Bruce Eisner's Writings

Psychedelic Culture An Interview with Terence Mckenna

Psychedelic Culture
An Interview with Terence Mckenna

Bruce Eisner: When I was first talking about this issue, I wanted you to do something about psychedelics and culture. So the first question I have is, "How do you think psychedelics should be sensibly used in a culture or society?"

Terence McKenna: Well, it depends upon whether you're talking about a very small, racially coherent and homogeneous culture like a rain forest tribe, or a mega-culture like the contemporary United States. The ways in which psychedelics are to be used are obviously very different. In a small, aboriginal culture there's usually complete agreement on the basic myth that the culture is using to manage its image of itself in the world. In a complex culture -- a modern, high-tech industrial culture -- people tend to evolve themselves into tribal subsets that are little images of the original aboriginal cultural situation.

Basically, the psychedelics induce boundary-dissolving experiences. And if everyone in the culture values that experience, then the culture itself can build its values around about that dissolution, around the idea of journeys to and from a spirit world or something like that. In the high-tech industrial cultures, everyone is left to sort it out for themselves, and, of course, some people conclude that psychedelics let you talk to the space people, and other people conclude that the experience is neurological noise, and so forth and so on.

So in the case of our own culture, we're really still figuring out how to do psychedelics. A lot of people like to do low doses in complex social environments, like rave parties. Other people like to be one-on-one with a friend or someone they trust, or even by themselves, and do classic, in-the-wilderness-alone-type journeying. I think probably it's a matter of personality, what age you are, and what kind of values are being discussed or promoted around you.

B: Well, let's take a look at the future. Do you think that our culture eventually will integrate psychedelics in the same way that, say, one of these smaller tribal cultures -- ?

T: It may. Because of the creativity of people like Sasha Shulgin and the entire pharmacological community, there is going to be an endless number of new psychoactive and psychedelic drugs. Also, the more we learn about the botany of this planet, the more psychedelic substances we discover, and the more sources we find for the substances we already know.

The thing that seems to hold back the integration of psychedelics in our culture is the fact that we obtain these experiences through ingesting substances. The access to these states of mind is now at the edge of technology through virtual reality and the Internet and so forth -- people are trying to produce altered states of consciousness that don't require that you swallow a pill or drink a brew. This may mean that eventually we will have psychedelic experiences without drugs. This could be through virtual reality or through electromagnetic induction -- some kind of brain machine, something like that. In principle there is no reason why the experience has to come through a substance. But, in fact, at least to this stage of our development, that's been the most effective way that we have found.

B: Yeah. Just as a kind of aside, I remember talking with Leary and I suggested that perhaps the most powerful psychoactive of the future would be a little nano-machine that would go in and reprogram your brain the way that you wanted it to be reprogrammed. One of those little nano-machines that --

T: Nanosites. Well, there are all kinds of things -- for example, suppose that a drug company were to embrace the idea of recreational drugs and then put out two or three million dollars to produce a drug which did nothing more than let you remember your dreams. It wouldn't be marketed as a psychedelic. It wouldn't even be called a psychedelic, but in fact that might be the most psychedelic of all drugs. A lucid dreaming drug, or a remember-your-dreams-while-awake drug.

You see, over the past fifteen years or so the largest area where money is being spent in the high-tech democracies has gone from military research and development to the entertainment industry. I think that's a clear signal that psychedelic experiences by some means or another are going to be delivered to the public. Because the public is extremely hungry for this. This is why brain machines, which so far have not been that stunning without drugs, have nonetheless gotten a lot of venture capital interested in them. Because if you ever could make a brain machine that was as good as a drug, the world would beat a path to your door, and the culture would applaud you. You would not be run out on a rail. You would be hailed as an Edison or a Ford.

B: You don't think they would apply the Analogs Act to it?

T: That would be a cat fight that I would pay to sit in the front row to watch.

You know, in a way TV is an electronic drug. They have studied how it affects people. Your eyes glaze, your brain waves flatten, blood pools in your rear-end. It is the presentation of someone who has taken some kind of a drug. But the culture is totally accepting of TV because it is marketed as a home appliance, not a drug. This tells us something about the cultural biases and the strategies that might lead to an acceptance of these things.

B: You've made a major point of emphasizing the use of sacred plants over synthetic psychedelics. Do you think that synthetics have any place at all in the psychedelic medicine chest?

T: Oh yes, absolutely! My distinction between synthetics and naturally-occurring substances isn't an ontological one. In other words, I'm not saying that one side is good, the other bad. It's simply that usually with a naturally-occurring substance you have a history of human usage, and so, in a sense, you already have your human data which tells you that this substance doesn't cause birth defects, blindness, impotence, Parkinsonism, whatever. Because psychedelics are illegal we don't get that kind of information on new synthetics. Because no one is allowed to give them to human beings in a proper clinical situation. So new drugs -- they may be wonderful, they may be terrible -- but society is arranged in such a way that we just can't find out.

If all drugs were properly tested, and clinical trials were done and so forth, we might well discover that out of the examples set by nature we might make new and improved drugs. LSD is a perfect example of that. There are analogs of LSD active in the milligram range -- like chanoclavine and iso-ergine and these sorts of things. LSD is definitely a better drug and we can now see that LSD represents an engineering improvement on those things.

So I think there will be more and more of this. But we can't go forward with synthetic psychedelic chemistry until we get the social attitudes and the legal situation straightened out around these issues.

B: Yeah, I would like to talk about LSD next. I attended a book-signing of yours at the Capitola Book Cafe, and I was sitting in the back and listening to you, and you mentioned that you first tried LSD back in the early '70s. But that it never really triggered off a visual psychedelic experience for you. Do you think that might have had something to do with the dosage you took, or the quality or purity of the drug?

T: Well, I haven't revisited it in a while, but my impression -- I started taking LSD in the summer of '65. And it did all kinds of things, but I had in hand Havelock Ellis' "The Dance of Life," and Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, and it never did the specific things described there. You know, the jeweled ruins dripping with alien life and all of that.
I did discover that I could smoke a lot of hash on LSD, and it pushed it much more in the direction that I wanted to go. So I ended up always doing that, and even eating hash with acid.

I may have a sort of unique physiology. Even at 300 micrograms what happens for me in terms of visuals -- hallucination -- on LSD is simply little things that look like disturbances in the wallpaper. Little fan-like, scale-like scintillations. They look to me more like they're something in the visual cortex, rather than what I would call a true hallucination.
Finally when I got to psilocybin, it was like, "Ah, this does what I've been looking for!" The LSD was very psychoanalytic. It was hard on me physically. I spent a lot of time lying around the day after. And psilocybin seemed to deliver the hallucinations with very little wrack and ruin on the body. And, of course, DMT is even more dramatic in that direction.
So that was when I got the idea that what I was interested in was the tryptamines.

