Program Notes
Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin
[NOTE: The two quotations below are by Sasha Shulgin.]
“Internally, no one’s an elder. Internally everyone’s kinda around 35 or so.”
“The people at the industry said, ‘Gee, if you have that kind of imagination that you can look at a structure and guess at another structure that might be active, why don’t you just do whatever you want to do.’ And I did.”
Download
MP3
PCs – Right click, select option
Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0963009605http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0963009699http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0140195408http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0892817577
Previous Episode
172 - The State of LSD in 2003″
Next Episode
Similar Episodes
- 022 - Natural vs. Synthetic Psychedelic Chemicals - score: 0.84706
- 506 - One Of Us - score: 0.84706
- 227 - Shulgin-Watts_ Sasha at MIT plus Alan Watts - score: 0.82730
- 025 - Cacti_ A Discourse by Sasha Shulgin - score: 0.79777
- 138 - The Shulgins at Mind States 2005″ - score: 0.79272
- 200 - A Few Words From Our Elders - score: 0.78594
- 257 - Shulgin in Palenque 2001 - score: 0.77488
- 325 - Cauldron Chemistry - score: 0.76468
- 216 - McKenna Under the Teaching Tree Part 2 - score: 0.75100
- 005 - Psychoactive Drug Research - score: 0.74440
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
And I have to tell you that I’m finding it hard to believe that so many people made donations to the Salon in the past 10 days.
00:00:35 ►
As we all know, we’re in for some difficult times ahead,
00:00:42 ►
and to think that people are still making donations to the Salon and to all of the other great podcasts out there that have been coming online. On many occasions, I’ve heard some names that I recognize as being donors to other programs,
00:00:49 ►
as well as to the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:51 ►
And so I want to thank all of you donors out there in podcast land for supporting our community at large.
00:00:58 ►
And today, I would specifically like to thank Dr. Laura, Slobodin Z., Douglas S, Trannon G, Michael M, and Graham W.
00:01:10 ►
And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that several of these donors have been
00:01:15 ►
helping out for several years now. And even though I haven’t met most of you in person,
00:01:20 ►
I do look forward to that day. We’re all in this together, you know, so thank you very much
00:01:26 ►
Laura, Slobodan, Douglas,
00:01:28 ►
Trannon, Michael, and Graham.
00:01:29 ►
I most definitely appreciate your help.
00:01:32 ►
And some other people
00:01:34 ►
I’d like to thank are all of our
00:01:36 ►
fellow salonners who have been actively
00:01:38 ►
posting on the many forums over at
00:01:40 ►
thegirlreport.com.
00:01:42 ►
And to all of you lurkers, too.
00:01:44 ►
We know you’re out there, and we’re happy for that.
00:01:47 ►
But on the Psychedelic Salon Forum at thegirlreport.com, Big Dirty Foot, yeah, you heard me right.
00:01:56 ►
We have a fellow salonner who goes by the handle Big Dirty Foot. Sounds like someone who’s been to
00:02:02 ►
Burning Man to me. Anyway, Big Dirty Foot was kind enough to start a thread asking for people to post their favorite episodes.
00:02:10 ►
It was that thread that inspired me to feature Sasha Shulgin today.
00:02:15 ►
Although I haven’t actually counted the votes, my sense is that Sasha seems to have nudged out Terrence McKenna as the number one favorite.
00:02:22 ►
nudged out Terrence McKenna as the number one favorite,
00:02:28 ►
which finally prompted me to dig out a recording that was sent to me quite a long time ago by fellow salonner Cohen from Belgium.
00:02:32 ►
And I apologize for possibly mispronouncing your name
00:02:35 ►
and for the fact that it’s taken me so long to get this recording podcast.
00:02:40 ►
And here’s part of what Cohen said when he sent me the MP3 file.
00:02:45 ►
Hello, Lorenzo.
00:02:46 ►
As I promised you some days ago,
00:02:48 ►
I have taken an audio rip of the VHS tape of the Shulgin Talk at the Psychoactivity Conference.
00:02:54 ►
It was recorded on 4 October 1998 in the morning.
00:02:59 ►
The host of the program was Jonathan Ott.
00:03:01 ►
Well, thanks for sending that, Cohen,
00:03:03 ►
and coincidentally, my wife and several of my close friends were actually at that conference, Thank you. produced this conference are still going strong. And I’ll tell you about their next event after we
00:03:25 ►
hear Sasha’s talk. But right now, let’s time travel back to one of my favorite cities,
00:03:31 ►
lovely Amsterdam. The year is 1998, and we’re attending a conference that also featured
00:03:37 ►
Christiane Roche, Giorgio Sammarini, Paul Stamets, and Dr. Albert Hoffman, among many other psychedelic luminaries.
00:03:46 ►
And so, let’s join them all as we listen to Jonathan Ott as he introduces our beloved
00:03:52 ►
Sasha Shulgin.
00:03:58 ►
It’s my honor and privilege to be able to present a man who really doesn’t need any
00:04:04 ►
introduction, but that’s an old cliche, and I able to present a man who really doesn’t need any introduction,
00:04:08 ►
but that’s an old cliche, and I’ll give him a little one anyway.
00:04:16 ►
Sasha R. Alexander Shulgin, one of our esteemed and revered elders in this field,
00:04:24 ►
and a real pioneer in the structure-activity relationship studies of the alkaloids themselves, of the phenethylamines first and the tryptamines secondly.
00:04:29 ►
And this morning he’s going to talk about the process of discovery
00:04:32 ►
and how it goes about that these things can be dreamed up or invented in the laboratory
00:04:38 ►
and become reality, as many of you may have seen or experienced directly last night.
00:04:43 ►
many of you may have seen or experienced directly last night.
00:04:52 ►
And, of course, everybody knows that Ann Sheldon and Sasha Sheldon wrote P.C.O.L., something like six years ago or five years ago, six, I think.
00:04:56 ►
And now T.C.O.L., the long-awaited sequel, has come out.
00:04:59 ►
And these have really revolutionized the availability and accessibility of substances in the last couple of years,
00:05:06 ►
and they’re having a really great impact, these books, far beyond what we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg, really.
00:05:14 ►
And for me it was really important because it was knowing that P-Call was going to come out.
00:05:20 ►
They published an excerpt in a magazine called The Whole Earth Review,
00:05:24 ►
I had just published an excerpt in a magazine called The Whole Earth Review.
00:05:29 ►
And I hadn’t seen the book, but just knowing that it was about to come out caused me to go back to publishing in this field,
00:05:32 ►
whereas I had been doing it for some time and I stopped
00:05:34 ►
because I was worried about attracting attention, legal problems.
00:05:38 ►
I was also dealing with my own career.
00:05:41 ►
And so it actually inspired me to start taking more of a political stand and speaking
00:05:47 ►
out and defending our political rights in this area. And I think that people focus a lot on the
00:05:54 ►
chemical and scientific importance of PCOL and T-COL, but their political importance is just as
00:05:59 ►
great and is really a valuable contribution. So on the process of discovery, please give a warm welcome to Dr. Alexander Shulkin.
00:06:27 ►
How do I say it? Ahoy, ahoy?
00:06:28 ►
Yeah, it works.
00:06:34 ►
It’s always a little strange to be introduced to one of the elders.
00:06:37 ►
I guess I am. I’m kind of getting on in years.
00:06:39 ►
But internally, no one’s an elder.
00:06:41 ►
Internally, everyone’s kind of around 35 or so.
00:06:48 ►
And you remain being kind of 35, and slowly this doesn’t work much anymore, and that doesn’t work much anymore.
00:06:52 ►
Then you have to kind of slow down, then you get this replaced, and then you get that modified.
00:06:57 ►
And someone said the body sort of goes on its own way.
00:07:01 ►
But the pleasure is that the internal head stays around 35.
00:07:03 ►
And that, believe me, is a great blessing. I am going to try to give
00:07:08 ►
a talk in a different way today. I usually get involved, well, I think the best way of
00:07:14 ►
describing it, see, this allows me to prance. You can still hear me over here. Ah, good,
00:07:19 ►
okay. I’m sorry, that’s problems for you, though. You have to keep looking.
00:07:32 ►
Yeah, the equation that is called research, investigation, discovering new things, experimentation.
00:07:42 ►
I would make up a slide, except I had some slide problems because I was using something for the transparencies last night that was slightly opaque.
00:07:45 ►
And I drew the transparencies out. I tried them out this morning. morning they were totally opaque so i had nothing but black on the screen so i found was given very
00:07:50 ►
nicely something that was transparent but i haven’t tried them out yet so this is still a
00:07:54 ►
mystery to be observed which is of course what life is anyway the uh what i want to talk about
00:08:00 ►
is not what one finds out in the research area but how one gets to
00:08:05 ►
finding things out in the research area is unusual talk I draw it up as an
00:08:09 ►
equation that a arrow be a gives B it’s a very nice equation it describes the
00:08:15 ►
research process the investigatory process you ask a question that’s the a
00:08:20 ►
you scrape scrape around in the in the lab or in the bottom of the barrel or in
00:08:24 ►
the library or something that’s that’s arrow. And you come up with the answer, B. And so everyone says,
00:08:29 ►
gee, you have just solved a very interesting scientific problem, discovery. But the asking
00:08:39 ►
of the question is part of this process and is very often given short shrift because the answer is where you get your reward.
