In 1897, Arthur Hefter, Levin’s rival, became the first person to single out and accept pure mescaline. Mescaline is a powerful visionary amphetamine found in the Lophophora williamsii peyote cactus . It has been used for at least several centuries by the Sonora Indians in Mexico. Its use in Peru, where it was extracted not from peyote, but from other types of cactus, has at least several thousand years.

Psychologist and one of the first sexologists Havelock Ellis, following the example of Weir Mitchell, soon presented his description of the pleasures of mescalin.

A vision never resembles familiar objects; they were extremely clear, but nevertheless always new; they were constantly approaching and, nevertheless, constantly elusive resemblance of familiar things. I have seen marvelous, puffy fields of jewels, arranged individually or in clusters, sometimes sparkling and glistening, sometimes cast in a luxurious subdued radiance. Then they exploded in front of my eyes with some similar forms of flowers, and then they seemed to turn into bright butterflies or innumerable folds of wings of some wonderful insects, wings, the transparent fibers of which were iridescent with all the colors of the rainbow … Some monstrous forms appeared , fabulous landscapes, etc. … It seems to us that any scheme that would define in detail the type of vision in accordance with the successive stages of the action of mescalin should be considered as extremely conditional. The only thing that is typical in terms of consistency is that the most elementary visions are followed by visions of a more complex nature.

Mescalin led experimenters to another chemical agent of “artificial paradise”, more powerful than hemp or opium. The descriptions of mescaline states could not but attract the attention of the surrealists and psychologists, who also shared fascination with images hidden in the depths of the newly defined unconscious. Dr. Kurt Beringer, a student of Levin, acquainted with Hermann Hesse and Carl Jung, became the father of psychedelic psychiatry. His phenomenological approach is marked by descriptions of inner visions. He conducted hundreds of experiments with mescalin in humans. The descriptions given by his subjects are simply wonderful.

Then again the dark room. Visions of fantastic architecture again captured me, endless transitions in the style of Moore, moving like waves, interspersed with amazing images of some fancy figures. One way or another, the image of the cross was extremely often present in the inexhaustible variety. The main lines shone with an ornament, sliding to the edges with snakes or dismissing tongues, but always straightforward. Crystals appeared again and again, changing the shape, color and speed of appearance in front of my eyes. Then the images became more stable, and little by little two huge space systems emerged, separated by some kind of feature into the upper and lower half. Shining with their own light, they appeared in infinite space. Inside they appeared new rays of brighter tones and, gradually changing, took the form of elongated prisms. At the same time, they moved. Systems, approaching one another, were attracted and repelled.

In 1927, Beringer published his “magnum opus,” “Mescaline intoxication,” then translated into Spanish, but never into English. This is a very impressive work, it has created a scientific platform for research pharmacology.

The following year, the publication in English of the book by Heinrich Kluwer “Mescal, a divine plant and its psychological effects” appeared. Kluwer, whose work was based on the observations of Weir Mitchell and Havelock Ellis, again introduced the English-speaking world to the concept of pharmacological visions. Especially important is the fact that Kluver took the content of the observed experiences seriously and first tried to give a phenomenological description of the psychedelic experience.

Clouds from left to right across the entire optical field. The tail of the pheasant (in the center of the field) turns into a bright yellow star, the star – into sparks. Moving sparkling screw, hundreds of screws. A sequence of fast-moving objects in pleasant tones. A rotating wheel (about 1 cm in diameter) in the center of the silver patch. Suddenly in the wheel is the image of God, as it is represented in the old Christian images. Intention to see a homogeneous, uniform dark field of view: red and green shoes appear. Most phenomena are much closer to the distance required for reading.

The study of hallucinogenic indoles dates back to the twenties of our century. A genuine renaissance of psychopharmacology takes place in Germany. In this atmosphere, Levin and others became interested in the garmin, an indole, the only source of which was Banisteriopsis caapi, a woody vine that Richard Sprus had encountered almost 80 years before. Of course, Levin’s last published work “Banisteria Kaapi – a new, intoxicating poison and therapeutic agent” reflects its enchantment with this plant. She came out in 1929. The excitement of Levin and his colleagues was understandable: the ethnographers and among them the German Theodor Koch-Grünberg returned from the Amazon with reports that some tribes used herbal remedies for telepathy to determine the correct path of their society. In 1929, chemists E. Perrot and M. Raymond-Game isolated the active agent fromBanisteriopsis caapi and named it telepatin. Decades later, in 1957, the researchers came to the conclusion that telepatin was identical to harmaline extracted from Peganum harmala,and the name Harmin was officially adopted.