B: That was actually going to be my next question, because you do emphasize that you prefer tryptamines over phenethylamines and the indole alkaloids. I think you pretty much covered that question, and possible, you know, that drugs are so idiosyncratic might possibly have something to do with it. I know that, for instance, say a drug like Ketamine -- some people have these amazing out-of-body experiences. For me, for instance, Ketamine is more of a body high, and has very little visual component to it. It reminds me of a super-PCP or something, but doesn't really deliver.
And other people, you know, think it's the ultimate.

T: Well, a similar situation exists with 5-MEO-DMT, on which I barely hallucinate at all. I've talked to people who say it's the most profound experience they've ever had.

But, you know, what you have to bear in mind is this: drug receptors are as individual a thing as height, hair color, eye color, and so forth. And it is simply true that we are born with affinities for certain drugs, and a lack of affinity for others.

The Irish are supposed to be able to drink. I can't drink. If I have two beers, then I'm worthless.

So I think that part of what growing into drug awareness means is not taking every drug and every combination around, but actually learning what works for you. Another good example is the tropanes. I would say that maybe 19 out of 20 people -- including myself -- should have nothing to do with that stuff. But there do seem to be people who can handle it.

B: Tropaines are -- ?

T: Oh, Daturas and things like that. Well, I just wouldn't go near that . I've had them several times in my life, and each time it's been nearly disastrous.

B: Well, it's because it's more like a delirient than a psychedelic, and there's very little recovery of memory . . .

T: That's right, but Ketamine is also considered a delirient. The thing about Ketamine, though, that has to be said that it has a vast range of presentational possibilities based on dose. Some people who do it quite frequently do as little as 50 milliliters. That is obviously a very, very different experience than 200 milliliters.

I did it about five or six times, and I always did quite high doses, and while it was happening it was very interesting but I could bring almost nothing out of it. And to me that's a requirement of a drug -- that you be able to talk about it afterwards.

A lot of people don't make that demand. Maybe they're not verbal to start with. You know, somebody will tell you that they took acid and then they took PCP and then they did something else, and then you say, "Well, how was it?" And they say, "Really weird!"

That's not really enough information to make me want to go there. I think one should spend at least as much time describing any given drug experience as actually having it.

B: Yeah, and I would have to say that some people should probably never take them at all.

T: I think that's absolutely true. The way I look at it is that what these things do -- whether you're for it or against it, -- what they do is dissolve boundaries, and most of us have our boundaries too high, too well defended. But some people can barely keep their boundaries in place, and they are not candidates for psychedelics.

People who are seeing visions on the natch, or people who have very low self-esteem, or people who are given to paranoia. These people should take themselves out of the game. In the same way that I don't try out for the NBA since I know that I wouldn't be good at it. They should just leave this to other people.

B: Exactly!
I'll give you one more drug question, and then we'll go to something else here.
I've never tried ayahuasca. Can you explain what I would get out of an experience with ayahuasca that say I wouldn't get with another major psychedelic?

T: Well, each one of these things is different. Even though ayahuasca is DMT made orally active in the presence of a MAO-inhibitor, to me the amazing thing about ayahuasca -- one of the amazing things, and this is unique to it -- it's the only psychedelic I know where after a major trip the next day you actually have more energy than you had going into it.

It's almost like a violation of the laws of physics. How can it be that we stayed up all night singing and hallucinating and raving, and now it's 9 o'clock in the morning, and you feel great? And you actually never have to pay that energy debt?

That is very interesting to me. The other thing about ayahuasca, which may happen on other psychedelics but probably rarely, is that it seems to be the one that is most friendly towards synethesia. In other words, you can see the songs you sing on ayahuasca, and that's a pretty general phenomenon.

So that makes ayahuasca an excellent vehicle for studying synethesia, and trying to understand how it works. Those are the things that makes it unique.

And then, of course, the other thing that may be attractive or repellent to people is that it is the most physical of psychedelics. In other words, if you get sick on LSD, there was something wrong with the LSD. But if you get sick on ayahuasca, it's working just fine.

Some people of a certain persuasion to feel that it's very important to have that full body involvement. It's not a head trip -- ayahuasca. It's a full body trip.

B: Yeah, well let's now change gears a little bit here.
Now you have predicted what you call an eschaton -- or end of time -- in the year 2012. Can you give us a picture of what that would be like? In 20 words or less!?

T: Well, at this time it's a little like asking somebody staring east at 2 am to describe the coming dawn. We're looking in the right direction, true. But it's still a little early to say just what it will be.

I think there's a general feeling in society that stretches from the wackiest of quasi-suicidal UFO cults right up into very sober, rational aspects of the technical community -- a general feeling that human historical development, or technological development, is in some kind of asymptotic acceleration. Nano technology, psychedelic chemistry, the Internet, the cloning of mammals, and whatever the rest of the list is -- all of these things synergizing each other are producing very, very rapidly a world almost incomprehensible to most people.
And there is no reason to suppose that this process is going to slow down. It has apparently been accelerating for as long as you care to think about it.

And so at this point it's really moving fast. At any point there could be a breakthrough -- cold fusion, real extraterrestrial contact, a nano-technological assembler, a telepathic drug, a longevity drug that stops aging. It could come from any of so many directions that I'm sure we'll be surprised.

But what we can almost count on is enormous breakthroughs in unexpected directions. In fact this is already happening and changing reality all around us.

I don't really know you all that well, but I'm sure you're probably pretty internetted and connected. So am I.

Three years ago, very few people even knew what the Internet was. And most people today don't know what it is, or hear about it, but are busy with their lives. Well, this is only one of many, many factors. If you seek the edge -- if you insist on taking the latest drugs, possessing the latest technology and being informed of the latest nano-tech breakthroughs -- then you are really living in a very different world than the people around you.

People are becoming frozen in time. I meet people who say they don't want to be connected. Life is already too complicated. Well, that's their business -- but what they are essentially doing is saying "Send me to the showers. Get me out of the game. The game has become too complicated for me to play or understand."

I don't want to be in that position. I think it's very exciting what's happening. Human experience is moving toward some kind of culmination. All the things that we have dreamed of for the past thousand years -- a physical paradise, a world of healthy, balanced human beings, a world of free access to information -- all of these things are pretty much on target and being delivered.

But one has to notice that this is going on. Of course, the psychedelic community is very aware of this, because in a sense the business of the psychedelic community is to notice what's going on. But the business of a lot of communities is to deny what's going on.

For example the political community. It doesn't lead us boldly into the future. It tries to deny that there is anywhere to go, and we should simply worry about health care maintenance, balanced budgets, and what is going on with Arafat and Netanyahu.

