025 - Cacti_ A Discourse by Sasha Shulgin

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin

Shulgin

Sasha Shulgin
(photo by Bill Radacinski)null
This podcast of the Psychedelic Salon Sasha Shulgin’s in-depth talk about cacti, which was given at the 2002 Mind States Conference held in Jamaica. After podcast #022 of another talk Sasha gave in Jamaica, we received a lot of eMail saying, “More Dr. Shulgin!!!!” … And so, here he is once again.

Although Sasha has given a lot of presentations at conferences all over the world, it isn’t often that he has devoted a single talk exclusively to a discussion of his extensive research into these intriguing plants.

In addition to PIKAL and TIKAL, Transform Press has also published Sasha’s new book about cacti, all of which are listed in the BOOKS section on the Shulgin’s page at Palenque Norte.

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024 - The Art of Alex Grey

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026 - The Role of Drug Geeks in Society

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Transcript §

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3-Dimensional Transforming Musical Linguistic Objects

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Elf Machines

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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space. I’m Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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A couple of podcasts ago, I played a talk that Sasha Shulkin gave at the 2002 MindStays

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Conference in Jamaica.

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That talk was titled, Natural vs. Synthetic Psychedelic Chemicals.

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At the same conference, Sasha also gave another talk simply titled, Cacti.

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That’s what you are about to hear in this podcast.

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But before we listen to Sasha, I’d first like to mention a publication that’s not only the best in its field,

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but they can also use your support if you are so inclined.

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I’m talking about the Entheogen Review.

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And no, this isn’t a commercial. they’re not paying me to say this i guess i guess you could say it’s a real strong plug but you can

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find uh find them on the web at www.entheogenreview.com that’s e-n-t-h-e-o-g-E-N-R-E-V-I-E-W.com.

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All one word.

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There on their website, you’ll learn that the Entheogen Review is a quarterly publication

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that serves as a clearinghouse for current data about the use of visionary plants and drugs.

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Actually, that’s what they say. The Use of Visionary Plants and Drugs. there on the website. But what I think will really blow you away is on the left-hand side of their front page or home page

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is a list of authors of recent articles.

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And, jeez, it’s like a who’s who of the psychedelic literary

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and scientific community.

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And just below that list of names,

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you’ll also find the links to two books that no good library should be without.

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One is the Psychedelic Resource List, which now, by the way, is in its fourth edition.

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And that book really lives up to its name.

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All in one place, you have an up-to-date list of all things psychedelic.

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I like to think of it as our tribe’s yellow pages.

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And the other book for sale on the Entheogen Review website

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is the recently published Trout’s Notes on San Pedro.

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And this gem of a book is a hefty 312 pages,

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and I think it has close to 900 black and white photographs in it.

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It’s a real treasure trove of information and Trout’s really, really good at what he does.

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And I guess I probably should give full disclosure here that both of these authors are good friends of mine

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and I think they are both impeccable to their core.

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Two of the best spirits our tribe has yet produced.

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So if you can, support their work.

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You know, their contributions are a benefit to us all.

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And now, on to the program.

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Actually, I planned on segueing from Trout’s book about cacti to Sasha’s talk about cacti.

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But I guess it got carried away once again.

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Anyway, here is Sasha Shulgin

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waxing lyrically about our good friends,

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the cacti.

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I have a very delightful opportunity

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just talking about cactus,

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which are little plants,

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kind of small or tall.

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No then saying you’ve seen

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3,428,000

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species, you’ve seen them all.

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That sounded like

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ball. No, no, okay.

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I’ve got also to lay an apology down

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ahead of time.

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There are so many names of

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genera and species and

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varieties and people and compounds

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and so forth,

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that I must create a little touch of what I usually call senior moments,

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which I know exactly the species I have in mind,

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but I somehow can’t quite get some up here out.

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I was listening to the radio about a week ago,

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and I heard a person discuss senior moments, but he used the term brain farts which I never

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heard before and so I try to avoid them under any name but they will occasionally happen.

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Also primarily I’d like to talk about some of my recent work with Cactus and where it

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started and how it’s going now and why I’m going to pretty soon sort of say I don’t know if it’s really worth the push.

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It’s an interesting evolution

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into getting back into synthetic chemistry again

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where the real magic is.

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Actually, one of my first talks on cactus

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was down in Palenque a year or two ago

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in which I talked about a cactus

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that I’ve been doing some work with.

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In fact, the introduction of that cactus

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into our western culture

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came at the first of the Mind States meetings

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in Berkeley

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what, four years ago perhaps?

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three or four years ago

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in which they were offering it for sale

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in the alley there

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inside of the International House

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and this cactus has the genus name of Globidia

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which I really

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was taken with

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it is a cactus

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and I love

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playing around

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with words

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and so if you take

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the first and third

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letter of Globivia

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you get him out

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with Bolivia

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and that’s where

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the cactus grows

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so I really can’t

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see a botanist

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who would have

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that kind of

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sense of humor

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not having a cactus that may be pharmacologically active also.

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And since indeed it is,

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they were selling it at the Mindstate

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and I was quite interested in seeing what’s in it.

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It had never been analyzed.

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So I had this, they gave me a few samples,

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the red blossom, the yellow blossom, the white blossom,

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the Lubevia.

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They called it Lubevia grandifloris.

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That’s the species I remember.

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And they said

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they’re all

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three-colored blossoms, cacti or

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acu, but the

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red is the most interesting.

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My red died almost immediately,

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but I had the yellow and white, so I

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worked them up and looked at what was in them.

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At a Palenque meeting where I was talking about this, I was talking a little bit about

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the usual things like chromatography, gas chromatography, mass spec, the usual things

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I know you’re familiar with.

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So what I was doing there was giving some sort of a report on what I had found in them,

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and this person came up to me.

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I was sort of

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working on the farm

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where I live

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about 4, 5, 6, 8 weeks ago

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and I have a little whistle

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like something to detect

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for the FBI

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DEA comes visiting

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I guess it’s a little horn

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that says

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like that.

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So I know someone’s driving up the driveway,

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and usually someone has the wrong address,

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but this horn went off, and I went out to meet this fellow,

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and there’s a person in a little pickup truck.

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He is, I put at 32, 34, sort of poorly dressed,

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a little bit thin, and he says,

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you don’t remember me, do you?

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And I’d like to have a 50 cents for every time someone has come up to me and said, you don’t remember

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me, do you? No, I don’t. I met you down at Palenque, he said, about four years ago, and

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I asked what you were working on, and you mentioned Lubevia grandifloris.

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So what I did, I wrote to a person

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who sells cactus seeds, or cacti.

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Who said cactus, cactuses earlier?

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Who said cactuses?

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There are three plurals to cactus, like octopus.

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There are three plurals to octopus.

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You have cactus, cacti, and cactuses.

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All are plural, potentially.

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Octus, octopus, octopi, and octopides.

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But that’s another lecture in a row.

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And I said, Grand DeForest, the Lvivian Grand DeForest.

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And I got a collection of maybe 100 or so seeds

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from this German cactus seed salesman.

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And I got 100 little black pots.

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And I put a seed in each pot and watered them

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with a little bit of food.

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And that was four years ago.

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In the back of my truck,

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I have about 55 Lubivia grandifloras,

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which I raised from seed.

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They’re yours.

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Would you want them?

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Sure.

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And so next thing I know,

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I have 55 little containers

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with about the size of grapefruit,

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of these beautiful cacti.

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They’re all spherical,

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and they’re all presumably

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of the same

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one of them was actually blooming

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it was a red blossom

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which I had a great touch with

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and he said thank you

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and he drove away

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that was it

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I fortunately got his name

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and his number

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he lives somewhere up

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near Fort Ross in California

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but he brought them off

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and went away

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so I got a good friend of mine

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who doesn’t mind

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putting out a little bit of labor

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for a small amount of money

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and he planted all these up just up inside the inner gate up there and watered them, fertilized them.

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So I now have a little bed of these rubivia.

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I have now with another person, another friend of mine in San Francisco,

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had all of his cactus in his neighbor’s backyard.

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And he was told about six or eight months ago by his neighbor, he said,

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I’m going to do something else with my backyard if you take these things out, please. So I got a call from him and said, do you mind a few cactus if I move them out to your farm? I said, sure, bring them on.

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four feet tall, all kinds of species you would not believe. Many of them

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the trichocereus, but some of them not.

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And they were all planted thanks

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to lava felt.

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Thank you fire, thank you earth out there

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digging holes and putting

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in lava chips and all that kind of thing.

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Then another friend

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came by after sort of a fourth of

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July and said, you know I’ve got a lot of extra

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plumbing and tubing

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and little electronic denizens

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that make water run and not run.

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Do you mind terribly if I would just install

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a dripping system on all your

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cacti?

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So now I have

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a big behind the barn, probably about

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75 cacti of various sorts.

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A valley, what I call Valley 1

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above where we used to have a vegetable garden.

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Probably another 150. Down below the patio, probably another we used to have a vegetable garden probably another 150

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down below

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the patio

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probably another

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75

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a greenhouse

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filled with

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retainers

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just in case

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we have a

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sudden frost

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and the

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place is

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looking something

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like a desert

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in Mexico

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it’s marvelous

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but it’s

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quite interesting

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anyway

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I had this

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this

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lobevia

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grandiflorus

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and I

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have a

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friend who

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is up in

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Washington

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State who is a botanist of great renown, came down

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and said, oh hey, that’s a neve trichoceros.

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I said, no, no, it’s a lubivia.

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No, no, no, no.

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It’s a trichoceros grandiflorus.

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Okay, so I dropped down on my notebook, trichoceros grandiflorus.

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Then another friend of mine lives down in LA,A. he’s the head of the botanical

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curators

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what

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who is

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Jim Baumann

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he’s head of

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something

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Huntington

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L.A. Arboretum

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Arboretum

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that’s it

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that’s it

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and he came and said

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hey that’s kind of

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a neat cactus

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do you know its name

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I said

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yeah it’s

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I think

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Lobivia or maybe

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Trachycerus

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grandiflorus no no no he said its or maybe Trachycerus grandiflorus.

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No, no, no, no, no.

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He said, it’s named Trachycerus lobivioides.

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He had taken the genus over here

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and jammed the funny thing on the word over here

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and made it into a species.

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So here I got this marvelous book

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published in England

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on all the common, or not even so common,

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genera and all the little species

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that go along with them.

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So I’m looking in there under Trachycerus, and they said the name Trachycerus doesn’t

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exist anymore.

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It’s now known, what is it like, I have it down, Echinopsis.

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So I had this fantasy of getting maybe eight well-known

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internationally headed

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departments,

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botanists,

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all together

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and a little party

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and chuck a cactus

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in between them

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and just stand back

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and listen

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to how they argue

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for territory,

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ego,

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whatever it is

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so they can dictate

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names to cactus.

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I think primarily

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so they can put

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a journal out

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and establish a journal

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with the BBOIDs

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or something

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rather like that

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that you should know.

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And that way they get tenure,

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they get a position on the faculty on botany.

