468 - Investigating Life

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Peter Gorman
“I have never gone to bed in Peru without having learned something new that day.” -Peter Gorman
Today’s podcast features the second part of an interview with Peter Gorman, one of the larger-than-life figures to be found among our psychedelic elders. The program begins by picking up with a story about river pirates in the Amazon, migrates to tales of running a bar in the jungle town of Iquitos, Peru that was frequented by DEA agents, and continues with Peter talking about his interactions with luminaries such as Albert Hofmann, Alan Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna. Also, Peter talks about his new book “Sapo In My Soul”, which is the first book to be published about this interesting medicine. Of interest to our younger saloners will be his telling of how, as a young man himself, he financed his trips to the Amazon and the methods he used to search for medicinal plants in the jungle.

Peter Gorman’s Web Site
Sapo In My Soul: The Matsés Frog Medicine
By Peter Gorman

Ayahuasca in My Blood: 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming
By Peter Gorman

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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And the first thing that I need to

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do today, at least according to my wife, is, well, to apologize to you for what I did last

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week when I more or less cut off the story just at its most exciting point. As you already

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know, well, I had my own childish reason for doing that. But after seeing the look on my

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wife’s face when she discovered that I’d ended the podcast a little prematurely,

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well, that look told me all that I needed to know about how most likely you felt about it as well.

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And if you can accept my apology while knowing that, well, I’m not actually sorry for doing that,

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well, then you most definitely must be a psychedelic thinker

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because you are someone who isn’t afraid of what Terence McKenna called

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the coincidentia appositorum.

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Now, in just a moment, I’m going to replay the part of the story

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that we ended with last week,

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and you will finally learn how it came out.

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For what it’s worth, Peter Gorman’s encounter with the pirates, though,

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was significantly more dangerous than that of the old lion tamer Clyde Beatty swinging on a vine.

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And in case you’re wondering what happened to Clyde when his vine broke,

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well, as it happened, there was a little ledge just below him when it broke, and he landed safely on it.

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I don’t remember what happened after that, because there was this big collective moan from the

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audience. Well, we all went home swearing that we would never again watch a to-be-continued movie.

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Of course, none of us held to that promise the next weekend. Now, not to overdo this too much, but Peter Gorman has played a major, and I say a major role, in bringing ayahuasca into mainstream discussions, and in creating a public atmosphere in which we are now seeing cannabis becoming legal throughout the U.S.

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It is Peter who has brought Sappho, or Cambo, to us here in the West.

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And in my opinion, that’s a life’s work that is every bit as important as, well, the work of Leary or McKenna.

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The world is a much better place than it would have ever been had Peter Gorman not had the adventures that he did,

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and then gathered up his courage to write about them here in the hostile political environment of the states.

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So, let’s continue with the rest of this interview,

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where we’ll discover that encountering river pirates in the Amazon wasn’t necessarily the most hair-raising thing that he has done.

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Let’s face it, there aren’t many of us who would have the courage to expose DEA undercover operations.

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That, my dear friends, takes a major dose of courage.

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And now, here once again, is the writer, editor, and world-class adventurer, Peter Gorman,

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telling the story that I so rudely cut off just before its end last week.

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Maybe our sixth night or seventh night, we were

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in the Amaril, going

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to a military base, Peloton,

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halfway up to where we were going to finally

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run into the

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Matzes.

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And before we got to Peloton,

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a light came around the corner

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behind us, around a bend,

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and it was moving too fast, with too much intention.

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And we instantly knew, oh my goodness, this is going to be pirates.

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We had heard, we had been told there were pirates on the river.

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And sure enough, they came up alongside us, they caught up with us.

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And there probably were 10 men, But it looked to me like 30

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or 50 or 100.

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And

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my driver, the son of the owner

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of the boat that I’d rented,

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and his

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timonel, the fellow who

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steered the boat at night. I steered it

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during the day. He steered it at night.

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They both said,

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those guys are drunk and they’re going to kill you.

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So, we’re going to

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join their boat and drink with them.

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And I looked and said, well, I’ve got

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Chepa and me.

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And I said, Chepa, get below.

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Below was a space of

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maybe three, three and a half feet.

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And I said, I don’t want these drunk

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guys to see you, because

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then they’re going to come on the boat and kill you.

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So you get down below, and I’ll see what I can do.

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And in the course of seeing what I could do, I picked up a machete and had a beautiful, beautiful knife.

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And I began to yell at them with force of ayahuasca. It was not my force.

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and he yelled at them with force of ayahuasca.

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It was not my force.

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I suddenly opened my mouth,

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and kind of a raging torrent of New Yorkese came out,

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saying, who wants to be the first motherfucker on this boat?

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Who’s going to be number one?

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Because I’m going to take your goddamn hand off.

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And number two, I’m going to stab you.

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So what are you going to do?

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What are you going to do?

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This is preemptive knowing I was going to die

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they had pulled up alongside

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and said we’re taking your motor

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we’re taking your motor and kill you

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this is what’s going to happen

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so I said get below

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my guys said they’re going to kill us

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we’ll join them

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we look like them

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we’re just part of the pirates now

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see you later

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which left me and her and and I said, get below.

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Why were you tripping on ayahuasca?

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No, I had done ayahuasca a couple of days earlier, but I had the power of the juice

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in me.

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And so when I started, my fear combined with the spirit of ayahuasca made my voice come

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out very powerfully.

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It almost physically stopped them for a moment, I think.

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It’s true.

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And after two minutes of me knowing I’m lying…

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Because I always knew him, like, charming, nice type of, but not that part.

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So he was like the baddest mother?

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Yeah.

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Well, you know, he thought, you know,

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that’s our lives or them.

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Night and shining armor?

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No.

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What happens was,

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she was the night and shining armor.

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Suddenly, she’s standing next to me.

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This most beautiful girl in the world.

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And hiding her.

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I told her to get down,

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just lift up the hatch

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and climb down the three-step ladder to the hold. So even if they get down, just lift up the hatch and climb down the

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three-step ladder to the hold, so even if they kill me, they won’t see you, so you’ll

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live. And suddenly, she’s, I turned around and said, what the freak are you doing here?

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I said, get below. She said, what do you got? I said, I got a machete and a knife. Takes

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her hand off me on the back and goes,

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now you got two machetes.

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And now I was able to

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change it to, who want to be the

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first three guys? Who want to be the

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first three guys? Because she’s going to take your hand off.

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And she starts speaking to them

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in Portuguese. Or

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what do they call it? Riverino Portuguese.

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Like a…

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I used to speak a little bit of Portuguese.

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Like a mix of…

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My dad used to take me to the river.

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And suddenly they were hearing their own sound.

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For me, they were hearing anger, English, and fear.

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For her, they were hearing,

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you think he’s lying?

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This guy is crazy, mother.

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He is going to hurt somebody.

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And then I’m going to have to hurt somebody

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because we’re not dying tonight.

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And I think in the end, I taught them to death and they were so bored

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like can we go now

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can we go we’re getting sober

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obviously and then we were like

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ok we have to tell them how cool they were

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oh you’re so cool

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that you knew I’m a white guy

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there’s a paper trail you’d get caught

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you’re smart for pirates

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so you should just

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leave now. And when

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we finally gave them enough face to leave,

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they just drove off, right?

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Yeah, they did. They took off and we were like,

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and my guys jumped on the

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boat at the last second. They were like, that was cool.

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You know, they didn’t kill you.

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Were there other white guys hiding?

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No, no. They were two Spanish guys. The owner

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of the boat’s son son who was running the motor

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and one assistant was with them.

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The four of us were the boat crew.

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And so they had jumped on the other boat

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to save their skins.

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They jumped back on our boat

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when the other boat revved up to leave.

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And I turned around

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and no one had ever covered my back like she had.

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I mean, I had had wonderful friends who covered.

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What’s my back, too?

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But she had covered my back, and I just said,

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Will you marry me?

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And she looked and said, No.

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No, of course not.

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But still, you know, that was good.

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We did good.

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And so it took me a year and a half or so to convince her.

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What was the purpose of this trip?

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we were collecting plants for Shama Pharmaceutical

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they had given me pictures of some

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really horrible disorders to the skin

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fungal infections

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bacterial infections

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herpes

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but not a herpes

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these were the worst of the worst somebody who had 8,000 herpes, but not eight herpes. These were the worst

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of the worst. Somebody

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who had 8,000 herpes all over

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their private parts and

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their lips, I mean, tongue.

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And the quest was to go

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to the cordoneros I knew,

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the different healers I knew on the river,

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and to ask them, show them pictures,

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and when they really

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hit like, yes, bring in so-and-so.

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And they bring in a boy and say, see, he has the same thing, but he’s getting better.

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I know that plant.

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My job would be, good, make a list.

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Tomorrow, let’s collect that plant.

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And we’d show them 150.

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They might hit on 100.

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But we’d only try to collect three or five from one cordonero

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because the Indians on the river or the indigenous on the river don’t have an attention span like ours.

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They don’t have enough food stored up to say, I’ll give you three days, four days of work.

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You get one night, one morning, maybe a second morning to collect, and then you’re gone.

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Because it’s time for them to fish or hunt or go to the fields, take care of their kids, take care of their family.

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They just get up and walk away.

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They’re tired of you.

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So we had a very limited time, but there were eight or ten, right, places where we stopped

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and were able to collect material.

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So it was primarily for you a humanitarian mission?

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No.

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I was getting paid by Shama Pharmaceutical.

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And if the trip went

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well, I would get paid more the next time.

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And if the trip went well, I would be

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one after another.

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In theory, I would then become

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a worker for them, and I would be able to spend my time

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on boats, traveling around the Amazon,

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collecting plants for 20 years.

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And you were paying Shama for that?

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Yes.

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Not very much, and I wasn’t getting paid very much.

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But the idea was, eat it the first time.

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No one ever paid me for my trips before.

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I mean, I sold some stories sometimes.

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That’s my dog.

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And that initial trip, what was the boom of that trip?

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What did you come back with?

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What was the boom of that trip?

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What did you come back with?

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We came back with about, I think we came back with 34 plants.

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I think 11 or 12 were unknown to Shama Pharmaceutical,

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who thought they had already milked the whole region.

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And one was a new subspecies, which blew their minds, that we had somehow come up with a plant

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they had never seen before.

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What was it?

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I don’t remember the name right now.

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But what it did was,

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well, it cured one of their illnesses.

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We’re going back 23 years now,

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so I’m not going to remember it.

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Super important stuff for history, though.

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Well, I’d have to look up the notes from that trip

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to find out what it did.

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You don’t know?

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No.

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But it intrigued shaman enough that the next trip

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they scheduled for four months later,

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this time with their botanist.

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Is it a coincidence that shaman pharmaceutical

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sounds like shaman?

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No.

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It was very much on purpose.

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The point of the whole…

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Normally, a pharmaceutical house,

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National Cancer Institute,

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would let anybody who’s a graduate student

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go down to a part of the world,

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and they would pay them $25

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for any plant they collect.

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That’s, you know…

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So if you collect 300 plants,

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you know, that would pay for your trip

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to go down somewhere

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during the course of doing your PhD, for instance.

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And you would have your name on 300 plants.

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You would have the first beginning of a real herbarium collection in your name.

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And so that’s what you’d work on, build on for the rest of your life as a field botanist.

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In this case…

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botanist.

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In this case… So you don’t have the credit

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for having discovered

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and brought back that plant?

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No, no. They sent down

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their own biologist to say

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it’s new

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to us, but we can’t identify it because

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he doesn’t have any fruit for it.

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Without the fruit, we can’t…

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For some reason, they couldn’t identify

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whether it was a male or a female.

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And

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they knew

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it was new, but they weren’t sure what the

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hell it was.

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Chepa’s job, really,

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was to teach me how

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to drive a boat,

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Timonela boat,

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to teach me how to move up and down

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the Amazon River,

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which is much more difficult than it seems,

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because if you go to the right, you will be lost forever.

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Stay to the left. Stay to the left.

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Every chance you get, stay to the left when you’re going down the Amazon.

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Coming up, stay to the right, right?

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Just normal stages.

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And get past the military bases.

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And get past the military bases.

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Yeah, what dangers? Well were, of course, animals.

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When I say the military base wouldn’t let you through

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if you didn’t pay the piper

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and give them whatever they wanted,

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what I mean is two years

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after we opened our bar,

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seven years after our trip

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together, eight years after our trip together,

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some Japanese

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students put together a raft

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and decided to float from a town called

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Bukalpa, 300 miles down to Iquitos, 300 miles or so, and then from there they were going

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to go out to the Atlantic Ocean.

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They were going to be the first balsa raft known that was going to do that.

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But no one had told them that you have to stop at a military base.

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Now military bases only count when you’re in international waters.

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The first one from Bukalpa to the Atlantic is at P military base. Now, military bases only count when you’re in international waters. The first one from Bukalpa

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to the Atlantic is at Pabos,

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where she wore out the cake.

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The Bolsheviks

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did not stop at Pabos to get a stamp.

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And so,

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the colonel in charge of Pabos

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at the time sent several

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canoes of his men out

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to hack them to death,

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which they did.

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They just simply stopped them and

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hacked them to pieces, buried

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pieces of their bodies,

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and shared their

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cameras and monies.

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These were medical students?

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No, they were just kids who happened to be

00:15:21 ►

tourists, but they happened to be going to college

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or just finished college.

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And they had some help from home.

