The War on Drugs has failed. According to all available indices, it is no longer defendable. Vast expenditure on drug law enforcement has resulted in increasing levels of overall drug-use and lowered drug prices. 2011 is the 50th anniversary of the 1961 UN Convention, which lies at the root of the criminalizing approach to drug control. Now is the perfect time to re-evaluate our approach.

Of all regions in the world, Latin America has perhaps been the most affected by the unintended consequences of global prohibition. Huge criminal markets have at times turned countries such as Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico into nigh-on war zones. Drug enforcement and eradication in one Andean country has displaced production into neighboring countries and back in turn, in an ongoing cycle. The criminalization of drug control has seen the numbers of those incarcerated for drug offenses (even the possession of minor amounts for personal consumption) rise to levels that overwhelm judicial systems. Currently there are over 10 million people in prison worldwide.

However, Latin America, as the region that has suffered the most, is now leading the way to an open and frank discussion of drugs. Recent declarations from certain politicians show a much greater understanding of the problems than those coming from some of their Western counterparts. In Peru, former President and current presidential candidate Alejandro Toledo declared himself open to full decriminalization. Whilst he nuanced his argument a few days later, the declaration itself shows that Latin American governments are becoming increasingly progressive in their nature. The Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, led by former presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, has declared its outright opposition to a “misguided and counter-productive war.”

The most significant declaration of all, however, may well be that of current Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. Santos is head of a country traditionally felt to be one of the US’ major allies in the War on Drugs. However, President Santos has declared himself open to a discussion on alternative approaches that may reduce both the risks and harms associated with illegal drugs. A recipient of major US aid, Colombia cannot turn away directly from Plan Colombia, but Santos’ comments show that Colombian drug policy may be slowly turning against the whirlpool of US foreign policy.

A fellow Andean country, Bolivia, has recently seen more and more countries support its proposals to reform the international prohibition of chewing the coca leaf. Flexibility and cultural sensitivity are vital within approaches to drug conventions. Drug control regimes should be respectful of human rights and take account of different cultural norms in societies around the world. There must be the freedom for individual countries to work out what is best for them. The one-fit-all model has shown itself to be highly destructive.

Various countries such as Portugal have shown how successful a change in policy can be. They have demonstrated that the decriminalization of use and a commitment to provide health and rehabilitation programs as alternatives to incarceration, together with a sustained educational program, can diminish the harms associated with drug-use. Both Hungary and the Czech Republic criminalized use in 1999. However, studies showed that this policy had been a disaster and brought more social costs than benefits. Consequently, both countries reversed this policy (in 2003 and 2010 respectively). We cannot let such lessons go unheeded. We must learn from these examples.

It is time for a new approach. The 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, with its zero-tolerance approach, was written in a very different context to today, both socially and politically. A rewriting of the UN Convention would enable us to move forward from the present impasse. Individual countries should have more freedom to be able to decriminalize the personal use of drugs and, should the country so wish, to legally regulate certain substances, such as cannabis, thereby being able to control and label their content, and tax them. This would have the advantage of saving vast sums on the continuation of the coercive approach, as well as raising substantial tax to implement an educational and treatment approach to drug-use. It would also solve the problem of hundreds of billions of dollars going into the hands of criminals each year.

The Beckley Foundation Global Initiative for Drug Policy Reform 2011-2012 is proposing such a model.

2011 is the 50th anniversary of the 1961 UN Convention, the 40th anniversary of the UK Misuse of Drugs Act and the 10th anniversary of the Portuguese drug decriminalisation. There has never been a more appropriate time for change.

What could be more festive than spending a night locked in an art gallery with a dozen reindeer and a fridge full of psychedelic drugs?Soma, Carsten Höller‘s current installation in a former railway station in Berlin, purports to be offering exactly that. A pen running the length of the Hamburger Bahnhof, now the city’s contemparary art museum, contains 12 reindeer, 24 canaries, eight mice and two flies. Giant toadstool sculptures are planted on a mushroom clock that the reindeer can turn with their antlers, and at the centre is a mushroom-shaped “floating hotel” – a bed on a platform complete with minibar, yours for €1,000 a night. (There’s also a raffle giving away free places.)

The twist is that this is meant to be a scientific experiment, in which half the reindeer have been fed “fly agaric” mushrooms, which they consume naturally in the wilds of Siberia. It makes their urine hallucinogenic (some people believe that this is the origin of the story of Santa Claus’s sleigh being pulled by flying, red-nosed reindeers).

The urine is collected by handlers and stored in fridges by the walls, which also hold both dried and fresh fly agaric mushrooms. By day they’re locked, but at night the fridges are opened, allowing people staying over to sample the contents. However, because only half the reindeer are fed the mushrooms, it’s impossible to know which bottles, if any, contain hallucinogenic urine.

Tanja Klein, 28, won a competition to spend the night in the museum with her boyfriend, Sachar Kriwoj, 30. “I wasn’t going to go and drink six bottles of reindeer urine to find out,” says Klein. “I’m not into drugs, I’m into art.”

Höller hasn’t tried the urine, but he has tried the mushrooms. “They’re very unpleasant,” he says, speaking from his home in Stockholm. “And you throw up. The first four times I tried it, I became comatose. Then you wake up, throw up, and you don’t know where you are, or how long you’ve been asleep. The sixth time, I started to chant like a Tibetan monk.”

The title Soma comes from the name of the sacred libation drunk by the Indo-Persian followers of the Vedic religion, Hinduism’s 5,000-year-old parent. Its ancient text, the Rigveda, contains 114 hymns to “creative juice”, supposed to offer immortality. The recipe was lost, but in the 1960s researcher Robert Wasson hypo-thesised that soma was based on the fly agaric mushroom.

Höller’s installation sets out to test this hypothesis – and the possibility that art may change perceptions even more effectively than drugs. It takes the form of an experiment set in a playground: from that giant “double mushroom clock” the reindeer move with their antlers, to the “mice square”, based on an actual playground in Paris designed by sculptor Pierre Székely.

One side of the hall is the “test”, the other the “control”. Reindeer on the test side are fed the mushrooms. (“At least in principle,” says Höller, helpfully.) On each side, the reindeer urine is spread on the food of the other animals. From observation posts, visitors watch the behaviour of the canaries, mice and houseflies for signs of intoxication and form their own conclusions. “The experiment is completed in the minds of the visitors,” says Höller. “It’s very unscientific.” In other words, it’s an open question whether the reindeer are even fed the mushrooms at all: the power of suggestion makes you likely to observe something that may not take place.

Experimentation has been a part of Höller’s work since he began his career as an artist while still an agricultural research scientist in the early 1990s. He went on to install 2006′s Test Site, in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, which allowed gallery-goers to throw themselves down double-helix slides.

Overnight visitors to Soma have reported some strange events. Florian Wojnar, a friend of Höller’s, spent the night in the museum with his 11-year-old son. “He was really excited, because at some point, there were seven reindeer on one side and five on the other. In the morning, we counted again and there were six on each. I never saw them move.”

Dorothée Brill, the museum’s lead curator, says: “As far as we can tell, nobody’s done anything they shouldn’t have.” Staff at the restaurant, however, report that some guests “drink the minibar dry”.

It’s hard to resist the suspicion that the exhibition is intended as a microcosm of society, an allegory for democracy, with extra privileges and more fun for those able to pay. And, if this is an experiment, make no mistake: it’s you in the lab. Meanwhile, those tempted to make a Christmas visit should bear in mind that the Hamburger Bahnhof is closed on Christmas Eve. “The reindeer have somewhere else to be that day,” the museum explained.

• Soma is at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, until 6 February. Details:somainberlin.org

By the end of planning her new exhibition, Caroline Fisher had come to an interesting conclusion. “It’s even harder to exhibit rats than drugs,” she says. The Home Office eventually granted her the necessary licences to exhibit a bottle of heroin, a ball of opium, some morphine, a selection of magic mushrooms, a peyote cactus, some hallucinogenic snuff and a variety of Victorian high-street pharmacy favourites including cocaine mouth lozenges and tincture of Indian cannabis – “as many drugs as we could get our hands on”. But Health and Safety weren’t having the rats. “We wanted to recreate a 7m-long Rat Park,” Fisher sighs, referring to the classic 1970s Canadian experiment that showed opiate addiction in rodents was determined not by the drugs they took, but the living conditions they took them in.

By Johnny Davis for the Guardian

Fisher is the co-curator of High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture at the Wellcome Collection in London, and offers a history of narcotics that feels fresh. After all, we hardly need another account of the Romantic poets getting carried away with hashish, or more woolly recollections from acid house revellers who outwitted the police on the M25 while going to Sunrise.