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And that’s not fair to say that botany,

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I think the same applies to astronomy,

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to physics, to chemistry, to psychology.

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All the academic departments

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have these structures of trying to find

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that their way is the best way of identifying things.

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So the first of the problems I want to get into,

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and I will get to it in a few minutes, before dinner,

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is the argument of how you know what a cactus is called.

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Excuse me, Sasha, is that cactus called locally San Pedro?

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No, no, no, no, no.

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No, San Pedro, that’s a pachynoid to itself

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I’ve always

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called it

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pachynoid

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I’ve been

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correct

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it’s

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pachynoid

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trichocereus

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pachynoid

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except

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there are

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varieties

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you have

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long spine

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trichocereus

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pachynoid

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or the

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San Pedro

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presumably

00:13:38 ► §

which are

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not that

00:13:39 ► §

dissimilar

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from the

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short spine

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trichocereus

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pruvianus

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and of course

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if you have shorter spine pruvianus but long spine pachynoid you can’t tell them from the short-spined trichocerous pruvianus. And of course, if you have short-spined

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pruvianus, but long-spined

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pachydro, you can’t tell them from the trichocerous

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what was the name

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of the other thing?

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Somebody’s giant.

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Who knows? Tom Jewell’s giant.

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Tom Jewell’s giant, yes. And then you have the Tom Jewell’s

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giant. John Jewell’s? Tom Jewell’s.

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Tom. Tom. Tom Jewell’s giant.

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I couldn’t tell any of them from any of the others.

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One was dead and one was alive.

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I found that Jules giant Cracoceres are known as vanilla and non-vanilla, which I took a little bit of searching out.

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When the blossoms bloom, some of the blossoms smell like vanilla, and some don’t have any smell at all.

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And so you have

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a subspecies of this

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I’m not interested

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in what they bloom like

00:14:28 ► §

what they look like

00:14:28 ► §

I’m curious

00:14:29 ► §

what’s in them

00:14:29 ► §

and I don’t know

00:14:30 ► §

if I use the same cactus

00:14:31 ► §

why

00:14:32 ► §

I was told

00:14:32 ► §

wait until the cactus

00:14:34 ► §

puts out what they call

00:14:34 ► §

pups

00:14:35 ► §

you know down the bottom

00:14:36 ► §

of the cactus

00:14:36 ► §

they can move

00:14:37 ► §

all the way around

00:14:37 ► §

the bottom

00:14:38 ► §

these are

00:14:38 ► §

sort of

00:14:40 ► §

you might say

00:14:40 ► §

physical reproductions

00:14:42 ► §

of the original cactus

00:14:43 ► §

they should have

00:14:44 ► §

the same gene

00:14:44 ► §

what have you all should be the same gene what have you

00:14:45 ► §

all should be the same

00:14:46 ► §

so I like the idea

00:14:47 ► §

of saving them

00:14:48 ► §

in my greenhouse

00:14:49 ► §

as a retainer sample

00:14:50 ► §

for what I had looked at

00:14:51 ► §

in the laboratory

00:14:52 ► §

and you look at

00:14:53 ► §

some of those pups

00:14:53 ► §

and every now and then

00:14:55 ► §

the third or fourth

00:14:55 ► §

pup around the thing

00:14:56 ► §

looks totally different

00:14:57 ► §

you have what I call

00:14:59 ► §

montroses

00:15:00 ► §

which I just discovered

00:15:01 ► §

the word of

00:15:01 ► §

it’s a nice way

00:15:02 ► §

of saying monster

00:15:03 ► §

and these are cacti that just look weird

00:15:06 ► §

they call them moncos

00:15:07 ► §

then you have crestosis

00:15:10 ► §

which is a really weird nice way of saying crest

00:15:12 ► §

the cactus doesn’t go up like that

00:15:14 ► §

it goes up like this

00:15:15 ► §

it has like an edge up at the top

00:15:18 ► §

and so I began looking

00:15:20 ► §

some of these in the

00:15:21 ► §

I’m not even going to get into this

00:15:23 ► §

I’m afraid of it I should

00:15:24 ► §

different compositions you think you have a cactus I’m looking at some of these in the, I’m not even going to get into the San Pedro, but I should.

00:15:26 ► §

Different compositions.

00:15:32 ► §

You think you have a cactus and you have a variety of vegetative offshoots from that cactus, they should all be the same. Don’t kid yourself.

00:15:37 ► §

Some of them are contained, for example, I was told that the

00:15:40 ► §

macrogonus, which is something I talked about up in Canada.

00:15:45 ► §

I love cactus with a speech.

00:15:47 ► §

It is a practice here,

00:15:48 ► §

it’s macrogonus.

00:15:50 ► §

Large corners.

00:15:51 ► §

Why cacti should have large corners,

00:15:53 ► §

I don’t know,

00:15:54 ► §

but they’re called macrogonus

00:15:55 ► §

and they’re perfectly fine.

00:15:57 ► §

And is this active?

00:15:58 ► §

I asked the person

00:15:58 ► §

who’s the source of my first 50 examples

00:16:01 ► §

of that or so.

00:16:02 ► §

Yes, by and large.

00:16:05 ► §

I say, well,

00:16:06 ► §

how do you mean by and large? Well,

00:16:07 ► §

sometimes they are extremely active,

00:16:09 ► §

but sometimes I’m using they have no action at all.

00:16:14 ► §

This is the kind of thing I’m trying to fight

00:16:16 ► §

through in determining why cacti are active

00:16:18 ► §

and I can’t even find if they’re active.

00:16:20 ► §

So, this whole thing gets

00:16:22 ► §

me out of the

00:16:22 ► §

Cactoceros,

00:16:25 ► §

I guess it would be the Oides, whatever it is,

00:16:29 ► §

and I want to talk about another cactus

00:16:30 ► §

which I’ve gotten very interested in,

00:16:33 ► §

and that is not a Cactus Serus,

00:16:35 ► §

but a Supringliai, a Cactus Serus.

00:16:39 ► §

It’s a cactus a good friend of mine found,

00:16:41 ► §

brought up into my reality.

00:16:44 ► §

He is a collector of cave drawings

00:16:46 ► §

and secret businesses inside of nice things.

00:16:50 ► §

And you go about halfway down

00:16:51 ► §

in the bottom of Baja, California,

00:16:54 ► §

on the east coast,

00:16:56 ► §

there’s an area where there’s an Indian tribe

00:16:57 ► §

who lived there in that area.

00:16:58 ► §

They now go over to the mainland

00:16:59 ► §

about 200 years ago.

00:17:01 ► §

But they left paintings

00:17:02 ► §

inside of the caves there.

00:17:04 ► §

He got permission to go in.

00:17:05 ► §

He loved the idea of paintings.

00:17:06 ► §

He took pictures of paintings.

00:17:08 ► §

And one of the paintings

00:17:09 ► §

had obviously a religious chief

00:17:12 ► §

or maybe a god or something.

00:17:14 ► §

And the guy had a hand like this

00:17:15 ► §

and he had a hand like that

00:17:17 ► §

with a marvelous painting

00:17:18 ► §

of an Indian

00:17:19 ► §

holding his hands like that.

00:17:21 ► §

And he said,

00:17:21 ► §

that’s not an Indian.

00:17:23 ► §

That’s a cactus.

00:17:25 ► §

And he went all around the whole area around the cave holding his hands like that, and he says, that’s not an Indian, that’s a cactus. You know.

00:17:26 ► §

And then all around the whole area around the cave

00:17:29 ► §

are these Pachycerus pringlii growing there.

00:17:33 ► §

And so this must be a religious cactus.

00:17:35 ► §

So, being a good adventurer,

00:17:37 ► §

he goes out and cuts down a few of them,

00:17:39 ► §

boils them up in a pan with a little bit of lemon juice,

00:17:41 ► §

and he and his wife consume them,

00:17:42 ► §

and turn on like he wouldn’t believe.

00:17:45 ► §

So I decided, what is making a Pachycerus pringlii?

00:17:49 ► §

You look in the literature, they have about four compounds known to be in it.

00:17:52 ► §

And so I got this from him, and, oh, I was going to mention one more thing about the

00:17:59 ► §

Lebediwetes.

00:18:01 ► §

I talked about that.

00:18:02 ► §

There’s an interesting little side that came up

00:18:06 ► §

because someone was talking about

00:18:07 ► §

the law,

00:18:08 ► §

I think it was Jonathan,

00:18:10 ► §

I found in a very small peak

00:18:12 ► §

inside of the libivioides

00:18:14 ► §

probably constituting a trace component

00:18:17 ► §

that had the empirical formula

00:18:20 ► §

of the N-dimethyl

00:18:22 ► §

by methylene dioxide

00:18:23 ► §

to methylene.

00:18:24 ► §

I didn’t worry about the details.

00:18:26 ► §

I had a blackboard drawn up.

00:18:28 ► §

So here is a material that’s known

00:18:30 ► §

but has never been found in a cactus before.

00:18:33 ► §

It just might be an active compound.

00:18:35 ► §

And so I’m really carefully

00:18:37 ► §

documenting its mass spec

00:18:38 ► §

and synthesizing the compound

00:18:40 ► §

to make sure that we’re okay.

00:18:42 ► §

The retention time in the sample is exactly the same. This is a good

00:18:45 ► §

encouragement from ESCA.

00:18:47 ► §

But the ratio between the primary peak and

00:18:49 ► §

the parent peak was just slightly different.

00:18:52 ► §

So what else would have the same

00:18:53 ► §

empirical formula? I snooped around a little bit.

00:18:56 ► §

It has the same empirical formula

00:18:57 ► §

as MDMA.

00:19:00 ► §

And so if you put the methyl group

00:19:01 ► §

off the nitrogen and stuck it on the alpha position,

00:19:04 ► §

you’d have MDMA, same mass spec approximately.

00:19:07 ► §

And so I just happened to get a little trace amount of MDMA to get a reference mass spec.

00:19:12 ► §

I said, damn thing, there’s MDMA, I think.

00:19:15 ► §

So all of a sudden, whoa, whoa, whoa.

00:19:18 ► §

There’s an old saying which I’m a firm believer in.

00:19:21 ► §

If you’ve made a marvelous discovery, wait until tomorrow morning before you publish it.

00:19:26 ► §

Believe me, I’ve saved my ass many times.

00:19:30 ► §

So how can I find a little bit of MDMA

00:19:33 ► §

in a cactus that grows down in Baja, California,

00:19:35 ► §

on the eastern coast,

00:19:36 ► §

halfway down to the bottom of the peninsula?

00:19:39 ► §

Well, I have not actually made MDMA

00:19:42 ► §

in my laboratory for probably 15 years.

00:19:45 ► §

But I conceivably have had a dirty beaker. I don’t know.

00:19:49 ► §

So I have a very good friend who is marvelous at hydroponics.

00:19:54 ► §

And so we’re raising a sample of this cactus in hydroponics

00:19:58 ► §

using nitrogen-15 nitrate only.

00:20:02 ► §

And we can get that same thing and get that same peak that has N15 in it,

00:20:06 ► §

then it has to be biologically

00:20:08 ► §

synthesized.

