Yeah, you read that headline correctly. While ayahuasca is known primarily as a vision-producing entheogen (DMT is the primary active ingredient, when combined with harmaline), it has already shown remarkable power in helping people break deadly addictions (see here, here, and here for starters).

One of the people at the forefront of research into the medicinal uses of ayahuasca as has been Dr. Gabor Mate - in this 2013 article he talks about his work with these plants. Among the diseases he has been researching is cancer - and now there is additional and independent support for the evidence that ayahuasca can be a powerful cancer treatment.

Here is the abstract - the whole article is freely available online.

Ayahuasca and cancer treatment

Eduardo E Schenberg [1, 2]

1. Departamento de Psiquiatria, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
2. Instituto Plantando Consciencia, São Paulo, Brazil

Abstract

Objectives: Comprehensively review the evidence regarding the use of ayahuasca, an Amerindian medicine traditionally used to treat many different illnesses and diseases, to treat some types of cancer.

Methods: An in-depth review of the literature was conducted using PubMed, books, institutional magazines, conferences and online texts in nonprofessional sources regarding the biomedical knowledge about ayahuasca in general with a specific focus in its possible relations to the treatment of cancer.

Results: At least nine case reports regarding the use of ayahuasca in the treatment of prostate, brain, ovarian, uterine, stomach, breast, and colon cancers were found. Several of these were considered improvements, one case was considered worse, and one case was rated as difficult to evaluate. A theoretical model is presented which explains these effects at the cellular, molecular, and psychosocial levels. Particular attention is given to ayahuasca’s pharmacological effects through the activity of N,N-dimethyltryptamine at intracellular sigma-1 receptors. The effects of other components of ayahuasca, such as harmine, tetrahydroharmine, and harmaline, are also considered.

Conclusion: The proposed model, based on the molecular and cellular biology of ayahuasca’s known active components and the available clinical reports, suggests that these accounts may have consistent biological underpinnings. Further study of ayahuasca’s possible antitumor effects is important because cancer patients continue to seek out this traditional medicine. Consequently, based on the social and anthropological observations of the use of this brew, suggestions are provided for further research into the safety and efficacy of ayahuasca as a possible medicinal aid in the treatment of cancer.

You can read the whole research article linked to above, or you can be satisfied with this summary written by Eric W. Dolan at Psy Post.

Psychedelic drug ayahuasca could help in battle against cancer, researcher says

By Eric W. Dolan on January 26, 2014

A powerful psychedelic brew consumed by shamans deep in the Amazon could help in the fight against cancer and should be researched, according to a Brazilian scientist.

Ayahuasca — meaning the “vine of the souls” – is traditionally prepared using the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and Psychotria viridis leaves, though other combinations of plants are sometimes used. Psychotria viridis contains N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in the leaves, while Banisteriopsis caapi contains beta-carbolines such as harmine and harmaline.

For centuries, the psychedelic brew has been used in shamanistic healing rituals. A Natural Geographic reporter who participated in an ayahuasca ritual described the experience as “terrifying—but enlightening.”

Eduardo E. Schenberg of the Federal University of Sao Paulo thinks some of the healing powers attributed to ayahuasca deserve scientific attention, particularly when it comes to cancer.

“There is enough available evidence that ayahuasca’s active principles, especially DMT and harmine, have positive effects in some cell cultures used to study cancer, and in biochemical processes important in cancer treatment, both in vitro and in vivo,” he wrote in an article published in SAGE Open Medicine. ”Therefore, the few available reports of people benefiting from ayahuasca in their cancer treatment experiences should be taken seriously, and the hypothesis presented here, fully testable by rigorous scientific experimentation, helps to understand the available cases and pave the way for new experiments.”

Rumors of ayahuasca helping people with cancer are common, according to Schenberg, and there are at least nine case reports of cancer patients using ayahuasca during their treatment. Of these nine reports, three showed improvements after consuming the psychedelic brew.

Rumors and less than a dozen case reports are hardly substantial evidence. But the physiological effects of the drug suggests there might be some truth behind them, Schenberg said.

DMT produces a powerful psychedelic experience by binding to serotonin receptors in the brain. More importantly, for Schenberg, the drug also binds to the sigma 1 receptor, which is found throughout the body and is involved in many cellular functions. The sigma 1 receptor appears to be implicated in the death signalling of cancer cells.

In addition, harmine has been shown to induce the death of some cancer cells and inhibit the proliferation of human carcinoma cells.

Other physiological factors suggest the combination of DMT and harmine could have medically-important antitumor effects, though more research is need.

“In summary, it is hypothesized that the combined actions of β-carbolines and DMT present in ayahuasca may diminish tumor blood supply, activate apoptotic pathways, diminish cell proliferation, and change the energetic metabolic imbalance of cancer cells, which is known as the Warburg effect,” Schenberg wrote. ”Therefore, ayahuasca may act on cancer hallmarks such as angiogenesis, apoptosis, and cell metabolism. ”

DMT is currently prohibited as a Schedule I drug by the U.S. Controlled Substances Act and the international Convention on Psychotropic Substances. The drug is relatively unknown compared to other illicit substances like cannabis, but researchers have found that DMT appears to be increasing in popularity.

“If ayahuasca is scientifically proven to have the healing potentials long recorded by anthropologists, explorers, and ethnobotanists, outlawing ayahuasca or its medical use and denying people adequate access to its curative effects could be perceived as an infringement on human rights, a serious issue that demands careful and thorough discussion,” Schenberg wrote.

– –

Photo credit: Periodismo Itinerante (Creative Commons-licensed)

Psychedelic Drugs: Harmful or Therapeutic? (Al Jazeera English)

On Al Jazeera's The Stream, there was a recent conversation on the risks and/or benefits of using psychedelic drugs (entheogens or hallucinogens) as therapeutics for mental health issues. Among the guests was Rick Doblin, Founder and Executive Director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).

Also included was Dr. David Nutt, the former chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) in England (a position from which he was dismissed due to his support of medicinal use of some "recreational" drugs) and current Chair of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs.

For most thinking people, especially those who have experienced entheogens, these are drugs that offer much more benefit than harm - but the government has a vested interest in rejecting the freedom to experience alternate states of consciousness, especially when those states can wake people up from the consensus trance.

Psychedelic drugs: harmful or therapeutic?

The Stream looks at the risks and benefits of these drugs on mental health.

Ecstasy pills in hand. (UIG via GETTY)

Have we lost decades of research on mental health disease because of legal controls on psychedelic drugs? Some scientists claim LSD and MDMA hold the key to treating illnesses like schizophrenia and depression, and are calling for an end to the restrictions on working with them. Others though, say they are too risky to experiment with and the long term dangers are not known. We will speak to experts who argue both sides. Join us at 19:30 GMT.

In this episode of The Stream, we speak with:

Bertha Madras @harvardmed
Professor of Psychobiology at Harvard Medical School
hms.harvard.edu

David Nutt @ProfDavidNutt
Chair of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs
drugscience.org.uk

Rick Doblin @RickDoblin
Founder and Executive Director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)

Rachel Hope
Writer

What do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

* * * * *

Here is some of the background information provided at the Al Jazeera site.

From LSD to MDMA, a recent editorial published by Scientific American has ignited a heated discussion regarding the research of psychoactive drugs. The article calls on the US government to "end the ban on psychoactive drug research". It goes on to say:

scientificamerican.com

New thinking is desperately needed to aid the estimated 14 million American adults who suffer from severe mental illness. Innovation would likely accelerate if pharmacologists did not have to confront an antiquated legal framework that, in effect, declares off-limits a set of familiar compounds that could potentially serve as the chemical basis for entire new classes of drugs.

The editors believe that by making it easier to do research on drugs like MDMA (a compound found in ecstasy) and LSD, scientists can explore whether these drugs can help with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), cluster headaches, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia.

Netizens had a mixed response to Scientific American's article:

Jordan Ray Johnston
It's great to see a mainstream scientific journal getting behind this. The research of the 60's should never have been stopped. However.... dope is a term originally used to talk about heroin. Tis sad that it's used so indiscriminately now.
18 days ago

facebook.com
while I earnestly believe the FDA is much too conservative with their rulings, I stand behind them when they ban psychoactive drugs from being medicinal. I used to pride myself on my above average mental constitution and ability to handle psychedelic drugs, but I can tell you from personal experience, and from the experience of witnessing other users, that those drugs are bound to make psychiatric disorders much worse (even if the response is delayed).
5 days ago

Many scientists agree that more research needs to be done on these drugs, but some argue that Scientific American's article is misleading. "While the stigma that comes from Schedule I placement of these substances makes scientific research clearance and fundraising difficult, research itself is not prohibited", writes April Short on AlterNet.org.

In 1970, the US government passed the Controlled Substances Act. The legislation classifies drugs into one of three categories, Schedules I, II, III. Schedule I includes drugs that meet the following criteria:

fda.gov
(A) The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse. (B) The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States. (C) There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.
5 days ago

deamuseum.org
5 days ago

The Controlled Substances Act does not explicitly prohibit the research of Schedule I drugs, but there are several guidelines for gaining approval to do research. The United Nations also has three treaties, including the The Convention of Psychotropic Substances that similarly classify these types of drugs.

A blog by David Nutt, a psychopharmacologist at the Imperial College London, echos Scientific American's call to end the restrictions on the research of Schedule I drugs:

drugscience.org.uk
Drugs get sucked into the black hole of Schedule 1 all too easily, but no evidence of medical value seems enough to get them out. We need to resist the scary fairy-tale that removing drugs such as cannabis from Schedule 1, or reforming the Regulations, will open a Pandora’s box. There’s much more reason to believe that we’ll unleash a Neuroscientific Enlightenment, making new discoveries about the brain and consciousness, developing new treatments for debilitating disorders like PTSD, depression and chronic pain, and giving a boost to our economy along the way.
5 days ago

Some online agree:

facebook.com
The ban on psychedelic drugs makes research into the therapeutic benefits virtually impossible. This is effectively one of the biggest cases on science ever. Many diseases can be cured and many lives can be saved if we abolish drug prohibition and introduce sendible regulation
4 days ago

A few recent studies have examined the use of these types of drugs. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), is currently studying the effect of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy on healing psychological and emotional damage from war, violent crimes and other traumas. In the video below, participants and therapists describe the MAPS study:

Healing Trauma in Veterans with MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy
mapsmdma
3 months ago

Online, some said they would take psychoactive drugs to treat disorders like PTSD and schizophrenia:

PoliticallyQuestiond

@AJStream Cannabis is essential for my and others' PTSD and safe. Risks of this and other needed drugs are introduced by criminalization...