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The Japanese television stations were meeting them at points to be able to say, how’s it been so far?

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What is it like putting this together?

00:15:34 ►

But even this was probably 99?

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Let’s put it into the history of the current phenomenon

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of all kinds of hundreds of

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thousands of people going down

00:15:48 ►

there and all kinds of

00:15:49 ►

white shaman

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or whatever leading people down there

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were you the first

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that you know of that was

00:15:57 ►

00:15:59 ►

and when did you first lead people

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down after

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this

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after you learned

00:16:06 ►

the ropes through her?

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Well, I had

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been with Moises for seven years before I

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met Chip.

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So I had already walked to Brazil,

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I’d walked across the jungle,

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so I knew her. I was pretty

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astute and pretty capable

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out there. What I didn’t

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know were the rivers. I’d never had my boat. That’s where she out there. What I didn’t know were the rivers.

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I’d never had my boat.

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That’s where she came in.

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But I was walking to Brazil before her with Moises,

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and I had stayed alone in the jungle many times for days on end without any help.

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You knew the dangers of the jungle, the insects, the snakes.

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Yeah, to me that was normal stuff.

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Almost no one would go in where I went

00:16:46 ►

it was too much of a pain in the neck

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it was too physically

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demanding

00:16:51 ►

so it was the political and social

00:16:53 ►

no, not political and social

00:16:55 ►

I would insist to Moises

00:16:57 ►

Moises, there must be a tribe living here

00:16:59 ►

so let’s just take this new path

00:17:01 ►

which left us hacking at jungle

00:17:04 ►

like the movies,

00:17:07 ►

looking for Indians who didn’t live there.

00:17:09 ►

Indigenous who didn’t live there.

00:17:11 ►

Of course, it dawned on me after 10 years of that

00:17:14 ►

that, oh, no one lives in the jungle.

00:17:17 ►

They live on the rivers,

00:17:18 ►

because that’s where the water is.

00:17:20 ►

Duh.

00:17:21 ►

But a white kid from Queens,

00:17:23 ►

it took me a long time to get that through my head

00:17:25 ►

she could have told me that the first day

00:17:27 ►

Moises did tell me that the first day

00:17:29 ►

I still didn’t believe him

00:17:31 ►

I thought you were going to hide the people

00:17:33 ►

I want to find the people that are hidden

00:17:35 ►

no one’s hidden

00:17:37 ►

just follow the water there

00:17:39 ►

that’s where the people live

00:17:40 ►

why in the great big why

00:17:44 ►

were you down there for so many years the great big why were you down there

00:17:46 ►

for so many years?

00:17:48 ►

The great big why was that

00:17:49 ►

I have never gone to bed

00:17:56 ►

in Peru

00:17:57 ►

without having learned something new

00:18:00 ►

that day.

00:18:02 ►

And so every day

00:18:03 ►

to me is a brand new day.

00:18:06 ►

And when I think,

00:18:08 ►

well, that’s enough of Peru. I think I’ll go back

00:18:10 ►

to Morocco. I think,

00:18:12 ►

you know, I love Morocco.

00:18:14 ►

But I didn’t learn something new every day.

00:18:16 ►

So I better go back to Peru

00:18:18 ►

to keep learning.

00:18:19 ►

And having fallen in love,

00:18:22 ►

having married her,

00:18:24 ►

having babies in love, having married her, having babies with her

00:18:26 ►

helping raise babies she had

00:18:30 ►

before me

00:18:32 ►

into 30 year old

00:18:34 ►

fine young men

00:18:35 ►

it’s really a second home for me

00:18:40 ►

in the big scheme

00:18:41 ►

at that time, those days,

00:18:45 ►

when I had the imprimatur of the Museum of Natural

00:18:48 ►

History, Peter Gorman

00:18:50 ►

is going to collect things for our permanent

00:18:51 ►

hall. I called up airplane

00:18:54 ►

companies. I got free tickets for years.

00:18:57 ►

I would

00:18:58 ►

say, would you like a copy of the

00:19:00 ►

letter thanking you

00:19:01 ►

to put in your stockholders report?

00:19:04 ►

Because you’ll have that. All you’ve got to do

00:19:06 ►

is give me a couple of free tickets.

00:19:08 ►

Yes. And you were the editor

00:19:09 ►

of High Times. Yes.

00:19:11 ►

And I was freelancing for Omni.

00:19:14 ►

Or Playboy. And being the editor of High Times

00:19:16 ►

did you get in trouble down there?

00:19:18 ►

No, I never mentioned that.

00:19:19 ►

That did not come up. No, no, no.

00:19:23 ►

I was smart enough

00:19:24 ►

from New York City, hip enough

00:19:25 ►

to know, hip enough to know, you don’t mix and match.

00:19:29 ►

Were filing stories?

00:19:31 ►

Not very many. From Peru, for High Times, no.

00:19:35 ►

So there were drug enforcement agents down?

00:19:39 ►

That was a whole different time. When I left High Times in 98,

00:19:46 ►

and we opened a bar, a restaurant,

00:19:49 ►

that was a whole very different time than the first 15 years of mine down there.

00:19:52 ►

Once we opened the bar and restaurant,

00:19:53 ►

I was no longer associated with High Times.

00:19:55 ►

I was no longer anything.

00:19:57 ►

I had left the magazine.

00:19:59 ►

We opened the bar.

00:20:00 ►

We were going to live there for a couple of years.

00:20:02 ►

Our kids were born there.

00:20:03 ►

We thought it would be a good time

00:20:04 ►

to bring them back to school there

00:20:05 ►

to remember their cousins, their grandma,

00:20:07 ►

and, you know, grandpa, and all that stuff.

00:20:11 ►

And when we opened the bar,

00:20:14 ►

yes, we became, we opened the bar in a very difficult,

00:20:18 ►

probably the toughest block in town.

00:20:20 ►

There was a port, so you had 50 or 100 men

00:20:24 ►

who were moving staples up and down a mud slope

00:20:26 ►

to waiting trucks

00:20:29 ►

which would be

00:20:31 ►

hired to carry that material to

00:20:32 ►

amazanes, to the warehouses

00:20:34 ►

where it would be stored, whether it’s cement

00:20:36 ►

or toilet seats, until it would be

00:20:38 ►

distributed somewhere else

00:20:39 ►

so these 50

00:20:42 ►

men are carrying ungodly weights

00:20:45 ►

maybe, you know, a guy weighs 140 pounds

00:20:50 ►

and he’s got to carry up a motor car that weighs 700 pounds on his back

00:20:54 ►

and all he’s got is one other guy to help spot it

00:20:57 ►

or he’s carrying a motorcycle down a muddy slope in the rain

00:21:01 ►

one slip and his knee’s gone, he’s crippled forever

00:21:04 ►

and it weighs 300 pounds.

00:21:06 ►

He weighs 110.

00:21:08 ►

This is what they did for a living.

00:21:10 ►

They were an angry, strong,

00:21:13 ►

badass bunch of people.

00:21:15 ►

The guys on the trucks

00:21:16 ►

were like picking up those motorcycles

00:21:19 ►

and passing them to their friends

00:21:21 ►

on the back of the truck.

00:21:23 ►

They were strong, angry, badass.

00:21:26 ►

And they smoked coca base that was unrefined,

00:21:29 ►

and they drank Aguero de Ente cane liquor

00:21:31 ►

that was, at the time, when it was not so expensive,

00:21:36 ►

almost always infused with kerosene or gasoline

00:21:38 ►

to give it a little extra bump.

00:21:40 ►

So you were dealing with crazy people by the end of the day.

00:21:44 ►

To get to our bar bar you had to pass through

00:21:46 ►

the gauntlet of a hundred of these people

00:21:49 ►

no one

00:21:50 ►

was willing to come into our bar

00:21:52 ►

except for a few crazy

00:21:55 ►

expats, right?

00:21:56 ►

a few locals

00:21:57 ►

and the military and the DEA guys

00:22:01 ►

and the guys who worked for

00:22:03 ►

you know, spraying for Plan Colombia, you know,

00:22:05 ►

spraying the herbicides.

00:22:06 ►

So we had a pretty tough crowd there.

00:22:09 ►

We had a pretty tough crowd

00:22:10 ►

and I’d have my bong hitters

00:22:13 ►

High Times t-shirt there

00:22:14 ►

from playing softball with High Times,

00:22:16 ►

the bong hitters.

00:22:18 ►

Sometimes there’d be a sign up that said,

00:22:19 ►

I am a reporter.

00:22:20 ►

Everything you say will be recorded and published.

00:22:24 ►

I did not find as an editor, executive editor, editor-in-chief of High Times,

00:22:29 ►

a huge hassle from the U.S. government.

00:22:34 ►

Once in a while, Chep would call me and say,

00:22:37 ►

there are men with suits at the door. They want to come in.

00:22:41 ►

And they’re saying, it’ll only take a minute.

00:22:43 ►

And I would say, don’t let them in, that’s just FBI.

00:22:46 ►

Maybe I’d written a story about something that I shouldn’t have known about.

00:22:51 ►

But you see, when we had the bar,

00:22:54 ►

you had a 28 or a 30-year-old guy,

00:22:56 ►

even if he’s the toughest,

00:22:58 ►

and please, military American, don’t come down on me for this,

00:23:02 ►

even the toughest soldier,

00:23:04 ►

a man who could

00:23:05 ►

beat me to death with my own limbs

00:23:08 ►

if he wanted to, if he’s

00:23:09 ►

been away from home for some months,

00:23:12 ►

if he’s in Peru, and if he accidentally

00:23:13 ►

gets drunk,

00:23:16 ►

he’s likely to start sharing things

00:23:17 ►

that he shouldn’t share.

00:23:19 ►

And he’s going to share them with a bartender.

00:23:22 ►

And he’s going to forget the

00:23:23 ►

bartender is recording his conversation. to forget the bartender is recording his conversation.

00:23:27 ►

Even if the bartender said, I’m turning the tape recorder on.

00:23:31 ►

Because what you’re telling me is going to be illegal.

00:23:33 ►

I will have to publish this in the new site, NarcoNews.com, run by Al Jordano in Mexico.

00:23:40 ►

And it’s going to appear on that site in 24 hours.

00:23:44 ►

And then they’re going to kill the operation.

00:23:47 ►

I don’t care.

00:23:49 ►

I just want to tell you,

00:23:50 ►

I really don’t like killing children so much.

00:23:53 ►

I just, I didn’t know.

00:23:55 ►

I thought it was grown man, and I shot, and I didn’t realize.

00:23:58 ►

Yeah, get it off your chest.

00:24:00 ►

I’m a prince, aren’t I?

00:24:03 ►

And Algea Downs’ site was getting quite a lot of attention at the time

00:24:06 ►

probably still does but it was

00:24:08 ►

so new it was the first real

00:24:10 ►

anti-drug war from Central and

00:24:12 ►

South America information out there

00:24:14 ►

that it was getting whatever

00:24:16 ►

interest there was he got it all

00:24:18 ►

and so in that

00:24:22 ►

case I had some people who really didn’t

00:24:24 ►

like me,

00:24:25 ►

and I knew from there I was getting flack

00:24:27 ►

from the U.S. government sometimes,

00:24:29 ►

and I’d get some warnings.

00:24:31 ►

I don’t know that the government put out the warnings,

00:24:34 ►

but, you know, I don’t know if they were official

00:24:36 ►

or it was just some guy who didn’t like me who said,

00:24:40 ►

but at our bar, the people who came to the bar,

00:24:43 ►

they were all like,

00:24:44 ►

look, we’re not allowed to come to your bar, we’re off limits,

00:24:47 ►

but they trained me for a half million dollars.

00:24:49 ►

What are they going to do, fire me because I like your hamburgers?

00:24:52 ►

And so those guys came anyway, even though we were off limits.

00:24:56 ►

And they told us stuff, and we got credit for having two or three operations shut down

00:25:03 ►

before they ever came off.

00:25:04 ►

That was about cocaine,

00:25:06 ►

right? It was generally, well,

00:25:09 ►

no, it also

00:25:09 ►

included the FARC rebels when the FARC,

00:25:12 ►

the FARC, Colombia’s

00:25:13 ►

revolutionaries, had been given

00:25:16 ►

a space in Colombia,

00:25:18 ►

an area, a state

00:25:20 ►

or two, where as long as

00:25:22 ►

they stayed inside, the military would not

00:25:23 ►

come in to try to get them.

00:25:26 ►

If they came outside, they were free, but they were promised. Well, during the time they were

00:25:31 ►

given that state, the U.S. military was training, I think it was two or three brigades of jungle

00:25:38 ►

specialists who would be ready when the government took away the protected area to come on down and force them into the Putumayo River

00:25:48 ►

where a team of Americans,

00:25:52 ►

former, I mean freelancers, but former military guys,

00:25:55 ►

would be waiting to pick them off as they arrived on the river.

00:26:02 ►

That, my story about that,

00:26:06 ►

talking about

00:26:09 ►

when it was going to happen,

00:26:12 ►

that the boats had been brought in,

00:26:13 ►

12 boats had been brought in, that there were 14 men,

00:26:16 ►

that it was a SEAL unit

00:26:17 ►

of former SEALs who were no longer

00:26:20 ►

officially with the U.S. government.

00:26:21 ►

They were like CIA contractors.

00:26:26 ►

That got shut down.S. government. They were like CIA contractors. That got shut down.

00:26:28 ►

It never happened.

00:26:30 ►

The U.S. government was really,

00:26:32 ►

really upset with me for that.

