022 - Natural vs. Synthetic Psychedelic Chemicals

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin

This is Sasha Shulgin at his best … talking about some of the most beautiful molecules on Earth. Recorded at the Mind States conference in Jamaica in 2002, this is classic Sasha.

“The revolution is in the ditch until you get your chemistry together.” ---Terence McKenna

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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Well, today’s program is a talk that Sasha Shulkin gave at the Jamaica Mind States Conference in 2002.

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I’d like to think that everyone who hears this podcast already knows a lot about Sasha.

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But if you don’t, then you owe it to yourself to go to Arrowhead or Wikipedia or just anywhere on the net and look him up.

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In my humble opinion, he’s the world’s greatest chemist.

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And in a perfect world, he’d already have his Nobel Prize.

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What do I base that over-the-top statement on, you ask?

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Just pick up a copy of P. Call and T. Call, two books that he and his wife Anne wrote,

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and check out the chemical stories that make up the second half of each book.

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There you’re not only going to find a listing of well over 200 phenethylamines and tryptamines that he synthesized, most of which I believe had never been built before Sasha did it,

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synthesized, most of which I believe had never been built before Sasha did it.

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But synthesizing these compounds wasn’t the first step,

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nor was it even the most important step, I don’t think.

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The first step was in figuring out which ones might be psychoactive and which ones weren’t, and how he does that is part of the talk that I think you’re going to enjoy hearing just in a few minutes.

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Thank you. Sasha’s talks more as performance art pieces than lectures. If you go to our podcast page at matrixmasters.com,

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then you’ll find Sasha’s name in the listing for our Program 22,

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the psychedelic salon.

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That’s the one you’re listening to right now.

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Click on Sasha’s name, and you’ll be taken to a page where I posted a picture that I took of Sasha

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while he was giving one of

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his talks back in the late 90s.

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I think you’ll get a little idea of how animated he can get when he really gets into his topic.

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In fact, in the recording you’re about to hear, Sasha was talking so fast at one point

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that Ann had to ask him to slow down a bit.

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And he did, for about two minutes or so.

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Since

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I’m not a chemistry whiz

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myself, whenever Sasha

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gets on one of his roles about

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moving this atom to that ring

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and then flipping it over or something like that,

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I just pretend I’m listening

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to the world’s greatest auctioneer.

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Only I know he’s not selling anything.

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He’s just waxing poetic about some of my favorite chemicals.

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You know, it’s too bad we don’t have a video of this performance.

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In fact, there wasn’t even a professional recording service there at the time.

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Fortunately for us, Kevin Whitesides was there,

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and he had the presence of mind to turn on his tape recorder.

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So without any further ado, here is Sasha Shulgin talking about natural versus synthetic psychedelic compounds.

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So what I want to talk about today is the synthetic side of things.

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I didn’t seem to know, there’s a very good friend of mine, now dead, named Terence McKenna.

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He was giving a lecture one time at Esalen.

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Remember that, Annie, remember that Esalen lecture McLean about 15 years ago?

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10 years ago?

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He was giving this long talk

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about the beauties of ayahuasca,

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the beauties of DMT,

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and all these natural psychedelics.

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And not very

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deeply disguised under his

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discussion was the fact

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if it ain’t natural, it probably

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ain’t safe’s not good.

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Which, he wouldn’t say it quite

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that way if he knew there was a prejudice

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sneaking in there about natural as opposed to

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as opposed to synthetic.

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And he’s commenting about these very excellent natural

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materials, and he got ready to go

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a little bit more about many

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other synthetics than

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the audience saw me.

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And he didn’t want to take me quickly tear down my little world of synthesis because

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he’s a different person who appreciates it, but his theme of that talk was natural versus

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synthetic. And so I did a little snooping around. I think Jonathan was one of the first

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ones to come up with the actual numbers. DMT, dimethylcryptamine, which I’ll get into, not get into in that sense, but get into in the lecture a little later in the hour,

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is a good example of the conflict here because it was first synthesized by Mastia up in Canada,

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roughly 1932, 1933, 1935, somewhere there.

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And it was discovered as a component of a South American plant about 20 years later.