“I don’t think anything similar has been done before,” says Mike Jay, the exhibition’s co-curator and author of an accompanying book. “There’s always been two different discourses, the ‘drug culture underground’ one and a rather more straight-lens way of looking at it, from a medical or political view. It’s the middle ground that feels interesting.”

High Society strives to cover as much of this middle ground as possible. It spans from pre-2000 BC chillum-style pipes fashioned from puma bones, to mephedrone and other internet-distributed synthetic stimulants of the 21st century. Along the way it takes in kava drinking in the South Pacific, betel chewing in Papua New Guinea and cocaine snorting in Weimar Germany. Tea, coffee and sugar also feature (albeit in supporting roles) and there’s plenty on the rise and fall of tobacco.

As such the exhibition is able to make its central premise: very few people live their lives without resorting to some sort of mind-altering substance. Taking drugs, it suggests, is “a universal impulse”. “Drug cultures are endlessly varied, but drugs in general are more or less ubiquitous among our species,” writes Jay. Later he quotes American anthropologist Donald Brown’s celebrated work Human Universals, which lists “mood- or consciousness-altering techniques and/or substances” as one of the essential components of human culture, along with “music, conflict resolution, language and play”. “The public perception is that drugs are this terrible thing that appeared with hippies in the 60s; that they’re a modern disease,” Jay says. “The historicality has been lost.”

The curators are at pains to underline the mutability of culture and society, and how a drug’s definition is determined by non-chemical factors such as intent behind its use, its method of administration and the social class of the user. (Nitrous oxide is a medicine when used by doctors, a drug when used for pleasure.) Even so a pattern soon establishes itself: a new mind-altering substance arrives accompanied by extravagant medical claims and counter-claims, gets enthusiastically taken up by sections of the public (usually the idle rich); then addiction and side-effects make themselves apparent over time.

“It was hard to designate drugs themselves as the problem when they were also being promoted to the public at large as the solution,” writes Jay of the nurses, doctors and military officers who were treating local infections with morphine injections in the 1880s, ushering in the first “morphinomaniacs” in the process. Elsewhere the 18th-century botanist and pioneering drug cataloguer Carl Linnaeus frowned upon coffee – he felt it sapped vitality and brought on early senility – but endorsed tobacco as a means of fighting infection. In a tract published in Leipzig in 1707, we see early adopters of tea being reprimanded for “drinking themselves to death” in the mindless pursuit of fashion. Around the same time the British literary intelligentsia waxed lyrical on the benefits of rounding an evening off with a few pipes of opium, something they believed helped digestion, fortified against fever and improved performance in the bedroom. Only alcohol seems to have maintained a constant reputation, viewed as the boorish vice of the corrupt elite in Roman times, banned across much of the Islamic world and the subject of US prohibition in the 1920s.

Still, High Society remains morally neutral. There won’t be any disclaimers. “We’re not doing, ‘Hey kids, drugs are good’, so ultimately we don’t need to do, ‘Hey kids, drugs are bad,’” reasons Jay. “Since that’s basically the entire popular discourse about drugs, it seems nice to get rid of both of them and take the subject on its own merit.”

High Society has commissioned some interactive artworks to help convey the quixotic effects of drugs on mind and body in the sober medium of an exhibition space. Joshua White was the resident artist at New York’s Fillmore East theatre during the late 60s. Using bottles of coloured liquids, hand-painted slides, lightbulbs on the end of sticks and clock faces, he projected his psychedelic “liquid light shows” on to live performances by Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane, among others. “Was my work best experienced on drugs? I would say so, yes,” says White, who’ll travel to the UK to install his new show at the Wellcome Collection. “Everybody had a different relationship with drugs back then, just as everybody in my parents’ generation had a different relationship with alcohol. Some people had a nice buzz; some people threw up. We would hire speed freaks for our special projects – get them to stay up all night gluing jewels on to a ball.”

There will also be a recreation of the “dreamachine”, the light-emitting cylinder built by artist Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’s “systems adviser” Ian Sommerville. “You look at it with your eyes shut in a dark room, and it supposedly recreates the hallucinatory experience,” explains Fisher.

Other contemporary artwork includes the video piece Cannabis In the UK, of artist Mark Harris reading Baudelaire’s Les Paradis Artificiels and Walter Benjamin’s Hashish in Marseilles to cannabis plants (“I hope it won’t be taken too seriously,” says Harris. “I just thought, ‘If you’re going to read to plants to make them grow, what better than to read to cannabis plants something about the effects of the drug?’”), and photographer Mark Leffingwell’s “collective intoxication” picture depicting 10,000 people gathered at the University of Colorado for a “smoke-in” to commemorate “420″, an event observed across America every 20 April to promote the legalisation of marijuana.

If none of those do the trick, there are plenty of accounts from the history of self-experimentation. There’s the study on nitrous oxide performed by 18th-century chemist Humphry Davy, who got fed up with testing the gas on rabbits, kittens and fish and took heroic quantities himself, reaching the less than empirical conclusion that “nothing exists but thoughts”. There’s the story of the family who discovered the liberty cap mushroom by accident: cooking some up for a morning broth they developed vertigo, visions and the overwhelming sensation they were dying, only to leave the house for help and forget why they had done so a few hundred metres later. (When a doctor did eventually reach them, the situation was scarcely improved by the family’s eight-year-old, whose symptoms proved unique: bursting into raucous laughter every time his terrified parents opened their mouths.) And there’s French psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau, who suggested that the low prevalence of insanity in the Arab world was down to a preference for cannabis over alcohol: testing his theory he swallowed three grams before dinner and found himself preparing to fight a duel with a bowl of candied fruit.

From more recent times there’s a photograph of “father of MDMA” and sometime US Drug Enforcement Agency employee Alexander Shulgin. Shulgin’s popularisation of ecstasy eventually gave rise to acid house, the last significant drug-led subculture. High Society largely steers clear of examining the hows and whys of such moments; in fact there’s little on why we might be drawn towards illicit drugs in the first place. “I just think it’s self-evident that people wouldn’t take drugs if they didn’t enjoy them,” Jay shrugs.

The most recent UN figures put the illegal drug trade at $320bn (£200bn) a year – the third biggest international market on the planet, after arms and oil. “2011 is the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs,” Jay says. “That’s the 50th anniversary of global prohibition; they’ve been trying for 50 years to achieve that. What’s so ironic is that 1961 was precisely the time when the drug counterculture formed; the point where policing started to fall apart with the surge in demand that was coming. Today our culture has become even more experimental: we regard it as a good thing to try something exotic and different, in a way that it just wasn’t 50 years ago. So it’s very hard to say, ‘That’s the way we are in culture. Oh – except for drugs, which have to be hived off.’”

Given that more people take more drugs than at any other time in history, you might wonder if they’ll ever be part of a counterculture again. At a time when Keith Richards is a bestselling author off the back of his national treasure status as a chemical dustbin, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken steps to decriminalise marijuana possession in California and Prince Harry is found inhaling “hippy crack”, it’s difficult to see how drugs could be more mainstream. “I wouldn’t be surprised if in five years, marijuana wasn’t fully legalised all over the US,” says Leffingwell. “Most people don’t see it as any more harmful than having a beer.”

Others suggest that the seeds of a new, drug-led counterculture are all around us. “I think smart drugs, things that boost your IQ such as Modafinil, could lend themselves to certain music,” says Jay. “Very techy electronica.”

To return to High Society’s premise, then: the drugs we consume may change – from over-the-counter laudanum in Victorian times, to over-the-internet mephedrone today – but the human relationship with them remains strangely constant. “Nothing’s changed,” says White. “The form changes, the fickleness changes – but our cravings stay the same.”

High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture is at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE from 11 Nov to 27 Feb. wellcomecollection.org

Listen to the fascinating BBC Radio documentary here

But documents obtained by the American writer Hank Albarelli suggest that rather than simple ‘ergot’ there was a strong possibility that the symptoms and the nature of the outbreak were not a tragic accident. In his research in to the mysterious death of the CIA biochemist Frank Olson and his post-war work on LSD and its uses as a biochemical weapon he got hold of papers implying Olson’s connection with the Pont St Esprit outbreak.

Mike follows up the claims talking to experts in LSD and its impact, historians of the cold-war search for the perfect biochemical weapon and agricultural scientists specialising in ergot poisoning. He also visits the town of Pont St Esprit and talks to one survivor, the local postman Leon Armundier, about the events of 1951. Leon describes of the horrors he faced as a young man, being forced into a straight-jacket for a week as burning sensations and images of snakes raged around him.
Many in the town are uneasy at re-opening the old story about Le Pain Maudit – the evil bread – preferring the establishment ‘truth’ that it was just a tragic accident. But there are some who believe a proper examination of the facts still hasn’t taken place.