00:26:34 ►

I thought I was saving hundreds

00:26:35 ►

of innocent women and children’s lives.

00:26:38 ►

Well, you did, right?

00:26:39 ►

I think so.

00:26:41 ►

On the other hand,

00:26:43 ►

the Colombian government

00:26:45 ►

and the U.S. government would have been real proud

00:26:47 ►

and they would have minimized those deaths

00:26:49 ►

and talked about the running FARC.

00:26:52 ►

The FARC were on the run

00:26:53 ►

and our people took thousands into custody

00:26:56 ►

or hundreds into custody

00:26:57 ►

and thousands are now going to jail

00:27:00 ►

at the end of the revolution.

00:27:01 ►

American business can go back to work in Colombia

00:27:03 ►

without worrying about the revolutionaries.

00:27:06 ►

So American business would have loved it

00:27:07 ►

if that had gone down. But no one understood

00:27:10 ►

what was really going to happen.

00:27:12 ►

The people fleeing the

00:27:13 ►

pincher movement from the U.S. government

00:27:15 ►

were going to include those wives and children.

00:27:18 ►

They were going to end up

00:27:19 ►

just like when the guy

00:27:22 ►

cried and said, I thought it was a grown-up

00:27:23 ►

and didn’t realize it was killing a kid,

00:27:26 ►

they were going to end up in the crosshairs.

00:27:28 ►

Whoever came out was going to,

00:27:29 ►

stood the chance of getting hit with a stray bullet

00:27:34 ►

or with a bullet in tension

00:27:35 ►

until the soldier realized,

00:27:37 ►

or the ex-soldier realized,

00:27:38 ►

the former soldier realized,

00:27:39 ►

my goodness, I didn’t mean,

00:27:41 ►

I didn’t know it was a woman.

00:27:42 ►

I just saw the movement.

00:27:44 ►

It was a mirror in her hand. It wasn’t a gun was a woman. I just saw the movement. It was

00:27:45 ►

a mirror in her hand. It wasn’t a gun, you know, but I saw the blink of light. Bang.

00:27:50 ►

Gosh, a pregnant woman. So yeah, I think I did a good job.

00:27:55 ►

Did anybody from the American government or the Peruvian government ever threaten or say,

00:28:01 ►

you know, you should get out of here. Or even private interests.

00:28:07 ►

Yeah.

00:28:10 ►

A lot.

00:28:12 ►

But when I was taught to smuggle,

00:28:17 ►

I did several stories about smuggling probably at times.

00:28:20 ►

The smugglers always made it clear,

00:28:21 ►

you smuggle in plain sight.

00:28:24 ►

If you hide it, it will be found.

00:28:27 ►

Just walk through.

00:28:28 ►

When they say, what’s in the box, just say, oh, I’ve got dope in the box.

00:28:31 ►

Ah, yeah, sure, get out of here.

00:28:34 ►

If you say, I don’t have dope in the box, they’re going to look in that box,

00:28:36 ►

they’re going to find your dope, and you’re going to jail.

00:28:40 ►

If you wrote, people would tell me you better write under a fake name,

00:28:43 ►

they won’t know it’s you.

00:28:44 ►

I thought, if I write it in a fake name, then they can kill me and no one even knows why I died.

00:28:51 ►

If I write under my real name, and if they know where to find me because I’ve got a bar,

00:28:56 ►

then they might say, he’s just such a jerk.

00:29:01 ►

And we can leave him alone.

00:29:03 ►

Because he’s not doing anything wrong.

00:29:05 ►

He’s telling everybody he’s a reporter.

00:29:08 ►

He’s not cheating anybody.

00:29:09 ►

He’s not sneaking.

00:29:11 ►

Did they try to recruit you?

00:29:13 ►

No.

00:29:14 ►

Nobody ever tried to recruit you?

00:29:15 ►

No.

00:29:16 ►

No.

00:29:17 ►

And the threats were pretty clear.

00:29:20 ►

But I don’t know where they came from.

00:29:23 ►

You know, if somebody comes in and says, you know, you could be dead this week. I don’t know if that came from. You know, if somebody comes in and says,

00:29:25 ►

you know, you could be dead this week.

00:29:27 ►

I don’t know if that’s a real threat or not.

00:29:30 ►

Am I a little scared when I left the bar that night at midnight and I’m alone?

00:29:33 ►

Yeah.

00:29:35 ►

I double check.

00:29:36 ►

Did I try to keep one of my clients in there to say,

00:29:38 ►

you walk out first, you walk out first,

00:29:40 ►

just in case there’s going to be a snipe, right?

00:29:42 ►

Of course you’re scared to death.

00:29:45 ►

I have a big question.

00:29:47 ►

I’m not exactly sure how to ask it,

00:29:51 ►

but what is Peter Gorman’s relationship to fear?

00:29:57 ►

He doesn’t fear the things that I fear,

00:30:00 ►

snakes and spiders and guys with machetes.

00:30:03 ►

snakes and spiders and guys with machetes.

00:30:10 ►

I’m probably the most fearful human you ever saw.

00:30:13 ►

I’m wracked with fear at all times.

00:30:16 ►

I’m fearful that I’m not man enough.

00:30:19 ►

I’m fearful that she doesn’t think I’m cute anymore.

00:30:22 ►

I’m fearful that a rat is in the house and I have to call my sons.

00:30:23 ►

Mice, I’m not so bad about. Rats kill. I have to call my sons. Mice are not so bad, but rats kill.

00:30:26 ►

I have to call my sons and say,

00:30:27 ►

you have to come here now

00:30:28 ►

because I’m going to have to commit suicide

00:30:30 ►

if this rat stays in the house

00:30:32 ►

and the darn cats are not chasing it.

00:30:34 ►

They think it’s cute.

00:30:36 ►

So I, you know,

00:30:38 ►

I like to act like I’m not particularly cheerful.

00:30:41 ►

But if you eat bacteria, you don’t care about it.

00:30:43 ►

There’s not, what can I do about it?

00:30:45 ►

If any negativity is going to have to happen,

00:30:47 ►

it has to happen to me.

00:30:49 ►

Right.

00:30:49 ►

And the universe obliges.

00:30:52 ►

And so I’ve had my stomach explode,

00:30:54 ►

intestines explode.

00:30:56 ►

I’ve had this,

00:30:56 ►

had the shishibib bite.

00:30:58 ►

I’ve had the malaria.

00:31:00 ►

I’ve had…

00:31:00 ►

Several times.

00:31:01 ►

Yeah.

00:31:02 ►

I mean, a host of things

00:31:04 ►

that most people really wouldn’t want.

00:31:07 ►

And I actually don’t want.

00:31:09 ►

But I’m really glad that I had them.

00:31:11 ►

But now.

00:31:13 ►

Forgot spider.

00:31:14 ►

Yeah, and the spider bites.

00:31:15 ►

It made holes in my leg.

00:31:18 ►

I mean, the bites down here started opening up holes everywhere.

00:31:21 ►

Huge holes.

00:31:22 ►

They were huge at the time.

00:31:23 ►

To let the poison out.

00:31:26 ►

Because it was going to be septic.

00:31:26 ►

It was septic.

00:31:30 ►

Most people, after the first bite, you know, that

00:31:31 ►

would be it.

00:31:34 ►

So,

00:31:35 ►

I, you know,

00:31:37 ►

those things weren’t going to make me quit.

00:31:39 ►

No. My

00:31:41 ►

problem, and where I really

00:31:44 ►

screwed up, and screwed up the marriage and screwed up a bunch, was that there have been periods when I simply drink too damn much, and I think I’m funny and cute, and the people around me, the people that love me, think you’re worrisome, a pain in the ass, and you are ruining everything.

00:32:03 ►

and you are ruining everything.

00:32:06 ►

And I think I’m just being the funniest, cutest guy in the world,

00:32:09 ►

and she doesn’t, and she’s right.

00:32:12 ►

So you asked me earlier, and I’ve never answered the question,

00:32:14 ►

what drugs did I do at the bar?

00:32:17 ►

Typically, I have a couple of cups of coffee every day.

00:32:23 ►

I mix decaf, real good quality decaf, half and half with caffeinated,

00:32:26 ►

and it’s usually limited to two cups a day, two and a half.

00:32:30 ►

I’ll eat ice cream a couple of times a week if I have the chance.

00:32:37 ►

If I don’t, maybe at least once a month I’ll treat myself to ice cream or a couple of M&Ms or some kind of candy.

00:32:44 ►

I drink wine, generally two bottles a day or a bottle and a half a day,

00:32:51 ►

which I don’t particularly think is bad these days, but in the past, if it was 35, 45 beers in a day,

00:32:56 ►

you know, that was a lot, you know.

00:32:57 ►

And when I had the bar, I started at 7 in the morning.

00:33:01 ►

You know, we served liters, I mean, three-quarter liters of beer.

00:33:06 ►

At the end of the day,

00:33:06 ►

if it was 30

00:33:07 ►

three-quarter liters of beer,

00:33:09 ►

you were really drunk

00:33:10 ►

and you were an ass

00:33:11 ►

and you were a jerk.

00:33:12 ►

And you were yelling

00:33:13 ►

at the people you loved.

00:33:14 ►

Most people call you

00:33:14 ►

an alcoholic.

00:33:15 ►

Yeah.

00:33:16 ►

Did you think of yourself

00:33:17 ►

as an alcoholic?

00:33:17 ►

No.

00:33:18 ►

I’d already quit

00:33:19 ►

for 15 years at one stage.

00:33:20 ►

I quit for a few years

00:33:21 ►

at another stage.

00:33:23 ►

When it’s time

00:33:23 ►

to clean up the act,

00:33:24 ►

it’s time to clean up the act. You know? It’s just that you often another stage. When it’s time to clean up the act, it’s time to clean up the act.

00:33:26 ►

It’s just that you often don’t see

00:33:28 ►

that it’s time to clean up the act for

00:33:29 ►

the year that you’re

00:33:31 ►

bad. The rest of the time

00:33:33 ►

you can say, well, I’m pretty good, you know what I mean?

00:33:36 ►

I’m seeing what I’m doing and I’m controlling it.

00:33:39 ►

Did you use

00:33:39 ►

ayahuasca ever to try to get off

00:33:41 ►

the blues?

00:33:43 ►

No, I never saw a reason to try to get off booze.

00:33:45 ►

I happen to like red wine. I don’t think it’s a big deal.

00:33:48 ►

Would I take another drink of gin?

00:33:50 ►

I haven’t had gin in

00:33:50 ►

since when?

00:33:53 ►

97 or something when we moved to Peru.

00:33:56 ►

I never had gin.

00:33:59 ►

Tell us about your conversation with Albert Hoffman.

00:34:03 ►

I’ve heard the tape. It’s hilarious.

00:34:06 ►

Most of the people on

00:34:07 ►

Psychedelic Salon have heard it. So just

00:34:09 ►

give us your version.

00:34:11 ►

Well, I decided to do a 50-year

00:34:13 ►

anniversary of LSD.

00:34:16 ►

And in my

00:34:17 ►

vision for High Times, that meant

00:34:20 ►

I’m going to use Albert Hoffman as

00:34:21 ►

a central interview.

00:34:24 ►

And I’m going to have somebody write the story of LSD

00:34:27 ►

but I’ll interview 15 or 20 people

00:34:31 ►

who were instrumental in getting the word out about LSD

00:34:34 ►

to write or interview them

00:34:39 ►

to be able to pull 300 or 400 words, a column or two

00:34:41 ►

people like Leary and Ginsberg and

00:34:45 ►

Beresford and

00:34:48 ►

a host, a host of people,

00:34:50 ►

Kate Kesey and Ken Babs,

00:34:52 ►

what I would,

00:34:54 ►

what it was like

00:34:55 ►

for them when LSD hit.

00:34:58 ►

And then Hoffman’s the centerpiece.

00:35:02 ►

So,

00:35:03 ►

I tried to reach Mr. Hoffman

00:35:05 ►

several times

00:35:06 ►

and I didn’t get him

00:35:08 ►

and I finally got him one night

00:35:10 ►

and

00:35:11 ►

I’m used to as a reporter

00:35:14 ►

when I get the subject

00:35:17 ►

I explain who I am

00:35:19 ►

what it is I want

00:35:20 ►

and then I try to say I really only need 10 minutes

00:35:23 ►

of your time

00:35:24 ►

give me 10 minutes, I’m lying, I want 3 hours but if I to say, I really only need ten minutes of your time. Give me ten

00:35:25 ►

minutes. I’m lying. I want three hours. But if I can get them interested in the ten minutes,

00:35:29 ►

they’ll forget dinner and they’ll let me do my thing. So that’s what I wanted with Mr.

00:35:34 ►

Hoffman. And Albert instead began with, well, how much do you pay me? Here in the United States, you can’t pay someone for an interview, or it’s not

00:35:48 ►

an interview. You know, live TV, you don’t pay for. Lady on the street, you just saw

00:35:53 ►

a dog get run over, what happened? If she charges money, she’ll make up whatever story

00:35:58 ►

you want, so of course you can’t pay her. It’s against the rules of journalism. In Europe,

00:36:03 ►

against the rules of journalism.

00:36:07 ►

In Europe, people get paid for their time.