In the 1930s, enthusiasm for the alkaloids of the harmala was generally reduced, as was the interest in ethnopharmacology. But there were exceptions. Among those interested was Austrian emigrant Blas Pablo Reko, born Blasius Paul Reko, who lives in Mexico.

Reko was a person with a wide range of interests. Wandering life led him to the United States, to Ecuador, and finally to the Mexican state of Oaxaca. There he became interested in ethnobotany and what is today called archeoastronomy – the study of the observation of the world of stars by ancient cultures and their relationship to it. Blas Pablo Reko was an attentive observer of the use of plants by local tribes, among whom he happened to live. In 1919, in his refutation of the article by William Safford, Reko said that the shamans of the Mixtec and Masathek peoples still traditionally use a hallucinogenic mushroom rather than peyote to invoke visions. / Cf .: Victor A. Reko, Magische Gife, Rausch’und Betaubungsmittel der neuen Welt (Berlin: Express Edition. 1987) / In 1937, Reko sent a bag of samples of two plants to a Swedish anthropologist and curator of the ethnographic museum in Gothenburg, Henry Wassen found it particularly interesting. One of the samples was the seeds of piole , a visionary bindweed ipomoea violacea, containing hallucinogenic indoles related to LSD.

Another pattern — unfortunately too decaying to identify the species — was a fragment of theononacatl, the first specimen containing the psilocybin fungus, proposed to scientific attention. Thus, Reko began to study the indole hallucinogens of Mexico and laid the foundation for two areas of research and subsequent discoveries, which will eventually be combined when the Swiss chemist-pharmacist Albert Hofmann determines the characteristics of both compounds in his laboratory.

A NISSY ABOUT SOME MUSHROOM OF NEW LIGHT

Reko got his sample of a mushroom from Roberto Weitlander, a European engineer working in Mexico. The following year, a small group together with Weitlander’s daughter and anthropologist Jean Bassé Johnson became the first whites to take part in the all-night mushroom ceremony, the velade .

In the end, Wassen sent Reko’s samples to Harvard, where they attracted the attention of a young ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultz. Schulz was a medical student until he came across Kluwer’s work on mescaline. Schulz thought that the Recole mushroom could have been the mysterious theonakatl described by Spanish historians. Together with an anthropologist from Yelles University, Weston-La Barr, he published a compilation of evidence that theonacatl is some kind of psychoactive fungus.

The following year, Schulz escorts Reco to the village of Ouatla de Jimenez in the highlands of the Sierra Masateca. Samples of psychoactive fungi were collected and sent to Harvard. But in the late 30s more significant forces would come; as in many areas, research in ethnobotany is suspended, and then completely stopped with the outbreak of the Second World War. Ryoko leaves, and when the Japanese consolidate their position on rubber plantations in Malaya, Schulz accepts an invitation to study in the Amazon basin rubber extraction for the Office of Strategic Services established during the war by the US government. But before that, in 1939, he publishes the work “Identification of Theonacatl, Aztec Narcotic Basidiomycitis”. / Richard Evans Schultes. “Plantae Mexicanae. II: The Identification of Teonanacati, a Narcotic Basidiomycete of the Aztec & ”, Harvard University (1939) 7: 37–54 / In it, he quietly offers a clue to the mystery, which at that time seemed nothing more than a subject scholars debate among specialists in central america.

Despite the fact that the luminaries of science left Europe, there was a fundamental breakthrough. In 1938, Albert Hofman was engaged, as usual, in his familiar pharmaceutical research at the Basel laboratory of Sandoz in Switzerland. He hoped to create new tools to alleviate the attempts (labor battles) and childbirth. Working with vasoconstrictor substances extracted from ergot, Hofman was the first to synthesize d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate — LSD-25. Being a modest man, he recorded the completion of the synthesis, and the previously unknown compound was cataloged and placed in the repository. There it remained in Nazi Europe five more of the most turbulent years of human history. It is terrible to imagine the possible consequences, become the discovery of Hoffman known at least a little earlier.