The French Media

How one French magazine covered the incident in 1951.

Victim

Leon Armunier, now 86, was a victim of Le Pain Maudit.

CIA Document

Contemporary CIA document referring to Pont Saint Esprit.

The Hospital

Local hospital, now closed, where the victims were taken.

Pont Saint Esprit by the River Rhone

In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country. The craving for ethyl alcohol and the opiates has been stronger, in these millions, than the love of God, of home, of children; even of life. Their cry was not for liberty or death; it was for death preceded by enslavement. There is a paradox here, and a mystery. Why should such multitudes of men and women be so ready to sacrifice themselves for a cause so utterly hopeless and in ways so painful and so profoundly humiliating?

To this riddle there is, of course, no simple or single answer. Human beings are immensely complicated creatures, living simultaneously in a half dozen different worlds. Each individual is unique and, in a number of respects, unlike all the other members of the species. None of our motives is unmixed, none of our actions can be traced back to a single source and, in any group we care to study, behavior patterns that are observably similar may be the result of many constellations of dissimilar causes.

Thus, there are some alcoholics who seem to have been biochemically predestined to alcoholism (Among rats, as Prof. Roger Williams, of the University of Texas, has shown, some are born drunkards; some are born teetotalers and will never touch the stuff.) Other alcoholics have been foredoomed not by some inherited defect in their biochemical make-up, but by their neurotic reactions to distressing events in their childhood or adolescence. Again, others embark upon their course of slow suicide as a result of mere imitation and good fellowship because they have made such an “excellent adjustment to their group” – a process which, if the group happens to be criminal, idiotic or merely ignorant, can bring only disaster to the well-adjusted individual. Nor must we forget that large class of addicts who have taken to drugs or drink in order to escape from physical pain. Aspirin, let us remember, is a very recent invention. Until late in the Victorian era, “poppy and mandragora,” along with henbane and ethyl alcohol, were the only pain relievers available to civilized man. Toothache, arthritis and neuralgia could, and frequently did, drive men and women to become opium addicts.

De Quincey, for example, first resorted to opium in order to relieve “excruciating rheumatic pains of the head.” He swallowed his poppy and, an hour later, “What a resurrection from the lowest depths of the inner spirit! What an apocalypse!” And it was not merely that he felt no more pain. “This negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened up before me, in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed…. Here was the secret of happiness. about which the philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered.”

“Resurrection. apocalypse, divine enjoyment. happiness. . . .” De Quincey’s words lead us to the very heart of our paradoxical mystery. The problem of drug addiction and excessive drinking is not merely a matter of chemistry and psychopathology, of relief from pain and conformity with a bad society. It is also a problem in metaphysics – a problem, one might almost say, in theology. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James has touched on these metaphysical aspects of addiction:

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties in human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no. Drunkenness expands, unites and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things into the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only through the fleeting earlier phases of what, in its totality, is so degrading a poison. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in Our opinion of that larger whole.

William James was not the first to detect a likeness between drunkenness and the mystical and premystical states. On the day of Pentecost there were people who explained the strange behavior of the disciples by saying, “These men are full of new wine.

Peter soon undeceived them: “These are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day. But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel. And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh.”

And it is not only by “the dry critics of the sober hour” that the state of God-intoxication has been likened to drunkenness. In their efforts to express the inexpressible, the great mystics themselves have done the same. Thus, St. Theresa of Avila tells us that she “regards the centre of our soul as a cellar, into which God admits us as and when it pleases Him, so as to intoxicate us with the delicious wine of His grace.”

Every fully developed religion exists simultaneously on several different levels. It exists as a set of abstract concepts about the world and its governance. It exists as a set of rites and sacraments, as a traditional method for manipulating the symbols, by means of which beliefs about the cosmic order are expressed. It exists as the feelings of love, fear and devotion evoked by this manipulation of symbols.

And finally it exists as a special kind of feeling or intuition – a sense of the oneness of all things in their divine principle, a realization (to use the language of Hindu theology) that “thou art That,” a mystical experience of what seems self-evidently to be union with God.

The ordinary waking consciousness is a very useful and, on most occasions, an indispensable state of mind; but it is by no means the only form of consciousness, nor in all circumstances the best. Insofar as he transcends his ordinary self and his ordinary mode of awareness, the mystic is able to enlarge his vision, to look more deeply into the unfathomable miracle of existence.

The mystical experience is doubly valuable, it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a less self-centered and more creative life.

In hell, a great religious poet has written, the punishment of the lost is to be “their sweating selves, but worse.” On earth we are not worse than we are: we are merely our sweating selves, period.

Alas, that is quite bad enough. We love ourselves to the point of idolatry, but we also intensely dislike ourselves – we find ourselves unutterably boring. Correlated with this distaste for the idolatrously worshiped self, there is in all of us a desire, sometimes latent, sometimes conscious and passionately expressed, to escape from the prison of our individuality, an urge to self-transcendence. It is to this urge that we owe mystical theology, spiritual exercises and yoga – to this, too, that we owe alcoholism and drug addiction.

Modern pharmacology has given us a host of new synthetics, but in the field of the naturally occurring mind changers it has made psychological methods of self-control preferable from every point of view to complacency imposed from without by the methods of chemical control.

And now let us consider the case – not, alas, a hypothetical case – of two societies competing with each other. In Society A, tranquilizers are available by prescription and at a rather stiff price which means, in practice, that their use is confined to that rich and influential minority which provides the society with its leadership. This minority of leading citizens consumes several billions of the complacency – producing pills every year. In Society B, on the other hand, the tranquilizers are not so freely available, and the members of the influential minority do not resort, on the slightest provocation, to the chemical control of what may be necessary and productive tension. Which of these two competing societies is likely to win the race? A society whose leaders make an excessive use of soothing syrups is in danger of failing behind a society whose leaders are not over-tranquilized.

Now let us consider another kind of drug – still undiscovered, but probably just around the corner – a drug capable of making people feel happy in situations where they would normally feel miserable. Such a drug would be a blessing, but a blessing fraught with grave political dangers. By making harmless chemical euphoria freely available, a dictator could reconcile an entire population to a state of affairs to which self-respecting human beings ought not to be reconciled. Despots have always found it necessary to supplement force by political or religious propaganda. In this sense the pen is mightier than the sword. But mightier than either the pen or the sword is the pill. In mental hospitals it has been found that chemical restraint is far more effective than strait jackets or psychiatry. The dictatorships of tomorrow will deprive men of their freedom, but will give them in exchange a happiness none the less real, as a subjective experience, for being chemically induced. The pursuit of happiness is one of the traditional rights of man; unfortunately, the achievement of happiness may turn out to be incompatible with another of man’s rights – liberty.

It is quite possible, however, that pharmacology will restore with one hand what it takes away with the other. Chemically induced euphoria could easily become a threat to individual liberty:, but chemically induced vigor and chemically heightened intelligence could easily be liberty’s strongest bulwark. Most of us function at about 15 per cent of capacity. How can we step up our lamentably low efficiency?

Two methods are available – the educational and the biochemical. We can take adults and children as they are and give them a much better training than we are giving them now. Or, by appropriate biochemical methods, we can transform them into superior individuals. If these superior individuals are given a superior education, the results will be revolutionary. They will be startling even if we continue to subject them to the rather poor educational methods at present in vogue.

Will it in fact be possible to produce superior individuals by biochemical means? The Russians certainly believe it. They are now halfway through a Five Year Plan to produce “pharmacological substances that normalize higher nervous activity and heighten human capacity for work.” Precursors of these future mind improvers are already being experimented with. It has been found, for example, that when given in massive doses some of the vitamins – nicotinic acid and ascorbic acid for example – sometimes produce a certain heightening of psychic energy. A combination of two enzymes – ethylene disulphonate and adenosine triphosphate, which, when injected together, improve carbohydrate metabolism in nervous tissue – may also turn out to be effective.

Meanwhile good results are being claimed for various new synthetic, nearly harmless stimulants. There is iproniazid, which, according to some authorities, “appears to increase the total amount of psychic energy.” Unfortunately, iproniazid in large doses has side effects which in some cases may be extremely serious! Another psychic energizer is an amino alcohol which is thought to increase the body’s production of acetylcholine, a substance of prime importance in the functioning of the nervous system. In view of what has already been achieved, it seems quite possible that, within a few years, we may be able to lift ourselves up by our own biochemical bootstraps.

in the meantime let us all fervently wish the Russians every success in their current pharmacological venture. The discovery of a drug capable of increasing the average individual’s psychic energy, and its wide distribution throughout the U.S.S.R., would probably mean the end of Russia’s present form of government. Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy. Even in the democratic West we could do with a bit of psychic energizing. Between them, education and pharmacology may do something to offset the effects of that deterioration of our biological material to which geneticists have frequently called attention.