Mohammed A. Elshafie

@AJStream Yes, but with a good understanding of the risks and excellence analysis on how to minimize it.

12 Feb 2014

Jennifer Huizen

@AJStream The extent these type of disorders disrupt the lives of those affected makes chances, maybe even risky ones, worth taking.

12 Feb 2014

Others, however, feel it may be too risky:

El_vii_diego

@AJStream #no you cant take a psychoactive drug to treat a disorder like #PTSD because the potential wont outweigh the potential risks but

12 Feb 2014

El_vii_diego

@AJStream #but it will rather increase the risks of the decease eg like #PTSD

12 Feb 2014

Richard Miller - Religion as a Product of Psychotropic Drug Use (The Atlantic)

This article is excerpted from Drugged: The Science and Culture Behind Psychotropic Drugs by Richard Miller. He offers here a very surface level look at the possible influence of entheogens on religion.

From The Atlantic.

Religion as a Product of Psychotropic Drug Use

How much of religious history was influenced by mind-altering substances?

Richard J. Miller Dec 27 2013


The notion that hallucinogenic drugs played a significant part in the development of religion has been extensively discussed, particularly since the middle of the twentieth century. Various ideas of this type have been collected into what has become known as the entheogen theory. The word entheogen is a neologism coined in 1979 by a group of ethnobotanists (those that study the relationship between people and plants). The literal meaning of entheogen is "that which causes God to be within an individual" and might be considered as a more accurate and academic term for popular terms such as hallucinogen or psychedelic drug. By the term entheogen we understand the use of psychoactive substances for religious or spiritual reasons rather than for purely recreational purposes.

Perhaps one of the first things to consider is whether there is any direct evidence for the entheogenic theory of religion which derives from contemporary science. One famous example that has been widely discussed is the Marsh Chapel experiment. This experiment was run by the Harvard Psilocybin Project in the early 1960s, a research project spearheaded by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Leary had traveled to Mexico in 1960, where he had been introduced to the effects of hallucinogenic psilocybin-containing mushrooms and was anxious to explore the implications of the drug for psychological research. What is the true identity of the drug used by the gods in the Hindu Vedas, or the "drug of forgetfulness" in The Odyssey?

On Good Friday 1962, two groups of students received either psilocybin or niacin (a nonhallucinogenic "control" substance) on a double-blind basis prior to the service in Boston University's Marsh Chapel. Following the service nearly the entire group receiving psilocybin reported having had a profound religious experience, compared to just a few in the control group. This result was therefore judged to have supported the entheogenic potential of hallucinogenic drug use. Interestingly, the experiment has subsequently been repeated under somewhat different and arguably better controlled circumstances and the results were substantially the same.

***

It may be easy for some to accept the idea that entheogenic substances played a role in the genesis of religion. However, when we move from generalities to specifics we are on less firm ground. There has been a great deal of speculation concerning the actual identity of drugs used for religious purposes in the ancient world. For example, what is the true identity of the drug soma used by the gods in the ancient Hindu Vedas? Or the identity of nepenthe, the "drug of forgetfulness" mentioned in The Odyssey? Although it is impossible to answer such questions in a definitive scientific sense, one can speculate about the various possibilities.

For example, consider the work of R. Gordon Wasson and the story of Amanita muscaria, the "fly agaric"—certainly the world's most famous mushroom. Wasson made several journeys to Mexico to research the Mazatec people and write about the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms in their ancient rituals, but his experiences there led him to tackle a different subject—the identity of the drug soma.

To understand the significance of soma one must consider some of the oldest religious texts known to man. These are the ancient Vedas, Sanskrit texts that represent the oldest Hindu scriptures. The most ancient of these texts—the Rigveda, a collection of over a thousand hymns—was compiled in northern India around 1500 BC. A parallel but slightly later development in ancient Persia was the composition of the religious texts of Zoroastrianism, the Avesta. People who understood the identity of the plant soma could use it to empower themselves and to communicate more effectively with the deities.

In both the Rigveda and the Avesta there is frequent mention of soma (or haoma in the Avesta). In these episodes soma is described as a plant from which a drink or potion could be produced that was consumed by the gods, giving them fantastic powers which aided them in their supernatural feats. People who understood the identity of the plant soma could use it to empower themselves and to communicate more effectively with the deities.

Consider the following from the Rigveda:

We have drunk Soma and become immortal; we have attained the light, the
Gods discovered.
Now what may foeman's malice do to harm us? What, O Immortal, mortal man's deception?

Or:

Heaven above does not equal one half of me.
Have I been drinking Soma?
In my glory I have passed beyond earth and sky.
Have I been drinking Soma?
I will pick up the earth and put it here or there.
Have I been drinking Soma?

But what actually was soma? There were suggestions that it was ephedra or possibly cannabis, but Gordon Wasson concluded that it was Amanita muscaria. Amanita muscaria or the "fly agaric" is a large mushroom that is instantly recognizable. This is due to its strikingly attractive appearance and its wide use in popular culture. It has often appeared in animated films (such as the Nutcracker scene in Fantasia, or in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), as well as being used in numerous types of kitschy household products and for illustrations in children's stories.

There are numerous details provided in the Rigveda suggesting how soma was prepared and used, which Wasson interpreted as indicating that Amanita muscaria was the true source of the drug. However, the most interesting and influential evidence that he considered originates from reports concerning the use of Amanita muscaria in the eighteenth century. In particular, in 1736 a Swedish colonel named Philip Johan von Strahlenberg published an account of the behavior of the Koryak people living in the Kamchatka region of Siberia. Von Strahlenberg had fought in the Great Northern War between Sweden and Russia, was captured by the Russians, and was incarcerated for twelve years. It was observed that the drinking of drug-containing urine could continue for up to five cycles passing from one individual to another before the urine lost its capacity for intoxication.

Among other things he described the use of Amanita muscaria as an intoxicant by the local people. He also noted the following unusual behavior: "The poorer Sort, who cannot afford to lay in a Store of these Mushrooms, post themselves, on these Ocassions, round the Huts of the Rich, and watch the Opportunity of the Guests coming down to make Water; And then hold a Wooden Bowl to receive the Urine, which they drink off greedily, as having still some Virtue of the Mushroom in it, and by this way they also get Drunk."

Von Strahlenberg's observations on urine drinking and other behaviors were considered extremely sensational when they were published in Stockholm and soon thereafter in other parts of Europe. Indeed, they were used to satirical effect in the writings of the English playwright and novelist Oliver Goldsmith who imagined the consequences of introducing such habits into London society. The use of Amanita muscaria by numerous Siberian tribes, as well as their habit of urine drinking to conserve the mushrooms' effects, was subsequently confirmed by other numerous travelers over the years.

Several 18th-and-19th-century reports described the use of Amanita muscaria by different Siberian tribes, and particularly by witch doctors or shamans who used it to achieve "an exalted state to be able to talk to the gods." Interestingly, it was observed that the drinking of drug-containing urine could continue for up to five cycles passing from one individual to another before the urine lost its capacity for intoxication. This was apparently often done because of the relative scarcity of the mushroom, and so preserving its hallucinogenic properties in this way had important practical benefits.

The use of hallucinogenic mushrooms, presumably Amanita muscaria, by the inhabitants of Siberia appears to be a very ancient practice. This is suggested by the discovery of several Stone or Bronze Age rock carvings (petroglyphs) in 1967 in northern Siberia near the Arctic Ocean. These seem to represent mushrooms and women with mushrooms growing out of their heads. This is an area inhabited by the Chukchi people, who were one of the subjects of the 18th-and 19th-century reports on Siberian mushroom use, so it may be supposed that they had used mushrooms continuously over many years. Indeed, the use of Amanita muscaria for its hallucinogenic actions continues in Siberia to this day, in spite of attempts by the previous communist government to stamp it out by resorting to measures such as dropping shamans out of helicopters. 

 

The precise psychological effects produced by Amanita muscaria are reported to vary a great deal depending on the individual and the social context. However, one interesting property noted in these early reports was a tendency to disturb the scale of visual perceptions so that a tiny crack in the ground might appear like a giant chasm. In particular, this was noted by the British mycologist and writer Mordecai Cubitt Cooke. Although he was responsible for writing books with riveting titles such as Rust, Smut, Mildew and Mold, Cooke also wrote one of the earliest books on psychotropic drugs, The Seven Sisters of Sleep, in which he described some of the properties of tobacco, opium, hashish, betel, coca, belladonna, and the fly agaric. Such books and observations were widely read and discussed in Victorian society. One story is that the book was read by the Reverend Charles Dodgson—better known to the world as Lewis Carroll—and so appeared as the mushroom which Alice could eat to alter her size at will in Alice in Wonderland.

***

The influence of Wasson’s writing can be seen in the subsequent development of an entire sub-genre of entheogenic literature, much of which has little to recommend it from a scholarly point of view. The idea is that if Amanita muscaria is identical with soma, which had a strong influence on the development of Hinduism, then why not every other religion as well?

Pride of place here goes to John Marco Allegro's 1970 publication, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Allegro considered the possibility that ancient peoples would have been particularly concerned with two things—procreation and the supply of food. He suggested that they may have viewed rain as a type of heavenly semen that then impregnated the earth, allowing the growth of crops and the success of the harvest. Plants absorbed this holy semen—and some plants more than others. Amanita muscaria was such a plant that, when consumed, allowed a person to commune more closely with God. According to Allegro, the Bible is really just a series of myths that describe the secrets of the Amanita muscaria fertility cult rather than real people.

Allegro also suggested that the information concerning the use of Amanita muscaria as a religious fertility sacrament was subject to great secrecy, the provenance of a priestly sect. He speculated that these practices developed very early on in human history, even prior to the time when writing first came into existence during the ancient Sumerian civilization. He further suggested that the existence of the mushroom was secretly encoded in the use of particular Sumerian word roots.

