506 - One Of Us

Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

Today’s podcast features a talk given by Sasha Shulgin in 1996. In many ways this is a perfect Shulgin talk for a podcast because he didn’t use any photos or the chalkboard to assist in his presentation. This talk is also one of Sasha’s best presentations as for not just the chemistry but also for some of the personal stories he tells. Also, he clarifies the Urban Legend about LSD occurring in nature.
“I suddenly realized the fatuousness of people saying that ‘mescaline taught me this’, and I think the same, in a funny way, applies to plants, that ‘the plants taught me this.’ What it is, you use the plant, you use the compound as a facilitator, as a catalyst, to see within yourself what’s there. And I think this is the heart of psychedelic drugs.” Sasha Shulgin

Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story
By Alexander Shulgin, Ann Shulgin

Tihkal: The Continuation
By Alexander Shulgin, Ann Shulgin

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19 ►

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

00:00:23 ►

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

00:00:30 ►

And before I get into today’s program, I first want to thank This Afternoon and Starshine,

00:00:35 ►

both of whose donations have made them lifetime members of the salon’s forums.

00:00:40 ►

And I hope that it’s okay to use the screen names that they chose on these forums, where I look forward to interacting with them and our other fellow salonners this summer

00:00:45 ►

as I begin to discuss some things that I’ll be bringing up on the next podcast.

00:00:50 ►

Well, unless I change my mind, of course.

00:00:55 ►

Before I introduce today’s program, however,

00:00:58 ►

I first would like to mention a man who has been in many of our thoughts these past few days.

00:01:03 ►

I’m speaking of Muhammad Ali,

00:01:05 ►

who died just a few days ago. Since I gave my own views about this great man a few months ago,

00:01:11 ►

I won’t repeat them now. What I want to do instead is to take a moment here to pass along to our

00:01:18 ►

younger salonners, and hopefully one day even to my own grandchildren, should they ever stumble

00:01:23 ►

across these podcasts.

00:01:33 ►

What I want to pass along is to give you a little sense of how deeply ingrained Muhammad Ali was in the minds of us older people.

00:01:38 ►

Ali was born in 1942, the same year that I was born.

00:01:46 ►

And so we live through the same times, but from very different perspectives. In the summer of 1960, I’d just graduated from high school and was looking forward to going to college in the fall. And in that

00:01:52 ►

same summer, Ali won the light heavyweight gold medal at the Rome Olympics. Now in the

00:01:58 ►

small Midwestern farm town where I was living at the time, there was only one black family

00:02:03 ►

that lived there,

00:02:10 ►

and so we really had no idea of the kind of prejudice that Ali had been forced to live with.

00:02:15 ►

To us, well, he’d won the gold medal for the United States, and that was enough for us.

00:02:23 ►

Muhammad Ali, who was still using his slave name at the time, became one of our heroes. Now, I need to say something here also about the sport of boxing

00:02:26 ►

in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

00:02:30 ►

The only way I guess to do this is maybe for you to try this someday.

00:02:34 ►

Put your phone and all the rest of your electronic devices in a drawer,

00:02:38 ►

disconnect completely from the internet,

00:02:40 ►

and limit your television intake to only a single black and white channel

00:02:45 ►

coming to you over an antenna on your roof. And if you do that for a day or two, you’ll get an idea

00:02:52 ►

of what it was like to live back in 1960. In short, there wasn’t much going on. In fact, AM radio was

00:03:00 ►

still a big deal, and everywhere you went in the summertime, you’d hear a baseball game on the radio,

00:03:05 ►

and that would be in the background no matter where you were.

00:03:08 ►

And those baseball announcers couldn’t say enough good things about this Muhammad Ali and his amateur boxing career.

00:03:16 ►

It seemed as if everybody was talking about this new sports hero who was about to become a professional boxer.

00:03:23 ►

Now, I confess to no longer being interested in boxing,

00:03:27 ►

but back then, when radio was king,

00:03:30 ►

there would be two or three big boxing matches each year

00:03:32 ►

for which our entire family would gather around the radio to listen to.

00:03:37 ►

There wasn’t a single classmate of mine who didn’t know about Joe Lewis,

00:03:41 ►

Ezard Charles, Jersey Joe Walcott, Rocky Marciano, Floyd Patterson.

00:03:47 ►

Even my mother knew who those people were, because boxing, at the time, was probably

00:03:53 ►

a bigger sport in this country than was professional football.

00:03:56 ►

So when Muhammad Ali came on the scene, we were already interested in the sport of boxing.

00:04:02 ►

By 1966, Ali was the world’s heavyweight champion and on a path

00:04:08 ►

to break every boxing record that there was. But then came his moment of truth. The American war

00:04:14 ►

in Vietnam had just started to become the main story on the front pages of our newspapers,

00:04:20 ►

and the American government, in its infinite wisdom, decided to draft Ali into the army.

00:04:26 ►

And you can find this story in hundreds of places, so I’m not going to repeat it all here.

00:04:31 ►

At the time, I was in officer candidate school, and knew that before the following year was over,

00:04:37 ►

that I would find myself in Vietnam trying to kill people with whom I had no quarrel.

00:04:43 ►

And so it was, during the summer of 1967,

00:04:47 ►

just about the time that our ship arrived off the coast of Vietnam,

00:04:51 ►

I read in the Navy Times that Ali had been found guilty of draft evasion

00:04:55 ►

and had famously said, and I quote,

00:04:59 ►

Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.

00:05:03 ►

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home

00:05:07 ►

and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam,

00:05:11 ►

while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?

00:05:19 ►

And at that very same time, the young people in San Francisco were experiencing what was called the Summer of Love.

00:05:27 ►

But four years later, in the summer of 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled to overturn Ali’s conviction,

00:05:37 ►

which allowed him to return to boxing, where he ultimately prevailed, well, beyond anyone’s wildest predictions.

00:05:43 ►

ultimately prevailed, well, beyond anyone’s wildest predictions.

00:05:48 ►

That decision by the Supreme Court also brought out all of the reasons that Ali had been right about the war ever since it began.

00:05:51 ►

And that discussion got a lot of us who were still in military uniforms

00:05:56 ►

to begin to feel a little more brave about expressing our own anti-war feelings.

00:06:02 ►

After all, we thought, if Muhammad Ali was willing to give up the world heavyweight title,

00:06:08 ►

what kind of cowards would we be if we didn’t protest the war,

00:06:12 ►

knowing that a bad fitness report was probably the worst thing that would happen to us?

00:06:16 ►

And it was about that time that thousands of us threw our service medals

00:06:20 ►

on the steps of federal buildings all over the country.

00:06:24 ►

And to no small degree, it was Muhammad Ali whose example gave us the courage to speak our own minds.

00:06:31 ►

But what was it about this man that has so inspired so many people for so long?

00:06:37 ►

Well, I can only speak for myself, but he just seemed to me to be what I think of as one of us.

00:06:44 ►

but he just seemed to me to be what I think of as one of us.

00:06:50 ►

I wish I could explain what I meant by that, but it’s just something that I’ve felt from time to time.

00:06:56 ►

I can clearly remember a night about 20 years ago in a Lisbon restaurant.

00:07:00 ►

I was having dinner with some friends when a woman diner walked by our table,

00:07:03 ►

and as she was leaving, our eyes happened to meet.

00:07:06 ►

It only lasted for no more than one or two seconds at the most, but again, I can’t really explain this, but time seemed to

00:07:12 ►

stop during the moment our eyes met, and somehow I understood that she was one of us, and that I was

00:07:19 ►

one of us. It was as if we had known one another for centuries, and in that brief moment we exchanged thousands of stories with one another.

00:07:27 ►

And then she was gone.

00:07:29 ►

I never saw her again, but to this day I know that she was one of us.

00:07:34 ►

And that is how I also feel about Muhammad Ali.

00:07:38 ►

He was one of us, and we will surely miss him.

00:07:43 ►

Now, if you hang in here with me,

00:07:45 ►

I promise you that we’re going to have some fun before this podcast is over.

00:07:49 ►

But as an interesting coincidence,

00:07:52 ►

two days before Muhammad Ali died

00:07:54 ►

was the second anniversary of someone else who was one of us,

00:07:59 ►

our dear Sasha Shulgin.

00:08:01 ►

And I’d already located the talk that we’re about to listen to

00:08:04 ►

when I learned of

00:08:05 ►

Muhammad Ali’s death. But rather than dwell on the deaths of these two wonderful men,

00:08:10 ►

it seemed more appropriate to focus on their lives and what they brought to the world and

00:08:15 ►

what they left here for us. Now, it was about a year after I started doing these podcasts

00:08:21 ►

that I got a call from Rob Montgomery, who many of our fellow

00:08:25 ►

salonners know quite well. Rob was one of the four people behind the legendary Palenque and

00:08:31 ►

Theobotany conferences, as well as being the cornerstone of the Botanical Preservation Corps,

00:08:37 ►

which, among other things, produced several psychedelic conferences. And Rob asked if I’d

00:08:43 ►

be interested in playing some of the talks from those conferences that he’d helped to produce.

00:08:47 ►

I, of course, said yes.

00:08:49 ►

And then proceeded a couple of years of random emails between us confirming our desire to play some of these talks in the salon.

00:08:58 ►

But somehow life seems to have gotten in our way and Rob and I lost contact.

00:09:03 ►

Now enter fellow salonner Phil B.

00:09:07 ►

About a year ago Phil sent me a digital copy of one of the tapes from a conference that Rob

00:09:11 ►

produced in 1996 but unfortunately the quality was too poor to use. Not to be deterred Phil

00:09:19 ►

bought some better equipment and then proceeded to digitize not only the talk that we’re about

00:09:24 ►

to listen to right now but quite a few more that we’re going to be hearing here in the

00:09:28 ►

salon this summer.

00:09:30 ►

And so today we begin with a talk that Sasha Shulgin gave in the fall of 1996, and which

00:09:38 ►

I believe is the very best audio-only talk that you’re going to hear from Sasha.

00:09:44 ►

You see, not only does he not use prepared slides or overhead projections that were in the fashion at the time,

00:09:51 ►

there was also no whiteboard available either.

00:09:54 ►

And so today we begin with the talk that Sasha Shulgin gave in the fall of 1996,

00:10:01 ►

and which, I believe, is the very best audio-only talk that you’re going to hear from

00:10:07 ►

Sasha. You see, not only does he not use any prepared slides or overhead projections as were

00:10:15 ►

the fashion at the time, there was no whiteboard available either. So while it sounds as if Sasha

00:10:21 ►

was actually drawing diagrams of molecules on the board, he wasn’t.

00:10:26 ►

He was instead drawing pictures in the air with his hands.

00:10:30 ►

In the program notes for today’s podcast, which you know you can find at psychedelicsalon.com,

00:10:36 ►

I’ve included a picture that I took of Sasha on the day before Halloween in 1999.