00:08:48 ►
So sometimes your question is modified by what answer you want,
00:08:52 ►
what answer you want to get to.
00:08:54 ►
And then you go back and find out what is a good question to ask.
00:08:58 ►
But either way, the process of getting there is often swept under the table, that arrow thing.
00:09:06 ►
For example, in academic research,
00:09:11 ►
there used to be always, you go to the universities back in the beginning of the century,
00:09:15 ►
early time, last century, beginning of this century,
00:09:18 ►
you went to the academic world because it provided a certain amount of stability,
00:09:21 ►
academic stability, a job, you could interact with students. You could teach.
00:09:25 ►
You could do research work.
00:09:26 ►
You’re given a little laboratory.
00:09:27 ►
Some funds came in from the university, and you could stir up something or react something
00:09:31 ►
or try hybridizing something as you wish.
00:09:34 ►
Your questions were of your own making.
00:09:36 ►
The funds came from the university, and the answers were happily published in whatever
00:09:41 ►
journal were necessary to build up your bibliographic.
00:09:44 ►
Inventory sufficient that you could get tenure, and then you could either stop working or published in whatever journal were necessary to build up your bibliographic inventory sufficient
00:09:45 ►
that you could get tenure and then you could either stop working or continue research at your
00:09:50 ►
own freedom. Unfortunately, in the academic world, this has changed more and more. More and more,
00:09:57 ►
the B has become the emphasis because over the last, I’d say, perhaps 40 years and recently
00:10:04 ►
almost totally disappeared has been the academic sources of research funds.
00:10:09 ►
They say, oh, you want to do research? You want some graduate students? Nice. Get a grant.
00:10:13 ►
Go out somewhere and find a source of funds. Find some industry that will give you a contract to do this work.
00:10:19 ►
We’re not going to give you the money for it. Get the funds. We’ll handle your students.
00:10:23 ►
We’ll handle the postdocs.
00:10:25 ►
We’ll do your research expenses.
00:10:27 ►
We’ll take 30% of it for the janitorial needs and keeping the garden green.
00:10:31 ►
But in general, the funds come from outside.
00:10:34 ►
So you get a situation.
00:10:36 ►
This I have found more and more in the university, that the answer is dictated by the source of funds.
00:10:42 ►
And the source of funds is, in turn turn what dictates the line of research.
00:10:47 ►
An example.
00:10:49 ►
I made this up, but it’s the kind of thing you might encounter.
00:10:51 ►
You’re curious.
00:10:52 ►
What is your question?
00:10:53 ►
What is the A if this A gives B?
00:10:55 ►
I have down here, does marijuana influence chromosome division?
00:11:00 ►
There’s a neat question.
00:11:01 ►
People are talking about marijuana is good, marijuana is bad, dangerous, not dangerous, innocuous.
00:11:07 ►
It should not be this and that.
00:11:09 ►
Does it influence chromosome division?
00:11:11 ►
That is not an effect you may want to ask for reasons of your own.
00:11:15 ►
But what you end up asking is, do marijuana users have excessive chromosome breaks?
00:11:23 ►
You’re still looking at marijuana. You’re still looking at marijuana.
00:11:25 ►
You’re still looking at chromosome.
00:11:26 ►
Buckle smears, few generations.
00:11:27 ►
Look at them under a microscope running 1.8% breakage.
00:11:31 ►
And then you try to get people who’ve been smoking marijuana,
00:11:34 ►
maybe look at their smears,
00:11:35 ►
and maybe you find something in 2.2, maybe 1.6.
00:11:38 ►
You find 2.2, well, it’s, as they would say,
00:11:41 ►
it is not statistically significant, but it’s suggestive. I love the way you can euphemize these answers to maintain your
00:11:48 ►
grant renewal so you get your grant it is funded and you end up say let’s say
00:11:55 ►
for example in your academic world you end up not finding significant amount of
00:12:00 ►
chromosome breaks so you say if yes of course you will say marijuana causes genetic
00:12:05 ►
damage if no you say no chromosome damage was seen from marijuana use or associated with marijuana
00:12:11 ►
use but the paper gets published in whatever journal it is you publish it in with keywords
00:12:18 ►
such as marijuana genetic damage chromosomes, reproduction risks.
00:12:26 ►
All these are pejorative terms that apply back to the paper,
00:12:30 ►
even though the paper was a clean bill of health.
00:12:32 ►
So this is a form of very subtle psychological influencing
00:12:37 ►
the granting agent in the U.S. government,
00:12:39 ►
the various governments love doing it as long as it applies.
00:12:41 ►
It’s in some way the answers can apply to what their current
00:12:45 ►
political needs are. It’s a sorry shift from the academic purity of research to the practicality
00:12:51 ►
of putting a dollar sign on that B of A gives B and then working back from that to where the A is.
00:12:58 ►
Industry is not much cleaner. There used to be a term known as fundamental research. Sometimes it was called exploratory research.
00:13:06 ►
Go in the lab, putsy around, just have fun, and see anything comes up that would be of value.
00:13:12 ►
This is ideal.
00:13:13 ►
I mean, anyone would love this.
00:13:15 ►
This is the academic world of 75 years ago.
00:13:18 ►
Play around.
00:13:19 ►
Enjoy exploring.
00:13:21 ►
Then more and more, the term I have heard used quite a bit, I think they’re called bean counters.
00:13:28 ►
People in industry who look at the bottom line and see if this line of research is really economically valuable.
00:13:34 ►
Is there not another line that could be more efficiently followed?
00:13:37 ►
The people in the accounting office tend more and more to dictate the direction of research
00:13:41 ►
because they are the ones who will eventually have to pay out the check to the
00:13:45 ►
laborers, to the people,
00:13:48 ►
to the employees, and that
00:13:50 ►
check must come from the funds that come
00:13:52 ►
from the selling of a product that comes out of that research.
00:13:55 ►
For example,
00:13:57 ►
you might have a person
00:13:58 ►
in the research department
00:14:00 ►
talking to the accountant who says, you know, DuPont
00:14:02 ►
has just come up with a seven
00:14:03 ►
fluoro steroid
00:14:05 ►
that is rather effective in treating something or other that steroids would be effective in treating.
00:14:11 ►
The answer is, let’s get your research group working on six and eight fluoro counterparts.
00:14:16 ►
They’re patentable, and out of those, we’ll certainly find something that will be of value.
00:14:22 ►
So you have the dictation, again, of research by the bottom end,
00:14:26 ►
the B and its dollar sign.
00:14:28 ►
And this, you’d think, would be totally absolved in the area of private research.
00:14:32 ►
And in principle it is, and in practice, not quite.
00:14:36 ►
There are a number of institutions, a number of groups in the area that we’re interested here,
00:14:40 ►
in the area of psychoactive drugs.
00:14:41 ►
You have the Hefter Foundation, you have the MAPS group,
00:14:44 ►
both of which have been very active in collecting, instituting, funding,
00:14:48 ►
and seeing research projects get initiated that are for the discovering of information
00:14:55 ►
about psychedelic drugs in general.
00:14:57 ►
But there’s always this little smell of an agenda.
00:15:01 ►
Not to take any of the glory from any of these groups. The agenda is still there.
00:15:06 ►
Namely, we want to achieve these ends.
00:15:08 ►
You wish to achieve
00:15:09 ►
a certain amount of academic acceptability.
00:15:12 ►
A certain amount of
00:15:13 ►
social balance. These are all
00:15:15 ►
noble ends. But they are ends.
00:15:18 ►
And those ends in some way
00:15:19 ►
must be thought of by the person who’s applying
00:15:21 ►
for a grant. Because he wants to get the
00:15:23 ►
grant. The grant is money. the grant will come from them,
00:15:26 ►
and I’ll apply for it in a way that will give me a favorable review by the review board.
00:15:31 ►
Not much of an influence, but not totally without.
00:15:34 ►
So this area is, unfortunately, still smells a little bit of the A gives B,
00:15:40 ►
and the B is indeed the point from which the research starts.
00:15:45 ►
Anyway, with that that I want to get
00:15:46 ►
into a lecture
00:15:46 ►
and how I got into the area
00:15:49 ►
and what I want to talk about. But what I want to talk
00:15:52 ►
about is not the B. It’s going this way.
00:15:54 ►
B. I want to talk about the arrow.
00:15:56 ►
But I’ll tell how I got into it.
00:15:58 ►
I had worked first in industry about
00:16:00 ►
1950-something or other, 55, 56.
00:16:02 ►
I went to Dow Chemical Company.
00:16:04 ►
I was never a totally virgin
00:16:06 ►
in industry, in that kind of chemistry.
00:16:08 ►
Here’s a big laboratory, big equipment,
00:16:10 ►
big instruments, anything you want to buy.
00:16:12 ►
You want to buy something, buy it, they’ll buy it.