This secret encoding of the mushroom fertility cult down through the ages eventually led to the development of the concept of Jesus to encapsulate the identity of Amanita muscaria around the time of the sacking of the second temple by the Romans. Thus, according to Allegro, Jesus never actually existed. He purported to demonstrate, using philological analysis of the structure of the ancient Sumerian language, that the name Jesus actually meant something along the lines of "semen" and that Christ meant something like "giant erect mushroom penis." According to Allegro, the Bible (and the New Testament in particular) is really just a series of myths that describe the secrets of the Amanita muscaria fertility cult rather than real people.

However, as fate would have it the stories caught on in a big way and their mythical origins were forgotten. The "Jesus myth" rapidly spread and became Christianity. Although Allegro's reasoning was mostly philological, he did occasionally refer to the other types of evidence such as the famous fresco in the Abbaye de Plaincourault in France that appears to show Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with the serpent coiled around a giant Amanita muscaria. It was reasoned that this fresco, painted around 1290, gives credence to the idea that the secret mushroom fertility cult was still in existence in the Middle Ages.

Allegro's hypotheses were very interesting and his arguments were certainly consistent. However, they were not well received. Many Christians took exception to the fact that he believed that Jesus never existed and was really just a code word for a giant phallus-shaped magic mushroom. Allegro was generally excoriated in the press and in many academic circles. Nevertheless, his work did strike a chord with some individuals and many subsequent publications have endeavored to describe the role of Amanita muscaria in the genesis of virtually every religion known to man.


~ This post is adapted from Drugged: The Science and Culture Behind Psychotropic Drugs.

Rick Doblin [MAPS] - 10 Best Answers to Questions About Using Psychedelics

Recently, Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) answered questions on reddit on MDMA, LSD, and other psychoactive drugs. Here is his introduction to the Q and A:

Hey reddit! I am Rick Doblin, Ph.D., Founder and Executive Director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Founded in 1986, MAPS is a 501(c)(3) non-profit research and educational organization that develops medical, legal, and cultural contexts for people to benefit from the careful uses of psychedelics and marijuana.

The staff of MAPS and I are here to answer your questions about:

• Scientific research into MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, ibogaine, and marijuana
• The role of psychedelics and marijuana in science, medicine, therapy, spirituality, culture, and policy
• Reducing the risks associated with the non-medical use of various drugs by providing education and harm reduction services
• How to effectively communicate about psychedelics at your dinner table
• and anything else!

Our currently most promising research focuses on treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.

This is who we have participating today from MAPS:

• Rick Doblin, Ph.D., Founder and Executive Director
• Brad Burge, Director of Communications and Marketing
• Amy Emerson, Director of Clinical Research
• Virginia Wright, Director of Development
• Brian Brown, Communications and Marketing Associate
• Kynthia Brunette, Operations Associate
• Tess Goodwin, Development Assistant
• Ilsa Jerome, Ph.D., Research and Information Specialist
• Bryce Montgomery, Web and Multimedia Associate
• Linnae Ponté, Zendo Project Harm Reduction Coordinator
• Berra Yazar-Klosinski, Ph.D., Lead Clinical Research Associate

Alternet collected 10 of the most interesting questions for your entertainment.

10 Best Answers to Questions About Using Psychedelics

December 4, 2013 | By April M. Short

"LSD is like dreaming—it’s not uniform content, it’s a way of processing content," and other fascinating insights came out of this "Ask Me Anything" session.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Spectral-Design

Rick Doblin—founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), appeared on Reddit’s AMA feature (Ask Me Anything) to openly answer questions along with a team of 10 from MAPS on December 3.

For those who are unfamiliar, AMA is like the town hall meeting of the digital age, providing a chance for anyone to ask about anything and, if the comment is promoted by other users to the top of the pile, they will receive a response. When President Obama made a surprise AMA appearance as part of his 2012 campaign efforts, he was bombarded with so many questions the flood of traffic momentarily took down the site.

In Doblin’s introduction to the AMA session he described MAPS as a 501(c)(3) non-profit research and educational organization that develops medical, legal, and cultural contexts for people to benefit from the careful uses of psychedelics and marijuana. Then, he noted that the staff could answer any questions about:

• Scientific research into MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, ibogaine, and marijuana;
• The role of psychedelics and marijuana in science, medicine, therapy, spirituality, culture, and policy;
• Reducing the risks associated with the non-medical use of various drugs by providing education and harm reduction services;
• How to effectively communicate about psychedelics at your dinner table;
• and anything else!

Doblin also noted that currently the most promising research at MAPS focuses on treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.

The MAPS team was inundated with more than 2,000 questions and had responded to more than 75 by publishing time (2:30pm, December 4).

According to Brad Burge, director of communications and marketing for MAPS, the team will continue to answer questions through the end of the week as long as there is interest—and they may even decide to continue answering questions indefinitely.

"Educating the public honestly about psychedelics and marijuana is a core part of our mission," he said. "This is one of the most exciting and inspiring parts of what we do: interacting with people who are actively trying to broaden their perspective about the risks and therapeutic benefits of psychedelics and marijuana.“

Here are ten of the most fascinating questions and answers to come out of the AMA:

1. Question from luttnugs: Is it possible for people to have completely different reactions/symptoms from the same psychedelic? Say hypothetically I eat mushrooms and my friend eats the same amount of said mushrooms. Should we experience similar symptoms or is it possible that genetics could lead to completely different reactions?

Answer from Rick Doblin:

Yes. The beauty of psychedelics is that we don’t have psychedelic experiences; we have experiences of ourselves catalyzed by psychedelics. Stan Grof has said that LSD is a “non-specific amplifier of the unconscious,” so that what we experience depends on who we are.

LSD is like dreaming—it’s not uniform content, it’s a way of processing content.

2. Question from SkittleSkitzo: How bad is marijuana for the lungs? Also, is it actually possible to "re-trip" (where you hallucinate years later because its in your spinal fluid) on acid?

Answer from Rick Doblin:

Marijuana does not cause lung cancer, nor does it cause chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The cannabinoids in marijuana have anti-tumor properties; however, people who smoke marijuana can sometimes get colds and respiratory infections. I think unbiased risk/benefit analysis by the FDA could result in marijuana in smoked form becoming an approved prescription medicine.

LSD is not stored in the spinal fluid and it is not possible to “re-trip” years later. That is entirely a drug war fabrication.

3. Question from Quasarstoquarks: Do you believe that spiritual drug experiences (such as shamanistic rituals involved with ayahuasca) will ever have a place in modern medicine?

Answer from Rick Doblin:

MAPS recently sponsored a study of ayahuasca in the treatment of addiction in British Columbia. Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, took LSD in the 1950s and felt it could play a major role in the treatment of addiction. The spiritual experiences help people to accept themselves, and give people strength. So spiritual experiences will have a place in modern medicine, such as research into LSD for people with anxiety associated with the end of life. Earlier LSD research in the 1960s for cancer patients showed that spiritual experiences were correlated with therapeutic outcomes. Spiritual experiences can occur in a hospital setting as well as in a shamanistic ritual. I think modern psychiatric medicine will increasingly combine psychotherapeutic and spiritual experiences.

4. Question from MDMA_Throw_Away:  My wife and I tried MDMA for the first and only time (so far...) earlier this year. It was the best experience I've ever had on any drug. We expected to be sexing like rabbits but much to my surprise we had a late night of chatting, laughing, and even airing grievances with each other in a way that we both could just accept and talk through. We cried together over things that we routinely did that were hurtful to the other. We had a whole night of connecting with each other like we never had before.

It was downright therapeutic.

I think this would be such an incredible drug for couples that need refocused on each other. What kind of work is being done to make MDMA legal for responsible adults?

Answer from Berra Yazar-Klosinski, Ph.D., lead clinical research associate:

Couples therapy was actually the most common therapeutic use for MDMA before it was placed on Schedule 1 in 1985. However, at present the most effective way to study the risks and benefits of MDMA is to study it as a treatment for a clinically diagnosable psychiatric disorder. After medical use becomes more accepted, it may become possible for additional uses of the medication to be studied.

Here is a related article from a 2011 issue of Elle magazine that you might find interesting.

Answer from Rick Doblin: 

We were recently contacted by a group of European researchers who want to start a study of couples therapy. They are seeking a government grant to complete the study. If accepted, this will be a remarkable study.

As Berra said, we are focused on turning psychedelics into medicine. Relationships aren't diseases. We definitely hope to see this research expand.

Medicine will increasingly combine psychotherapeutic and spiritual experiences.

5. Question fromOceanMan7: I know from experience that a bad trip on psychedelics can be extremely scary and traumatizing. How do you guarantee that your patients have a positive experience?

Answer from Ben Shechet, cilinical study assistant:

There is no guarantee that a psychedelic experience will be 'positive'--in fact, since most of our research subjects are dealing with significant psychological issues in their lives, their experiences can be quite difficult. We make sure that our subjects feel safe and well cared-for within the therapeutic space, and focus on building a strong working alliance between the therapists and subjects. But we also view difficult experiences as moments that carry great potential for healing and growth, and encourage our subjects to enter into those experiences willingly, as they are often the very things that need to be experienced fully in order for the individual to move forward in their life.

6. Question from dennisb230980: What is your opinion about [T]im [L]eary in terms of psycedelic scientific research[?]

Answer from Rick Doblin:

Tim Leary, when he was at Harvard, did incredibly valuable scientific research. The Good Friday Experiment for which he was a faculty sponsor was the first study of psychedelics in spiritual experiences ever conducted. My undergraduate thesis was a 25-year follow-up study to Leary’s study. It was a key to my understanding of the 1960s. The people I interviewed who participated in the original Good Friday Experiment told me that the mystical experience of oneness had important political implications in their lives in that it inspired them to see our commonality more so than our differences, and motivated them to work for social change. When I look back on the 1960s, the backlash from society was more about psychedelics going right and motivating people to challenge the status quo than it was about psychedelic experiences going wrong, though that happened as well. The Good Friday Experiment has motivated almost all of the current psychedelic researchers.

Leary’s Concord Prison Experiment was exceptionally idealistic in trying to show that psychedelic mystical experiences could produce measurable reductions in recidivism. Where I’m not comfortable with Tim Leary is that once he left Harvard he exaggerated the results of the Concord Prison Experiment and ended up sharing false information.

I believe there’s something holy and spiritual about science, and that the results of research need to be shared with the greatest of integrity. I admire Tim, but also feel that he became what he was objecting to: Propaganda against psychedelics in his mind justified propaganda for psychedelics. MAPS is trying to be a leader in research into both the benefits and the risks of psychedelics, and reporting them honestly.