00:10:43 ►

And while at the time I was disappointed to not to have captured a better

00:10:47 ►

photo of Sasha’s face, well, it’s a really good picture to show you how he built molecules in the

00:10:52 ►

air with his hands while he was talking. In past podcasts, you’ve heard me talk about the times,

00:10:59 ►

particularly in Palenque, when a small group of us would have a leisurely week or so to sit around the pool and

00:11:06 ►

talk with people like Sasha. And you’ve also heard me say that even though I had two semesters of

00:11:11 ►

organic chemistry in college, the only thing that I remembered about my chemistry class

00:11:16 ►

was that while I recognized the buzzwords, I could no longer tell you what they meant.

00:11:22 ►

Nonetheless, it was always such a pleasure to sit around a table

00:11:25 ►

with some of the world’s leading chemists who were quizzing Sasha about one thing or another,

00:11:30 ►

and even without understanding in any detail at all what he was talking about, well, it was still

00:11:36 ►

great fun to listen to him talk. By the way, when you hear people talking about Sasha, and you hear

00:11:43 ►

them say something about his dirty pictures,

00:11:45 ►

you need to know that what’s being referred to are the chemical drawings of psychedelic molecules,

00:11:52 ►

which, as you also know, the uptight governments of this world think of as dirty.

00:11:58 ►

Now, I realize that this is clear to all of us who knew Sasha and attended his talks,

00:12:02 ►

but our numbers seem to be thinning these days,

00:12:06 ►

and so I want to make sure that those who come after us

00:12:08 ►

know exactly what kind of dirty pictures Sasha was into.

00:12:13 ►

Now, let’s listen to what I think is the best talk by Sasha Shulgin

00:12:18 ►

that you’re ever going to hear.

00:12:22 ►

Again, Alexander Shulgin, or Sasha Shulgin, as he’s known to his many, many friends,

00:12:29 ►

a number growing all the time, certainly needs no introduction here in his home court in the Bay Area,

00:12:35 ►

but I’d like to give him a little one anyway.

00:12:40 ►

I remember some people have the expression, I think the common expression is,

00:12:45 ►

run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes.

00:12:48 ►

Is that the way it’s said?

00:12:50 ►

And so I have often used Sasha as a sounding board for ideas

00:12:56 ►

because he’s able to more or less find problems with just about any theory you can come up with,

00:13:03 ►

no matter how well thought out or intricate.

00:13:06 ►

The more intricate, the more problems, of course.

00:13:09 ►

So I say, you know, run it past Sasha and see how many holes it can poke in it.

00:13:14 ►

And he’s very good at that.

00:13:17 ►

He’s really got an excellent analytical faculty, great sense of humor.

00:13:22 ►

And we’ve been really fortunate to have him participate recently

00:13:25 ►

in our Botanical Preservation Corps events and of course you all know about his publications

00:13:31 ►

PCOL and then the long awaited T-COL which we’re all eagerly hoping to see

00:13:36 ►

and PCOL of course has really had a profound effect on what William Burroughs was fond of calling the narcotics industry on all levels,

00:13:46 ►

I think, as he put it, from the bottom to the top, so to speak,

00:13:51 ►

meaning the narcotics industry writ large, including also the police complex.

00:13:58 ►

And so I asked Sasha for his talk, the title for his talk this time,

00:14:03 ►

and so he very coyly came up with a very specific and detailed title,

00:14:09 ►

phenethylamines and tryptamines.

00:14:10 ►

And so, once again, I’m as much in the dark as you are as to exactly just what we’re about to hear.

00:14:17 ►

And so I’ll let him tell you.

00:14:20 ►

Alexander Shogun.

00:14:44 ►

I thank you very much. It’s a great welcome.

00:14:46 ►

And it’s a great pleasure to be here.

00:14:49 ►

And it’s a great audience.

00:14:51 ►

And I’ve heard it laughing at the right time, which is a very great pleasure.

00:14:56 ►

I was going to put together, I was just asked a moment ago if I had any slides.

00:15:00 ►

And I was told the idea of putting together a small set of 40, 50 slides.

00:15:08 ►

I have a knack of using a term which I happen to enjoy called dirty pictures.

00:15:13 ►

These are benzene rings with chains on them and naphthol rings and indole rings and quinoline rings.

00:15:25 ►

and I like throwing them around because it’s easier, in a sense, to use a symbol as a definition of a chemical or of a drug.

00:15:32 ►

And it’s this transformation that’s necessary.

00:15:35 ►

Just look at a white crystalline material and say, this is mesclun.

00:15:40 ►

Or look at a picture, what I call a dirty picture,

00:15:42 ►

a ring with some methoxy groups on it and a chain and a nitrogen hanging out there somewhere,

00:15:46 ►

and say, this is a dirty picture of mesclun.

00:15:48 ►

This is what mesclun would look like if you get rid of the other 10 to the 25th things and have only one thing left

00:15:54 ►

and had a microscope that was big enough to see it.

00:15:57 ►

That would be the structure of it.

00:15:59 ►

And people say, well, don’t get technical.

00:16:01 ►

Don’t get into chemistry.

00:16:02 ►

I mean, tell me about mesclun.

00:16:05 ►

And my whole world has been, yes, telling about mesclun, but also telling about chemistry

00:16:09 ►

and trying to bridge, in a sense, what a thing is, what it looks like, long needles, white,

00:16:16 ►

sharp edges, certain angles known with great accuracy, and certain action in the body if

00:16:22 ►

it’s absorbed and dissolved and goes into the correct areas.

00:16:25 ►

And yet a dirty picture that lets the chemist know what is attached to what at the atom level,

00:16:32 ►

the five balls in the bottom of the basket level that was talked about yesterday,

00:16:36 ►

at that level so that if you want to make something that is not quite mesclun,

00:16:41 ►

you know that you can, in a sense, pull that off and put that on, and

00:16:46 ►

you get a nice white crystal, different angles, different things, different solubilities,

00:16:50 ►

and very often, different action in the body.

00:16:53 ►

So, in keeping with the marvelous example that was given by Kerry yesterday, Harry Mullis,

00:16:59 ►

I threw out these hypothetical 52 slides, and I think I will do as he did, come off the wall and just sort of talk about

00:17:07 ►

phenethylamines and tryptamines.

00:17:11 ►

Yeah. Actually, I have one more advantage

00:17:16 ►

over him. He had to leave Georgia and come to Berkeley to find a life.

00:17:20 ►

I was born in Berkeley. I found a life there.

00:17:27 ►

All right. We’ve had a lot I’m gonna I’m gonna fly in the face of what’s going on yesterday and what would

00:17:30 ►

undoubtedly continue and conclude tomorrow in which everyone talks about a

00:17:34 ►

plants and plant teachers and plant entities and spirits and these magical

00:17:40 ►

things that they really are and after all the second half of the title of the

00:17:43 ►

of the whole meeting is is botany So I guess that’s quite appropriate. And indeed, plants are often felt as being

00:17:50 ►

superior teachers. They’re natural. And they grow everywhere. They’re available. Sometimes they’re

00:17:57 ►

scarce. But we’ve heard a few things that give me some pause about some of the virtues that are always attributed to them.

00:18:06 ►

They’re natural, yes, but they are natural.

00:18:09 ►

And how do you modify a plant away from nature?

00:18:11 ►

Well, you have to go into chemistry to do that.

00:18:13 ►

So I heard, for example, a nice talk by Jace in which he talked about the composition of ayahuasca.

00:18:22 ►

And he said, I asked, I had a number of these sort of things.

00:18:25 ►

At least it gives us a picture

00:18:26 ►

of what’s in there

00:18:27 ►

and what does what.

00:18:29 ►

And I hear things like

00:18:30 ►

the DMT level

00:18:31 ►

in the various drinks of ayahuasca

00:18:33 ►

ranges from 12% to 0%.

00:18:35 ►

And the harameen level

00:18:38 ►

ranges from 30% to 50%.

00:18:40 ►

And sometimes there is

00:18:41 ►

a harameen present

00:18:42 ►

and sometimes not.

00:18:44 ►

I’m wondering if not,

00:18:46 ►

it’s a variable teacher.

00:18:48 ►

I mean, how do you,

00:18:48 ►

you’re learning that the teacher has different faces

00:18:51 ►

and I don’t know if you can really

00:18:52 ►

sometimes talk to the same teacher twice

00:18:55 ►

because you’re getting different admixtures,

00:18:58 ►

you’re getting different things added to what.

00:19:00 ►

It turns out we’re not quite sure

00:19:01 ►

what the plant was that went in there.

00:19:03 ►

I was told it was such and such,

00:19:04 ►

but really we’ve named it so and so because it’s not that, but it’s something else.

00:19:08 ►

And there’s an element of uncertainty that I feel is no more than if you go into chemistry, but not necessarily less.

00:19:18 ►

Chemistry has its uncertainties, believe me.

00:19:20 ►

So in a sense, I believe that chemicals can also be very good teachers as good teachers as plants

00:19:25 ►

and they also contain impurities

00:19:28 ►

they also contain impurities

00:19:32 ►

and sometimes you know what they are

00:19:34 ►

and sometimes you don’t

00:19:35 ►

you have the argument for example

00:19:37 ►

I hear it both ways

00:19:38 ►

it’s a little bit tricky

00:19:38 ►

these little impurities that might occur

00:19:42 ►

as side products in this alkaloid

00:19:45 ►

are the very things that give it color and give it personality and make it something special.

00:19:50 ►

Then the next sentence will be,

00:19:52 ►

these little impurities are there in such small amounts

00:19:55 ►

that they can’t contribute significantly to the effect of the plant.

00:19:58 ►

So in essence, if you want to say this is different than that because of impurities,

00:20:02 ►

you’ve got it made.

00:20:02 ►

You want to say this is the same as that in spite of the impurities, you’ve got it made. Well, we have impurities in organic chemicals

00:20:08 ►

too, believe me. And you have the advantage of knowing what

00:20:12 ►

they are. You do have somewhat of an advantage in that you probably

00:20:16 ►

have a better consistency in making a material in the laboratory,

00:20:20 ►

although, believe me, I have had experiences in which that is not so. I made a

00:20:24 ►

sample of 2CE many, many years ago.

00:20:27 ►

And I’m getting ahead of the story, but I’m used to that.

00:20:31 ►

A sample of 2CE, in which I got a beautiful white crystal solid,

00:20:35 ►

and it was a remarkable chemical.

00:20:36 ►

I wrote a better part of a chapter on that.

00:20:39 ►

And then I said, oh, about a few, maybe 10 years ago,

00:20:41 ►

I would like to make another sample of that, you know, and just to, you know, consistency,

00:20:46 ►

at least I can get more of it and explore it further

00:20:48 ►

if that were my want.

00:20:50 ►

And I made it.