Alfred Jerry may have expressed his premonition of this momentous event and allegorically portrayed him in his book Passion, which was considered a hobby for high-altitude bicycle races, written in 1894. In fact, the Dadaists and Surrealists and their predecessors, grouped around Jerry and his “School of Patatysical”, did a great deal to study the use of hashish and mescalin as amplifiers of creative expression. They created a cultural platform for truly surrealistic dissemination of LSD information to the public. Any enthusiast

LSD knows the story of April 16, 1943, feeling the approach of a pre-existent bustle and not knowing that he received a dose of LSD when he came into contact with a substance without gloves, the chemist and almost the counterculture hero Albert Hoffman finished his work early and went on a bicycle through Basel.

I had to stop work in the laboratory after lunch and go home, prompted by a noticeable feeling of anxiety combined with a slight dizziness. At home, I lay down and plunged into a dream-like state of some kind of intolerance intoxicated, characterized by extremely stimulated imagination. In this state with my eyes closed (daylight seemed unpleasantly blinding), I watched a continuous stream of fantastic paintings, extraordinary images with intense kaleidoscopic color play. Somewhere in two hours this state has passed.

In 1947, in the scientific literature, there were finally reports of the unusual discovery by Hofman of a metagalucinogen active at the microgram level. As shown by the events of the 50s, Pandora’s box was opened.

Aldous Huxley wrote “Doors of Perception” in 1954 – a brilliant sketch of the fight of European intellectuals who fought with an awareness of the true dimensions of consciousness and the Cosmos, as well as the amazed ones.

The fact that everyone else sees only under the influence of mescalin, the artist, by nature, sees him from birth all the time. His perception is not limited to being useful biologically or socially. A piece of knowledge belonging to the World Mind, leaks in addition to the restrictive valve of the brain and the artist’s “ego” into his consciousness. This is knowledge of the intrinsic value of all things. For the artist, as well as for the recipient of mescaline, fabrics are living hieroglyphs, which in some unusually expressive way symbolize the incomprehensible mystery of life. Even more than an armchair, although probably less than the altogether supernatural colors in the vase and the folds on gray flannel trousers, they are filled with this “something complete”. What they owe their privileged position, I do not dare to say.

In 1956, the Czech chemist Steven Heat synthesized DMT – dimethyltryptamine. DMT remains the strongest of all hallucinogens and one of the shortest known compounds of this kind. When DMT is smoked, intoxication reaches a peak for about two minutes, and then subsides for about 10 minutes. Injections usually last longer. Here is a description of the discoverer himself.

At the third or fourth minute after the injection, vegetative symptoms appeared, such as: tingling sensations, tremors, mild nausea, pupil dilation, increased blood pressure and increased heart rate. At the same time, eidetic phenomena, optical illusions, pseudo-hallucinations, and then later – real hallucinations appeared. Hallucinations consisted of moving, blindingly painted Oriental motifs; then I saw wonderful, rapidly changing scenes, pictures.

A year later, in May 1957, Valentina and Gordon Wasson published their famous article in Life magazine , announcing the discovery of the psilocybin mushroom complex. This article, like many other brief publications on this subject, brought to the mass consciousness the understanding that plants can cause exotic, and perhaps even paranoid, visions. New York Bank Deposits Specialist Wasson was well acquainted with the driving forces and the troublemakers of the establishment. And therefore, naturally, he turned to the publisher “Life” to his friend Henry Luce, when he needed a popular forum / to announce his discoveries. The tone of the article in the journal contrasts sharply with the hysteria and the hype that the American mass media subsequently inflates. The article is correct and thorough, unbiased and scientific.

The free ends of Wasson chemical discoveries were tied up by Albert Hoffman, who flashed a second time in the history of psychedelic pharmacology with a bright light, chemically isolating psilocybin and determining its structure in 1958.

In a short time in the recent past, from 1947 to 1960, the main indolic hallucinogens were characterized, cleaned and investigated. And it is not by chance that the following decade was the most turbulent in America over the past hundred years.