B: Right. When you think of the left-wing politics these days -- I saw Jerry Brown recently at the Digital Be-In, and he was making a big point that because of the technology there is a gap between the haves and the have-nots that is growing wider because the haves have access to this technology and the have-nots don't. He's concerned about that, and wanting to give it to the other people as well, to make it available to everybody.
That was his main point, but he wasn't too well received because the group that he was in was, you know, all the cutting-edge, high-tech computer people.

T: Well, I would actually take issue with him. I've heard this argument before -- that the rise of the Internet has created the most elite culture in history. But if the curve of the development of the modern automobile had followed the same developmental curve as the computer, automobiles would today cost $100 apiece, would go 50,000 miles an hour, and a tank of gas would take you to the moon.
It is true that today the Internet is a technology of elites. But I think that well before 2012 -- by 2005 or so -- the computer that sits on my desk today will be a stud earring, and it could sell for about two-hundred bucks.

This is an enormous empowering of third world and non-high-tech people.

But let me make another point about left-wing politics. Part of the problem there is that left-wing politics is as afraid of the future as right-wing politics. What we are hearing from the left is resource management, ecological catastrophe, necessary slow-down in the development of technology, and so forth. But these are a) things that are not going to happen, and b) it's no vision for the future.

So I think that both the right and the left have, in a sense, been transcended. What the right offers is consumer capitalism. A complete sell-out to the idea that you are what you own, and that's all there is. What the left is offering is a kind of purist rejectionism that may let you sleep at night but doesn't form the basis of any coherent political program to lead us into the future.

B: Yes. And I think you've probably made it clear already but we'll go over it one more time -- that you've written about what you call the "archaic revival." I was going to ask you how does that fit in with technology and the idea of progress?

T: My notion of where this could all lead if everything was managed right is to a world that looks very much to the exterior observer the way the world must have looked 15,000 years ago.

In other words, a very low level of visible technology, people living tribally in many kinds of ecosystems and environments, but -- and the "but" is very important -- when you translate your point of view from the outside of the situation into the inside, and look at the world through the eyes of these future people, you discover menus hanging in space behind closed eyelids. In other words, the entire material culture could be interiorized. It isn't necessary to own large numbers of things, and build very large, complex physical cities.

What we need to do is to limit our population, and integrate ourselves into the natural ecosystem.

My political program for the future is pretty simple, and I don't know whether it would be called right-wing, left-wing or what. But I've noticed that if each human being would parent only one child, the population of the planet would drop 50% in thirty years. In the next thirty years, it would drop 50% again. And so on.

You do that for 100 years, and the major political debate that everybody's interested in is "Are there enough people in the world?"

I think that is what we must do. Every man, every woman should parent only one child; this is the greatest political act we can do for the human community and the planet.

You know the only place it's been tried is in China, which is not where it is most likely to succeed. We need to say to the women of the high-tech industrial democracies, "If you will parent one child, you will have increased leisure time, you will have greater earning power, more expendable income and you will be a genuine hero. Not a false hero, a genuine hero."

We have to give people the idea that this is a good thing. I have heard all kinds of objections.

And I'm very interested in talking to young people mostly about psychedelics. Most people my own age -- I'm 50 -- have either long ago embraced psychedelics or long ago decided it wasn't for them. But there are numbers of kids -- people between 18 and 25 -- who are coming up in an even more compromised and distorted situation than I grew up in, they need information about psychedelics.

I'm very excited, for instance, by things like Salvia divinorum. Because it's legal, and because it is not chemically similar to any presently scheduled compound, and because it has a history of religious usage, and because it can be grown easily in most parts of the world.

I think we need to endlessly promote and bring forth things like this. New sources of the psychedelic experience. New chemical families. New botanical species.
And to make it clear to the establishment that there is no way this can be legislated out of existence, or controlled, or propagandized to silence. We are here to stay.
The psychedelics represent the unbroken thread of gnosis, back to the original human world before history. And I will promote that message as long as there is breath in my body. Because I think people need to hear it.
You know, there are different things going on in the politics of drugs. A lot of people think that the medical marijuana thing is a great thing. Well, on one level it is a great thing. But on the other hand, I don't want to trade the cops and judges in for doctors and hospital administrators. I don't want anybody making these decisions for me.

And then there's another group of people who want the concept of "recreational drugs" to be accepted by society. Well, that's fine. But that implies that all drugs are is recreational. They are not. -- I am not willing to be granted legalization because the establishment finally decided what I was doing was trivial.

These things are not trivial. So talking about recreational drug use and legalizing drugs that can be confined in that category -- that's not good enough either.

We have to actually confront that these things are transformative.

B: I wrote an essay called "Why We Get High." I played on the word "recreational," though I used Peter Stafford's term "re-creational."

T: Much better!

B: And the idea that the ultimate purpose of psychedelics might be considered re-creational in the sense that we re-create ourselves. And that they allow us to play in the way that children play, in the sense that they free us up from the stultified adult -- "adult" being the past participle of the verb "to grow."

I had a biology professor who said that humans should be better called Homo ludens than Homo sapiens, because "Homo ludens" means "playful man," and humans play longer than any other species -- except maybe for dolphins -- because dolphins and humans learn from that play. So "re-creational" and "play" are part of it.

But the term "recreational" is pejorative in the sense that people think of it in the same way as -- you know, go to a bar on Saturday night.

T: Right. It trivializes it in the minds of most people.

But I agree with you. Adulthood seems to be a freezing of the reflex to play. And then one is forever caught where one was standing at age 25 when one suddenly became intellectually and esthetically constipated.

B: Right. And later a lot of the psychologists like Maslow and Jung said that the purpose of our whole life is to keep growing with self-actualization and self-realization. You know, the earlier stages of the Freudian is kind of a place where it all ends according to the conventional psychology. But in the new psychology, we constantly grow.

T: That's right. Human life that isn't growing is human life that is dying.

B: Exactly!
One last question here. Aldous Huxley wrote Island about a third of a century ago. I've been working on a project -- the Island Foundation -- which one of its purposes is to link what you could call "the usual suspects." Also, we plan eventually to attempt to create a model psychedelic culture, a meme somewhere in the southern hemisphere, where we can start playing with some of these ideas -- a place free from the political constraints that we have here in the good ol' USA and the northern hemisphere.

What do you think about Island Foundations -- some of our plans?

T: As long as we are only a dissonant minority inside the belly of the beast, we basically represent a critique of that beast, but nothing more. I think it would be a fantastic thing to attempt on an island or somewhere remote to actually experiment with the lessons of psychedelics, with the insights of psychedelics, and I also predict that this would be perceived as a new level of threat by the establishment. Because, in a sense, that's what happened in the Haight-Ashbury in the '60s. Not on an island, and that was part of the problem. But it certainly was perceived as a threat by ordinary establishment organizations.