7. Question from Rack3m: What do you see as the next big hurdle for publicly funded research grants?

Answer from Rick Doblin:

NIMH has not funded psychedelic research since the mid-1960s, but we hope that will change over the next few years. We are currently developing a research grant proposal to send to the NIMH in order to move forward with our PTSD research.

We are also in discussion with the VA and DOD about the concept of treating veterans suffering from PTSD with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. It may take several more years before we engage in a collaborative study and receive government funding.

Currently, all of our research is funded through donations.

8. Question from musicisbelieving85: With the current MDMA research, once that is finished is the expected result to get FDA to approve MDMA psychotherapy or is the plan to do even more research? What's the current expected timetable for making this available for basically anyone that needs help in this way?

Answer from Amy Emerson, director of clinical research:

We are currently in Phase 2 of our clinical trials, this phase gathers preliminary information on the safety and efficacy of the drug to treat the condition under investigation in populations of 12 to 200 subjects. Phase 3 trials gather conclusive evidence regarding efficacy and safety in larger populations of 250 to 2000 subjects. At least two Phase 3 studies are typically required to prove safety and efficacy before permission for prescription use can be approved.

While we are working to complete the Phase 2 studies, Phase 3 planning will start including work to identify a GMP (good manufacturing process) manufacturer of MDMA as well as large scale training of Phase 3 investigators. We anticipate completing the primary end points in our Phase 2 studies in late 2015. We plan to have our End of Phase 2 meeting with FDA in early 2016 and apply for programs to accelerate development. By the end of phase 2 we will know if we have been accepted to any accelerated development programs and will finalize our Phase 3 strategy with FDA.

We estimate we will need to do 2 Phase 3 studies with 200-250 subjects per study across multiple sites, the studies will be conducted in a staggered fashion from 2016-2020. In parallel with this, MAPS will request FDA permission to conduct Expanded Access (Compassionate Use) studies with cost recovery for people who do not qualify for the Phase 3 program. If a drug proves to be safe and efficacious in two Phase 3 studies, the sponsor of the studies submits a New Drug Application (NDA) to the FDA and/or the European Medicines Agency (EMEA), which review the application for possible approval as a prescription medicine. We anticipate the decision regarding MDMA as a prescription medication would occur in 2021.

9. Question from Pipken:  A very recent study by Taurah et al. indicates that MDMA use results in widespread behavioral deficits when compared to other drug users, and that alarmingly, these deficits did not go away even after a prolonged period of abstinence. When taken together with evidence in animal models that any substantial MDMA usage causes irreparable damage of serotonergic neurons, it appears that MDMA use can result in the selective yet permanent death of these neurons even in humans.

What methods have you utilized to minimize the damage and maximize the benefits of these psychedelics in your research trials?

Answer from Ilsa Jerome, Ph.D., clinical research and information specialist:

We have examined the literature on MDMA toxicity over time; there are sections on the matter in our Investigator's Brochure, which is periodically updated.

The recent study features a large sample but is still retrospective (meaning people are measured after they start taking ecstasy) and compares between groups. This makes it similar to 99% of most studies of ecstasy users, and the problem with this is that the method makes it hard to eliminate the other potential points of causation; it's essentially a fancy correlational study with multiple groups. Drug use is poorly matched in this sample.

MAPS studies involve a couple of administration of known MDMA in a therapeutic setting, and so are different from unsupervised use of "ecstasy" in various settings.

We examined cognitive function in our first study of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in people with PTSD, and we did not find any indicate that receiving MDMA as compared with inactive placebo reduced performance on these tests.

The animal models have long been in question since they are based on interspecies scaling, and this model is not suitable for compounds with nonlinear pharmacokinetics (meaning, a higher dose has a greater effect than expected), and MDMA has nonlinear pharmacokinetics. Hence most rodent and monkey toxicity studies use inappropriately high doses.

We still inform people of the potential risks of toxicity before they take part in MDMA studies, and we leave three to five weeks between each dose.

10. Question from entropico:  What is the single most challenging anti-psychedelic argument used and how do you deal with it?

Answer from Brad Burge:

The single most challenging rational argument against psychedelic research is the claim that by investigating the beneficial potential of these drugs and engaging in public education about the results of that research, we are also encouraging the irresponsible use of the drugs by leading people to believe that they are safe.

There are two simple responses to this question that we have found to be useful: (1) We do not claim that psychedelics, or any drugs, are safe, only that in defined situations their benefits can outweigh their risks; and (2) ultimately, we do encourage the responsible use of psychedelics, though we acknowledge that current prohibitionist and anti-harm reduction policies make those responsible uses more difficult to engage in.

The main resistance encountered by psychedelic research, however, is not rational, but deeply emotional. Decades of cultural paranoia surrounding the use of psychedelics, combined with the suppression of scientific research into their benefits until recently, have traumatized our culture and conditioned many people to fear them. As a result, our main challenge as we work to increase public awareness about the risks and benefits of psychedelics is to find a way through these fears. When you talk to others about psychedelic research or what they can do, remember that they might be afraid. When it comes to communicating about psychedelics, compassion is key.

For more information about scientific research into the medical potential of psychedelics and marijuana, please visit maps.org.

Shunyamurti - The Transcendental Party at the End of Time Is Now Officially Under Way

From Reality Sandwich, this is a partly interesting article and a partly misguided article. The analysis of the breakdown of society as it now exists is accurate. However, the notion that entheogenic consciousness is the only option to replace the current system is wishful and naive thinking.

Or maybe it's just been too many years since I last ingested an entheogen.

Emergence of the Entheopolitan

Shunyamurti

A mass transmutation is occurring on our planet, leading to the emergence of a new kind of transhuman being: the Entheopolitan. Consider this essay an outline of both the complex dissipative environment in which this rhizomatic interconnective supercharging shamanic shape shift is happening and some of the early, unintended consequences of this unpredictable event-in-process.
First, we need to examine the intersection of a number of factors and actants in the current sociopolitical level of reality that has served as the petri dish for the emergence of our new species. 

The main ones are the following:

1. The slo-mo collapse of global civilization and particularly of the capitalist empire that pulls its strings; 

2. Climate change acceleration, heightened seismic and volcanic activity and the distributive effects of drought, plagues, floods, and superstorms on global stability; 

3. The fall of the petro-citizen paradigm and its hobbling of conscious creativity and alienation from nature;

4. The loss of religious, ethical, and social paradigms that once channeled collective psychic energies into sublimating tendencies that served to contain the lower death drive; and simultaneously the almost ironic occurrence of a new wave of near-death experiences and other paranormal phenomena by neuroscientists and doctors, among other credible witnesses; 

5. The chaotic state of current science, with the lack of consensus on the meaning of quantum physics, and the return of the “hidden variables” theorists (those who refuse to give up obsolete paradigms, claiming that someday there will appear hidden variables that will prove their newtonian perspective to be correct); the credible challenge to neo-darwinism by some non-mythic form of intelligent design theory; and the discovery of new anomalies—requiring hypotheses such as dark energy and dark matter and alternatives to big bang cosmologies; plus the far more immediately disconcerting loss of consensus on the psychological, not to mention ontological foundations of human consciousness (thanks to the fall of the psychoanalytic establishment and the lack of any widely accepted alternative concepts of the unconscious and of human development and awareness—Jung, Deleuze, the Dalai Lama, and Ken Wilber notwithstanding); 

6. The massive disinformation campaigns led by government-controlled mass media, abetted by governmental and corporate corruption and not-so-secret plans for a new world order; the so-called austerity measures that are destroying the social fabric of the developed world; plus the irrational conspiratorial paranoia that inevitably surrounds such a situation; all this exacerbated by the growing awareness of the extraterrestrial presence and secret involvement in world affairs; 

7. The consequent loss of consensus in relation to discourse itself; the lack of common ground between different sub-cultures; the lack of trust among humans at all levels of organization; the hyper-politicization of psychiatry and diagnostic paradigms influenced greatly by the military-industrial phalanx led by the pharmaceutical industry; the accelerated fragmenting and destabilizing of individual ego consciousness, leading to a pandemic of psychosis; and thus to a new understanding of the unconscious mind and its relation to consciousness as well as to the long-denied reality of super-consciousness and the cosmic noosphere.

All of the above leaves us in the abyss, groundless, with nothing to hold onto in our relentless search for security and wisdom. For this reason, most people choose one of the following strategies:

• Denial—and submission to the system;
• Alcoholism or some other addiction or behavioral pathology or mental disorder, including psychosis;
• Despair, sometimes leading to suicide;
• Savage hyper-religiosity and/or extreme nationalism;
• Political activism and civil protest—which usually ends in violent repression;
• Weaponized survivalism;
• Transmutation into Entheopolitans.

The last-named alternative is the only path that leads through the oncoming singularity into the possibility of a new age of benign world structures and life-supportive existential conditions. The choosing of the Entheopolitan alternative is in itself only explicable as a karmic emergence of hyper-complexity through an individual’s traversal of hopelessness (rather than denial) and initiation into the dark knighthood of the soul, through courageous dedication of the power of consciousness to truth, love, and the unknowable potentialities that can arise through self-discipline and perseverance in the striving toward the highest possible destiny.

To break through pre-conceptions, even those of a religious dimensionality to the point of bringing about an ego death and rebirth into entheocentricity, requires infinite trust in the fundamental goodness of Being, openness to awe and wonder, and recognition of the unique importance of living as a psychonaut willing to enter into the depths of crazy wisdom without submitting to the paralyzing fear of going insane or being perceived by others as mad.

This crossing of the border between conventional sanity and the sublime madness of higher knowledge in order to bring back touchstones of the miraculous is the imperative that underlies our power to survive and thrive as beings of ontological centrality to the purpose of existence itself. The meme of survival of the fittest now reaches to the farther shore of shamanic magic and nirvanic Self-realization, if we are to leap the gap between imminent mass die-off and tantric creation of a new world aeon.

We have reached the tipping point in the psycho-spiritual development of consciousness, in which the complexity accumulated in our collective chronology is meeting the resistance of the deadlock of non-adaptive egocentricity; yet in those who can withstand the pressure, the kairos of clairvoyance is erupting as a change in our essential nature. A new type of consciousness is emerging, one foreshadowed by religion—and by such metaphors as coal into diamond, caterpillar into butterfly, snake shedding its skin, matter becoming light, and human morphing into angel.

