into adulthood, but in our culture we don't have it. In a way, this is the kind of a search that goes on. It's something like a rite of passage.
S: Possibly telling the older generation that you are your own person.
A: Which is also part of the rite of passage. "I'm no longer a small child. I'm an adult."
B: We've talked a little about 2-CB here, and you've mentioned in your lectures and some of your writings that 2-CB doesn't produce as much of what you call "elaboration" and mental noise as LSD does. That it is shorter acting, and for this reason you tend to find it more useful in therapy.
A: Put this in the past because since 1986 I have done nothing - this was all previous to the Analog Act.
B: Do you see this as based on your own experiences mainly, or is it anecdotal? I mean do you feel that LSD is not really useful for therapy, or that it is useful, but 2-CB tends to be more specifically useful?
A: Well, it's shorter. Again, LSD is not everybody's cup of tea.
Of course, neither is 2-CB. I can't help being influenced to some extent by my own experience of both, and to me LSD has the drawback of being very noisy and piling a lot of stuff onto you which is not that useful in therapy. You want to be able to focus on a problem, and be able to work through it before you go on to the next problem. LSD makes this really quite difficult. It's easier with 2-CB.
S: There are some people who do therapy differently than you. Rather than as an interaction and dropping of defenses and paranoia against others. On go the eyeshades, on go the earphones, and into isolation. You drop the barriers to yourself. And in that case, I know of LSD having been used quite successfully.
A: That's a different model and it's the one that the psychologist whom we refer to as Adam Fisher used. (Note: See the new book, The Secret Chief by Myron Stollorof)But I think most of the time he was not always or not necessarily tackling a problem as much as he was doing a spiritual journey - or allowing the patient to do a spiritual journey. His role was being a baby-sitter. Sitting by the side, and being ready to be supportive when needed. It's a different function.
S: But the preparation was to bring pictures of people you've had interactions with, your parents or your siblings, and then design for yourself what kinds of a question you would like to address. So there was that preparation. It was not strictly traveling and tripping, but also searching.
A: No, what he did was always searching. The trouble with the vocabulary - "tripping" is thought of as a recreational use without any particular point or any particular learning. It's just having fun.
Well, I don't think that you can ever rely on any psychedelic experience to give you just fun. I mean you are opening up your own psyche. You don't know what's going to come through. So you have to be prepared. As Sasha has always said, "There is no casual experiment."
And it is absolutely true. You must be prepared for finding yourself stepping into a place that can be quite overwhelming. Whether you took it in recreational surroundings or not.
I believe that almost all psychedelic technique ends up at least being spiritual searching. That's my own prejudice.
B: In my essay "Why We Get High" I use Peter's term "re-creational." Re-creational becomes to recreate oneself, and play becomes a way that therapy works in a sense. Because one can try new behaviors and new learnings.
Another point I was trying to make on that particular question is that drugs are kind of idiosyncratic for the individual. That everybody has their kind of favorite or, you know, ones that seem to work better for them. Their "allies" is term used by Castenada.
I mean some people would just swear by Ketamine. Other people can't stand it. It's the worst thing of all.
P: Some people like to empty their head. Others like to fill it.
S: Some people like to get into their body, and some people want to get very much out of their body.
P: The reactions of both of you to marijuana is a very good instance of how idiosyncratic it is.
A: Yeah, right. It's really strange that neither of us can tolerate it.
P: It's like Albert Hofmann saying that psilocybin is much heavier than LSD. For a lot of people it goes the other way.
A: Oh, no! I would agree with him.
P: Once I gave a talk in Berkeley, after going across the street to get some niacin and niacinamide. I told the audience that I wanted to warm them up internally, rather than starting with jokes, though I would probably do that too.
I got more than half the people there to take niacin, and asked them to raise their right hand when the prickling and reddening sensations reached the top of their heads, and their left hand when that got to their stomachs.
Some people started about two or three minutes later, and an hour and half later people were still doing it. I thought that was a very instructive example of variations.
A: Also, of the response of the psyche to a blank sheet of paper!