From these political and ethical considerations let us now pass to the strictly religious problems that will be posed by some of the new mind changers. We can foresee the nature of these future problems by studying the effects of a natural mind changer, which has been used for centuries past in religious worship; I refer to the peyote cactus of Northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States. Peyote contains mescaline – which can now be produced synthetically – and mescaline in William James’ phrase, “stimulates the mystical faculties in human nature” far more powerfully and in a far more enlightening way than alcohol and, what is more, it does so at a physiological and social cost that is negligibly low. Peyote produces self-transcendence in two ways – it introduces the taker into the Other World of visionary experience, and it gives him a sense of solidarity with his fellow worshipers, with human beings at large and with the divine nature of things.

The effects of peyote can be duplicated by synthetic mescaline and by LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), a derivative of ergot. Effective in incredibly small doses, LSD is now being used experimentally by psychotherapists in Europe, in South America, in Canada and the United States. It lowers the barrier between conscious and subconscious and permits the patient to look more deeply and understandingly into the recesses of his own mind. The deepening of self-knowledge takes place against a background of visionary and even mystical experience.

When administered in the right kind of psychological environment, these chemical mind changers make possible a genuine religious experience. Thus a person who takes LSD or mescaline may suddenly understand not only intellectually but organically, experientially the meaning of such tremendous religious affirmations as “God is love,” or “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”

It goes without saying that this kind of temporary self-transcendence is no guarantee of permanent enlightenment or a lasting improvement of conduct. It is a “gratuitous grace,” which is neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation, but which if properly used, can be enormously helpful to those who have received it. And this is true of all such experiences, whether occurring spontaneously, or as the result of swallowing the right kind of chemical mind changer, or after undertaking a course of “spiritual exercises” or bodily mortification.

Those who are offended by the idea that the swallowing of a pill may contribute to a genuinely religious experience should remember that all the standard mortifications – fasting, voluntary sleeplessness and self-torture – inflicted upon themselves by the ascetics of every religion for the purpose of acquiring merit, are also, like the mind-changing drugs, powerful devices for altering the chemistry of the body in general and the nervous system in particular. Or consider the procedures generally known as spiritual exercises. The breathing techniques taught by the yogi of India result in prolonged suspensions of respiration. These in turn result in an increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the blood; and the psychological consequence of this is a change in the quality of consciousness. Again, meditations involving long, intense concentration upon it single idea or image may also result – for neurological reasons which I do not profess to understand – in a slowing down of respiration and even in prolonged suspensions of breathing.

Many ascetics and mystics have practiced their chemistry-changing mortifications and spiritual exercises while living, for longer or shorter periods, as hermits. Now, the life of a hermit, such as Saint Anthony, is a life in which there are very few external stimuli. But as Hebb, John Lilly and other experimental psychologists have recently shown in the laboratory, a person in a limited environment, which provides very few external stimuli, soon undergoes a change in the quality of his consciousness and may transcend his normal self to the point of hearing voices or seeing visions, often extremely unpleasant, like so many of Saint Anthony’s visions, but sometimes beatific.

That men and women can, by physical and chemical means, transcend themselves in a genuinely spiritual way is something which, to the squeamish idealist, seems rather shocking. But, after all, the drug or the physical exercise is not the cause of the spiritual experience; it is only its occasion.

Writing of William James’ experiments with nitrous oxide, Bergson has summed up the whole matter in a few lucid sentences. “The psychic disposition was there, potentially, only waiting a signal to express itself in action. It might have been evoked spiritually by an effort made on its own spiritual level. But it could just as well be brought about materially, by an inhibition of what inhibited it, by the removing of an obstacle; and this effect was the wholly negative one produced by the drug.” Where, for any reason, physical or moral, the psychological dispositions are unsatisfactory, the removal of obstacles by a drug or by ascetic practices will result in a negative rather than a positive spiritual experience. Such an infernal experience is extremely distressing, but may also be extremely salutary. There are plenty of people to whom a few hours in hell – the hell that they themselves have done so much to create – could do a world of good.

Physiologically costless, or nearly costless, stimulators of the mystical faculties are now making their appearance, and many kinds of them will soon be on the market. We can be quite sure that, as and when they become available, they will be extensively used. The urge to self-transcendence is so strong and so general that it cannot be otherwise. In the past, very few people have had spontaneous experiences of a premystical or fully mystical nature; still fewer have been willing to undergo the psychophysical disciplines which prepare an insulated individual for this kind of self-transcendence. The powerful but nearly costless mind changers of the future will change all this completely. Instead of being rare, premystical and mystical experiences will become common. What was once the spiritual privilege of the few will be made available to the many. For the ministers of the world’s organized religions, this will raise a number of unprecedented problems. For most people, religion has always been a matter of traditional symbols and of their own emotional, intellectual and ethical response to those symbols. To men and women who have had direct experience of self-trascendence into the mind’s Other World of vision and union with the nature of things, a religion of mere symbols is not likely to be very staisfying. The perusal of a page from even the most beautifully written cookbook is no substitute for the eating of dinner. We are exhorted to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”

In one way or another, the world’s ecclesiastical authorities will have to come to terms with the new mind changers. They may come to terms with them negatively, by refusing to have anything to do with them. In that case, a psychological phenomenon, potentially of great spiritual value, will manifest itself outside the pale of organized religion. On the other hand, they may choose to come to terms with the mind changers in some positive way – exactly how, I am not prepared to guess.

My own belief is that, though they may start by being something of an embarrassment, these new mind changers will tend in the long run to deepen the spiritual life of the communities in which they are available. That famous “revival of religion,” about which so many people have been talking for so long, will not come about as the result of evangelistic mass meetings or the television appearances of photogenic clergymen. It will come about as the result of biochemical discoveries that will make it possible for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things. And this revival of religion will be at the same time a revolution. From being an activity mainly concerned with symbols, religion will be transformed into an activity concerned mainly with experience and intuition – an everyday mysticism underlying and giving significance to everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, everyday human relationships.

Inside City Hall in Oakland, Calif., Jim Wilcox explained his plan for a commercial marijuana farm. “My idea was a Silicon Valley of cannabis,” he told the city council recently. “An office park for pot.” The council has approved the creation, licensing and taxing of four such medical marijuana farms inside Oakland city limits.

Four hundred miles to the south in Los Angeles, it’s a completely different story. After four years running the Pure Life Alternative Wellness Center, Yami Bolanos fears her medical marijuana dispensary will be shut down. “The patients are the ones that are getting screwed royally by the city council.”

Los Angeles is cracking down hard on the number of “collectives”, which have grown like weeds in the last few years. By some estimates, there were 700 medical marijuana dispensaries a few months ago, more pot outlets than Starbucks in LA. A new law will reduce that number to 182. “The sale of marijuana has never been approved by voters,” says Los Angeles Assistant Attorney Asha Greenberg. “Cities have the ability to restrict the numbers of collectives.”

This tale of two cities reflects a divergence of opinion in California over the future of what may be its largest cash crop. Voters will decide in November whether to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes.

The State Board of Equalization estimates that pot in California is worth $15 billion a year. Taxing it could bring in $1.5 billion in much-needed revenues. But that’s based on current prices. A Rand study suggests that if the November ballot measure passes, prices could drop 90 percent to $38 an ounce, while consumption could increase as much as 100 percent.

Jane Wells
CNBC Reporter

The November initiative, called Proposition 19, would allow California residents 21 years or older to grow marijuana at home for personal use, in an area no larger than 25 square feet. It would also allow adults 21 and older to possess and transport up to an ounce. Finally, it would allow local governments to license, regulate, and tax commercial growers and sellers. Like alcohol, sales to anyone under 21 would be banned.

“Look at all the people that are being killed in Mexico every day, as well as the home invasion robberies and other things that come from the inflated price that’s caused by prohibition,” says Richard Lee, who authored Prop 19. Lee runs Oaksterdam University in Oakland, a school which teaches people how to grow medical marijuana and run a dispensary.

Lee says the benefits of legalization go beyond sales tax revenues, and include “ancillary benefits such a tourism, jobs, and hotel rooms and transportation and food that would go along with the cannabis industry.”

“They will probably two, three, four to one outraise us financially,” says Covina police chief Kim Raney, leading the No on Prop 19 campaign, “but I think our message will be clear. I think our message will be the truth, and I think the voters in the state will understand that.”

What is clear is that Prop 19 will again put California’s marijuana laws in direct opposition to the feds. Because of that, the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office says it’s impossible to know how much money the state might bring in.

The LAO says savings to correctional facilities “could reach several tens of millions of dollars annually,” and a new jobs-creating industry could let the state “eventually collect hundreds of millions of dollars annually in additional revenues.” But with the federal government poised at any moment to snuff out any legalized pot business, “the revenue and expenditure impacts of this measure are subject to significant uncertainty.”