00:20:51 ►

I got the penultimate compound,

00:20:52 ►

beautiful orange crystalline solid,

00:20:55 ►

right melting point, right infrared, GCMS,

00:20:57 ►

right on the money.

00:20:58 ►

I reduced it.

00:20:58 ►

It reduced beautifully to a white crystalline solid,

00:21:01 ►

and it was not 2CE.

00:21:02 ►

It had the mass spec of 2CE.

00:21:04 ►

The infrared was totally different and I

00:21:06 ►

could not interconvert the two. To this day, I don’t know what went wrong. I mean, here’s a good

00:21:10 ►

example of getting the wrong plant out of the wrong part of the wrong garden, getting the wrong

00:21:14 ►

chemical out of the right reaction in the wrong way. And so you cannot just assume because it’s

00:21:19 ►

a discipline that has been worked into a technology that is so sophisticated that things can’t go wrong.

00:21:26 ►

Believe me, they do, and they do with sad, sad regularity.

00:21:31 ►

Now, I’m going to get into hand…

00:21:32 ►

I was asked, do I want a chalkboard?

00:21:34 ►

Sure, I love chalkboards.

00:21:35 ►

But then I stand at the chalkboard and I never wear a microphone, so I can’t be heard.

00:21:39 ►

And also get in the habit, if I have five erasers at the chalkboard and one podium,

00:21:45 ►

five trips to the podium brings five erasers back to the podium,

00:21:48 ►

and I have no eraser at the chalkboard, and the chalk is back here,

00:21:51 ►

so I end up coming back for the chalk, taking five erasers over, I spill them,

00:21:54 ►

and I just didn’t do it here.

00:21:56 ►

So no slides, no chalkboard.

00:21:58 ►

I will use hand wavings.

00:22:02 ►

I do it anyway.

00:22:07 ►

If you could visualize, in a sense,

00:22:12 ►

away from the white crystal solid and into the chemical structure, a great big sort of fuzzy thing that was somewhat negative,

00:22:15 ►

I mean that in the sense if you put a positive thing on a magnet, it would go in that direction,

00:22:20 ►

and it didn’t have well-defined borders, but it was a big, what you call,

00:22:23 ►

a ring, and we call a ring.

00:22:28 ►

And then you had a separation in two units, a certain distance,

00:22:33 ►

from a little tight thing that’s very negative, the chemical name for it is a nitrogen atom.

00:22:39 ►

So if you had a big ring, fuzzy, and a carbon-carbon and a nitrogen atom,

00:22:49 ►

you have a system, a ring ethylamine, that probably is a skeleton of 90%, 95%. I’m going to take a chance here and head for the P word rather than the E word. There’s 95% of all psychedelics have that

00:22:56 ►

as a skeleton of their chemical structure. So the whole question comes in, what is a big fuzzy ring

00:23:02 ►

and what does it look like? Can you vary the separation?

00:23:06 ►

And what is this little sharp nitrogen like and what can you do to it?

00:23:10 ►

And in a very general sense, and I’m talking about 95% of all these drugs,

00:23:16 ►

the big ring over here is usually either a benzene ring or an indole ring.

00:23:20 ►

That’s it.

00:23:21 ►

You get into all kinds of other things.

00:23:22 ►

They’ve made oxygen over there, sulfurs over there.

00:23:24 ►

They’ve made two carbon systems over there. They’ve put two nitrogens in,

00:23:27 ►

the nitrogen in each of the two. No good. It’s either a benzene ring or an

00:23:32 ►

indole ring. There are exceptions, of course, but this is basically it. Two carbons. No, one

00:23:36 ►

carbon, you get something that’s usually a very funny and a peculiar out-of-body

00:23:39 ►

nice thing. Some people love out-of-body stuff. I don’t care for it. When I want to go to the bathroom, I want to know

00:23:44 ►

it’s me who wants to go to the bathroom and make it there.

00:23:49 ►

I guess each person has his own pace and stride. But I kind of like, that didn’t sound right either.

00:23:56 ►

I kind of like being where I know I am. And I love getting into visual and physical visible

00:24:05 ►

imagery

00:24:08 ►

interpretive

00:24:09 ►

erotic occasionally but not so much you know when you get old

00:24:12 ►

but

00:24:13 ►

the idea of somehow

00:24:16 ►

going out on the astral plane

00:24:17 ►

and getting away from there and seeing what the

00:24:20 ►

universe is really like from out there

00:24:21 ►

looking back at this poor guy who’s lying

00:24:23 ►

on a bed somewhere with a full bladder, and it’s not his concern.

00:24:26 ►

Ah, no.

00:24:28 ►

That, I can say, that’s not my pace.

00:24:33 ►

So I guess I’m kind of the old 19th century classic psychedelic chemist, in that the idea

00:24:40 ►

of visual, tactile, auditory, all these things are extraordinary. And from these,

00:24:46 ►

I always see the things as being the instructive, the informative, the rewarding aspects of it.

00:24:53 ►

And I do not personally, I have been out there, do not personally see the reward of having a

00:24:58 ►

cosmic picture of something that I’m not quite sure if it applies to me. Okay, the personal.

00:25:03 ►

that I’m not quite sure if it applies to me.

00:25:04 ►

Okay, they’re personal.

00:25:08 ►

So I first got in this area.

00:25:09 ►

Let me give you a little picture.

00:25:13 ►

We have this benzene, carbon-carbon, nitrogen called a phenethylamine.

00:25:17 ►

You have indocarbon-carbon-nitrogen called a tryptamine.

00:25:23 ►

You have a third family that is both an indocarbon-carbon nitrogen and a benzene carbon-carbon nitrogen

00:25:25 ►

in the same molecule, usually called an ergalene. And these are basically the three classes

00:25:30 ►

of psychedelics. You can take this benzene ring, it’s a fuzzy, almost negative thing,

00:25:37 ►

carbon-carbon nitrogen, and bang it back onto itself with one more carbon atom, maybe two,

00:25:43 ►

whatever it is down there. It’s called a tetrahydroisoquinoline. Big name, forget it. There are almost none of them known to be

00:25:48 ►

psychedelics. But you know what’s important?

00:25:52 ►

Almost all the alkaloids in cacti are those tetrahydroisoquinolines.

00:25:56 ►

And they haven’t been tasted. I didn’t say they weren’t psychedelics. I just said they weren’t

00:26:00 ►

known to be psychedelics. So there’s a lot of territory you have to go.

00:26:03 ►

Take a great big fuzzy aromatic ring system called indole

00:26:09 ►

and hook it carbon-carbon to the nitrogen giving you the tryptamine

00:26:13 ►

and take that nitrogen and hook it back onto the indole with the carbon atom in there.

00:26:17 ►

You have what’s called a beta-carboline.

00:26:19 ►

Now here they are, some active compounds, and I want to talk about those.

00:26:23 ►

And then, as I say, when you have both of them the same molecule, you have the LSD-type lysergide family.

00:26:29 ►

So that is kind of a hand-waving start.

00:26:33 ►

My interest in this area became precipitated very abruptly in the mid-1950s,

00:26:39 ►

and much in the same way that Peter’s was with the mescaline peyote world.

00:26:46 ►

same way that Peters was with the mescaline peyote world. And I was exposed to a 400 milligram opportunity with mescaline sulfate. Interestingly, my now co-worker, partner, mate, wife, Anne,

00:26:56 ►

at almost the same time, her first exposure was to peyote. And it happened to be that one of the sort of viewers, inspectors,

00:27:08 ►

watchers over me happened to be the same person that was a watcher over her. And we did not know

00:27:13 ►

this for another 15 or 20 years. We didn’t know each other. We didn’t know the one person knew

00:27:19 ►

the person, but didn’t know the other person knew the person. And there was no awareness of one

00:27:22 ►

another for mid-50s,

00:27:25 ►

60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 40-some odd years, and I’ve been married for 20 years, didn’t know

00:27:29 ►

this.

00:27:30 ►

So my first experience was Meslin, I don’t know, 1952, 53, 54, somewhere in there.

00:27:35 ►

And it was an experience that completely caught my attention, completely changed my attitude

00:27:41 ►

toward who I was and what I did.

00:27:44 ►

And I think I’ve talked about it before.

00:27:47 ►

I won’t get into it too much now.

00:27:49 ►

But the heart of it was I realized that there was an immense amount in me,

00:27:55 ►

available to me, that I didn’t have access to normally.

00:28:00 ►

And I suddenly realized the fatuousness of people saying that mescaline taught me this.

00:28:05 ►

And I think the same in a funny way applies to plants, that the plants taught me this.

00:28:10 ►

What it is, you use the plant, you use the compound as a facilitator, as a catalyst to see within yourself what’s there.

00:28:19 ►

And I think this is the heart of psychedelic drug.

00:28:27 ►

So go back to 1950, whenever it was.

00:28:30 ►

And at this point, I wanted to take and cast a picture at that time.

00:28:33 ►

We were just getting out of Truman in the World War II.

00:28:36 ►

And I just had gotten out of college and into some graduate school somewhere.

00:28:42 ►

And I got exposed to this mescaline thing.

00:28:45 ►

What was known at that time in the area, God, it wasn’t even called, I think they already

00:28:48 ►

used the other words, it wasn’t called even P words at that time.

00:28:51 ►

They had H words and other things back then, hallucinogenics, they had psychotomimetics,

00:28:55 ►

they had delusional things, but no one, the term psychedelic was not created for another

00:29:01 ►

ten years.

00:29:02 ►

What was known there?

00:29:03 ►

In the phenethylamines, there was mesclun.

00:29:05 ►

It had been worked out in Germany.

00:29:07 ►

The compound had been isolated and structured.

00:29:10 ►

Structure is not determined.

00:29:11 ►

It had been isolated in the 1890s, Hefter.

00:29:14 ►

And it was first synthesized, I believe, by Spett about 1920 or so.

00:29:19 ►

It was a German origin.

00:29:21 ►

There was N-N-dimethyl mesclun was known.

00:29:23 ►

I believe it’s called tricocerine.

00:29:25 ►

It was worked out by a Frenchman who had assayed it in the sense that he had tasted it up to 750 milligrams

00:29:31 ►

and got nothing out of it.

00:29:33 ►

And that was a known not active material.

00:29:36 ►

MDA was known.

00:29:38 ►

It was worked out by Gordon Alice, an American.

00:29:40 ►

He worked in UCLA.

00:29:42 ►

He was a pharmacologist at UCLA who reported and had synthes synthesized and converted over to SmithKline and French.

00:29:49 ►

SmithKline and French, I guess, was the name of the company then,

00:29:52 ►

as a possible apatrite thing or a stimulant thing, but it’s nothing of central activity.