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By, uh,

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the second reporter

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was the research director at Bristol for a while.

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That’s how I learned about that.

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But this is 20 years. It was a synthetic

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compound. And then it was discovered in nature.

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So for 20 years, from his

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philosophy, it’s something that is not a good

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chemical, not a good drug.

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But once it was found in a tree somewhere in South America,

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or bush,

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it’s okay.

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And there are about four or five drugs

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that are synthetic that have been found in nature.

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So the idea of keeping…

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I question things that are naturally safer.

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Because people have used them…

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People have used strychnine for hundreds,

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thousands of years.

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It doesn’t make it safe. So you have to hold that kind of a restriction in abeyance.

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But anyway, I want to talk about the synthetics that have come out of studying the natural materials.

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The first material I ever got into, about 1950-something or other, with synthetic mesclun.

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It was a beautiful,

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I loved the appearance,

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a beautiful white crystal in salt.

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It was the bisulfate salt.

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Long white needles.

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And I took, I think,

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350 or 375 milligrams,

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forget it,

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350, 375.

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I was with three,

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four babysitters,

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and there were about four of us who were in the experiment,

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just enough to get into a car.

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One of the babysitters was a driver, I might have shown you.

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That’s a good thing to keep in mind.

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Don’t try driving a car under a vessel in a cemetery.

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You know that.

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Anyway, it was an interesting experience.

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Once I got over the initial nausea,

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and the nausea was not that really bad.

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I had forgotten I had eaten not that much before, but I was reminded of what I

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had eaten when I looked at my vomit.

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And there it all was.

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I think it had chewed up peas and some carrots, and nods and is like that.

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And the first thing that caught my attention when I was in a strange place is I really

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enjoyed looking at my vomit.

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Now here’s out in the field on the grass.

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And here’s, this is part of me.

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It came out of me.

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It was in essence identified with it. What in the field, on the grass, and here’s, this is part of me, it came out of me. It was an essence, I identified with it.

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What in the world is going on?

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My first psychedelic experience.

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And that developed from there into strange, strange, fascinating areas.

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One, we were way up at the top of the hills behind Berkeley,

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and one of my first close encounters with a thing in nature that I had not really ever tangled with before,

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was a bee.

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And I watched this

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bee, it came up to a flower, and the bee kind of entered this blossom, and the bee saw me

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and ignored me. I watched the bee, I watched the blossom, looked at the interaction, and

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that bee was taking stuff out of this flower and putting it in something like a little

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sack down its leg on one side. It it didn’t blossom again and got some more

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and put it in the sack

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on the other side.

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I don’t know how long

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this went on.

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It may have been

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25 minutes.

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I was watching that bee

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throw itself away.

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The bee, again,

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was aware of me

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and had the grace

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of ignoring me totally.

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And I watched this whole thing

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and it was all gone.

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The bee went away.

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I took the flower.

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It’s a little part

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of the story later on.

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But all kinds of things

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alongside the road

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up there

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where we parked was gravel.

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There was a pavement, the gravel was on the side, the gravel was in different colored

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stones. And I could not get out of the car on the passenger side because I saw that as

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the back of a crocodile or something nasty. And if I stepped on the back of that animal,

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I might not be safe. So I had to get out of the other side of the car. Visual colors, I saw colors that were totally alien to me. I used to think

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I knew the dedication of colors. The colors that were not, look at a plain piece of color,

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and the outer edges were affected by the color of the thing that was next to it. You know,

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there would be green, but when there’s red over here, the green became kind of purplish

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to reflect the red, and the red became sort of different colors to reflect the green.

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And I saw the colors were not a single thing.

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They were a continuous continuum of change, fascinating.

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At the end of the experience,

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in fact, I lived in Berkeley at that time,

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I went down there,

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and the flower I put in a little vase on the coffee table in front of the thing,

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and I smelled it.

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It was a gorgeous smell.

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I was intrigued by the inside of that flower,

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and I looked down inside. I couldn’t even touch the pebbles.

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I mean, it was a little boozy, the carypallid.

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This is what they call it.

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In the center of it, and I looked inside.

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I could barely, I tried to move the pebbles apart,

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but I couldn’t do it.