00:36:11 ►

So what ensued when I reached Albert Hoffman and my tape was running

00:36:12 ►

was an argument about

00:36:14 ►

how much money am I making for the story

00:36:18 ►

and how much will I give him for the story

00:36:21 ►

and me trying to explain I can’t pay him anything

00:36:25 ►

and him saying, what you’re getting paid,

00:36:27 ►

what am I getting paid?

00:36:29 ►

Why, you’re important and I’m not

00:36:31 ►

but I’m the subject. So what’s going

00:36:33 ►

on here? And in the middle

00:36:36 ►

of that, there was a beep

00:36:37 ►

on my phone and it was another phone

00:36:40 ►

call.

00:36:42 ►

And I thought

00:36:43 ►

about it for a moment and I asked Mr. Hoffman,

00:36:47 ►

Albert, would you mind holding on a minute?

00:36:49 ►

I’ll get rid of this person.

00:36:51 ►

And I clicked to the other line,

00:36:53 ►

never really occurring to me that he would hang up.

00:36:57 ►

And on the other line,

00:36:59 ►

Hello, Peter.

00:37:01 ►

This is Laura, Laura Huxley.

00:37:03 ►

Yeah, so good to hear from you. Laura Huxley, this is H. Laura Huxley. Yeah, so good to hear from you.

00:37:05 ►

Laura Huxley, this is

00:37:07 ►

Huxley’s wife. This is

00:37:09 ►

the Doors of Perceptions muse.

00:37:11 ►

This is it.

00:37:13 ►

I said, Laura, I can’t talk now.

00:37:16 ►

I’m on the phone with Albert Hoffman.

00:37:18 ►

Oh, dear Albert.

00:37:20 ►

Dear Albert,

00:37:21 ►

please tell dear Albert

00:37:23 ►

I love him so much.

00:37:25 ►

He is just someone I love.

00:37:28 ►

Tell him Laura says hello and sends him a lot of love and maybe a hug, whatever it was.

00:37:34 ►

So I said, great, I’ll call you back when I finish with Hoffman.

00:37:36 ►

Click.

00:37:37 ►

Albert, I’m waiting on the phone for you, and you’re taking on the phone?

00:37:43 ►

That was Laura.

00:37:45 ►

Laura?

00:37:46 ►

Yes, yes, yes.

00:37:48 ►

That was, sorry, that was Laura Huxley.

00:37:51 ►

Laura!

00:37:52 ►

How is Laura doing?

00:37:55 ►

And he went into a two-minute rapture, I think,

00:37:58 ►

about Laura Huxley,

00:37:59 ►

and what a beautiful woman she was,

00:38:01 ►

and made him kind of forget about the money thing.

00:38:04 ►

So in the end I said,

00:38:05 ►

I’ll give you half the money I’m making.

00:38:06 ►

I’ll make $300 for the story.

00:38:08 ►

I’ll give you $150 or something like that.

00:38:10 ►

I’m sure I never paid him.

00:38:11 ►

I knew I was lying at the time.

00:38:13 ►

I hope my fingers are crossed.

00:38:14 ►

I had kids at the time.

00:38:16 ►

I couldn’t pay him half my money.

00:38:20 ►

And then he gave me two hours

00:38:22 ►

of a wonderful, wonderful interview.

00:38:25 ►

But there was that moment in the beginning

00:38:27 ►

where is he going to be back on the line when I click?

00:38:30 ►

And Laura Huxley saved the day.

00:38:33 ►

What do you think was your main thing you wanted to get from Hoffman?

00:38:38 ►

Was there anything maybe that he had never addressed that you were able to get?

00:38:41 ►

By the 50th anniversary

00:38:46 ►

of LSD,

00:38:49 ►

he’d pretty much addressed everything

00:38:51 ►

he could.

00:38:53 ►

But he hadn’t told me.

00:38:57 ►

And every time

00:38:57 ►

someone tells a story, there’s a slightly different

00:38:59 ►

version. They emphasize

00:39:01 ►

a point or they de-emphasize another

00:39:03 ►

point. And so I basically wanted the story of how did you stumble onto this?

00:39:10 ►

Just what everyone else wanted.

00:39:12 ►

How did you stumble onto it when you did stumble onto it

00:39:15 ►

and you went home and it was on your fingers

00:39:17 ►

and you realized the whole world was shape-shifting in front of you

00:39:21 ►

on a bicycle ride home in Basel, what was that like?

00:39:26 ►

And I knew he told the story, but I knew my voice was a fresh voice.

00:39:31 ►

He would tell the same story with a fresh attitude.

00:39:35 ►

And he told a wonderful version of it to me, just wonderful.

00:39:40 ►

And, of course, once I had Hoffman in the can, then everyone else, everyone else had to say,

00:39:48 ►

well, I’m included.

00:39:49 ►

You’ve already got Hoffman.

00:39:50 ►

Well, I was going to be too busy, but now I’m thrilled with, you know, to be part of this.

00:39:57 ►

And that was vital to me, and it made one of the best issues Hot Times ever had.

00:40:02 ►

Did you talk about his micro-dubdosing that he did later in life?

00:40:07 ►

Do you know about that?

00:40:08 ►

A little bit.

00:40:09 ►

He talked about some things that I thought.

00:40:12 ►

He talked about Leary coming there.

00:40:15 ►

What did he think of Leary?

00:40:16 ►

Oh, he thought Leary was an asshole.

00:40:19 ►

Or an ass.

00:40:20 ►

I shouldn’t add to it.

00:40:21 ►

He thought he was kind of an ass because he was way too public,

00:40:25 ►

and he knew he was going to get in trouble for being public,

00:40:29 ►

and then he resented being in trouble once he was public.

00:40:33 ►

And Hoffman thought, you know, that he told me, at least at that moment,

00:40:38 ►

that he thought Larry was too far out on a limb to complain about being in trouble,

00:40:46 ►

being out on a limb. complain about being in trouble being out on a limb that he brought it on himself

00:40:49 ►

yeah

00:40:50 ►

but he also told me

00:40:52 ►

that

00:40:53 ►

oh yo yo yo yo

00:40:56 ►

ayahuasca analogs

00:41:02 ►

the author of ayahuasca Analogues

00:41:05 ►

a younger fellow

00:41:09 ►

Hoffman told a couple of stories

00:41:13 ►

that night

00:41:15 ►

about

00:41:16 ►

spending time with Schultes

00:41:18 ►

and Wasson

00:41:20 ►

and going to Mexico

00:41:21 ►

and spending time with a younger author,

00:41:26 ►

the fellow who wrote Ayahuasca Analogues.

00:41:30 ►

Did Hoffman take Ayahuasca?

00:41:32 ►

No.

00:41:34 ►

But he talked about eating magic mushrooms

00:41:36 ►

and watching the fellow who wrote Ayahuasca Analogues,

00:41:41 ►

watching his wife dance under the moonlight

00:41:43 ►

and describing being 90 years old

00:41:46 ►

and saying, I was so young when I watched her dance. And she’ll face next to me and

00:41:54 ►

was in the other side. Who would guess? We are the fathers of the whole movement. We were not trying to be.

00:42:06 ►

We were scientists.

00:42:11 ►

And there she was, dancing in the moonlight.

00:42:16 ►

And there we were, 20 years old again.

00:42:20 ►

I mean, he was bringing tears to your eyes,

00:42:24 ►

listening to him from 4,000 miles, 5,000 miles away,

00:42:31 ►

describing being in Mexico with the other two and some other famous people.

00:42:33 ►

Was Hoffman afraid of Iron Man stuff?

00:42:40 ►

I don’t think he was a drug user or a medicine user.

00:42:41 ►

He was a scientist. He accidentally wound up with the

00:42:45 ►

LSD and he tried it

00:42:47 ►

subsequently a few more times

00:42:49 ►

to see if he could replicate

00:42:52 ►

the experience.

00:42:54 ►

And after that, I don’t believe

00:42:56 ►

he used it ever again.

00:42:58 ►

I’m told that in later

00:43:00 ►

life he was taking it every day.

00:43:02 ►

He might have been.

00:43:04 ►

He did not tell me that.

00:43:07 ►

The other people that you talked to for that issue, who else?

00:43:14 ►

Well, to me, the favorite one, I’d already spoken to Allen Ginsberg several times.

00:43:21 ►

Do you have a good Allen Ginsberg story?

00:43:20 ►

several times.

00:43:22 ►

We have a good Allen Ginsberg story.

00:43:25 ►

Allen Ginsberg was a pain in the butt.

00:43:26 ►

He,

00:43:30 ►

everything he said was poetry.

00:43:31 ►

And he hated to be edited.

00:43:34 ►

So he would make it real clear,

00:43:36 ►

really clear at the beginning of it too.

00:43:39 ►

Well,

00:43:40 ►

I talk,

00:43:42 ►

I speak,

00:43:43 ►

poetry comes,

00:43:48 ►

evoke soul-searing.

00:43:53 ►

If you edit, I will have you killed.

00:43:58 ►

I need to see the tape, the text, and the magazine.

00:44:10 ►

Side by side, side to side, side beside and side beside. I speak poetry, revelation.

00:44:18 ►

It was like, you big bopper. Not everything you speak is poetry. You don’t even make sense half the time, but you couldn’t say this to Allen Ginsberg. So you had to swear to him

00:44:22 ►

always, and maybe I did ten interviews with him over the years,

00:44:26 ►

I will give you the tape

00:44:28 ►

unedited, I will give you

00:44:30 ►

transcription unedited,

00:44:32 ►

and your employees

00:44:34 ►

will look at it and double check,

00:44:35 ►

and then I’ll show you the magazine layout.

00:44:39 ►

And of course,

00:44:40 ►

I never did. I had to edit the

00:44:42 ►

hell out of him just to make it make sense.

00:44:44 ►

He didn’t recognize that, but I was a very good editor.

00:44:47 ►

So you never got letters of complaint back from him?

00:44:50 ►

No, he always thought, like, finally, a writer who knows.

00:44:53 ►

And it was like, good, good.

00:44:55 ►

I’ve got several writers, writers who worked for me,

00:44:58 ►

not Ginsberg never worked for me,

00:44:59 ►

but writers who think every word they write is golden.

00:45:04 ►

And your job as editor of that story

00:45:06 ►

is to make such slender cuts,

00:45:10 ►

even if you’re cutting half the story,

00:45:13 ►

that they don’t notice.

00:45:15 ►

And they come back to you and say,

00:45:17 ►

ah, glad you didn’t cut anything.

00:45:21 ►

I’d be really pissed off.

00:45:22 ►

And you’re thinking, you gave me 7,000 words,

00:45:24 ►

I published 3,000, and you’re not

00:45:26 ►

noticing. Yeah, there were

00:45:28 ►

4,000 words that were no good and didn’t add

00:45:30 ►

anything. So, and that counts.

00:45:32 ►

You know, I love being a good editor.

00:45:35 ►

But I,

00:45:36 ►

to me, one of the favorites was

00:45:38 ►

Ken Kesey,

00:45:39 ►

because he was

00:45:42 ►

a hero from the first time I

00:45:44 ►

read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,

00:45:46 ►

from the time I heard about the bus, when I was still an 18-year-old kid or something,

00:45:51 ►

and missed all that because I wasn’t quite old enough to be one of the real hippies.

00:45:56 ►

It was another one of those moments, like with Dave Foreman,

00:45:59 ►

where you ask for inspiration.

00:46:04 ►

And trying to reach Ken Kesey,

00:46:07 ►

Wadey Gravy had given me his private phone number,

00:46:11 ►

which was Fishlips, with the right area code.

00:46:15 ►

And I had called Fishlips a hundred times

00:46:19 ►

and got no response.

00:46:22 ►

And then one day, I was watching TV,

00:46:25 ►

I knew I had to have him in this,

00:46:27 ►

and no one would give me another phone.

00:46:30 ►

His wife would either pick up the phone,

00:46:31 ►

or no one would pick up the phone.

00:46:33 ►

And I was at home,

00:46:35 ►

and I realized I’m watching an Oregon football game,

00:46:39 ►

Saturday afternoon.

00:46:41 ►

I said, Ken Kesey went to Oregon.

00:46:44 ►

He lives in Oregon. He must be watching this

00:46:46 ►

game. So I waited, and the moment halftime hit, I dialed blah, blah, blah, fish lips,

00:46:54 ►

and the phone got picked up, and it said, you got nine minutes. You’re not doing anything.

00:46:59 ►

I need nine minutes of your time to talk to you about LSD. You son of a bitch. When LSD hit, it dripped down

00:47:06 ►

from the sky like rain on

00:47:07 ►

like manna raining on

00:47:10 ►

heaven. And he just went into

00:47:11 ►

this most fantastic, beautiful poetry,

00:47:14 ►

prose poetry,

00:47:16 ►

and about seven minutes into it he said,

00:47:18 ►

now I have two minutes to get a

00:47:19 ►

goddamn beer. Click.

00:47:22 ►

So I had taken almost his whole

00:47:23 ►

halftime. Later I met him, and we had a good time remembering that story,

00:47:27 ►

but it was one of those, you know, football’s been very, very good to me.

00:47:33 ►

Let’s talk about Timothy Leary.

00:47:35 ►

Timothy Leary and I spoke together at, I’d spoken to him several times.

00:47:40 ►

He was always a very generous man when it was done.