But this has to be done. We have to move beyond oligarchy, capitalism, consumerism and mass media.

B: You know I was fairly close friends with Tim Leary, and he had a great deal of faith in these multi-national corporations. He felt that at a certain point there was a critical mass that had turned on and that the psychedelics would touch everywhere, and transform even the multi-nationals. But there's some skepticism on my part about all of that.

I think that there has to be some kind of alternative -- a new vision that replaces this idea of transactions as the basis of human interaction, which even the most regressive seem to cultivate.

T: Well, it's interesting that you mentioned this. I think that we are going through a transition analogous to a transition that happened early in the 17th century. At the beginning of the 30 Years War, Europe was ruled by Popes and kings. At the end of the 30 Years War, it was ruled by parliaments and peoples. And the Church was told by national governments: "We will now take over the reins of the money-making enterprise. You feed the poor and bury the dead and provide spiritual counsel."

Now the corporations are saying to those same national entities: "Now you feed the poor and bury the dead and keep the roads repaired and clear the swamps. Meanwhile, we will take over the money-making enterprise."

But there are certain things about the world corporate state, as I call it, that I think are to be at least temporarily preferred over the old way of doing business. The first is that war is an instrument of national policy. It is not an instrument of corporate policy. Corporations do not like war because by and large it is bad for business.

It's not bad for the corporations building weapons, but most corporations don't build weapons. What capitalism likes is well-fed, hard-working, well-paid populations that do a lot of television watching and mall strolling.

The other thing is that corporations do not like are unregulated markets. This will work in favor of drug legalization, if that's what we want. In other words, corporations do not have moral agendas. Illegal drugs were almost a necessary part of the tool box of the nation state because that's where it raised its black capital and did the back-channel business of funding its intelligence agencies and that sort of thing. But unregulated markets are anathema to the world corporate state, and so I think we will eventually see -- because of that -- the legalization of all drugs.

Nevertheless, at the center of the world corporate state is a very bad policy or way of doing business, and that is the idea of the sale of commodities. That somehow raw materials must be fashioned into objects of greater worth and then sold through a market economy. If this is allowed to continue uncritiqued, every forest will be cut, all metals will be extracted, all watersheds will be polluted.

So likely we are going to see a movement toward virtual products and virtual markets. In other words, if what a corporation sells you is clip art, very few rain forests are cut down to support that. If what they sell you are game environments -- again these are environmentally-friendly things. But if capitalism continues to insist on dealing true things, then it will cut its own throat and will be replaced by something else.

At this point, I can't quite see what the "something else" will be. I am encouraged by the fact that though American capitalism is basically slash-and-burn capitalism, companies like Fujitsu -- which, interestingly, has a big stake in virtual reality -- they have a 500 year plan for the company.

You know, American corporations don't plan beyond the next quarter. So if capitalism can tame its wilder tendency -- the slash-and-burn tendency -- then it may have a certain longevity as a social system. If it cannot tame that tendency, then it will consume itself along with everything else in the next 50 years.

B: I think that we have gotten near the end. Is there anything more that you want to say to our readers? Or do you want to put a cap on it here?

T: I would just say that I want to make it explicitly clear that I am very optimistic about the human future, about the role of psychedelic substances -- both plants and products of the laboratory -- in the human future. I think we stand at the brink of the great, great adventure.

I went out last night and looked at the comet. We've been having a lot of overcast here, so it was the first time I had seen it, and it was so clear to me, looking at that thing, that above the chatter of argument about 2012 and legalize this and that, and is Terence McKenna full of shit, and so forth and so on, all of these discussions, it is very clear to me that we have arrived at the final act of the human drama on this planet.

It isn't the end of the human drama, but we have outlived this embryo, this human cradle, and now it's time to be up and about the great business of becoming citizens of the galaxy and at home with our own heart.

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 . The photographer departed, Cliff joined us (Peter Stafford, the Shulgins and I) around the kitchen table as we ate sandwiches and talked for awhile. Then the tape machine was turned on

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!

Timothy Leary's Ultimate Trip -- Leary Interviewed by Bruce Eisner

Timothy Leary's Ultimate Trip
-- an Interview --
by Bruce Eisner
Thursday, June 08, 1995

Note: We humbly apologize for not crediting David Banton for his transcription of Ram Dass' “Brave World or Island?” published in the last Island Views. We thank David for the transcript that follows.

My car pulled up to the large ranch house on a cul-de-sac in the Beverly Hills neighborhood -- a house that I have visited scores of times in the past 12 years -- since Timothy Leary had moved there from Laurel Canyon in 1984. In the past year, Leary has put up a web site offering a tour of this house. As you walk in, you are struck by the amounts of striking art pieces hung on the walls -- gifts Tim has received from psychedelically-inspired artists grateful for his role in their work's evolution.

In the past year, Leary has put up a web site (http://www.leary.com) which uses the house's layout as a metaphor for navigating this web site’s features: the video room for How to Operate Your Brain, Tim's great multimedia essay on the global village future, for example.

In previous visits to Timothy's home, we often sat out on the patio, which has a majestic, panoramic view of Hollywood. On his web site, you can run a video which will give you a chance to share this experience.

In the livingroom, you see some of Leary's art collection -- or can visit the Art Room, a constantly-changing gallery of art by Timothy's friends, plus a life-spanning set of photos of Leary . . . covering stages of his life from childhood, to Harvard, to the 'Sixties, all the way up to current photos from the past couple for years. Also in the livingroom, you can chat on a variety of topics with people sharing the site. Or read the Global Village Voice, edited by Zach Leary, and get the latest on developments with Tim, including his current health status.

Tim's current health is what makes made this visit so much different than all the other visits. In late 1994, Tim announced that he had prostate cancer, a cancer that had spread throughout his body. Although we have been friends for twenty years, I never asked Tim for an interview before. I decided to interview him, to get some of his last thoughts on topics of special interest to me -- areas which our readers share, and not covered by the many mainstream media interviews that have been conducted since his announcement.

Zach Leary greeted me at the door. While we waited for Tim to wake up, we sat by a familiar yellow and green Mexican table and chatted for about a half an hour. Zach told me that it was a good time to interview Timothy, because there was nobody in the house except for us -- which he told me was rare.

I had been given an old but "broadcast quality" tape recorder by a friend in Santa Cruz who produces a local interview show -- with the hope she could air the interview. I asked Tim if it was OK to interview him. He agreed and I set up the recorder and tested it. It didn't work! Nothing I could do would make it work, and I soon found myself tangled in a mass of wires from the mike and power supply.