00:16:14 ►
And I thought, gee, this is marvelous. I can do
00:16:16 ►
whatever I want. Well, they don’t
00:16:18 ►
quite let you do whatever you want.
00:16:20 ►
They say, here’s what we’re interested in working on.
00:16:22 ►
And I was introduced to
00:16:24 ►
my lab partner.
00:16:25 ►
He’s a man who had been there a few years, Warren Kading, from which I learned a great deal.
00:16:29 ►
I learned this entire process of look at the arrow and not look at the bee.
00:16:33 ►
I learned it from him.
00:16:34 ►
He’s kind of a remarkable person.
00:16:36 ►
He is a person who I learned two things immediately.
00:16:39 ►
One, when he found something went strangely in a laboratory, he’d say, that’s utterly bizarre.
00:16:45 ►
He did not know that bizarre was pronounced bizarre, and he’d say, bizarre.
00:16:49 ►
That’s okay.
00:16:51 ►
The second one is one, I guess it’s a little bit sexist, but I learned it from him, and it had its applicability.
00:16:57 ►
When something would really go wrong, he’d slam something on the floor.
00:17:01 ►
In fact, he kept a little line of broken beakers on the shelf.
00:17:05 ►
There’s a wall at the end of the lab.
00:17:07 ►
And something went quite wrong.
00:17:08 ►
He’d pick up a beaker and throw it against the wall, smashing it.
00:17:11 ►
Well, the beaker’s already been cracked, so it had no value.
00:17:13 ►
But just that throwing of the beaker, just marvelous.
00:17:16 ►
It expunged him of any, of his anger.
00:17:20 ►
But as things went generally bad in a generic sense,
00:17:22 ►
he’d mumble, grumble, and say, chemistry is a woman.
00:17:26 ►
And we had a delightful, delightful, we both had technicians helping us, and they both were ladies.
00:17:33 ►
And somehow they got used to this from him, but it always struck me as a strange owner.
00:17:38 ►
What he had, now here is my first experiment on transparent transparencies.
00:17:43 ►
If this, I, A and A. No, yes. experiment on transparent transparencies if this like a no yes you’re gonna have
00:17:49 ►
to suffer dirty pictures I call these dirty pictures because it always
00:17:56 ►
offends someone who thinks they’re going to come up with pornography but a lot of
00:17:59 ►
chemistry is pornography in disguise you just have to know where to look for the functional group, so to speak.
00:18:09 ►
Anyway, this is industry.
00:18:12 ►
They had tithing, you know, pennies a pound.
00:18:15 ►
And they could make benzoic acid for pennies a pound.
00:18:21 ►
And Warren Kading discovered that if you put benzoic acid, that’s the thing that’s up there that I can point,
00:18:24 ►
I can point there, you can see it, the one up in the middle at the top.
00:18:26 ►
You put it in with copper, copper salt,
00:18:28 ►
copper, this, copper, that,
00:18:32 ►
and throw fire to it, it went into phenol.
00:18:34 ►
Well, benzoic acid is pennies a pound,
00:18:36 ►
phenols, many pennies a pound,
00:18:38 ►
and you go to a million tons, this is sending big money.
00:18:41 ►
And so that was his discovery,
00:18:43 ►
you could oxidize an acid to a phenol.
00:18:44 ►
Marvelous.
00:18:47 ►
So when I got there, he had been exploring the second line.
00:18:52 ►
They said, we need a lot of paratibutyl. That’s a t-butyl group, that’s CCH3-3 at the bottom.
00:18:55 ►
Paratibutyl phenol.
00:18:57 ►
Why not take paratibutyl taioine, pennies a pound, oxidize it to paratibutyl benzoic acid,
00:19:03 ►
and then oxidize the
00:19:05 ►
para t butyl phenol they’re doing they will not have a quiz on this lady this
00:19:08 ►
just generally free he did it and he came out with a wrong thing he got meta
00:19:13 ►
that group was in the wrong place well the group didn’t move the phenol move
00:19:18 ►
but he worked that out later so suddenly he got something that he was not
00:19:21 ►
assigned to get it was the wrong thing. The boss said, wrong product, bad scene.
00:19:29 ►
Try again.
00:19:30 ►
That’s the mindset on the B and how you get there.
00:19:34 ►
Warren said, wrong product, good scene.
00:19:37 ►
What went wrong?
00:19:39 ►
And that, of course, is the heart of the arrow.
00:19:41 ►
What went wrong?
00:19:42 ►
And he fiddled around and suddenly found, by golly, it goes through a solid
00:19:45 ►
silica acid,
00:19:45 ►
decarboxylates here,
00:19:46 ►
the phenols over here,
00:19:47 ►
and it goes metastrofampera,
00:19:48 ►
whatever.
00:19:49 ►
Anyway, got the wrong thing.
00:19:51 ►
That thing is a virtually
00:19:51 ►
unknown compound.
00:19:53 ►
And that’s when I came
00:19:54 ►
into the industrial scene
00:19:55 ►
and that was available
00:19:56 ►
and said,
00:19:56 ►
what you can do with it?
00:19:58 ►
Well, this I took
00:19:59 ►
as almost being
00:20:00 ►
a freelance offer.
00:20:01 ►
And I looked at that thing
00:20:02 ►
and I said,
00:20:03 ►
gee, that’s got the same
00:20:03 ►
carbon skeleton as
00:20:04 ►
physo-stigmine. And I skeleton as physo-stigmine.
00:20:05 ►
And I drew down physo-stigmine down at the bottom here.
00:20:08 ►
And I guess I, I don’t know, do I dare point?
00:20:11 ►
Yeah.
00:20:12 ►
Yeah.
00:20:12 ►
Here’s a methyl.
00:20:13 ►
There’s a methyl.
00:20:14 ►
There’s a methyl.
00:20:15 ►
There’s a carbon.
00:20:16 ►
Just as there is in here, methyl, methyl, methyl, carbon.
00:20:19 ►
And there is an oxygen.
00:20:21 ►
So I bet, since a physo-stigmine thinking is a real potent thing it’s not that far from current
00:20:26 ►
insecticides I’ll wager you could take
00:20:28 ►
that t-butyl thing and put an amino
00:20:29 ►
group in the pair of position and make
00:20:30 ►
it dimethylated and maybe something
00:20:32 ►
maybe a 3-5 dimethyl I bet you get
00:20:34 ►
insecticide so I had the wit the skill
00:20:37 ►
of the luck to get six signatures of
00:20:41 ►
testing for that as being a good idea so
00:20:43 ►
I had witnesses to the idea i made the
00:20:45 ►
compound and went commercials on the sector side and so they of course the person around the
00:20:50 ►
insecticide lab person around that lab my boss everyone along i tried to take all the credit
00:20:54 ►
for it but i had six signatures and said i had thought it through and created it i got the patent
00:20:59 ►
and the people at the industry said gee if you have that kind of imagination that you can look
00:21:04 ►
at a structure and guess another structure that might be active, why don’t you just do whatever you want to do?
00:21:18 ►
And I did.
00:21:20 ►
And it’s about five years later, I left industry.
00:21:29 ►
Because what I wanted to do is nice nice but not exactly what they wanted done I got into the psychedelic drugs and spades began making all kinds of neat things
00:21:34 ►
I sent them in for biological screening none of them are particularly active
00:21:37 ►
but they weren’t looking for what I thought they had and what I then later knew they did have
00:21:41 ►
and so I was published for about two years out of Dow
00:21:44 ►
and then they said we’re not comfortable with your publishing with Dow’s address in this area then later knew they did have. And so I was published for about two years out of Dow.
00:21:49 ►
And then they said, we’re not comfortable with your publishing with Dow’s address in this area.
00:21:53 ►
I said, OK, I live on my own street up there. I’ll publish from my home address. They said, fine.
00:21:56 ►
So for about three years, I published from my home address and it was getting more and more uncomfortable. So I split the scene, left industry, went back to school and then became a consultant and got into things that I truly have enjoyed.
00:22:04 ►
And that has been going ever since.
00:22:06 ►
So, with this, I will now really start my lecture.
00:22:11 ►
Am I under time constraint? I am.
00:22:14 ►
Oh, I don’t know.
00:22:16 ►
I have drawn here four more dirty pictures.
00:22:19 ►
Phenethylamine, PEA, and this shows the direction I really am now going with great interest.
00:22:26 ►
PEA can cyclize that little amino group, hang it down, bring it down, hang it down,
00:22:32 ►
and stick in something, and you come up with tetrahydroisophenol.
00:22:36 ►
The carbons are all there, plus one carbon.
00:22:38 ►
Where that carbon comes from becomes quite an interesting story.
00:22:42 ►
And so the PEA, and down here you have tryptamine,
00:22:45 ►
and tryptamine can do the same thing.
00:22:47 ►
Tryptamine has an amine hangling out there,
00:22:49 ►
which can dip around this way
00:22:50 ►
with a carbon and become tetrahydro-beta-carboline.
00:22:53 ►
So there’s a relationship between phenethylamines
00:22:56 ►
and tetrahydro-isophenolines,
00:22:58 ►
between tryptamines and tetrahydro-beta-carbolines.