B: Sasha, you have talked about the possibility of the creation of a new vocabulary of awareness in your essay "Why I do what I do." Do you see a future in which we will be taking chemicals a lot more of the time, as a way of controlling our nervous system, or perhaps we might take them less of the time but learn more?
S: Well, the first thing that came to mind was the fact that with our pharmaceutical industry producing, and with our medical community choosing drugs over other kinds of more personal therapy, I see no question but what there will be more and more drugs controlling and modifying mental processes. You may call them anti-depressants, you may call them uptake-inhibitors, you may call them pro-this and anti-that. It's almost as if there is not the time - and money is probably equated to this - in the medical community to address problems. Directly by interaction.
You have 14 minutes to handle this patient - or is it 9 minutes?
And, of course, if you say, "Well, are you depressed?" . . . "Well, yes, actually, I am depressed."
"Well, I have these samples of a rather good anti-depressant. Let's give it a try and see how they work with you. And come back in a while. If they don't seem to be doing the job, we'll look for something else."
I think this is not a healing. It seems to me a move to placate, and perhaps put a Band-Aid on problems that are definitely of a psychological nature. I think there is a lot of medical practice that follows that line. And as such, yes, there will be more and more drugs that will be strictly for the purpose of affecting and changing the mental state.
So this is possibly not the direction you wanted the answer to go, but
I think that in answer to your question, yes, there is a move toward using the commercialization of materials that affect mood and attitude.
B: Talk a little bit more about this new vocabulary of awareness.
Maybe you could address that a little bit more.
I mean you were talking about how we are learning more and more about how particular compounds and substances could affect each mental state. How do you see down the future? Will it be pure research? Is it going to be a new modality of work with ourselves?
S: Well, research is certainly not going to be a blatantly obvious thing that deals with changing states of consciousness. The practice of medicine in our culture is almost totally going after the unwell and making them well, or going after the diseased and curing disease. But there are very few medicines that are allowed to go after the well and to make them better or to make them different. The only things that are legally used to change the state of consciousness from a normal state to an abnormal one are anesthetics that allow you to perform surgery.
There are no moves that go in the opposite direction that are medically acceptable. We have spent fifty years - seventy years - trying to find modifications of the structure of morphine or opium or any of the narcotics that would maintain the pain-relief but not give the pleasure. Finally, after seventy years, people have begun to realize these may be hand in hand, and to eliminate one eliminates the other. But the mood is, "Here is something that will control your illness, but will not in any way violate the principles of your favor."
B: To follow up on that, can you talk about the relative safety of psychedelic compounds as opposed, say, to other recreational drugs, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs?
Also, I was talking to a friend this morning and he was noting that a something very toxic like Amanita phalloides is not even scheduled, whereas other non-toxic fungi like Psilocybe Cubensis - psilocybin mushrooms, not even a drug but a plant - are treated like a
Schedule I substance.
S: No, in fact the plant itself is not scheduled.
Well, what is "relative safety?" The relative safety of alcohol?
The so-called "Therapeutic Index" has been misused - in fact, Lester Grinspoon got called on it.
The Therapeutic Index is how much drug does it take to have an effect, and how much drug does it take to do damage? How large is that ratio? In alcohol, it ranges around ten. For instance, this amount of alcohol - a blood-level of 0.06 or 0.08 - and you know you are intoxicated and kind of disinhibited and seeing things in perhaps a more relaxed way. Ten times that - a blood-alcohol of perhaps 0.6 or 0.8 - and you are in a coma or dead. So there you have a very tight ratio.
The goal of every pharmaceutical house is to try something where you at least get a factor of a thousand, and settle for a hundred. But with some of the more common drugs, the number is much smaller. Yet in this respect some of the psychedelic drugs have proven they have a remarkably good track record.
Because the ER admissions when they come in, they are usually in conjunction with some other sort of problem. The MDMA hysteria in
England - a lot of it is tied in with hypothermia and lack of fluids, or responding to hypothermia and drinking too many fluids. So is this a hazard of the drug?