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Caught my attention, the reason I mentioned the flower

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is my next, first real synthetic experiment was with a material which I had extended the chain one carbon to go from a phenethylamine, which is over here with a two carbon chain.

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This is, by the way, takes the place of slides, takes the place of projection things.

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This is the dream.

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Anyway, I was going to use a blackboard for drawing dirty pictures, and we compromised, and I draw a sylapine here, and a trypone here, and I’ll point to them as we go so I don’t have to use a blackboard and let that be it.

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I said, if this compound is this dramatic, and then I stopped and thought for a while.

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The compound wasn’t doing anything.

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It was I who was doing everything. I was seeing the color. The compound was not the white. It was I who was doing everything.

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I was seeing the colors.

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The compound was not just white.

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There was no color there at all.

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I went into meditation and went deep thoughts

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and heard some early childhood things

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in which I had found

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some pretty colored flowers

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out behind the house,

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another house in Berkeley

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where I lived.

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And I can remember that

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with great clarity

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being out underneath the honeysuckle

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and watching up and watching out

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and no one could see me because I was inside under the fence with

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a honeysuckle all around me.

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And I remember that with great clarity.

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And I began to say, where in the molecule that happens to have three methoxy groups

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over here and two carbon chains is the memory of honeysuckle?

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Where is the knowledge of colors?

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Where is all this memory?

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Where is the ability to watch a bee

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with a complete immunity

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do its honey-sauce,

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do its flower thing?

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I said, what it is,

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this is not a drug that’s doing anything,

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providing me information,

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doing anything for me.

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It is allowing me to get into myself.

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So in essence,

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it is not a chemical drug,

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but it’s a catalyst that allows me internally

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to find things. By luck, I may find things I want. I don’t know what they’re going to

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be, but I was totally fascinated. This was back in the 50s. And that completely changed

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the direction of my entire life research. I had some knack of chemistry, and I was quite

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interested in things that were psychoactive. I delved around in the library for this but never really gotten the psychedelics before and that was my very first introduction

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and so class was obvious you have three you have three four five prime epoxy over here to work

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where you want epoxy is two carbon chain and the mean group on this end and that’s the simplicity

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of the molecule not a very potent thing it took a few hundred milligrams to do the job

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but uh the job was fascinating because the job was it from me, not to me, but out of me.

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So I said, well, by golly, what can you do there?

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So I said, well, there’s an output position there.

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I put a methyl group on there.

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This is where chemistry on a blackboard is such fun.

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And people say, well, it’s easy on a blackboard.

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When you go to the laboratory, then you can’t just go

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and take a little nail and a hammer

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and take a methyl group

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and quack a methyl group

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on the side of the chain.

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I mean,

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you don’t do that

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quite that way.

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On a blackboard,

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if all chemistry

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was blackboard

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with erasers and chalk

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it would be simple.

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You could make any molecule

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in about 20 seconds.

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But the truth is

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making molecules

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to jive with structure

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is not that much more difficult.

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You have to think

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from a different point of view

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but it’s all there.

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So I moved to the laboratory,

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and I made the methyl group down in that position,

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which is the amphetamine chain, carbon, carbon, carbon,

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and down

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at the mean group, the amphetamine.

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And to make that, I used nitrothane,

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and I had to have a little nitrothane,

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so I coupled the corresponding trimethoxybenzaldehyde.

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Now don’t worry about this, it’s all in the book somewhere.

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Trimethoxybenzaldehyde with nitrothane,

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and there was the corresponding amphetamine. Trimethoxin is not a hydrogen nitrate. They were used in sodium and lithium. I’d like to know if there was, of course,

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monounfetamine.

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Climatoxin and amphetamine,

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that’s called TMH in the heart.

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So I looked into the chemical literature.

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It had been synthesized by a group of people

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in Canada about three years earlier.

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And they had said it had an interesting property.

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If you’re watching a,

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what’s the wheel that rolls around

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and gives you color?