00:23:01 ►
I have worked this trilogy quite thoroughly,
00:23:05 ►
and still things are coming. But the and it is almost is almost unknown up
00:23:09 ►
there so I want to talk a little bit about substitute phenethylamine is not
00:23:13 ►
an active compound I mean it’s in this it’s in that I’ve taken up to a gram and
00:23:17 ►
a half nothing perhaps if you took some other maybe things that would inhibit
00:23:21 ►
its oxidation or metabolism it might be but, but as it stands, no.
00:23:26 ►
You put stuff on that ring, and that’s, of course, one of the main areas.
00:23:29 ►
Right up in here, without getting too technical,
00:23:32 ►
you put a methoxy monosubstitute, little odds and ends,
00:23:35 ►
up to about mono, and into the dye substitution you get stimulants,
00:23:39 ►
but they still decompose in the body quite rapidly.
00:23:42 ►
You get two or more than two, you get psychedelics.
00:23:45 ►
You get up to about four or four and a half, four or four and a half,
00:23:48 ►
I’d love to get half a group onto a ring,
00:23:50 ►
four or five on there, they begin losing all the activities, becoming inactive.
00:23:55 ►
So I played around in that area a great deal.
00:23:57 ►
The trimethoxy in that position with three methoxys around here
00:24:00 ►
was mesclun 1, 2, 3.
00:24:02 ►
It’s a compound mesclun, which is my first introduction into the entire area,
00:24:05 ►
personal introduction
00:24:06 ►
into the area of psychedelics.
00:24:08 ►
And I began making
00:24:09 ►
all kinds of modifications,
00:24:10 ►
put a methoxy here, up there,
00:24:11 ►
change them around,
00:24:12 ►
put a methyl group here,
00:24:13 ►
hang something on there,
00:24:14 ►
put a bromine in,
00:24:15 ►
put a methyl group,
00:24:15 ►
play around.
00:24:17 ►
And it’s simple on a blackboard,
00:24:19 ►
and people say,
00:24:19 ►
well, it’s easy to do
00:24:20 ►
on the blackboard.
00:24:21 ►
Again, the laboratory
00:24:21 ►
is more difficult.
00:24:22 ►
Sure, it’s more difficult.
00:24:23 ►
Perfectly doable.
00:24:24 ►
Just be patient, sit around, find a way, you’ll do the laboratory, it’s more difficult. Sure, it’s more difficult. Perfectly doable. Just be patient.
00:24:25 ►
Sit around.
00:24:25 ►
Find a way.
00:24:26 ►
You’ll do it.
00:24:27 ►
And so this worked out gorgeously.
00:24:29 ►
And in general,
00:24:30 ►
I found the two oxygens out here,
00:24:31 ►
like methylene dioxide
00:24:32 ►
is not with a two-carbon chain,
00:24:35 ►
three-carbon chain,
00:24:35 ►
is MDA.
00:24:36 ►
That MDMA came from this whole route
00:24:38 ►
which has that methylene dioxide group on there.
00:24:40 ►
You can put methylene dioxide
00:24:41 ►
in a methoxy.
00:24:42 ►
You get MMDA.
00:24:43 ►
These are things that come directly
00:24:44 ►
out of essential oils such as elemycin, myristicin and such.
00:24:49 ►
And then getting, but more than that, mainly the focal point on this particular molecule is this 4 position.
00:24:55 ►
What is on that 4 position calls the type of action you get, but with something in the 4 position you get activity.
00:25:00 ►
So it’s really a beautiful thing, you take a salt shaker, put a little salt on there, you get this kind of a compound, put a little salt on there you get this kind of a compound put a little pepper on there
00:25:05 ►
you get something else
00:25:05 ►
just modify that 4 position
00:25:07 ►
with the tryptamine world
00:25:09 ►
it was not quite as clean cut
00:25:10 ►
initially
00:25:11 ►
then I began finding out
00:25:12 ►
I took oxygen out here
00:25:14 ►
you have serotonin
00:25:16 ►
you have psilocybin or psilocin
00:25:18 ►
oxygen up here
00:25:18 ►
you have bifotinine
00:25:19 ►
oxygen unsubstituted out here
00:25:21 ►
ok
00:25:22 ►
but the real power is
00:25:24 ►
what’s on the nitrogen so i’ve been
00:25:26 ►
once i settled on a methoxy or an oxygen out that position a dimethyl diethyl dipropyl diacetyl
00:25:30 ►
propyl methyl propyl isopropyl on and on and on the alkyl number alkyl groups are unlimited and
00:25:35 ►
then we’re putting them on is unlimited and the the novelty the treasure the the unique
00:25:41 ►
cascade of products that come out from it are absolutely joyful.
00:25:46 ►
Joyful to discover, to play with.
00:25:48 ►
Whether you have good actions or not is another question.
00:25:52 ►
But anyway, this is where the tryptamine is, but it’s only monosubstituted.
00:25:55 ►
You make disubstituted tryptamine over there, activity goes.
00:26:01 ►
So again, the emphasis is some oxygen is good or can help.
00:26:02 ►
But the activity is on these two groups in the tetrahydro beta carbolines these are
00:26:07 ►
not as versatile and not as well explored the one I really got in originally was was harm harm lean
00:26:13 ►
itself which is has a double bond up in here and a methyl group hanging down here and an oxygen over
00:26:18 ►
here but that’s these are that’s another lecture to talk about structures carmaline and harming
00:26:24 ►
were the earliest ones I began exploring.
00:26:26 ►
Harmaline itself, which is the active, or at least one of the major components of many of the plants you’ve been hearing about for the last two or three days.
00:26:33 ►
In my original experiment with that beta-carboline, I got the two or three hundred milligrams of what I thought was a pure chemical.
00:26:41 ►
And I got into very strange nauseous vomiting things and
00:26:45 ►
it’s a case of having nauseous and having diarrhea and thanking the Lord
00:26:50 ►
they’re not quite simultaneous it was it was a difficult experience but I did try
00:26:56 ►
my best to visualize something and I got my eyes closed and I came back from the
00:26:59 ►
toilet and kept my eyes closed and I had to go again came back and I got eyes I
00:27:04 ►
got a face I’ve got a mouth
00:27:05 ►
i was visualizing a face that’s going to be informative and i got around to the nose and
00:27:09 ►
those came on in upside down and there’s no way i can identify the person i gave the whole thing
00:27:14 ►
went and vomited again and gave up on beta carbolines as entities unto themselves as
00:27:20 ►
enzyme inhibitors of course their action is leg, and this is an area of very, very extensive research right now that is going on on finding the balance between monamine oxidase inhibition, which are things that prevent the metabolic disposition of compounds otherwise orally inactive, such as DMT, which has been talked about several times in the last three days, and making them orally active.
00:27:46 ►
orally active okay and oh i was saying about harmony which i thought was pure it came on a bottle from merk an old old bottle roughly 1920 something or other and it was great big 100 gram
00:27:52 ►
bottle of harmony that i used for all of my uh early work i made it available to several other
00:27:58 ►
people for clinical studies and then i got into an interesting uh dialogue with someone in in sweden
00:28:04 ►
on the purity of these materials.
00:28:06 ►
And I looked at that material by mass spec, and there’s about 30% harmine.
00:28:09 ►
So this is from Merck.
00:28:11 ►
It says on the bottle, harmaline hydrochloride with the smells of medical authority.
00:28:16 ►
And yet it’s converted, or it is 30% contaminated with harmine.
00:28:20 ►
I wrote to Merck, and I asked what kind of criteria they used back in the 20s to establish identity of materials.
00:28:26 ►
They answered a very nice letter saying that they have never offered this commercially,
00:28:30 ►
which is a nice answer, but not the answer to my question.
00:28:32 ►
And I got no satisfaction from there.
00:28:34 ►
I began playing around with it.
00:28:36 ►
The argument has been brought out, for example, some of the work by Boo Homestead
00:28:39 ►
on some of the old fractions from Harmeen harming plants the banisteriopsis group
00:28:48 ►
suspecting that they may oxidize spontaneously from harming to harming over time storage
00:28:54 ►
period of time i can’t tell whether my material is contaminated by its being 50 75 years old or
00:29:00 ►
whether it is impure to start with i cannot answer the question i. I isolated both and purified both harmine and harmaline,
00:29:06 ►
and I put them aside in the same way, and they appear to be stable.
00:29:09 ►
Answers I don’t know, but it was a fascinating problem.
00:29:12 ►
Some of the published literature on the action of harmaline in clinical trials,
00:29:16 ►
I must say, is contaminated because the material, I won’t go into who or what,
00:29:21 ►
was 20 or 30 percent harming.
00:29:22 ►
I was at fault there.