Public opinion polls have delivered conflicting results on the initiative’s chances for success. “I think in November, (voters) will realize the consequences and devastation that this act will have on their communities, and I think the voters will turn it down,” says Chief Raney.

Richard Lee’s pro-Prop 19 group has hired an Internet fundraising company used during the Obama campaign, and its Facebook page has well over 130,000 fans. The political battle will be fierce, and opposition may come from unexpected sources. “Two groups that have come out against (Prop 19) are growers who don’t want to pay taxes,” he says, “and the cops who want to keep getting the forfeiture money and seizure money, and job security from it.”

MINDSET
I was born in Washington State on the edge of Western exploration in the New World in
the summer of 1971. I came of age in and around the communal rooms of AA, NA, ACA,
Alanon and Alateen throughout the Pacific and Mountain West. My father is 33 years
sober. His father died 14 years sober in 1982.

I too wrestled my psychospiritual demons through alcohol and Cannabis which gratefully
led me to the rooms of AA and NA where, at the age of 14, I declared myself an
alcoholic and an addict. I delved headlong into the 12 Steps and promptly saw that I had
wrapped myself in a shame-bound identity (‘ism’ – internalised shame manifested). Upon
recognising this, I had the promised spiritual awakening of the twelfth step. I then sought,
via being of service to other addicts and alcoholics, to maintain this awareness.

Eventually, I came to a point where I just didn’t feel I belonged in AA. I felt that what I
had come to learn had been learned. I was no longer afraid to be alive nor was I willing to
hide. I had recovered from my shame-bound self. In short, I got tired of pretending that
there was something wrong with me, I had become a spiritualized being living a
predominantly joyous and fulfilling life.

So, on October 31st 1993, on the eve of my 8th AA birthday, I ended my inflexible ‘once
and always’ identification with alcoholism and drug addiction. This came about in an
“All Hallows Eve” ritual which had a ‘spiced wine’ component. I had requested of my
partner that my wine be heated to remove the alcohol. This was done.

As we journeyed through the ritual, I pondered the rigid way in which I had insisted on
having the alcohol removed from my ‘sacrament’. I had recalled seeing a heart-rate
monitor flat-line. Life had pulse, it had cycles, and a flat-line meant only one thing:
death.

In a flash, I realized the most important insight: Life is transformation. Life is a cycle of
death and rebirth, renewing itself each day. Upon recognising this, I declared to my
companions in a choked up teary-eyed expression, “I am recovered.” My future
uncertain, my world of illusion shattered, I ventured forth into unfamiliar territory. The
ritual had worked.

2
About three weeks later, a friend of mine, John, was coming to visit me in Idaho. He and
I had met in Yosemite Valley, California, at an AA meeting. We had been sober and
travelled together for six years; he had ended his tour of AA with much the same
realization as I had. We chose to celebrate his arrival by drinking our first beer together.
Absolutely nothing happened, we didn’t foam at the mouth or go into fits of obsessive
compulsive behaviour, nothing.

Another three weeks passed and John and I rented the video, The Making of ‘A Brief
History of Time’ by Stephen Hawking (Hawking, 1992). As it started John said, “Oh hey,
did I mention to you all, I have some Liquid LSD that ‘the Lorax’ made.” I knew ‘the
Lorax’ was a mad, old-school chemist and I trusted and respected him. I had also heard a
few stories of peoples’ spiritual adventures with LSD, peyote cacti and ‘magic’
mushrooms; not least of which were told by many ‘Deadheads’ I had known whilst being
a ‘clean and sober Wharf Rat’ on Grateful Dead tour. I also knew that Bill Wilson, the
co-founder of AA, had consumed LSD with spiritual intent (Wilson, 1984). With all this,
I was curious.

SETTING
On a cold night in December of 1993, I ingested approximately 250 micrograms of LSD.
Although, I was borne into a global ‘War on (some people who use some) Drugs’, I was
unaware that I had just ingested the forbidden fruit, or at least the modern-day variant.

I ‘tuned in’ somewhere in the midst with Stephen Hawking philosophizing about the
origins of the universe. About an hour or so in, I wanted to go outside. After discovering
that I could still don my foul weather gear, tie my shoelaces and otherwise perform with
dexterous ease, I stepped out for a snowy night-time walk through the woods to the
lakeshore; damn, the world was breathlessly bright and I awoke into a childlike wonder!

INSIGHT
Several hours later, whilst it lightly snowed on my face where I lay buried in the pea-
gravel of the lakeshore, I recognised ‘I’ was still and yet my experience was vast:
complete absorption; self had vanished. This was my first glimpse of a possible ‘Land
without Evil’.

Two hundred years earlier William Blake wrote, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(1793), “I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses
discover’d the infinite in everything”. Transformed by my ineffable LSD experience, I
knew what he meant; there was no going back.

In less than eight hours I had been shown a rare glimpse of the power of the human mind
to shape reality. I saw that my limited neurotypical consciousness was only one plane,
level or aspect and that there were infinite new things to discover. I found new
perspectives on birth, death, and the nature of mind and consciousness as the field of
creation. The experience of the oneness of all things replaced the myth of separation.
Perennial wisdom dawned and my heart burst forth in praise, gratitude and love, rooted in
a mindset of compassion for self and other.
3
INTEGRATION
In absorptive reverie, I began to integrate these insights whilst a deep desire welled up
within me to study consciousness and its intersection with mysticism, the creation of
religious belief systems and man’s place in this great biosphere. Some hours later, I was
roused by the bells ringing out at the local community college a mile across the water; I
had never noticed them before. It was time to go to school!

Later that morning, still reeling from the profound transformations of the previous 13
hours, innocent, humbled and hungry for wisdom, I went down to the local community
college and, in tears, I begged them to let me in. I was 22, I had not graduated high
school and I was determined to do what ever it took to understand what had just
happened to me, to validate my experience and to find others who had tasted these
forbidden fruits.

At school I refused to hide. I boldly declared to anyone who would listen that I was intent
on studying psychedelics, psychoactivity, consciousness and its interconnection with
religious belief systems. Several professors, friends and family attempted to steer me
from my path concerned that I would end up in prison. They were right but I was willing
to pay the piper if the monkey showed up with the cup; indeed, Martin Luther King Jr.
had said (King, 1963):

“[A]n individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly
accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community
over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.”

Here, those in power had drawn a line in the sand on the shores of a Rubicon which I had
already crossed; so, I knew and accepted my possible futures and pasts. Hell, after
promising certain death, all God could think to do was throw Adam and Eve out of the
Garden for eating the forbidden fruit. If that is the worse that can happen, so be it.

In school I learned that not only has mankind been intentionally consuming psychoactive
substances to alter mental functioning for a proverbial eon or two, we also consume
plants rich in alkaloids as an important source of nutrition and energy for survival,
particularly in stressful environmental conditions. This suggests an evolutionary purpose
for ‘drug’ taking and illustrates our symbiotic relationship with plants evident in our
shared chemical communicants.

I also learned that in the last twelve thousand years or so there has evolved a priest-class
hell-bent on maintaining control of these substances as a way of enforcing the artificial
divide between orthodox and heretical experience (Council on Spiritual Practices, 1997).

I recognised this artificial divide as the crux of the ‘War on (some) Drugs’ that continued
an ancient ‘pharmacratic inquisition’ which had begun sixteen hundred years earlier
when Alaric’s Goths sacked the sanctuary at Eleusis ending a two thousand year old
Mystery religion which centred on the ingestion of a sacred potion, the kykeon; where
individuals permitted to imbibe saw ‘ta hiera’, ‘the holy’ (Ott 1993, 1995). It has been
4
suggested that the kykeon is derived from the Ergot fungus, Claviceps, which grows on
many cereal grains, synthesises the biochemical precursor of Lysergic Acid
Diethylamide, LSD, and, is the source of Ergotism also known as ‘St. Anthony’s Fire’
(Ruck, Wasson & Hofmann, 1978; Schultes, Hofmann & Rätsch, 1979, 2001).

COMMITMENT
On learning this, I made a commitment to myself that I would synthesise Albert
Hofmann’s ‘Problem Child’, LSD (Hofmann, 1979). I had completed the requisite
undergraduate chemistry courses, so, I knew I was capable of synthesising most
psychedelic-type drugs, but I was not yet ready; I was experiencing the adage “when the
student is ready the master will appear”. So, after some pedagogical meandering and
whilst continuing to experiment with various psychedelic compounds, I fixed on
biochemistry and medical anthropology as the paradigmatic backdrop upon which I
would unite my conscious studies and psychospiritual development.