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Kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscope. Good. You watch a kaleidoscope, and it generates colors. The colors

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are more intense if you take this compound first. Well, I didn’t think anyone would play with a

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kaleidoscope, but I appreciated the fact they had colors. And so I made the compound. If you go

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and gather twice what they use, you get into a psychedelic place. Now, there’s not merely a mescalite,

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but a different thing. But meanwhile,

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while I was preparing that compound,

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I said, well, nitrothane, nitrophene, nitrothene,

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I got all the nitroalkane I had

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into one carbon, and it makes

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this inward, different thing.

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It’s at two, it’s at three, it’s at four, it’s at five.

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So it’s this size of iodine compounds,

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all with different size chains hanging down there.

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And by the time I had gotten the others made out here, the first one I had evaluated,

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it was about twice as active in potency as mesclun, but totally different in its action.

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It was not the friendly closeness of mesclun. It was almost too aggressive, almost as if you had a portrait.

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It revealed in me, not the compound who’s doing it, It’s meat, what is being revealed from meat by the compound. And again, the fair and all, I’m going to mention the flour at some length of mesclun is I had a very similar flour on the coffee table in Berkeley with this. And I was curious about the snow and what’s inside, and I tore it apart. Tore it apart to look inside. Completely damaged, destroyed the flour. But it was completely, I mean, obviously, this is my thing, I want to look, I did it. So I tore it apart to look inside. Completely destroyed the flower.

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But it was completed in energy. I mean, obviously this is my thing. I did it.

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So I thought for a while, I said, why is one actually so precious that you can’t destroy any part of nature,

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and the other you can just tear it apart because you’re curious?

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Anyway, I made the third compound of the chain of eight or ten of them.

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Not active at all.

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And it’s a heck of a rest of them.

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What else can we do in this molecule?

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That really got me started.

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If you can change an atom in a molecule,

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you can keep a kind of a psychoactive aspect of it.

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Change all the atoms.

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Go look around.

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Try this, try that.

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Move it over here.

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So I looked at this one.

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And I think I have it written over here.

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3, 4, 5.

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Mess them with 3, 4, 5-tribothopsy.

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You dangle the thing

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by the ring, the aromatic ring

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on my right, over this way,

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and have those methoxys

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down there. There are six

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ways you can have three methoxys in the ring.

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You have 2-3-4, 2-3-5,

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2-3-6, 2-4-5,

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2-4-6,

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and one other I’ve forgotten. 2-3-6, that one., 5, 2, 4, 6, and one other I’ve forgotten.

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2, 3, 6, that one.

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One is all consumed,

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because the one is where hands are.

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I’m holding this little thing

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off the Christmas tree by the dingler,

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and I’m holding a number of clips

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on the hexagon to attach things to.

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So I made all six of them.

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So I have TMA2, TMA3, TMA4, TMA5, TMA6.

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And, of course, in diligence,

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and a bit of inattentiveness,

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assayed them all in about the same way,

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ran them all down.

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And the first one I hit was the TMA2,

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the one with the lymphocytes in the 2, 4, 5 physicians

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as the amphetamine, alpha-methyl down there.

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And that caught me off guard

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because I happened at that point to be

00:16:23 ►

an employed chemist at Dow in Roman Creek in Pittsburgh.

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And I went in. I was not feeling very comfortable.

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And I went into a closet where they kept the things that they came to Florida with.

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But no one who worked there would go in there, because that’s a janitor’s place.

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No janitors during the day, so I felt fairly not discoverable in there.

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And I found myself going into a very, I thought, I had

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very carefully moved myself one small

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increment up with activity.

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Some activity, maybe 12, I went to 20.

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And 20 came on very

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heavy and very fast, and I was into a whole

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new territory that was totally scary.

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And so I was

00:16:59 ►

against that for a while, so I tried it

00:17:01 ►

more carefully later on, and it’s

00:17:03 ►

about 10 times as potent as this great increase in potency, and a lot of visuals. But a kind of thing that

00:17:12 ►

didn’t reveal a part of me that I cared that much about. But that’s okay. Right then I

00:17:17 ►

was still counting potency rather than quality. Actually, both are very valid majors of activity.

00:17:25 ►

And so,

00:17:27 ►

the TMA-3 was a 2-4-5,

00:17:29 ►

2-2-3-4,

00:17:29 ►

TMA-4

00:17:30 ►

was a 2-3-5,

00:17:31 ►

2-2-3-5

00:17:32 ►

was a 2-3-6.