00:47:44 ►

Anything I wanted, and

00:47:47 ►

he had no reason to be this nice, but anything I wanted, he gave me the time of day, even

00:47:52 ►

when he was older and dying. When he was definitely dying, we ended up speaking at a conference

00:47:57 ►

together, and I forget what the name of it was, but I decided I’m going to go into his,

00:48:03 ►

the rest of us shared like a small green room, you know, where people go before a show or before a conference. Timothy had his own room, so I went to Leary’s room, and there was someone there, his partner on stage that night, and they were talking about AIDS, and they were talking about diseases and about death.

00:48:25 ►

and about death, and I sat down and told him who I was,

00:48:28 ►

and he remembered, like, you know, I don’t remember a whole lot now because he was very ill, and he was like,

00:48:29 ►

but you call me a lot from high times, you know,

00:48:31 ►

and I keep talking to you, nice to meet you,

00:48:33 ►

and just very, very generous, very educated, very elegant man.

00:48:40 ►

I mean, he might have seemed out of line with Harvard 25 years earlier,

00:48:45 ►

but he was still kind of that East Coast.

00:48:50 ►

He carried himself like an East Coast intelligent, wonderful person

00:48:55 ►

who was generous with his time, with his ideas.

00:48:59 ►

I mean, I thought the world of him in person.

00:49:02 ►

I didn’t think the world of him in reading a lot of his material.

00:49:05 ►

I didn’t think he was a good writer.

00:49:06 ►

I thought he was a jerk when I was growing up.

00:49:09 ►

Why?

00:49:10 ►

Because he kept talking out loud about things

00:49:12 ►

that were just going to get people in trouble.

00:49:14 ►

And I didn’t think you should talk out loud

00:49:16 ►

about things that are going to get people in trouble.

00:49:19 ►

Because he might get away with it

00:49:21 ►

because he was a professor at Harvard,

00:49:23 ►

but all the kids who are going to follow his thing are going to end up in jail.

00:49:26 ►

So you kind of side with Adolf Huxley.

00:49:29 ►

You know, there’s a chapter in Timothy’s autobiography

00:49:32 ►

where he talks about the two kind of men on his shoulder.

00:49:37 ►

Huxley saying, this has been done for 3,000 years.

00:49:41 ►

It’s got to be secret.

00:49:43 ►

If it gets out to the public, that’s when the cops

00:49:45 ►

you know, it’s gone on forever.

00:49:48 ►

It’s for the elite.

00:49:50 ►

And then Ginsburg saying

00:49:51 ►

no, everybody

00:49:53 ►

needs to turn on and it’s going to

00:49:55 ►

stop the Vietnam War.

00:49:57 ►

And Timothy had to choose between those

00:49:59 ►

two characters. You know, like

00:50:01 ►

Pinocchio had the two characters on either

00:50:03 ►

side of his head. That’s the way I see it

00:50:06 ►

and he ended up going with Ginsburg

00:50:08 ►

which ended up

00:50:10 ►

causing his life

00:50:12 ►

to be the way it was

00:50:13 ►

constantly pursued by the

00:50:15 ►

government

00:50:16 ►

so you more or less sided with

00:50:20 ►

Huxley on that philosophical

00:50:22 ►

question

00:50:22 ►

early on I did

00:50:24 ►

well, in my

00:50:26 ►

experience, when I heard about

00:50:28 ►

Leary, you know, I didn’t

00:50:29 ►

necessarily like what I heard.

00:50:32 ►

You know, I mean, I was raised by a Republican.

00:50:35 ►

Eisenhower Republican,

00:50:36 ►

but it was still Republican.

00:50:39 ►

And it took

00:50:40 ►

a while for me to

00:50:42 ►

get my own opinions going.

00:50:44 ►

And

00:50:44 ►

my dad, you know, a good Lutheran,

00:50:49 ►

would have looked at somebody like Leary as a jerk.

00:50:54 ►

Just, he’s an idiot.

00:50:56 ►

He talks too much, he talks too loud,

00:50:57 ►

he wants to be the center of attention.

00:50:59 ►

And anyone who does those three things is an idiot,

00:51:03 ►

no matter what they do.

00:51:05 ►

And it really wasn’t until I began to talk with him in interviews

00:51:09 ►

that I realized how generous he was and what a nice human being he was

00:51:15 ►

and that he really didn’t like anyone having gone to jail for listening to him,

00:51:20 ►

that he really regretted that stuff,

00:51:23 ►

and that he would have phrased it differently if he was smarter

00:51:26 ►

but he recognized that he wasn’t smart enough to do that

00:51:29 ►

and so he really loved Ram Dass

00:51:32 ►

his partner in crime at Harvard

00:51:35 ►

but that he at the time

00:51:39 ►

didn’t know how to tone anything down

00:51:41 ►

and so he regretted not having

00:51:44 ►

a muzzle or a filter to filter out some of what he said.

00:51:50 ►

He was pretty clear about that.

00:51:51 ►

He wasn’t unhappy that he’d said it.

00:51:54 ►

He wished he’d have said it in a way that was less offensive.

00:51:58 ►

But he also recognized that if he’d said it in a less offensive way, no one would have heard it.

00:52:02 ►

So he was still kind of caught knowing

00:52:05 ►

he had done a great thing, knowing the price he paid, but knowing that other people had

00:52:10 ►

paid a price too. And that’s what I thought made him such a good human, that he got it.

00:52:16 ►

You don’t always get it right the first time. He got it.

00:52:20 ►

What about his work as a researcher?

00:52:24 ►

I’m not a scientist, so it’s not fair for me to talk.

00:52:27 ►

I really don’t know how to weigh in.

00:52:30 ►

I know his work with virtual reality is coming true.

00:52:36 ►

When you put on some of the new virtual reality,

00:52:39 ►

you really are in reality, and dinosaurs are eating you.

00:52:42 ►

It’s really horrible to get eaten by dinosaurs.

00:52:45 ►

reality and dinosaurs are eating you and it’s really horrible to get eaten by dinosaurs um and that’s going to get worse and worse as this stuff gets better and better but he was pushing

00:52:52 ►

this you know 30 years ago and he was right uh he was right about mushrooms he was uh right about

00:53:02 ►

so many things and then he was still very human and very flawed, and

00:53:08 ►

we all are, and so I’m not, nothing to hold against the guy. I think the guy’s life work

00:53:11 ►

stands for itself, you know, and stands by itself, and it certainly doesn’t even need

00:53:18 ►

to critique him. As a human, in those ten times we interacted,

00:53:25 ►

and those two or three times we physically met, I thought he was great.

00:53:29 ►

In the end, I ended up putting out a special issue of Timothy Leary after he died.

00:53:34 ►

And I could not resist doing that, so my respect was immense.

00:53:39 ►

Even though I didn’t agree with him early on.

00:53:45 ►

Terrence McKenna.

00:53:47 ►

Terence McKenna was a big shot long before I met him.

00:53:52 ►

And he was a wonderful, arrogant Irish imp.

00:53:56 ►

And I remember calling him once.

00:53:59 ►

We’d spoken 10 times, 20 times.

00:54:02 ►

And I called him once and said,

00:54:03 ►

Well, I really hate to do this,

00:54:05 ►

but I’m probably going to use you for a centerfold interview for a lot of times. And his response

00:54:10 ►

shocked me with a, Peter, well, I really don’t think you need to, you don’t need to pimp

00:54:18 ►

for me out there. I said, pimp for you? I was going to ask you questions everybody’s

00:54:24 ►

been afraid to ask for the last 20 years.

00:54:26 ►

Because you’re full of shit on so many levels

00:54:28 ►

that no matter how much good you do,

00:54:30 ►

you’re so wrong,

00:54:32 ►

your timeline is off by 100,000 years.

00:54:34 ►

It doesn’t make any sense.

00:54:36 ►

It’s brutal.

00:54:37 ►

Well, Peter, if you put it that way,

00:54:40 ►

maybe an interview is in order after all.

00:54:43 ►

So we liked each other.

00:54:46 ►

He liked the challenge.

00:54:48 ►

He threw down the gauntlet.

00:54:50 ►

A little bit.

00:54:51 ►

And his brother, Dennis,

00:54:52 ►

who really is something of a friend.

00:54:55 ►

I knew Dennis, I know Dennis much more than I know Terrence.

00:54:58 ►

Dennis would always say,

00:55:00 ►

Terrence’s good ideas come from me.

00:55:03 ►

And he was a charmer who was an idiot. That’s how Dennis thinks of Terrence’s good ideas come from me. And he was a charmer who was an idiot.

00:55:07 ►

That’s how Dennis thinks of Terrence.

00:55:09 ►

Or that’s what he’ll say sometimes.

00:55:12 ►

It just…

00:55:14 ►

I don’t know.

00:55:15 ►

I thought Terrence was great.

00:55:16 ►

When he would start talking,

00:55:18 ►

I swear, that guy kissed the blarney stuff.

00:55:21 ►

You couldn’t stop.

00:55:23 ►

It didn’t matter if bells were going off saying,

00:55:26 ►

that’s inconsistent with that.

00:55:27 ►

That doesn’t work with that.

00:55:29 ►

You just said two things that are opposite.

00:55:30 ►

You want to raise your hand and say,

00:55:31 ►

can I correct you, teacher?

00:55:33 ►

But your hand won’t move

00:55:34 ►

because he was so spellbinding.

00:55:36 ►

And he just sat there.

00:55:39 ►

Well, let’s talk about where the human brain comes from

00:55:42 ►

and speech comes from.

00:55:47 ►

And without moving, he had 300 people like mesmerized, like rats looking at a snake. It doesn’t matter if the

00:55:54 ►

rat could just walk away, it can’t. It’s going to eventually end up in the damn snake’s mouth.

00:55:59 ►

It can’t help itself. And then one of my greatest joys, the day I knew I made it.

00:56:06 ►

Now, tell me the author

00:56:08 ►

of Eden Cowgirls Get the Blues.

00:56:10 ►

Tom Robbins.

00:56:12 ►

I’m at home

00:56:14 ►

before

00:56:16 ►

I met Chippa,

00:56:17 ►

and I’m living alone

00:56:18 ►

on East 90th Street,

00:56:22 ►

and I get a phone call, and the phone

00:56:24 ►

call says, hello, this is Tom Robbins. I hope I get a phone call. And the phone call says,

00:56:25 ►

Hello, this is Tom Robbins.

00:56:28 ►

I hope I’m not bothering you.

00:56:29 ►

I said, Tom Robbins?

00:56:31 ►

The author, Tom Robbins.

00:56:32 ►

I’ve written a couple of books.

00:56:33 ►

Oh, Tom Robbins.

00:56:35 ►

Jesus.

00:56:36 ►

Yeah, cool.

00:56:37 ►

Are you calling me?

00:56:38 ►

What for?

00:56:38 ►

He said, I hope you don’t mind.

00:56:40 ►

Terrence gave me your number.

00:56:43 ►

Hold on.

00:56:44 ►

And before he said one more word,

00:56:46 ►

I was like, yes, yes, yes!

00:56:50 ►

Terrence gave Tom Robbins my number.

00:56:52 ►

And I said, what do you want?

00:56:52 ►

He said, it turns out you’re the one

00:56:54 ►

who knows everything about this frog.

00:56:56 ►

And I’m writing a book called

00:56:58 ►

Half Asleep in Frog’s Pajamas.

00:57:00 ►

And I need to talk to you about the frog

00:57:02 ►

because I don’t know anything about it.

00:57:04 ►

Of course, it turned out he was not talking about my frog, Sapo, now known often as Cambo.

00:57:09 ►

My new book is about that.

00:57:11 ►

But he was talking about the Bufotinan.

00:57:13 ►

He was talking about the cane toads.

00:57:16 ►

And so, in the end, I didn’t have a ton of information to give him.

00:57:21 ►

You know, so the phone call didn’t work.

00:57:22 ►

But the fact that Terence McKenna had me in his phone book

00:57:26 ►

to pass on to Tom Robinson to call me

00:57:29 ►

made me feel like, yes, I really am a writer.

00:57:35 ►

Somebody knows me.

00:57:37 ►

And that was just like one of the highlights of my writing career.

00:57:41 ►

Well, let’s go into Sappo since the subject came up.

00:57:41 ►

my riding career.

00:57:44 ►

Well, let’s go into sapo since the subject came up.

00:57:52 ►

Sapo is a medicine that is the protective goop, sweat,

00:57:57 ►

that comes off a frog called the phylumodusa bicolor.

00:58:02 ►

Here in aquariums in the States, it’s called the giant waxy monkey frog.

00:58:05 ►

It’s sold in aquariums, and it has no poisons.

00:58:07 ►

In the jungle,

00:58:08 ►

when it’s frightened,

00:58:11 ►

it gives off a thin layer of sudor, sweat,

00:58:14 ►

which,

00:58:17 ►

since its primary predator

00:58:19 ►

are tree constrictors, snakes,

00:58:21 ►

the frog will enter a snake’s mouth,

00:58:23 ►

get frightened,

00:58:24 ►

put this stuff off,

00:58:27 ►

the snake will freeze,

00:58:28 ►

and the frog’s got a moment

00:58:29 ►

to walk back out of the snake’s mouth

00:58:31 ►

and get away.

00:58:33 ►

Tell it from your story,

00:58:35 ►

how you first heard about it,

00:58:37 ►

and then how you…

00:58:37 ►

Okay, that’s what it is.

00:58:39 ►

I first heard about it,

00:58:40 ►

I was out with the Matzes,

00:58:42 ►

my Aruna,

00:58:43 ►

on the Rio Galvez,

00:58:44 ►

and I was at my friend, a man who

00:58:45 ►

became my friend, Pablo’s house.