The qualitative change that we are undergoing is accelerating most in those who have successfully traversed the ego’s event horizon, whether through the assistance of entheogenic substances and/or of entheonic practices, such as meditation or other techniques of sustained recognition of non-duality.

The transmutation is being accompanied, and furthered, by the creation of new works of art that bring the truth of the entheopolitan consciousness into the Real. Such artists as Alex Grey, Android Jones, and Pablo Amaringo open a visual portal into entheogenic reality, just as the writings of recent psychonauts like Terence McKenna and a host of others, not to mention all the great sages of superconsciousness from Ramana Maharshi back to the Buddha and Yeshua the Christed, kept open the cognitive portal to the Immanent Beyond for all of us throughout history.

What is different about this moment, and why it is indeed fair to call this the end time, is that not only are we pouring the ancient wine into new bottles, but now we are finally drinking it! We are not just keeping it in our wine cellars to be handed down to a future generation.

Once enough of us have drunk the divine nectar of entheogenic consciousness, the vibrational field that supports the current constructs of reality will be realized by one and all as demonic delusion. The intensification of full-spectrum consciousness will open us all to the gravity-less rainbow of infinite delight, boundless, weightless, timeless freedom, and pure insight from the mind of the Beingless God. The kingdom will only come when the kingly Samadhi of omnicentric unity has made royal again our raging egos, melting down desire into love supreme, through the zero point of raja yogic reinstatement of the Absolute as ruler of every soul.

This imminent moment, when the breakthrough of original memory, the vision of the future as our lost past, is our longshot bet on the long-promised eternal return, the omega point is our alpha bet, the decisive commitment to be that ultimate uncreated indestructible residue that remains after all the planet has imploded, to blossom again into a new world of unimaginable perfection.

The ego mind is now too loaded on death and fury, its nihilistic gnostics cannot imagine the luminous infinite, the intelligence that lies beyond the matrix, the ecstasy engineers who tape the edges of the tapestry of time by tapping into the archetypes of mathematics, hyper-dimensional topologies fleshed out with color, sound, and sublime living mandalas of beauty.

It was such a vision, far more than the concupiscence of conquistadors, which launched the thousand ships of longing for the goddess of the new world and brought us to the shores of our lost cause.

This was once the vision of Columbia, our statue to lost liberty, which brought Columbus and so many other pilgrims from around the world, to a district of Columbia inspired by founding fathers now foundering in a false-flag fascist fatalism and reduced now to a columbarium, and to the meme of Columbine, reiterated daily, now sandy hooked and (bo)stoned by a marathon of murders, including the assassination of hope. Long ago, we buried our heart at Wounded Knee. Now we murder our minds before the TV.

This is the message of the mainstream. Terror, TINA (There Is No Alternative), and titillation are the only reactions allowed. Those who turn away (becoming TINA turners, singing out their pain) too often take a path of violent resistance that only accelerates the trend toward totalitarian control, martial law, and concentration camps. Guantanamo was only an hors d’oeuvre to start the rollback of all movements of freedom since before the Magna Carta; the wars we have witnessed in recent years are only trifles to tempt the appetite for aggression to the mad max, total war to destroy every society once and for all time.

There is a logic to this madness. But to understand it requires a deeper madness, really a deeper sanity, that can see the full picture even with only a few of the dots connected. This is the significance of entheonic intelligence. To develop this level of mind power on a collective basis requires the creation of new kinds of communities, brainstorming rather than brainwashing communities, led by sages and seers of our true mindnature, willing and able to think outside every box, synthesizing the wisdom of the past, from all the world’s philosophic and spiritual traditions, with the most avant-garde, overlooked, marginalized and “minor” thinkers of the present day.

And of course we need the work of those who do more than think—those who dare to feel, those who risk heightened sensation and enhanced intuitive knowing, who open the gates of gnosis, who will bomb the inner censor with substances or the Shakti of Self-enquiry; those who invoke the benign interstellar presences and download their discourse; who bring about the elimination of the deepest repression barrier and accept the onslaught of akashic information overload that goes direct to heart of the Self.

But the Entheopolitan is not a naïve smiley-faced fool who smokes too much weed. One enters the new consciousness through the old hard work miracle, the discipline of self-transformation, the willingness to face the inner darkness, to struggle with the projections and distortions of one’s own ego, to recognize the il n’y a pas (there is no possibility of authentic relationship at the ego level); to pass through the field of unconscious phantasies and conventional standards of beauty and meaning to reach the core of the Supreme Real. The Entheopolitan goes through many rites of passage before attaining the goal; in fact, it is never attained, because the end is the Endless. But the passage goes through Absolute Nothingness, to numinous multiplicity to unitive noumenal fullness, and every stop in between.

The Entheopolitan is at home everywhere because the mind of God is everywhere. The within is also without. The intersubjective seeks the intergalactic. The noocosm is Indra’s net prophet from the exchange of vibrational currencies in the mana market of the many worlds. We are all implicated in the implicate order that is now explicating itself in the apocalyptic revelations ripping apart our world to reveal our unmanifest destiny. Let us accept the coup de grace with full grace.

The Entheopolitan is emerging. When the critical mass is reached, the Entheopolitans will create an authentic Entheopolis, a cosmic City of the All-One God-Self, inhabited by enlightened and magical beings of bodhisattvic beauty and joyous generosity and genius. The Entheopolitans are already morphing into egoless leaders, Entheopoliticians, and soon a sublime alternative cosmic order will be negotiated in a constituent assembly of buddhas and beatified ones, devas and dakinis, reminiscent of the Lankavatara Sutra and other Madhyamaka visions of the promised, pure land of Sukhavati, the same Satya Yuga alluded to in the most ancient Vedic texts.

The great shift, the new kalpa, the transcendental party at the end of time, is now officially under way. Please RSVP.

Namaste,
Shunyamurti


Image by Bill David Brooks, courtesy of Creative Commons license.

Amazonia: Healing With Sacred Plants (Documentary)

The narrator of this documentary, the psychologist and anthropologist Alberto Villoldo, is the author of many books related to shamanism, including Healing States: A Journey Into the World of Spiritual Healing and Shamanism (1987, with Stanley Krippner, Ph.D.), Shaman, Healer, Sage: How to Heal Yourself and Others with the Energy Medicine of the Americas (2000), and Illumination: The Shaman's Way of Healing (2011).

Villoldo combines the neuroscience of entheogens such as ayahuasca with a deep belief in the spiritual realms revealed by the plant. What we get, then, is another form of neurotheology.

Amazonia: Healing With Sacred Plants

Alberto Villoldo, psychologist, anthropologist and bestselling author, has studied the shamanic healing practices of the Amazon for over 25 years.

In this beautifully filmed documentary he reveals secrets of the jungle’s sacred plants and the healers who administer them, deep in the Amazon rainforest.

Amazonia chronicles the work of the master shamans of Peru’s Madre de Dios River in the Amazon watershed. Dr. Villoldo explains the process and theory of the powerful brew made by the shamans known as Ayahuasca – the vine of the souls.

Shot completely in High Definition by director Miguel Heded Abraham, the power and beauty of the virgin jungle transports the viewer into Amazonia and shares the wisdom of its healers

Watch the full documentary now – 68 min

Vanessa Grigoriadis - Travels in the New Psychedelic Bazaar

Throughout human existence, human beings have used substances that produce intoxication. The most potent of these have been the entheogens - psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, salvia divinorum, and mescaline containing cacti - and in the 20th century, the creation of LSD-25 by Albert Hofmann.

When the U.S. government over-reacted to the 1960s hippie culture and declared the hallucinogens Schedule 1 controlled substances (a listing generally reserved for substances that are addictive and without medical value), the underground chemists began to synthesize these drugs themselves. Particularly in the last 25 years, these chemists have created hundreds of variations of the basic hallucinogens, each designed for specific experiences or to offer specific duration of intoxication.

New York Magazine recently posted an article by Vanessa Grigoriadis that offers an introduction to the strange new world of designer psychedelics.

Travels in the New Psychedelic Bazaar

The synthetic drugs being invented, refined, and produced today—and often shipped in from China—would have blown Timothy Leary’s mind. Who knows what they’re doing to the brains of users.

By Vanessa Grigoriadis
Published Apr 7, 2013

(Photo: Steve Smith/Getty Images)

A few years ago, on the West Coast, I made the acquaintance of a 32-year-old whom some people call “the Wizard.” He’s a nice guy, quiet, with a long beard that he wasn’t going to cut until Americans stopped killing civilians in our two wars, and a deep interest in organic chemistry. He was once a computer programmer and at another time a pot dealer. “It wasn’t uncommon for me to drive around with pounds of weed in my truck,” he says. “I’d just put on a hillbilly hat, load up the car, and throw tools in the back.” Now, though, he’d wandered through a different door and found himself in the midst of a bazaar of weird new drugs. In the Wizard’s offline world, which was made up of patchwork-­wearing hippies and Rainbow Family elders, there was acid, pot, and MDMA, usually called ecstasy, and that was about it. But on the online forums he began to obsessively frequent, the Wizard learned about a vast array of new white powders. It was as if MDMA (now being called “Molly”) and LSD had somehow melded together, producing dozens of new psychedelic substances. On the forums, there were also whole new classes of dissociatives, stimulants, sedatives, and cannabis-based products (“cannabinoids”), along with a group of drugs called “bath salts,” which, of course, have nothing to do with Epsom salts or the lavender-scented kind purchased at Aveda.

The gray market for these new drugs, referred to as “research chemicals” or “synthetics,” has gotten little attention outside the tabloid media in the past few years, even as there has been worry about Mexican cartels and cocaine and heroin rings and medical-marijuana laws. It’s not a huge market, but it is a vivid one and fervent. For young guys interested in drugs today (and the users of these drugs are “150 percent male,” as one aficionado puts it), this underground scene of hobbyists and tinkerers, hippie-meets-hipster drug geeks, who like to call themselves psychonauts, there’s no better reason to try a new drug other than it happens to be just that—new. These drug users imagine themselves as amateur chemists, proto–Walter Whites, sampling and resynthesizing drugs to achieve exactly the state of consciousness they find most pleasurable. And there are no end of drugs to play with. As Hamilton Morris, the son of filmmaker Errol and a ­Williamsburg-­based journeyman drug historian, as well as an independent chemist conducting research at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, has noted, this era “is to ecstasy what the Cambrian period was to arthropods.”