00:29:57 ►

And one report in Canada of TMA, trimethoxyamphetamine,

00:30:00 ►

which is mesclun, this thing, ding, ding, bong, that thing,

00:30:04 ►

with one more appendix hanging down over here. It’s called a methyl

00:30:07 ►

group. So it’s really a three-carbon chain, but still, the separation between this and this is

00:30:11 ►

two carbons. That’s Canadian. In the

00:30:15 ►

area of the tryptamines, what was known had DMT, had been

00:30:19 ►

identified finally as a plant source, although it was synthetic much, much, much earlier, synthesized

00:30:23 ►

by Manske in much, much, much earlier. It was synthesized by Amansky in Canada again, gosh, in the 30s, I believe.

00:30:29 ►

But it was known as a plant component.

00:30:32 ►

And a person by the name of Steve Zara, with whom I’ve had a marvelous relationship for about 40 years,

00:30:37 ►

had synthesized the endihomoethyls, the propyls, the butyls, the amyls, the prolidyls, the morpholyls, the piperidyls, whatever it is.

00:30:44 ►

A host of these things with… The big thing is small. Metropols, the butyls, the amyls, the prolidyls, the morpholyls, the piperidyls, whatever it is,

00:30:47 ►

a host of these things with… The big thing is small.

00:30:49 ►

Okay.

00:30:50 ►

The big thing is over here.

00:30:50 ►

The small one, the nitrogen over here, has things.

00:30:53 ►

I’m right-handed, and I’m doing this mirror image to you.

00:30:57 ►

The big thing I usually draw on this side of the blackboard and the nitrogen over here,

00:31:01 ►

and the Hiss variations is on the nitrogen.

00:31:03 ►

and the nitrogen over here, and the HISS variations is on the nitrogen.

00:31:09 ►

And 5-methoxy-DMT, which has recently become quite well-known for a number of reasons, not the least being the fact that the toad, the dry toad down in Sonora Desert,

00:31:14 ►

as opposed to the wet toad that is now in Australia, as elsewhere, has it in its gland secretions.

00:31:22 ►

Bufotinine is known, something that which I am still collecting, a remarkable

00:31:26 ►

collection of reports that is extremely active or it’s not active at all. And psilocybin, silicin

00:31:33 ►

would be tryptamines, and they are the components that have been mentioned frequently in the mushroom

00:31:37 ►

area. Carbolines, haramine was known, harmaline is known, tetrahydroharmin was known, and a couple of synthetic things that were not explored,

00:31:46 ►

but other than the basic three H compounds there,

00:31:50 ►

harmin, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmin,

00:31:53 ►

that was about the extent of knowledge of the chemistry of the beta-carboline.

00:31:57 ►

And in the ergot world, LSD was known,

00:32:00 ►

and about ten synthetic variations of LSD.

00:32:03 ►

Again, here are the nitrogens up here.

00:32:06 ►

Amide, instead of diethylamide, LSD, less surgic acid,

00:32:10 ►

diethylamide, dimethyl, methyl ethyl, H2,

00:32:15 ►

again, morpholine, pyrolidine, all kinds of things,

00:32:18 ►

all of them less active.

00:32:20 ►

And also at that time, there was some recognition

00:32:23 ►

of the botanical origins of the Ololuki that was mentioned in the Morning Glory Seeds.

00:32:29 ►

And so this was, again, in the Ergoline area.

00:32:31 ►

This is what was known.

00:32:33 ►

So this is where I started.

00:32:35 ►

And I said, you know, gosh, if a little bit of mescaline can change my attitude toward myself

00:32:41 ►

and make me quite so dramatically aware of how beautiful things are

00:32:45 ►

and how clever I am and how intelligent I could be if I could only devote myself to something.

00:32:50 ►

Devote myself to something.

00:32:51 ►

So let’s start making some new compounds.

00:32:53 ►

So I immediately went and got this Canadian argument of the TMA, the trimethoxyamphetamine.

00:32:59 ►

The tri, you have a benzene ring out here, this fuzzy ring.

00:33:05 ►

It’s a benzene ring. It’s this fuzzy ring. It’s an attached to this way, it’s a hexagon, and it has a methoxy there, methoxy there, methoxy there.

00:33:10 ►

That’s a tri, three, four, five, trimethoxy, benzene, carbon, carbon, NH2.

00:33:16 ►

What they report in Canada was trimethoxy, benzene, carbon, carbon, carbon hanging down the appendix,

00:33:21 ►

the methyl group, the thing that makes it an amphetamine-like chain, NH2.

00:33:26 ►

So I remember one of my last points in my first mescal experience was coming back to the home,

00:33:32 ►

my home that lived in Berkeley at the time.

00:33:34 ►

Everyone lives in Berkeley about this time in life.

00:33:38 ►

And I had on the coffee table in front of the couch a fantastic rose.

00:33:43 ►

And I somehow went into that rose.

00:33:45 ►

I went into that rose with such completeness.

00:33:48 ►

I learned that it indeed

00:33:49 ►

was an embodiment of many levels of colors.

00:33:52 ►

I had never seen colors

00:33:54 ►

as I saw in that experience

00:33:56 ►

and that rose was symbolic of it.

00:33:58 ►

I mean, purple is purple, sure.

00:34:00 ►

I saw purples up against other colors

00:34:02 ►

and it got up against other colors.

00:34:03 ►

The purples became lavender, became violets, became little changes that don’t have names.

00:34:07 ►

I’m totally, totally seduced by it.

00:34:10 ►

I must have looked in that flower for half an hour.

00:34:13 ►

About three or four or five weeks later, I actually made, duplicated the Canadian synthesis,

00:34:19 ►

made trimethoxyamphetamine.

00:34:20 ►

I said, are all these things really that similar?

00:34:23 ►

I took that.

00:34:24 ►

I had a little nausea going in.

00:34:25 ►

That’s very proper.

00:34:27 ►

And I took somewhat less of the material because I gathered from the Canadian reports it was somewhat more potent.

00:34:33 ►

And so I did get a very interesting experience.

00:34:35 ►

And amongst other things, my late wife then had had another rose on that table.

00:34:40 ►

And in the course of it, I looked at that rose with extraordinary analytical indifference.

00:34:47 ►

I looked at it, and the colors were there.

00:34:49 ►

They weren’t as dramatic as mesclun.

00:34:50 ►

I took it in my hand, I looked at it, and I tore it apart to look inside.

00:34:56 ►

Totally shocking different attitude.

00:34:58 ►

I said, whoops, what is this in me that can dismember a thing to see what makes it work,

00:35:04 ►

as opposed to appreciate it

00:35:05 ►

as a working entity. And so I realized, hey, there’s something else inside of me that maybe

00:35:09 ►

I’m not the perfect person I thought I was. You know, there’s something in there, something

00:35:14 ►

to be learned from. Well, okay, now you got that. I published a note in Nature or Science

00:35:20 ►

or somewhere, Nature I guess it was, indicating, because we had about three or four more of

00:35:24 ►

my friends who explored this, and each of them had some aspect of aggression.

00:35:29 ►

One of them got it to a thing on the radio,

00:35:33 ►

a slaughter on Fifth Avenue or Tenth Avenue or something,

00:35:35 ►

a very, very dramatic and a very piercing piece of music.

00:35:41 ►

And he got quite aggressive.

00:35:42 ►

We had a lot of talk to talk him down.

00:35:48 ►

With mesclun, this was almost unthinkable. One carbon atom,

00:35:52 ►

this little appendix, this thing hanging down here, not only changed the potency a little bit,

00:35:55 ►

but it changed the character of this thing quite dramatically.

00:36:00 ►

So, you know, good attitude. If one carbon changes this way, it’s put two, three,

00:36:04 ►

four, five, six, eight. And I just went in the laboratory with a great gusto and I synthesized

00:36:05 ►

a variety of appendical appendages

00:36:08 ►

hanging down from this particular alpha carbon.

00:36:11 ►

And of course,

00:36:12 ►

alpha ethyl was the TMA.

00:36:14 ►

I made the propyl,

00:36:16 ►

the butyl,

00:36:16 ►

the amyl,

00:36:17 ►

the hexyl.

00:36:17 ►

I couldn’t find the right nitrosine for the seven.

00:36:19 ►

I made the octyl.

00:36:20 ►

By the time I had the octyl made,

00:36:22 ►

I had actually explored the four carbon thing,

00:36:24 ►

the methyl group hanging down

00:36:25 ►

and had no activity

00:36:26 ►

none at all

00:36:27 ►

I got up to about 500 milligrams

00:36:28 ►

nothing

00:36:29 ►

didn’t want to go any higher

00:36:30 ►

just didn’t feel right

00:36:31 ►

so all of a sudden I got the lesson

00:36:33 ►

that you know

00:36:33 ►

3 is better than 2

00:36:35 ►

1 is better than none

00:36:36 ►

3 if it’s not been 2

00:36:38 ►

I had this whole host of beautiful compounds

00:36:40 ►

gorgeous white crystals

00:36:41 ►

none of them I assumed would be active

00:36:43 ►

okay

00:36:44 ►

so it didn’t work.

00:36:45 ►

So what do you do now? Well, the next move I said, you know, the Teutonic mindset. Here’s this big,

00:36:52 ►

big fuzzy ring over here. I have a 3, 4, 5. How many ways can you put three different methoxy

00:36:58 ►

groups onto this fuzzy ring? Well, you can go 3, 4, 5, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3,5, 2-3-6, 2-4-6, 3-4-5.

00:37:05 ►

Six different ways.

00:37:06 ►

Make all six of them.

00:37:07 ►

Well, it’s easy on a blackboard.

00:37:09 ►

You take an eraser and erase off methoxy here and write a methoxion down there.

00:37:13 ►

In the laboratory, it takes a bit more time.

00:37:17 ►

Especially those who are chemically inclined, think about 2-3-5 for a moment.

00:37:22 ►

It’s a virtually unknown ring orientation.

00:37:25 ►

It is now known. I figured a way of making it, and, five for a moment. It’s a virtually unknown ring orientation. It is now known.

00:37:26 ►

I figured a way of making it, and I got into this thing.

00:37:28 ►

So I synthesized all these other five positional isomers.

00:37:32 ►

And I said, well, how do you determine which is best?

00:37:35 ►

Well, at that time, they’re getting very red-hot about Siamese fighting fish,

00:37:39 ►

what’s called beta splendens, or something like that,

00:37:41 ►

where fighting fish would sort of put their tail up or float to the bottom of the tank, do something weird with psychedelics.

00:37:49 ►

And spiders, oh, they love spiders spinning webs that are funny.

00:37:52 ►

And this funny web was evidence of a psychedelic action of the compound,

00:37:56 ►

so people had these big spider cages with spiders.

00:37:58 ►

And I actually, this is the beginning of my first disillusionment in trying to find an animal model

00:38:04 ►

for something that is explicitly a human type of action.

00:38:08 ►

So I played there.

00:38:09 ►

I did some other work later on.

00:38:10 ►

Occasionally, I’m sad to say, I would kill a dog, and I often would kill mice.

00:38:14 ►

The dog was a cardiac dog, and I didn’t know him well.