To understand the role of psychedelics in the 60s, we must recall the lessons of prehistory and the importance that ancient people attached to the dissolution of boundaries in a group ritual based on the consumption of hallucinogenic plants. The effect of these compounds is mainly psychological and is only partly due to culture: in fact, these compounds act as solvents, removing cultural conditionality of any kind. They boost the destructive process of reforming social values. Such compounds should be recognized as agents contributing to the removal of conditionality; revealing the relativity of generally accepted values, they become powerful forces in the political struggle for the direction of the evolution of social images.

The sudden introduction of such a powerful agent of withdrawal of conditionality as LSD had the effect of creating mass apostasy from generally accepted values, especially those based on a hierarchy of dominion dedicated to the suppression of consciousness and awareness.

LSD is a uniquely powerful drug among psychoactive substances. The effect of LSD on a person is found at a dose of 50 micrograms, or 5/100000 grams. About compounds that could cause a similar effect in smaller quantities, it was not necessary to hear. So, theoretically, you can get 10 thousand doses of 100 micrograms from just one gram. This stunning ratio of the physical mass to the market price, more than any other aspect explains the rapid rise of LSD consumption and its subsequent prohibition. LSD has neither color nor odor, it can be mixed with a liquid; hundreds of doses can be hidden under a postage stamp. For LSD, neither the prison walls nor the national borders were a barrier. It can be produced anywhere with the necessary technology and immediately transported anywhere.Millions of doses of LSD can be made and made by a very small number of people. Colossal markets formed around these sources of supply: criminal syndicalism quickly emerged – a precondition for the rise of fascism.

But LSD is more than a commodity. This is a product that destroys the social machine through which it passes. This effect was confusing to all the factions that tried to use LSD to push through some political program.

The agent of withdrawal of psychological conditioning is, in essence, an anti-program agent. When the different parties, trying to gain control of the situation, understood this, they were able to agree on one thing: LSD must be stopped. How and who did it is a living story that was especially well told by Jay Stevens in “Stormy Skies” and Martin Lee and Bruce Schlein in “Acid Dreams”. / Jay stevens. Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. 1987); Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shiain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press. 1985) / These authors clearly showed that when the methods that worked on colonial empires selling opium in the 19th century, were used by the CIA for domestic purposes – the direction of the state of mind in America during the Vietnam War – they almost completely smashed the entire psychosocial needs.

Lee and Shlein wrote.

LSD consumption among young people in the United States reached a peak in the late 60s, shortly after the CIA organized a series of covert operations designed to split, discredit and neutralize the new left. Was this a historical co-ownership, or did the agency take any steps to ensure the illegal trade in acid? No wonder the CIA representatives launched such an idea. “We are not making targets of American citizens,” former CIA director Richard Helms told the American Society of Newspaper Publishers in 1971. “The people must accept in some way on faith that we, the leaders of the CIA, are honest, dedicated to serving the people.”

Holmes’ assurances are hardly comforting in the light of his own role as the first instigator of Operation MK-ULTRA, which used Americans as guinea-pigs for testing LSD and other substances that change their state of mind.

As it turned out, almost all the drugs that appeared on the black market in the 1960s were marijuana, cocaine, heroin, Pi-Pi-Pi (PCP), amyl nitrate, mushrooms, DMT, barbiturates, laughing gas, “speed” [Methamphetamine. – Approx. ed. ] and many others were previously thoroughly investigated, verified, and in some cases improved by the CIA and military scientists. But none of the methods studied by the agency in the quarter-century multi-million dollar search for the overcoming of the human mind had received so much attention, and none aroused such enthusiasm as LSD-25. For a while, CIA personnel were completely blinded by this hallucinogen. Those who first experienced LSD in the early 50s were convinced that it revolutionizes the mask and dagger case … During Holmes’s tenure as director of the CIA, the agency conducted a massive illegal domestic campaign against the antiwar movement and other dissident elements in the United States.

As a result of Helms’ successful campaign, the new left was in turmoil when he left the CIA in 1973. Most of the official reports related to the CIA’s drug-related and mind control projects were soon destroyed by order of Helms shortly before his departure. The files were destroyed, according to Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, chief of staff of the CIA’s technical service, because of the “growing paper problem”. In this process, numerous documents relating to the operational use of hallucinogenic substances, including all existing copies of the systematic CIA manual entitled: “LSD, some non-psychedelic applications” were lost.