00:20:10 ► §

Very interesting. Don’t know the answer, probably won’t know for a year.

00:20:12 ► §

But these are the kind of things that are fun.

00:20:13 ► §

Talking of MDMA, this brought up the other discussion

00:20:15 ► §

just a little while ago, about the

00:20:18 ► §

original law.

00:20:19 ► §

I eventually,

00:20:22 ► §

I should tell you, I have what I call

00:20:24 ► §

little red flags.

00:20:26 ► §

And when I lecture, especially should tell you, I have what I call little red flags. And when I lecture,

00:20:27 ► §

especially at the university,

00:20:28 ► §

I love doing it,

00:20:28 ► §

I have these red flags

00:20:29 ► §

are totally invisible

00:20:31 ► §

to anyone but me.

00:20:32 ► §

I know where they are.

00:20:32 ► §

I can see them

00:20:33 ► §

and no one else can.

00:20:34 ► §

So I’m lecturing along

00:20:35 ► §

and suddenly I leave

00:20:37 ► §

my path in my lecture.

00:20:38 ► §

I put a little red flag

00:20:39 ► §

in the path.

00:20:40 ► §

That way I go off the side,

00:20:42 ► §

go up the wall,

00:20:42 ► §

go across the wall,

00:20:43 ► §

out of the ceiling,

00:20:44 ► §

back down again.

00:20:45 ► §

The class is about to figure it out, he’s lost it. He’s lost his bike.

00:20:48 ► §

I know where that bike is, I come back, I pick up my bike and go up my left.

00:20:52 ► §

So I’m just taking a little bit of the side, I’ll come back, same place.

00:20:56 ► §

For example, mention was made about MDMA.

00:21:00 ► §

Someone was talking about, who was talking about the endulus, the Cataedilis.

00:21:05 ► §

Someone this morning was talking about Cataedilis, the source of CAC.

00:21:10 ► §

There are four plants that are listed in the Federal Drug Law as being illegal.

00:21:17 ► §

You have peyote, under the name of the Amylomiolevenii, or whatever they call it. You have the THC or the mesclun

00:21:25 ► §

the marijuana

00:21:28 ► §

plant

00:21:28 ► §

several appropriate names.

00:21:32 ► §

You have under Schedule 2

00:21:33 ► §

you have the cocaine plant and you have

00:21:35 ► §

the opium plant. These are the four plants that are mentioned

00:21:38 ► §

in the law as

00:21:40 ► §

originally written. There are

00:21:42 ► §

two more plants that have been added to

00:21:43 ► §

the law illegally.

00:21:46 ► §

And one of them is Catholic Edulis.

00:21:47 ► §

They were putting cat on the schedule one.

00:21:50 ► §

And it got over the whole

00:21:52 ► §

necessary thing about going through

00:21:53 ► §

12 months of hosting a federal register,

00:21:56 ► §

holding hearings, all that, at the end of 12 months

00:21:57 ► §

of scheduling. At the end of 12 months

00:22:00 ► §

you say, we’ll take a 6 month extension.

00:22:02 ► §

At the end of 5.9 months

00:22:04 ► §

of that 6 month extension, they say no more

00:22:05 ► §

arguments, it’s now illegal. So it’s about

00:22:07 ► §

18 minus a few days

00:22:09 ► §

to put the sample on to the

00:22:11 ► §

drug law. This is written in the law how you

00:22:13 ► §

do it. With the

00:22:15 ► §

cat plant

00:22:17 ► §

they went through the whole federal register thing

00:22:19 ► §

with the name of the

00:22:21 ► §

compound. It was in there

00:22:23 ► §

the very last posting after the

00:22:25 ► §

17.9 months thing, they said

00:22:28 ► §

this compound is now

00:22:29 ► §

Schedule 1, and of course,

00:22:31 ► §

because of our history of doing this,

00:22:34 ► §

so is the plant.

00:22:35 ► §

It never was mentioned in any of the federal registers

00:22:37 ► §

prior to the very last posting.

00:22:40 ► §

I don’t think the plant is legally in there.

00:22:42 ► §

You have another one in Schedule 1, you have

00:22:43 ► §

material, I don’t think the plan is legally in there. You have another one in Schedule 1. You have material, I don’t know, the ibogaine.

00:22:49 ► §

Ibogaine.

00:22:51 ► §

In 1970, the law was written and ibogaine was spelled out as being Schedule 1.

00:22:56 ► §

At that time, there was no DEA.

00:22:58 ► §

At this point, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, BNDD,

00:23:01 ► §

sent out a notice to all the people around everywhere, industry, academic, what have you,

00:23:06 ► §

this is the way we intend to write up

00:23:07 ► §

the federal drug law, using these spellings

00:23:09 ► §

and using this organization,

00:23:11 ► §

give us your opinions.

00:23:13 ► §

And the opinions came in in 1971,

00:23:15 ► §

they printed up one of the new correct spellings

00:23:17 ► §

and all that, and under Ibogaine

00:23:19 ► §

they happened to volunteer the name

00:23:20 ► §

Iboga Tabernacle.

00:23:22 ► §

It did not go through the necessary 17.9 months.

00:23:26 ► §

So I don’t think that is

00:23:27 ► §

illegal legally.

00:23:30 ► §

You have another two of those that are actually fascinating.

00:23:32 ► §

One of them is MDMA.

00:23:34 ► §

In 1985,

00:23:36 ► §

emergency scheduling, MDMA

00:23:38 ► §

was proposed for scheduling. It had 12 months

00:23:40 ► §

plus the almost

00:23:41 ► §

six months of the second thing.

00:23:44 ► §

And they made it schedule one. That was the end of the second thing and they made it schedule

00:23:45 ► §

one that was the end issue in 1988 a lawsuit was bought by by Lester

00:23:51 ► §

Grimspoon back in Harvard but they hadn’t done this hand on that they

00:23:54 ► §

should have done this and should have done that and the judge says okay you’re

00:23:57 ► §

right take it out of schedule one so on roughly I’m guessing give me take a

00:24:02 ► §

month or two January of 1988 it was removed from Schedule 1.

00:24:06 ► §

And then roughly next month, February of 1988, it was put back in.

00:24:11 ► §

So at this point, at that point,

00:24:14 ► §

it obviously should not have been in before because it had not met these legal requirements.

00:24:18 ► §

So anyone who was arrested for MDMA between 1985 and 1988

00:24:22 ► §

has a damn good argument for having that penalty thrown out

00:24:26 ► §

because it was technically not illegal.

00:24:28 ► §

But when they put the thing back in again,

00:24:30 ► §

they didn’t go through 18 months.

00:24:32 ► §

They just said,

00:24:32 ► §

we’ll just make it illegal.

00:24:34 ► §

Put it in front of the register,

00:24:34 ► §

it’s illegal again.

00:24:35 ► §

I don’t think MDMA is today illegal.

00:24:38 ► §

But if you want to fight a battle,

00:24:39 ► §

I suggest you get a lot of money behind you

00:24:43 ► §

because it’s going to be a long, long, hard battle.

00:24:46 ► §

Okay, that was one of the points.

00:24:47 ► §

Here are the compounds I’m going to talk about.

00:24:49 ► §

Oh, yes.

00:24:49 ► §

Another one is people say that methamphetamine is Schedule II.

00:24:55 ► §

I suggest you get a sample of the 1970 listing of Scheduled drugs

00:25:00 ► §

and the 1971 listing of Scheduled drugs.

00:25:03 ► §

You may have to go to a library somewhere to get them.

00:25:04 ► §

drugs, and the 1971 listing of scheduled drugs, you may have to go to a library somewhere to get them, and you’ll find in 1970, injectable MDMA is Schedule II.

00:25:10 ► §

But otherwise, injectable methamphetamine is Schedule II.

00:25:15 ► §

But other than that, methamphetamine is Schedule III.

00:25:19 ► §

In 1971, they just kept saying it was Schedule II.

00:25:22 ► §

Not going through the procedure. So I think if you are nailed with a heavy penalty

00:25:26 ► §

for normal methamphetamine,

00:25:30 ► §

you may want to get a very expensive lawyer

00:25:31 ► §

and a lot of money,

00:25:32 ► §

and you may be able to constitute

00:25:34 ► §

the throwing out of methamphetamine

00:25:35 ► §

as a Schedule 2 drug.

00:25:37 ► §

Interesting idea.

00:25:38 ► §

Just toss it in there and let it circulate.

00:25:39 ► §

Okay.

00:25:40 ► §

That’s a serious thing that I catch.

00:25:45 ► §

What my friend did,

00:25:47 ► §

he brought up from

00:25:48 ► §

Baja.

00:25:51 ► §

He and his wife had cooked up

00:25:53 ► §

a whole batch of this stuff,

00:25:54 ► §

put it in the pot and the stove, boiled it down,

00:25:57 ► §

chewed it out, decanted it, put it in the little vial,

00:25:59 ► §

and we went up into

00:26:01 ► §

the area near Auburn

00:26:03 ► §

in California, where there are a number of people who are interested in this general area of research.

00:26:09 ► §

Almost every small town in the United States you’ll find.

00:26:12 ► §

In the world you’ll find a number of people who are interested in this kind of research.

00:26:15 ► §

And we sat around one at each point of the compass, and there were 12 of us,

00:26:19 ► §

and we poured out these four vials, three here, three here, three over here, three over here,

00:26:24 ► §

and you’re up there, you remember the incident.

00:26:27 ► §

And after having

00:26:28 ► §

cast blessings to the various

00:26:30 ► §

points of the compass and had said the various

00:26:32 ► §

religious things necessary to save you, I’m down

00:26:34 ► §

with our extract of the

00:26:35 ► §

Pachycerus Praline.

00:26:37 ► §

Interesting experience, very definitely psychedelic.

00:26:40 ► §

A little bit on the light side.

00:26:43 ► §

What it is

00:26:45 ► §

my personal experience

00:26:46 ► §

was I was sitting in a theater

00:26:48 ► §

a strange theater

00:26:49 ► §

and I was looking at the stage

00:26:51 ► §

and there was activity on the stage

00:26:53 ► §

but the damn curtain had not been opened yet

00:26:55 ► §

and I worked for about a half an hour

00:26:58 ► §

trying to get that damn curtain open

00:27:00 ► §

because I wanted to see what was going on the stage

00:27:01 ► §

I just couldn’t get that concept open other people saw what they saw but I couldn to see what was going on in the state. I couldn’t quite do it. I just couldn’t get that concept open.

00:27:05 ► §

Other people saw what they saw,

00:27:07 ► §

but I couldn’t see it.

00:27:09 ► §

About three months later,

00:27:11 ► §

he brought up another sample,

00:27:12 ► §

boiled it up in the same way,

00:27:14 ► §

and we went up to the same place,

00:27:16 ► §

and we had another religious ceremony,

00:27:17 ► §

and we all took it.

00:27:18 ► §

I think with good fortune,

00:27:19 ► §

both Anna and I took the same amount we took before,

00:27:22 ► §

just to be sure that everything was going to be all right.