The Wizard claimed a highfalutin motivation for his interest in these drugs—it’s about studying the way that changing one’s brain chemistry alters consciousness, he says, and drawing conclusions from there about what “is” is—but it seemed to me that the drug-taking itself had become the thing. He was constantly scanning the forums to check out the best dosages and “delivery methods” of various drugs—discerning whether, say, E-Cat, a bath salt, was better taken buccally, insufflated, perhaps injected (though the Wizard didn’t like to do that), or “pegged” in a “shamanic enema,” which is lingo for putting a packet of drugs up the butt. Eventually, the list of substances that he tried, in addition to old standards like alcohol, heroin, MDMA, cocaine, marijuana, acid, ether, nitrous, hydrocodone, mescaline, and cubensis mushrooms, grew to include MDA, DOM, LSA, MDAI, DOB, DOI, DOC, DMT, K, GBL, GHB, TMA-2, AMT, BZP, 2C-B, 2C-C, 2C-D, 2C-I, 2C-T-7, 5-MeO-DiPT, 5-MeO-MIPT, 5-MeO-DALT, 5-MeO-DMT, PCP, MDE, 4-Acetoxy-DET, 4-Acetoxy-DiPT, FLEA, 4-FA, JHW-018, MPA, AM-2201, AM-2233, 4-MEC, 4-EMC, 5-APB, 6-APB, ALD, MXE, BHO, Bromo-DragonFLY, Salvinorin A, Soma, fentanyl, Dilaudid, Marinol, thujone, oxymorphone, hydromorphone, and some of the “bath salts,” which is just a catchy, ­consumer-friendly name for “synthetic cathinones,” a slew of amphetamines and MDMA-like substances invented in 2008 to mimic the chemical composition of the African khat plant. (In Belize, before his legal troubles, McAfee Virus founder John McAfee claimed to have synthesized, though he later walked this back, MDPV, a bath salt that he called “super perv powder” and that is supposed to feel like doing a bunch of meth and then, twenty minutes later, a line of very fine cocaine.*)

As we sit in front of a crackling fire at his neatly kept cabin in the woods, the Wizard smiles. “These are all awesome substances, if you know what to expect,” he says. It’s possible he may have missed a few drugs when he put together this list, he adds—given the hammering to his cerebrum over the years—but he feels satisfied that he could remember most of them.

The story that America tells itself about drugs, particularly psychedelic ones—that term, invented by Aldous Huxley, is preferred these days, since “hallucinogens” implies that one is not actually on a trip through one’s mind (or a universal mind) but seeing things that aren’t there—is that they exploded in the sixties and seventies, in circles like Timothy Leary’s and on Haight-Ashbury, then were demonized by the government and shortly dispensed with, relegated to being the plaything of curious college kids at Oberlin and Brown. These days, though, almost every drug, from pot to GHB to morphine, has been messed with, as chemists find that removing a methoxy group or adding a benzene ring makes a new drug with different properties: body-grooving with a side helping of visuals, euphoric or speedy, long or short, or administering just the right dose of primal fear. These man-made compounds were called “designer drugs” in the late nineties; you might have thought, as I did before I researched this story, that they had such a name because they were carried around by trendy types in designer Gucci handbags, but it refers to a chemist’s “designing” a new molecular compound that replicates the effects of an illegal drug.*This article has been corrected to show that McAfee only claimed to have synthesized MDPV.

(Photo: Steve Smith/Getty Images)

By virtue of being molecularly distinct, these newer synthetics now exist somewhere between the realms of legal and illegal, in the gray. That’s a big deal to most of the people who are drawn to them: those who are often drug-­tested, particularly in the Army and Navy, or trying to dodge rehab (drug tests have yet to be updated for many synthetics); less affluent users who like the fact that a lot of these drugs are extremely cheap and sometimes even found in head shops; and kids who probably don’t even know a drug dealer, but they do know how to order things off the Internet. Most of these folks are looking for legal amphetamines. The Wizard’s crowd of underground psychonauts, probably made up of about 10,000 to 20,000 people, most of whom communicate through the forums, are a little different. They’re most interested in the ability to custom-match a substance with a desire—even if, in some cases, the new drugs are substandard to known ones (making your heart race; shoving you through a fractal landscape with elves coming out of the gloaming; making you feel weird, and not good weird, but bad weird). “You can pinpoint what you want now: ‘I’d like something of four hours’ duration with mescaline effects, or twelve hours’ duration with alternating mushroom and LSD rushes,’ ” says a 37-year-old software engineer whose activity in this realm has led friends to give him the nickname of Saddam Hussein’s poison-gas henchman, “Chemical Ali.”

One afternoon at the Jivamuktea Cafe near Union Square, Lex Pelger, a slight, unprepossessing 30-year-old with a degree in biochemistry, an evil eye pinned to his plaid shirt, digs past a copy of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and an invitation to a Bushwick burlesque party in his messenger bag, pulling out a creased, complicated chart of all the new synthetics. He points to the entry for the new hot synthetic psychedelic, the “N-bomb” (the NBOMe series), which resembles LSD in its effects but is shorter-lasting and cheaper, at about $1 per dose. You have to be careful with the dosage, which must be measured in sub­milligrams: “A tiny amount is so powerful,” Chemical Ali had told me. “I figured out that if you mix it with vodka and put it in a nasal-spray bottle, it’s a fifteen-minute come-up, peaks at an hour and a half, and you’re on your way out at two hours.” At Jivamuktea, Pelger takes a bite of his salad. “In New York, you can’t give acid away—it’s an entire day: ‘I have to do laundry,’ ‘I need to see this person,’ it sucks,” he says. “The N-bomb is less intellectual and about giant God questions than LSD, and a little bit more in your body—great for dates or art museums.” The last time he took it, he went to his favorite tripping spot in Prospect Park, then to the Asian-art section of the Brooklyn Museum. “There was this Korean pot that was so beautiful that I got it in my head that it was unsafe where the assholes and pigfuckers could see it, and I had to smash the glass and rescue it. It was the first time in a long time that I almost made a mistake with psychedelics.”

If you happen to be looking to vandalize a museum in order to rescue some Korean pots, obtaining these drugs is easier than you might imagine. Like everything else, the business of drug dealing is getting disrupted by the Internet. Some users download an encrypted web browser to purchase peer-reviewed illegal drugs on the website the Silk Road, but it’s far more commonplace for them to simply type “buy N-bomb” into Google, hit a site located abroad, and process fees through an anonymized payment service (some may rip you off, but that’s just part of the game). That the DEA has shut down U.S.-based vendors of these drugs doesn’t really have an effect on the end consumer, who still receives his package in the mail, usually stamped with a label reading not for human consumption on the front, in hopes of some protection from U.S. drug laws.

The bags usually come with a diagram of the drug’s molecular structure taped to the front, a nice wrapping paper, “and you could show it to a cop if you were ever stopped with a bag,” says one user, “and show him that the molecular structure of the drug makes it technically legal.” Like many others, the Wizard followed the recommended dosages for these drugs on Erowid.org, an online nonprofit sort of World Book of drugs that is funded entirely by donations. Run by a husband and wife, Earth and Fire Erowid (the names are pseudonyms), living outside Yosemite, the site has the slogan “Know your body. Know your mind. Know your substance. Know your source,” and some of its 59,000 pages of information were recently used as the most reliable source of human data on drugs in a study at UC Berkeley.

(Photo: Steve Smith/Getty Images. Photo-illustration by Joe Darrow.)

There are a few interlocking strands in this new drug culture, many familiar from previous movements, but this time woven in a different way. To start with, there’s the media and its fantasies (“MDMA makes holes in your brain”), and gurus delivering hoary mystical lore (“There is a cosmic mushroom mind”). And one could argue that drugs are an essential part of the futurist spirit of the moment, in full swoon with tech and science, and “now in the mainstream blossoming of the mid-nineties underground ‘techno pagan’ culture,” as author and psychedelic historian Erik ­Davis puts it. The process of selecting, sampling, and sometimes resynthesizing drugs is also connected to the do-it-yourself culture of computer hacking, another democratized technology. Many of these new experimenters feel that simply by journaling their experiences on the Internet, they are adding to the sum of scientific knowledge about these ­compounds—which, to a certain sort of person, means progress.

There has never been a time when we’ve been more open to the recognition that, as Hamilton Morris says, “everything is chemical in the world,” so there’s no reason to think that putting “chemicals in your brain, which is made of chemicals, is bad.” The right to put drugs in one’s own body is one that some people hold dear, a form of “cognitive liberty.” In the drug community, there’s utopian talk about what the future portends. “Every few months, we hear from someone who has just received their Ph.D. in pharmacology, chemistry, neurology, or psychology,” say the Erowids. “In 40 years, they will be senior researchers … The 2010s will be to the 2060s what the 1960s are to today.”

But there’s another way of looking at these preternaturally colorful developments. National emergency-room visits, the accepted metric for drug trends, found a record 49 novel compounds in 2011. “We’re starting to get a big-time problem with these new drugs,” says Rusty Payne, an agent at the DEA’s national office. “It turns out that we, as Americans, have an appetite for silly things like synthetics.”

For the wizard, Morris, and Pelger, the contemporary psychedelic idol isn’t Timothy Leary’s preacher man, or Terrance ­McKenna and his shamanic plants, though he’s beloved by those into ayahuasca, a psychedelic brew that Allen Ginsberg described as “a big wet vagina” or “great hole of God-nose.” Instead, it’s the original underground psychonaut and tinkerer: Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, a Harvard-educated Dow Chemical scientist who left the company shortly after he discovered that MDMA had psychoactive properties (it’s thought that it was synthesized by Merck in 1912, by chemists looking for drugs to stop bleeding), and has basically been a one-man R&D department for synthetic drugs for the past 50-odd years. In his home lab in the Bay Area, which for decades was semi-­sanctioned by the DEA (agents liked to be able to call him when something esoteric crossed their paths) and ignored when the politics in the country started to change, Shulgin made over 100 completely novel drugs and many more variations on a theme. He tried them himself, along with a small circle of friends called his “research group” and his wife, Ann, whom he seduced through chemistry. After imbibing his compounds, the couple engaged in “absolute truth-­telling,” with Rachmaninoff forming “huge petals of sensuous violet and pink, with a stamen of glowing yellow,” finally stripping their dressing gowns for lovemaking and then sitting quietly to type “experience notes” and eat a bowl of thick Dutch split-pea soup.

