Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ethan Natalman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
Speaker 1: show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
Speaker 1: of view is expressed here do not represent those of
Speaker 1: I Heart Media, Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, heed,
Speaker 1: as an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may
Speaker 1: not even represent my own. And nothing contained in this
Speaker 1: show should be used as medical advice or encouragement to
Speaker 1: use any type of drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. So today's
Speaker 1: guest is a fellow name Mike J. Based in the
Speaker 1: United Kingdom. I think he may be the most outstanding
Speaker 1: of all the drug historians living today. And I say
Speaker 1: that because there's a lot of competition for that title.
Speaker 1: But Mike has been somebody who's both delved narrowly into
Speaker 1: specific bits of history as well as written kind of
Speaker 1: almost sort of global like histories about drugs. Google Hamm
Speaker 1: or look him up on Amazon and you'll see his
Speaker 1: books on drugs include High Society and Emperors of Dreams.
Speaker 1: But he's also written you a dozen or more other
Speaker 1: books about madness with all sorts of neat and weird titles.
Speaker 1: I mean, he's been a historian for decades. He's he's
Speaker 1: he's written about science and medicine and madness, literature, radical politics,
Speaker 1: but drugs, psychoactor, drugs have played a really big role
Speaker 1: in the stuff that he's been writing. So, Mike, we
Speaker 1: only just start off by by welcoming you and and
Speaker 1: thank you so much for joining me on Psychoactive. Oh,
Speaker 1: great pleasure to be here. I'm talking to Mike here
Speaker 1: about his latest book, which is Mescalin. It's the history
Speaker 1: of the drug mescal in. I mean, you've written about
Speaker 1: the history of drugs going way back. What prompted you
Speaker 1: to focus on mescalin as something write about, right? I
Speaker 1: guess I started writing about the history of drugs at
Speaker 1: a point when not many people were doing that, and
Speaker 1: it's become, as you say, a kind of thing that
Speaker 1: I do um among other things. And the history of
Speaker 1: drugs is not a lot of what things that we
Speaker 1: recognize today as psychedelics don't play a huge role in
Speaker 1: broader histories, largely because a lot of them weren't synthesized
Speaker 1: or discovered until then. UM and mescalin seemed to me
Speaker 1: be a really appealing way of getting at this because
Speaker 1: unlike L S D, for example, which kind of appeared
Speaker 1: in a laboratory as we know in the nineties, having
Speaker 1: had no previous life, mescaline had had many, many different
Speaker 1: lives before it was the psychedelic, back before the fifties
Speaker 1: for decades. That have been why we used in science
Speaker 1: and in medicine and in psychiatry all the way back
Speaker 1: to the nineteenth century, and then before that, of course,
Speaker 1: it a very very long history through the mescaline containing
Speaker 1: cacti and indigenous history going back thousands of years. So
Speaker 1: it was a chance to look at something that is
Speaker 1: kind of a foundational psychedelic and then to see how
Speaker 1: it played out in different times and places, how it
Speaker 1: was used before you know, all this kind of very
Speaker 1: capacious concept of psychedelic got wrapped around it. And the
Speaker 1: other thing that was really appealing to me about mescaline
Speaker 1: was that it's a history that you can kind of
Speaker 1: divide equally between Western and non Western understandings. It was
Speaker 1: a chance to tease those two apart and see the
Speaker 1: roles that mescaline containing plants have played in indigenous cultures,
Speaker 1: and then kind of in parallel to unfold the story
Speaker 1: of the Western discovery of mescaline the chemical compound. I
Speaker 1: pitched that to my editor and he said, why isn't
Speaker 1: there a book about mescaline. You know, there's dozens of
Speaker 1: histories of LSD and m D, m A and stuff,
Speaker 1: so why isn't there a history of masculine? And I said, oh, man,
Speaker 1: that would be such a job to pull together because
Speaker 1: most of the literature is not translated. Huge trunk chunks
Speaker 1: of it are in French or in German, or in
Speaker 1: Spanish or in Polish or Romanian. You know, you'd have
Speaker 1: to be right across all these different disciplines and the
Speaker 1: history of science. And he just taking, like good editions do.
Speaker 1: I was pushy to do something that's more than you
Speaker 1: wanted to do and sign up for in the first place.
Speaker 1: So I guess that was the aha moment which I went, Okay,
Speaker 1: we need approper history of mascaline. Part of what you
Speaker 1: do early on in the book is that you take
Speaker 1: mescaline back to its origins, and that origins doesn't just
Speaker 1: go back to you know, Native Americans in a Native
Speaker 1: American church and Peyote in the southwest of the us
Speaker 1: a hundred years ago or so. It goes back much more,
Speaker 1: much deeper than that. So why don't you start off,
Speaker 1: by my test, tell us all bit about that more
Speaker 1: ancient history of escaline. Yeah. I think for um, most
Speaker 1: people who know a bit about psychedelics, the assumption is
Speaker 1: that this is where the story starts in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: with all this Huxley and with Mescaline and LSD. That
Speaker 1: was one of the things that I noticed early on
Speaker 1: trying to tell the story of mescaline is that is
Speaker 1: pretty much the end of the story of mescaline. I mean,
Speaker 1: even when Huxley was writing Doors of Perception, it was
Speaker 1: kind of being replaced by LSD and disappearing. So actually,
Speaker 1: the story, the story of psychedelics, of course goes forward
Speaker 1: from that moment, but the story of mescaline goes all
Speaker 1: the way back. You know, it goes back in Western culture,
Speaker 1: you know, to the nineteenth century, and I think that's
Speaker 1: a fascinating period that's not really looked at. And then
Speaker 1: before that we have this long period of indigenous history.
Speaker 1: And what really opened that up for me was many
Speaker 1: years ago, I guess about fifteen years ago, going to Peru,
Speaker 1: and visiting this ancient temple site called Chavine, which is
Speaker 1: up in the high Andes, very mysterious site. Not much
Speaker 1: was known about it until recently, probably kind of a
Speaker 1: thousand BC. Was one of the first sort of bit
Speaker 1: of a temple there was built. And it's got a
Speaker 1: freeze with drawings around it of these figures half human,
Speaker 1: half animal with kind of fangs and claws, some of
Speaker 1: them like they're transforming from humans into animals. And the
Speaker 1: main one right in the middle is holding this cactus
Speaker 1: which is very obviously the San Pedro cactus of mescaline
Speaker 1: containing cactus and in fact still around Chevine there. San
Speaker 1: Pedro cactus grows everywhere you're up on the high Altiplano there.
Speaker 1: It's quite wind swept, so lots of people plant hedges
Speaker 1: of san Pedro around their houses. It's that commonplace. And
Speaker 1: actually just interrupt you nex thing because that we talked
Speaker 1: a bit about this and the Michael Polin episode. But
Speaker 1: when we think about mescaline, the two principal cactus one
Speaker 1: is payote um you know, I guess from the similar
Speaker 1: parts of our northern Mexico in the southwest of the US,
Speaker 1: and the other one is san Pedro, which grows much
Speaker 1: more extensively and doesn't quite have the famous ring of peyote,
Speaker 1: but it's also a major and actually much more abundant
Speaker 1: source of mescaline in its natural form right, it's enormously abundant.
Speaker 1: I remember driving around the Andes and just you know,
Speaker 1: through those valleys and you're saying, um, mile after mile
Speaker 1: after mile, there's almost nothing but san pedro cactus. It's
Speaker 1: not quite as potent, doesn't as a mascaline source as
Speaker 1: pyote is. Percentages are difficult, but pyotes often about three
Speaker 1: percent um mascaline and san pedro more like one percent.
Speaker 1: It's traditionally um brewed up and student re boiled and
Speaker 1: reduced and taken as a as a drink. And there
Speaker 1: is a tradition of its use by Corndero's traditional healers,
Speaker 1: which evolved on the north coast of Peru and was
Speaker 1: not really much known about until the seventies when it
Speaker 1: started to be studied. And now I think san pedro
Speaker 1: to use it's it's indigenous, it's catch you a name.
Speaker 1: Wachuma is very very widely used around the world in
Speaker 1: kind of shamanic neo shamanic healing. Psychedelic contexts m So basically,
Speaker 1: I mean one of the encounters writers. You have this
Speaker 1: use going back thousands of years in parts of South America,
Speaker 1: and then the Spanish conquistadors and invaders come, and as
Speaker 1: with coca, there's quite a tangle as I understand, between
Speaker 1: them and the indigenous users of this. I mean, the
Speaker 1: main thing, of course, that we get, as you know,
Speaker 1: looking back into this history is that's the point where
Speaker 1: we get written records. So a lot of the Spanish
Speaker 1: who arrived in Mexico in the sixteenth century due to it,
Speaker 1: and also physicians and Spanish people of learning and military
Speaker 1: people of different stripes give us little bits of about
Speaker 1: peyote that give us some sense of how it's used.
Speaker 1: And they're astonished, obviously to discover this culture, which is
Speaker 1: in some ways in terms of herbal medicine, it's much
Speaker 1: more advanced than Europe. It's got all kinds of valuable
Speaker 1: medicines in it, but it's also got these mushrooms and
Speaker 1: these cacti and all sorts of other plants and seeds
Speaker 1: that produce hallucinations or visionary experiences. And yeah, we start
Speaker 1: to get get an account of that and what's going on.
Speaker 1: Of course, it's very heavily inflected through the religious wars
Speaker 1: and the witch craze which are going on in Europe
Speaker 1: at the time. So if people are taking a cactus
Speaker 1: and getting possessed and going into trances and seeing the
Speaker 1: future and channeling spirits and not Christian, this is obviously
Speaker 1: the work of the devil. So from the seventeenth century onwards,
Speaker 1: the Mexican Inquisition prohibited payote and it became excluded, but
Speaker 1: nevertheless you can see people carried on using it, and
Speaker 1: also the Mestizo populations, the generations who emerged after conquest
Speaker 1: also started started using it for healing and divination and
Speaker 1: sorcery and all kinds of other uses. So it became
Speaker 1: a problem drug, I guess, in the way that we
Speaker 1: would think of it in the in the modern era,
Speaker 1: and also at the same time a marker of the
Speaker 1: difference between indigenous people and civilized Western people. Indigenous people
Speaker 1: used payote and civilized Western people didn't. The same way
Speaker 1: in which the Spanish reacted to this stuff hundreds of
Speaker 1: years ago really resembles the way the other elements of
Speaker 1: the Western world, including in the US, respond to this stuff.