00:58:48 ►

Pablo had four wives.

00:58:49 ►

He was the headman of a small camp.

00:58:51 ►

Him and his brother Antonio lived there.

00:58:54 ►

Alberto lived there.

00:58:56 ►

And Alberto had two wives.

00:58:57 ►

Pablo had four. And they were

00:58:59 ►

the two adults in the camp. Lots and

00:59:01 ►

lots of children around of all sorts of different ages.

00:59:05 ►

And…

00:59:05 ►

What year?

00:59:07 ►

00:59:10 ►

1986, early on.

00:59:12 ►

And I was on that trip

00:59:14 ►

with my brother-in-law, Steve Flores,

00:59:16 ►

who was acting as photographer for things.

00:59:19 ►

And it was a rainy day.

00:59:23 ►

And we had done a substance called Nunu the night before,

00:59:27 ►

or two days earlier.

00:59:29 ►

Snuff, tobacco, and Macambo,

00:59:31 ►

from a variation of chocolate,

00:59:35 ►

from the inner bark of a tree that produces chocolate.

00:59:40 ►

That was a fantastic medicine,

00:59:43 ►

and we had done a great deal of good hunting

00:59:44 ►

based on what we’d learned from the medicine. So now it was a fantastic medicine, and we had done a great deal of good hunting based on what we’d learned from the medicine.

00:59:47 ►

So now it was a rainy day,

00:59:50 ►

and Alberto offered to take Steve, my brother-in-law,

00:59:53 ►

out to a lake where there were lots of black caiman,

00:59:57 ►

lots of really ferocious caiman, crocodilians.

01:00:01 ►

And Steve jumped at the chance.

01:00:03 ►

Yes, yes, let’s go out there.

01:00:07 ►

And I said, I’ve already been around black caiman. they’re way too aggressive, I’m not really happy with that

01:00:09 ►

so I’m going to stay here

01:00:10 ►

and what I thought I would do is

01:00:13 ►

ask Pablo, I’d point to different things

01:00:15 ►

in the hut

01:00:17 ►

his number one wife’s hut, my shed

01:00:19 ►

and say, what is that, what is that

01:00:21 ►

what’s this little low stool you sit on, what’s that pot

01:00:23 ►

what do you call the fire, what do you call,

01:00:26 ►

so I would make a little dictionary.

01:00:29 ►

And I already knew that above the fire,

01:00:33 ►

people in the river often keep medicines they’ve collected,

01:00:36 ►

or seeds they’ve collected for next year’s planting,

01:00:39 ►

so above the fire, cockroaches, and there’s lots of them out there,

01:00:44 ►

won’t be able to get at them, and they won’t rot with the constant, cockroaches, and there’s lots of them out there, won’t be able to get at them,

01:00:45 ►

and they won’t rot with the constant change in humidity

01:00:48 ►

where it’s raining and then it’s dry and raining and dry,

01:00:51 ►

so they won’t get the fungal growth.

01:00:53 ►

So you keep things in bags or in little glass jars above a fire

01:00:58 ►

to keep them far enough above the fire so they’re not hot,

01:01:01 ►

but they’re not getting moist.

01:01:05 ►

And when I got to this particular bag,

01:01:07 ►

and I thought, okay, he’s going to tell me

01:01:08 ►

it’s a medicine, what kind,

01:01:10 ►

he suddenly, instead of giving the name,

01:01:13 ►

he pulls it down, opens it up,

01:01:14 ►

and there’s a thin stick in this little,

01:01:16 ►

kind of a plastic bag, like a waxy bag of some sort,

01:01:20 ►

a little thin stick, and he goes,

01:01:22 ►

Petron, sapo, sapo.

01:01:25 ►

I think it’s sapo, Io. I think it’s sapo.

01:01:26 ►

I don’t know what the word sapo means.

01:01:28 ►

All right?

01:01:29 ►

And for some reason, he thought,

01:01:32 ►

I wanted to do this.

01:01:34 ►

When I asked him what the name of the chair was

01:01:36 ►

or what a mother was, and he goes, titan.

01:01:39 ►

He knew I didn’t want a mother.

01:01:41 ►

I just wanted to know, how do you call a mother?

01:01:43 ►

But in this case,

01:01:45 ►

he decided I needed to do this stuff. And I didn’t know there was anything to do.

01:01:51 ►

So first he spits on the stick. And he starts moistening up what looks like dried lacquer or

01:02:00 ►

dried varnish on the stick. And he moistens it into a small paste. Petro Sappo, he says, offering it to me.

01:02:07 ►

Okay, I don’t know what the heck this is.

01:02:09 ►

And then he reaches into the fire,

01:02:11 ►

he reaches up to a crossbeam,

01:02:13 ►

and he’s got some vine on it,

01:02:15 ►

there’s vine up here like at Tamashii,

01:02:17 ►

and he snaps off a little piece of it,

01:02:19 ►

thrusts it in the fire,

01:02:21 ►

I still don’t know what’s going on and what we’re doing,

01:02:24 ►

takes it out, blows

01:02:25 ►

on it, and then in a split second, grabs my arm, holds it totally rock steady, didn’t

01:02:32 ►

give me any opportunity. I try to pull it away. This little 120 pounder was stronger

01:02:36 ►

than I was. I couldn’t move that arm. He takes that little stick and he burns me two or three

01:02:41 ►

times on the inside, twice on the inside of my forearm. And he scrapes away the burned skin

01:02:46 ►

and he takes the goop that he made

01:02:48 ►

from the stick that looked like lacquer

01:02:50 ►

and puts it on there

01:02:52 ►

and the whole time he keeps saying over and over,

01:02:54 ►

Petrodokia, Zappo, Zappodokia.

01:02:58 ►

And I looked to Moises,

01:02:59 ►

my fantastic guide who brought me out there

01:03:02 ►

and said, okay, we did the new news,

01:03:06 ►

so I trust this medicine won’t kill me,

01:03:07 ►

that medicine didn’t kill me.

01:03:08 ►

What is this stuff?

01:03:10 ►

And what’s going to happen? And Moises looks at me and says, I never saw this before.

01:03:14 ►

And ten seconds after I did it, I started…

01:03:17 ►

He was your shaman?

01:03:20 ►

Moises was not my shaman.

01:03:21 ►

Moises was my jungle survival teacher.

01:03:26 ►

And we would do the trips,

01:03:27 ►

walking, looking for Indian tribes

01:03:29 ►

in the middle of the jungle.

01:03:30 ►

And he would take money for it,

01:03:32 ►

telling me we’re not going to find anyone.

01:03:33 ►

But we kept crisscrossing back and forth.

01:03:35 ►

So we did a lot of work and walking together.

01:03:37 ►

But at the Matzahs,

01:03:40 ►

he,

01:03:42 ►

when I was given this substance,

01:03:44 ►

you know, 15 seconds, 20 seconds into it, my heart began to speed up.

01:03:51 ►

I began to sweat my forehead.

01:03:53 ►

I began to feel like clammy all over.

01:03:56 ►

And after a couple of minutes, I kind of was down on hands and knees.

01:04:01 ►

And a couple of minutes later, my heart was beating so fast.

01:04:03 ►

My pulse was so fast. I was sweating so profusely. I really, I was down on hands and knees, and a couple of minutes later, my heart was beating so fast, my pulse was so fast,

01:04:05 ►

I was sweating so profusely.

01:04:07 ►

I really, I was poisoned.

01:04:10 ►

And then I really couldn’t move much.

01:04:13 ►

I could moan, but I couldn’t move much.

01:04:14 ►

And Pablo’s kids are standing around me,

01:04:18 ►

kind of kicking me like, is the animal dead yet?

01:04:21 ►

You know, that’s what it felt like.

01:04:23 ►

That’s what it seemed like.

01:04:24 ►

It was like, I can’t respond, but

01:04:26 ►

they’re kicking me.

01:04:28 ►

I’m dead. They think I’m already

01:04:29 ►

dead. I’m not dead. I’m going to scream. I’m not dead.

01:04:32 ►

But I couldn’t say anything. I was in the throes

01:04:34 ►

of this horrific, horrible

01:04:35 ►

medicine that was going to just burn me up

01:04:38 ►

from going so fast.

01:04:40 ►

At some point, I must have blacked out, because

01:04:42 ►

when I woke up, I was in the

01:04:44 ►

hut that Steve and I had been given to use.

01:04:47 ►

It was unwalled, so it had a small roof, a couple of hanging mosquito nets with hammocks inside.

01:04:55 ►

And I stood up and was like, how did I get here? I’m not dead.

01:05:01 ►

And then I heard voices. I was like, who’s here?

01:05:06 ►

Turned around,

01:05:06 ►

there was no one there.

01:05:08 ►

Across the entire camp,

01:05:11 ►

Ma Xu and one of the other wives

01:05:12 ►

were talking in normal voices.

01:05:15 ►

He would say,

01:05:16 ►

ah,

01:05:16 ►

it sounded like they were shouting in my ears.

01:05:21 ►

And then I looked up,

01:05:22 ►

I heard some noise in the trail,

01:05:23 ►

I looked up,

01:05:24 ►

and I saw the slightest movement of leaves. I looked up. And I saw

01:05:25 ►

the slightest movement of leaves that I normally wouldn’t have seen. And then I suddenly realized

01:05:30 ►

I’m looking right through them. I’m seeing a group of monkeys, a troop of monkeys walking

01:05:34 ►

through. I never would have seen. My eyes, I could see the serrated edges of the leaves.

01:05:40 ►

I haven’t got this eyesight. And I stretched when I stretched it felt like 30 new muscles popped

01:05:46 ►

I’m strong

01:05:48 ►

I see, I hear

01:05:49 ►

what is this?

01:05:52 ►

and of course what it turned out to be

01:05:54 ►

was that this medicine

01:05:56 ►

Sapo, now called Cambo

01:05:58 ►

what I had done was become

01:06:02 ►

one of the first but certainly the first to publish the use of sapo frog sweat.

01:06:14 ►

Sapo actually means toad.

01:06:16 ►

In Spanish, the Matzahs Indians did not have a great grasp of Spanish at the time, so all amphibians were called sapos.

01:06:21 ►

have a great grasp of Spanish at the time.

01:06:24 ►

So all amphibians were called sapos. In real

01:06:26 ►

life, each one had a name. So some people

01:06:28 ►

say, well, the Matzahs were dumb if

01:06:30 ►

they didn’t know the difference between sapo and rana.

01:06:32 ►

That’s pretty distinct.

01:06:34 ►

You know, it’s pretty insignificant when

01:06:35 ►

you’re learning a new language.

01:06:37 ►

What was significant was that they called it

01:06:39 ►

dauket, which is the only frog in the jungle,

01:06:41 ►

or that they called dauket

01:06:43 ►

was that particular one, because each frog has its own name.

01:06:47 ►

And so they weren’t dumb,

01:06:49 ►

they just didn’t speak the Spanish language.

01:06:52 ►

The medicine I had taken when I wrote about it

01:06:55 ►

became, and when it was published in, I guess,

01:06:59 ►

Omni and several other magazines within a year,

01:07:03 ►

became the first public known comics,

01:07:06 ►

known, somebody might find an old book somewhere,

01:07:09 ►

but they haven’t yet,

01:07:10 ►

about the use of sapo as a medicine.

01:07:16 ►

But what was significant about it was

01:07:18 ►

there was a scientist in Italy, Vittorio Esparmer,

01:07:23 ►

who had twice made the finals

01:07:25 ►

for a Nobel Prize in medicine.

01:07:28 ►

He was a

01:07:28 ►

pharmacologist.

01:07:32 ►

And he was the fellow who

01:07:33 ►

isolated serotonin.

01:07:35 ►

So he was a big shot.

01:07:39 ►

And he

01:07:40 ►

thought he finally was going to win the Nobel

01:07:41 ►

with this. He had studied the

01:07:43 ►

amphibian skin of this particular frog,

01:07:46 ►

and he knew that it had proteins that were,

01:07:49 ►

dozens of proteins that were powerful.

01:07:52 ►

More powerful than similar proteins in the human body.

01:07:56 ►

But there was no history of human use.

01:07:59 ►

So he couldn’t test whether those proteins would kill someone or not.

01:08:03 ►

So when I went back to the museum and gave them

01:08:06 ►

the paper on that, and they would

01:08:08 ►

send things like those papers, like they sent

01:08:10 ►

the leaves that I badly collected

01:08:11 ►

to the leaf people. They sent the paper

01:08:14 ►

to the frog guy.

01:08:15 ►

Well, here’s a story about a frog that you’ve been working on.

01:08:18 ►

I mean, the museum was very good at disseminating

01:08:20 ►

the material. And he wrote back and said,

01:08:22 ►

you’ve used this?

01:08:23 ►

Do you have it? Can you get me some?

01:08:26 ►

Can you get me the frog? And so that gave me a few more trips to go down there until I could

01:08:30 ►

accomplish all that. And it turned out to be the most bioactive substance that had been found to

01:08:37 ►

date. And bioactive, and I’m not a scientist, so forgive me if I phrase it weakly, essentially means a substance that interacts with the human body

01:08:47 ►

as if the human body made it.

01:08:51 ►

In other words, no overdosing, no addiction potential,

01:08:57 ►

the same way that you have when you work out your muscles

01:09:02 ►

and then your muscles need a break,

01:09:04 ►

your body releases some lact is it lactate acid,

01:09:07 ►

to tell your body to slow down a little bit.