The times were extraordinary, and the situation was further aggravated by the fantasies of those who tried to control it. The sixties can be regarded as a time when two pharmacological minds of the mind collided in an atmosphere close to war. On the one hand, the international heroin syndicates tried to anesthetize the black ghettos of America, while at the same time engaging the middle class in a campaign to support military adventurism. On the other hand, self-organized crime syndicates produced and distributed tens of millions of doses of LSD, while at the same time conducting a well discernible underground campaign to incite hidden psychedelic anarchy.

The result of this collision can be considered in some way to reduce these efforts to nothing. The war in Southeast Asia was a catastrophic defeat for the American establishment, but, paradoxically, hardly any remnants of psychedelic utopianism survived this clash. All psychedelic drugs, even such unknown ones as ibogaine and bufotenin, were declared illegal. In the West, the tireless revival of structured values ​​began; In the 1970s and 1980s, the need to abandon the influence of the 1960s almost got the taste of some kind of mass obsession. During the 70s, a new management program was clarified: since heroin had lost its charm, now it was television for the poor and cocaine for the rich.

By the end of the 60s, psychedelic studies were completely erased from life – not only in the United States, but throughout the world. And this happened despite the tremendous excitement that these discoveries caused among psychologists and specialists studying human behavior, anxiety similar to the feelings that engulfed the community of physicists with the advent of the splitting of the atom. But if the power of the atom, reversible to weapons of mass destruction, was attractive to the establishment of dominion, then the psychedelic experience ultimately looked like a terrible abyss.

A new period of repression has begun, despite the fact that many researchers have used LSD to treat conditions that were previously considered incurable. Canadian psychiatrists Abram Hoffer and Humphrey Osmond tabulated the results of eleven different attempts to study alcoholism and concluded that 45% of patients who used LSD in their treatment showed improvement. / A. Hotter and H. Osmond. New Hope for Alcoholics (New York: University Books. 1968) / Promising results were achieved when attempting to treat schizophrenics, childhood autism, and patients with severe depression. Many of these findings were criticized after LSD became illegal, but new experiments were no longer planned, and the work could not be repeated because of its illegality. The promising use of LSD in psychiatry for the treatment of pain, addiction,alcoholism and depression in fatal diseases, was postponed indefinitely. Contribute to improving our understanding of hallucinogenic plants fell to the share of modest science – botany.

In the center of this peaceful revolution in botany stood a single person – Richard Evans Schultz, the same Schultz, whose Mexican studies were interrupted by World War II. Schultz spent more than fifteen years in the Amazon; he regularly reported to the Office of Strategic Services on the yield of natural rubber, until the invention of synthetic rubber made this work unnecessary; he also studied and collected orchids of tropical rainforests and plateaus. While Schulz was traveling, it turned out that his interest in the experiments of Kluwer with mescaline and the fascination with psychoactive plants of Mexico did not die out in South America.

Years later, he will write about his work among the shamans of the Sibundo valley in southern Colombia: “The shamanism of this valley may well personify the most highly developed psychedelic consciousness on Earth.” What was true of Sibund was, in general, almost as true for the Upper Amazon, and for the next several decades, it was Schultz and his graduate student who practiced and spread the gospel of modern ethnobotany.

Schulz focused on psychoactive plants from the very beginning of his work. He truly understood that Aboriginal peoples, who diligently gathered the whole arsenal of medicinal and medicinal plants, probably best understood their effects on the psyche. After working on peyote and mushrooms, Schulz turned his attention to several types of defiant vision of convolvuli consumed in Oaxaca. In 1954, he published his work on Amazonian nasal (snuff) drugs, and thus heralded the world to the existence of the traditional shamanic use of DMT of plant origin.

Over the next thirty-five years, the Harvard group meticulously researched and published all the uses of psychoactive plants that were in its focus. This part of the ever-expanding work – an integrated set of taxonomic, ethnographic, pharmacological and medical information – forms the basis of the database that is used throughout the world.

The birth of ethnopsychopharmacology took place at Harvard under the watchful eye of Schulz in many respects during those troubled years when Timothy Leary was at Harvard, creating for her, by his efforts to incorporate psychedelic experience into the social agenda, a largely different reputation.