Speaker 1: In the in the late nineteenth and twentieth century when
Speaker 1: it becomes calm in among you know, for certain different
Speaker 1: tribes in the southwest of the US. At one point
Speaker 1: you say that the Spanish talking back in the fires,
Speaker 1: the Spanish observed psychedelics through the lens of alcohol, while
Speaker 1: the Indians treated alcohol like a psychedelic mm hmmm. I
Speaker 1: think both cultures had very different attitudes to intoxication, and
Speaker 1: each one imposes, you know, their cultural form of intoxication
Speaker 1: on this. So the Spanish, i think, looked at indigenous
Speaker 1: Mexicans on peyote or mushrooms and went, or they're drunk.
Speaker 1: This is an intoxication. So they didn't really see the
Speaker 1: ceremonies in which they were used as sacred or spiritual.
Speaker 1: They just saw them as kind of drunken orgies. And
Speaker 1: in the same way, the Indians, when they encountered alcohol,
Speaker 1: used it in a way that looked to the Spanish
Speaker 1: as if they were kind of just all congenital alcoholics
Speaker 1: are unable to refrain from drinking. But they kind of
Speaker 1: pursued alcohol in the same way that they would pursue
Speaker 1: these kind of more intense plant psychedelics. So Spanish habits like,
Speaker 1: for example, having a little casual drink of alcohol of
Speaker 1: wine on your own, or you know, something like that.
Speaker 1: You know, Indians would never have done. But if they
Speaker 1: had some alcohol and they decided to take it together,
Speaker 1: everybody would take it together, and everybody would drink at
Speaker 1: all until it was drunk, and people would have, you know,
Speaker 1: the most powerful visionary experience they could have. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean in a way that their distinction between the sort
Speaker 1: of communal use and experience of mescal land among indigenous
Speaker 1: folks and on the other hand, are very individualistic use
Speaker 1: of it among more contemporary Western folks, you know, is
Speaker 1: a major theme throughout you're writing. Now. Presumably the use
Speaker 1: of mescaline continues, you know, notwithspanning the Spanish efforts to
Speaker 1: suppress it in a part of Latin America extending up
Speaker 1: through Mexico. But I guess it really enters into the
Speaker 1: US around the late nineteenth early twentieth century. And I'll
Speaker 1: have to say there were two figures I did not
Speaker 1: know about before um who really stand out in this
Speaker 1: history of a hundred twenty years ago in the US.
Speaker 1: One is a white guy named James Mooney, and the
Speaker 1: other is a Native American, a Comanche leader named I
Speaker 1: think Quit, And maybe you could just use those two
Speaker 1: folks to tell us a little of the story about
Speaker 1: how peyote in the church really get going in the
Speaker 1: United States. Yeah, it's fascinating because payote is known back
Speaker 1: into the tribes back in the sevente century as a medicine,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't really get used as a sacrament, and
Speaker 1: the payote religion doesn't really develop until the period of
Speaker 1: forced captivity after the Indian Wars, when the Indians are
Speaker 1: confined on reservations. Every tribe has got a different story
Speaker 1: of how it starts. But the first thing you hear
Speaker 1: from white sources is that there's is groups of Indians
Speaker 1: getting together on reservations at night in the tp so
Speaker 1: nobody can see what they're doing, and having these private,
Speaker 1: little ceremonies. And the first white man to attend one
Speaker 1: of these ceremonies was a fellow you mentioned, James Mooney,
Speaker 1: who was an ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution who spent
Speaker 1: that period of his life traveling around Oklahoma and learning
Speaker 1: everything he could about the tribes. He learned a lot
Speaker 1: of their languages, He was fascinated by their traditions which
Speaker 1: were of course at that point, all disappearing before his eyes,
Speaker 1: because you know, the Federal Indian Bureau was about, you know,
Speaker 1: assimilating the tribes into normal American life and breaking these
Speaker 1: traditions down. So Mooney was really kind of running as
Speaker 1: fast as he could to catch all these centuries of
Speaker 1: tradition before they disappeared. And this is at the moment
Speaker 1: when the Ghost Dance appears, a new Indian ceremony that
Speaker 1: it's um prophesied by a prophet who comes up with
Speaker 1: new dances and new songs and new costumes and begins
Speaker 1: this movement, this kind of millenarian movement, which is about
Speaker 1: kind of dancing the white man out of their out
Speaker 1: of the territory. And this is the late the late
Speaker 1: eighteenth century. Basically, Yeah, this is sort of eighteen ninety,
Speaker 1: and we remember it from the terrible massacre at Wounded
Speaker 1: Knee that ended it. So James Mooney wrote the Smithsonian
Speaker 1: Institution's Report on the Ghost Dance that's still one of
Speaker 1: the great classics of American anthropology. And the course of
Speaker 1: this he became kind of a trusted interlocutor and was
Speaker 1: introduced in Oklahoma by a group of Kiowa people to
Speaker 1: a Payote ceremony and the wilderness up in the Washington Mountains,
Speaker 1: which he attended, and after that became kind of a
Speaker 1: very powerful advocate for Payote because he thought this was
Speaker 1: really the solution to the problem of preserving indigenous Native
Speaker 1: American culture and religion, because unlike the Ghost Dance, which
Speaker 1: had been, you know, a real confrontation with white society
Speaker 1: that the Indians were bound to lose, the Payote ceremony
Speaker 1: was a way of keeping the old medicine alive inside
Speaker 1: this sort of structure of white supremacy. You know, the
Speaker 1: people were in the reservations, but when they got together
Speaker 1: and had their Payote meetings, the spirit of the culture
Speaker 1: and the religious tradition could still be kept alive. So
Speaker 1: Money became passionate about trying to find out where this
Speaker 1: had come from and how it had developed, and all
Speaker 1: his leads pointed him back to the Comanche people who
Speaker 1: were at that time in a reservation in the Washington
Speaker 1: Mountains with Kuana Parker as their leader. Kuana had been
Speaker 1: a rebel one of the last Comanche bands to be
Speaker 1: brought into forced cap activity, and he became a very
Speaker 1: powerful leader in this period speaking for his people keeping
Speaker 1: all their kind of land and property that they've been
Speaker 1: allocated together and fighting their cultural battles. And he was
Speaker 1: also a very powerful advocate for payote because he'd seen
Speaker 1: the ghost dance, I had seen how it was going
Speaker 1: to end. He was at a point where he was
Speaker 1: just starting to get his people living reasonably comfortably and
Speaker 1: making a bit of money and surviving. So he was
Speaker 1: also very keen to develop the peyote religion as a
Speaker 1: way of preserving and sustaining and nurturing Indian culture in
Speaker 1: this new age they were living in. Mooney eventually went
Speaker 1: down to the Comanche Reservation and had a Payote meeting
Speaker 1: with Quana Parker in eighteen ninety three. It's very well documented.
Speaker 1: Mooney took photos and after the meeting, Mooney said to Kuana,
Speaker 1: I would like some payote to back to Washington, d c.
Speaker 1: To do kind of scientific tests on and so forth.
Speaker 1: And Kuana sold him a big bill up sack of
Speaker 1: dried peyote buttons, which Mooney took back to Washington, and
Speaker 1: they were the peyote buttons that were used by the
Speaker 1: Federal Department of Agriculture in their first chemical essays that
Speaker 1: the medical department of the university used them in the
Speaker 1: first human trials of psychedelics. They were given to America's
Speaker 1: leading neurologist to that passed someone to his friend, William James,
Speaker 1: and he had a terrible time of it. So William
Speaker 1: James found the drug that took him where he wanted
Speaker 1: to go. In fact, it turned out to be nitrous oxide,
Speaker 1: which he writes about in the Varieties of Religious Experience.
Speaker 1: And you know, so this is really the beginning of
Speaker 1: what we now call psychedelic science. And it came out
Speaker 1: of this transaction in the middle of Oklahoma between the
Speaker 1: white man who knew most about Indian culture at that
Speaker 1: point and the Indian who had really of negotiated what
Speaker 1: what culture best than anyone else. So I think it's
Speaker 1: a great moment. It's kind of a handover transmission between worlds.
Speaker 1: It's the point where payote moves from centuries of indigenous
Speaker 1: tradition to the gays of Western medicine and science. You know,
Speaker 1: there were a couple of points you made about this
Speaker 1: transitory period. One is that peyote in some extent plays
Speaker 1: a role. It really among one of the first Pan
Speaker 1: Indian movements in North America, right, that a lot of
Speaker 1: it has been much more individual tribes in the past,
Speaker 1: and where the federal government had played one against the other,
Speaker 1: and where there has always been a tradition of conflict
Speaker 1: between any of the both conflict and alliance, but between
Speaker 1: any of the troops. And here you have a Pan
Speaker 1: Indian movement. So it's not just one group the Commandes
Speaker 1: or others. It's multiple groups. And the second thing that
Speaker 1: I learned was that actually, when the Native American Church
Speaker 1: actually gets formalized and created by Kanda and such, it's
Speaker 1: actually the first time that you see the transition to
Speaker 1: the phrase Native American from India. Right. I think you
Speaker 1: make the point that you know, there have been white
Speaker 1: Americans who call themselves Native American nineteenth century because they
Speaker 1: wanted to distinguish themselves from other white immigrants who had
Speaker 1: arrived the United States at a later point in the
Speaker 1: late nineteenth century. But the ownership of the term Native
Speaker 1: American by Indians really happens with the creation of this church,
Speaker 1: and so that Pan Indian element of it. Just say
Speaker 1: a little more about that. Yeah, that was something that
Speaker 1: had started with the Ghost Dance with all the tribes
Speaker 1: getting together in this mass act of resistance against white settlement.