00:17:33 ►

And the other one,

00:17:34 ►

the final one,

00:17:34 ►

where they’re

00:17:35 ►

the opposite thing,

00:17:36 ►

the 2-4-6

00:17:37 ►

was also potent.

00:17:39 ►

And comparable

00:17:40 ►

to TMA-2.

00:17:40 ►

So TMA-2

00:17:41 ►

and TMA-6

00:17:42 ►

were the two

00:17:42 ►

in there

00:17:43 ►

that I found

00:17:44 ►

to be interesting

00:17:44 ►

and active

00:17:45 ►

and worth pursuing.

00:17:46 ►

The whole area

00:17:47 ►

from that point on,

00:17:48 ►

this is the

00:17:49 ►

epilamine world,

00:17:51 ►

what I did,

00:17:52 ►

I took that basic structure

00:17:54 ►

and began mucking around with it.

00:17:55 ►

But the TMA6 structure

00:17:57 ►

allows fully

00:17:58 ►

a comparable degree

00:17:59 ►

of exploration

00:17:59 ►

and I’ve never explored it.

00:18:01 ►

So if anyone really

00:18:02 ►

wants to go into chemistry

00:18:03 ►

and get the whole area,

00:18:04 ►

start with the 246 instead of a 245

00:18:06 ►

and duplicate everything.

00:18:08 ►

You’re going to find fascinating compounds

00:18:09 ►

and fascinating things.

00:18:11 ►

Different to make.

00:18:12 ►

Some are more difficult.

00:18:13 ►

Some are easier.

00:18:13 ►

I just haven’t gotten around to that.

00:18:15 ►

That’s kind of the thing.

00:18:16 ►

I mean, you start bossing out

00:18:17 ►

and take this path, that path, that path,

00:18:19 ►

and you go past thousands of paths

00:18:21 ►

that go up from your path.

00:18:22 ►

You’re gone.

00:18:23 ►

None of them have been explored.

00:18:24 ►

Oh, who knows what’s

00:18:25 ►

out that way? You don’t know. It’s like going down the corridor

00:18:27 ►

with 55 doors. You go through the door, there’s another

00:18:29 ►

corridor with 55 doors.

00:18:31 ►

What are the other doors in this corridor that you

00:18:33 ►

don’t know? There’s something out there

00:18:35 ►

that’s interesting. If you had 55 lives,

00:18:37 ►

you’d find it out. But at the end, you

00:18:39 ►

pursue the one that happens to catch your fancy

00:18:41 ►

at the moment. And that’s where I went. So,

00:18:44 ►

you have the methoxys out there.

00:18:46 ►

Well, methoxy,

00:18:48 ►

two methoxys make two oxygens,

00:18:50 ►

and two oxygens are methane dioxide.

00:18:52 ►

So, if you take that same molecule,

00:18:54 ►

2, 3, 4, 5, 6,

00:18:55 ►

did I write the 6 on there? I think I did.

00:18:57 ►

Yeah, down here.

00:18:59 ►

If you had to bridge two adjacent spots

00:19:02 ►

with the methane dioxide,

00:19:03 ►

the two oxygens tied together by carbon,

00:19:06 ►

and then put methoxy on something that’s left,

00:19:09 ►

you have six possibilities.

00:19:11 ►

So I call this MMDA, methanoxy, methamphetamine,

00:19:15 ►

methoxyamphetamine.

00:19:16 ►

And there are six that are possible.

00:19:18 ►

And I made the five that were obvious.

00:19:21 ►

The six I had no way of figuring out how to make.

00:19:23 ►

I tried a variety of things.

00:19:24 ►

Never succeeded. I’m amused because they made the methamdoxy, methamphetam, methamphetam,

00:19:30 ►

methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam,

00:19:34 ►

methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam,

00:19:35 ►

methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam,

00:19:36 ►

methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam,

00:19:37 ►

methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam,

00:19:38 ►

methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam,

00:19:39 ►

methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam,

00:19:40 ►

methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamphetam, methamph all positional isomers are also included under this definition. So although I can make five,

00:19:46 ►

they only reported one, but the

00:19:48 ►

total of six are instead of one.