00:27:25 ► §

And of the 12 people,

00:27:26 ► §

six, totally,

00:27:28 ► §

two of the vials,

00:27:30 ► §

six of us came down with viciously poisoned.

00:27:32 ► §

And the other six had a smart script.

00:27:35 ► §

All from the same boiling,

00:27:37 ► §

all from the same cactus,

00:27:38 ► §

or mixture of cacti,

00:27:39 ► §

I don’t know which.

00:27:41 ► §

And in my case,

00:27:43 ► §

I could not move.

00:27:46 ► §

I managed somehow to work myself onto a bed downstairs, and I just lay still. I know if I wiggle my toe, I’m in trouble.

00:27:51 ► §

I lay still for about 40 minutes, and eventually I began feeling safe to move again. And you

00:27:56 ► §

have the six who were very ill, had diarrhea, and he locked himself in one bathroom for

00:28:00 ► §

a couple, three hours. But one of the people in the experiment happened to be

00:28:06 ► §

a microbiologist, and he took a

00:28:08 ► §

sample back to see if he could raise some sort of a

00:28:09 ► §

growth in this, if not in that, maybe

00:28:12 ► §

as an endotoxin from some bug.

00:28:14 ► §

And I took samples from the good and the bad

00:28:16 ► §

for GCMSing to see if there was some component

00:28:18 ► §

in the bad that was not in the good, or

00:28:20 ► §

vice versa. Neither of us found

00:28:21 ► §

one hint of what was going wrong.

00:28:24 ► §

To this day, I do not know why six of us were viciously ill, and six of us had good trips.

00:28:29 ► §

So it gives you a little bit of a…

00:28:30 ► §

So this caught my fancy.

00:28:32 ► §

And I wanted to go into finding out what is in the cactus, what is in there.

00:28:37 ► §

The literature gives four compounds that are interesting.

00:28:42 ► §

But I thought I’d give…

00:28:44 ► §

How many people here are

00:28:45 ► §

totally at peace with chromatography?

00:28:49 ► §

Chromatography.

00:28:50 ► §

Well, okay.

00:28:52 ► §

How many people are at peace

00:28:54 ► §

with gas-liquid chromatography?

00:28:57 ► §

H-P-L-C-H-9-C-L.

00:28:58 ► §

Gas-liquid chromatography.

00:29:00 ► §

One, two, three.

00:29:02 ► §

The first page is what happens

00:29:04 ► §

when I took a little smudge of this cactus extract and

00:29:09 ► §

dissolved it in 90% niobium butanol and put it in a deep…

00:29:15 ► §

Chromatography, in essence, is like you spill some butter on your t-shirt and you want to

00:29:22 ► §

wash it off and you wash it off with a little bit of gasoline or hexane.

00:29:24 ► §

As you wash the hexane off

00:29:26 ► §

the butter moves down

00:29:27 ► §

the shirt

00:29:27 ► §

at its own slow pace.

00:29:29 ► §

If you had only

00:29:30 ► §

margarine or something else

00:29:31 ► §

it probably moves

00:29:31 ► §

at a slightly different pace.

00:29:33 ► §

So if you had a mixture

00:29:33 ► §

on your shirt

00:29:34 ► §

of margarine and butter

00:29:35 ► §

and used gasoline

00:29:36 ► §

you could separate the two

00:29:37 ► §

as they went down

00:29:38 ► §

your shirt.

00:29:38 ► §

This is a good talk.

00:29:40 ► §

Now,

00:29:42 ► §

that’s not,

00:29:43 ► §

okay,

00:29:43 ► §

I could have picked

00:29:44 ► §

a better example.

00:29:45 ► §

Ripley, it was a 1920- something or other, I forget his name, Schmetz or something like this,

00:29:50 ► §

in Germany. Everyone knew what chlorophyll was, it’s the green stuff that makes plants green.

00:29:55 ► §

And he made a solution of chloroform, he made up some ground up sand I think it was,

00:30:00 ► §

and poured the solution, got the solution of sand all wet with some solvent or other and put this chlorophyll on top of the thing

00:30:06 ► §

and added more of the solvent

00:30:07 ► §

and the chlorophyll moved down through this ground glass

00:30:10 ► §

column and it went down separating

00:30:11 ► §

into four bands. And he collected

00:30:14 ► §

first, the second came off, a little more,

00:30:15 ► §

third came off, he identified chlorophyll

00:30:18 ► §

as being a mixture of four compounds

00:30:19 ► §

by using ground sand and a solvent.

00:30:22 ► §

This is the very first of chromatography.

00:30:24 ► §

Hence it’s because chlorophyll green, that’s why it’s of chromatography. Hence it’s because it’s purple.

00:30:25 ► §

Green, that’s why it’s called chromatography.

00:30:27 ► §

But that’s back in the 20s.

00:30:29 ► §

So this has now gotten to a very sophisticated thing.

00:30:33 ► §

The gas chromatographic system I use here

00:30:35 ► §

has a capillary column made of quartz.

00:30:38 ► §

It is about 30 or 40 feet long

00:30:41 ► §

in a spiral like this.

00:30:44 ► §

It is so fine internally

00:30:45 ► §

you cannot put a human hair into it.

00:30:47 ► §

It’s about a tenth the diameter of a human hair.

00:30:50 ► §

And it’s coated on the inside

00:30:52 ► §

with a material that is

00:30:53 ► §

really bound to the quartz.

00:30:56 ► §

So when you inject something hot

00:30:58 ► §

in there, the gas runs through this whole

00:31:00 ► §

thing, and this thing moves a little bit more slowly

00:31:01 ► §

than the gas, wanting to move with the gas, which is

00:31:03 ► §

moving, but also wanting to adhere to the outside surface that is not

00:31:07 ► §

moving and the more volatile the sooner it moves, the faster it moves, the less volatile

00:31:12 ► §

it is, the more slowly it moves and so you put the goof in the front, it runs through

00:31:17 ► §

this long thing and after about four or five minutes something begins coming out the tail

00:31:21 ► §

end, then something else comes out, then something else comes out.

00:31:23 ► §

So this is a form of gas chromatography.

00:31:25 ► §

I’m separating things by means of a long silica spiral into its various components.

00:31:32 ► §

Then you have mass spec.

00:31:35 ► §

How many of your pieces mass spec?

00:31:37 ► §

One, two, three, four, five, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen,

00:31:40 ► §

sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty,

00:31:41 ► §

twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty,

00:31:42 ► §

twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty,

00:31:43 ► §

twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty,

00:31:44 ► §

twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, I’m getting real picky on math checks when I get away from it. I think the best way I tell about it,

00:31:46 ► §

when you take a molecule,

00:31:49 ► §

there’s a bunch of atoms all hooked together,

00:31:51 ► §

and they’re all bonded together.

00:31:53 ► §

Every bond has a couple of electrons in it.

00:31:55 ► §

So you have however many atoms you have,

00:31:57 ► §

you have an even number of electron bonds.

00:32:00 ► §

So 28 electrons to 30 electrons.

00:32:04 ► §

And if you go and whack this thing with a very, very energetic electron, you knock the electron out.

00:32:09 ► §

So suddenly you have a molecule with an odd number of electrons.

00:32:12 ► §

And it can’t stay together. It falls apart.

00:32:14 ► §

And as it falls apart, it falls apart in fragments that are different degrees of stability, different sizes.

00:32:20 ► §

And this is what a fragmentation mass effect is.

00:32:23 ► §

So if I had this stuff coming out of the column over here

00:32:26 ► §

and coming to an area where I get under a vacuum,

00:32:28 ► §

I can hit it with a hot electron

00:32:29 ► §

and let the stuff be accelerated down a little,

00:32:32 ► §

some sort of a thing that accelerates things.

00:32:34 ► §

And it goes down this way,

00:32:35 ► §

and at the very end you have a large piece of film.

00:32:39 ► §

And I have a great big head sitting down here.

00:32:41 ► §

And all these things are coming through,

00:32:43 ► §

and the more massive they are,

00:32:44 ► §

the less they’re detected by the magnet.

00:32:47 ► §

So if something’s real massive,

00:32:48 ► §

it goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, a little bit like that.

00:32:49 ► §

Something very light, it goes, you know, down there.

00:32:51 ► §

You develop the film, this is really,

00:32:53 ► §

this is 1960s, what the mass effects were.

00:32:55 ► §

You develop this film, and you have the white things

00:32:58 ► §

down there, and the heavy things up there,

00:33:00 ► §

and you can tell what the mass is of those fragments

00:33:02 ► §

by where it is on that film.

00:33:03 ► §

So suddenly you’ve broken the molecule apart into little bitty things, and you can tell what the mass is of those fragments by where it is on that film. So suddenly you’ve broken the molecule apart

00:33:05 ► §

into little bitty things,

00:33:07 ► §

and you can measure the amount and the mass

00:33:09 ► §

of those little bitty things

00:33:10 ► §

by means of magnetic diversion.

00:33:12 ► §

Now we have what’s called quadrupole,

00:33:14 ► §

you have four little lines of the RF field

00:33:16 ► §

going around the detector over here.

00:33:18 ► §

It’s sudden, sudden, and it goes into the magnetic field,

00:33:20 ► §

and it flanges into the detector,

00:33:22 ► §

and you vary the RF in this field,

00:33:23 ► §

and it’s faster and faster, or whatever,

00:33:25 ► §

or slower and slower. Anyway, light come out

00:33:27 ► §

first, then heavy come out later, and then very heavy

00:33:29 ► §

get later. This whole thing

00:33:31 ► §

takes about a third of a second

00:33:33 ► §

to give you a complete spectrum.

00:33:36 ► §

So every third of a second, three

00:33:37 ► §

times a second, you get

00:33:38 ► §

all these mass specs

00:33:41 ► §

coming out. And then you have this

00:33:43 ► §

machine, blessing on computers up to a point, that will take all these little effects coming out. And then you have this machine, blessing on computers up to a point,

00:33:47 ► §

that will take all these little things coming out,

00:33:50 ► §

and add it.

00:33:51 ► §

If there’s not a lot coming out,

00:33:52 ► §

you get a deflection of the pen up like that.

00:33:54 ► §

Not much coming out, you don’t get much deflection.

00:33:56 ► §

So suddenly a peak comes out,

00:33:57 ► §

and you get…

00:33:58 ► §

Each of these, every third of a second,

00:34:02 ► §

you get another thing.

00:34:03 ► §

So you see the amount of material

00:34:04 ► §

and its retention time by plotting the total mass

00:34:08 ► §

of what’s coming out.

00:34:09 ► §

But every single third of a second you have a complete spectrum of what’s coming out,

00:34:13 ► §

and in the computer you can bring out this spectrum.

00:34:15 ► §

So you’re not really able to tell what comes out in what order, and what’s early, what’s

00:34:20 ► §

late, what’s mixed, what’s separated, what’s not separated.

00:34:23 ► §

But what you can tell is what the mass and what the charge arrangement is on each of the fragments.

00:34:28 ► §

So not only do you know where the mixture is in the sense of resolving it,

00:34:33 ► §

but you know, have a good insight of what the materials might be that are in that mixture.