Speaker 1: And it was one of the things that the Ghost
Speaker 1: Dance collapsed that people like Kwana Parker and James Mooney
Speaker 1: were very keen to preserve and deepen was his connections
Speaker 1: between tribes, and that's still very much part of the ethos.
Speaker 1: When you have a pyote meeting these days, you should, oh,
Speaker 1: it's it's good to have a bunch of people from
Speaker 1: different tribes involved. That's an important part of it. And
Speaker 1: the concept of Native American this is something that I
Speaker 1: you know, I'd never read about or seen this before.
Speaker 1: It was something that it was actually the president of
Speaker 1: the Native American Church of Oklahoma, Charlie Haig, who's the Cheyenne,
Speaker 1: kind of walked me around to the place where the
Speaker 1: you know, the Native American Church charter was put together
Speaker 1: and was telling me about the people who were involved,
Speaker 1: and he said, you know, I think that's the first
Speaker 1: time that Native American was ever used, and I've never
Speaker 1: found any earlier use. And I think it's unlikely that
Speaker 1: you would because Native Americans didn't become American citizens until
Speaker 1: five and the church was founded in nineteen eighteen, so
Speaker 1: at that point, you know, they weren't officially American citizens,
Speaker 1: and as you said, the idea of a Native American
Speaker 1: had been appropriated by you know, pretty much the Trumpists
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century. So it's very powerful phrase, the
Speaker 1: Native American Church, and it's making a lot of big claims.
Speaker 1: It's also kind of staking a big claim on the
Speaker 1: future of Native Americans as Americans. And it's also you know,
Speaker 1: the assumption from a lot of the federal governments, a
Speaker 1: lot of the missionaries that this this was some kind
Speaker 1: of drunken Hagen ceremony that was had to be stamped
Speaker 1: out before the Indians would accept Christianity. What Quanna and
Speaker 1: James Mooney both said was no, No, it's the other
Speaker 1: way around this um. This religion is actually an Indian
Speaker 1: expression of Christianity. It's not opposing Christianity. It's Christianity with
Speaker 1: a distinctive Indian form and with its own sacraments. You know,
Speaker 1: you to put this into broader context. Was a bit
Speaker 1: remarkable about all this is that you're seeing the spread
Speaker 1: and growth and even to some extent legitimation of this
Speaker 1: Peyote use um and the emergen in the American Church
Speaker 1: in the context of the progressive era movement in the
Speaker 1: United States, which is, you know, advancing all of these
Speaker 1: positive reforms around child labor, working conditions in food, and edicine,
Speaker 1: all this sort of stuff, but at the same time
Speaker 1: as pushing for the prohibition of psychoactive substances. I means
Speaker 1: the this the progressive woman was pushes for the banning
Speaker 1: of alcohol in the eighteenth Amendment. It's the progressive movement actually,
Speaker 1: you know a li'm the banning of opium imports and
Speaker 1: then the banning of heroin and coca and cocaine. So
Speaker 1: there's a broad sort of prohibitionist movement directed or virtually
Speaker 1: all psychoactive substances. And here's peyote and the Native American
Speaker 1: use getting caught up in this stuff. But somehow they're
Speaker 1: able to maneuver and survive through this part of it,
Speaker 1: I guess must have been the fact that that that
Speaker 1: you know, you had Kana and Mooney being very clever
Speaker 1: about presenting this not as a threat or challenge to Christianity,
Speaker 1: but as somehow advancing the goals of the missionaries and
Speaker 1: those who hoped for Indians to be better human beings
Speaker 1: than they imagine they could be. Yeah, that's right. I
Speaker 1: mean it's a challenge generally for us. Now we think
Speaker 1: about the Progressive era. Of course, as you say, it's
Speaker 1: the era of drug and alcohol prohibition. But I think
Speaker 1: one of the things, yes, it was the Progressive era
Speaker 1: was also about uniting progressives and conservatives if you look
Speaker 1: at things like alcohol prohibition. That was really what made
Speaker 1: it so powerful, was it. It was a coalition that
Speaker 1: include you know, doctors and the women's movement and all
Speaker 1: these traditionally progressive forces alongside you know, the church and
Speaker 1: all the the conservative ones. And inasmuch as the Progressive
Speaker 1: era was about citizen activism and solidarity, of course in
Speaker 1: the South it encouraged states rights. And it was also
Speaker 1: the era of Jim Crow and Lynch ngs and so on.
Speaker 1: So it's got this kind of double side to it.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I think um Mooney and Quana both independently
Speaker 1: figured out how to sell payot if you were to
Speaker 1: a sort of predominantly hostile white culture, and that was
Speaker 1: to make two claims for it. Firstly, it's a medicine.
Speaker 1: This is a very valuable medicine. It's useful for all
Speaker 1: kinds of things that should really be part of the
Speaker 1: Western farmer kapea. Western doctors and scientists should be taking
Speaker 1: a look at this, you know, hitting that message very hard,
Speaker 1: and at the same time, you know, this is a
Speaker 1: genuine spiritual experience. It's very valuable for the tribes. The
Speaker 1: members of the Native American church are often the backbones
Speaker 1: of their community, and these are the you know, these
Speaker 1: are the people holding the society together. And it's interesting
Speaker 1: to me to see the way they make those claims,
Speaker 1: because there's a in a way, very much claims that
Speaker 1: the psychedelic community make today. For psychedelics. You know that
Speaker 1: it's a very valuable medicine and it produces genuine spiritual experiences.
Speaker 1: And I think that's that's not necessarily because those are, like, objectively,
Speaker 1: the two main properties of psychedelics. I think it's because
Speaker 1: those are the two sets of values, the two propositions
Speaker 1: that fall on the most fertile ground when you're trying
Speaker 1: to sort of present the psychedelic experience to any culture
Speaker 1: that doesn't understand it. We'll be talking more after we
Speaker 1: hear in this that I have to say. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, my beloved New York Times, if you look
Speaker 1: at its sordid history, of covering the drug issue. You know,
Speaker 1: one of the more infamous headlines was Cocaine crazy negroes,
Speaker 1: you know, killing people in the South. But another one
Speaker 1: you pointed out was the headline of there's three peyote
Speaker 1: used as drug and Indians cult of death above an
Speaker 1: article arguing that it's worship originated in the Aztec cult
Speaker 1: of human sacrifice. So even in twenty three, when you're
Speaker 1: beginning to have a scientific thing, you still have the
Speaker 1: quote unquote elite press, you know, doing the worst form
Speaker 1: of sort of crappy journalism about this stuff. So obviously
Speaker 1: most Americans are remaining deeply uninformed throughout this time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true in you know, progressive opinion as well. You know,
Speaker 1: there are big kind of spiritual movements of the time,
Speaker 1: sort of new thought, a lot of people reacting within
Speaker 1: this progressive era context against mass culture and mass industry
Speaker 1: and mass consumerism. There's a lot of people seeking out
Speaker 1: other forms of life and sort of seeking to expand
Speaker 1: consciousness in different ways. But even those people, when you
Speaker 1: look at them, they kind of they're all opposed to alcohol,
Speaker 1: of course, because they see that as something that's produced
Speaker 1: by big business. You know, bruins and distillers praying on
Speaker 1: the vulnerable, advertising their product, addicting people, and kind of
Speaker 1: that's the way that drugs are seen as well. Drugs
Speaker 1: are seen in you know, by those progressive figures as
Speaker 1: something that is kind of deadening and dehumanizing and a
Speaker 1: terrible kind of destructive effect on consciousness in modern society. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: there's also this fascining story about the head of the
Speaker 1: Mormon Church, you know, becoming all bit and freily to
Speaker 1: pay What was there about? I love that. That's fantastic.
Speaker 1: I mean, here's the here's the grandson of of the founder,
Speaker 1: Fred Smith. He was and his was a breakaway group,
Speaker 1: but he was at that point, like a lot of
Speaker 1: people in the progressive era, saying, um, you know, we
Speaker 1: need real ecstatic spiritual experience. That's what's being ground out
Speaker 1: of people in our kind of the mass culture that
Speaker 1: we're living in today. And he was obviously in Utah.
Speaker 1: The Mormons did a lot of outreach to the Native
Speaker 1: American tribes, and fred Smith got very interested in their
Speaker 1: religious practices, and he attended payote meetings and he studied
Speaker 1: the history of kind of ecstatic spiritual experience, doing a
Speaker 1: psychology doctorate, and he's reading his William James and he
Speaker 1: gets very interested all Williams James and stuff about second Wind.
Speaker 1: How it turns out that little kinds of ways and
Speaker 1: all kinds of cultures people can reach what seemed to
Speaker 1: be the limits of their physical endurance, but then suddenly
Speaker 1: discover more energy, and there's a whole untapped sources of
Speaker 1: mental and probably spiritual energy as well, that if we
Speaker 1: could figure out how to get to, we could be superhuman.
Speaker 1: That's what he reads m the Yet his Payote experiences
Speaker 1: through the idea that if we can stay up all
Speaker 1: night have this really intense experience altogether, than we push
Speaker 1: ourselves onto a kind of higher mental plane and we
Speaker 1: have access to parts of our minds that we normally
Speaker 1: can't reach. And he wrote quite explicitly, he said, this
Speaker 1: is what we need. This is what we're not giving
Speaker 1: our worshippers. You know, it's all very well to kind
Speaker 1: of all wandering to church and sing hymns together, but
Speaker 1: you know, we need to be offering people the possibility
Speaker 1: of real spiritual transcendence and advocating peyote is the way
Speaker 1: to go, a proposition that didn't get very far, but
Speaker 1: he wrote a book about it and a kind of
Speaker 1: doctor world thesis, and it's fascinating to see the way
Speaker 1: that uh he sees that something like Mormonism could incorporate
Speaker 1: a psychedelic ritually into the center of it. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it reminded me so much of this story of Bill
Speaker 1: w Right, one of the founders of books Anonymous, who
Speaker 1: I think it was LSD, starts having LSD trips, you know,
Speaker 1: and and begins to advocate that LSD use could basically help,
Speaker 1: you know, lead to the kind of spiritual deep insight
Speaker 1: that's necessary for people to put their alcohol addiction behind them.