00:19:50 ►

And I’m a little bit amused. I checked

00:19:52 ►

this before I came down here because I want to be sure I’m up to date.

00:19:55 ►

I looked up in Chem Abstracts

00:19:56 ►

for the six of them. No one’s ever

00:19:58 ►

made it. It’s never been made.

00:20:00 ►

It’s twice in the literature, reported in the literature,

00:20:02 ►

but both because I wrote it as an interesting

00:20:04 ►

compound that’s never been made in a review article.

00:20:06 ►

So it’s in the literature because I said it was interesting but it never had been made.

00:20:09 ►

When it came out, I’m sorry, it never had been made.

00:20:11 ►

But the person who first succeeded in making that has committed a felony.

00:20:16 ►

Because it was just scheduled.

00:20:18 ►

Well, it was named as such, right in the law, even though it’s never been made.

00:20:22 ►

These are humorous parts of the law.

00:20:24 ►

They’re a lot of luxury.

00:20:27 ►

Anyway, so six of those,

00:20:30 ►

made five of them, and the only ones that interested me were the mesengokshi

00:20:31 ►

in the three-four position. So my attention

00:20:34 ►

is being sucked out to that three-four position.

00:20:36 ►

As it turns out, I’m not going to go

00:20:37 ►

into the full detail. Let’s go through all the

00:20:40 ►

growth steps that went on. It takes probably

00:20:41 ►

four or five hours. If you want to take

00:20:43 ►

time, you need to eat dinner tonight

00:20:45 ►

but anyway

00:20:46 ►

I made a whole lot

00:20:47 ►

of those

00:20:48 ►

I began looking

00:20:49 ►

around different

00:20:50 ►

different ways

00:20:50 ►

different combinations

00:20:51 ►

of things

00:20:52 ►

the next

00:20:54 ►

general direction

00:20:55 ►

I went is

00:20:55 ►

I settled on

00:20:56 ►

the 2,4,5

00:20:57 ►

which is 2-methoxy

00:20:58 ►

4,5-methylenoxy

00:21:00 ►

or 2,4,5-privothoxy

00:21:01 ►

and I made

00:21:02 ►

H-methoxy

00:21:03 ►

into an S-methoxy

00:21:04 ►

and methoxy

00:21:04 ►

is a methyl but an oxygen S-methoxy is 2-carbon and primethoxy. And I made H’s of methoxy into an F-doxy. And methoxy is a vessel group of methoxy.

00:21:05 ►

F-doxy is two carbons on a lot.

00:21:08 ►

So, in essence, if you have

00:21:09 ►

2, 4, 5 primethoxy,

00:21:11 ►

you can have 2 F-doxy, 4, 5

00:21:13 ►

dimethoxy, 4 ethoxy,

00:21:15 ►

2, 5 dimethoxy,

00:21:17 ►

5 ethoxy, 2, 4 dimethoxy,

00:21:20 ►

2, 4 diethoxy,

00:21:21 ►

4 ethoxy, 2, 5

00:21:23 ►

diethoxy, 4 ethoxy, or 4, 5 diethoxy,-ethoxy-4-methoxy, 2-5-di-ethoxy-4-methoxy, or 4-5-di-ethoxy-2-methoxy, or 10-methoxy,

00:21:30 ►

the tri-ethoxy.

00:21:31 ►

So I made them all.

00:21:33 ►

And I’m sure in the lab, having done, you might as well go ahead and make them all,

00:21:36 ►

which I did.

00:21:37 ►

The only one that showed interesting activity was the 4-ethoxy.

00:21:41 ►

So this is a little bell of mine.

00:21:43 ►

Something about that 4 position has got a little bit of sparkle to it.

00:21:46 ►

And there’s a point where nature,

00:21:49 ►

I guess I’m natural,

00:21:50 ►

so I’m doing natural things.

00:21:52 ►

So this is the point at which I’m going to begin

00:21:54 ►

if I get mutations going on

00:21:56 ►

or changes in the way I do things.

00:21:57 ►

This is where I’m going to focus a little bit.