The Shulgins might sound like Santa and Mrs. Claus, but Sasha’s choice to publish all the recipes for the drugs he made in two enormous “cookbooks,” titled PiHKAL and TiHKAL (“Phenethylamines [or Tryptamines] I Have Known and Loved”), was actually quite subversive. Not only did he often refrain from using illegal “precursor chemicals” when chemically composing his drugs, but he was also able to retain legal use for awhile for most of them even under the Federal Analog Act of 1986, which says that any chemical that is “substantially similar” to a controlled substance is illegal.

In fact, the recipes in his books formed the entirety of the designer-drug market in the nineties. The most popular was 2C-B, a euphoriant Shulgin described as “unbelievably erotic, quiet, and exquisite.” For these drugs, and other phenethylamines, Shulgin substituted around the phenethylamine skeleton, adding different groups of molecules to create brain stimulants, ­central-nervous stimulants, or more and more serotonin, which starts to create hallucinations. “I like Shul­gin’s 2Cs a lot,” says Chemical Ali. “2C-D is strictly visual; 2C-P is twelve hours long; 2C-B is my favorite, because it’s an ecstasylike experience—not that you’re in a cuddle puddle or anything, but you do feel good.”

Today, most of Shulgin’s compounds are gone—he supposedly burned many of them, which Morris, the self-styled drug historian, expresses dismay about, because “to burn such a thing would be like burning a painting.” Now 87, Shulgin has had multiple strokes and is suffering from dementia, and friends are soliciting donations for his care, reminding others to “think of all the ways that your life, and the lives of others, have been healed, transformed, and bettered by this wonderful man.”

Before he became incapable of inventing new drugs (colleagues don’t believe that Shulgin’s drug use added to his dementia), the research-chemical market started to change. Things ramped up in 2000, in part because the DEA managed to catch William Leonard Pickard, thought to have been the biggest LSD manufacturer in the world. Pickard’s lab, with Persian rugs and a $120,000 stereo system, was located in a decommissioned missile silo near Topeka, Kansas. The DEA claimed the lab was capable of producing 2.8 billion hits, though Pickard disputed this figure, claiming he only had precursor for 15 million hits. Acid suddenly became very scarce in the U.S. ­Users had to become open to trying new drugs. At the same time, online forums like Bluelight and Drugs-Forum introduced locked advanced-chemistry sections, where chemists of all stripes—from university professors and Ph.D.’s to amateur hobbyists like the Wizard—were able to communicate for the first time.

On a recent evening, I went to tea with Morris, a handsome 25-year-old with the desiccated–Ivy Leaguer look of a Vampire Weekend musician, and the six-one, 120-pound form of someone who couldn't care less about normal sustenance—often he just drinks a mix of vegetable and protein powder shakes for lunch and dinner. “When I was younger, it seemed impossible to me that one human being could make so many novel compounds—Shul­gin’s work, I thought, would take 100 lifetimes—but the truth is, one committed chemist working in a lab can make a new compound almost every day, and very quickly will make hundreds,” says Morris.

We’re talking about the evolution of the synthetics industry, which Morris has been closely watching and chronicling for Vice magazine. Morris says that, with notable exceptions like some designer benzos, Ph.D.’s at mainstream university labs made most of the big innovations in post-Shulgin synthetics, mostly while developing drugs for other purposes. For example, the N-bomb was a product of a Free University of Berlin chemist who was researching schizophrenia. “Synthetic cannabinoids” were discovered by Clemson University professor John W. Huffman when he probed cannabinoid receptors to regulate nausea and appetite during cancer treatment.

Patents for these drugs are easy to find on Google Patents. That’s where many underground chemists and ­research-chemical vendors look for new drugs to synthesize, in hopes that their quasi-legal nature will help them get rich while staying out of jail. Once the drugs are on the market, gray-market tinkerers take them into their own labs or study them and make modifications—some members of the advanced-chemistry forums made variations on Huffman’s synthetic-pot group, for example, each with its own trip.

Academic researchers aren’t happy about this, for the most part—the theft of his patented drugs, Huffman has said, is a “royal pain in the rear end.” They truly did not intend that these drugs would be taken by humans. There aren’t even tests on rats for some of this stuff.

But with no FDA, making large batches of these drugs is surprisingly easy. All you have to do is send a CAS number (chemical I.D.) to the one country in the world that’s best at making all sorts of weird chemicals, from HGH to soy sauce to the plastic goo that forms Walmart toys—­China. Morris has checked out a couple of Shanghai labs where vendors outsource drug production and says they make other drugs there, like off-market Viagra. “The [Chinese plants] may not be up to the standard of a Merck pharmaceutical manufacturing plant, but many are producing high-purity products, with surprisingly few compounds containing dangerous contaminants” or misidentified ones, he says, describing standing on a shipping dock with barrels of synthetic pot doubtlessly headed for the U.S.

For most underground psychonauts, direct-from-China is now the preferred source of drugs, other than a clandestine chemist who can be trusted, and with China in the picture, there are fewer and fewer of those in the U.S. “Clandestine chemistry is a dying American folk art,” says Morris.

Says a law-enforcement official, “China’s a mess. We’re not going to go over there and just tell them they’re dropping the ball. It’s being done, but sensitively. It’s a monster challenge.”

Underground psychonauts like the Wizard and Chemical Ali might not be as accomplished researchers as Huffman, but they think about their drug use as research, too, and keep their own notes on their experiences, just as Shulgin did. Unlike some ­users’ “trip reports” on the forums, which say things like “in the presence of the God-head I forget who and what I am,” “the time has come for change, and the change is paradise,” “I felt like my heart was being flogged by a miniature devil,” or declare “nothing made sense!!!,” the Wizard’s usually kept things light. His report on 16 milligrams of 2C-E reads: “At 1:30am, Tera, my girlfriend, has vomited two times now. (Sidenote, she vomits on everything, including water.) We have been listening to a wide range of music, however the choice songs of the night were ‘Lodi Dodi’ by Snoop Dogg and ‘The fluffy little clouds’ by the Orb. What a combination, eh? Paul compares it to 5 hits of LSD and 75mg of MDMA. Tera and I disappear occasionally through out the night for the sexual escapades that 2c-e always has on us. At about 3am, we go back upstairs and Paul and I rant a while about the U.S. government and such. (Sidenote, pre-rolled joints are required if you plan to smoke weed during your trip, LOL.) Overall, the experience was wonderful, however I still prefer the 20mg dose, as it’s almost double the intensity.”

Offline, the drugs began to dribble into the hypersocial 24-hour YOLO party-people scene, particularly among the older crowd—“gravers,” or adult ravers, in neon and feathers—and among the BDSM community. The Wizard was even playing with his sexuality, coming out as bisexual and establishing a “Temple of Discord” with a big pink lacquered cross in his three-car garage. Some in the polyamory scene, of which Pelger is also a part, are embracing the new ketamine drugs, like 3-MeO-PCP. “Those are lovely—the best sex drugs and dissociatives out there, I would say,” says Pelger at Jivamuktea. “Longer than K, about two hours, a little goopier, a little less boundaries between skin.” He pauses. “It’s great for people in the kink community, too. If you want to do some hard play, like take your sex-worker girlfriend, knock her out for two hours, and have men come in and fuck her and film it and let her wake up and watch it, then it’s a safe way to do that.”

Of course, dangerous games become not games at all if someone forgets where the lines are. That’s always been the thing with heavy drugs, mental structures can give way without warning, which can be exhilarating—or something else.

As he got deeper into drug use, the Wizard began living a Summer of Love lifestyle in a contemporary world, and as it turned out, it wasn’t that hard to do. He began taking road trips up and down the West Coast in a 1979 Chevy school bus, though he soon flipped it for a regular car—it turns out that it costs a lot in gas to drive a school bus a thousand miles. He bought a scale and reagent tests so that he could be sure of what he was taking—put a little bit of the solution, usually mixed with sulfuric acid, on the drug, and it turns a different color for each type. He also started calling himself a “harm-reduction specialist,” offering “medical missionary” services at underground parties, and wrote this ditty:

Traveling from town to town
From show to show
Testing that shit, and letting them know
With his laptop in hand he’s ready to post
Wherever he’s at from coast to coast
Be it pills, liquid, powder, or gel
Best rep it properly or else he’ll yell
Letting people know what the drugs ­
really are
Mecke
Ehrlich
Mandelin and Marquis
[various names of reagent tests]
He’ll even show up to test at parties
So the next time that you are at a show
Ask “who has a test” and then you’ll know
That the harm reduction
specialists are far and few
But they’ll tell you what’s in a pill,
and not just that it’s blue

It sounds wholesome. But it was so easy to cross the line from drug fan to DIY chemist—doing simple extractions of DMT and salvia and learning about more advanced chemistry from someone making AMT and 2C-I—and, from there, a small hop to selling these wares. Soon, he and his friends were dealing drugs at festivals like Earthdance, the Oregon Country Fair, and Bonaroo, which he calls “Bustaroo” because a friend was busted there. “He got high on a Greyhound and ended up passing out waiting at a layover,” says the Wizard. “When the police woke him up, they found a few pounds of mushroom and 500,000 hits of a research chemical called DOB.” He strokes his beard. “The cops said he was a chemist, but I know enough to know that he wasn’t the chemist.”

This sounds like such an interesting world, doesn’t it? There’s only one problem—unlike with LSD, pot, or mushrooms, which are known to be among the safest drugs on the planet, people die from synthetics. Not a lot. But a few. Bromo-DragonFLY, a drug pilfered from the Purdue University lab of pharmacologist David Nichols for commercial release and considered to be the strongest serotonin agonist in the world, caused some people to lose their arms after taking high doses. “It clamped down so much on the blood vessels that the limbs die—you’re literally strangled from the inside,” says Jeff Lapoint, a medical toxicologist and emergency physician at Kaiser Permanente. After hearing stories like this, Chemical Ali and his group of “fellow travelers” decided to take a “threshold dose” of 1 milligram of each package they get in the mail and wait a day, for safety reasons. The Erowids even advise users of esoteric drugs to have a blood-pressure and pulse-monitoring device on hand. “When one takes a new and unstudied drug, one makes oneself a human guinea pig,” they say. “The drug may be perfectly safe. It may even be beneficial. On the other hand, after three uses one might suddenly find one’s body frozen up with symptoms resembling Parkinson’s disease.”