00:38:17 ►

But I got to know the mice, and I hated running LD50s

00:38:20 ►

because 50 of the animals survived, but 50 are dead.

00:38:23 ►

And what do you do with a dead mouse?

00:38:25 ►

I mean, you haven’t learned anything.

00:38:28 ►

All you know is that this much compound killed a mouse.

00:38:31 ►

And so at least the live mice were turned loose in the field

00:38:33 ►

and they fed something natural, the ones that survived.

00:38:37 ►

And I gave up on mice.

00:38:38 ►

So I have not used a mouse or a dog now probably about 35 years.

00:38:43 ►

Why?

00:38:43 ►

Why?

00:38:43 ►

or a dog now probably about 35 years.

00:38:43 ►

Why?

00:38:50 ►

The human was a test animal, and I was a test animal,

00:38:53 ►

and I tried them on myself, and I would get answers.

00:38:57 ►

And sometimes my friends would confirm them, and sometimes they wouldn’t.

00:38:58 ►

That’s fine.

00:39:04 ►

But I had a very definitely strong ethic that if I was going to ever give it to anyone else or talk about it or other people would use it, I would try it myself and learn exactly what it did to me.

00:39:09 ►

And I would at least have that one aspect of an LD, hopefully zero, value to build on.

00:39:16 ►

So I made these five other isomers with methoxys.

00:39:20 ►

And of all the orientations, the 2, 4, 5, and the 2, 4, 6 were the only ones that were really active.

00:39:27 ►

And they were both very active.

00:39:29 ►

So, God, you know, the 3, 4, 5 nature, nature made the 3, 4, 5 mescaline.

00:39:34 ►

Why did it choose to make the one that was about the least active of the possible ones?

00:39:40 ►

So this got me into a little thought process. Does nature make alkaloids for people’s benefit in plants?

00:39:47 ►

Are the plants made for plants’ benefits?

00:39:49 ►

Are they defensive?

00:39:50 ►

Why do these plants make alkaloids at all?

00:39:53 ►

People ask me every now and then, you know, tell me, why do plants make alkaloids?

00:39:58 ►

Yeah, maybe it’s a garbage can for unwanted nitrogen.

00:40:02 ►

Ah, nonsense.

00:40:02 ►

Dump it if you don’t want it.

00:40:01 ►

garbage can for unwanted nitrogen?

00:40:02 ►

Ah, nonsense.

00:40:03 ►

Dump it if you don’t want it.

00:40:10 ►

Maybe it’s to attract insects that make pheromones that make armpit attractions to other insects so they can mount and do their thing.

00:40:12 ►

No.

00:40:13 ►

Maybe you can find an example.

00:40:15 ►

But generally, I have no idea why the world of plants produces alkaloids.

00:40:20 ►

They’re gorgeous compounds.

00:40:21 ►

Some of the most complex rascals you can even imagine are in there and you find them only as a rule because you either run a crystal

00:40:28 ►

test on it and you find an alkaloid positive color test, but more apt you find

00:40:32 ►

a dead animal under the plant and he’s been eating the leaf and you find there’s a poison there.

00:40:36 ►

And so there is this action. You often pursue these compounds

00:40:40 ►

isolations and identifications on the basis of the fact there’s something

00:40:44 ►

that goes on there and usually goes on not basis of the fact there’s something that goes on there

00:40:45 ►

and usually goes on not to a plant but to an animal.

00:40:48 ►

And you have this balance.

00:40:50 ►

And I found this again and again in nature.

00:40:52 ►

The plant does what the animal needs.

00:40:55 ►

The animal does what the plant needs.

00:40:57 ►

The plant pees out CO2 and takes in whatever it is.

00:41:00 ►

Animals pee out.

00:41:01 ►

No, it’s the other way about it.

00:41:02 ►

Plants take in CO2 and out goes oxygen.

00:41:04 ►

People take in oxygen, take out CO2.

00:41:07 ►

Beautiful balance.

00:41:08 ►

If you find something that is 2-4 in a plant,

00:41:12 ►

you’ll find it’s 3-4 in animals.

00:41:14 ►

If you find something like your carbolines

00:41:16 ►

from the methoxy dangling down,

00:41:18 ►

which hand?

00:41:18 ►

Down here on the carboline in the plant,

00:41:21 ►

it’s out here in the carboline in the animal.

00:41:23 ►

It’s almost as if the

00:41:25 ►

two kingdoms were balanced in some clever way. And sometimes you get insight of what’s going to be

00:41:32 ►

active in a person by the basis of where the plant did it and do it the other way. So yes,

00:41:39 ►

plants can be teachers, but sometimes in a very oblique manner in which that which is taught

00:41:43 ►

is taught by omission or is taught by change

00:41:47 ►

and not taught to be duplicated or to be imitated.

00:41:50 ►

So what I did, I did, as I say, I put these other things.

00:41:53 ►

I had the 2, 4, 5 out there and the 2, 4, 6.

00:41:57 ►

Along the same general time, I tried less methoxy groups.

00:42:01 ►

It didn’t work.

00:42:02 ►

I tried more methoxy groups.

00:42:03 ►

It worked, but not as well.

00:42:05 ►

So roughly three oxygens, two or three oxygens was kind of the best out there.

00:42:09 ►

Then I said, well, if you have all these methoxy groups, what about making them longer?

00:42:13 ►

Make an ethoxy there or an exoxy.

00:42:16 ►

I said two, four, five.

00:42:17 ►

I’m going to work a two, four, five.

00:42:18 ►

It’s easy to make, straightforward.

00:42:20 ►

As potent as it comes, a two, four, six is about equivalent.

00:42:29 ►

forward, as potent as it comes, the 2, 4, 6 is about equivalent. So instead of 2, 4,

00:42:36 ►

instead of 2, 4, 5 trimethoxy, I put ethoxy on there. I made monoethoxy, dimethoxy. There’s three of those. I made diethoxy, monoethoxy. There’s three of those. I made trimethoxy.

00:42:41 ►

So I made seven more compounds. Ethoxy is the place of methoxys here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, or all.

00:42:48 ►

You know, another couple weeks’ work.

00:42:52 ►

A couple months’ work, a few months’ work.

00:42:54 ►

And tasted them.

00:42:56 ►

And the only ones that were as or more active were the ones where the four was the four ethoxy.

00:43:02 ►

The others were down in activity.

00:43:03 ►

So that four had something, and I found the 4 and its magic will be the nitrogen and its magic in the cryptamines

00:43:10 ►

and will be the nitrogen at the 5 position of the ergot family and its magic in the LSD-type compounds.

00:43:17 ►

The other parts of the molecule, okay, go along with the ride or become a little less active or become inactive,

00:43:23 ►

but there is a spot in which magic occurs in each of these three families, and that’s the spot. You can only find

00:43:28 ►

it by experimental trial and error. That’s the spot in which you express your imagination.

00:43:33 ►

In the case of the phenethylamines, it was a four position. So what great things. I put a

00:43:38 ►

chloro there. I put a nitro group there. I put a bromyl group there. I put an diodo group there.

00:43:43 ►

Anything I could put out there was fine.

00:43:45 ►

But the first thing that occurred to me, if a methoxy in that position, which gave me TMA2, active at about 20 milligrams,

00:43:52 ►

that was one of my stumble compounds, had made something like 8 or 10 milligram trial and had nothing.

00:44:00 ►

It was 8 milligrams.

00:44:01 ►

So I went to 15 milligrams.

00:44:03 ►

And my arrogant confidence that I knew what was going on, it couldn’t be active until it got up to there, you know, somewhere. So I was 8 milligrams. So I went to 15 milligrams, and my arrogant confidence that I knew what was going on,

00:44:06 ►

it couldn’t be active until it got up to there, you know, somewhere.

00:44:08 ►

So I was down here.

00:44:09 ►

So after an hour, I doubled the dosage, and I think it took 24 or something milligrams.

00:44:13 ►

I discovered that 12 would have been quite adequate if I had waited another 5 or 10 minutes.

00:44:19 ►

I spent the day in a laundry room watching a washing machine that was not going around go around.

00:44:25 ►

It was a – yeah, I learned a great deal about being humble and extrapolating from one structure to another.

00:44:34 ►

That was a very instructive – anyway, what I did, I said, here is an oxygen out here.

00:44:38 ►

Without doubt, this thing metabolizes by the methyl group being taken.

00:44:42 ►

That’s the active position.

00:44:43 ►

Methyl group is off.

00:44:44 ►

I get a phenol.

00:44:44 ►

The phenol conjugates to something. Rather, it gets excreted. That’s the active position. Methyl group is off. I get a phenol. The phenol conjugates to something or other.

00:44:46 ►

It gets excreted.

00:44:47 ►

That’s how it gets metabolized.

00:44:48 ►

What if I were to put the methyl?

00:44:51 ►

Yeah.

00:44:52 ►

What if I were to put the methyl?

00:44:53 ►

I’m sorry.

00:44:53 ►

I’ve not drawn a blackboard from behind the blackboard before.

00:44:56 ►

This is interesting.

00:44:58 ►

I’m standing behind the blackboard.

00:45:00 ►

And here’s the ring, and here’s the chain, and here’s the nitrogen.

00:45:02 ►

Okay.

00:45:02 ►

What if I were to take the oxygen out, and I wipe it out with an eraser,

00:45:08 ►

and put the methyl group right on the ring?

00:45:11 ►

Interesting.

00:45:12 ►

If the compound gets into whatever receptor sites,

00:45:16 ►

at that time I still had some sort of a naive belief that there was something to do with receptor sites

00:45:22 ►

and the action of these drugs.

00:45:23 ►

I have gotten rid of that finally.

00:45:26 ►

If this thing could get into that

00:45:28 ►

receptor site, and this

00:45:30 ►

point of metabolism was

00:45:31 ►

very necessary, and this

00:45:33 ►

thing couldn’t be metabolized,

00:45:36 ►

that son of a gun would be a very

00:45:38 ►

potent compound, because it couldn’t get rid

00:45:40 ►

of it. On the other hand,

00:45:42 ►

if it get in the receptor site and block the receptor

00:45:44 ►

site, and it was not an active compound, then it would block whatever in the body makes you skitzy from getting

00:45:51 ►

in the receptor site and be the perfect prophylactic. So either it’s going to be a very potent compound

00:45:55 ►

or it’s going to be a very good defense against the body’s natural tendency to go

00:45:59 ►

wonko with too much of this chemical, whatever it is. We’ll identify the chemical by identifying

00:46:03 ►

the receptor site by modifying this thing chemical by identifying the receptor site,

00:46:09 ►

by modifying this thing that goes into the receptor site in a way that it either is accepted or it’s metabolized and gets out of there.

00:46:11 ►

You couldn’t lose.

00:46:11 ►

Beautiful thing.

00:46:12 ►

I like this kind of experiment.

00:46:13 ►

So this was instead of 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methoxy, it was 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methyl.