00:21:59 ►

So I did.

00:22:00 ►

I made this 2-4-5 try methoxy.

00:22:03 ►

I said, if the four position is so fancy,

00:22:06 ►

here’s a situation where you can’t lose.

00:22:09 ►

If you were to take and take that methoxy,

00:22:11 ►

I knew the methoxy came off

00:22:12 ►

because I can’t keep collecting urines

00:22:14 ►

and running analyses

00:22:15 ►

and the methoxy disappears.

00:22:16 ►

I’d like to know what happens to it in me

00:22:18 ►

because sometimes you get into things

00:22:20 ►

in which the compound doesn’t do something.

00:22:22 ►

The compound goes into you

00:22:23 ►

and it’s changed to something

00:22:24 ►

and what it’s changed to is what does things to you.

00:22:27 ►

So sometimes the metabolites are the things that are the active ones to pursue.

00:22:30 ►

This is a whole other chapter of this talk, which I won’t get into.

00:22:34 ►

Anyway, so I may say to myself, if the form of the thought group is the active thing,

00:22:39 ►

and it kind of comes off easily, let’s say,

00:22:40 ►

and it becomes a phenol and it conjugates with some nucleotide gas,

00:22:43 ►

and something gets treated in urine,

00:22:45 ►

let’s put something on that group that can’t come off easily, let’s say, and it becomes a phenol and it conjugates with some nucleotide gas and something gets treated in urine, let’s put something on that group that can’t come

00:22:47 ►

off easily. So I said, why not

00:22:49 ►

instead of a methox, you put a methyl on there?

00:22:52 ►

Now, methyl can’t hydrolyze

00:22:53 ►

all. It can oxidize to an acid,

00:22:55 ►

it can do all kinds of things, but it cannot

00:22:57 ►

hydrolyze all. We love

00:22:59 ►

sort of an animal. So, I put

00:23:01 ►

a methyl group in there and I said, you’ve got a case

00:23:03 ►

here to win if the compound turns out to, like the receptor site somewhere in the brain that’s superior to these things,

00:23:10 ►

go and plug in, do things.

00:23:12 ►

If it likes that receptor site, it’s going to go to that receptor site.

00:23:15 ►

It’s going to go into the receptor site.

00:23:17 ►

And one of two things.

00:23:18 ►

Either it is going to be an active psychedelic,

00:23:21 ►

and it’s going to be an MCA because it can’t hydrolyze into something that’s inactive.

00:23:25 ►

So it might be a very open thing.

00:23:27 ►

Or it might go in

00:23:29 ►

and be inactive.

00:23:30 ►

And if it’s inactive,

00:23:32 ►

but it goes to the receptor cycle,

00:23:33 ►

the psychedelic drug cycle,

00:23:35 ►

and it’s inactive,

00:23:36 ►

if there’s something

00:23:37 ►

in the person

00:23:38 ►

that makes the person want to,

00:23:39 ►

well, that’s the wrong term.

00:23:40 ►

It’s good to see you.

00:23:41 ►

And second,

00:23:42 ►

excuse me,

00:23:43 ►

I use the word

00:23:45 ►

skitsy.

00:23:47 ►

I have been frequently asked

00:23:51 ►

to speak more slowly.

00:23:55 ►

And I will do my best to

00:23:57 ►

lead to that request.

00:23:59 ►

It’s good for about 40 seconds.

00:24:05 ►

I’ll try.

00:24:06 ►

If it were to go into the receptor site

00:24:08 ►

and block the receptor site

00:24:10 ►

from some indigenous factor in there

00:24:12 ►

that makes a person schizophrenic,

00:24:14 ►

you have a cure for memory illness.

00:24:16 ►

You can’t lose.

00:24:17 ►

It’s either going to be a potent psychedelic

00:24:19 ►

or a good deal.