00:34:37 ► §

Okay, so now the first of the pictures is what happened when I put that little extract.

00:34:43 ► §

This was not the poisonous one, not the non-poisonous one.

00:34:46 ► §

This is the first of the ones about three months earlier.

00:34:49 ► §

I put a little smudge in there, and you can see there’s a nice little peak,

00:34:52 ► §

and then a bing-bong-bong, this is the first of the things,

00:34:55 ► §

and a total of about eight or ten peaks.

00:34:58 ► §

And notice the middle peak of this, more or less the middle peak,

00:35:00 ► §

is quite a big monster.

00:35:02 ► §

That is the major component of this cactus.

00:35:06 ► §

The second picture,

00:35:08 ► §

I took that little section

00:35:09 ► §

of these materials coming, banging out there,

00:35:13 ► §

and blew it up

00:35:13 ► §

for a hot way. You can view it on a computer,

00:35:15 ► §

you turn the knob, stretch it out, and print.

00:35:17 ► §

And this is a picture of those things.

00:35:19 ► §

Now you see that big peak is really much overloaded,

00:35:21 ► §

as a matter of fact. It’s so big,

00:35:24 ► §

it’s warped.

00:35:25 ► §

But all the little peaks, B, E, I made these letters, you’ll see why in a moment.

00:35:29 ► §

I identified them so I know the chromatogram belongs to what peak.

00:35:32 ► §

And the third thing in there, I took the bottom quarter inch of this entire thing and put it out to bring out the noise level.

00:35:39 ► §

And there, suddenly you see, you can see another 15 peaks.

00:35:43 ► §

So here’s a total of 20, 25 feet.

00:35:47 ► §

Every one of those, I have a mass spectrum.

00:35:50 ► §

So if you know, if you have a reference sample,

00:35:51 ► §

you know what that material is.

00:35:53 ► §

I found dimethoxypinephalamine,

00:35:54 ► §

I found dimethoxyamnethylamine,

00:35:55 ► §

I found cordonine,

00:35:56 ► §

I found all kinds of pinoplamines.

00:35:59 ► §

But the bulk of these things are isoquinolones.

00:36:02 ► §

And I really got turned on about four years ago,

00:36:02 ► §

five years ago. By the way, the book on simple plant isoquinolones,

00:36:05 ► §

I put a few flyers on the back table to introduce it. It’s dull. It really got turned on about four years ago, five years ago. By the way, the book on simple plant isoquinolones,

00:36:08 ► §

I put a few flyers on the back table to introduce it.

00:36:08 ► §

It’s dull.

00:36:11 ► §

It’s finally been printed about a month ago.

00:36:15 ► §

It’s a listing of the very simple isoquinolones.

00:36:19 ► §

I was writing an appendix for the third book with Ann,

00:36:23 ► §

and I was going to put a little appendix in there on simple isoquinolones from plants.

00:36:26 ► §

And by the time I got the information compiled in one place,

00:36:28 ► §

it was over 600 pages of information.

00:36:31 ► §

And so I decided to do the book by itself, which it is.

00:36:35 ► §

Dull. No sex. No drugs. No excitement.

00:36:36 ► §

Strictly dull.

00:36:39 ► §

It lists the name of the critical name of the isoquinoline.

00:36:42 ► §

I found a way of alphabetizing structures, which is kind of neat.

00:36:45 ► §

It lists the alphabetization of all the structures,

00:36:47 ► §

with the plants that are in there, their names and plants.

00:36:52 ► §

And the very last section of the book gives you the names of all the plants,

00:36:54 ► §

with cross-indexed references.

00:36:57 ► §

So if you have an interest in an alkaloid that is an isoquinoline,

00:37:01 ► §

or a plant, or a structure, it’s in that book.

00:37:04 ► §

And as I say, there’s no excitement in it.

00:37:05 ► §

I recommend it only if you’re one of the few people in the world who would be interested in that book and as I say there’s no excitement in it I recommend it only if you’re

00:37:05 ► §

one of the few people

00:37:06 ► §

in the world

00:37:07 ► §

who’d be interested

00:37:07 ► §

in that particular thing

00:37:08 ► §

but there’s a brochure

00:37:09 ► §

back there

00:37:10 ► §

if you want to read about it

00:37:11 ► §

so what I did

00:37:12 ► §

where am I

00:37:14 ► §

why am I

00:37:15 ► §

where’s the book available

00:37:16 ► §

we had

00:37:18 ► §

transform press

00:37:19 ► §

but that gives

00:37:20 ► §

the mailing address

00:37:21 ► §

of the press

00:37:22 ► §

and the number

00:37:24 ► §

of suppliers

00:37:25 ► §

of stock.

00:37:27 ► §

Okay, where am I?

00:37:28 ► §

Where am I?

00:37:28 ► §

Why am I here?

00:37:31 ► §

Yeah, the interesting,

00:37:32 ► §

the fourth picture

00:37:33 ► §

is an actual picture

00:37:35 ► §

of the mass spec

00:37:36 ► §

of that major peak.

00:37:38 ► §

And it shows you

00:37:39 ► §

the extreme parallel

00:37:42 ► §

between K

00:37:43 ► §

is the number of K

00:37:44 ► §

that’s the big peak,

00:37:45 ► §

I’ve seen on the first of the four,

00:37:48 ► §

and what it is,

00:37:50 ► §

that’s a mass spectrum that came out,

00:37:52 ► §

that was recorded in a third of a second,

00:37:55 ► §

and then I had a feeling,

00:37:57 ► §

it looked vague and familiar,

00:37:59 ► §

and I went into my files,

00:38:00 ► §

and I found a structure of carnigine,

00:38:01 ► §

and it had race in the spectrum,

00:38:03 ► §

so I synthesized carnigine,

00:38:04 ► §

that’s the structure down below here

00:38:05 ► §

it’s isoquinoline

00:38:06 ► §

with two methoxys and two methyl groups

00:38:08 ► §

straightforward synthesis

00:38:09 ► §

made a sample

00:38:10 ► §

and the two spectra are superimposable

00:38:14 ► §

so that major peak is carnitine

00:38:16 ► §

now that is quite certain

00:38:21 ► §

I looked in the literature

00:38:23 ► §

two people had worked on this particular cactus before.

00:38:26 ► §

They published the compounds they had found.

00:38:29 ► §

None of them had mentioned carnitine.

00:38:31 ► §

So, what’s going on here?

00:38:33 ► §

Again, is this the right cactus?

00:38:35 ► §

Is it the right name?

00:38:36 ► §

Why did they not see it?

00:38:37 ► §

What cactus are they using it with?

00:38:39 ► §

So I began snooping around

00:38:41 ► §

different sources of cactus.

00:38:43 ► §

I got a sample from Baja, California.

00:38:45 ► §

I got a sample from Mesa Gardens

00:38:47 ► §

back in the south of Albuquerque.

00:38:49 ► §

I got a sample from,

00:38:51 ► §

what’s this place with the horrible name up near Rippon?

00:38:54 ► §

Poots.

00:38:55 ► §

Poots Cactus up near Rippon.

00:38:58 ► §

And you sent me a sample.

00:38:59 ► §

I got another sample from some other source.

00:39:02 ► §

And I don’t know if it was your sample I ran

00:39:04 ► §

or the samples from other sources, but I have it in my it was your sample I ran or the sample from another source

00:39:05 ► §

but I have it in my lab

00:39:06 ► §

I did not record the source of the spectrum

00:39:10 ► §

I ran

00:39:10 ► §

I ran a spectrum totally different

00:39:13 ► §

totally different

00:39:16 ► §

so I’m back into the argument

00:39:18 ► §

of how do you run the same cactus

00:39:19 ► §

twice, how do you know what you have

00:39:21 ► §

and so I’m really

00:39:23 ► §

a little uncomfortable

00:39:25 ► §

with this. I don’t want to

00:39:27 ► §

say that this is the right

00:39:29 ► §

cactus.

00:39:32 ► §

I have a lot of different

00:39:33 ► §

the cactus itself, the necrolithinus

00:39:35 ► §

they grow about 6 or 8

00:39:38 ► §

inches in diameter, very fine polluting.

00:39:40 ► §

They have almost

00:39:41 ► §

whitey spines and a cast of blue

00:39:43 ► §

to them. And so you look at it from a distance it looks like it has blue spines and a cast of blue to them.

00:39:46 ► §

And so you look at it from a distance,

00:39:47 ► §

it looks like it has blue spines.

00:39:48 ► §

You don’t know that’s like a fraction.

00:39:51 ► §

But it has that sharp spine that kind of curl in like a cat’s claws.

00:39:54 ► §

And it has a blue-ish white appearance.

00:39:56 ► §

So I got samples from poops.

00:39:58 ► §

I got samples from mesa.

00:40:01 ► §

And I’ve been running them also

00:40:02 ► §

different spectrum.

00:40:05 ► §

I’m keeping a reference sample of each plant,

00:40:08 ► §

so if anything really comes to, push comes to shove,

00:40:11 ► §

I can say, this is the plant I ran,

00:40:13 ► §

but the trouble is I’m not even sure those are valid.

00:40:16 ► §

So this is where I’m getting off into strange territory.

00:40:21 ► §

I am beginning to believe that the idea of trying to find

00:40:24 ► §

all these active material in cacti is looking at the wrong thing.

00:40:29 ► §

This is my own feeling, my own direction, I’m going in a little bit right now.

00:40:34 ► §

I think the cactus is, I don’t think I can explain why a cactus is that.

00:40:38 ► §

It takes, for example, this carnagean.

00:40:40 ► §

I took it up to 100 milligrams, and I’m now hesitant to do 100 milligrams, because it is known to be a

00:40:46 ► §

bacteriostatic, bacteriocide, or bacteriostatic

00:40:48 ► §

which doesn’t bother me at all.

00:40:50 ► §

But in some animals, it’s also a convulsant,

00:40:53 ► §

which does bug me a little bit.

00:40:55 ► §

And I’m not quite sure

00:40:56 ► §

if I really want to go any higher.

00:40:58 ► §

I don’t turn on by

00:41:00 ► §

convulsing.

00:41:02 ► §

But also, what is an interesting

00:41:04 ► §

point is it happens to be

00:41:06 ► §

a tremendously good

00:41:07 ► §

monamine oxidase inhibitor.

00:41:10 ► §

And I’m wondering,

00:41:11 ► §

both of these little peaks

00:41:12 ► §

in this thing

00:41:13 ► §

are isoquinolones.

00:41:15 ► §

Several of them

00:41:15 ► §

are very effective

00:41:16 ► §

monamine oxidase inhibitors.

00:41:19 ► §

I have run a mixture of this

00:41:20 ► §

through a general screen.