00:46:20 ►

And since it took the oxygen out and put the methyl on, I called it DOM, just to give it a set of initials.

00:46:27 ►

And it turned out to be an active compound, quite active.

00:46:29 ►

In fact, it was on the top of my list for potencies for a couple, three years.

00:46:34 ►

And that was one of my transition compounds in that it was the – about this time, I had left Dow Chemical Company with mutually agreeable separation.

00:46:46 ►

That in itself was a story.

00:46:48 ►

I worked for them for five years.

00:46:52 ►

I was employed by them for ten years.

00:46:53 ►

That’s a better way of putting it.

00:46:56 ►

The first five years, I truly worked for them,

00:46:59 ►

and I invented an insecticide that was the first biodegradable ones.

00:47:04 ►

They were happy on that.

00:47:05 ►

And I was working on something else.

00:47:07 ►

And their feeling was, since you can invent an insecticide by theory,

00:47:10 ►

and I invented it because they had something that was close to Pfizer’s stigmy,

00:47:12 ►

and that’s another story entirely.

00:47:14 ►

If that is indeed what you can do, why don’t you use that same inventive thing

00:47:17 ►

and create something that you’re interested in?

00:47:20 ►

I said, fine.

00:47:21 ►

So that was five years’ free laboratory space for working on psychedelic

00:47:25 ►

drugs. And I got about a dozen patents out of it. And Dow still has a dozen patents on

00:47:32 ►

psychedelics with no knowledge of what to do with them. But I got a dollar for each

00:47:37 ►

of them. And that was the standard of the industry at the time. So at that point, I

00:47:43 ►

had left Dow and had gone into med school over in San Francisco.

00:47:46 ►

And this is about the time people were wandering up and down the hate thing, holding hands and

00:47:50 ►

having summers of love. And I was walking down the hate street memorizing the circles of

00:47:56 ►

bullets while people coming toward me were stoned on something called STP. And I had no idea what

00:48:01 ►

it was. And it turned out STP, which was initially the Serenity, Tranquility, and Placidity,

00:48:08 ►

and Placidity being an unpronounceable and undefinable thing,

00:48:10 ►

it became Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace.

00:48:13 ►

Then it became Stop the Police.

00:48:16 ►

And then from the police point of view, it became Too Stupid to Puke.

00:48:20 ►

In any event, it was called STP.

00:48:22 ►

The first thing, this was my DOM compound.

00:48:24 ►

I didn’t know it because it was somehow introduced on the street.

00:48:28 ►

And my level of, I call it an active compound, 4, 5, 6 milligrams is quite adequate.

00:48:32 ►

It lasts for about 18, 24 hours.

00:48:35 ►

But at that time, it was being put out on 20 milligram tablets.

00:48:39 ►

But its effects don’t come on for an hour.

00:48:41 ►

And people would take the tablets and say, there’s nothing there, and take a second tablet.

00:48:43 ►

on for an hour. And people would take the tablet and say, there’s nothing there, and take a second tablet.

00:48:47 ►

So people were coming into the Haight-Ashbury Clinic with 40 milligrams on board on something that 5 milligrams is quite adequate, and there were some very, very difficult

00:48:51 ►

times. And I was innocently doing what you do

00:48:55 ►

up in the Parnassus Avenue there, and I was unaware for until about

00:48:59 ►

six months later that the material, the STP, was the DOM compound that I had had.

00:49:04 ►

And that, I had a big supply of Dow, but that was intact.

00:49:06 ►

I don’t know where it came from.

00:49:07 ►

But there it was.

00:49:09 ►

Anyway, so this was the direction that went.

00:49:11 ►

An interesting thing happened about that time.

00:49:13 ►

I was thinking about, back to my old appendix, one carbon, two carbon thing.

00:49:17 ►

I said, since this compound was a totally different type of activity,

00:49:20 ►

long-lived and different style, maybe it has other actions.

00:49:23 ►

So I put an ethyl group on it. And what’s my, I go to

00:49:28 ►

1030? Yeah, okay. So I put an ethyl group

00:49:32 ►

on that, and I said, this is probably not going to be a psychedelic, but it may be centrally

00:49:36 ►

active. And I’ve tried it, I was working quite closely with Claudio

00:49:39 ►

Naranjo, who was down in Chile at that time, and he put it into about a dozen of his

00:49:43 ►

rather agitated and depressed patients, and all of them undepressed.

00:49:48 ►

And so we had what could very well be an antidepressant here, before really antidepressants were

00:49:52 ►

much in popularity.

00:49:53 ►

And Bristol, I happened to be talking to Bristol.

00:49:55 ►

I gave a talk at a Gordon Research Conference, and the head of research at Bristol was the

00:50:00 ►

secretary there, and I gave this talk.

00:50:01 ►

He said, why don’t you give some to Mr. Bristol?

00:50:02 ►

We’ll try it out.

00:50:03 ►

We’ll see on our animals what it does.

00:50:07 ►

And so I gave him a supply of this. I had called it Ariadne, just because I was in that kind of a mood. And I gave him

00:50:12 ►

a sample, Bristol, and they finally found an animal test in which it showed an action

00:50:18 ►

that they could define as being antidepressant. I think it caused monkeys to run mazes more

00:50:23 ►

readily or something. And then they also kept finding, they wanted to prove it was not hallucinogenic.

00:50:28 ►

And they found that I think it was either DOM or mescaline made a cat’s tail go up like this and get all fuzzy.

00:50:33 ►

They called it a Halloween cat’s tail.

00:50:35 ►

And this compound did not make the cat’s tail go up and go fuzzy.

00:50:40 ►

So they used that to the FDA’s evidence that it was not a hallucinogen, which I think.

00:50:43 ►

So they used that to the FDA’s evidence that it was not a hallucinogen, which I think…

00:50:51 ►

And the FDA said, okay, sounds good to us, and they gave a…

00:50:53 ►

Things were different in those days.

00:50:58 ►

Gave a IND, it’s called an IND, to Bristol to try it in human clinical studies,

00:51:00 ►

and Bristol promptly did so.

00:51:02 ►

But that was a little aside.

00:51:04 ►

That was an interesting thing, but Bristol… I was not interested in antidepressants.

00:51:05 ►

I was interested in things that would serve as exposures of the human mind to itself.

00:51:10 ►

And so I continued with my own work.

00:51:14 ►

And I mentioned where the methyl was, chlorines, bromines, iodines.

00:51:17 ►

Then I got the idea to go back to the – all these were with this little methyl group hanging down.

00:51:22 ►

Got rid of the methyl group, go back to the phenethylamines themselves.

00:51:25 ►

And I went through a lot of these things.

00:51:26 ►

I tried that two-carbon system,

00:51:28 ►

and the one that really has,

00:51:30 ►

now has achieved a fair amount of notoriety

00:51:32 ►

is putting the bromocoop in that four position

00:51:34 ►

with the two-carbon chain,

00:51:35 ►

this thing called 2CB,

00:51:38 ►

and it got quite popular in Europe

00:51:39 ►

and then in this country,

00:51:40 ►

and it became illegal,

00:51:41 ►

which is a pattern that I have seen occur before.

00:51:46 ►

Anyway, another one in the same area was exploring with methyl groups on the nitrogen.

00:51:50 ►

This is out of this part of the nitrogen.

00:51:52 ►

The dimethyl I mentioned very early, tricosteroid, was not active.

00:51:55 ►

I put methyl groups on a host of other psychedelics.

00:51:57 ►

All cases, the activity dropped away, and the compounds became quite different and quite uninteresting.

00:52:02 ►

One exception was that one of the compound that was known at that time

00:52:06 ►

when I first got into this area in the 50s was MDA,

00:52:08 ►

and putting a muscle group on there produced a compound called MDMA,

00:52:12 ►

and it was quite different, but it was not a disappointment.

00:52:15 ►

And that, of course, is another story of another time.

00:52:22 ►

Okay, phenethylamines are still alive and going.

00:52:26 ►

There are lots of things that can be done.

00:52:27 ►

That four position is still a magic, magic place.

00:52:34 ►

One thing I’m reading, it’s a marvelous thing.

00:52:36 ►

I’d love to have time to do it, but I’m into tryptamines and other things now,

00:52:39 ►

but I’ll get back to it someday.

00:52:41 ►

It’s using the Teflon argument.

00:52:44 ►

If you, for example, you say, well,

00:52:46 ►

I’ll put something that’s very polar out there, a nitro group or maybe an alcohol or an acid or

00:52:51 ►

something, and if it gets into this so-called receptor site and where that thing dangles,

00:52:56 ►

it’s attracted to something that once a polar thing, it’ll go this way. If you put in a very

00:53:01 ►

negative lipophilic fat-loving thing like an alkyl choke,

00:53:05 ►

it would be repelled.

00:53:07 ►

It would go that way and go down that way.

00:53:10 ►

If you put something like Teflon in there,

00:53:13 ►

Teflon neither likes water nor does it like fat.

00:53:14 ►

It doesn’t like anything.

00:53:17 ►

So suddenly you’re putting something into that receptor site that’s not going to go up or go down.

00:53:19 ►

It’s just going to get in the way of something and not be attracted at all.

00:53:22 ►

So I put a trifluoromethyl group out there.

00:53:25 ►

Trifluoromethyyl is a one-carbon

00:53:26 ►

Teflon. And the damn

00:53:28 ►

thing is not only is it interesting,

00:53:30 ►

it’s the most potent phenethylamine yet made.

00:53:32 ►

The thing is active at not much over a milligram

00:53:34 ►

and the amphetamine is active at less than a milligram.

00:53:36 ►

Fantastic. So what about

00:53:38 ►

putting a tri-penefluorethyl,

00:53:40 ►

put out a heptafluoropropyl.

00:53:42 ►

Let’s put out bigger and bigger Teflons out there.

00:53:44 ►

What’s going to happen? I don’t know.

00:53:47 ►

This is exactly what I love about chemistry.

00:53:49 ►

I have no idea.

00:53:52 ►

Every time you turn around,

00:53:54 ►

you get a question that suddenly,

00:53:56 ►

if you’re honest with yourself,

00:53:57 ►

I have no idea what’s going to happen.

00:53:59 ►

It could be extremely potent.

00:54:00 ►

It could be extremely selective.

00:54:02 ►

It could be extremely damaging.

00:54:04 ►

It could be extraordinarily effective as a tool in this way. Or it could be extremely selective. It could be extremely damaging. It could be extraordinarily effective

00:54:05 ►

as a tool in this way.

00:54:07 ►

Or it could fry a neuron.

00:54:09 ►

You don’t know.

00:54:11 ►

And you won’t know until you make

00:54:13 ►

the compound a little bit salty.

00:54:16 ►

It crunches between the teeth, but it’s okay.

00:54:18 ►

Try it. See how it feels.

00:54:20 ►

Record what goes on.