Determined to move forward, I set off into Hollywood and returned with an inexpensive Sony recorder with built-in microphone. However, when I returned, my notes and other equipment had been scattered about -- and a cryonics freezing tank had been set up where the table had been. There were a dozen new people in the house -- including Trudy Truelove, Tim's secretary, Deane, his aide and nurse, David Prince, coauthor on a new book, Timothy Leary's Ultimate Trip, Vicki Marshal, a novelist friend of Timothy's, and three people from the cryonics company. Zach wheeled Tim out to the displaced Mexican table. Without my notes, with cryonics people pounding on hammers and installing the cryonics tank, and with half a dozen people coming in and out of the vicinity talking, joking and sporadically checking in with Tim, I turned on the tape recorder:
Bruce: First of all, I wanted to express all the love that my friends in Santa Cruz sent with me. Everybody has a great amount of gratitude for all of the things you've said and done all these years. I just want to say that at the beginning.

Leary: And I'd like to say at the beginning that I think we all know that Santa Cruz is a very special, special city on this planet. There's a higher ratio of enlightened cybernetic and psychedelic people in that area per capita than any place in the world by far, so I consider myself an honorary member of the community. I'm with you!

B: In Exo-Psychology and several other books you wrote in the late '70s to early '80s you talked a great deal about your eight-circuit theory of the brain. More recently you've been talking about the effects of computers on the culture, and the media on the culture and so forth. How do you feel about your eight-circuit theory of the brain and how would it apply to 1996?

L: Well, number one, anytime you set up a classification system it has to be open to change. By definition, we have to revise it.

B: Yeah, you started with seven levels, and then you got to eight circuits.

L: Yeah, and I hope we get to 12! There's nothing sacred. Now, what is the eighth circuit?

B: The eighth is the neurological fusion with the . . .

L: Is it? My memory was that the fifth had to do with the sensual, right, and the sixth was --

B: Neuroelectric . . .

L: Yeah, that's cybernetic.

B: So we're moving from that . . .

L: And the seventh is genetics, where you're getting into genes, implanting, and changing there and see, it moved away from electricity and into the real situation which is genes . . . and after that we talked about all the systems of the Orientals, Asians, and Western, like the Harvard salons of William James, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Reich was very big there. So, it's been taken around the ultimate point of, sort of flash light illumination, and now we can do that, because we have the technological equipment and we can do that. I have a painting here in this house which was done with a flashlight, which is a first eighth-circuit expression, work of art. The guy's using a flashlight and going around pointing it around and taking pictures of where his flashlight lands, where his light lands.

B: In one of your most recent books, Chaos and Cyberculture, you characterize the last millennium as the Christian millennium.

L: Starting when?

B: Starting 1,000 years ago -- perhaps it might be more like 2,000 years ago when it started?

L: The idea of feudalism started somewhere about 500 BC. Basically they say that feudalism went until Gutenberg, the 15th Century, and that's where the feudal is: basically hand mediate, lift that bale, lift that pyramid stone, and all that. It moved into the mechanical, and then every kid could have a book, and every kid has the power to read and write, and it was the invention of that technology that made that possible. So the new era started with Gutenburg and the industrial, and it goes up to the 20th century when you got radio, television. Now it's digital and . . .

B: You called the next millennium the “millennium of the new paganism.”

L: Well, that's a bumpersticker.

B: A bumpersticker -- just a catch-all?

L: I have to preface this interaction with the statement that don't believe anything I say, I'm throwing ideas out there to look at. The last thing I want is someone taking notes while I lecture. I long for an interaction back and forth. That goes way back, basically to the psychology of Harry Stack Sullivan in the '50s and '60s, interpersonal. And that goes back to quantum physics where they say it's all a field and no electron can live by hirself, it has to have another electron to send and receive, so it's always being back and forth. We were applying this at Harvard, in the interpersonal stuff at Kaiser, the principles of quantum physics, field stuff, getting interactions from everybody, everybody's rating everybody else, that's how psychologists interpret things.

B: Before that everybody just looking at the individual . . .

L: You had the doctors who were looking, and the rest of us were listening. I'm exaggerating too, that's part of the profession.

B: Let's move 100 ahead, to 2096. How do you think that people are going to be living differently, how is all of this going to impact ordinary lives?

L: I think it’s futile to make such a long range prediction, so much is going to happen. It's the next 10 years that are going to be clearly important, I think.

B: Just the next ten?

L: What is developing right now, is it all goes back to McLuhan, I'm rolling out a big banner now which says “Viva McLuhan.” He predicted it all, he talked about the global village, meaning the kid in Kyoto would be on-line with the kids in Paris and Mississippi.

I want to tell you a little story. Last night, in my bedroom studio, for six hours we had a television screen showing, uh, beamed in from Tokyo. I was watching this studio of my friends in Tokyo, and our partner Chris [editors note: Christopher Gray, of the video production company Retinalogic, and Tim's webmaster] is there, he s waving and we fooled around for awhile and then we'd go away. It was going for six hours, and it's no big deal. Tokyo is on my screen live, and every now and then somebody'd come over and I'd take my flashlight and point it at him and make myself disappear, and then I would talk back and forth. Now that's the future.

B: CU-C-ME? Is that what it was?

L: Yeah. And you'll explain to your wise readers what that is.

B: I certainly will. [See Sidebar]

L: They even have a picture of how it looks. Now that's thrilling. I mean, it's one of the first times that a private citizen is allowed to have a 60 minute -- an hour -- open-line video phone.

B: Well, the World Wide Web is beginning to really open things up, empowering people to broadcast their own versions of what is, rather than having to rely on the networks and mainstream media.

L: Everything that we do -- we have a whole list of priorities and we're working in many media. We have eight basic media that we work through. ut the goal and the aim of everything is the Web. We have what's called leary.com" on the Web, and I'm pouring all my thoughts into the Web right now. All of my books, one by one, we're putting up there, and you can play the book.
The first screen of my book, say Flashbacks, comes on-line, and on the same page there's another copy of it, and I edit that. So if it's, "In the beginning was the word," I could say on the other side, "In the beginning was the bird," or "the turd." And that comes in color, so you can see in a glance how I've changed my original.
The performer out there can do the same thing. SHe can build up hir own library of living books and sHe can have hir diary there, and people can help edit and re-edit, so it's the concept of the living book.

B: On my Web site we have a Web-chat area when people can keep posting words and images . . . .
You've been called a Cheerleader for Change, and during your life you've espoused a number of different new ideas: the sacramental use of psychedelics, life extension and cryonics, space migration, computers, virtual reality, a whole variety of new ideas. Which one had the most passion for you?