ACTION
Central to therapeutic efficacy, as described by an interdisciplinary Medical
Anthropology, is the power of declaration either made by the sufferer or the healer that is
listened by the sufferer with credibility or faith (Csordas & Kleinman, 1996); this
especially holds in the magico-religious context outside of Western Biomedicine and
married nicely to my insights from AA’s 12 Steps, the use of psychedelics, meditation
and the personal empowerment paradigm I had engaged in as a participant of Landmark
Education. Crucially, I was able to apply this to myself.

As I matured and my insights began to consistently manifest in new ways of being which
produced measurable results, I engaged in lively philosophical transactions within the
scholastic community and followed my intellectual curiosity until, after 11 semesters, the
public funding ran out.

Conveniently, during my last school semester, I managed to talk the Anthropology
department Head into giving me a grant and credit to attend the spring 2000
Entheobotany Seminar in Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico. All I had to do was present a slide
show, talk and a paper when I got back.

Entheobotany is the study of plant entheogens. The neologism entheogen derives from an
obsolete Greek word meaning “realizing the divine within” – the term used by the ancient
Greeks to describe states of poetic or prophetic inspiration – and now used to describe the
entheogenic state which can be induced by sacred plant-drugs. (Ott, 1993, 1995)

In Palenque, I was in an indefatigably good mood as I had found validation of my path
and true community with which to resonate. I was no longer a lone psychonaut. I had
arrived and just in the nick of time. Suddenly, I was immersed in a diverse community of
those who were on the path of the entheogenically inclined. I was ecstatic to say the least.
I took notes and photographed the main speakers for my slideshow. I tried to absorb as
much of the proceedings as I could whilst I sampled a veritable variety of other
entheogenic entities, i.e. psychedelic-type drugs. In so doing, I noticed a number of
5
individual conference participants had subjectively bioassayed 2C-T-7, an entheogenic
phenethylamine substantially similar to the mescaline found naturally in peyote cacti
(Shulgin & Shulgin, 1991).

Recognizing this as an opportunity to further the understanding of 2C-T-7 through
anecdotal experiential accounts and to lend credibility to the scientific methodology of
the subjective bioassay, I transformed insight into action, prepared and administered a
written survey and, with gratuitous grace, the Multidisciplinary Association of
Psychedelic Studies agreed to publish the results in their forthcoming summer 2000
Bulletin, 10 (2).

Upon returning to the States, I knew my life was never going to be the same. I presented
my slideshow to about 50 people from the University, about half of whom where
professors. I received the credit, a serious cheer, and respect. What a confirmation of my
path.

OPENINGS
I wrote up the 2C-T-7 article whilst under the influence of 2C-T-7 and to this day no one
has noticed that I classically forgot to count myself and ‘K-dog’ in the 48 bioassays.
Shortly thereafter an individual who had just renewed his subscription to the MAPS
Bulletin, which had lapsed for some years, got his first new issue.

I received a cryptic letter from him. He told me he had studied for 20+ years the
phenethylamine and tryptamine families of psychedelic-type drugs until the 1986 US
Controlled Substances Analogue Act came into force. He said he had seen my article in
the MAPS Bulletin and thought I might want to communicate; mysteriously, I ignored his
letter.

Later that fall he wrote again. This time more direct and to the point. He was serious. He
wanted to give me his lab and years of research notes. He wanted someone to pick up his
torch. Was the student ready? Had the master appeared? Knowing from direct experience
the profound impact of these molecules to facilitate healing and shatter epistemological
paradigms, I wanted to be of service and thus I was more than willing. So in spring 2001
I picked up his torch and began the slow process of assembling the materials for a
sufficient laboratory.

I recognised my bench practice was limited but I had worked in the biology and
chemistry labs throughout university. I cold-called Sigma Aldrich Chemical Co., danced
through their questions, ordered the chemicals and purchased, via the Web, more used
glassware.

I began by making mistake after mistake until I succeeded finally in making a viable,
purified molecule: 2C-D, another psychedelic phenethylamine. I chose 2C-D because I
had a fantastic recipe and the precursors and reagents to start four steps back thereby
improving my skill and avoiding detection. 2C-D has a very gentle dose-response curve
6
with a fantastically large range. 2C-D is what some have called a ‘pharmacological tofu’
(Shulgin & Shulgin, 1991).

Imbibing my first home-made entheogen was a serious triumph. Even better was sharing
the gift with my friends and family. The results were immediate and over the years many
people have expressed their appreciation of my facilitations of their psychospiritual
transformations. I would thank them for ingesting, remind them that they had done the
work and ask that if they could do but one thing, they could integrate their insights and
transform them into concrete actions which make a difference for humanity.

Unexpectedly, whilst at play in the fields of the Lords, opportunities abounded and my
services were in high demand. I was travelling the world from one conference to another,
stopping off in foreign lands to learn of their people’s drugs of choice; and I saw
intimately how today’s diversion of immense resources away from the everyday needs of
humanity to combat a ‘War on (some) Drugs’ leaves people thirsty, hungry and destitute,
and so they turn with evolutionary predictability to the very drugs the West is purportedly
seeking to suppress.

In December 2001 I attended the ‘Ibogaine Conference’ in London on the eboga plant,
Tabernanthe iboga and its alkaloids. Eboga is an African rainforest shrub of the Gabon
region traditionally used by indigenous peoples of western Africa in low doses to combat
fatigue, hunger and thirst, and in higher doses as a sacrament in spiritual initiation
ceremonies.

Ibogaine is a naturally-occurring psychoactive indole derived from the roots of
Tabernanthe iboga whose pharmacological properties have been researched for over 100
years. In fact, ibogaine was marketed in France until 1970 as Lambarene to promote a
sense of well being. In 1962, Howard Lotsof discovered the efficacy of ibogaine for
treatment of drug dependence and, in 1985, “he was awarded a series of use patents
related to ibogaine’s apparent ability to ‘interrupt’ a wide range of substance abuse
disorders, including those associated with opiates (heroin), opioids (methadone),
stimulants (cocaine & amphetamine), as well as alcohol, nicotine and poly-substance
abuse” (Anonymous, 2003).

At the conference in London I was offered the opportunity and funding to set up and run
a sub-pilot Tabernanthe extraction laboratory in order to isolate ibogaine. I accepted the
offer and immediately began acquiring the necessary materials to conduct laboratory
work. By June 2002 my lab was up and running and I was fulfilling my obligations with a
traditional organic laboratory, including all necessary reagents, enabling me to follow
almost any common organic synthesis or phytochemical research and development path I
so chose. As capital and experience was reinvested, my capabilities and competencies
expanded.

I chose to synthesise the phenethylamine 2C-B for my own psychospiritual explorations.
2C-B had been invented in 1974 by Alexander Shulgin. He introduced it to
psychotherapists around the world, many of whom found it of value in creating a warm,
7
empathetic bond between patient and healer, as its pharmacological action helps dissolve
one’s ego-defences, enabling an individual to contact suppressed emotions and repressed
memories, helping to resolve psychospiritual trauma (Shulgin & Shulgin, 1991; Stolaroff,
1994). In time, my efforts went towards facilitating a reliable pure source of 2C-B for
psychotherapists.

FULFILMENT
Late 2002, I was approached with the express intent of synthesising LSD for a group. It
was my first chance at LSD synthesis and I took the opportunity though in my heart I had
no desire to continue working with this group after completion of the agreement. I was
successful.

Then, in early 2003, I created the opportunity to research the ergot fungus, Claviceps,
first hand. Ergot is possibly the single most important medicinal genus on the planet, as
evidenced by the volume of literature on ergot as well as the current use of over 400
prescription compounds (Kr!n & Cvak, 1999). In fact, it was medicinal ergot research
which facilitated the 1943 discovery of LSD and other lysergamides by Albert Hofmann,
a chemist working for Sandoz Pharmaceutical in Basel, Switzerland whilst looking for a
blood stimulant. Prior to it being controlled by international agreement in the 1971 UN
Convention on Psychotropic Substances, LSD underwent thousands of hours of clinical,
laboratory and psychotherapeutic research with many promising results (Erowid, 2005).

Notably, LSD is substantially similar to the psychoactive Lysergic Acid Amide found in
the sacred Convolvulaceae Morning Glory, Ololiuqui, which, until 1955, Mazatec
curanderas of the Oaxaca highlands of Mexico utilized undisturbed for more than three
millennia alongside teonánacatl, the ‘sacred mushroom’ of the Aztecs, Psilocybe
mexicana and Psilocybe cubensis, in healing and divination ritual (Wasson, 1957;
Hofmann, 1971).