01:09:10 ►

Or it first releases some painkiller, endorphins,

01:09:13 ►

and that gives your body the strength to go on.

01:09:16 ►

And when your endorphins are pushing too much,

01:09:18 ►

the acid comes out to say stop.

01:09:20 ►

You’re about to ruin those muscles.

01:09:22 ►

But none of that becomes addictive physically,

01:09:25 ►

and none of that hurts your body.

01:09:27 ►

It’s your body.

01:09:27 ►

Everything’s working lock and key with your septicite.

01:09:30 ►

And so this medicine was a real breakthrough

01:09:36 ►

for the scientific community

01:09:38 ►

to realize we can begin working with amphibian skins,

01:09:42 ►

with humans.

01:09:43 ►

There’s a history of use now

01:09:45 ►

that Gorham published his story.

01:09:47 ►

Tell us about your book.

01:09:50 ►

Oh, let’s pause here.

01:09:51 ►

That’s all right.

01:09:53 ►

This is not important.

01:09:55 ►

As long as the podcast is important.

01:10:00 ►

In the last couple of years

01:10:02 ►

I started to write some books,

01:10:03 ►

put together old stories,

01:10:04 ►

put together old trip notes.

01:10:07 ►

And I guess in 2010, I wrote and self-published the book, Ayahuasca in My Blood, 25 Years of Amazon Dreaming, about my work with ayahuasca over the years.

01:10:18 ►

And earlier this year, 2015, I published a book called Sapa and My Soul, The Matzah’s Frog Medicine.

01:10:27 ►

And that

01:10:28 ►

book deals with how I

01:10:30 ►

first stumbled on it with Pablo

01:10:32 ►

in the village, how

01:10:34 ►

I watched them use it,

01:10:36 ►

different ways it was used medicinally.

01:10:38 ►

A child’s got the gripe.

01:10:40 ►

The gripe to you and me is a bad cold.

01:10:43 ►

To an indigenous person in

01:10:44 ►

Peru, it’s liable to kill them

01:10:45 ►

because they don’t have protection for it.

01:10:47 ►

So a small dose of sapo, even on a child, can break a sweat and clear that right up.

01:10:53 ►

I’m not recommending parents buy sticks of sapo and give it to their small children.

01:10:57 ►

This is how I saw the Matzahs use it.

01:10:59 ►

Jungle, by pushing them to sweat so much,

01:11:04 ►

it helped eliminate their human

01:11:06 ►

odor, which allowed them to hunt a little closer to animals without shotguns, where you really need

01:11:12 ►

to get up close, you’re going to like hit a boar on the head with a stick, if the animal could smell

01:11:17 ►

you, it’s going to not let you do that, so by pushing you to sweat, and then if you bathe in the river,

01:11:22 ►

and don’t eat anything, you know, you’re, if you need a long hike, this will stave off your hunger and thirst.

01:11:29 ►

It’ll allow an adrenal drip to, it turns on an adrenal drip that’ll last for a few days,

01:11:34 ►

allowing you to hike a long time, take a rest for 10 minutes, be refreshed and go again,

01:11:40 ►

rather than, say, you really need eight hours to sleep.

01:11:44 ►

You told me once it detoxes all the organs of the body at the same time.

01:11:50 ►

Right, and that’s the cleansing that allows you to not smell like a human.

01:11:53 ►

We have learned with the proteins that have been discovered in this

01:11:57 ►

that it is the most amazing detox for a human body.

01:12:02 ►

It’s one of the proteins, an enormous vasodilator.

01:12:05 ►

So you take these tight little pipes

01:12:07 ►

that are encrusted with garbage

01:12:08 ►

that we put in our lives,

01:12:09 ►

like my cigarettes,

01:12:10 ►

and you stretch them open,

01:12:13 ►

and that stuff begins to crack,

01:12:14 ►

all that bad stuff,

01:12:15 ►

because the pipe’s open again.

01:12:18 ►

And then it gets washed out.

01:12:21 ►

And in the space of 15 minutes,

01:12:24 ►

where you’re having the acute intoxication feeling of it

01:12:27 ►

you really hate peter gorman and you want to die i can attest to this okay ladies and gentlemen

01:12:34 ►

and two hours later you’re totally in love with peter gorman because you see a little better you

01:12:40 ►

hear a little better you have a better blood flow through your system, your liver, your kidneys.

01:12:45 ►

If your heart had palpitations, one or two doses is liable to clean those valves so that

01:12:51 ►

the heart now opens, you know, the valves open and close properly instead of all gummed

01:12:55 ►

up with junk that you put in your body and that you’ve accumulated over the years. hypertension or since it increases heart

01:13:06 ►

beat, right?

01:13:10 ►

Raises your heart beat.

01:13:12 ►

Yeah. What if you already have

01:13:14 ►

a… Because

01:13:15 ►

the proteins at work

01:13:17 ►

that are raising the heart beat are

01:13:19 ►

bioactive. When your body

01:13:22 ►

has had enough, your body

01:13:24 ►

shuts them down.

01:13:25 ►

For instance, MDMA

01:13:27 ►

can be dangerous to

01:13:30 ►

someone who has

01:13:31 ►

hypertension, right?

01:13:34 ►

So can

01:13:35 ►

ayahuasca, so can several things.

01:13:38 ►

But not sapo.

01:13:39 ►

Sapo is bioactive. The proteins

01:13:42 ►

are bioactive, and that is

01:13:43 ►

what sets it apart as a medicine

01:13:46 ►

and sets it apart as a potential

01:13:48 ►

for potential use in humans with new medicines.

01:13:56 ►

Is there no contraindications that you know of?

01:13:59 ►

Like ayahuasca is contraindicated for us.

01:14:01 ►

The only time I was not served sapo

01:14:04 ►

was when my leg was full gangrene

01:14:07 ►

with the flesh-eating bacteria

01:14:10 ►

and it looked like

01:14:12 ►

I had a big green and yellow helmet

01:14:13 ►

on my leg that sounded like a drum

01:14:16 ►

when you hit it. Bang, bang, bang.

01:14:17 ►

It was that hard and solid.

01:14:19 ►

And Pepe, Amatsa’s friend of mine,

01:14:22 ►

said no.

01:14:23 ►

And I asked why. And a friend of mine, Juan, speaks dialect. So Pepe, a Matses friend of mine, said no. And I asked why, and a friend of mine, Juan, speaks dialect,

01:14:27 ►

so Pepe basically explained in shorthand,

01:14:31 ►

you have poison in your system.

01:14:33 ►

If we clean the poison out of your system,

01:14:35 ►

we’re going to be putting that poison all through your system,

01:14:38 ►

so you might have a bad effect.

01:14:40 ►

So get rid of that poison before we start spreading poison.

01:14:44 ►

To clean you up

01:14:45 ►

and send stuff out your kidney is one thing

01:14:47 ►

but to put

01:14:48 ►

I might

01:14:51 ►

affect my heath

01:14:52 ►

it might affect my kidney

01:14:54 ►

you’ve never seen

01:14:55 ►

you’ve administered it to a lot of people

01:14:58 ►

it’s legal right

01:14:59 ►

for what it’s worth

01:15:02 ►

it’s under the radar

01:15:03 ►

it’s just simply not in focus.

01:15:06 ►

And you’ve never heard of any…

01:15:09 ►

No.

01:15:11 ►

There are some people who have a very difficult time with it.

01:15:14 ►

But as a rule, that’s 15 minutes or…

01:15:18 ►

For some people, it’s 30 minutes.

01:15:19 ►

They think they’re dying, but they’re not.

01:15:21 ►

No.

01:15:21 ►

They’re actually just getting better.

01:15:23 ►

But if you release tons of poison through your system

01:15:27 ►

to be eliminated,

01:15:29 ►

for the moments that poison is in your system

01:15:32 ►

running through your bloodstream,

01:15:33 ►

you’re being poisoned.

01:15:34 ►

Yeah.

01:15:35 ►

So, yeah, you damn well feel like you’re dying.

01:15:37 ►

Do you think it could lead to a stroke?

01:15:40 ►

I don’t know.

01:15:41 ►

If you told me someone…

01:15:43 ►

I mean, there are people that I wouldn’t serve it to.

01:15:45 ►

Let people say, I’m Superman.

01:15:47 ►

Give me, you know,

01:15:50 ►

ten quarter ounce, you know, quarter inch hits.

01:15:52 ►

No.

01:15:53 ►

I mean, I don’t think it’ll hurt you, but…

01:15:56 ►

It’s strong medicine.

01:15:57 ►

It’s very powerful stuff.

01:16:00 ►

Lorenzo wanted me to cover a couple things,

01:16:02 ►

and then I have one question,

01:16:04 ►

so just like five more minutes of your time.

01:16:08 ►

He wanted me to ask you about the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam. Is that something that you went to?

01:16:23 ►

ran into Ben Dronkers.

01:16:27 ►

Ben Dronkers

01:16:28 ►

was a former seaman

01:16:31 ►

who had collected Canada seeds

01:16:33 ►

from all over the world

01:16:35 ►

when he was a seaman.

01:16:38 ►

He went back to Amsterdam

01:16:40 ►

and he had a little bit of money

01:16:41 ►

and he bought a house

01:16:44 ►

that was kind of like a

01:16:45 ►

little castle-ish sort of thing.

01:16:47 ►

Not really, but it still was

01:16:48 ►

a lovely place.

01:16:52 ►

And he hired a great grower

01:16:54 ►

to begin growing those

01:16:57 ►

strains of seeds out,

01:16:58 ►

a fellow named Neville Schoenmakers.

01:17:01 ►

Steve Hager got wind of this,

01:17:03 ►

my boss,

01:17:04 ►

flew to Amsterdam to meet Mr. Tronkers and Neville

01:17:09 ►

Schoenmakers and discovered that they were growing and beginning to hybrid seeds and

01:17:14 ►

beginning to mix and match, to grow new strains out, and Hager dubbed their place Cannabis

01:17:20 ►

Castle. And so he wrote a cover story, a long cover story called Something Something at

01:17:26 ►

Cannabis Castle. What year? Let’s say 87, 88, 86. It all happens in the 80s. And within

01:17:38 ►

a couple of years, Steve realized no one is protecting the seed stock,

01:17:47 ►

the genetic stock of cannabis around the world.

01:17:51 ►

Well, the parent, the male parent, Columbia Gold,

01:17:56 ►

is the male parent of half the world’s stock.

01:17:58 ►

I mean, you know, half the world’s marijuana plants.

01:18:03 ►

If that gets eliminated, what’s the father plant now?

01:18:06 ►

So Steve Ager came up with this incredibly,

01:18:09 ►

look crazy but turned out to be fantastic idea of let’s us at high times

01:18:13 ►

have an event in Amsterdam

01:18:16 ►

where people pay to come and be judges

01:18:20 ►

of the world’s best strains.

01:18:23 ►

And those strains will then be protected,

01:18:26 ►

the seeds of those strains will be protected

01:18:28 ►

for future use as a genetic bank.

01:18:32 ►

And it sounds corny because it’s like,

01:18:34 ►

oh man, so all the stoners are going to Amsterdam

01:18:36 ►

and smoke a lot of dope.

01:18:38 ►

And the answer is yes, that was one part of it.

01:18:41 ►

But protecting those seed strains was vital.

01:18:46 ►

And Steve Hager knew that if he could get Neville and Ben Dronkers on board with the idea of protecting those strains,

01:18:53 ►

they would have the wherewithal and physical and financial capability to do it.

01:18:58 ►

So what started out as a very small event, by 96 it was my turn to go run that event. Or, it was always Steve

01:19:09 ►

Hager’s event, but it was my year to write about it, to be behind the scenes, to talk

01:19:14 ►

to everybody. And by that time, it had grown to, I think we had, a year earlier, we had

01:19:22 ►

100 judges. This year, in 96, we suddenly had judges, this year in 1996 we suddenly had 2000.

01:19:27 ►

I mean we were overwhelmed, we had no concept of what to do with, there’s a line outside the street that’s three blocks long.

01:19:34 ►

You know, Amsterdam is very prim and proper and you can do what you want and get away with it.

01:19:38 ►

But people on the street were getting pissed off that we got 2000 people out here smoking dope.

01:19:43 ►

What’s going on? And they were mad because we couldn’t get

01:19:46 ►

them through. We had no idea how many people

01:19:48 ►

were coming. We couldn’t get them through

01:19:49 ►

getting their credentials for the conference ride

01:19:52 ►

and getting their seed strains right

01:19:54 ►

and getting their marijuana right.

01:19:55 ►

It was a huge mess, but it was a spectacular

01:19:58 ►

fantastic huge mess.

01:20:00 ►

And I think…

01:20:02 ►

Is it still happening?

01:20:04 ►

That cup still happens happens but it now happens

01:20:06 ►

in Canada, it happens in Washington

01:20:08 ►

it happens in Denver, it happens in Mexico

01:20:10 ►

you know, high times

01:20:12 ►

I think does a good

01:20:14 ►

part of its living and a lot

01:20:16 ►

of other people do as well

01:20:18 ►

doing various

01:20:20 ►

cannabis cup around

01:20:22 ►

different states and different

01:20:24 ►

countries and almost always

01:20:27 ►

somebody’s going to be chosen the winner of this indoor hybrid strain this pure

01:20:32 ►

strain the centiva strain you know etc so I presume that a lot of that has gone

01:20:38 ►

into the medical marijuana trade now you have the medical marijuana cups. And the medical marijuana cups

01:20:46 ►

are going much more for

01:20:47 ►

what effect this will have on

01:20:50 ►

a disease rather than how high it will get you

01:20:52 ►

or how many colors you’ll see.