A person gets into some drug and manages to drive on the sidewalk and kill five people. Are these five deaths due to that drug? Or is it due to that person's behavior? In one sense you have to determine not only the individual risk, but also the collective social and family and related risks. All have to be related to the hazard of a major drug.
And yet in many of the books, there is no question but that overuse is damaging. Overuse may be just modest if the use is normal. A lot of mileage has been made out of the fact that there are no recorded deaths on marijuana. But the truth is that marijuana may be a very forgiving drug.
If that were true, then that would be a safe drug in the definition of the Therapeutic Index.
I imagine a few doses of heroin taken simultaneously could very well arrest breathing and be lethal. The margin may be very small there.
All drugs are risky. All drugs have hazards. All drugs are, as far as I am concerned, lethal. And yet, all drugs are only used because they make some change in your body. That change may be to the good from someone's point of view. It may be bad from another person's point of view.
Is smoking opium and going to sleep a good or a bad result of smoking enough opium? It's a quiet, dreamy sleep-state.
B: There is certainly a difference between what's toxic to the body and what's good for the mind in terms of one's growth or self-actualization. There is a big difference in relative safety in terms of physical safety rather than what's good for a person mentally.
S: There are people who hold to the philosophy that any moving of the mind in any direction away from what is the prosaic faith of the Catholic Church, so to speak, is a negative response. So it's hard sometimes to separate that particular aspect of effect from a toxic response.
B: Peter, you got one?
S: He's just smiling -
P: Tell us something about your current project.
S: Oh, as I said at the meeting on Sunday, this is my decade of cactus. I'm just having a tremendous amount of curiosity digging into it - I have discovered, I guess it is well known to many but I was not fully appreciative of the intimate relationship between cactus alkaloids and opium alkaloids.
They're extremely similar in their general nature. And yet, they never quite exchange colors.
You will have this group in this position on a cactus alkaloid, but never in that position. You have that same group in that position in an opium alkaloid or in a related carydalis-type world of alkaloids, but never in this position. So I have this fantasy of taking the basic alkaloid structures that are common to opium or are common to cacti and `marry' them - putting the groups of one on the positions of the other. Coming up with compounds that are virtually unknown. And you may very well come up with a compound that has the virtues of both. That would be a very interesting type of action.
B: How about you, Ann? What are your current interests and projects?
A: First of all, my biggest interest is surviving the holiday season, and after that I'm already starting to tape - what I want to do on my own is to have maybe a four- or five-chapter book in which each chapter is devoted to one very extraordinary and interesting person. In particular, people who have all their lives experienced changes of consciousness or recollections of past lives, and how they have made it in the world, how they have succeeded and not drowned.
These are survivors. But people who are highly intelligent, very creative and whose psyches are already quite open. Some of them will have discovered their interior creativity and that kind of thing through use of psychedelics. Some of them were born with the ability to have those doors open. I would like to write in a great deal of detail about four or five such people.
That's my solo project, and then Sasha and I will do the cactus book together, I hope.
B: Maybe you could tell our readers a little bit about TIHKAL.
The first book was about phenethylamines, and now we've gone into tryptamines - and that includes LSD-like compounds.
S: Well, the first book covered my research and other people's research into the phenethylamines -- which are basically a not-so-widely-distributed group for psychoactivity in nature, but have been around much longer and explored much more, and have led to a lot of synthetic ventures into structural variations. So there are many, many psychoactive phenethylamines known. To a large measure, they are synthetic. They are man-made.
The tryptamines, as I have said, is the other half of the psychedelic coin. There are many more of these in nature than there are phenethylamines - psychoactive ones. The amount of research that has gone into exploring variations has been more limited. But still, there are quite a few synthetic variations that are unexpectedly potent, and some that are unexpectedly toxic. They lie in a continuum where you do not expect this deviation of behavior.
So in essence, they are a little bit more adventurous to explore.
Nature is not the goal. Nature is the source of ideas, and that is, of course, the beauty of having a garden on the one hand, and a lab on the other. Find a plant, know it's active, and explore that component that you isolate and identify. And then using that as a basis for "Well, what if?" -- and suddenly you have little indications as to what may be worthwhile to explore.