L: You're trying to make invidious comparisons, They're all stages I go through. I love being a teenager, but then it's time to move on. I can always go back.

B: Currently you're working on a number of new projects -- the CD-ROM, and a film?

L: No, there's been a lot of talk about a film being made, and it’s been bantering around the top studios, and top crooks of Hollywood are talking about it. I expect there will be one made, but I have no lust. The ultimate masturbation in Hollywood -- who's gonna play me?
My answer to that is Grace Jones. Grace Jones is a Harvard professor in drag, and she dresses up like a guy, and she seduces all those graduate students to turn on and tune in the world. Me and Grace!

B: Tell me a little bit about the CD-ROM. That one's solid, right?

L: What do you mean by solid?

B: I mean it's gonna be Timothy Leary's house . . . or?

L: Yeah, we have that down. I've already got pages and pages of it.

B: I've seen that on the Web. Is that going to be a CD-ROM as well?

L: No, see, you click into my house, and you click around the house, you can click into my art room, my library room, you can click into my music room, my video room, my cyber room. In each of these rooms for the Web, there's a featured artist of the month, of the week. We save everything that goes on the Web, and it's stored on the CD-ROM. You continually replay, and store, the CD-ROM is a storage library that you can get stuff and access, and then use it for anything you want.

We're not selling the product like a CD-ROM game, although you can play it like a game, clicking around the house. You can click and see what kind of drugs I've done all day, or yesterday. What I had to eat, and who these great guys who come by are, like Mr. Rand here (referring to Leary's novelist friend who was sitting with us).

B: If you were to have your life to live all over again, is there anything you would do differently, or would you do it all the same?

L: How could I do it all the same? How could I?

B: I mean, knowing what you know now, if you had it all stored in memory and you could live your life again, what would you do differently?

L: I say I couldn't, because what I know now is what's happening right now and tomorrow, so I'm involved in that.

B: So it's all perfect?

L: I didn't say that. And, by the way, I did nothing -- I just surfed the wave. I didn't start the interest in drugs. If anything, it was hot in the '50s, it was the beatniks that beat that drum. Kerouc and Ginsburg, and Burroughs, the great father of us all. So, I didn't start this, it was there. I'm a very skillful communicator and I'm a very enthusiastic person. I like to be involved and engaged. It's been just perfect for me.
But I didn't lead, I didn't want followers. I was moving along with it. I've always, well, more and more I've hung out with people who are younger than me. The people I work with are always between the ages of 25 and 35, always! And they keep changing.
Just last week we had a reunion of five Harvard graduate students who worked with me then. I want to tell you that they are five of the most good-looking, sophisticated, intelligent psychologists. Not one of them became a faculty chairman. They learned to apply what they learned to, uh . . . Gunther Weil is the Dean of the East-West Foundation. It's a wonderful thing, but its not what a psychologist used to do, and right down the line they had something special, and they were good-looking men of dignity and fun. It was a really proud moment for all of us.

B: And Metzner was another one?

L: Metzner, oh yeah. Ralph was a very, very brilliant, brilliant British experimentalist, objective right down the line, and he's beautiful because he managed to maintain his integrity as an academician, and at the same time, taking LSD on the flat of his back in a maximum security prison with the most dangerous prisoners in Massachusetts. Now, that's a jump for a sedate Englishman. But he did it, with courage. And they all have a nice little twinkle in their eye, which I love.
They taught me. They knew about drugs before I did. Metzer and others would come and tell me about drugs, and I didn't like drugs, because in those days, in the '50s , the psychiatrists were drugging everybody with Valium and all that stuff, and the libertarian view then was, don't get involved in those doctors’ drugs, because they are going to tranquilize you into loving Eisenhower.

B: I remember I was on a panel with you once, actually I had put it together, and . . .

L: Where?

B: It was at Stanford, at the Bridge Conference. We ended up having about four or five doctors on the panel with you, and I think you expressed the sentiment that you would rather not see the psychedelics with the medical profession with all this experimentation, that you thought it was out in the world doing it, you know, with your lover or with . . .

L: That sounds pretty babbling, but, yes, I agree!

B: Maybe you could tell us a little about this cryonics process. As I'm sitting here, I'm watching them set all of this up, and uh . . .

L: As I approach my dying, which includes the possibility of self, uh, suicide, I've got all charts and diagrams and rating scales so when it gets to a point where when I'm immobile and can't talk, and all these ratings go below what I'd like, then my executors are commanded to help me hit a button so that I will be through the transition. This is classic stuff, it's been others uh . . .

B: Do you have any last things you'd like to say to our readers? This is going into our first magazine issue of Island Views, and you know that Island is an organization that's looking to create a new culture based on new ideas. We're trying to take new ideas from Huxley and bring them into the 21st century, the idea of transforming our culture through all the new ideas . . .

L: Well, number one, Aldous Huxley was one of the most magical people I ever
met in my life. He came to Harvard while we were there, and he coached us
and guided us, and he was way ahead. He'd written a classic book, Doors of
Perception. Heaven and Hell was about, actually, suicide, remember, and
the book Island . . .

B: Well, Island was about transitions.

L: Yeah, anyway it turns out that after all these years, Laura Huxley
lives almost in the same canyon, she's my closest neighbor, and she comes
down often. She was there when Aldous passed on, and she was the one who
handed Aldous the pills that he used -- or it was actually Dr. Sidney Cohen
who did it -- and it gives me a great, great honor that she is now kind of
guiding me, and I'm just the luckiest guy.
The point there is we always had a team, there was always a group of us working together. In this house, there is a team of us. Everybody who works now at this house with
me, last night I even burst out into tears thinking about it, Bruce. Their lives are going to be changed forever, when you think about it, going through this experience, and that's not something you do lightly, you know.
It's a new social organization in a way, with total honesty and openness, and it's thrilling, and I'm glad that you're a part of it, and I would invite you to communicate to and fro with our friends in Santa Cruz area, the Holy Cross, the Cross of Light.

OK, stay in tune!

Postscript: My role as interviewer ended. I spent the rest of the day with Timothy. I sat at his bedside as he bantered with an official from the cryonics group that was contracted to freeze his brain after his death -- along with a doctor and a nurse. Their relationship was strained and at one point, Timothy remarked to the official: "If I have to wake up in 50 years with you standing over me with a clipboard, I don't want to wake up!"
In early May, he issued the following announcement:
“Due to recent events and personal decisions, Dr. Leary has decided to terminate all relationships and contracts with Cyrocare, Inc. and all other cryonic organizations. Dr. Leary is now energetically exploring all other options regarding his ‘designer’ dying and all other post-mortum details including conventional plans such as cremation and burial. Because of the recent media attention regarding his planned suicide on the World Wide Web, Dr. Leary also wants to make it very clear that no date has been set for any suicide whatsoever. Dr. Leary's updates regarding his medical condition and dying can be obtained on a regular basis at http://leary.com.”