00:41:21 ► §

Very effective

00:41:22 ► §

deamination inhibition. And I’m wondering,

00:41:27 ► §

I asked Jonathan if I could steal a word potentially from him and he said sure. And so I’m calling,

00:41:33 ► §

I coined the word, thank you Jonathan. Are you here Jonathan? Oh good. The cacti wasca,

00:41:40 ► §

you use primal wasca, you use all kinds of different wascas. So I have the

00:41:45 ► §

term cacti wasca,

00:41:47 ► §

which I think

00:41:48 ► §

is a mixture of

00:41:49 ► §

alkaloids that

00:41:50 ► §

contain phenethylamines,

00:41:52 ► §

and indeed there

00:41:52 ► §

are a lot of

00:41:52 ► §

phenethylamines in

00:41:53 ► §

this particular

00:41:53 ► §

cactus, that

00:41:55 ► §

themselves are

00:41:55 ► §

known not to be

00:41:56 ► §

active, and they

00:41:58 ► §

contain isophenes

00:41:59 ► §

that are known to

00:42:00 ► §

inhibit the

00:42:01 ► §

contamination of

00:42:02 ► §

these phenethylamines,

00:42:03 ► §

and I have a

00:42:04 ► §

feeling you’re

00:42:04 ► §

going to get in a situation

00:42:05 ► §

in which you’re not going to find an active compound,

00:42:09 ► §

but you’re going to find an active cactus.

00:42:11 ► §

Because it contains at least two compounds.

00:42:12 ► §

Let’s say, make it simple, two compounds,

00:42:14 ► §

one of which is deaminated, hence it’s not active,

00:42:17 ► §

and the other of which inhibits that deamination.

00:42:20 ► §

So you eat the cactus, take both compounds,

00:42:22 ► §

you turn on.

00:42:23 ► §

Eat either compound alone, you don’t.

00:42:25 ► §

It’s very much like ayahuasca in combination with DMT,

00:42:27 ► §

and carbon and harmony.

00:42:29 ► §

So that is where this is kind of going.

00:42:32 ► §

So what I want to do with the cactus now is not to try to identify why they’re active,

00:42:37 ► §

but really pursue what’s in them.

00:42:39 ► §

And let this be a clue, as a kind of direction for synthetic things to go into.

00:42:44 ► §

I’ve specifically synthesized

00:42:45 ► §

20, 30,

00:42:47 ► §

40 of these isoquinolones.

00:42:49 ► §

I have a very good friend in

00:42:51 ► §

Virginia, the state of Virginia,

00:42:53 ► §

who has a marvelous monominoxidase

00:42:55 ► §

inhibition assay,

00:42:57 ► §

A’s and B’s, and so I’m

00:42:59 ► §

sending him 10 at a time,

00:43:01 ► §

and he’s running them all through, and we find, for example,

00:43:03 ► §

methylene dioxyl is much more potent than dimethoxyl, or if it’s not, both methyl groups are not,

00:43:09 ► §

so you get these clues, and I want to synthesize 10 more exoquilins with the active thing here,

00:43:13 ► §

the active thing there, because the degree of aromaticity, find that the things are active,

00:43:17 ► §

that maybe one more pass, keeping that most active aromaticity thing in there, and maybe

00:43:22 ► §

varying the position of the methoxy groups or the methoxy groups, variations like that,

00:43:26 ► §

I will wager three passes with his health,

00:43:29 ► §

and I’m going to come up with a monamine oxidase inhibitor,

00:43:31 ► §

that’s going to be in the cactus somewhere,

00:43:33 ► §

and it’s going to be an active compound,

00:43:35 ► §

it’s going to be a potent inhibitor.

00:43:36 ► §

And if nothing else, that itself might be a,

00:43:39 ► §

might be an interesting experimental research tool.

00:43:43 ► §

So this is kind of where it’s going,

00:43:44 ► §

not into the cactus more, but the idea of finding what’s in there,

00:43:47 ► §

getting ideas, different kinds of groupings that might be on there,

00:43:50 ► §

and it’s a fascinating area.

00:43:54 ► §

Actually, what I’m going to talk about,

00:43:55 ► §

this is tomorrow or whatever the next talk is,

00:43:57 ► §

is getting back in the laboratory again,

00:43:59 ► §

because another thing that is eroding very much

00:44:02 ► §

my dedication to cacti as a primary

00:44:05 ► §

target is the fact that I’ve come across

00:44:08 ► §

a whole new bunch of cryptamine ideas

00:44:10 ► §

and in these cryptamine ideas

00:44:12 ► §

are a whole new bunch of activities

00:44:13 ► §

someone asked me, someone asked this outside

00:44:16 ► §

do you have a permit

00:44:17 ► §

do you have a permit

00:44:19 ► §

to do this kind of work

00:44:20 ► §

and I said, I don’t see where you need a permit

00:44:22 ► §

well, these are illegal drugs

00:44:24 ► §

these are illegal drugs no they’re you’re the one who asked.

00:44:25 ► §

These are illegal drugs. No, they’re not.

00:44:28 ► §

Well, are they in the law? No, I’m just now making them.

00:44:33 ► §

There is a four-year, I’ll make it round and round,

00:44:37 ► §

four-year delay between making new compounds, finance activity.

00:44:41 ► §

And then four years down the line, the DEA gets around to scheduling it, and you that problem, but I’ve got a four year leave. And I’m going to keep going

00:44:48 ► §

ahead that way. And it’s totally legal. I don’t have any illegal drug in my lab. As

00:44:53 ► §

soon as they schedule something, I throw my records down the way. There’s no problem there.

00:44:57 ► §

But the whole beauty, this whole area is absolutely, I cannot begin to explain the joy, the pleasure, the absolute magic of making new compounds.

00:45:09 ► §

Compounds have never been made.

00:45:10 ► §

Some of these never made before.

00:45:12 ► §

And once you make them, oh, maybe that wasn’t a cabbage, maybe it’s not.

00:45:15 ► §

Just give yourself the theoretical picture of having a white salad in a nice, peckery dish in your lab.

00:45:23 ► §

You’ve just made the thing.

00:45:24 ► §

You know it’s right,

00:45:25 ► §

you have a spec on it, you have infrared on it, everything is absolutely right, it has the right

00:45:28 ► §

analysis, everything is in order, everything looks beautiful.

00:45:33 ► §

And you look at that white solid, and you say, you know, no one has ever made that before.

00:45:38 ► §

It’s not in the literature, and I will wager that it’s never been made.

00:45:41 ► §

Maybe in yonder galaxy somewhere there’s a chemist who made that, I don’t know.

00:45:45 ► §

But certainly not on Earth, at least there’s no record that it’s never made, maybe in yonder galaxy somewhere there’s a chemist who made it, I don’t know. But certainly

00:45:46 ► §

not on Earth,

00:45:47 ► §

at least there’s

00:45:47 ► §

no record

00:45:48 ► §

that it’s

00:45:48 ► §

anywhere on

00:45:48 ► §

Earth.

00:45:49 ► §

And you

00:45:49 ► §

have this

00:45:50 ► §

little white

00:45:50 ► §

crystal solid

00:45:51 ► §

out there,

00:45:52 ► §

you say,

00:45:52 ► §

you know,

00:45:54 ► §

I bet that

00:45:54 ► §

might be a

00:45:55 ► §

psychedelic,

00:45:55 ► §

I’m sorry,

00:45:57 ► §

entheogenic.

00:46:02 ► §

I happen to

00:46:03 ► §

like the term

00:46:04 ► §

psychedelic.

00:46:05 ► §

We cross swords occasionally down a good line.

00:46:08 ► §

But that’s okay.

00:46:09 ► §

This may be a psychedelic.

00:46:11 ► §

How are you going to find out?

00:46:14 ► §

Well, obviously, come.

00:46:20 ► §

You’re going to taste it.

00:46:22 ► §

But how much do you taste?

00:46:24 ► §

What’s your first taste?

00:46:26 ► §

What analogy do you draw from what you know

00:46:28 ► §

in your literature and so forth to say,

00:46:30 ► §

oh, I think I’ll start with a tenth of that.

00:46:34 ► §

How much do you determine?

00:46:36 ► §

You don’t know that compound.

00:46:38 ► §

That compound does not know you.

00:46:39 ► §

I mean, it’s a total alien relationship.

00:46:43 ► §

The only way you can get into it

00:46:44 ► §

is by saying, well, let’s see.

00:46:47 ► §

I know something very close to that.

00:46:49 ► §

It’s active at maybe 3, 4, 5, 9.

00:46:51 ► §

I better start at 100 micrograms.

00:46:52 ► §

Nah, I’ll start with 1 microgram.

00:46:55 ► §

If you start at 100 micrograms or 1 microgram,

00:46:58 ► §

the difference in weight is trivial.

00:47:00 ► §

But it takes time.

00:47:02 ► §

But then you have several other things

00:47:03 ► §

you can assay in between,

00:47:04 ► §

and you work them out.

00:47:06 ► §

And you eventually find, you get into a beautiful, it’s a situation where you cannot lose.

00:47:11 ► §

Because when you eventually get up to an area where you know what the activity is, now you

00:47:17 ► §

know the compound a little bit, and of course it now moves you, and you have established

00:47:21 ► §

this little relationship.

00:47:22 ► §

Dialogue is a strange sort of thing

00:47:25 ► §

but it’s there

00:47:25 ► §

you’re kind of talking to it in a funny way

00:47:28 ► §

you certainly can hear it like plants

00:47:30 ► §

whatever you talk to in the jungle

00:47:32 ► §

you’re talking a little bit with it

00:47:35 ► §

and you say

00:47:36 ► §

you know I think you are

00:47:38 ► §

an activist-academic

00:47:39 ► §

and then you cannot lose

00:47:44 ► §

because you publish that

00:47:44 ► §

you write a book you put it out in the book,

00:47:45 ► §

you write a book, you put it in the

00:47:47 ► §

political literature that this is an active

00:47:49 ► §

compound at such and such a level.

00:47:51 ► §

And someone will come up and say,

00:47:53 ► §

we tried that and it is active.

00:47:55 ► §

You’re right. You’re right. You win.

00:47:59 ► §

Then someone else will

00:47:59 ► §

come up and try it out and say,

00:48:01 ► §

it’s not active at that level. What did I do

00:48:03 ► §

wrong? You win!

00:48:06 ► §

Either way,

00:48:07 ► §

you’ve got to win it. So that’s the beauty

00:48:09 ► §

of publishing for us to be able to say,

00:48:11 ► §

and it’s

00:48:14 ► §

an exciting thing. The idea

00:48:15 ► §

of just taking something totally new, lifting up

00:48:18 ► §

a rock out in the field and seeing what’s crawling

00:48:19 ► §

under it is one of the most exciting things

00:48:21 ► §

I can conceive of doing. Because you’re seeing something

00:48:24 ► §

that you’ve never seen before.

00:48:26 ► §

And this whole area,

00:48:28 ► §

this whole area of synthesis and these ice equivalents

00:48:29 ► §

are just absolutely delightful things

00:48:31 ► §

to work with.

00:48:31 ► §

They’re all crystal solids.

00:48:32 ► §

Some of them have an oxide

00:48:33 ► §

that’s a little tricky to make.

00:48:35 ► §

And possibly you get aromatic rings

00:48:36 ► §

and you get little problems

00:48:37 ► §

and fluorescence and decay.