So, to me, continuing that exploration of what is known and what can come from what is known is exciting.
B: I know that both Owsley and Albert Hofmann tended to enjoy the plants. But you seem to have gone beyond what the plants yield -
S: If you stuck strictly in the plant world, you would never have had LSD.
I have periodically gotten into the argument between what is in the plant and what is in the laboratory. It is of some bemusement - the fact that people who adhere to the naturals being safer and more compatible with the spirit and psyche, and to be preferred -- and use DMT as an example, where you can get it from the Ayahuasca in South
America and in many other plants.
The fact is that Manske synthesized it in l935 or thereabouts. It was a pure synthetic chemical, unknown in nature for years. And then 20 years after it was first synthesized, it was found in plants. A 20-year window in there in which it was not a "natural" compound.
And tomorrow, LSD may be found in some morning glory.
B: There's a compound - you call it "huasca" I guess - that's grown in popularity within the psychedelic community. In your book, you
say some good things about it. Do you feel it is particularly useful?
S: I have a couple of comments on its usefulness. Firstly, every weird, interesting plant or combination of plants is of great value to some, and it's totally disliked by someone else. So the usefulness or the virtue of it is in the people who have found that as being a creative outlet or other helpful vehicle.
I think its primary use is that it may lay the groundwork for the eventual bringing of these drugs into use in this country with some form of a religious, sacrament background.
Every brew is different. There is no consistency. On the other hand, every culture that uses it has its own familiarity as a brew that's a part of their culture or their religion.
It's coming into this country from the Southwest, and it's being talked about and used, and it may or may not contain DMT. It may or may not contain an enzyme inhibitor, but the concept of mixing things together, and then either celebrating, or mixing things together and going into maybe a sacramental state is becoming quite popular in this country.
And if it is handled I think with care, and without conspicuous drug connotations, it could very well serve as a possible stepping stone for the use of plant extracts as a religious thing.
B: I have a young friend who went over to Amsterdam, and he had a huasca trip there. He came back and said, "That was the furthest-out experience I ever had! It was so great!" It was guided and ritualized, kind of in the way that you describe in your book.
I think it was because it was the first time he had had a ritualized experience. It could have been acid or almost anything else.
A: This is a very interesting point. The psyche - the unconscious
-- when given a safe structure in which to open up, will open-throttle.
The therapeutic environment can do that, and also the ritual environment. It gives permission for the psyche to be opened.
S: You have the analogue in the confessional booth in the
Catholic Church. You are in a position of safety, and you will not be chastised for what you are saying -
P: Ann, would you say something about preparations for therapy?
You talked about that at the Mind States conference.
A: Are you talking about the therapeutic stuff, or the legality and illegality?
P: Both.
A: Well, what I was describing at the Mind States conference was the way that such work has to be done now, when it is done. I can talk about this kind of a thing now because I haven't done the work for well over ten years. And most of the people still doing this sort of therapy are doing it underground.
The psychiatrists and psychologists who first discovered the use of MDMA in therapy have continued -- to the best of my knowledge. A great many of them have continued, as best they could, doing this kind of therapy because MDMA was felt to be, you know, "penicillin for the soul."
In the books I describe as well as I could the kinds of precautions that one has to take - anyone doing that kind of work would have to take. It would take rather a long time to go through.
P: Yes. But it is all written down.
A: It is all written there. Yes, absolutely.
This is where I feel angry and sorrowful at the fact that all the information that is being gathered by these therapists about the deeper parts of the human psyche is not being published, cannot be published.
It is simply being lost because of the laws as they stand now.
Let me give you my favorite four-second sound bite. The more I think about it, the more strongly I feel about it.
I really believe that in a country that calls itself a country of freedom, or a "free country," the government has no right to tell any adult citizen what he may eat, what he may drink, what he may smoke, or what he may ingest. What a free adult citizen chooses to do with his own body is his business, and it is not the Government's. I feel very, very strongly that we are moving - I hate to use the term "police state" because it is so overused. But we seem to be moving in a direction where the government is being given the right to interfere in everything that is vital. I believe this is wrong and very dangerous.