Interview with an Alchemist: Bear Owsley Interview

Interview with an Alchemist:
Bear: Owsley, LSD Chemist Extraordinaire
In Conversation with Bruce Eisner

Owsley Stanley or “Bear” is a legendary figure with his roots going back to the 1960’s psychedelic movement. Timothy Leary, in his ‘Sixties anthology of essays, Politics of Ecstasy predicted, “The television folk heroes of today are the merry outlaws of the past. The Television Robinhoods of the future, the folk heroes of the twenty-first century, will be the psychedelic drug promoters, A.O.S. 3, acid king, LSD millionaire, test-tube Pancho Villa, is the best-known of a band of dedicated starry-eyed crusaders who outwitted the wicked, gun-totting federals and bravely turned on the land of the young and the free to the electronic harmony of the future.” A.O.S.3. was Leary’s acronymic code for the name that Bear was given at birth -- Augustus Owsley Stanley III.

No, the television program or movie hasn’t been made yet. But in Leary’s unique literary style, he was introducing us to the greatest LSD chemists who ever lived. Yet Oswley’s fame extends even further, because besides being the most venerable and celebrated of LSD chemists, Bear was also the soundman for the Grateful Dead during their early years and one of the key characters in Tom Wolfe’s best-selling Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test – which chronicles Bear’s history with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. There is also a lengthy description of his story in Storming Heaven --- Jay Stevens popular history of the psychedelic movement.

In 1997, I received an email from “out of the blue” by the one and only – “Bear” Owsley. He had read a 1977 article I had written called “LSD Purity: Cleanliness is Next to Godheadlines” (the High Times editor’s title, not mine) which I had first published in January 1977 and republished in the library section of Island Web (http:///www.island.org) - the website of my non-profit educational organization Island Foundation.

Bear had read the article and had a few historical bones to pick with it. After a rapid exchange of email, Bear and I realized we were, in a certain sense, kindred spirits.. I asked Owsley if he would do an interview with me for Psychedelic Island Views a publication of Island Foundation with a very limited circulation of about 4,000. Bear accepted.

The actual interview was conducted by telephone. Bear now lives with his third wife on a homesteaded piece of land off the energy grid somewhere in Queensland, Australia. The interview carried on for over four and one-half hours and has been carefully edited and re-edited. The first portion of the interview was published in two installments in Psychedelic Island Views, with the last one appearing over a year ago. This is the first publication of the approved Owsley edit of the interview that was conducted on May 17, 1998.

Bruce Eisner:

Before we get into all of the psychedelic stuff, let’s do a little cybernetics. How do you see computing in the future as going, and what do you think the implications for it all is on the human race?

Owsley Stanley:

Well, the biggest impact computers are having is the rapid expansion of the Internet, mass communication. Computers themselves are just tools like anything else. They are pretty good tools and they’re getting better all the time. The interface is still clumsy, because they kind of grew out of typewriters. They still have those clumsy ways of operating. But they don’t seem to increase productivity very much. Almost every company that’s gotten into computers has actually increased the number of personnel it has for the same amount of work. It makes a different kind of work, and it involves a different kind of employee.

B: Let’s maybe look even further in long term. How do you see the Internet as radically different from all of the communication technologies that it’s displaced, and what kind of implications does that have for the alternative culture?

O: Well, I don’t know. That last part sounds almost like a separate question.

The interesting thing about the Internet is the protocol. The TCP/IP protocol packetizes the information and sends it off through the system without basically having one specific pipeline between the originating and terminating computer, so that it can flow through a network of interconnected computers freely. It seeks the quickest or most direct path. But because of this structure it’s impossible to interfere with it. So all the governments that are jumping up and down and passing laws are sort of like the King going down to the beach and commanding the sun to rise, or commanding the tides to go out! They are trying to interfere inappropriately with processes they really have no real way of interfering with. The protocols are in a state of flux or change, the new Asynchronous Transfer Mode worries me simply because it provides a continuous -stream type connection.

The concept of having a continuous flow like ATM is promoted by people who want streaming video and real-time cheap telephone communications over the net [and which] will provide a continuous stream which can, of course, easily be tapped into, modified, blocked, or whatever. It’s the packet style of information exchange that’s so difficult to deal with, and I think that attempts by the government to “censor” it will always fail. But if they abandon the protocol that makes the Internet what it is, then of course they’ll fall subject to censorship, and I think the freedom from censorship is the most important aspect of the Internet. For this reason I don’t feel attracted to ATM.

One of the things the net produces is a situation where you can no longer control what people have to say. The Internet is not a broadcast medium; it’s not a medium similar to anything else; it’s more like a complicated sort of telephone system. You call somebody up, and then you can access whatever he or she has in their computer. But nobody can actually force their content on you. If you get junk mail, there’s plenty of filters that’ll throw it out, you don’t even have to see it. Nobody can really broadcast, although they’re trying to fix that, its called “push technology,” and is another thing I think is an aberration. It’s not in the spirit of things. The point there is that people anywhere in the world can access anyone else’s opinion they wish, and read the postings freely, is a forum that will absolutely spell the end of tyranny.

B: So you’d rather have pull than push?

O: Absolutely. You just need convenient ways to search for and find the things you want, which is where search engines are very important. The ways in which the Internet is organized and catalogued are very important. These things are not that well developed so far. The net breaks down borders; it breaks down censorship; it breaks down propaganda. It allows you to freely exchange information with people everywhere. And once people start getting together and comparing notes, well . . . ever read Machiavelli? You’ve got to control the sources of information, you’ve got to control the sources of pleasure, you’ve got to control all those things in order to rule with absolute authority. Of course they’re always trying to do this.

B: Let’s talk a little about your views about government in general. You just sent me over the Internet what you call “The Modest Proposal.” Why don’t you talk a little bit about your modest proposal. Just summarize it. We were talking last time about tribal culture, and you were talking in that essay about professional politicians, and I’d like you to maybe talk about both those ideas.

O: Well, people evolved over millions of years from a very poorly defined animal— because archeological traces of people are not all that easily discovered—, and no one’s really quite sure what the proto-human mammal was like, or what precursor it evolved from. These are the so-called “missing link” things that anthropologists have so much trouble with. But I think we’ve been pretty much like we are today for a very, very long time. A lot longer than most people realize. And our social structures were basically tribal during most of this developmental period. It is the social interaction between people that is the thing which makes us unique. Our social structures, and our methods of learning virtually everything that we use in our behavior, is learned from adults while we are children. That’s all very important, and this is one of the things I’m discussing in the little diatribe against children’s TV. It’s all interrelated, we know we’ve got something wrong, things are not working right.