00:29:24 ►
I gave the material to the researchers
00:29:26 ►
with the belief that the label was to be believed and i now will not make that mistake again
00:29:31 ►
okay so this gets back to where i want to go what i think i will do i’ll put up the next one and see
00:29:40 ►
if i can jockey it on stage and then ignore it for a while. You move to the right
00:29:46 ►
and the thing moves to the left. There we are. More or less, that’s good enough. I want to get
00:29:52 ►
into actually the topic of my talk, which I’m not ready to start now. I’ve made three false starts
00:29:58 ►
and I’ll run out of time. This happened before I go through a lecture and by the time I’m about
00:30:02 ►
ready to start the lecture, I’m out of time. of time so I have to oh I want to talk about
00:30:06 ►
psychoactive cacti possibly possibly about psychoactive poppies and the whole
00:30:13 ►
area of cactus and poppies immediately brings out often a prejudiced gut
00:30:20 ►
response a sort of a immediate reply. You hear, really, psychoactive cactus?
00:30:27 ►
Oh, sure.
00:30:28 ►
Peyote, of course, trichocereus, that and the other, contain mesclun.
00:30:32 ►
What else is new?
00:30:33 ►
And they dropped the whole topic right there.
00:30:36 ►
Poppies, psychoactive poppies.
00:30:37 ►
Oh, yes.
00:30:38 ►
Paparazzi, what do you call it?
00:30:39 ►
Opium.
00:30:40 ►
Opium.
00:30:41 ►
There’s where the active compound is.
00:30:42 ►
What else is new?
00:30:43 ►
As if all of cactus could be explained by mesclun. Forget the rest. There’s nothing else. All the poppies could be explained by opium. There’s where the active compound is. What else is new? As if all of cactus could be explained by mesclun. Forget the rest. There’s nothing else.
00:30:47 ►
All the poppies could be explained by opium. Forget it. There’s nothing else.
00:30:51 ►
And nothing can be further from the truth.
00:30:53 ►
These plants, the plant area, the cactacea, are absolutely incredibly loaded, largely, with those, I don’t have the examples up there, tetrahydroisoquinolones, dihydroisoquinolones, isoquinolones, quaternary salts of isoquinolones.
00:31:08 ►
The poppy world, and not just poppy, you get off into the other related genera,
00:31:13 ►
but all basically in, I love to begin as poppies, are loaded, but they are loaded with different isoquinolones.
00:31:21 ►
And what I found in snooping around in the literature uh that there is an
00:31:25 ►
extraordinary absence of overlap between the two groups and here that caught my fancy is
00:31:31 ►
in the theological sense are there are there two gods a poppy god who made the poppies and a cactus
00:31:38 ►
god who made the cactus and they don’t talk or is it one god had a little omission of of attention
00:31:44 ►
for a while and forgot that
00:31:45 ►
he put beautiful techniques in one plant other techniques in the other plant but
00:31:50 ►
never cross contaminated the techniques so I did and this is exactly where this
00:31:55 ►
is the arrow this is my arrow I’m not the beach people said what do you want
00:31:58 ►
to talk about what if what have you found out recently that’s B I’m not
00:32:01 ►
talking about I’m talking about the arrow How I’m going to find the B without knowing where or what B is. So I have this thing up here.
00:32:09 ►
Aha.
00:32:12 ►
I drew four tetrahydroisoquilines and four
00:32:16 ►
more over here. This is a clutch of eight, which I’m using as my template
00:32:20 ►
to begin finding out where I am, what’s going to happen. Here are the dimethoxy,
00:32:24 ►
dimethoxy, dimethoxy, dimethoxy, dimethoxy.
00:32:26 ►
The same over here, identical except methylene dioxys in each of the four positions.
00:32:31 ►
Here I have these two,
00:32:33 ►
these two positions there and there, HH, H-methyl,
00:32:38 ►
methyl H, methyl methyl. So these are all possible permutations of methylated dimethoxy with its positions being respected.
00:32:47 ►
Tetraisoquinolone is there, and the exact counterpart is over here with the methyldoxy.
00:32:52 ►
So what I’m arguing here is, what is the difference in the plant world, in the pharmacological world,
00:32:58 ►
between dimethoxy and methyldoxy with scattering of methyls?
00:33:01 ►
with scattering of metals.
00:33:05 ►
In the phenethylamine,
00:33:10 ►
the dimethoxy almost always exceeds the dimethoxy in potency or in activity or is active whereas the other is not.
00:33:14 ►
3,4-methylendoxyamphetamine is MDA.
00:33:17 ►
The corresponding dimethoxy is 3,4-dimethoxyamphetamine is not active.
00:33:22 ►
In the case of the mescaline-like things,
00:33:24 ►
the poppy plant very nicely plops
00:33:26 ►
a methyl endoxys in places of two methoxys,
00:33:29 ►
forming lefophirine, for example,
00:33:30 ►
out of what would be otherwise mescaline,
00:33:32 ►
and you have materials that should be active,
00:33:34 ►
but no one’s gotten around to exploring them yet.
00:33:36 ►
The unexplored alkaloids
00:33:38 ►
in the peyote plant alone
00:33:40 ►
is a lifetime search
00:33:42 ►
if you really want to get into some fascinating chemistry
00:33:44 ►
and totally unknown pharmacology.
00:33:46 ►
Is peyote pharmacologically similar to mesclun,
00:33:50 ►
the mesclun to peyote?
00:33:52 ►
The studies have never been made.
00:33:53 ►
The people on which mesclun has been titrated clinically
00:33:57 ►
have never been given peyote as a control,
00:33:59 ►
and people out in the field who work with peyote
00:34:01 ►
have never been given mesclun as a control.
00:34:03 ►
Just the comparison of a cactus and the major component of the cactus would be a fabulous clinical study as yet undone
00:34:10 ►
it should be done okay this this top one helenamine uh is found in six different cactus species
00:34:19 ►
uh it’s never been found in a poppy if you take away and begin hydrogenating the ring on the right with the points without the double bonds you can put one or two double
00:34:27 ►
bonds in there you get dihydro isoquinolones or just isoquinolones
00:34:31 ►
there are a number of these known and you go up to about 12 different cactus
00:34:35 ►
species in which those are found not one of them is found in a poppy it’s at all
00:34:39 ►
cactus the next one the end methyl howine, is known in six cactus species.
00:34:46 ►
By the way, it’s a rather potent monamine oxidase inhibitor.
00:34:49 ►
The cacti, and I’ll bring this point in a little later, are loaded with monamine oxidase inhibitors,
00:34:53 ►
which it brings in the smell of what will be eventually kind of an ayahuasca direction.
00:34:58 ►
It is known in a number of cactus, but never in a poppy.
00:35:04 ►
Interestingly enough, for those who are in the analytical game, this particular compound,
00:35:07 ►
the methyl group there, in certain forms of analysis, certain types of mass spec analysis,
00:35:13 ►
comes up with this compound with the methyl group down here.
00:35:16 ►
Namely, that methyl group moves from there to there in the course of analysis.
00:35:20 ►
So you have to be a little careful.
00:35:21 ►
Some of the literature statements of what are in these poppies may be faulted by this internal rearrangement that is chemically bizarre and has never been studied but has been mentioned by two people and I suspect is to be respected.
00:35:34 ►
Salsolidine is the same world dimethoxybutamethyl group down here.
00:35:39 ►
This is an interesting material.
00:35:40 ►
It’s found, by the way, in six different cacti and has never been found in a poppy.
00:35:46 ►
But these little groups in here, if you take these groups off, you have a material that is a dihydroxy-salsolinol,
00:35:54 ►
which is a dihydroxy-methyl-H. This is a material that comes from dopamine.
00:35:59 ►
If you look at that dihydroxy in the amine group, it is dopamine. it is dopamine and you put acid aldehyde in down here you get that methyl group this
00:36:09 ►
material has been found in chronic alcoholics as a material that is present
00:36:13 ►
in various parts of the body maybe the alcohol oxidized acid aldehyde that’s
00:36:18 ►
captured by dopamine dopamine however has also been used in the treatment of
00:36:22 ►
various things like parkinsonism and that people who are parkinsonism positive and have this
00:36:28 ►
material have this compound I had Roxy it’s called sal solenoid or Sal in the in
00:36:34 ►
the medical slang as a major component in their brain different parts of the
00:36:38 ►
brain if you find and put that in the brain of an animal the animal becomes
00:36:42 ►
Parkinson like in its behavior so again you have a very interesting this would be an example of
00:36:47 ►
an alkaloid that’s found in mammals and found in man but it’s tied in with
00:36:51 ►
either alcohol acid aldehyde or dopamine dopamine being natural but oh don’t mean
00:36:55 ►
also being given as a hydroxy dopa or a dopa itself as a treatment for
00:37:01 ►
parkinsonism so again this is a tie- together. I don’t know how it’s all going to fit,
00:37:05 ►
but this material is found in the mammalian world.
00:37:10 ►
The compound carnagene, down at the bottom,
00:37:13 ►
or pectine, has a various number of names,
00:37:16 ►
is again found in three different cacti,
00:37:18 ►
never found in poppies.
00:37:20 ►
One thing the poppy can do,
00:37:22 ►
it can put stuff down here.
00:37:23 ►
It sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t.
00:37:26 ►
There we go, it does.
00:37:27 ►
Instead of this methyl group, you put big benzo groups.
00:37:30 ►
You put isofuranol groups or things down in that area.
00:37:34 ►
These are made in buckets by the poppy world.
00:37:37 ►
The cactus doesn’t know how to put a big thing down there.