00:48:39 ► §

And sunlight,

00:48:39 ► §

you have to be a little careful

00:48:40 ► §

with some of them.

00:48:41 ► §

But to a large extent,

00:48:42 ► §

they are stable.

00:48:43 ► §

And they are easily handled. And they’re all white crystal and solid, which is maybe a bit racist,

00:48:48 ► §

but that’s what I have.

00:48:49 ► §

I’m going to work through it.

00:48:51 ► §

Oh, one thing on this picture I quite forgot to mention.

00:48:54 ► §

Don’t worry, that’s the glasses.

00:48:55 ► §

You take the third of the four pictures, and you get a very good view of it over on peak

00:49:01 ► §

P and Q.

00:49:04 ► §

And if you look at P, you’ll find you can see the little lines

00:49:07 ► §

going up every third of a second like that, to the top, and down every third of a second,

00:49:11 ► §

down to where it becomes Q peak. So you can actually see it. L is even a better example.

00:49:17 ► §

We have little steps going up. Every one of those steps is recorded over a third of a

00:49:21 ► §

second. And every one of those steps is a different separate mass spec.

00:49:25 ► §

And what you can do with the mass spec, which is absolutely marvelous,

00:49:28 ► §

is take a peak that comes out like this,

00:49:30 ► §

and check every single spec on that peak.

00:49:34 ► §

And sometimes you find that the spectrum going up

00:49:37 ► §

is different than the spectrum coming down.

00:49:39 ► §

There’s two compounds that happen to come out almost at the same time.

00:49:43 ► §

Instead of you have two compounds, you only thought you had one.

00:49:46 ► §

Another thing you can do is, oh, thank goodness for the computers.

00:49:50 ► §

I mean, if you have an X-ray of $60,000,$80,000, $100,000,

00:49:52 ► §

I recommend you get one of these machines.

00:49:56 ► §

There’s beautiful things to play with.

00:49:58 ► §

They now have what they call a triple quad.

00:50:00 ► §

We have one over at the General Hospital in San Francisco.

00:50:04 ► §

Instead of being a mass spec with a quadrupole

00:50:06 ► §

it’s three mass specs in essence

00:50:08 ► §

in a row, all running the same sample

00:50:10 ► §

all at the same time

00:50:11 ► §

about a third of a million dollars

00:50:14 ► §

we only have, well actually we have two now

00:50:17 ► §

thank you government grants

00:50:20 ► §

and other people who would help

00:50:21 ► §

but what it is, you can put a sample in there

00:50:24 ► §

and you can actually run sample in there, and

00:50:25 ► §

you can actually run this

00:50:28 ► §

liquid chromatography, not gas chromatography,

00:50:29 ► §

so you can run salt, you can run quaternary salt,

00:50:32 ► §

you can run things that are not volatile, you can get them

00:50:33 ► §

through this sort of thing. I felt I worked with

00:50:35 ► §

Peyton over there and ran a beautiful,

00:50:38 ► §

beautiful example. We’ve always

00:50:40 ► §

had sort of an

00:50:41 ► §

axiom that we’ve always followed, nicotine is everywhere.

00:50:44 ► §

You can take a swipe

00:50:46 ► §

and right this little thing over here and come up

00:50:48 ► §

with a staggering amount of nicotine.

00:50:49 ► §

Because somewhere within the last few months, someone

00:50:51 ► §

smoked in here. And that nicotine is on this,

00:50:54 ► §

it’s on that, it’s everywhere.

00:50:55 ► §

So he was running on this triple quad,

00:50:57 ► §

which has pretty good resolution,

00:51:00 ► §

but superb sensitivity. Forget

00:51:01 ► §

nanograms. You’re down to the picos

00:51:04 ► §

and below. I and below that kind of

00:51:05 ► §

sensitivity

00:51:05 ► §

really gorgeous

00:51:06 ► §

and he was

00:51:07 ► §

running a sample

00:51:08 ► §

of serum

00:51:09 ► §

he was not

00:51:09 ► §

looking at

00:51:10 ► §

nicotine

00:51:10 ► §

but at

00:51:10 ► §

cocaine

00:51:11 ► §

which is a

00:51:11 ► §

major metabolite

00:51:12 ► §

of nicotine

00:51:12 ► §

and he’s

00:51:13 ► §

running a

00:51:14 ► §

sample of

00:51:14 ► §

a plasma

00:51:15 ► §

sample

00:51:15 ► §

down through

00:51:16 ► §

the things

00:51:17 ► §

getting beautiful

00:51:18 ► §

down to very

00:51:18 ► §

small levels

00:51:19 ► §

down when he

00:51:19 ► §

got near

00:51:20 ► §

down to the

00:51:20 ► §

bottom of the

00:51:21 ► §

picogram area

00:51:22 ► §

it got a little

00:51:23 ► §

bit noisy

00:51:24 ► §

it was not

00:51:24 ► §

not a very good curve but he gave up and made a 10 picograms per ml or something like that.

00:51:30 ► §

And so he tried something else. The plasma sample deteriorated down around 5 or 10 picograms per ml.

00:51:36 ► §

So he figured this was just… Then on pure insight, just pure luck, on imagination, on truly a marvelous thing to a kind he had back in the lab

00:51:46 ► §

some tetraduterol

00:51:48 ► §

cocaine

00:51:48 ► §

which is a sample

00:51:50 ► §

with four hydrogen

00:51:51 ► §

and deuterium

00:51:52 ► §

so it has a mass

00:51:53 ► §

of four or more

00:51:54 ► §

other than that

00:51:55 ► §

it’s a vinegar

00:51:55 ► §

for all intents and purposes

00:51:56 ► §

resolution

00:51:57 ► §

chromatography

00:51:58 ► §

everything else

00:51:58 ► §

spectrum of things

00:51:59 ► §

except it’s four masses

00:52:01 ► §

heavier

00:52:01 ► §

and he spiked

00:52:03 ► §

a clean plasma sample

00:52:04 ► §

with this tetradutero

00:52:06 ► §

cocaine, ran through

00:52:08 ► §

the mass spec,

00:52:09 ► §

right through the serum, just beautiful.

00:52:13 ► §

Well, tetradutero is not out in nature.

00:52:15 ► §

So somewhere 18 years ago,

00:52:16 ► §

someone who’s smoking a cigar

00:52:18 ► §

happened to spit into the

00:52:20 ► §

solid factory that would be

00:52:22 ► §

buying super pure solid

00:52:23 ► §

and was sold with cocaine. And the solids are loaded

00:52:25 ► §

with cocaine.

00:52:27 ► §

And so you don’t get a good baseline because it’s

00:52:29 ► §

everywhere. So I think back to the marvelous sample

00:52:32 ► §

the example was given some time ago

00:52:34 ► §

of you have money?

00:52:36 ► §

You have paper money?

00:52:37 ► §

Guess what’s on it? They said we proved

00:52:40 ► §

there’s cocaine on it. All paper money

00:52:42 ► §

has cocaine on it. This was established first

00:52:43 ► §

by the DEA surprisingly enough. They don’t talk much about it but a lot of laboratories on it. All paper money has cocaine on it. This was established first by the DEA, surprisingly enough.

00:52:45 ► §

They don’t talk much about it, but a lot of laboratories verify it.

00:52:48 ► §

All paper money has cocaine on it.

00:52:52 ► §

All paper money has methamphetamine on it.

00:52:55 ► §

So if you want to be arrested for possession of a drug,

00:53:00 ► §

they ought to look at your paper money and you’re dead.

00:53:02 ► §

On the other hand, everybody else’s money, the bank, the news,

00:53:06 ► §

what have you, has cocaine, has

00:53:08 ► §

methamphetamine, has all these things on the paper money.

00:53:11 ► §

And the idea,

00:53:12 ► §

the analyses are now so sensitive,

00:53:14 ► §

so extremely sensitive,

00:53:16 ► §

that you can’t get baselines or zero anymore.

00:53:18 ► §

You always get something.

00:53:20 ► §

And it turns out to be pretty much

00:53:22 ► §

what you’re looking for.

00:53:23 ► §

So the idea of looking for traces…

00:53:26 ► §

Oh, you take a blood…

00:53:28 ► §

Tell me, I think who’s talking about…

00:53:30 ► §

John, you’re talking about in beef,

00:53:34 ► §

where you find morphine as a metabolite in animals.

00:53:38 ► §

Japan has a law that any trace of morphine

00:53:41 ► §

should be considered a drug positive.

00:53:44 ► §

If you have a hamburger, you are morphine should be considered a drug positive in the United States.

00:53:46 ► §

If you have a hamburger,

00:53:47 ► §

you are morphine positive.

00:53:48 ► §

And therefore,

00:53:49 ► §

you are against the law in Japan.

00:53:50 ► §

That’s how sensitive

00:53:51 ► §

you are right now.

00:53:52 ► §

You can see these things

00:53:53 ► §

in minuscule,

00:53:55 ► §

absolutely minuscule levels.

00:53:57 ► §

The Nazis are so,

00:53:58 ► §

so extremely sensitive

00:54:00 ► §

that they, in essence,

00:54:01 ► §

are worthless

00:54:02 ► §

at trace amounts.

00:54:04 ► §

That sounds not very nice.

00:54:06 ► §

But

00:54:06 ► §

that’s the way it is. I’m open for

00:54:10 ► §

questions. Who has questions?

00:54:11 ► §

Someone raise their hand somewhere. Oh, that

00:54:13 ► §

brings up a fascinating point.

00:54:14 ► §

I’m going to say

00:54:15 ► §

for his name, he’s down in Utah.

00:54:18 ► §

He’s the one who is one of the two

00:54:20 ► §

sources of cryptamines

00:54:22 ► §

being in cactus.

00:54:24 ► §

And people often ask me, are there any cryptamines being in cactus. And people often ask me,

00:54:26 ► §

are there any cryptamines in cacti?

00:54:28 ► §

Well, there are two things.

00:54:30 ► §

His paper,

00:54:32 ► §

that wasn’t a paper,

00:54:33 ► §

there was a person named Abai,

00:54:35 ► §

who was an anthropologist,

00:54:36 ► §

who published an article

00:54:37 ► §

on the Tarahumara Indians,

00:54:39 ► §

and their little cacti,

00:54:41 ► §

what’s in them,

00:54:42 ► §

and it was published about 1960-something,

00:54:44 ► §

in the early, late 60s, but in them. It was published about 1960-something,

00:54:47 ► §

maybe in the early, late 60s, early 70s.

00:54:51 ► §

And he said, we have found a peyote,

00:54:53 ► §

and in the town of Hamada,

00:54:54 ► §

this is the northern part of Mexico, just down in the Sonora,

00:54:56 ► §

where there’s, what do you call it,

00:54:58 ► §

little cuddly dogs that have state names after them all?

00:55:00 ► §

Chihuahua.

00:55:01 ► §

That part of Mexico.

00:55:03 ► §

The town of Hamada in there

00:55:04 ► §

used the word peyote

00:55:06 ► §

not for what we know as peyote

00:55:08 ► §

but for any small cactus that has medical

00:55:10 ► §

use. So you have to be very careful

00:55:12 ► §

of the use of the term peyote in northern Mexico.