00:24:22 ►

For people who are a little bit schizophrenic

00:24:25 ►

not schizophrenic

00:24:26 ►

oh I said

00:24:27 ►

gave a

00:24:27 ►

00:24:28 ►

grand rounds of Harvard

00:24:30 ►

I used the word

00:24:30 ►

schizophrenic

00:24:31 ►

for a psychiatrist

00:24:32 ►

it was not a graceful thing to do

00:24:33 ►

and I got

00:24:34 ►

chewed up

00:24:35 ►

after

00:24:35 ►

schizophrenic

00:24:36 ►

is the word I did

00:24:37 ►

I’m sorry

00:24:37 ►

talk about

00:24:39 ►

people who are

00:24:40 ►

there are

00:24:41 ►

this is an aside

00:24:43 ►

an aside

00:24:44 ►

I don’t have a time

00:24:45 ►

that’s a boy, that’s a compliment

00:24:48 ►

we had

00:24:51 ►

at Donner Labs

00:24:53 ►

about 20, 25 years ago

00:24:55 ►

an opportunity to work with schizophrenic patients

00:24:58 ►

from Mendocino County

00:24:59 ►

when they had a whole lot of mental hospital

00:25:01 ►

the mental hospital

00:25:03 ►

okay

00:25:04 ►

and so I made some Oh, I was in the mental hospital. In the mental hospital. Okay.

00:25:07 ►

And so I made some esogenesis methionine, which is a kind of neat

00:25:09 ►

derivative of methionine, because what they

00:25:11 ►

thought at the time, methionine is what provokes

00:25:13 ►

mental illness in people who are

00:25:15 ►

with it in their diet and have the proclivity

00:25:17 ►

toward mental illness. It made it more

00:25:19 ►

extreme, but those who did not have that proclivity

00:25:22 ►

did not have that response to it.

00:25:24 ►

They were using methionine as sort of a titan for potential schizophrenic illness. And I happened to have

00:25:30 ►

some radioactive sulfur knocking around, so I made radioactive sulfur. So you put it in

00:25:35 ►

there and measure the distribution of it in the brain. You put it in here, you put people

00:25:40 ►

in a concert, and you see them walk with the camera, and you put them in there, and we

00:25:44 ►

had these five-inch normals.

00:25:46 ►

A little tricky to find them in Norris Lab, but we found them.

00:25:49 ►

And five different things were simple.

00:25:50 ►

We’d get up and then see the hospital and line them all up,

00:25:53 ►

and we gave each of them a separate day, separate circumstances,

00:25:56 ►

enough radioactive eccedency and refining to see it in the brain.

00:26:00 ►

And we ended up with ten photographs.

00:26:02 ►

We put them on the wall of the North Slab up on the hill.

00:26:07 ►

And there are pictures of the brain with this radioactive thing in there, and every one was different.

00:26:12 ►

Every one was different. Some had bright here, some bright there, some blind, some hid, what have you.

00:26:18 ►

And every time someone comes through from the National Institute of Health, coming in from the East Coast, in brain chemistry and what have you. Here it is. Ten brain scans. That’s the difference in the finding.

00:26:27 ►

Five of them are normals and five of them are schizophrenics. Which are the normals?

00:26:31 ►

Oh, we’ve got to be kept tallies. Random, random, random. I mean, no one can pick up

00:26:36 ►

which one is abnormal because they’re all different. And then about

00:26:39 ►

three months later, one of the schizophrenic patients came in and

00:26:43 ►

Tony, my ally there, who can talk to schizophrenics

00:26:46 ►

with great ease, they just sort of

00:26:47 ►

trusted him for some beautiful reason.

00:26:50 ►

And he was in there

00:26:51 ►

and the schizophrenic came in,

00:26:53 ►

and I said, those are the pictures you took of us.

00:26:55 ►

Well, one of each of you. Oh, that’s

00:26:58 ►

me.

00:26:59 ►

And he pointed at this photograph, and he said, he’s absolutely

00:27:01 ►

right. He picked his

00:27:03 ►

picture out of ten pictures that was of his head under his stent.iamine. So he says, how’d you know? Simple, simple. See the little star shaped thing down the little right hand corner?

00:27:05 ►

The little thing that looks like a star there?

00:27:06 ►

I see it all the time.

00:27:07 ►

So there are a lot of things about brain chemistry we don’t understand yet.

00:27:08 ►

But that’s the kind of thing you keep running into.

00:27:09 ►

Things that are apparently not true.