Sasha points out very well in TIHKAL in his "Cui Bono" chapter that controlling drug use is now a multi-billion dollar industry. I have another explanation of why the war against certain drugs has so much force in it. I think that the kind of people who are thrown into government - also into certain kinds of business, but into government very much so - tend to come from homes where there is a prejudice against understanding too much about one's own mind. Where dreams are not talked about. Where fantasy is discouraged. Where there is never any discussion of the deeper parts of oneself - the spiritual, emotional parts. This is considered, especially for men, to be very unmanly – to "psychologize," as these people put it.
Coming from such backgrounds, they are unconsciously very much afraid of the human unconscious. They are afraid of their own. They suspect, unconsciously again, that the essence of themselves very deep down is probably a really monstrous thing.
This fear of their own nature - essential nature - is projected out onto the population in general, so when they say that psychedelic drugs are evil and bad, that this is being said out of a very deeply buried fear. I think that this is what fuels the passing of laws against consciousness-changing drugs. It is this fear of the essence of the human soul.
B: In your book when you described the DEA searching your house and the way that they greeted the peyote, it was almost like it was going to contaminate them.
A: Yes, they instinctively jumped backwards. It was amazing. They were really scared of it.
P: It is quite astonishing that they didn't recognize it!
A: I know! I thought that was rather interesting too.
You would have thought they would have recognized it. Of course, they had been here before, and the pots were right out in the open. Sasha had a right to have peyote, with his license. Nobody recognized it. `Course they weren't expecting to find such things.
There was a chapter I did not put into TIHKAL which was called "A
Message to a Narc." I'm sort of sorry I didn't put it in, but it would have to be worded better. It was basically a message to the people who are in law enforcement who may find themselves in an LSD lab and are being taught that if the powder gets on their skin and contaminates them, that they will probably go psychotic and have to be put in hospital.
These agents really believe this. It was a short chapter saying - it was really rather impractical because they have hard and fast rules about such things. But it was an effort to say, "Look, don't go to a hospital if you have any choice in the matter. Don't go home. Go to the nearest church or synagogue."
If an agent really finds himself turning on, the message was,
"Don't be afraid of it. It's not going to hurt you. You will definitely not go psychotic. And if you become fascinated with what opens up under such circumstances, you can pursue that part of yourself by finding a good hypnotherapist and learning hypnotic trance. You don't have to take drugs to do this."
The message was, "Don't believe what your superiors have told you about it. They are telling you what they themselves believe, but it is not true. This drug will not do you harm, and neither will the experience if you happen to have it."
I didn't put that in.
B: Peter and I were talking in the car on the way up here, just kind of as a point of history - Sasha, do you think you were the first human to take MDMA?
S: No, I'm not the first man -
B: But you were early on, were you?
S: Yes. There were reports - at least one report - of it having been found on the street before I got involved with it. I discovered just recently that Merck was not the first inventor of it, but that it was synthesized in Germany at the end of last century.
They still didn't do it for any pharmaceutical reason. I had just never bothered going to the library and looking up the first synthesis.
1912 was the patent.
P: Salvia divinorum as I recall was investigated in the early
`60s, and thought either to be too weak or completely inactive.
S: I was one of the persons who did some of that early work. So was Albert Hofmann. We both came to the same conclusion. We both raised it in greenhouses, and ate as much as we could keep down, and got nothing.
And then the mythology comes around - "Oh, you don't eat it. You stick it behind the gums, or you dry it and smoke it, or you this, that and the other."
I had never heard of any of the Indians drying it and smoking it,
so I had no knowledge that this was the idea. So the discovery of its activity via those routes is really an uncelebrated contribution. It's humorous that at almost the same time we both raised it and looked at it, and could find nothing of interest in it, and abandoned it.
B: You have developed some new compounds that you mentioned both in PIHKAL and TIHKAL - of course prior to the Analogs Act - which you felt were interesting. You don't have to answer anything but "Yes" or
"No", but do you think there were any of them that you couldn't really talk about because of the current climate that exists right now?
S: Well, yes and no.
B: There's a drug called Euphoria - I can't remember the chemical name.