00:55:15 ► §

Down in central Mexico, down along

00:55:16 ► §

with Huitu and all that thing, it’s routinely

00:55:18 ► §

the peyote cactus.

00:55:20 ► §

In the Tarahumara, it’s any small cactus

00:55:22 ► §

that has medical action.

00:55:24 ► §

And he had this, and he

00:55:26 ► §

advised, said he ran a color test on it,

00:55:28 ► §

looked at the color test, you know,

00:55:29 ► §

in my opinion, this is a cryptamine.

00:55:32 ► §

And so it went into Baye’s paper

00:55:34 ► §

as being a cryptamine

00:55:35 ► §

in this particular cactus, I forget,

00:55:37 ► §

the Areocarpus or something or other.

00:55:39 ► §

In this particular cactus, there was a cryptamine

00:55:41 ► §

reference personal communication.

00:55:44 ► §

This is a friend of mine is back

00:55:46 ► §

in Purdue. And I know him well enough to know that he had found a cryptamine in cactus.

00:55:51 ► §

I had given him between three and four weeks before that appeared in some journal somewhere.

00:55:55 ► §

He’s very, very, he wants to be in front of everything and he is lost in front of it.

00:56:00 ► §

It never appeared. And so I contacted one of my other allies in Purdue and found that he had not

00:56:06 ► §

published it, so he had moved to Utah,

00:56:07 ► §

I moved to Butten, Utah,

00:56:09 ► §

and I said, whatever happened to that

00:56:11 ► §

cryptamine you found in cactus? It’s one of the

00:56:14 ► §

two reports in the literature of cryptamines being

00:56:15 ► §

intact. He said, well, it

00:56:18 ► §

turned out to be an imbecile. It wasn’t

00:56:19 ► §

cryptamine at all. So he had to care of one.

00:56:23 ► §

There’s another

00:56:24 ► §

issue, the first edition of

00:56:26 ► §

Hoffman and Schultz’s book on plants and hallucinogenics, what the name of the thing is, had N-N-dimethyl,

00:56:37 ► §

had DMT as being a component of the cactus dimethyl cryptamine. And that was the other

00:56:43 ► §

one, they had some sort of a reference,

00:56:45 ► §

but it wasn’t a signable reference.

00:56:46 ► §

Again, a communication of some kind.

00:56:48 ► §

The second edition of the book,

00:56:50 ► §

the same place,

00:56:51 ► §

those two pages had just been removed.

00:56:53 ► §

It was not in the second edition at all.

00:56:55 ► §

So I got a photo of Hoffman.

00:56:56 ► §

I said, what are you changing your mind here?

00:56:57 ► §

What’s going on here?

00:56:59 ► §

Well, he said,

00:57:00 ► §

that was kind of an interesting mistake.

00:57:03 ► §

He said, what it is,

00:57:04 ► §

is the secretary

00:57:05 ► §

who’s typing it

00:57:06 ► §

got as far as

00:57:07 ► §

the N-N-dimethyl

00:57:08 ► §

and she had

00:57:09 ► §

DMT on her mind

00:57:10 ► §

and she just wrote

00:57:11 ► §

a hot tryptamine

00:57:12 ► §

actually it’s

00:57:13 ► §

N-dimethylmethylmethyl

00:57:14 ► §

and so that’s

00:57:16 ► §

the second appearance

00:57:17 ► §

of tryptamines

00:57:17 ► §

in cactus

00:57:18 ► §

that I’ve shot down

00:57:19 ► §

except the fact

00:57:20 ► §

that I found gramine

00:57:21 ► §

but I’ve not confirmed

00:57:22 ► §

it in one cactus

00:57:22 ► §

I don’t really know

00:57:23 ► §

of any documented

00:57:24 ► §

tryptamines anywhere in any cactus, I don’t really know of any documented cryptomines

00:57:25 ► §

anywhere in any cactus species.

00:57:28 ► §

They will be there. I mean,

00:57:29 ► §

things like cryptopane amino acids don’t count.

00:57:31 ► §

I mean, alkaloids are cryptomines.

00:57:33 ► §

I see a…

00:57:34 ► §

Got a question.

00:57:38 ► §

Is it possible

00:57:39 ► §

that where

00:57:41 ► §

the different cacti, which are

00:57:43 ► §

the same cacti,

00:57:47 ► §

if there’s different

00:57:54 ► §

capitals in the soil that you will get something different in the different cacti

00:58:01 ► §

not only it’s possible it’s almost a certainty these are things i was telling someone earlier about my friend David Repte down in, oh what’s

00:58:05 ► §

that 500 job down in the midst of San Francisco?

00:58:08 ► §

Roach.

00:58:09 ► §

Roach?

00:58:10 ► §

Oh, the sand guy.

00:58:11 ► §

The sand guy.

00:58:12 ► §

He’s a chemist down there at Wellcross.

00:58:13 ► §

I’ve published a lot with him.

00:58:14 ► §

He’s a master of cryptamine synthesis.

00:58:15 ► §

All my synthetic skills in cryptamine I’ve learned from him.

00:58:16 ► §

He had a grain in the back of his backyard, an Acacia baiana.

00:58:17 ► §

It’s a very good plant.

00:58:18 ► §

It’s a very good plant.

00:58:19 ► §

It’s a very good plant.

00:58:20 ► §

It’s a very good plant.

00:58:21 ► §

It’s a very good plant.

00:58:22 ► §

It’s a very good plant.

00:58:23 ► §

It’s a very good plant.

00:58:24 ► §

It’s a very good plant. It’s a very good plant. It’s a very good plant. It’s a very good plant. It’s a very good plant. I’ve learned from him. He had been growing in the back of his backyard an Acacia baileana.

00:58:28 ► §

This is in the Bay Area, the Acacia, that in the springtime you don’t see any green

00:58:34 ► §

leaves because it’s solid yellow.

00:58:36 ► §

That little penny point blossom that makes the whole tree yellow, then the yellow drops

00:58:40 ► §

and you see the green leaves and that’s the next tree.

00:58:43 ► §

And he in his backyard gathered leaves from that thing in the spring and the summer and the fall the green and you see the tree. And he and his backyard gathered these from that thing

00:58:45 ► §

in the spring

00:58:45 ► §

and the summer

00:58:46 ► §

and the fall.

00:58:46 ► §

Put them all in the freezer.

00:58:47 ► §

The next year

00:58:48 ► §

he worked them all up

00:58:49 ► §

at the same time

00:58:50 ► §

in the same way

00:58:50 ► §

to see what the DMT levels were.

00:58:53 ► §

And in one of the samples

00:58:54 ► §

which it is

00:58:55 ► §

it’s all been published

00:58:55 ► §

he found DMT

00:58:57 ► §

at a fairly high level

00:58:58 ► §

almost no other alkaloids

00:58:59 ► §

but a little bit

00:59:00 ► §

of harming and harming.

00:59:01 ► §

A second sample

00:59:02 ► §

had heavy harming

00:59:03 ► §

and harming

00:59:03 ► §

but no visible DMT. And the third sample had heavy Harmine and Harmoline, but no visible

00:59:05 ► §

DNP. And the third sample had no affluence at all. The same tree, same clipper, same

00:59:12 ► §

zipper, same freezer, different kinds of year. One of the beautiful examples of that is a

00:59:17 ► §

fellow named, oh I forgot his name, Senior Moore. He was looking at a plant on the Orinoco

00:59:28 ► §

He was looking at a plant on the Orinoco down in South America, and it’s a plant that was used to help snap blood flow off after childbirth, and they had this growing over here, and then

00:59:34 ► §

Mr. Dinoid, if all these people went, Curandero, who are they called, said, this is a plant

00:59:40 ► §

that is so superb it saved many lives in childbirth.

00:59:43 ► §

And he said, I’m a botanist,

00:59:45 ► §

I’d like to take samples. So look, no, I’m a plant. This plant, they’re the same plant,

00:59:50 ► §

I’m a botanist, I know. This plant doesn’t work, this plant does work. It’s the same

00:59:56 ► §

plant. Impact. So he had the wit to take samples from both plants. He’d sample both plants,

01:00:03 ► §

and this is where I learned the term endophyte. I’ve never heard

01:00:06 ► §

the term before, but this came up.

01:00:08 ► §

And he took both plants

01:00:09 ► §

back with him to his lab back wherever it was

01:00:11 ► §

in the United States somewhere, and

01:00:14 ► §

he ran both of them,

01:00:16 ► §

and it turned out one of them was loaded with ergot.

01:00:18 ► §

And the other was totally devoid of ergot.

01:00:20 ► §

Same plant.

01:00:21 ► §

Exactly the same plant. Well, it turns out

01:00:24 ► §

the one loaded with ergot had what is called endophyte.

01:00:26 ► §

Inside the plant, the ergot is not visible.

01:00:29 ► §

In the blossom, the ergot is there, but in the blossom you can’t see it.

01:00:32 ► §

The seed contains it, but it’s inside the seed, you can’t see it.

01:00:35 ► §

You plant the seed, you have a new plant, but you don’t see the ergot.

01:00:38 ► §

At no point is that ergot visible outside of the plant.

01:00:41 ► §

You can never know because this one worked and this one did not.

01:00:44 ► §

So you have this kind of thing that can make identical plants

01:00:47 ► §

be totally different.

01:00:49 ► §

Yes?

01:00:50 ► §

I sort of had a vague recollection

01:00:51 ► §

from the first MySpace conference

01:00:53 ► §

that you had thought that it was TMT that was found

01:00:57 ► §

in the Transiris graniflorus.

01:01:00 ► §

Ah, no, it was the Transiris graniflorus.

01:01:02 ► §

That would be the,, that was the MDMA

01:01:07 ► §

Yeah, I guess I found hints of the Grammy which is in though, but not quite a nice stop quickly

01:01:13 ► §

No, I’m not I’m not

01:01:16 ► §

PMP is a lot of points through that grasses and other things but not not the cactus

01:01:23 ► §

Well, I’m sorry to have to cut it off here not to catch them. and speaking of the recording itself I again want to thank Kevin Whiteside

01:01:45 ► §

for making a recording of this talk

01:01:47 ► §

and for letting us use it

01:01:49 ► §

here in the psychedelic salon

01:01:50 ► §

John Hanna, thanks again for

01:01:53 ► §

producing these Mind States conferences

01:01:55 ► §

right now I think they’re probably

01:01:58 ► §

the closest thing

01:01:59 ► §

to a university that our tribe has

01:02:02 ► §

so I think they’re very valuable resources to the community.

01:02:07 ► §

And Sasha, thanks again for everything.

01:02:10 ► §

There’s absolutely no doubt in the minds of anyone I know

01:02:14 ► §

in the psychedelic community about the fact that, indeed,

01:02:18 ► §

the world is a significantly better place right now than it would be

01:02:22 ► §

had you not undertaken your great work. Thank you. your music here, and to all of you here in the Psychedelic Salon, thanks again for being here.

01:02:47 ► §

For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends. you