00:54:21 ►

Settle back for a couple, three days and

00:54:23 ►

gather your notes and see, is it worth going on, is it a lead that’s worthwhile, does it make sense,

00:54:29 ►

can you use the information in any way in the human study of the human mind,

00:54:33 ►

can you use the information in any way in designing other tools that might be effective in the human mind.

00:54:39 ►

Okay, I’ll go back to the second of these.

00:54:40 ►

This is the ring out here that’s an endo, carbon, carbon, nitrogen, tryptamine.

00:54:44 ►

the second of these. This is the ring out here that’s an endocarbon-carbon-nitrogen tryptamine. Tryptamines, as I mentioned,

00:54:48 ►

Sara had made a host of these things, all alkyl groups. It turns out

00:54:52 ►

on the aromatic ring, nothing, a 4-oxygen,

00:54:56 ►

a 5-oxygen, and that’s it. There’s no variety out there

00:55:00 ►

at all. You can have a 5-methoxy, this is the 5-methoxy-DMT world,

00:55:04 ►

5-hydroxy, the bufot DMT world, 5-hydroxy, the

00:55:05 ►

bufotinine world, 4-hydroxy, the psilocybin-silicin world, no hydroxy, no oxygen, this is just

00:55:12 ►

the plain tryptamine world. On the chain, a little bit of play can be had. Again, a

00:55:16 ►

one-carbon dingler or a no-carbon dingler, two-carbon or two-carbon with one hanging.

00:55:21 ►

But the nitrogen is the area where all the versatility, the flexibility, the excitement can occur.

00:55:26 ►

So I said, why not?

00:55:27 ►

Let’s make a whole bunch of these

00:55:28 ►

with different things out in the nitrogen,

00:55:29 ►

which I did.

00:55:31 ►

And you get into things.

00:55:32 ►

One of the most remarkable things,

00:55:33 ►

again, tricked me.

00:55:34 ►

Sara made the diethyl,

00:55:35 ►

dipropyl, dibutyl,

00:55:36 ►

diamyl, the perolidyl,

00:55:38 ►

the piperidyl,

00:55:39 ►

and the morpholil.

00:55:39 ►

Don’t take notes.

00:55:40 ►

There’ll be no quiz in this.

00:55:41 ►

Morpholil, okay.

00:55:43 ►

So I said,

00:55:43 ►

what about making

00:55:44 ►

some other kinds of groups out there? So I made a diisopropyl group. And there this. Morpholil. Okay. So I said, what about making some other

00:55:45 ►

kinds of groups out there? So I made a diisopropyl group. And there’s a isopropyl. No. That’s right.

00:55:51 ►

Diisopropyl. So now you have N, N-diisopropyl tryptamine, or N, N, or just D-I-P-T. And this

00:55:59 ►

was the most unusual compound. It had an action that I have not seen anywhere else and not found in any

00:56:05 ►

other compound. And that is, I had 40 milligrams. I’m not getting any effect, you know, 10, 20 usual

00:56:11 ►

scaling up, 40 milligrams. And I was pounding through the house getting a cup of coffee.

00:56:15 ►

And Housy’s Young People’s Guide to the Symphony was on the radio. It was horrible. It was

00:56:21 ►

absolutely horrible. I mean, musically it’s good, not the way it was being performed.

00:56:25 ►

So, you know, who let the amateurs at San Jose or wherever it was

00:56:29 ►

record this and play it on a major radio music station?

00:56:34 ►

I listened through it. Everything was out of tune.

00:56:36 ►

The timpani even was out of tune. The fiddles were out of tune.

00:56:39 ►

They even played these large musical string chords.

00:56:42 ►

They were out of tune.

00:56:43 ►

And it turned out that the ear, somewhere in there,

00:56:46 ►

was taking in the information, it was getting to the back of the head,

00:56:49 ►

going whatever association goes on there, out to wherever the sides are interpreted,

00:56:53 ►

and somewhere along that line, things are getting screwed up.

00:56:55 ►

This ear was the same as that ear, so it probably wasn’t an ear damage,

00:56:59 ►

and the music was going in, but it was not like you’re putting

00:57:01 ►

your finger on the side of a record and slowing everything down.

00:57:04 ►

It was that you were distorting the harmonic integrity of what you’re hearing.

00:57:08 ►

Wow. Substantly, this, an auditory, no visuals, no interpretive things, no colors, strictly auditory,

00:57:16 ►

screw up. And so on this basis, it has been now tried by a person unnamed with two people,

00:57:24 ►

both with perfect pitch.

00:57:25 ►

One was with a striking instrument.

00:57:27 ►

I think it was a harpsichord.

00:57:28 ►

The other was with a sine wave generator, which takes all weird harmonics out of the picture.

00:57:33 ►

And the person would take, on separate occasions, each of these two people,

00:57:37 ►

and before, check this note, check that note, E above middle C, B flat, notes.

00:57:42 ►

And what the note really was and what the note was said to be

00:57:45 ►

was a measure of the accuracy of a thing.

00:57:47 ►

Beautiful baseline.

00:57:48 ►

Then about 30 minutes into the thing, the error grew, grew very badly.

00:57:53 ►

This way, then it began closing off again and pretty soon became no error again.

00:57:58 ►

So for the first time, A, you had a quasi-objective measure of the time course

00:58:03 ►

and the qualitative nature course of a psychedelic, not a psychedelic, what is it?

00:58:07 ►

It’s an auditory distortant. But a beautiful thing, almost objective

00:58:12 ►

because obviously the person had no idea what the note really was. He said what the note

00:58:16 ►

sounded like to him, and he said so. Both people had the same distortion, same time

00:58:20 ►

course at 40 milligrams. Subsequently, no, one was at 40 milligrams,

00:58:23 ►

one was 100 milligrams.

00:58:26 ►

No visual. So I have taken that as a lead. I make the isopropyl, make the ethyl isopropyl,

00:58:31 ►

make the propyl isopropyl, make the propyl. I’ve got a lot of interesting new chemistry

00:58:34 ►

coming out of it. All things close, things that had the same shrubbery mass, not there.

00:58:40 ►

So something very weird about that specific compound. It’s something that made the compound with the 5-methoxy group and the NN-diacepropyl very much like 2C-B.

00:58:51 ►

A light intoxicant, short-lived, no auditory distortions at all, very interesting compound.

00:58:56 ►

Another humble lesson, just because this does it here, this is just not going to make it more potent.

00:59:01 ►

It’s going to change the character.

00:59:02 ►

Every compound is unique.

00:59:04 ►

You can say this looks like that.

00:59:06 ►

This is related to that.

00:59:07 ►

This appears to be an analog of that along this line.

00:59:10 ►

Prepare to be surprised.

00:59:11 ►

It’s going to be something a little unexpected, and it may be very unexpected.

00:59:14 ►

I have never found another one that had that particular auditory change.

00:59:19 ►

But look at the possibilities.

00:59:20 ►

I now know how to make dialkyl substitution in that nitrogen of any kind I want.

00:59:25 ►

Let’s take, for example, a methyl, ethyl, propyl, butyl, isobutyl, secondary butyl, isopropyl, amyl.

00:59:31 ►

Forget the other isomers.

00:59:32 ►

Amyl.

00:59:32 ►

Put on a hexo out there for good luck.

00:59:34 ►

And maybe something else.

00:59:35 ►

And then you make another axis for the other group.

00:59:37 ►

You have methyl, ethyl, what do you get?

00:59:38 ►

Ten by ten.

00:59:39 ►

A hundred compounds could be made in the course one a day.

00:59:43 ►

There’s no reason.

00:59:44 ►

You take more than a day to make each,

00:59:46 ►

maybe four days to prove that you’re right and you got what you think you do.

00:59:49 ►

A hundred compounds of which I would say 85 are new.

00:59:52 ►

Unknown.

00:59:53 ►

This is why this damn thing is so exciting.

00:59:56 ►

Any one of those could be a very specific thing for the color red.

01:00:00 ►

It could be a very specific thing for this particular sound range of change.

01:00:03 ►

It could be a very specific thing for assaying this particular part of the personality,

01:00:07 ►

such as self-image or faith in the church or who knows what.

01:00:14 ►

You could very well touch some peculiar human thing with one of these materials unpredictably,

01:00:20 ►

and you’re not going to find self-image changes and faith in the Catholic Church in experimental rats.

01:00:28 ►

It’s just not going to work.

01:00:30 ►

Anyway.

01:00:32 ►

What else do you have?

01:00:33 ►

The five methoxy I’ve mentioned.

01:00:34 ►

It generally amplifies the potency of the compound.

01:00:38 ►

Six, seven positions are of no interest in the tryptamine area.

01:00:41 ►

At least I’ve found nothing of interest so far.

01:00:43 ►

And the one thoroughly, thoroughly dramatic thing that was known, worked out by Albert Hoffman,

01:00:50 ►

was the structure of psilocin and psilocybin, both of which were exclusively from the mushroom world,

01:00:56 ►

specifically a very narrow portion of the mushroom world,

01:00:59 ►

all with an oxygen on the foreposition of this particular thing,

01:01:03 ►

and all of them orally active, which is quite an unusual thing.

01:01:06 ►

I was talking to someone in the lobby during one of the many discussions and conversations in the lobby

01:01:14 ►

on the story of the isolation and the identification of the structure of psilocybin, silas, and bihofen.

01:01:21 ►

It’s a good example of, it example of direct outgrowth of a person

01:01:25 ►

who sent me a piece of peculiar plant

01:01:28 ►

and asked me that question

01:01:29 ►

which I despise,

01:01:31 ►

but I am always gracious to say

01:01:32 ►

I don’t think I can.

01:01:34 ►

What’s in it?

01:01:35 ►

Here’s an interesting plant.

01:01:36 ►

What’s in it?

01:01:38 ►

I taught a course over in Berkeley

01:01:39 ►

for about 15 to 20 years

01:01:40 ►

called Forensic Toxicology.

01:01:42 ►

And I told them

01:01:43 ►

no matter how powerful

01:01:44 ►

and important your boss is,

01:01:46 ►

if he hands you a sample they’ve seized on the street and he says, what’s in it?

01:01:49 ►

Ask him to rephrase the question.

01:01:51 ►

Is cocaine in it? Is heroin in it?

01:01:54 ►

Does it contain this? Does it contain that?

01:01:56 ►

Fine, that’s answerable. What’s in it?

01:01:58 ►

Maybe a 30-year futile task.

01:02:01 ►

Because you may never find out what’s in it

01:02:03 ►

because you don’t know what the heck you’re looking for.

01:02:08 ►

And so this is exactly what happened. The mushrooms came out of Mexico.

01:02:12 ►

The story has been told several times. It will be told again. But the story of Hoffman in the laboratory, a little bit of this mushroom thing,

01:02:15 ►

Hein, Hein, Hein, I think it was, in France, took rats

01:02:20 ►

as a test animal, made this extract, that extract, into the rat, looked at the rat, did another

01:02:24 ►

extract, into the rat, looked at the rat, did another extract, into the rat, looked at the rat,

01:02:26 ►

and in essence found nothing, could not find what was going on.