01:20:54 ►

And so,

01:20:55 ►

you know, I mean, I’m a fan of them.

01:21:00 ►

I like the idea of protecting seed stock.

01:21:02 ►

I like protecting seed stock

01:21:04 ►

of trees, flowers, tulips, potatoes, whatever you’ve got.

01:21:09 ►

I think the more real stock we have, the real genetic material we have,

01:21:14 ►

the less we need to depend on some big company to do genetic modifications to keep that strain alive.

01:21:20 ►

No, I’d rather see the original strain, and you know, that’s what we’ll work with.

01:21:25 ►

And I include that with marijuana, which I think

01:21:28 ►

is a wonderful medicine

01:21:30 ►

for most people.

01:21:31 ►

Lorenzo also wanted me to

01:21:33 ►

get you to weigh in on your

01:21:36 ►

opinion about where we are

01:21:38 ►

with medical,

01:21:40 ►

with marijuana

01:21:41 ►

legalization,

01:21:43 ►

legalities wherever?

01:21:46 ►

I have no…

01:21:48 ►

I left that time two years ago.

01:21:54 ►

I still write a column, a long column,

01:21:57 ►

1,500 to 1,800 words a month for

01:21:58 ►

Skunk Magazine out of Canada

01:22:00 ►

about the drug war.

01:22:03 ►

But I’m no longer on

01:22:04 ►

the front lines like I was for years and years

01:22:07 ►

in terms of pretty much being able to say which way the wind blows,

01:22:11 ►

which senator is going this way on that particular issue.

01:22:15 ►

I think certainly with medical marijuana,

01:22:16 ►

it’s getting very difficult for states to keep it illegal.

01:22:22 ►

I think that we will certainly…

01:22:25 ►

I’ll go out on a limb and say

01:22:27 ►

I believe that President Obama,

01:22:29 ►

three days before he leaves office,

01:22:31 ►

is going to make some declarations

01:22:32 ►

regarding the state of marijuana

01:22:34 ►

and marijuana’s schedule on the CIA list,

01:22:38 ►

on the DEA list of controlled substances.

01:22:41 ►

And since he’s allowed to,

01:22:42 ►

he doesn’t need anyone in the Senate or Congress

01:22:44 ►

to say, okay.

01:22:46 ►

I think three days, four days before

01:22:47 ►

he leaves, oh, by the way,

01:22:49 ►

marijuana’s no longer, you know,

01:22:52 ►

on the first, number one. Marijuana

01:22:54 ►

has been moved to number three.

01:22:55 ►

So you can work with it if you want to. You can get it from

01:22:58 ►

a doctor anywhere in the country. You can

01:23:00 ►

prescribe it. You can grow it. You can, you know, as long as you

01:23:02 ►

have a note. I have a feeling

01:23:03 ►

because the evidence is way, way too overwhelming at this point that for medicinal value,

01:23:11 ►

this plant is a wonder drug. In terms of legality of smoking for fun, I think you’re seeing in

01:23:22 ►

Colorado, whether people like to admit it or not

01:23:25 ►

since they’ve made it legal

01:23:27 ►

since shops have opened up

01:23:28 ►

where you can go in and buy your weed

01:23:30 ►

murders are down

01:23:32 ►

car wrecks are down

01:23:33 ►

police arrests are down

01:23:35 ►

violence is down

01:23:36 ►

violence against women is down

01:23:38 ►

violence in the family is down

01:23:39 ►

rapes are down

01:23:41 ►

every major category of crime

01:23:44 ►

is down in Colorado and most of them pretty

01:23:47 ►

significantly. The number one crime was getting arrested for marijuana. Take that away, let

01:23:55 ►

people smoke marijuana, and people tend to be a little more mellow. How does that play

01:24:01 ►

out in five years? I don’t know. Does everybody just get goofy and watch TV and everybody forgets to go to work? I don’t think so, but I think politicians who have a stake in the game against marijuana are going to say, we don’t know enough yet for several years.

01:24:23 ►

it or not. And if they don’t want to work, they’re not going to work. If they want to be on the public dole and think it looks good to look like a bum, okay. But I think most people are going to say,

01:24:31 ►

hey, I can smoke when I get home. I can have a beer when I get home. But no, I can’t have a beer

01:24:36 ►

at work. And I can’t smoke a joint at work. I got it. I think most people will go that way.

01:24:42 ►

And I think right now that’s how it’s playing out.

01:24:44 ►

I think most people will go that way, and I think right now that’s how it’s playing out.

01:24:54 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:25:02 ►

Twenty years ago, if you were into cannabis, it seemed like California was the best place to be.

01:25:06 ►

But today, it seems like Colorado might be that place.

01:25:10 ►

And regarding the money that can be raised from cannabis sales,

01:25:17 ►

well, right now, the state of Colorado has collected around $60 million in marijuana taxes that, you ready for this, ultimately may have to be given back to its taxpayers

01:25:22 ►

as the result of a strange quirk in their laws.

01:25:26 ►

Now, wouldn’t it be great if Colorado had to give all of its citizens enough money to

01:25:30 ►

buy their year’s supply of pot? It won’t happen, of course, but it sure is fun to dream about.

01:25:38 ►

And regarding the Amsterdam edition of the High Times Cannabis Cup. I’ve done a lot of thinking about the significance,

01:25:46 ►

well, at least for me, the significance of that event.

01:25:49 ►

I only attended one time.

01:25:51 ►

It was the 11th Cup, and it was held in November of 1998.

01:25:56 ►

Now, if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while,

01:25:59 ►

you’ve already heard my story about attending a McKenna workshop in August of 1998,

01:26:04 ►

and then going to the Planque

01:26:06 ►

event with him in January 1999, and that was when I made what I call my hard left turn.

01:26:13 ►

What I don’t think I’ve mentioned, however, is the profound effect that the Cannabis Cup had on me

01:26:18 ►

in between those two conferences. At the time, I was living in Florida and had only one friend with whom I could share a

01:26:25 ►

joint. We were literally at the end of the line back then. So I go to Amsterdam for the cup, and

01:26:32 ►

along with my 2,000 new best friends, I became a judge for the small price of, I guess, maybe 200

01:26:39 ►

bucks or something like that. And for what it’s worth, I can prove that I voted for the winner of that year’s cup,

01:26:45 ►

which was Super Silver Haze. And the reason that I can prove it is that I still have my ballot.

01:26:51 ►

You see, I was, well, I was a little too stoned that week to remember when and where we had to

01:26:57 ►

turn our ballots in. Now, after much reflection, I’ve come to realize that the big breakthrough in

01:27:03 ►

my thinking that took place that week in Amsterdam was largely precipitated by the fact that for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of other people just like me, people who enjoyed a toke now and then.

01:27:25 ►

experience to be in the midst of so many smokers, and coupled with some other things that happened that week, it was the catalyst, I think, that put my mind in the state that enabled me to

01:27:32 ►

take my hard left turn in Palenque a couple months later.

01:27:36 ►

If you’ve never been in a large crowd with a lot of people smoking pot at the same time,

01:27:41 ►

well, then it’s something that you most definitely owe it to yourself to experience. Today there are many opportunities to do just that in many of our countries, so if you

01:27:52 ►

get the chance to attend such an event, it might be worth your time to go out of your way and

01:27:57 ►

experience such a thing firsthand. You know, it could even change your life. Well, there was so

01:28:03 ►

much that Peter covered in the past hour and a half

01:28:06 ►

that I don’t know what one or two things to comment on.

01:28:10 ►

But for me, one of the most significant facts about our psychedelic community today

01:28:15 ►

is that its three major founders were men that were so straight and involved in the status quo

01:28:22 ►

that I, for one, wouldn’t really care to spend any time with them.

01:28:26 ►

These men, of course, are Hoffman, Schultes, and Wasson.

01:28:31 ►

And if you’re interested at all in the history of the tribe,

01:28:33 ►

well, this is something that I believe deserves more awareness on your part.

01:28:37 ►

Let me play for you one more time what Peter had to say about them.

01:28:41 ►

Peter had to say about them.

01:28:45 ►

Hoffman told a couple of stories that night about spending time

01:28:50 ►

with Schultes and Wasson

01:28:52 ►

and going to Mexico

01:28:53 ►

and spending time with a younger author,

01:28:58 ►

the fellow who wrote IOS catalogs.

01:29:02 ►

Did Hoffman pick IOS?

01:29:04 ►

No. But he talked about eating magic mushrooms ayahuasca analogs. Did Hoffman take ayahuasca?

01:29:05 ►

No.

01:29:08 ►

But he talked about eating magic mushrooms and watching

01:29:10 ►

the fellow who wrote ayahuasca analogs

01:29:12 ►

watching his wife dance

01:29:14 ►

under the moonlight

01:29:15 ►

and describing being 90 years old

01:29:18 ►

and saying,

01:29:19 ►

I was so young when I watched her dance

01:29:22 ►

and she’ll

01:29:24 ►

dance next to me and was in the other side.

01:29:28 ►

Who would guess?

01:29:30 ►

We are the fathers of the whole movement.

01:29:35 ►

We were not trying to be.

01:29:37 ►

We were scientists.

01:29:40 ►

And there she was dancing in the moonlight.

01:29:43 ►

And there we were, 20 years old again.

01:29:50 ►

I mean, he was bringing tears to your eyes,

01:29:53 ►

listening to him from 4,000 miles, 5,000 miles away,

01:29:57 ►

describing being in Mexico with the other two and some other famous people.

01:30:05 ►

Just think about it. Three men

01:30:08 ►

who were most likely more conservative than you and I will ever be

01:30:11 ►

were the ones who brought psychedelics back into the light

01:30:15 ►

after a 2,000 year hiatus. And that man

01:30:19 ►

mentioned, the one who wrote Ayahuasca Analogues, was none

01:30:23 ►

other than Jonathan Ott, one of the two

01:30:26 ►

co-inventors of the word entheogen. Now, I think that it must have been one of Jonathan’s girlfriends

01:30:32 ►

who they were watching dance, because, well, to the best of my knowledge, I don’t think Jonathan

01:30:37 ►

ever got married. I do know that on the occasions when I saw him, he was almost always in the company of a strikingly

01:30:45 ►

beautiful woman, but never a wife to my knowledge. And just one more word about Jonathan, whose

01:30:51 ►

talks I’ve played here in the salon, by the way. Without a doubt, Jonathan Ott has the most

01:30:57 ►

intensely brilliant mind that I have ever encountered. He may be difficult to deal with

01:31:02 ►

from time to time, but what a mind he has. He actually

01:31:06 ►

may be the only genius that I’ve ever met. Now, I hope that you found it as fascinating as I did

01:31:13 ►

when, after less than a favorable critique, but I think a fair critique, of Terrence McKenna’s work,

01:31:19 ►

Peter mentioned that the highlight of his writing career was when Tom Robbins called and told him that Terrence McKenna had given Tom Peter’s phone number.

01:31:29 ►

Now, for those who have never had the opportunity to meet Terrence, this should give you some measure of what a deep impact he had on people.

01:31:36 ►

I can’t say that I personally found Terrence to be what is called charismatic.

01:31:41 ►

It was, well, it was something much deeper than that, I think.

01:31:45 ►

charismatic. It was, well, it was something much deeper than that, I think. I don’t know what to call it, but when a powerful person like Peter Gorman can get excited by the simple fact that

01:31:51 ►

Terrence has saved his phone number, well, it seems to me that, well, that speaks volumes about

01:31:57 ►

the Bard McKenna. Speaking of whom, it reminds me that it’s about time for me to play another one

01:32:02 ►

of his recordings here in the salon.

01:32:10 ►

Now, what I forgot to mention last week is that Peter Gorman now has a new website,

01:32:13 ►

and it was built by our mutual friend Hector,

01:32:18 ►

who was also in Peter’s study when the interview we just heard was recorded.

01:32:28 ►

The URL for the website is www.pgorman.com.

01:32:33 ►

And it’s really worth your time to go there and see some of the pictures of Peter from his younger days,

01:32:40 ►

back when he was a young adventurer, as contrasted to his being an old adventurer today, I should add.

01:32:43 ►

The adventure never stops for people like Peter.

01:32:49 ►

Also, both on Peter’s website and in today’s program notes, you’ll find links to purchase his books.

01:32:56 ►

In particular, his Sappo book, as far as I can tell, is the only book about that substance that you can find.

01:33:00 ►

It may even be the first book written exclusively about Sappo.

01:33:05 ►

And most likely it’s going to become a collector’s item, which is why I ordered a copy for myself this morning. Now in closing for today, I want once again to thank Hector Glass, Tom Huckabee,

01:33:13 ►

George Wada, and the rest of their crew for conducting and recording this interview for us

01:33:18 ►

here in the salon. Hopefully you have picked up a little bit more of the history of this interesting tribe of which you have self-selected to become a member.

01:33:28 ►

And you’ll be hearing more from me about Peter in the months ahead, as later this year he’s going to be featured on the Discovery Channel here in the States.

01:33:36 ►

And I’ll be sure to let you know in advance when that’s going to happen.

01:33:40 ►

But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.

01:33:44 ►

Be careful out there, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

468 - Investigating Life – Part 2

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Program Notes

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Similar Episodes

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