The modern period of psychopharmacology interest in the use of hallucinogenic plants by aborigines is unusually short. Its beginning dates back to the end of the 19th century, when German pharmacologist Lewis Levin took his trip to the USA.

On his return to Berlin in 1887, Levin brought with him a certain amount of peyote-head cactus, which evokes visions from the Sonora Indians, which he received from Park Davis during his stay in Detroit. He set to work, extracting and identifying new compounds discovered by him, and testing them for himself. And a decade later, peyote attracted so much attention that in 1897 Philadelphia storyteller and physician Silas Weir Mitchell became the first gringo to describe drunkenness.

The picture that unfolded in this pair of magical watches was such that I find it useless to attempt to describe what I saw. It is impossible to find a language that would convey to others the beauty and splendor of it. Stars … thin, flowing colored threads … then a sharp rush of countless points of white light swept across the entire field of view, as if invisible millions of Milky Way scattered before the eyes of a sparkling river … zigzag lines of a very bright color … wonderful wondrous charm colors more lively tones – it all passed before me, before I could label anything. Then, for the first time, certain objects became associated with the appearance of different tones of color. A clear gray stone spear has grown to an enormous height and has become a slender, richly decorated Gothic tower of a very complex and clear pattern with a lot of easily dressed statues standing in the aisles or on stone pillars. As I saw, each protruding corner, cornice, and even the surface of the stones at their junctions were staggered or hung with clusters of something that seemed to me huge precious, but untreated stones, something like a mass of transparent fruit.