Speaker 1: I mean, there was a remarkable parallelsm I think, between
Speaker 1: your story of Frederick Madison Smith and and Buill w
Speaker 1: But look, let's let's switch over a little bit here,
Speaker 1: which is that you know, many of our listeners will
Speaker 1: be familiar with the organization MAPS, you know, founded by
Speaker 1: Rick Doublin in the eighties in terms of his advocacy
Speaker 1: around psychedelics research and m D m A. And some
Speaker 1: will be familiar with the Heft Research Institute, which has
Speaker 1: been also around for almost thirty years and probably the
Speaker 1: leading organization of of researchers and scientists trying to do
Speaker 1: psychedelics research. But Hefter plays an important role in your story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he does. After James Mooney brings the Payote back to
Speaker 1: Washington and people start taking it and writing up the experiences,
Speaker 1: often know very beautifully and very wonderful detail, and medical journals.
Speaker 1: Of course, chemists get very excited to try and figure
Speaker 1: out what it is, what's the active ingredient, what's the
Speaker 1: thing in the payote cactus that is doing this specifically
Speaker 1: producing the visions, which is a bit that Western scientists
Speaker 1: get so fascinated by from the very beginning, And it
Speaker 1: turns out to be a difficult question to answer because
Speaker 1: Payote contains lots of resins and dozens of different alkaloids.
Speaker 1: And there's kind of a race which is won by
Speaker 1: Arthur Hefter, who's a not very well known chemist in Leipzig,
Speaker 1: who wins this race by self experiment. He gets his
Speaker 1: Payote buttons, he extracts some resin, He takes the resin.
Speaker 1: He doesn't feel anything except but a bit of nausea. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's not the resin. Then he starts looking through the
Speaker 1: different alkaloids and then finds the one that produces the visions,
Speaker 1: which he calls mescaline. Mescal is one of the words,
Speaker 1: one of the names for peyote at that point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So from that point there is still the cactus, but
Speaker 1: there is also this alkaline salt that's sort of pure drug, mescaline,
Speaker 1: which then twenty years later in Vienna is synthesized for
Speaker 1: the first time in the laboratory, not extracted from the cactus,
Speaker 1: but synthesized from, you know, some starting from something you
Speaker 1: get out of eucalyptus oil, you know, through organic chemistry,
Speaker 1: you get this kind of chemical mescaline sulfate, which is
Speaker 1: white crystalline powder. And as soon as you have that much,
Speaker 1: the next year, um Mark Pharmaceuticals, the German pharmaceutical companies,
Speaker 1: start making it available as a research chemical, and from
Speaker 1: that point on you really have two different histories, because Sir,
Speaker 1: before that, everybody knew that mescaline was this thing that
Speaker 1: came out of this cactus that had this backstory that's
Speaker 1: to do with American Indians and so forth. Once it
Speaker 1: becomes a white powder and a little vile on a shelf,
Speaker 1: people forget the backstory. So people forgot that mescaline came
Speaker 1: from peyote, it became a substance in its own right.
Speaker 1: Something the same happens with cocaine. In the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: The first coca wines and coca products are all branded
Speaker 1: with pictures of incas and conquistadors and things, reminding us
Speaker 1: that this comes from a plant in South America. Once
Speaker 1: cocaine is isolated, it just becomes like white tablets, and
Speaker 1: that becomes like what they're called a pure white drug,
Speaker 1: you know, a product of modern science and changes its identity.
Speaker 1: And so from that point on, mescaline has its own
Speaker 1: distinctive Western identity that separates itself from its indigenous tradition. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, to jump forward a bit, I mean, there's
Speaker 1: this point in your story when you get to the
Speaker 1: week fifties are always sixties, and it's kind of like
Speaker 1: people had tried mescal in and now they're switching to
Speaker 1: LSD because they prefer that, or maybe psilocybin or something else.
Speaker 1: But the meat of your story, to some extent, is
Speaker 1: this period really in the first half of the twentieth
Speaker 1: century when mescaland's it right, there is no LSD and
Speaker 1: psilocybin has not been um you know, it's sort of
Speaker 1: extracted and synthesized, you know, from mushrooms and mescalin sort
Speaker 1: of sort of reigns alone. And there's his vivid history described.
Speaker 1: That's part about psychiatry and medicine and part about intellectuals
Speaker 1: and artists and writers, and so first on that, on
Speaker 1: that sort of psychiatric side, we know that psychedelics can
Speaker 1: be risky for some people mental illness. We also know
Speaker 1: it may be incredibly beneficial with people, you know, having
Speaker 1: certain types of mentals. Now, when it comes to schizophrenia,
Speaker 1: there's a special role I think that mescaland plays in
Speaker 1: all this. Yeah, that's right, and that's what got it
Speaker 1: to the point oldest Huxley decided he was interested in
Speaker 1: in trying it. Through the en twenties and nineteen schies,
Speaker 1: mescal and it's very, very widely used in psychology, and
Speaker 1: the thing that people are most interested in studying is hallucinations,
Speaker 1: as they call them, sort of visual imagery, which is
Speaker 1: a kind of fascinating subject for psychologists because where do
Speaker 1: hallucinations come from? And what do they mean? All these questions,
Speaker 1: But also they're very hard to study because when people
Speaker 1: are hallucinating, they're normally either kind of have a high
Speaker 1: fever or in the middle of a toxic crisis or
Speaker 1: a psychotic episode. They're normally not very good at telling
Speaker 1: you what's going on, and normally in a kind of
Speaker 1: extremely intense and disturbed state. But what scientists found so
Speaker 1: fascinating about mescaline once they had it in this pure
Speaker 1: form is that you could inject someone with it, which
Speaker 1: is the way they usually went, and then an hour
Speaker 1: or so later they would suddenly start seeing these visions.
Speaker 1: You tell them to close their eyes and say, tell
Speaker 1: me what you're seeing on your eyelids, and people would
Speaker 1: produce these hours long monologues of these incredible visions that
Speaker 1: are having having, you know, very particulately and coherently. So
Speaker 1: there's a long history of that and of giving mascaline
Speaker 1: to artists and philosophers and writers to see what they
Speaker 1: made of the experience. So people like John Paul Sartre
Speaker 1: and Walter Benjamine get given mescaline. Modernist artists paint on it,
Speaker 1: and then when you get to the nineteen fifties is
Speaker 1: where it really finds um it's kind of vital application
Speaker 1: in psychiatry because that's the decade in which psychiatry starts
Speaker 1: getting more biological in its orientation. People discover things like
Speaker 1: clau promosine, the early antipsychotics, which look as if they
Speaker 1: can switch off a psychosis. So then you've got these
Speaker 1: things like mescaline and LSD which are conceived as psychoto mimetics.
Speaker 1: The idea is that the effects they're producing a kind
Speaker 1: of like a model psychosis, a chemical version of psychosis,
Speaker 1: where you hallucinate and have disjoint in thinking, and time
Speaker 1: and space gets start getting distorted and all these things
Speaker 1: that people recognize that symptoms of schizophrenia, which is of course,
Speaker 1: you know, the great sort of central mental disorder that
Speaker 1: everybody is trying to deal with. So you get this idea, well,
Speaker 1: if we can switch psychosis on w a psychedelic or
Speaker 1: hallucinogen or a psychoto mimetic as they were called at
Speaker 1: that time, and you can switch it off with an antipsychotic,
Speaker 1: then we can play around experimentally. But also that suggests
Speaker 1: that schizophrenia might have a chemical cause. So if masculine
Speaker 1: or l s D produce something like schizophrenia, then maybe
Speaker 1: there is a chemical in the brain that's something like
Speaker 1: mesculine or l S D that's producing these um psychosis,
Speaker 1: and that if you could figure out what that was,
Speaker 1: then you could retrofitter chemical cure to it. But in
Speaker 1: the end there doesn't go very far, right, That's right,
Speaker 1: there's a great I mean, I think one episode that
Speaker 1: people people usually remember is ken Kiss signing up as
Speaker 1: a young man to a psychedelic trial um Palo Alto
Speaker 1: Veterans Hospital and he's given LSD and mescaline and that's
Speaker 1: how he gets turned onto them, and then he writes
Speaker 1: one flu of a Cuckoo's Nest about it. Now. That
Speaker 1: trial that he was participating in, run by a researcher
Speaker 1: called Leo Hollister, was was kind of um. Was was
Speaker 1: looking at this question of well, are the effects of
Speaker 1: psychedelics really very like um, you know, the effects of
Speaker 1: schizophrenia and psychosis. So Hollinger wanted a control trial of
Speaker 1: healthy individuals to take psychedelics and see what happened to them.
Speaker 1: And he went, well this words like this word um
Speaker 1: hallucination sounds very kind of you know, clinical and precise,
Speaker 1: and you get it in a lot of doctor's notes,
Speaker 1: But actually, what are we talking about if you talk
Speaker 1: about the hallucinations experienced by people having in psychotic episodes.
Speaker 1: It's often that things kind of taste strange, or they
Speaker 1: think they're being poisoned, or they hear voices. You know.
Speaker 1: These are very different from the hallucinations that normal people
Speaker 1: have on psychedelics. Yeah, so those two starts to get decoupled.
Speaker 1: And then around about the same time as well, a
Speaker 1: lot of people started coming into emergency wards with really
Speaker 1: kind of having some full blown psychotic episodes and it
Speaker 1: turned out they've been taking loads of amphetamines and they've
Speaker 1: carried on taking them, and that was what happened. So
Speaker 1: the term amphetamine psychosis was coined. And then people looked
Speaker 1: at that and went, Okay, well that's working on the
Speaker 1: dopamine system, So maybe um schizophrenia and the psychotic disorders
Speaker 1: are dopamine disorders. So at that point the science shifted
Speaker 1: away from mescaline and LSD and the psychedelics in a
Speaker 1: different direction. Right, But before this shift, either was enough
Speaker 1: interesting stuff out there to interest the CIA and its
Speaker 1: predecessor agency, the o S SC after Strategic Services in
Speaker 1: military branches. Of what was their interest in all of this, Well,
Speaker 1: they pretty much every psychoactive drug they had a crack
Speaker 1: at looking for truth serums, and they ended up, as
Speaker 1: we know, sort of mostly with things like sodium pentophile
Speaker 1: and these kind of narcotic, hypnotic sedative drugs. But on
Speaker 1: the way, they tried cannabis, they tried LSD, they tried mescaline.