00:37:40 ►
The poppy doesn’t know how to get there without putting a big thing down there.
00:37:43 ►
So just that one little spot, that one little group down there the methyl is cactus big stuff down there like a
00:37:50 ►
benzo is poppy and no overlap this to me is totally fascinating this left-hand side is a
00:37:56 ►
in essence a cactus world now on the other side methane doxies you say well gee obviously these
00:38:02 ►
are all from plant sources but interestingly enough the, the first of these, I call it MDHH4 because it’s methylene dioxide and it has hydrogen, hydrogen, hydrogen, hydrogen, and it’s an arbitrary, these will change, these are unpronounceable, is not found in any plant.
00:38:18 ►
It does not exist in any plant.
00:38:29 ►
plant. The second one, the hydrohydrastamine, is found not in poppies, but is found as a product of the workup of poppies. It can be generated synthetically from certain poppy alkaloids,
00:38:35 ►
but again, usually with something big hanging down that, in the lower one position, that is
00:38:39 ►
dropped off. But it is on the edge of being natural, and it is on the edge of being natural and it is on the edge of being in the poppy world the last
00:38:46 ►
two over here with a methyl H mh and mm are not known in any plant at all the methane doxy is not
00:38:55 ►
a stranger to the to the peyote plant but the peyote plant or the other cacti put it in this
00:39:01 ►
position it knows how to put a methane doxy group in to a tetra isoquinoline but it doesn’t know how to get it in the 6-7 position
00:39:07 ►
it only gets it in the 7-8 position
00:39:09 ►
so the machinery is there in the cactus
00:39:11 ►
it’s just misapplied in some way
00:39:13 ►
if you apply it correctly
00:39:15 ►
in my opinion
00:39:16 ►
and get these kind of things
00:39:17 ►
you have materials that don’t occur in any plant source
00:39:20 ►
so this is exactly where I am
00:39:23 ►
I don’t know where it’s going to go
00:39:23 ►
I’m beginning to explore it some isomers of carnagene
00:39:27 ►
of salsalidine are pretty good monamine
00:39:32 ►
oxidase inhibitors. Not up to the
00:39:36 ►
harmin-harmaline area by a factor of perhaps 40, but they are there and I think
00:39:40 ►
structural variations of them might indeed bring them into some
00:39:43 ►
sort of understanding.
00:39:45 ►
What I want to do, I’m going to finish synthesizing all these routes.
00:39:49 ►
These last two over here have only been in the visitor two or three times as chemical intermediates for something.
00:39:54 ►
Never been looked for, never been found anyway in plants.
00:39:57 ►
These are totally strange.
00:39:58 ►
So I want to get these eight compounds, and I’ve already made arrangements to do the work,
00:40:04 ►
and combine, and not combine, but arrangements to do the work and combine and not
00:40:05 ►
combine but add to that collection of eight a sample of harming and harmaline and let the ten
00:40:10 ►
of those go this is one of my major projects right now into analysis for monomine oxidase inhibition
00:40:15 ►
are any of those inhibitors i know some already are how do they compare with harming and harming
00:40:20 ►
which are more of the standards in the psychedelic industry how do they compare and when you find this and this maybe that might be very interesting and then i want to take off
00:40:29 ►
the hydrogens make them dihydros make them aromatic make them with n-methyls make them with
00:40:35 ►
there’s some substituents but take the most interesting and expand from those until you get a
00:40:39 ►
new collection of of activity take the most interesting and expand from that until you get
00:40:43 ►
yet a newer collection of activity keep moving all the time from the most interesting leads to where
00:40:48 ►
it might go. Don’t try to predict where it’s going to go. Just learn from how it goes.
00:40:53 ►
I mentioned the anhalamine, anhalanine, anhalonidine, peyotein, lefafurine. These are all alkaloids
00:41:02 ►
from the cactus world. They’re not just in peyote, there are many cacti.
00:41:10 ►
Probably the five or six with the peyo prefix and with a lofo prefix,
00:41:16 ►
which are named from the peyote plant, are found in perhaps 20 or 25 cactus species.
00:41:18 ►
They’re very widely distributed in nature.
00:41:24 ►
But none of these dimethoxyhydroxy or primethoxy tetrahydroisoquinalins has ever been reported in any other plant than a cactus.
00:41:29 ►
As I mentioned, the ones with the methyndoxy down in that bottom position
00:41:33 ►
are in the cactus and in other plants.
00:41:35 ►
You find them in a variety of other genera, in fact, in other families,
00:41:40 ►
but not in the cactus.
00:41:42 ►
So with that in mind, there’s one other point.
00:41:45 ►
I should have brought, I didn’t even know when I started,
00:41:47 ►
so the time it is now doesn’t make any difference.
00:41:51 ►
I have one last of this.
00:41:53 ►
That one last is always a nice thing when people are in the audience
00:41:55 ►
wondering when this is going to end.
00:41:57 ►
My last slide brings up one other point that compares poppies in some ways and cacti.
00:42:05 ►
Top is dimethoxyphenethylamine with an NN dimethyl.
00:42:13 ►
This is very, very frequently encountered in the cactus world.
00:42:19 ►
The free amino NH2 dimethoxyphenethylamine, which is not an active compound, is in about
00:42:24 ►
20, over 20 cactus species.
00:42:26 ►
The monomethyl, which is the one with just one methyl on the far end up there, is in well over 20 cactus species.
00:42:33 ►
The dimethyl is known in six.
00:42:35 ►
There are probably many, but at least six have been reported in the literature.
00:42:38 ►
Seven, I found one in the Pacocerous, so there are seven in which I can find that.
00:42:44 ►
This compound, I think, should be psychoactive.
00:42:46 ►
It’s got all the goodies and the smells
00:42:47 ►
of being psychoactive. Two methoxy groups, well,
00:42:50 ►
maybe it’d be better. It’s methylene doxy.
00:42:52 ►
But why not if? The dimethyl up
00:42:54 ►
there, it’s a mini cacti, but it’s never
00:42:56 ►
been tried in man. That compound’s totally unknown
00:42:58 ►
in man. And I wonder if
00:43:00 ►
with the monamine oxidase inhibitor, it might
00:43:01 ►
become more early active in man. But to me,
00:43:04 ►
even more intriguing is the lower compound, which uses that methylene doxy group.
00:43:09 ►
Here is something that is unknown in the plant world.
00:43:12 ►
It should be there, and it’s not there.
00:43:14 ►
And I think, as I say, some divine mischief is going on to leave it out.
00:43:19 ►
It’s simply made, very simply, I’ve made it, you’ve made two steps, you’ve made the damn thing.
00:43:24 ►
But it’s not in the plant world, it’s almost not in the literature, almost no mention of it in the literature,
00:43:30 ►
simply made and totally unexplored.
00:43:32 ►
So this is kind of where I want to go.
00:43:34 ►
Now, where I want to go is the B.
00:43:36 ►
This is how I’m going to get to wherever it is I end up getting to, the process,
00:43:41 ►
is I want to look at these eight compounds on the previous slide,
00:43:44 ►
and harming, harming as monominoxidase inhibitors not that I particularly want
00:43:48 ►
it but by looking for these one gets into a very oh by the way I didn’t
00:43:53 ►
mention but one of the compounds on the right the one with the methyl down and
00:43:56 ►
the hydrogen out and nothing doxy I already found is active between 1500
00:44:00 ►
milligrams so there is activity to be found in these things anyway I want to
00:44:04 ►
eventually explore all of these it is always nice from a from an ethical and legal point of view looking at
00:44:09 ►
things that might or might not have monomane oxidase inhibition in that if they are clinically
00:44:13 ►
active they might be or they might not be antidepressants and antidepressants in no way
00:44:18 ►
compromises any research work because it is only illegal to look for psychedelics which i do not
00:44:23 ►
look for i look for antidepressants and this takes care very nicely of some
00:44:26 ►
aspects of legal morality so I want to look at these these this kind of where I
00:44:33 ►
am this is the shape of the arrow a to B arrow right now I want to look at these
00:44:38 ►
eight compounds and harming harm lean as monomine oxidase inhibitors as clues to
00:44:42 ►
where enzymatic and biological activity might lie.
00:44:46 ►
And I don’t know where I’m going to find them.
00:44:47 ►
They’ve never been compared with one another.
00:44:49 ►
About four of them have been run, three on one system, two on another system.
00:44:53 ►
Results cannot be compared.
00:44:55 ►
I want all ten on the same system so the results are directly comparable to one another.
00:45:00 ►
They can be compared and evaluated.
00:45:02 ►
I want very much to explore these
00:45:06 ►
materials pharmacologically, and I will continue
00:45:08 ►
doing what I am already doing.
00:45:10 ►
I think a lot of these things can be
00:45:11 ►
dehydrogenated to the totally
00:45:13 ►
aromatic dehydro- and methyl-quantylated.
00:45:16 ►
I think, for example, an area
00:45:18 ►
of chemical modification
00:45:19 ►
is valid. I can show it on this.
00:45:22 ►
Where you have two methoxy groups in a row, take
00:45:24 ►
one of them off. You have methoxy groups in a row, take one of them off.