I began my research into ergot by learning saprophytic culture techniques for the fungus
but culturing was slow and deliberate work and by May 2003, whilst attempting to
extract the alkaloids from the culture broth, I failed knowing I had neither adequate
facilities nor knowledge for the sterile growth and extraction of ergot; I experienced once
again the adage ‘when the student is ready the master will appear’. I trusted the
‘mutterkorn’ alkaloid.

Having kept the faith, in late 2003 another opportunity to work with Ergot alkaloids
arose. I was given a mass of dark resinous material purported to be ergotamine tartrate
(ET) which had undergone a botched conversion to lysergic acid (LA) an intermediate in
the production of ergot alkaloids as well as other lysergamides. I was entrusted with the
goal of sorting out what had gone wrong and hopefully recovering enough LA to cover
the costs of the original starting materials.

I struggled for several months trying to unwind what was possibly a futile effort. I
utilized all spare monies I had and even began borrowing capital to help the project
possibly bear fruit. I was confounded by not having adequate qualitative analytical
8
equipment and reference standards for the LA and ET as they are available only with a
Home Office licence or purchased from the black market. I had neither connection.

Eventually, I was able to confirm that the original material indeed had ET in it but I was
unsure if it had been adulterated as the individual who handed me the black resin had
acquired the original material without a certificate of analysis. So, using every extraction
technique I could dream up, my only way of knowing if I had actually extracted LA was
to attempt to synthesise LSD with it and then test the final product via the usual method
of the subjective bioassay.

I failed repeatedly in my attempts at extraction and synthesis and had to find a method
that was not extremely sensitive to water, light or other resinous materials. By January
2004, I felt that I had synthetic process enabling me to proceed. Eventually, the first week
of February 2004, I succeeded. In ordinary circumstances, I might have been awarded a
novel synthesis patent; instead, I was-awarded a twenty-year prison sentence.

CLOSURE
So, why did I do it? There is no single pat answer. The simplest: my love of learning. The
veiled: for my ego, for the attention, to feel special, to be loved, etc. The flippant:
because I could. With hindsight: civil disobedience, academic and religious freedom in
the study of the mind, and an expression of equal rights. The most accurate: my desire to
share entheogenesis with others, to wake humanity up from the penumbral dream-world
of materialist delusion, to help end the blatant injustice and rape of human dignity that
occurs within the context of a “War on (some) Drugs”, to seize the world stage and help
create a forum for the cooperative and conscious stewardship of Mother Earth and all her
relations.

REFERENCES
Anonymous (2003) Ibogaine: Treatment Outcomes and Observations. Bulletin of the
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 13 (2), 16-21. www.maps.org

Boire R G (1999) On Cognitive Liberty, Journal of Cognitive Liberties, 1(1), 7-13.
Davis, CA: Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics. www.cognitiveliberty.org

Council on Spiritual Practices (1997) Entheogens and the Future of Religion. R Forte
(Ed.). SF, CA: Council on Spiritual Practices. www.csp.org

Csordas T J & Kleinman A (1996) The Therapeutic Process. In: Medical Anthropology:
Contemporary Theory and Method, Rev. Ed. C F Sargent & T M Johnson (Eds.).
Connecticut: Praeger Publishers.

Erowid (2005) LSD Timeline.
Available at www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_timeline.php

9
Hardison C (2000) An Amateur Qualitative Study of 48 2C-T-7 Subjective Bioassays.
Bulletin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 10 (2), 11-13.
www.maps.org

Hawking S (1992) The Making of ‘A Brief History of Time’. Paramount Home
Entertainment.

Hofmann A (1971) Teonanacatl and Ololiuqui, two ancient magic drugs of Mexico.
Bulletin on Narcotics, Issue 1, 1971: 3-14.
See: www.unodc.org/unodc/en/bulletin/bulletin_1971-01-01_1_page003.html

Hofmann A (1979) LSD My Problem Child: Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism,
and Science. Publisher: J.P. Tarcher, Inc.

King Jr M L (1963) Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963. Open Source.

Kr!n V & Cvak L (1999) Ergot: the Genus Claviceps. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic
Publishers.

Ott J (1993, 1996) Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic drugs, their plant sources, and history.
Occidental, CA: Natural Products Co.

Ott J (1995) The Age of Entheogens & The Angel’s Dictionary. Occidental, CA: Natural
Products Co.

Ruck C A P, Wasson R G & Hofmann A (1978, 1998) The Road to Eleusis. William
Daly
Rare Books.

Schultes R E, Hofmann A & Rätsch C (1979, 2001) Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred,
Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers. Vermont: Inner Traditions Publishing.

Shulgin A & Shulgin A (1991) PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley: Transform
Press.

Stolaroff M J (1994) Thanatos to Eros: 35 years of Psychedelic Exploration. Berlin:
GAM-Media GmBH.

Wasson R G (1957) Seeking the Magic Mushroom. Life, 42 (19), 100 et seq.

Wilson B (1984) ‘Pass it on’: the story of Bill Wilson and how the A.A. message
reached the world. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services Inc.

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND COCAINE

By Mike Jay – http://mikejay.net/

Cocaine was the great pharmaceutical success story of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In a few short years, it went from a minor item in specialist catalogues to a major seller in a huge range of preparations in high-street chemists, grocers and general stores. It was hailed as a miracle of modern medical science, a panacea for all manner of minor ailments – but also, increasingly, as a dangerous and addictive novelty, a social menace and even a new ‘scourge of humanity’. During this period of the cocaine boom – in retrospect, the euphoric high before the crash – its impact on the public consciousness is vividly illuminated by the enduring literary character who emerged from its golden age: Sherlock Holmes.

From around 1885 to the beginning of the twentieth century, cocaine was both soft drink and hard drug: mild tonic preparations and strong pharmaceutical solutions coexisted side by side. The most famous and successful of the tonics was the range produced by the Corsican entrepreneur Angelo Mariani, who had begun in the 1860s to produce a stimulant wine for the French market by steeping coca leaves in sweet burgundy. ‘Vin Mariani’ was the first brand to penetrate the new market in Europe and America, and was rapidly accompanied by a wide ancillary range of therapeutic preparations. By the late 1880s these included Pâte Mariani (cocaine lozenges for catarrh), Thé Mariani (a concentrated coca tea recommended for long walks), and Pastilles Mariani (for coughing fits).

But one of Mariani’s lesser-known competitors was to eclipse his fame in the long run. John Pemberton, a small-scale Atlanta druggist, began to supply a ‘Peruvian Coca Wine’ in the mid-1880s; when the city of Atlanta adopted alcohol prohibition in 1886, he removed the alcohol and produced a gloopy syrup masking the bitter active ingredients of coca leaf extract, cocaine and cola nut, a natural caffeine source. He christened it ‘Coca-Cola’, and in 1891 he was bought out by a marketeer called Asa Chandler who set up ‘The Coca-Cola Company’, promoting the ‘nervine tonic’ as a cure for ‘headaches, hysteria and melancholia’ and pushing it with slogans such as ‘the intellectual beverage’ and ‘the Temperance drink’ (which, in a sense, it remains – the bar-room alternative to alcohol). Chandler took Coca-Cola’s sales to over a million dollars a year by the end of the century, and provoked a flurry of copycat products with names like Koca Nola, Celery Cola, Rocco Cola, Wiseola and even Dope Cola.

We might expect the ‘ethical’ pharmaceutical suppliers to have furnished a more sober alternative to this kind of hucksterism, but the promotion of cocaine by the Big Pharma of the day, especially the multinational Parke Davis, made their advertising look bashful by comparison. The 1885 Parke Davis catalogue offered cocaine in powders, solutions, tablets, lozenges, even cigars and cheroots, all accompanied by copy claiming the drug to be ‘the most important therapeutic discovery of the age, the benefits of which to humanity will be simply incalculable’. Their range expanded to include toothache drops, cocaine-impregnated bandages, haemorrhoid remedies and, from the 1890s, asthma and catarrh inhalers which made use of cocaine’s vasoconstrictive properties to dry up the nasal passages by spraying more or less pure cocaine straight up the nose. Statements that cocaine ‘can supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent’ ran alongside ads for hypodermic injection kits – smart pocket-sized steel cases styled like large Zippo lighters and containing cocaine, morphine and miniature needles. What the pharmacists and patent hucksters had both discovered was that you could sell cocaine for almost any treatment which came to mind, and the customer would very likely feel better after using it.

It was against this background of medical hype and shock of the new that Sherlock Holmes, and his distinctive cocaine habit, were first presented to the public – by a doctor who had brushed against the drug repeatedly in the course of his medical career. But although the appeal of Conan Doyle’s detective would endure for generations, the edgy thrill of cocaine was soon to take on a darker image, and Doyle’s later revisions of its role in Holmes’ lifestyle provide a barometer of how the public mood began to turn against the ‘cocaine vice’ during the 1890s and beyond.

