Psychedelics and

Table 6.3. Psychedelic and other recreational drugs selected examples.

To varying degrees, such inadequacies are present in most medical research with psychedelics, and progress in this area can be expected to be very slow, especially in view of the legal hindrances due to neanderthaloid legislators. 

My Neoreality books discussed in Chapter 8 deal with Noah s Ark, sexy blonde supermodels with gibbon brains, fractal sex, cyanocobal-amin, intellectual arthropods, and God in the form of moldy cheese. Is that sufficiently psychedelic for you My artwork is also quite psychedelic and featured at such places as Erowid.org, alongside art produced by people under the influence of psychedelic drugs. 

Information and Images about more than 50 influential or inspiriational individuals in the fields of literature, psychedelics and spirituality... 

A second report carries, at least for me, much more impact. A study of the use of the seeds of a South American legume, Anadenanthera columbrina var. Cebil by the Argentine Shamans in Chaco Central, shows then to be dramatically psychedelic. And yet, extremely sophisticated spectroscopic analysis has shown them to contain bufotenine and only bufotenine as their alkaloid component. 

The qualitative aspects of these (and other) reports imply some individual variability. It is always easy to look at tryptamines such as this one, or the others in these recipes, and say, "We know that they are psychedelics. And maybe good ones or maybe bad ones. So we should look at them with that preconceived notion in mind." But looking objectively at this particular compound,... 

MAPS - supporting research with MDMA, psychedelics and medical marijuana since 1986... 

Pharmacology and psychology are thus in a three-way interaction with physiology that determines the form of conscious experience. That form shapes and constrains its content. And much of this process appears to be due to chance. If positive emotions predominate, my dream or LSD trip will be psychedelic and possibly even ecstatic. If negative emotions prevail, my dream will be more or less nightmarish and my LSD trip more or less monstrous. 

Unless one retains the medieval view that even dreaming is caused by some vagabond genie from the spirit world (who squeezes through the cerebral valve in sleep), the most parsimonious (and, to me, completely adequate) hypothesis is that dreams, psychedelic and hypnotic visions, and psychosis are all caused by functional changes in the brain. 

But how does one find a new class One way is to kind of stumble into it as a side-line of human experimentation with new psychedelics. But it is really difficult to pick up the clues as to what will be a good anti-depressant if you are not depressed. This compound, to which I had given the name of ARIADNE as the first of my ten classic ladies (I ll say more about them later), was not really a stimulant of any kind, certainly it was not a psychedelic, and yet there was something there. It had been explored rather extensively as a potential psychotherapeutic ally by a friend of mine. He said that there seemed to be some value in a few of his patients... 

Thus, there were serotonin 1 receptors, and then there were 1 and 2 receptors, and then la and lb and 2a and 2b receptors, and on and on. These are called 5-HT receptors, since the chemical name for serotonin is 5-hy-droxytryptamine, and the scientist would never want to let the layman know just what he is talking about. DOI has been synthesized with a variety of radioactive iodine isotopes in it, and these tools have been of considerable value in mapping out its brain distribution. And by extrapolation, the possible localization of other psychedelic compounds that cannot be so easily labelled. A small neurochemical research company on the East Coast picked up on these properties of DOI, and offered it as a commercial item for research experiments. But I doubt that they are completely innocent of the fact that DOI is an extremely potent psychedelic and that it is still unrecognized by the Federal drug laws since, in their most recent catalog, the price had almost doubled and a note had been added to the effect that telephone orders cannot be accepted for this compound. 

It is inevitable that this simple and most appealing precursor will be found to be present in the cactus, at some future time when we will have tools of sufficient sensitivity to detect it. And certainly, it would be reasonable to expect it to be an active psychedelic, and to be as interesting in man as its close cousin, mescaline. But, at the present time, LOPHOPHINE is not known to be present in the plant, and it is not known to be active in man. I am confident that both statuses will change in the future. 

Pharmacologists have developed quite an art in the design and evaluation of animal behavior models for the study of psychedelic drugs. They have always faced two formidable tasks, however. There is the qualitative question is the drug a psychedelic And there is the quantitative question how potent is it ... 

PART IX. CONCLUSION Psychedelics and the Future. Humphry Osmond and Bernard S. Aaronson 461... 

The fundamental reason for taking psychedelics is the experiences they produce. These experiences may be of many kinds. Walter Pahnke (1967) has recently classified them into five types psychotic, characterized by fear, paranoid symptoms, confusion, impairment of abstract reasoning, remorse, depression, isolation, and/or somatic discomfort psychodynamic, in which unconscious or preconscious material becomes vividly conscious cognitive, characterized by "astonishingly lucid thought" aesthetic, with increased perceptual ability in all sense modalities and psychedelic mystical, marked by all the characteristics of spontaneous mystical experience observed in the literature. These experiences may be the cause for the effects of psychedelics on behavior. They are also the fundamental thing that must be explained if psychedelics and their effects are to be understood. 

The four of us, heading out to the desert to get high together, had little more in mind than a feeling that we d enjoy sharing an intense experience. Ed had picked up some Yage a few days before from a man of diverse interests. I don t think any of us knew much about this, other than that it was from an exotic plant—possibly even a bark or a vine—from somewhere in South America, and that it had psychedelic properties. Each of us had had experience with psychedelics and was... 

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