B: You talk about the professional politician. Could you talk a little bit about that first, and then talk about children’s TV.

O: OK. Well, in a tribal setting, people generally gather together to discuss and make decisions, and often there will be a person who is chosen as spokesman. Usually these people are highly dominant. And the development from this highly dominant individual as a spokesperson into the kings and princes was kind of a lineal thing, it just happened, that’s the way it went.

We now have a society that’s hierarchical. Most of the power is taken away from the people, and it’s put in the hands of the few individuals. These individuals form a government. We have over the centuries slowly tried to modify and develop a form of government that was more responsive to the people. Unfortunately, it’s always been diverted, it’s always been taken over by those who love the power; you know, it’s an elitist group. One time this elite group was called princes and dukes and kings. Now the elite group is basically the people with lots of money. The people who are elected into politics are elected according to a set of rules. In the United States this set of rules is called a constitution. There are some countries that don’t have written constitutions. They have a body of law that is considered as a whole, combined with traditions over generations, that actually functions as their constitution. But the rules that are described in the constitution are to define the way in which elections are run, the kind of people who can run for them, and so forth and so on. Unfortunately, most of the documents are too simple. They don’t really produce a description that will provide a real representative government, a government that really represents the people who go down and cast their votes. It represents other—monied—people’s interests.

B: And in the US it is probably worse than most of the other so-called democracies.

O: You see it everywhere. In order to get elected, you have to have a lot of money, because media costs are very high. In order to get this money, unless you’re independently wealthy, you’ve have it given to you by someone. And these “donors” never give things without strings attached. So conditions are always placed on the donations in various ways. Sometimes these conditions are quite explicit, and sometimes they’re implied, but they’re always there.

The individual who seeks government usually is in a system that allows people to be reelected and often, in fact, gives them generous retirement benefits at the end of a certain number of years of service. This induces people to become professionals, professional politicians. Their true profession, however, is getting elected, and then retain the office, so their most important skills are solely to be elected and to remain in office. Their skills involve manipulating public opinion, of looking nice and talking well, seeming intelligent, seeming responsive, seeming competent. None of this is necessarily true. In fact, that’s why you see the biggest absurdity of them all, movie actors becoming leaders of countries. It’s just absurd! Because a good actor with a good script can present himself as anything. A professional politician does not need to be a lawmaker. He’s used as one, but that’s not his profession. A politician need not know how to write a good law, how to run a country, how to generate foreign policy, how to generate an economic policy. He doesn’t have to have any of these skills; he can hire advisors. Actually, the advisors attach themselves to him like parasites, like fleas to a dog. He doesn’t actually have need of any skills at all that are of any other use except to become elected and reelected. Judging from the current crop, perhaps other skills are just an impediment to a successful career.

I think what we need is people who are part of the community, who are citizens who have other jobs and other interests, who go and serve in the same spirit a person would serve on a jury, not as a profession that’s going to lead to a fat retirement, but rather as a service to the community and to his fellow citizens.

B: Talk about your ideas about children’s TV and how that’s part of this system that you’re talking about.

O: Children’s TV is mostly used as baby-sitting to entertain the children. Its nature is passive. The children sit and watch it; they don’t really learn anything from it. All they do is waste time. They’re distracted, entertained, when a child, a human being, doesn’t have the time to spend just being entertained. Anything that’s entertaining also must be instructive. Children’s games for generations were instructive kind of things; they developed various skills in both communication and physical aptitude, and were one of the ways of teaching the qualities that a person needs to interact and communicate with others and form a tight community. Humans are cooperative animals. What’s distinctive about us is that we work together in groups. It has made us very effective hunters, it makes us effective builders and so forth, and all of the things we learn as a child are the skills which make us human. If you waste time during these critical years, where every small short period of time is a window of learning for a particular skill, you miss out on something important. If you don’t learn that particular skill and that window closes, then later you can’t go back and sort of “rewrite the disk,” to use a computer simile. It’s more like burning data into a CD. If all the data doesn’t go down right, you’ve got a Frisbee.

B: Yeah! That’s a good one!

O: I’m afraid we’ve got a lot of Frisbee Kids. And we’re going to have a lot of Frisbee Adults when they mature, and this will cause a general breakdown in the social structure, which you see increasing all the time. Some of the teenage behavior is completely baffling, like all the vandalism and civil disbehavior.

B: Have you ever had a chance to read Aldous Huxley’s Island?

O: Many years ago I did.

B: You know that Island Foundation is based on the idea of creating a psychedelic culture, and it looks at society as a whole system, and a lot of the things that you’re addressing were addressed in Island. Childhood education, tribal ways of relating with one another, more open, trusting societies, and so forth.

O: It was a blueprint for one form of Utopia.

B: What do you think about the idea of Island Foundation? How do you relate to it as an idea?

O: I don’t know, I really haven’t given it that much thought. I will say one thing: social structures, since they’re founded in early childhood learning which locks in, burns in, like a CD, doesn’t allow societies to change very fast or radically. They change slowly, they evolve. The evolution sometimes is so glacially slow that you’ll find ritual behavior in many groups of people that goes back 10,000 years even. No one really knows why certain things are done, but everybody feels uncomfortable unless they do them. So trying to create a society out of nothing is hard.

B: Do you want to talk about where you’re living these days?

O: Well, I live out in the country. I’m basically a country boy; I don’t like cities much. I like nature. I don’t like to rely upon the civil infrastructures; we generate our own electricity and so forth. It keeps me busy trying to maintain things, but I don’t have to worry about the power surges that blow out your TV and your computer and telephones. And believe me, it happens a lot, they have a very primitive power system here. I don’t know why it’s primitive, but no one here seems to know what to do about it. In fact, I don’t even want to think about it, so I just ignore it, I stay away from it.

B: Getting back to the idea of people picking up these old imprints and being stuck with them. I was listening to a tape that Tim Leary did back in 1981 or ‘82 at Esalen, called “The Power of Imprinting.” This was back when he was on his twenty-four circuit model, before he got into virtual reality and computers and so forth.

O: Well, not really, he never really got into the computer movement. He was always on the periphery of it, but he was always at least a couple of years behind the curve.

B: Oh, I know.

O: You do know that?

B: I know very very well, because I was very close with him.

O: Why didn’t you tell him that, because I tried to . . .

B: Oh, I tried to push it. I was the only one who ever actually surfed him around the net, this was four months before he died. He had a Mac set-up with an ISDN, and I sat down and surfed him around, and then he ordered everybody in the house to go up and get his web site up to speed!

O: I’ll tell you a little story here, about Tim. I went down to see him one time in LA, I’d tried for years to just get him to open up to me an