00:45:26 ►
You have methoxy-hydroxy,
00:45:28 ►
this area of vanillin, isovanillin,
00:45:31 ►
the hydroxy-methoxy metabolites of epinephrine,
00:45:32 ►
norepinephrine, all these goodies,
00:45:35 ►
lie in this general area.
00:45:38 ►
But one says, well, the hydroxy group has to be on the molecule so it’ll get into the brain.
00:45:39 ►
But if the hydroxy has to be off,
00:45:41 ►
you can’t have a bare hydroxy.
00:45:42 ►
But the hydroxy is next to the methoxy, it’s not bare.
00:45:45 ►
It’s compromised. And there are’t have a bare hydroxy. For the hydroxies and extra methoxy, it’s not bare. It’s compromised.
00:45:49 ►
And there are things that contain free hydroxy groups that do get in the brain if they are protected from getting too associated with water.
00:45:53 ►
An example is silicin.
00:45:54 ►
A silicin has a bare hydroxy group, yet it’s active as such orally.
00:45:58 ►
But it is associated with a very strong base, and so you have an internal salt.
00:46:02 ►
And that salt may be what protects it.
00:46:03 ►
The same thing is totally doable in the area of the tetra hydro isoquinolones
00:46:07 ►
and one last point I want to pursue is a concept of it’s brought out in
00:46:11 ►
discussions of of ayahuasca in which you might have materials such as these that
00:46:16 ►
are should be active and would be active if they’re not the aminated and a cat
00:46:22 ►
these are the operands at least from a cactus and cactus components that themselves may not be active but may inhibit that deamination and a cactus, the operons at least from a cactus, and cactus components that themselves may not be active
00:46:27 ►
but may inhibit that deamination. So it’s exactly the parallel to ayahuasca that is very possible in a cactus.
00:46:33 ►
You could have a phenethylamine that would not normally be active, but it is active because in the same cactus
00:46:39 ►
there happens to be a tetrahysoquinoline that inhibits the inactivation of the phenethylamine.
00:46:44 ►
So in essence you have an internal ayahuasca.
00:46:46 ►
This is a doable thing, a believable thing.
00:46:49 ►
And what is really provocative is that if you have that combination in there,
00:46:56 ►
you have a mixture of compounds that may show activity,
00:47:00 ►
but neither one of the compounds alone would show any activity.
00:47:03 ►
So it’s an example of search for what is in a cactus.
00:47:06 ►
Find out something in there.
00:47:07 ►
Is it active?
00:47:08 ►
And fail to find activity is not necessarily a discouragement.
00:47:12 ►
Because it may be only in combination that it’s active.
00:47:14 ►
Therefore, the plant may be active, but the components of the plant are not.
00:47:18 ►
So this is kind of what I wanted to do.
00:47:20 ►
I wanted to bring you a report of what’s going on.
00:47:23 ►
Not where it’s going to go.
00:47:24 ►
I don’t know where it’s going to go, but how I’m going to explore getting to wherever
00:47:27 ►
it’s going to go, and let that be kind of the bottom line to the title of the talk.
00:47:34 ►
And I really do believe that this whole process of getting to a target rather than achieving
00:47:41 ►
a target is a lot more exciting.
00:47:43 ►
Thank you very much.
00:47:55 ►
I think we have time for questions a little bit,
00:47:58 ►
and Dr. Shulman would be happy to answer them.
00:48:01 ►
Try to answer them.
00:48:02 ►
Yeah.
00:48:06 ►
From the microphone, please.
00:48:08 ►
Sorry, I’m too short.
00:48:16 ►
My brief statement is that you’ve certainly given me a new dimension to think about in Island by Huxley, the fact that he named one of the characters Joe Aldehyde because I was only familiar with it in the perfume industry.
00:48:22 ►
I had never thought of him related to psychoactive chemicals.
00:48:26 ►
But my question is, I know my field is more in organic chemistry, my interest,
00:48:34 ►
but with cannabis, in the U.S. generally,
00:48:37 ►
it’s thought that the THC is the only active compound in cannabis.
00:48:41 ►
And I was wondering, have there been any studies to find there’s, what,
00:48:46 ►
200-something other alkaloids in cannabis? And it’s been proven that Marinol, the isolated,
00:48:52 ►
doesn’t work as well. Has anybody done any research on all these other ones?
00:48:57 ►
Okay. Let me go back kind of in the middle of the question back toward the first. One thing you
00:49:01 ►
termed alkaloids, be cautious. They’re not alkaloids in cannabis. It is an alkaloid-less
00:49:05 ►
plant, at least from the point of view of
00:49:08 ►
its activity. These materials are
00:49:10 ►
hydrocarbon, they’re actually ethers,
00:49:12 ►
and they’re terpene-like,
00:49:14 ►
but they are not alkaloids.
00:49:15 ►
Is THC the only active compound? Absolutely not.
00:49:18 ►
There are other materials in there that are known
00:49:20 ►
to be active, but the clinical studies
00:49:22 ►
in man have not, to a large measure, been
00:49:24 ►
successfully done. Yeah, that’s my question. The animals, yes. And there’s no question, but the clinical studies in man have not, to a large measure, been successfully done.
00:49:25 ►
Yeah, that’s my question.
00:49:27 ►
Yeah, the animals, yes.
00:49:33 ►
And there’s no question, but what they will contribute, in my mind, at one level or another, to the overall action of the plant.
00:49:38 ►
To study the action of THC in isolation is a very unnatural thing to do.
00:49:41 ►
THC of Marinol is actually synthesized. It doesn’t come from the plant, although there’s work in Holland in obtaining it from the plant in a competitive way. Isn’t it even
00:49:47 ►
hexahydrocannabinol? It’s a separate. It’s hexahydrocannabinol, right? It’s a separate.
00:49:52 ►
The tetrahydro has one double bond. The hexahydro
00:49:55 ►
has been studied in animals. I don’t remember the results of the study. I don’t believe it’s found
00:49:59 ►
in the plant. But there are many variations of the double bond position and
00:50:03 ►
variations of the ring integrity that are common components of the plant. But there are many variations of the double bond position and variations of the ring integrity that are common components of the plant. And many have been studied in animal studies. I
00:50:09 ►
do not know of clinical studies in men. Okay. Will you keep working on cactus and poppies?
00:50:13 ►
I promise. Is there a microphone? I thank you very, very much. You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:50:33 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:50:39 ►
Have you ever been in a foreign land
00:50:42 ►
where you only spoke a few words of the native tongue?
00:50:45 ►
Well, that’s kind of how I felt just now when I was listening with you to that last exchange
00:50:50 ►
between Sasha and an obviously well-versed woman questioner.
00:50:54 ►
I could make out some of the words, like cannabis, cannabinoids, THC, and things like that,
00:51:01 ►
but for the most part, their conversation sounded more like an Italian opera or something to me.
00:51:06 ►
The lovely sound of human voices singing in a language that I do not know.
00:51:11 ►
In fact, I have no idea now how I even managed to pass chemistry class in college.
00:51:17 ►
But I digress.
00:51:19 ►
I guess what I’m trying to get to is that even though I don’t grok all that Sasha says,
00:51:24 ►
I think it’s important
00:51:25 ►
to preserve these talks as best we can for any future chemist who may find some inspiration
00:51:31 ►
from his words, and more particularly by hearing a little bit more about the processes involved
00:51:37 ►
in doing the very sophisticated work that he does. Sasha also came up recently in an
00:51:43 ►
email from fellow salonner James M., who writes in part,
00:51:47 ►
Hi Lorenzo, I’ve been enjoying the podcast as always, and I like that as Facebook friends, I get to know when you are working on them.
00:51:55 ►
I have two questions. First, has there been a word on how Sasha Shulgin is doing?
00:52:10 ►
Well, James, as far as I know, the only problem, main problem, is his loss of sight, which of course is a major problem.
00:52:18 ►
He does have Ann and a crew of other friends and family to help out, but if someone has the tech chops to set it up, I think that we could all go a long way to keeping a smile on his face by maybe collecting a bunch of Skype messages to him and
00:52:25 ►
put them on a CD and send it to him. And I’ll let you talk about that on our Grow Report forum if
00:52:31 ►
somebody thinks they could pull that off. And speaking of our forum, there is an amazing
00:52:37 ►
discussion going on right now about a group of fellow salonners coming together and adding to
00:52:42 ►
the good start on transcripts that Allison has begun
00:52:45 ►
and going on to publish a book of Terrence McKenna transcripts. Now, I don’t know where this is all
00:52:51 ►
going to end, but it began with a simple question by M.N. Borden that grew into a very active thread.
00:53:00 ►
By the way, in addition to our forum over there, there are dozens of other forums,
00:53:04 ►
all of which I think you’ll find very interesting.
00:53:07 ►
It’s a truly wonderful community that is forming over there, and I’m very pleased to be a part of it.
00:53:13 ►
Now, getting back to James’ email, there was a second question that he asked.