As originally conceived by his author, the primary motivation of the world’s most famous fictional detective is cocaine. ‘My mind’, he tells us in the famous passage that opens The Sign of Four, ‘rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram…I can dispense then with artificial stimulants’. Part of Holmes’ enduring appeal is precisely that he’s drawn to his profession not to do good, but to stave off boredom. His few – and mostly late – sententious statements about public service and the common good are substantially outweighted by his expressions of coldness and misanthropy, his rhetorical question that ‘Was there ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world?’. What distinguishes him from the vast majority of subsequent fictional detectives is that his primary interest is in pleasing himself, and the main reason he bothers to solve crimes at all is to keep his mind active enough to dispense with his ‘seven per cent solution’.

The Sign of Four emerged in 1889, and it’s this first period of Sherlock Holmes stories that is most liberally sprinkled with drug references. In the first published short story, A Scandal in Bohemia, we learn that Holmes ‘had risen out of his drug-created dreams, and was hot on the scent of some new problem’; in The Five Orange Pips, Dr. Watson describes him as a ‘self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco’. But it was the exchange between Holmes and Watson at the beginning of The Sign of Four that established for all time the nature of Holmes’ habit, and Watson’s attitude to it. The story starts in Holmes’ study, with the detective taking a syringe from a ‘neat morocco case’ and injecting it into an arm ‘all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture marks’. Watson tells us that this has been going on ‘three times a day for many months’, and remonstrates with Holmes about his habit.

Watson’s argument against his friend’s chemical vices reads today like a mischievous pastiche of Victorian medical mumbo-jumbo, but it can be found more or less verbatim in many of the textbooks of the time. ‘It is a pathological and morbid process’, the doctor insists, ‘which involves increased tissue-change, and may at last leave a permanent weakness’. This chilling but nebulous diagnosis is probably very close to what Conan Doyle himself believed (and could have applied with equal conviction to, for example, masturbation). Holmes, however, dismisses it airily, and it prompts him to his famous justification and motive for his career: ‘I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.’

Why did Doyle, in 1888, seize on the cocaine habit as a central plank in the character of his new detective? At the time it seemed to reviewers ‘a curious touch’, but it struck an immediate chord with the public and Doyle continued to thread it through the stories as their success built. It was imitated, too, by other writers: M.P.Shiel’s exotic detective Prince Zaleski, who emerged in 1895, sits in his room full of Oriental antiques where the air is heavy with ‘the fumes of the narcotic cannabis sativa - the base of the bhang of the Mohammedans – in which I knew it to be the habit of my friend to assuage himself’.

Doyle’s intention was to create a bohemian character of acquired and exquisite tastes – a character quite unlike the author himself who, as a practising GP in provincial Southsea, was far closer to Dr.Watson. But Doyle had been immersing himself in the ‘yellow’, decadent writings of Bloomsbury, and met Oscar Wilde at the famous dinner at the Langham Hotel in 1890 when The Picture of Dorian Gray was commissioned: it’s likely that he had Wilde partly in mind while conceiving his ‘pallid’, ‘languid’ detective. Holmes’ distinctive props – the violin, the Meerschaum pipe, the batchelor apartment in the metropolis and the cocaine habit – are all intended to establish him as one of the new bohemians: eccentric, sophisticated, and tantalisingly immune to public opinion. Unlike the masses with their patent coca tonics, Holmes would have taken the trouble to acquire the finest quality of stimulant: his cocaine, we imagine, by mail-order from Merck in Darmstadt and his hypodermic kit not the standard Parke Davis set but the bespoke creation of a chemist in Piccadilly or Mayfair.

The inner Holmes, as well as the outer, was faithfully conceived around the bohemian sterotype. He is solitary, and haunted by an existential darkness: the ‘black moods’ that come over him, his bipolar swings from insomnia or focused, obsessive, day-and-night work to his days and weeks ‘in the dumps’, when he doesn’t ‘open my mouth for days on end’. For a late Victorian doctor like Conan Doyle, this was a familiar medical syndrome associated with the highly-strung, ‘neurasthenic type’, the febrile ‘brain-workers’ who were increasingly identified in the medical literature as a high-risk group for drug abuse. In The Sign of Four, Doyle mirrors these unstable mood-swings by giving Holmes a dual dependence on morphine and cocaine, but morphine is never subsequently mentioned: perhaps he felt that it carried rather too strong a whiff of the pathological drug addict, while cocaine was at most a ‘vice’ or character weakness.

Although in his later autobiography Conan Doyle insists that ‘I had no great interest in the more recent developments of my own profession’, he had certainly come across cocaine at some point in his medical career. He went to study medicine at Edinburgh University in 1876, the same year that the Edinburgh medical professor Robert Christison attempted an early coca leaf trial that he published in the Lancet; Christison selected several students to chew the leaf and, although Doyle was not among them, he was probably aware of the experiment. In 1885 the annual conference of the British Dental Association was held in Doyle’s home town of Southsea, and cocaine anaesthesia was the major new development discussed. Most conclusively Doyle, in an abortive attempt to set himself up as a Harley Street specialist, went to Vienna in 1890 to study ophthalmology, where the use of cocaine for local anaesthesia in eye surgery had recently been pioneered in the city’s General Hospital by Freud’s associate Carl Koller. It was the greatest surgical breakthrough in the discipline’s history, and a major focus of study: Doyle may well have administered it himself during his training.

His profession of ignorance seems particularly disingenuous on this point, since Doyle’s earliest professional interest was in drugs and toxicology. He achieved the feat – as remarkable then as now – of getting his first article published in the British Medical Journal while still in his third year at Edinburgh. It was on the action of a poison called gelsenium, an extract from a jasmine root and an ingredient in Gowers’ Mixture, a neuralgia treatment; Doyle’s experiment included self-poisoning with a substantial dose of 200 minims. His passion for toxicology frequently bleeds through into his fiction: there are several exotic poisons in the Holmes stories, all conceived with a relish for scientific detail. One of them, the hallucinogenic ‘Devil’s Foot Root’ in the short story The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot, has even made its way into some medical and ethnobotanical literature, planted mischievously by a Sherlock Holmes afficionado and subsequently taken as real. All this suggests that Doyle was well aware of the existence and properties of cocaine, and was using his professional understanding of it to underscore the character of his mysterious detective.

When the crash came, as with all cocaine crashes, you could see it coming. The euphoric overselling by pharmaceutical companies like Parke Davis was inevitably followed by a backlash that began almost immediately: already in 1887 the British Medical Journal was observing that an ‘undeniable reaction against the extravagant pretensions advanced on behalf of this drug has already set in’. It has since been recognised that the most common pattern of cocaine abuse is not, as with opiates, a lifetime of dependence, but a three to five year binge of excessive and increasing use leading to a crisis followed by one of three outcomes: abstenance, a substitute dependence on opiates or sedatives, or a scaling-down of cocaine use to manageable levels. Nineteenth-century Europe and America binged their way to crisis in a few short years and, horrified at their own reflection in the mirror, fled in panic towards the path of abstinence.

Sherlock Holmes’ career, which ran right through to the 1920s, is an eloquent witness to the eclipse of cocaine’s image as a miracle drug. Concern about its associations with delinquency and addiction built throughout the 1890s, and by 1900 the serious lobbying to control and prohibit it had begun. This was mostly taking place in the United States, where by this stage the Sherlock Holmes stories were being serialised to an enthusiastic American audience in Collier’s Weekly, a magazine that was also in the forefront of the campaign against the ‘cocaine menace’. Doyle had been gradually pruning back references to Holmes’ habit throughout the 1890s, limiting them to the occasional dark reference to his hero’s ‘weakness’; but in 1904, in The Missing Three-Quarter, he closed the unsavoury chapter by stating that Holmes had been ‘weaned’ from by Dr.Watson from the ‘drug mania’ that had ‘threatened to check his remarkable career’.

This is a narrative twist that destroys the inner logic of Doyle’s world, requiring his hero to forget why he became a detective in the first place. But it mirrors accurately the changing times: cocaine, which originally boosted Holmes’ popularity, had become a blight that might destroy it. From this point on, Holmes would begin to explain his mission in conventional moral terms, and would disown the hypodermic syringe as an ‘instrument of evil’. Collier’s were satisfied, and so was Doyle, who conquered the magazine market in America as he had in Britain – but the original scenario would never be erased. Cocaine would be prohibited across the globe long before Holmes’ final adventure in 1927, but his cocaine habit remains intact in his early and formative adventures, to be enjoyed and reassessed by successive generations.

This article is adapted from Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century. An extended version, including some thoughts on R. L. Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, appeared in Darklore Vol. 3 (2009)

Holmes illustration by Paul M. McCall