Speaker 1: So I usually did persist for them for very long
Speaker 1: until let's see, i A in the nineteen fifties decided
Speaker 1: to work with LSD. So he just had this incredible
Speaker 1: crazy period, completely unsupervised, completely unethical. Were you know, through
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties you had ci
Speaker 1: A researchers giving LSD usually rather than mescaline, two hundreds
Speaker 1: and hundreds of people to people in mental hospitals to
Speaker 1: convict people without their knowledge. A lot of this, of course,
Speaker 1: came out in the early nineties seventies, the mk Ultra
Speaker 1: program was it was called m h. Well there was
Speaker 1: another thing, too, right, I mean there was I think
Speaker 1: you said that a lot of us about trying to
Speaker 1: find a truth serum. Then the other old and I
Speaker 1: think was about springing it into the air in order
Speaker 1: to produce mass anxiety or something like that. I don't
Speaker 1: think everything ever came of that right now, that's right,
Speaker 1: or you know, that's sort of the kind of persistent
Speaker 1: urban legend about how you could put it into the
Speaker 1: water supply. The idea was that it could be used
Speaker 1: in military combat in that way that you could disorientate
Speaker 1: a civilian population and so on. But yeah, and then
Speaker 1: there were all kinds of crazy ideas that we could
Speaker 1: put some LSD in Castro's cigar and kind of you know, right,
Speaker 1: make him crazy just before he did some big public lecture.
Speaker 1: There were all kinds of ideas which, as you say,
Speaker 1: didn't get anywhere. And actually kind of their real life
Speaker 1: and their real contribution is to fiction. These are all
Speaker 1: stories that we kind of know from sort of paranoid
Speaker 1: science fiction spy thrillers, and I think that's where a
Speaker 1: lot of them came from in the first place. These
Speaker 1: CIA agents were great readers of you know, things like
Speaker 1: the earlier James Bond novels and uh, you know, all
Speaker 1: the way further the Manchurian Candidate and so on, and
Speaker 1: I think there's some there's some great interviews with them
Speaker 1: later where they said, oh, the trouble with the Manchurian
Speaker 1: candidate was that persuaded everybody. This thing that we've been
Speaker 1: trying to do for ages have been unable to do,
Speaker 1: was possible. There was one interesting line that you head
Speaker 1: in the book where you said that there was some
Speaker 1: of the near immergrants would say, is that, you know,
Speaker 1: with with with alcohol, the hangover comes later, with peyote,
Speaker 1: the hangover comes first. Yeah, that's right, that's a that's
Speaker 1: a Native American expression. Uh Mescaline is slightly different chemically
Speaker 1: from the other psychedelics LSD and psilocybin and d MT.
Speaker 1: Trip to means kind of class of chemical that's active
Speaker 1: at very small doses and heads straight for the brain.
Speaker 1: Mescaline is a finethylamine. I guess the chemical that it's
Speaker 1: most closely related to is uh M d M A
Speaker 1: or two CB. So you have to take a much
Speaker 1: larger dose and it has a lot more physical effects.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot in the Native American church payote
Speaker 1: ceremony which is about mediating these effects, getting everybody sort
Speaker 1: of you know, working the physical effects through with the
Speaker 1: drums and the singing and the kind of whole stages
Speaker 1: of the of the ceremony and so on. M You
Speaker 1: also see at one point and it's probably released to
Speaker 1: the sort of bigger cultural conflict over psycholics in the sixties.
Speaker 1: And you're talking about two other quite famous intellectuals in
Speaker 1: the mid twentieth century, you say, where is Walter Benjamin
Speaker 1: saw the potential and psychedelics for political resistance in expanded consciousness.
Speaker 1: Earns Younger saw a weapon of the individual against society.
Speaker 1: When he was the fellow coined the phrase psychonaute. I mean, yes,
Speaker 1: once again, so people sort of using this drug and
Speaker 1: going in all sorts of different directions, and then many
Speaker 1: of them getting frustrated and sort of turning away from it.
Speaker 1: But Alvis Huxley really is kind of the right person,
Speaker 1: right time, right place. How and why is that? It's
Speaker 1: partly because he had figured all this stuff out already
Speaker 1: before he took masculine in this sense, I mean, the
Speaker 1: other great origin story of psychedelics is Albert Hoffman's. But
Speaker 1: if he read Hoffman's notes that he wrote in nine
Speaker 1: three after his LSD experience, it's kind of a horrible
Speaker 1: overdose in regards as a terrible, you know, terrible experience.
Speaker 1: And then gradually you can see as the way he
Speaker 1: talks about it, it works its way through until by
Speaker 1: the nanteen seventiers. You have his famous account of it
Speaker 1: in LSD My Problem Child, which is all about, you know,
Speaker 1: the beautiful visuals and the psychedelics and the kaleidoscopes and
Speaker 1: the whirlpools and the rainbows and so on. It took
Speaker 1: Hoffman a long time to really get with the psychedelic
Speaker 1: aspects of LSD UM and I think Huxley actually was
Speaker 1: there already. Ten years before he took mescaline. He had
Speaker 1: written this anthology of the Perennial Philosophy where he gathered
Speaker 1: together all his favorite sacred and mystical texts from different
Speaker 1: traditions and said, look, they're all basically talking about the
Speaker 1: same thing. He'd read his William James of course, and
Speaker 1: William James had come up with this kind of classification
Speaker 1: for spiritual experiences, saying they're no ethic, they seem really true,
Speaker 1: they seem really undeniable. They just can't you can't prime them.
Speaker 1: They just come and they just happen. They're not repeatable,
Speaker 1: you know. So these had a good idea of what
Speaker 1: the experience was going to be. I think before he
Speaker 1: took it. I mean, the thing that he's most famous for,
Speaker 1: you know, the insight in doors of perception that everyone
Speaker 1: remembers is this idea that the brain is like a
Speaker 1: reducing valve. You know, we have all these different experiences
Speaker 1: and stimuli coming at us all the time, and our
Speaker 1: brain reduces them down to the little trickle that we
Speaker 1: can deal with in everyday life and normal reality. And
Speaker 1: what mescaline does is to take away this reducing valve,
Speaker 1: and suddenly we get flooded with all the stuff that's
Speaker 1: going on there that we normally screen out. So Huxley
Speaker 1: explains this all to Humphrey Osmond, the psychiatrist who gives
Speaker 1: him the masculine in his first letter to Osmond, so
Speaker 1: like way before he's taken it. So I think Huxley
Speaker 1: had these ideas already worked out, and actually he was
Speaker 1: a little bit depressed. It was a bit hard to
Speaker 1: get through to people. People, particularly in the literary world,
Speaker 1: were kind of jaded and cynical and oh, it's Huxley
Speaker 1: and his cranky you know, spiritual theories again. But then
Speaker 1: suddenly once they were insights from mescaline, which brought with
Speaker 1: it this idea of kind of cutting edge science, you know,
Speaker 1: very sort of futuristic, opening up new ideas about the minds.
Speaker 1: Then a lot of the ideas that Huxley already had
Speaker 1: were filtered through the mescaline experience, and he really went
Speaker 1: with it as an identity, having a lot of those
Speaker 1: early researchers like John pool satro or Walter Benjamin just
Speaker 1: took it once. It was an interesting day, They wrote
Speaker 1: it up and they got on with their lives, you know.
Speaker 1: So Huxley it became his identity and I think it
Speaker 1: really turned his late career around and made him into
Speaker 1: you know, a peculiarly modern sort of profit. And of
Speaker 1: course that was a contract because when he real breeve
Speaker 1: New World, you know, there was a prominent drug in
Speaker 1: their Soma, which was more of the kind of superific.
Speaker 1: There was a bad drug. It was the one in
Speaker 1: which you kept the masses happy at some superficial level,
Speaker 1: so they didn't challenge the established order. So he obviously
Speaker 1: got through an evolution in his view of psychoactives phycho
Speaker 1: active subs. Yeah, I mean Soma is very much the
Speaker 1: progressive era review of drugs. You know, it's the drug
Speaker 1: that's mass produced by you know, forward industries or whatever,
Speaker 1: and everybody has to take it and it keeps all
Speaker 1: those difficult individual feelings in place and bonds everybody in
Speaker 1: a rather kind of you know, bovine way, with the
Speaker 1: sort of mass consciousness, and keeps society in its place.
Speaker 1: And I think that was how progressive of that era
Speaker 1: saw drugs in general. And I think Soma is the
Speaker 1: great expression of that. And you know, even like a
Speaker 1: year or two before he writes Doors of Perception, that's
Speaker 1: still Hucksley line. You know that transcendence through drugs is
Speaker 1: a false transcendence and your brains just being chemically manipulated
Speaker 1: and you might get a brief little illumination, but the
Speaker 1: calme down is going to be not worth it. He's
Speaker 1: like that kind of right up until the moment when
Speaker 1: he takes mescaline, and then I think he has this
Speaker 1: thing of huh, well, this isn't drugs, this is something else.
Speaker 1: You know. There's a little paragraph you have in book
Speaker 1: which reminded me why Huxley also is that link between
Speaker 1: on the one hand, the Bill w you know, or
Speaker 1: Mormon leader Fred Smith insight from the religious side, and
Speaker 1: the contemporary researchers. And you write mescaline did not drive
Speaker 1: Huxley mad, as Osmond had feared, but it triggered the
Speaker 1: quote unquote truth taking stare. His account has the urgent,
Speaker 1: supercharged quality of what psychotherapists might describe as a quote
Speaker 1: unquote spiritual emergency or breakdown breakthrough. It brought a long
Speaker 1: period of accumulated mental and psychic stress to an explosive
Speaker 1: moment of truth, from which he emerged with a new
Speaker 1: narrative and direction. Yeah, that's right, And I think that's
Speaker 1: such a that's such a joyous nous and uh Huxley's
Speaker 1: uh discovery and acceptance of mescaline and uh that deals
Speaker 1: the perception. I think that's it's kind of wonderful quality.