Then, of course, there are the freak-outs. It’s been impossible to miss these stories in the news, which loves a zombified drug-apocalypse story as much as it did during Reefer Madness in the twenties and doesn’t care much if mental illness enters the picture. On the N-bomb, an actor on FX’s Sons of Anarchymurdered his landlady in the Hollywood Hills, dismembered her cat, then killed himself. Bath salts have been blamed, among a zillion such stories, for making a Pennsylvania couple “slash their 5-year-old daughter repeatedly as they attacked the ‘voices in the walls’ ”; a guy in Maine get off his motorcycle and try to hit cars with a piece of wood; a woman try to cut out her teeth with a knife; and a man at a Tampa nightclub named Rat Soap fall into a bath-salts-induced seizure—clubbers tried to save him by putting a Valium in his mouth and wrapping him in plastic, but he died.

And who can forget the cannibal in Miami? That’s the Haitian guy who abandoned a purple Chevy (Koran in the back seat) and ripped his clothes off on the causeway, attacking a 65-year-old homeless man for eighteen minutes. Cops had to shoot him six times to get him to stop, at which point only 20 percent of the victim’s face remained intact, mostly a goatee. The media storm over this attack got so intense that Chuck Schumer, the government’s loudest advocate for making these drugs illegal, was able to push a new federal synthetics act past the opposition of Rand Paul and others. In the summer of 2012, Obama signed it into law, making most of the 2C class, as well as a few bath salts and Huffman’s drugs, illegal, with manufacture and sale punishable by up to twenty years in prison.

That the day after the synthetic-drug-control bill was passed the coroner finally released a toxicology report showing the cannibal was high only on THC, the natural kind, is neither here nor there. The more important fact is that it took only a few months for vendors to start selling a new set of drugs: The cannabinoids went from AM-2201 (illegal) to UR-144 (legal), and there was suddenly a new bath salt called a-PVP, which users on the forums declared good, although it “smelled very much like sperm” when insufflated. The trip is far from over.

The wizard seemed as hale and sharp as a 32-year-old ingester of hundreds of unknown drugs can be expected to be. Which didn’t mean that he was unscarred by his experiences. In his life, he felt that fate had always been on his side, but weird things started to happen. In fact, his local post office told him that his packages were being watched. Then an ex-girlfriend stole a bunch of synthetics and $40,000 from him; a few days later, she was stopped speeding in a construction zone and consented to a search of her car. The cops seized 2C-I, 2C-E, LSD, oxycodone, ketamine, MDMA, and a rare GHB “pro-drug” (whose chemical composition, different from GHB, is converted to it by the body’s enzymes when ingested) that the law-enforcement lab had never seen before. “There’s pictures of my pink-elephant blotter 2C-I on the DEA’s website because of that!” says the Wizard. As his business expanded, he began working with a lower-level dealer, a guy he knew from high school, who was “all about making money, and misrepresenting things, like a lot of people are,” he says. “He’d call 2C-I ‘synthetic mescaline,’ which it is technically a derivative of, but it’s not, at all.”

A couple of months later, the lower dealer was caught capping off a pistol at a lake. The cops took him in, and he said he had something to tell them if they’d let him off on the charge—he could turn them on to a major source of acid. When the dealer came back to talk to the Wizard, he told him that he’d met some guys who were “big fans” of his work, and the Wizard’s ego, the thing he was supposed to be destroying with all this, got puffed up. He gave the informant 2C-I, 2C-B, and Bromo-DragonFLY, but the agents kept asking for “real acid”—they didn’t want to deal with prosecuting someone in an analog case, which can be hard to win because juries are easily confused by chemistry.

The Wizard said he’d see what he could do. A week later, he put twenty vials in a Starbucks bag, a taste before they said they’d purchase two raw grams, and went to meet his friend at the mall. “Suddenly, there were five SUVs all around me, and guys in plainclothes with guns—honestly I thought we were getting robbed,” says the Wizard. “I might have been a little high.” When he said he wanted a lawyer, “the cops said, ‘Shut up, this isn’t a movie.’ I said, ‘Oh, they don’t have civil rights in movies?’ I got in the cop car, and just to be a dick, I said, ‘How much do I need to pay to get out today?’ ‘You’re not getting out today,’ the cop said. ‘We’re the DEA.’ That’s when I shut the hell up.”

The prosecutor on the Wizard’s case was interested in whom he knew, but he refused to talk. He might have run, but for the ankle bracelet. His friend, a naturopath once close to Shulgin, said that they could found an institute for research chemicals on Native American land. In the end, the judge was relatively lenient: The Wizard was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

The new psychonauts are comfortable with the notion that their explorations will have casualties, that all of the seekers won’t necessarily make it back. “All of this [experimentation] is producing valuable toxicological information that would never exist otherwise,” says Morris, who also notes that if the government hadn’t made so many drugs illegal, probably no one would be taking synthetics and risking their lives at all. “Because of THC’s benign nature, cannabinoids have long been considered one of the safest drug classes,” he says, “but now there are instances of people becoming addicted to synthetic cannabinoids or even reports of death.”

Besides, even scientists inside the academy believe that these drugs have uses beyond Burning Man. “These research compounds have the potential to teach us something about brain chemistry and different neural circuits—they’re potentially gold mines of information,” says Julie Holland, a New York psychiatrist and editor of a book on cannabis and another about MDMA. She talks about a study in Arizona using psilocybin to treat OCD. “Are you going to get those people high on mushrooms every day? No. But is it possible that the mushrooms are targeting a particular receptor beyond the way that Prozac or any other SSRI works?” It’s a matter of refining the medicines we have. When your car needs oil, you don’t just lift up the hood and pour oil on the engine. “It’s possible that SSRIs that flood the entire brain with serotonin aren’t the answer—maybe working on one circuit where your anterior cingulate is.” Holland believes that it’s a foregone conclusion that the next decade will include a new generation of Big Pharma meds based on marijuana. “You’re going to have medicine for inflammation and metabolism tickling the cannabis receptors—they’ll act like cannabinoids, but aren’t going to get you high.” (Harvard Medical School professor John Halpern recently started a company, Entheogen Corp., to develop 2-bromo-LSD, a non-hallucinogenic LSD analog, to treat cluster headaches, one of the most painful conditions in medicine.)

Some academics who study drugs view the research-chemical scene as an annoying sideshow, pointing out that it’s pretty hard to tell the difference between drugs in the same class with similar durations (MDMA and 2C-B, for example). The focus, they think, should be on gaining mainstream acceptance of old-line psychedelics, and they’re excited about current studies on psilocybin, the magic in magic mushrooms, for end-of-life care at Johns Hopkins and NYU. A privately funded group, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, is studying the ways MDMA can help soldiers with post-traumatic-stress disorder (therapists schedule sixteen non-drug sessions as well). Their goal for the next ten years is to reinstate the original use of MDMA, which was embraced by the psychiatric community in the seventies, and force the FDA to approve prescriptions for use during therapy.

The pathology of the underground psychonaut isn’t hard to imagine, and not that different from the video-game addict or extreme-sports obsessive—someone who also likes the rush of alternative reality more than the quotidian one. Real life can remain at a standstill, with jobs and relationships less important than surfing the edge. The possibility of addiction isn’t to be underestimated. “The reward circuit in the brain is very clever,” says Richard Friedman, director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College. “When you’re off the drugs, the background pleasure state of your brain may be changed for a week, a year, or even permanently. This is a wild social experiment.” Nevertheless, some users say they’ve had spiritual breakthroughs. “I know now that there’s more to the world than science has been able to explain so far, and it’s not to be feared,” says Chemical Ali. “I don’t have a death wish, but I’ve practiced death. When it happens, it will be fun, a cool experience.” He’s talking to me on the phone with a Björn strapped to his chest, and the baby boy inside, only a few weeks old, starts to wail. “I do feel like I should put this stuff away, at least for a while,” he says, “because I have something to live for.”

The Wizard’s story is a cautionary tale, almost a parable, but the government may start to take a closer look at this world. The Feds even recently scheduled 2C-N, a necessary intermediate for the manufacture of many synthetic drugs, though it doesn’t actually get you high—but it is useful in a synthetics lab. Morris calls the current situation an “infinite game of cat and mouse,” where the government schedules a drug, then chemists race to find a new legal compound. “Three weeks ago, we had our first detection of new derivatives, PB-22 and 5F-PB-22,” says Kevin Shanks, a forensic toxicologist in the Midwest. “Quinoline derivatives are uncontrolled by the federal government, and I see them becoming prevalent very quickly.” Adds Lapoint, the toxicologist: “Until we can break the model of releasing a new chemical that retains the same affinity for the receptor of an illegal drug but is structurally dissimilar enough that you can avoid getting popped, this is the new normal. Brick-and-mortar quasi-legal head shops are hard enough to stop, but the Internet vendors are fully whack-a-mole … The new drug dealer is the mailman.”

Will the cat finally catch the mouse? Some psychonauts fear that the government, in desperation, might take a pharmacodynamic backward approach, looking at the receptor activated by the drug and scheduling backward from there, claiming that any organic molecule that binds to the CB1 receptor and makes you stoned is a schedule 1 drug. * But then they’d have to schedule other drugs with CB1 affinity, including Tylenol. And they’d be “banning specific states of consciousness,” says Morris. “If the plan weren’t so futile, it would be utterly terrifying.”

Lapoint starts spitballing about what may happen in the future. “If I was a [research-chemical drugmaker], I’d want to make a structure of an endogenous chemical,” he says, “one that’s already in your brain and [can be enhanced] to hit the right neurotransmitters to get you high. The problem is that if you took this drug out of your brain and tried to eat it, it would be quickly broken down by enzymes. But you could tweak these [naturally occurring] structures, or add a substance that inhibits these enzymes, and you would get a psychoactive effect.” This would surely stump regulatory officials. Lapoint is completely against the proliferation of these drugs—he’s not interested in more patients in his ER. Still, as a man of science, he can’t but marvel at this type of reverse-engineering. “Whoa,” he says. “That would be really cool.”

*This article has been corrected to show that the psychonauts fear the government's approach will be "pharmacodynamic backward," not "pharmacode dynamic password."