LIRI IN GARVARDA

It is doubtful that Liri or Schultz find much in each other. They could hardly be more different – the reserved Brahmin, the botanist Schultz, and the trickster shaman and the social researcher Leary. Liri had his very first psychedelic experience with mushrooms; he later recalled that this first contact with psilocybin in Mexico prompted him to what he called his “planetary mission”. But economic benefit policies have spread to the Harvard Psilocybin project; LSD was more affordable and cheaper than psilocybin. Michael Hollingshead was the person most responsible for choosing LSD as a vehicle used in psychedelic Harvard circles.

got caught by Hollingshead, who became his guru. Leary followed him all day long … Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, two closest associates of Leary, had a hard time seeing him in such a helpless state. They decided that he was completely mad, and blamed Hollingshead for this. But their own introduction to the contents of the mayonnaise pod was only a matter of time. Hollingshead gave this tool to members of the psilocybin project, and since then LSD has become part of their research repertoire.

After the suppression of the psychedelic subculture, which began with the declaring of LSD illegal in October 1966, it seems that the impulse to further forging this substance has dried up. The most significant phenomenon in the 70s from the point of view of the public, which was set up on psychedelic searches with previous experiences with LSD and mescaline, was the emergence, since the end of 1975, of various home bred psilocybin mushroom breeding guides. Several such manuals have appeared; the very first was written by me together with my brother and published under pseudonyms O.-T. Ose and O.-N. Eric “Psilocybin: A Guide for Growing a Magic Mushroom.” The book sold out over the next five years in quantities of over 100,000 copies. Some imitation books also went well. So, psilocybin, long sought and familiar to the psychedelic community by the expansive prose of Wasson and Leary, has finally become available to many people who no longer needed to go to Oaxaca in order to gain real experience.

The general atmosphere in the case of psilocybin is different from LSD. Hallucinations occur more easily, and also there is a feeling that this is not just some kind of lens for observing the personal psyche, but also a kind of communication tool to get in touch with the world of high shamanism of Archaic antiquity. A community of therapists and astronauts of the inner spaces emerged around the use of these mushrooms. To this day, these quiet groups of professionals and pioneers of interior spaces constitute the core of the community of people who have accepted the fact of psychedelic experience in their life and profession and continue to struggle with this experience and study in it.

And here we will leave the story of human enthusiasm for plants that intoxicate, cause visions or destroy insanity. Today, we really know no more than our distant ancestors knew. Perhaps less. In fact, we cannot even be sure whether science is suitable for this task – a tool of knowledge, on which we are now so dependent. For we can begin our search for understanding in the cold realms of archeology, botany, or neuropharmacology, but the exciting and wonderful fact is always preserved that all these approaches, when viewed with psychedelic eyes, seem to lead to the inner connection of self and world that we perceive. as the deepest levels of our own existence.

What does the fact that the pharmacology effort to reduce the mind to the molecular structure contained in the brain, has returned to us with a vision of the mind, indicating its almost cosmic proportions? Psychoactive substances seem to be potential agents of our regression back to the animal, and our metamorphosis into the bright dream of possible perfection. “Man for man is like a lost beast,” wrote the English social philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “and man for man is almost a god.” “And never to the same extent as it happens with the consumption of psychoactive substances,” we could add.

The eighties were a period unusually poor in psychedelics. Synthetic amphetamines, such as MDA, occur sporadically in the early 1970s, and in the 1980s, MDMA, the so-called Ecstasy, appeared in significant quantities. MDMA, in particular, seemed promising when used in guided psychotherapy, / Sophia Adamson. Through the Gateway of the Heart (San Francisco: Four Trees Press. 1985) / but these substances quickly became illegal and were driven underground, before they achieved some noticeable influence on society. MDMA was simply the most recent echo of the search for inner harmony, which guides the ever-changing styles of substance consumption and internal research. The drug of the 80s was crack cocaine,whose economic profile and high risk of addiction made it ideal in the eyes of the already established infrastructure to provide for the regular cocaine market.

The cost of training and treatment in the field of psychoactive substances is small compared with current military costs, and it can be sustained. But it is impossible to withstand the effect that psychedelics would have on the formation of our cultural image of ourselves if all substances were legal and accessible. This is a hidden reason for governments to reluctant to discuss the issue of legalization: an uncontrollable change in consciousness, which would be brought by legal and accessible substances, including vegetable psychedelics, would be extremely dangerous for a culture of dominion – an ego-oriented culture.