Speaker 1: He's this intellectual who has read everything and knows everything
Speaker 1: and then suddenly light in life. He takes full the
Speaker 1: milligrams of this powder dissolved in water, and he suddenly
Speaker 1: has this breakthrough experience. Yeah. I think at that point
Speaker 1: in his career there was a lot of accumulated frustration,
Speaker 1: a lot of ill health. He was, you know, attempting
Speaker 1: all kinds of remedies for different health problems. His eyesight
Speaker 1: was getting worse, and it really turned him around. It
Speaker 1: made him back into a household name in a way
Speaker 1: that they hadn't been since the twenties, and I think
Speaker 1: it kind of you know, he just radiates this wonderful
Speaker 1: serenity for those last few years of his life. I
Speaker 1: think his most famous line in the book is when
Speaker 1: he's looking at his pants and he says, those folds
Speaker 1: in the trousers, what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity.
Speaker 1: And the texture of the great flannel, how rich, how
Speaker 1: deeply mysteriously sumptuous. And I think many of the psychelic
Speaker 1: no that experience of just focusing on something and seeing
Speaker 1: the endless number of things you've never seen before. That's right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: how though? Did you say it? Actually, he wasn't actually
Speaker 1: wearing great flannel pants, and his wife persuaded him to
Speaker 1: change the story. He was just like wearing jeans, and
Speaker 1: she said, I'll read Rhed read better if you actually
Speaker 1: substitute flannel pants into this. Yeah, that's that's that's true. Uh,
Speaker 1: he was, by all accounts wearing jeans. And then when
Speaker 1: he wrote it and his wife read it, she said, oh, this,
Speaker 1: I think he ought to dress up for your readers.
Speaker 1: And I think that was just right, because if he'd
Speaker 1: been wearing jeans, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as good.
Speaker 1: It was because he was this kind of tweety, intellectual
Speaker 1: British figure that this kind of effusion of joy was
Speaker 1: so wonderful. H So listen, So now, by the time
Speaker 1: you get to the sixties, just explain why there's this
Speaker 1: sort of mass defection from mescal into LSD. A lot
Speaker 1: of it, I think is about dose. A gram of
Speaker 1: mescaline is two or three doses. The gram of LSD
Speaker 1: is thousands of doses. So you know, even by the
Speaker 1: time that Huxley was writing Doors of Perception, clinical researchers
Speaker 1: were switching to LSD partly because it was cheaper, but
Speaker 1: also because if it was active at such small doses,
Speaker 1: and it must be hitting some particular trigger or lock
Speaker 1: and key mechanism in the brain, because the theory of
Speaker 1: mescaline and cannabis up until that point would been all
Speaker 1: this kind of floods the brain with sort of weird chemicals.
Speaker 1: But LSD obviously wasn't doing that. It was doing something
Speaker 1: more specific, so I think that made it more appealing.
Speaker 1: And then by the early nine sixties, when psychedelics were
Speaker 1: starting to take off in the wider world, mescaline, of
Speaker 1: course was one of the very first to be closed down.
Speaker 1: You know, after sixty three. You know, you could get
Speaker 1: hold of it if you had the right headed notepaper
Speaker 1: or a PhD. But even that got tighter as things
Speaker 1: went along, and then by five when you know, sort
Speaker 1: of hours Lee and the underground chemists sort of starting
Speaker 1: to synthesize psychedelics. You know, what are you going to
Speaker 1: do is at the size and gram of mescaline and
Speaker 1: give it to two of your friends, or the sizogram
Speaker 1: of LSD and give it to like everybody in the
Speaker 1: Bay area. That's the you know, and that you know,
Speaker 1: the criminal penalties the same. So LSD entirely took over
Speaker 1: the illicit market for the sixties drug culture from the
Speaker 1: very beginning. But mescaline of course had a particular cachet
Speaker 1: because everybody had read Doors of Perception, and you know,
Speaker 1: everybody wants wants to try mescaline. It had this sort
Speaker 1: of magic about it, and some kind of connoisseur chemists
Speaker 1: would make small bat runs, so it was kind of
Speaker 1: always remembered. But I think by the time you got
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventy probably everybody had heard of it, but
Speaker 1: very few people have taken it, and the cultural product
Speaker 1: I think of from that moment is Hunter Thompson's Fear
Speaker 1: and Loathing in Las Vegas, where you know, from page
Speaker 1: one he's taking kind of every drug in the farmer
Speaker 1: appear and more and then so where do you go,
Speaker 1: like a third of the way in, you've got a
Speaker 1: sort of head for some huge, sort of chaotic, apocalyptic
Speaker 1: drug experience. And he says, at that point, we cracked
Speaker 1: out the mescaline. And I think that's because there were
Speaker 1: not that many people who really knew what it did,
Speaker 1: but everybody knew what it signified. And after that, I
Speaker 1: think people remembered it from Fear and Loathing as this
Speaker 1: kind of it's a sort of no plus ultra. It's
Speaker 1: it's the most intense psychedelic experience you can imagine. Let's
Speaker 1: take a break here and go to an act. You know,
Speaker 1: there's something almost about mescalin and your story that reminds
Speaker 1: me of almost like like almost mescalin is almost sort
Speaker 1: of the forest Gump of psychedelics, right somehow popping up
Speaker 1: and showing up. I mean, you have this wonderful moment
Speaker 1: where you you talk about the world at Mescalin plays
Speaker 1: in one of the great works of Minor American poetry,
Speaker 1: which was the poem Howell by Alan Ginsburg. Yeah, that's right. Well,
Speaker 1: Um Ginsburg and William Burrows were very early adopters of
Speaker 1: payote and mescaline. They were kind of taking a lot
Speaker 1: around that Payote, particularly around the time that Ginsburg wrote
Speaker 1: how And Yeah, that's the story he tells about that,
Speaker 1: you know, devastating sequence in how We're sort of Molok.
Speaker 1: You know, this enormous, great kind of sort of beasts
Speaker 1: that represents some industrial mass society becomes its looming presence.
Speaker 1: And there's a point where Ginsberg says he'd taken some
Speaker 1: payote and was looking out of his window in San
Speaker 1: Francisco in the fog and sort of big building with
Speaker 1: all its lights on through the fog, and that's where
Speaker 1: he got the idea of Molok, this kind of biblical
Speaker 1: monster that consumes it's young m Now to jump forward,
Speaker 1: another point you make here is that when you reflect back,
Speaker 1: you say, the most consequential mescal in trip of the
Speaker 1: sixties was the one taken in April nineteen sixty by
Speaker 1: Alexander Shorgin that rate, Yeah, that's right, Well, that was
Speaker 1: Alexander Shulgin's first psychedelic experience, and he puts it wonderfully,
Speaker 1: his sort of his equivalent of Huxley looking at his
Speaker 1: trousers is saying, um, it was amazing when the mascaline
Speaker 1: came up, that he suddenly he was at a world
Speaker 1: that he remembered, but it was the world that he
Speaker 1: lived in when he was a child five or six
Speaker 1: years old, when everything was kind of new and fresh
Speaker 1: and everything was possible, that it transported him straight back
Speaker 1: to that childlike moment. You know. William Wordsworth's poetry as
Speaker 1: another great sort of touchstone for a lot of the
Speaker 1: early mescaline experiment as I think for the same reason.
Speaker 1: And then after the trip, Shulgin, who was an organic chemist,
Speaker 1: became fascinated that there had been so little work around
Speaker 1: analogs of mescaline. He started tinkering around and synthesizing versions
Speaker 1: of it, and of course from those experiments he kind
Speaker 1: of synthesized M D M A, which was the one
Speaker 1: that you know, became a breakthrough first and psychotherapy, and
Speaker 1: then are the street druggers ecstasy, So that whole sort
Speaker 1: of second wave of psychedelic culture. I think you know
Speaker 1: pretty much came out of Shilgun's mescaline trip in that sense,
Speaker 1: and not just MG, of course, but dozens and dozens
Speaker 1: of different finel A means and then trip do means
Speaker 1: different novel psychedelics, I mean notably to CB as well.
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, that's right, yeah, you know, And in
Speaker 1: a way it made me think, right when we think
Speaker 1: about the use of M D M A, and we
Speaker 1: think about it especially in two different types of contexts,
Speaker 1: right one where or th really three, I mean, one
Speaker 1: is in the its value in things like couples counseling
Speaker 1: and psychotherapy and now we're will likely be approved for
Speaker 1: you know, PTSD, and then we think about your um
Speaker 1: or maybe that one shifts into the second, which is
Speaker 1: the more medical use. But the third has been its
Speaker 1: use in the rave scene and in people dancing together
Speaker 1: and enjoying it in that context. And it made me
Speaker 1: think in a way also, And now this lead to me, Squint,
Speaker 1: where you talked about the way in which is used
Speaker 1: communally among your Nativemerican church, among indigenous peoples, but also
Speaker 1: much more individualistically very early as a group thing among
Speaker 1: you know, Western world. But that's kind of similarity in
Speaker 1: their sort of journeys in a way, or they're different experiences. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's uh. I think that that's very valid.