00:53:19 ►
Can you think of any one book which would serve as a good historical cultural introduction
00:53:24 ►
to the psychedelic scenes
00:53:25 ►
beginnings in the 50s and 60s. I asked because I recently introduced a friend to the sacred
00:53:31 ►
medicine and talked to her during our session about the impact of LSD on our culture. She had
00:53:36 ►
never heard of Timothy Leary and had no idea that there were ever legitimate studies done with
00:53:41 ►
psychedelics. She asked me for a book as it was a whole new world to her,
00:53:46 ►
but I couldn’t think of anything in particular.
00:53:48 ►
So how about it?
00:53:50 ►
Well, not to keep coming back to the same point,
00:53:52 ►
but on our forum, opethegirlreport.com,
00:53:56 ►
I started a thread a couple of weeks ago asking, once again,
00:54:00 ►
what people’s favorite books are.
00:54:02 ►
And there have been some very interesting comments posted,
00:54:06 ►
but I’ve never thought before about one single book
00:54:09 ►
that would be a good introduction to the early psychedelic scene.
00:54:13 ►
Again, that’s a great idea for another thread.
00:54:16 ►
But I’ll add my own two cents here anyway.
00:54:19 ►
Of course, I’m going to have to do it by mentioning more than one book.
00:54:24 ►
But that way you can check them out on Amazon and pick the one you think might be the best fit for your girlfriend.
00:54:30 ►
In other words, this is probably a case where you aren’t going to be able to find a one-size-fits-all book.
00:54:36 ►
So here are two of my favorites, although they don’t exactly fit the early 60s genre that you mentioned.
00:54:43 ►
First one is Sisters of the Extreme,
00:54:45 ►
Women Writing on the Drug Experience
00:54:47 ►
by Cynthia Palmer and Michael Horowitz.
00:54:50 ►
And the second one is The Long Trip,
00:54:53 ►
A Prehistory of Psychedelia by Paul Devereaux.
00:54:57 ►
And together, I believe those two books
00:54:59 ►
should make it clear that the psychedelic resurgence
00:55:02 ►
of the 60s was simply the start of what Opaque Lens calls the re-shamification of the human consciousness.
00:55:10 ►
Maybe it was Fraser Clark who said that on Opaque Lens’ Shamanic Freedom radio podcast that was a tribute to Fraser.
00:55:17 ►
Anyway, if after reading those two books someone still isn’t interested in our sacred medicines,
00:55:23 ►
then maybe they should move on to other topics that are of more interest to them.
00:55:27 ►
As we all know so well, being a professional psychonaut isn’t for the faint of heart.
00:55:33 ►
But if you do want to rub shoulders with some of your fellow entheogenic explorers and adventurers,
00:55:39 ►
a good place to start might be at one of the conferences that take place from time to time,
00:55:43 ►
as I’ve said many times before. You know, a few minutes ago we heard a talk that was given at the
00:55:48 ►
psychoactivity conference that was held in Amsterdam in 1998. And the people who produced
00:55:55 ►
that conference are the same ones, I think, who are producing psychoactivity 6 in Tibet
00:56:00 ►
later this year. And you can find the full details on their website at psychoactivity.eu,
00:56:06 ►
where they say this about their next conference.
00:56:10 ►
The tiger meets the jaguar.
00:56:12 ►
Shamans from Nepal meet shamans from South America.
00:56:16 ►
Intercultural meeting of the shamanic traditions between the Himalaya and the Amazon.
00:56:22 ►
And if any of our fellow slawners are able to attend this conference, I hope you’ll send me an account of it to pass along here in the Amazon. And if any of our fellow slaughters are able to attend this conference,
00:56:25 ►
I hope you’ll send me an account of it
00:56:27 ►
to pass along here in the salon.
00:56:30 ►
Now, I’ve got
00:56:31 ►
a couple more things to say, and as much
00:56:33 ►
as I hate being negative, the first
00:56:35 ►
of them is negative.
00:56:37 ►
It’s about my relationship with
00:56:39 ►
SanDisk MP3 players.
00:56:42 ►
Now, long-time slaughters may
00:56:43 ►
remember a few years back when I dropped my sand
00:56:46 ►
disc on a tile floor and broke the on-off switch, making it totally useless. So, for the past several
00:56:53 ►
years, I’ve been using a little iRiver MP3 player that the Dope Fiend sent me to replace my broken
00:56:59 ►
one. And I love that little player, by the way. Now, about a year ago, my wife bought the tiny version of the SanDisk,
00:57:05 ►
and it worked great until she dropped it all of maybe six inches,
00:57:10 ►
and it broke the same way.
00:57:12 ►
This on-off switch no longer works.
00:57:15 ►
Now, maybe this was just bad luck on my part,
00:57:17 ►
but you can bet that I’m not going to be buying any more SanDisk products,
00:57:21 ►
which is really too bad, except for their crummy switches.
00:57:24 ►
I really like their players. any more SanDisk products, which is really too bad, except for their crummy switches.
00:57:26 ►
I really like their players.
00:57:31 ►
Again, a good topic for our forum might be, what kind of MP3 player are you using?
00:57:32 ►
Do you like it?
00:57:33 ►
What are your favorite features?
00:57:36 ►
You know, things like that I think a lot of us would find interesting.
00:57:43 ►
Finally, I want to say a few more words about my newfound fascination with Facebook and Twitter.
00:57:44 ►
Like many of our fellow slawners, I’ve been constantly searching for better and more efficient Thank you. fascinating things that can be done with Facebook and possibly even more importantly with Twitter.
00:58:05 ►
I have no idea, of course, where all this is leading, but here is just one tiny example of
00:58:11 ►
how these sites, along with podcasting, can bring people together who otherwise never would have
00:58:16 ►
crossed paths. Many years ago, I first heard about the work of Albert Bates, but I never would have
00:58:23 ►
been so bold as to try to contact him.
00:58:26 ►
However, my friend KMO has no such qualms and drove down to the farm and interviewed Albert
00:58:31 ►
for several of the Sea Realm podcasts. So when I finally got on Facebook and saw that Albert Bates
00:58:37 ►
was there, well, I clicked the add a friend link and much to my delight and surprise, he agreed to
00:58:43 ►
link up with me on that site.
00:58:51 ►
So the other day, as I was scanning my friend’s status updates, I read that Albert Bates was listening to Sancho and Cody’s Black Light in the Attic podcast at the exact same time as
00:58:56 ►
I was listening to the same program. Now that’s not much of a big deal, you might say, and in
00:59:01 ►
truth, I guess it isn’t such a big deal. But somehow, for me to
00:59:06 ►
learn that someone I respect is listening to a podcast that I recommended, well, it just made
00:59:11 ►
this world a lot smaller and friendlier for me. So if you haven’t taken the plunge to experiment
00:59:16 ►
with these sites yet, my advice is to ignore everything that’s being written about Facebook
00:59:22 ►
and Twitter and check them out for yourself. For example, it’s possible to watch the Twitter cloud in real time
00:59:29 ►
and see what the main things are that are being discussed by a million and a half people.
00:59:34 ►
And depending on who you decide to follow on Twitter,
00:59:37 ►
you’ll most likely be surprised at the level of discussion that’s taking place in those short 140-character bursts.
00:59:44 ►
And searching the Twitter space can lead to all kinds of interesting connections.
00:59:49 ►
For example, just now I searched for the word psychedelic salon and discovered that so far
00:59:55 ►
this month, two people besides me have mentioned the salon.
00:59:59 ►
So thank you Ben Zier, JP, and Mark G85.
01:00:03 ►
I appreciate you keeping us alive in Twitter space,
01:00:06 ►
and I’m happy to be following you guys now too.
01:00:09 ►
And if you happen to connect with me on Facebook,
01:00:12 ►
you can go to my friends list and sort by region,
01:00:15 ►
where you’ll see that I have more friends in Australia than I do in London,
01:00:19 ►
or that I only have one friend in France, but two in Croatia.
01:00:23 ►
Who knows?
01:00:24 ►
Maybe one day you’ll be able to find the others in your own hometown this way.
01:00:29 ►
So if you want to join us in this little experiment,
01:00:32 ►
you can find me on Twitter as Psychedelic Lozo,
01:00:36 ►
P-S-Y-C-H-E-D-E-L-I-C-L-O-Z-O,
01:00:40 ►
and on Facebook as Lorenzo Haggerty.
01:00:43 ►
And Haggerty, by the way, only has one G.
01:00:46 ►
I’ve heard from several friends that they couldn’t find me there at first,
01:00:50 ►
and as it turns out, if you search for the two G Haggerty’s,
01:00:53 ►
you aren’t going to see us one G-ers.
01:00:55 ►
But if you can find me, I’d be more than happy to connect with you.
01:00:59 ►
And that way, at least, I will have found another one of the others.
01:01:04 ►
Well, now that I seem to be rambling,
01:01:05 ►
I guess it’s time to bring this podcast to a close.
01:01:09 ►
And as always, I’ll end by saying that
01:01:11 ►
this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:01:14 ►
are available for your use under the
01:01:16 ►
Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 License.
01:01:20 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
01:01:22 ►
just click the Creative Commons link
01:01:24 ►
at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org. And that’s also where
01:01:31 ►
you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from
01:01:37 ►
cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.