S: Yeah, 4-methyl-aminorex.
B: Could you talk a little about that?
S: I have never taken the material, but I have talked to people who are very enthusiastic about it. I have also talked to people who are promoting it and are therefore even more enthusiastic if not sincere about it. It has hit several of the Rainbow Gathering phenomena, and the lower part of the West Coast.
A very close relative of it - aminorex itself -- was used as a stimulant prescription drug. I think it was used in conjunction with bicycle racing, if I recall correctly. For its endurance contribution.
P: Have you had any experience with Herbal Ecstasy?
S: No, I have not. I understand it's largely ephedrine.
B: We'll delete that one from the interview. I don't want to promote that stuff, Peter.
P: Well, I thought we could maybe put it down!
S: I do know that Nicholas Saunders had quite an interaction with one of the big promoters of Herbal Ecstasy, in that he took a blind study of both it and similar-looking vitamin capsules in exchange for getting written reports of how it went, and distributed them at a rave in England. To see whether Herbal Ecstasy or the vitamin capsule as a placebo was or was not better, or effective at all. And he found that about half the people swore by it, and half the people thought it was no good at all. He told this to the guy promoting this down in L.A. - and he took the first half of that quote and said that people swore by it, and dropped the second half of the quote entirely!
B: Oh, they've done terrible things with me. I could tell you stories -Speaking of the Ecstasy scene in England, they have what they call "disco biscuits" that go around. There's an awful lot of misrepresentation of substances over there, isn't there?
S: Actually, it's hard to tell. Unlike Holland, where you have an official, government-accepted liaison between the street and the government - who will take the tab and say, "Yup," or "Whoops, these are too heavy. Go back. There is something wrong with the weighing."
What it is, and how much is there. This is considered promotional in this country of illegal behavior.
One of the things I always instructed my students, in when I was teaching toxicology is, "don't accept the question of 'What is it'?" Accept the question "Is it so and so?" Then you have a straightforward answer: yes or no. But "What is it?" may be a lifetime project.
P: Also, the intentionality is very important. I think when they first examined MDA it was in terms of weight reduction. And a lot of people found that it was too distracting!
A: Imagine taking that stuff for weight reduction!
B: You have talked about the joys of creative chemistry, finding these new synthesis routes, and so on.. What do you think about the possibilities and implications for nanotechnology?
S: Well, you already see it. If you go wandering into a research lab - go into Lawrence Berkeley Lab to see what is going on there. You used to start with 50 grams of material, work up, say, 32 grams of product, run a melting point, a microanalysis, this, that and the other thing. Now you start with 200 milligrams of something and you depend not on microanalysis - you would destroy your whole sample.
So you do things in which it can be recovered by microscopic analysis, or things that would take a miniscule amount of material.
Like TCMS [USE FULL NAME]. I can get a perfectly fine TMS on a few micrograms of material. So that sort of microscale chemistry is already part of the entire system.
P: Do you know of many chemists who have, say, looked at PIHKAL and carried out fairly extensive examinations themselves?
S: I periodically get very nice letters saying, "It started me in a new way of thinking." And, "This really served as encouragement to go back to school."
A: But the book has also been found in clandestine labs.
B: Okay. Island Foundation, whose magazine this will appear in, is attempting to develop a whole-systems approach to psychedelics and culture. Can you tell our readers whether you are familiar with our work at all, and what you think about Island Foundation's goals?
S: Oh, I have been more or less watching it with some pleasure from the very origins of it. As a matter of fact, I wrote you a first letter some 20 years ago - in which I challenged one of your statements I disagreed with -- and we've had a dialogue since. You had said, "It is the traces of LSD that cause the bad responses" - "traces of impurity" I should say. And you said in the next sentence that LSD is the most potent drug that is known. Traces cause this, and obviously they are more potent than the LSD.
From that humorous episode, we have developed a friendship and I have watched Island grow.
B: I've moved on to bigger things from those tiny, little impurities!
P: Psychedelic Island Views will be the size of Vogue very shortly! With perfumed pages!
S: Even better if it comes in vogue!
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