Speaker 1: If you go back to the first Spanish reports of
Speaker 1: payote in Mexico, they report on it being used in
Speaker 1: two different ways. One for kind of healing or divination,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, effectively a patient and a doctor
Speaker 1: sitting down in a sort of healing compact in which
Speaker 1: you know, the payote is sort of the third personality
Speaker 1: that mediates and you get a kind of conversation between
Speaker 1: the two people and the cactus from which you know,
Speaker 1: the solution to the problem, whether it's a sort of
Speaker 1: medical healing or whether it's divination or sorcery, you know,
Speaker 1: emerges from that. And then there's a second use, which
Speaker 1: you read about in some of the early Jesuit reports
Speaker 1: where they find particularly up in the north of Mexico
Speaker 1: where peote comes from whole villages where people take it together,
Speaker 1: usually around afar, usually at night, usually with that kind
Speaker 1: of three steps shuffle dance, and people will just keep
Speaker 1: going on the cactus and on the dancing, and on
Speaker 1: the alcohol if it's there as well, and get into
Speaker 1: this kind of group trance group mind for which it's
Speaker 1: so wonderfully effective. So I think, yeah, there's two modern
Speaker 1: uses that you identify. You can follow them all the
Speaker 1: way back to the very beginning of the story. In
Speaker 1: a way, some of them, I think you present as
Speaker 1: a difference nature of the use of peyote or san
Speaker 1: pedro between those Native American groups that have been more
Speaker 1: of the kind of warrior, the hunter, gatherer, the commanches,
Speaker 1: what have you, as opposed to the other more settled
Speaker 1: Indians who have been agricultural for hundreds of years, and
Speaker 1: in part because of their you know, very different cultures,
Speaker 1: their nature of the use of this it varied substantially.
Speaker 1: There's also a big distinction in that sense between the
Speaker 1: indigenous use of payote in Mexico by tribes like the
Speaker 1: witch All. There's usually a shaman or someone who's very
Speaker 1: specialized in mediating these ceremonies, mediating these states and these spaces.
Speaker 1: It's very different from the use of payote in the
Speaker 1: Native American Church, which is much more democratic and in
Speaker 1: a way, I think, perhaps reflecting the white Christian culture
Speaker 1: in which it evolved, it's more kind of Protestant. Everybody
Speaker 1: is their own conscience and their own priest. Everybody is
Speaker 1: having their own conversation with the payote and the roadman,
Speaker 1: who is the person who officiates at the ceremony is
Speaker 1: not a shaman or a priest or anyone with special
Speaker 1: spiritual power. In fact, they're very very scrupulous about making
Speaker 1: clear that's not what they are. All the ceremonial instruments
Speaker 1: get passed around the circle, so everybody gets to share.
Speaker 1: And that's a i think, a very different type of view.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of you know, it's sitting and seeing
Speaker 1: and praying. It said a way, very very sober as
Speaker 1: a ceremony. It's not a kind of ecstatic or dionysiac
Speaker 1: thing in every way. But that also, as you say,
Speaker 1: was much more congenial to some tribes than others. The
Speaker 1: Comanches where it may have started, they were nomadic people,
Speaker 1: and you know, any warrior pretty much could stand up
Speaker 1: and say, okay, I want to go down here and
Speaker 1: do a raid over the border in Mexico here and there,
Speaker 1: and other people would kind of say, okay, I'm with
Speaker 1: you and come with him. You get all these impromptu
Speaker 1: bands for me all the time. So within that context,
Speaker 1: it was very easy if some people chose to have
Speaker 1: the Peyote meetings and other people didn't. That was all
Speaker 1: pretty pretty loose and pretty simple, whereas with the Pueblo people,
Speaker 1: you know, he'd been living in much more tightly ordered
Speaker 1: societies for hundreds of years, where spiritual ceremonies tended to
Speaker 1: happen in a in a kiva, in a special sacred place,
Speaker 1: and everybody had their role in the ceremony. Much more
Speaker 1: disruptive in that kind of culture. To suddenly introduce the
Speaker 1: whole new religious movement, Mike, when you were doing this
Speaker 1: research right about the historical uses of pot and indigenous
Speaker 1: people's how do you deal with that issue of the sources,
Speaker 1: especially when they were not There's essentially nothing are almost
Speaker 1: nothing in the way of indigenous ridden sources about pot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's one of the fascinating things about writing a Western
Speaker 1: history and a non Western history in parallel. They're very
Speaker 1: very different types of history with very different types of sources.
Speaker 1: So from the very beginning, the Western history is about
Speaker 1: individual experience. There's an enormously rich history of I took
Speaker 1: some payote, and I took it at twenty three PM
Speaker 1: and at nine fifty and I started to notice these
Speaker 1: violent rings around the you know, it's a story about
Speaker 1: individ duals and individuals trying to describe this experience in isolation.
Speaker 1: And when you turn to indigenous sources, there is really
Speaker 1: very little like that. You can look out for sort
Speaker 1: of first person narratives of psychedelic experience from indigenous cultures,
Speaker 1: and there are really not a lot, And most of
Speaker 1: them are kind of in conversation with Western anthropologists because
Speaker 1: I think that's um it's a fundamentally different experience that
Speaker 1: produces a very different type of history. It's not so
Speaker 1: much about the individual experience, it's much more about the
Speaker 1: It's much more of a communal experience, and it can't
Speaker 1: really be lifted out of its culture. So what you're
Speaker 1: telling in sort of indigenous and non Western histories is
Speaker 1: much more broadly a story of the people and what's
Speaker 1: happening to them, you know, And those are wonderful narratives,
Speaker 1: you know, if you can find your way into them
Speaker 1: and find enough sources, you know, they're really epic and
Speaker 1: really powerful. And you come across it in various sources,
Speaker 1: sort of which all and Native American Church that there's
Speaker 1: a bit of a presumption against talking about the actual
Speaker 1: experience itself. If you say to people, so, what happened
Speaker 1: when you took the payote and the meeting, what were
Speaker 1: your experiences? People won't really answer that. And I think
Speaker 1: that's partly because you're you're not really thinking about your
Speaker 1: own experience at that point. You're part of something bigger.
Speaker 1: And also what you're getting when the payote speaks to
Speaker 1: you is something that's private. It's something that goes straight
Speaker 1: to your heart. And there's a lot more Indigenous cultures
Speaker 1: suspicion about people's motives and why would you share this
Speaker 1: incredibly private personal experience. Would you be doing it, you know,
Speaker 1: to boost your status? Would you be doing it to
Speaker 1: have some kind of influence or control over the person
Speaker 1: you're telling the story to. You have to come up
Speaker 1: the questioning quite a different way. And yeah, there are
Speaker 1: I'm sure enormous numbers of stories of indigenous people's all
Speaker 1: up and down the America's and the engagement with masculine
Speaker 1: containing cacti that we don't know, that we can't get to,
Speaker 1: but the ones that we can, they end up kind
Speaker 1: of being a very different type of story from the
Speaker 1: Western story. And it was fascinating to see the way
Speaker 1: that those two kind of sources and historical methods diverged. Well,
Speaker 1: I think it's also fortunate that you had first James
Speaker 1: Mooney and then after him the academic Western labar, both
Speaker 1: deeply committed to trying to present the Indians, the Native
Speaker 1: Americans use of these things, and they're very different experience
Speaker 1: to Western audiences, whether in testimony before legislative committees or
Speaker 1: in their books and their other writings. And and the
Speaker 1: fact that there were some who were deeply committed to
Speaker 1: that probably helped, but not as you and as a historian,
Speaker 1: but in terms of conveying this alternative perspective, even at
Speaker 1: the time, definitely. I mean, it's a great tragedy that
Speaker 1: James Mooney never got to write his Payote book. If
Speaker 1: we had a big Payote book to sit alongside his
Speaker 1: big ghost Dance book, that would be great. But in fact,
Speaker 1: Western Labarre, as you say, you know, a Yale anthropologist
Speaker 1: who spent time in Oklahoma in the nineteen thirties wrote
Speaker 1: a big book called The Peyote Cult, which was kind
Speaker 1: of effectively in a way, the book that Mooney had
Speaker 1: never written, and that became a bible for all sorts
Speaker 1: of people. It went through edition after edition after addition,
Speaker 1: and that time, from theties onwards, there were lots of
Speaker 1: Native American groups who were setting up Native American church
Speaker 1: branches and chapters around the place for the first time.