Until now, public awareness of psychoactive substances was insufficient, and public opinion was easily manipulated. This situation must change. We need to be ready to deal with the problem of our attitude towards psychoactive substances. It is impossible to do this by appealing to some anti-human standard of behavior, which would mean greater suppression of the psyche of the masses by the slogans of dominion. There can be no “Let’s say no to substances!”. Nothing could be more stupid and absurd. And it is not necessary that we should be guided to the path of enjoyment by good philosophies, who see in the unbridled hedonism the Holy Grail of the organization of society. Our only reasonable course is a course on the rehabilitation of psychoactive substances, the education of the masses,and on shamanism as an interdisciplinary and professional approach to these realities. What hurts when we suddenly abuse drugs is our souls; the shaman is a soul healer. Such measures will not immediately solve the general problem of psychoactive substances, but they will retain the much-needed connection with the spirit that we must have if we hope to restructure society’s attitude towards the consumption and abuse of plants and substances.

The disruption of the psychophysical symbiosis between us and the hallucinogenic plants is an unidentified reason for the alienation of the modern world and the cultural attitudes of the mind of planetary civilization. The pervasive attitude of fear regarding psychoactive substances is encouraged and directed by the culture of dominion and its mass propaganda organs. Huge illicit fortunes are cashing in, and governments, as always, wash their hands. This is just the most modern attempt to speculate on the deep innate needs of our whole species in establishing connection with the mind of Gene, our living planet, an attempt to break this need.

There is, of course, a psilocybin group, discovered by Valentina and Gordon Wasson, the magic mushrooms of central Mexico, which almost certainly played a major role in the religion of the Mayan and Toltec civilizations. This group includes the most widely spread mushroom Stropharia cubensis, which was considered the birthplace of Thailand, and now it is found everywhere in the warm tropics.

The plateau of Masatec Mexico is a growing place for two species of bindweed. The properties of ergot that interested Albert Hoffman, which ultimately led to the discovery of LSD, are the properties to reduce smooth muscle and thus be a potential help during childbirth, which was known for a long time by Sierra Masateca’s midwives. The concomitant effect of dissolving the boundaries of perception and the influx of visionary information made these species of convolvulus a preferred substitute for the psilocybin mushroom in those times when the latter was unavailable.

All shamanic plants that cause visions, including the group of bindweed from Mexico and the psilocybin group, with one exception, turned out to be hallucinogenic indoles. This is the only exception – mescaline, which belongs to the amphetamine group.

We should not forget other indoles – short-acting tryptamines and beta-carbolines. Short-acting tryptamines can be taken separately or in combination with beta-carbolines. Beta-carbolines, although hallucinogenic in and of themselves, are most effective when used as monoamine oxidase inhibitors to enhance the effect of short-acting tryptamines, as well as to make tryptamines more active when taken by mouth.

I did not mention a single synthetic substance, as I would prefer to separate the plants that cause visions from what is a drug in a popular way. The planetary problem of drugs is another matter. It has to do with the fate of nations and criminal syndicates who spend millions of dollars. I avoid synthetic means and prefer organic hallucinogens because I believe that the long history of shaman use is the first sign of approval that you should pay attention to when choosing a substance because of its possible influence on personal development. And if people have used the plant for thousands of years, you can be quite sure that it will not cause any tumors or miscarriages and will not create any other unacceptable physical effect.Over time, through trial and error, the selection of the most effective and least toxic plants for shamanic use occurred.

Other criteria are relevant in the evaluation of a substance. It is important to use only those compounds that do not harm the brain, no matter what the relation of the physical brain to the mind, it definitely has to do with the metabolism of hallucinogens. Compounds that are foreign to the brain and therefore difficult to metabolize should be avoided.

One way to decide how long the history of the symbiotic relationship between man and one plant or another is, is to determine how soft this compound is for human metabolism. If, after you have taken the plant, your eyes do not focus for another two days or three days, your knees become as sore as if they were scrubbed with sandpaper, then this is not a soft connection, which is comfortable, like a gloved hand, by the consumer.