Speaker 1: And a couple of Native American sources have said to
Speaker 1: me that a lot of that was in you know,
Speaker 1: people would pick up the Western Labar's Payote cult as
Speaker 1: a bible, you know, and it's got the diagrams of
Speaker 1: how the fire circle is arranged in the different traditions.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a real how to guide and manual
Speaker 1: as well. M M, yeah, I mean. And then of
Speaker 1: course there's the next step of that where I think
Speaker 1: you describe with some of our taking along a young
Speaker 1: researcher named Richard Evan Shalty on one of his first experiences,
Speaker 1: and he then becomes the famed ethnobodenist at Harvard who
Speaker 1: mentors a whole new generation of people looking at psychoactive
Speaker 1: and non psychoactive medicines and plants, et cetera in Latin
Speaker 1: American elsewhere. That's right, and that's that is Richard Chilter
Speaker 1: is his first gig, and he gets interested by reading
Speaker 1: a book by a German psychologist from the nine twenties,
Speaker 1: Heinrich Cluver, who did some of that early mescaline research
Speaker 1: and tried to classify hallucinations in terms of what he
Speaker 1: called form constants, spirals and lattices and cobwebs, the underlying
Speaker 1: geometrical forms and what they tell us about the relationship
Speaker 1: between the eye and the brain and how mescaline might
Speaker 1: disrupt that. That was kind of really early classic of
Speaker 1: mescaline science cognitive psychology, I guess. And that was the
Speaker 1: book that Shelter has picked up in Harvard Botanical Library
Speaker 1: and read and thought, wow, this is fascinating, and then
Speaker 1: discovered that, yeah, there was this other young researcher, Western Labar,
Speaker 1: who was going out to Oklahoma and researching Payote, and
Speaker 1: he went along and they did what they called a
Speaker 1: joint Harvard Yale expedition, which was kind of the two
Speaker 1: of them in an old Studa baker bumping up and
Speaker 1: down dirt roads on the way out to the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere in Oklahoma. But I think that Shalter says, well,
Speaker 1: that was the very first work that he did in
Speaker 1: this area was fantastic because he he said, Okay, the
Speaker 1: Payote ceremony is relatively new, and payote is not indigenous
Speaker 1: to hear, but let's look at all the other plants
Speaker 1: involved in the ceremony. Let's look at the stage and
Speaker 1: the cedar and all the incenses. And he did this
Speaker 1: beautiful sort of taxonomy of all the different plants that
Speaker 1: were used in the ceremony, so that you could see
Speaker 1: that even if the payote was a recent innovation, everything
Speaker 1: else was really really deeply embedded in the culture. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it's funny the way you describe I was
Speaker 1: some of ours book that, in his making such an
Speaker 1: effort to depict accurately the perspectives and practices of Native
Speaker 1: Americans and using peyote, it lands up becoming the sort
Speaker 1: of guide in reference book for Native Americans themselves and
Speaker 1: succeeding generations. It reminds me, almost Mike, of what people
Speaker 1: hear about The Godfather, right, how it's kind of based
Speaker 1: up on mafia culture. And then it turns out that
Speaker 1: the mafia in the nineteen seventies and eighties and nineties,
Speaker 1: for them, the Godfather becomes their reference point to how
Speaker 1: to be a mafiosi, you know, So there is this
Speaker 1: kind of interplay back and forth between the uh, the
Speaker 1: writer and who portrays it to the broader world and
Speaker 1: actually the original people who they wrote about. That's right, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, Mike, I'm just thinking that when we think
Speaker 1: about the sort of you know, the drug war, the
Speaker 1: modern American drug war, and not just beginning with Nicks
Speaker 1: in the seventies, but even before that, and you see
Speaker 1: mescaline getting swept up, you know, getting banned by the
Speaker 1: Perogrim in the sixties, it becomes you know, subject to
Speaker 1: you know, the nineteen seventy Controlled Substances Act, I think
Speaker 1: it's put in Schedule one. Then goes into the United
Speaker 1: Nations Convention of seventy one, it gets banned there, but
Speaker 1: amidst all of the sort of criminalization essentially of the
Speaker 1: crystal form of Mescaland at the same time, it almost
Speaker 1: feels like Peyote is sort of carrying the flag as
Speaker 1: the one semi quasi limited but still legal use of
Speaker 1: a psychedelic and that even when the threats come down,
Speaker 1: even when there's movements by the federal government back in
Speaker 1: the thirties to ban it, you know, the Native American
Speaker 1: Church is able to fight that fight back, and then
Speaker 1: at even at that key moment in the early nineteen
Speaker 1: nineties when the U. S. Supreme Court and Justice Scalia
Speaker 1: say no religious exception. The hell were the First Amendment
Speaker 1: frate and religion here doesn't go that far. You see
Speaker 1: Congress coming right back, you know, and saying, no, there's
Speaker 1: gonna be a federally federal protection here for the religious
Speaker 1: use of peyote by the Native American church. And so
Speaker 1: there's something about that fusion of this psychedelic with the
Speaker 1: sort of Native American use, and that even as Native
Speaker 1: Americans are being perpetually discriminated again string the second class citizens,
Speaker 1: being forced into elements of assimilation, what have you, there
Speaker 1: is that element of difference for this piece of it
Speaker 1: that enables it to survive and almost carry the torch
Speaker 1: until this new renaissance. Yeah, I mean they you know,
Speaker 1: the persecution of payote was brutal, you know, from the
Speaker 1: eighties all the way through to the nineteen thirties, and
Speaker 1: then you had the Indian New Deal and in theory
Speaker 1: more of an acceptance of the principle of preserving traditional
Speaker 1: Indigenous culture and worship. But then after that the harassment
Speaker 1: continued and continued, and as you say, it all went
Speaker 1: all the way to the Supreme Court in the ninety nineties.
Speaker 1: You know, it's been a generational and attritional struggle, and
Speaker 1: I really understand why for Native Americans it is a
Speaker 1: little hard to take the fact that we've got this
Speaker 1: new young generation of white Americans um saying yeah it
Speaker 1: psychedelics are great, and yeah peyote, and you know, that's
Speaker 1: I think pretty hard for those, particularly the older generation
Speaker 1: of people who've lived through that history, to come to
Speaker 1: terms with. But I think it is fascinating that at
Speaker 1: this point mescaline, the crystal, as you say, has pretty
Speaker 1: much disappeared. You can still get it um, you know,
Speaker 1: on some chemical websites, but obviously very highly controlled and
Speaker 1: it's only really used for kind of small amounts of
Speaker 1: sort of you know, drug testing purposes and so on,
Speaker 1: as a recreational or non medical or illicit drug. I mean,
Speaker 1: you could barely find it on the on the dark web.
Speaker 1: You kind of can, but it's almost disappeared. And really,
Speaker 1: you know, the flag as you say, for mescaline, is
Speaker 1: now being carried by the Catti, and there must be
Speaker 1: more people around the world taking peyote in San Pedro
Speaker 1: than ever before that. There are serious conservation issues. Around
Speaker 1: San Pedro, there is not enough of it. It only
Speaker 1: grows and it's kind of quite small area of sorry, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: around Peyote. It grows a little bit kind of in
Speaker 1: Texas around Laredo, but there's barely enough if there is
Speaker 1: enough to supply the Native American Church, let alone all
Speaker 1: the other people who are suddenly interested in it. So
Speaker 1: I think what emerges from this is um Actually that
Speaker 1: San Pedro looks like the future because there are unlimited
Speaker 1: amounts of it. Unlike Peyote, it grows very very quickly,
Speaker 1: and you can grow it pretty much anywhere, and lots
Speaker 1: of people do. Mescaline is federally prohibited, but you know,
Speaker 1: growing and trading San Pedro cacti seems to be pretty
Speaker 1: loosely controlled. I mean, I'm aware of some people being
Speaker 1: arrested for doing it, but there are also lots of
Speaker 1: parts of the world where that's not enforced. So curiously,
Speaker 1: it's the Yeah, it's the San Pedro cactus that has
Speaker 1: emerged as the foreman, which mescaline looks most likely to
Speaker 1: survive and be used broadly in the future. That's wonderful way.
Speaker 1: So what's the next book about? Well, The next book
Speaker 1: is kind of a a big survey of the history
Speaker 1: of drugs. It's working title is Drugs and the Making
Speaker 1: of the Modern Mind, So it's kind of the history
Speaker 1: of addiction and the history of criminalization and drug control.
Speaker 1: And there was very little about the drug experience and
Speaker 1: drug experiments and you know, the user's perspective. So that's
Speaker 1: the kind of material that I've been gathering over the years,
Speaker 1: and you end up with this picture where you can see, like,
Speaker 1: particularly by the end of the nineteenth century, drug experiments
Speaker 1: in science and medicine are very common and beyond as well.
Speaker 1: And this is the period of course, of the birth
Speaker 1: of psychology and the discovery of the unconscious, and the
Speaker 1: arrival of modernism, and all these um aspects of modernity
Speaker 1: are really thoroughly infused with drug experiments and drug experiences.
Speaker 1: And then in the twentieth century they kind of get
Speaker 1: written out of our intellectual history because once drugs are problematized,
Speaker 1: we kind of forget. This is what I'm really trying
Speaker 1: to do in this new book is to say that
Speaker 1: what we have now in the twentieth century, this fascination
Speaker 1: with drug experiences and sort of expanded altered states of consciousness,
Speaker 1: which we tend to assume is something that we've just
Speaker 1: discovered in the West, right, that we have no tradition of.
Speaker 1: In fact, there is a long tradition of this in
Speaker 1: Western culture and Western science, and so that's what I'm
Speaker 1: really trying to encompass and sort of reclaim and you know,
Speaker 1: restore that story to where it should be in our
Speaker 1: intellectual history. Oh, Mike, I can't wait for it, So listen.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think I'd love this conversation. Let me
Speaker 1: just tell tad or listeners first. I mean, just take
Speaker 1: a look at you know, google him, look on Amazon
Speaker 1: whenever you'll see these amazing sets of book he's He's
Speaker 1: written about all sorts of drug and other issues. But
Speaker 1: beyond that, I haven't really asked this before, but I'm
Speaker 1: really curious. If you really liked this episode and if
Speaker 1: you'd like to hear more conversations with historians, just tweet
Speaker 1: me or send an email to psychoactive at protozoa dot
Speaker 1: com and let me know, and in which case I
Speaker 1: will be happy to oblige. So Mike, thanks ever so much,
Speaker 1: best of luck with this next book, and I look
Speaker 1: forward to our pass crossing again sometimes. Oh thanks so
Speaker 1: much and that's a great pleasure. If you're enjoying Psychoactive,
Speaker 1: please tell your friends about it, or you can write
Speaker 1: us a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts. We love to hear from our listeners. If
Speaker 1: you'd like to share your own stories, comments and ideas,
Speaker 1: then leave us a message at one eight three three
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Speaker 1: or you can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com,
Speaker 1: or find me on Twitter at Ethan natal Man. You
Speaker 1: can also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive
Speaker 1: is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures.
Speaker 1: It's hosted by me Ethan Nadelman. It's produced by Noam
Speaker 1: Osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden,
Speaker 1: Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures,
Speaker 1: Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from My Heart Radio and
Speaker 1: me Ethan Nadelman. Our music is by Ari Blucien and
Speaker 1: a special thanks to a Brio s f Bianca Grimshaw
Speaker 1: and Robert Deep. Next week in advance of the upcoming
Speaker 1: presidential election in the Philippines to replace President to Turkey.
Speaker 1: I'll be speaking with Gideon Lasco, a medical anthropologist and
Speaker 1: what If Philippines leading academic studying the drug war. When
Speaker 1: I started interviewing the young men, they ended up sharing
Speaker 1: me their stories about shaboo, about meta feta mean. So
Speaker 1: I got to know that their their community, I got
Speaker 1: to know their lives, I got to have out with them.
Speaker 1: But when a few years later, the third embarked on
Speaker 1: this deadly drug war, my thoughts came back to all
Speaker 1: the young men I met and wondering if they were
Speaker 1: targeted at all. By by day, and I knew that
Speaker 1: the people like them were being killed, and I felt
Speaker 1: that I had a moral responsibility to go back to
Speaker 1: this topic to be an advocate of drug reform. Subscribe
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