01:02:29 ►

Hoffman, very simply, took the material,

01:02:31 ►

verified it was active,

01:02:32 ►

divided it into this and that fraction,

01:02:34 ►

I think one was a fat-soluble, one was a fat-insoluble,

01:02:37 ►

ate this one, and then three days later,

01:02:39 ►

ate this one.

01:02:39 ►

Here’s where the activity is good.

01:02:41 ►

Then you take this, and you fractionate it this way, that way.

01:02:44 ►

He ran it on, I think, a chromatographic separation into 10, 1 to 0 to 1.1,

01:02:49 ►

0.1 to 0.2 up to 0.9 to 1.0.

01:02:51 ►

And on Thursday, 8 to 0 to 0.1.

01:02:53 ►

And on the following Tuesday, 8 to 0.1 to 0.2.

01:02:55 ►

And here’s where the activity was.

01:02:57 ►

And so you get at it.

01:02:58 ►

You follow the activity.

01:02:59 ►

In the only animal species, it shows that activity.

01:03:02 ►

And he found it.

01:03:03 ►

Here it was.

01:03:03 ►

It was an alkaloid.

01:03:04 ►

It turned out to be silicin. He spent about

01:03:06 ►

a week and a half at the lab to synthesize it.

01:03:08 ►

Fine. Spent a long time and got the

01:03:10 ►

phosphate ester, which is silicin.

01:03:12 ►

And the compound was identified

01:03:14 ►

and it turns out to be the right compound.

01:03:15 ►

But you have to know what you’re looking for. You have to be able

01:03:18 ►

to follow some way

01:03:20 ►

of shining light on what you are

01:03:22 ►

separating and where the interesting

01:03:23 ►

component of that separation is.

01:03:26 ►

And in the case of things that’s only active in man, only man can be your test animal.

01:03:30 ►

So that was a little story on psilocybin.

01:03:32 ►

Where am I?

01:03:33 ►

Psilocybin.

01:03:34 ►

This man’s on.

01:03:35 ►

Why am I using notes?

01:03:36 ►

I can’t follow notes.

01:03:41 ►

One interesting thing that came up in the tryptamines,, I’m still in the tryptamines for some reason

01:03:45 ►

and I mentioned 5-methoxy-DMT

01:03:48 ►

this is a material that recently got into quite a bit of

01:03:51 ►

popularity, notoriety, what have you

01:03:53 ►

as being the Bufo alvarez

01:03:56 ►

actually it’s called Sonoratoad I guess

01:04:00 ►

or the Colorado River Toad

01:04:01 ►

and this is the one that got into Australia.

01:04:05 ►

Australia, as I think I have said in previous talks somewhere,

01:04:09 ►

has a knack of bringing in a new problem every ten years to solve an old problem.

01:04:14 ►

And in ten years, a new problem has become a new problem.

01:04:16 ►

A solution has become a new problem, and you bring in something else.

01:04:19 ►

I think they did this with rabbits or with dogs or something or other.

01:04:22 ►

And then they brought in sugar cane.

01:04:24 ►

The cane had beetles.

01:04:24 ►

They brought in toads to eat the beetles.

01:04:27 ►

And the trouble is they got toads that are down here and the beetles up here,

01:04:30 ►

and the toads couldn’t get the beetles, but there’s no natural enemy for the toads,

01:04:33 ►

so they began reproducing throughout northeast Australia.

01:04:36 ►

And they are now everywhere in northeastern Australia,

01:04:38 ►

and they are now working on a virus of some kind in South America that is specific against this toad.

01:04:44 ►

I said this to – I was in Sydney about three or four months ago,

01:04:47 ►

and I was in a toad exhibit, a frog exhibit, right,

01:04:50 ►

the Natural History Museum, and this little old lady,

01:04:53 ►

I love saying things spontaneously alongside little old ladies

01:04:56 ►

because they never know, a lot of people don’t know if I’m kidding or not.

01:04:59 ►

And you get away with murder when you search.

01:05:02 ►

Did you realize that?

01:05:03 ►

You know, they believe whatever you say.

01:05:05 ►

It’s murder.

01:05:06 ►

Anyway, I was looking at this thing, and they were talking about this.

01:05:10 ►

That was the Bufo Morinus.

01:05:11 ►

They brought the wrong toad in.

01:05:13 ►

Bufo Morinus had a marvelous documentary.

01:05:16 ►

I’m off the wall.

01:05:17 ►

I’ll come back in a moment.

01:05:18 ►

A marvelous documentary shown on American TV on this particular toad

01:05:23 ►

and how it became such a mess in Australia.

01:05:25 ►

And they had pictures, people saying you get extra points if you drive your car and get them from in front and get them head on because they explode by the captured air.

01:05:33 ►

And you get points if you get loud noises.

01:05:34 ►

You don’t get points.

01:05:36 ►

It’s a human animal sometimes, a strange thing.

01:05:39 ►

Anyway, what this woman is looking at this toad thing, they talk about the toads that come in.

01:05:43 ►

They can’t get the sugar cane beetles, but the toads are getting out of control.

01:05:47 ►

And they had a note down there saying that this virus is being developed that is specific against the toad.

01:05:52 ►

I said, you know, I wonder if that’s the same virus.

01:05:54 ►

I said, just loud enough for you here to hear.

01:05:56 ►

That they are wondering if it might cause some form of aplastic anemia in wallabies in 10 years.

01:06:05 ►

She gave me this look.

01:06:09 ►

She walked away.

01:06:10 ►

That’s a great compliment, I guess.

01:06:13 ►

Anyway, the toad, the other toad, the dry toad, the Sonora toad, the alvarious toad,

01:06:20 ►

has a secretion, has 5-methoxy-DMT.

01:06:23 ►

Indeed, you take the toad and you massage the parotid gland against a piece of glass,

01:06:26 ►

and it squirts out and it dries up,

01:06:27 ►

and you put it down like a little ball of rubber cement and put it into a little pipe and smoke it.

01:06:32 ►

And about 20 milligrams per little rubber ball of cement of 5-methoxy-DMT is quite an effective charge.

01:06:39 ►

It’s very quickly there.

01:06:40 ►

Some people love it.

01:06:40 ►

Some people despise it.

01:06:42 ►

Very few people dislike it enough not to try it a second time, which speaks well for a psychedelic.

01:06:48 ►

Anyway, this is an example of an unexpected treasure of the tryptamine area from animal sources.

01:06:55 ►

And so sometimes I think animals may be good teachers, too.

01:06:59 ►

Okay, carbolines.

01:07:01 ►

I’m getting near the end.

01:07:02 ►

I still have 18 minutes.

01:07:04 ►

Carbolines. I’m getting near the end. I still have 18 minutes.

01:07:14 ►

Carbolines are this indole thing, two carbons, nitrogen with the nitrogen stuck around back on the indole with another carbon called beta carbolines.

01:07:23 ►

If they have a methyl group dangling off that bottom of that carbon down below the one that’s stuck on there, it has a name that begins with H-A-R-M.

01:07:25 ►

H-A-R-M is the beginning of the name,

01:07:28 ►

means there’s a methyl group in the one position. It’s a nice equation to have. So you have harmin, harmaline, harmalol, tetrahydroharmin, tetrahydroharman, harman, all, harmalan,

01:07:35 ►

all those harm things have a methyl group down here. The carboline itself usually’s just called acarboline. Jace gave a very nice story when he’s exploring 300 milligrams of beta, of, God, what was he into?

01:07:52 ►

Harmaline, harmaline itself, in which he described the phenomena of puking between his knees while sitting on the toilet.

01:08:01 ►

I can, I think I came out a little bit more lucky than he.

01:08:04 ►

I think I came out a little bit more lucky than he my highest try on just plain

01:08:06 ►

Harmaline was 250 milligrams as a hydrochloric salt

01:08:10 ►

and I was sitting on the couch

01:08:13 ►

and I had three things going at once

01:08:15 ►

and fortunately they didn’t get in one another’s way

01:08:19 ►

but not by much

01:08:20 ►

one was I was trying my best

01:08:22 ►

if this is a psychedelic if I can get vision

01:08:25 ►

let’s just get a vision

01:08:26 ►

close my eyes

01:08:26 ►

get a vision

01:08:27 ►

vision

01:08:27 ►

get a vision

01:08:28 ►

and so I got this pair of eyes

01:08:31 ►

hey we’re on our way

01:08:33 ►

keep at it

01:08:35 ►

I wasn’t feeding too well

01:08:36 ►

things were not right

01:08:37 ►

but I’m going to get a vision

01:08:38 ►

and I got a mouth

01:08:40 ►

right place

01:08:41 ►

and now if I can only get a nose

01:08:43 ►

I might know who I’m looking at.

01:08:46 ►

And with a little bit of effort, I got a nose, and it came in upside down.

01:08:50 ►

So I had eyes, nose, mouth, and diarrhea.

01:08:56 ►

But fortunately, my nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea were not at the same time.

01:09:01 ►

They alternated with great grace.

01:09:02 ►

were not at the same time, they alternated with great grace.

01:09:10 ►

And I managed to keep sanitary in a sense as well.

01:09:12 ►

It was not a successful thing.

01:09:19 ►

And I will avow confirmation of those people who say harmoline has activity, but it’s best to be used at somewhat lower levels as a monamine oxidase inhibitor of those things that are

01:09:24 ►

normally not active without its being present.

01:09:28 ►

An interesting thing grows out of harmaline in an entirely different way.

01:09:31 ►

This is what’s known as a RAM.

01:09:32 ►

That’s why I don’t.

01:09:34 ►

Okay.

01:09:36 ►

A thing came out of harmaline in quite a different way.

01:09:38 ►

I was asked by a person about a year ago,

01:09:40 ►

what’s the ratio of harmaline to harmaline in piganum harmala seeds?

01:09:46 ►

Well, gee, I don’t know so I got some piganum harmala seeds

01:09:48 ►

ground them up, poured a little bicarb

01:09:50 ►

ground it up in a little dichlorovapid

01:09:52 ►

the dichlorovapid put a little 90-10

01:09:53 ►

butanol, no, tywin butanol

01:09:56 ►

stuck a two, maybe three

01:09:58 ►

micrograms in the GCMS

01:10:00 ►

and got this beautiful pair of peaks

01:10:02 ►

and here’s harming and here’s harmal, or the other way about it, I forget which.

01:10:08 ►

And this whole thing led to a number of rather interesting little ramifications.

01:10:12 ►

First of all, the first thing said, let’s be a scientist.

01:10:15 ►

Let’s be systematic.

01:10:17 ►

I will get my reference sample of harming and make sure this harming, which looks like

01:10:20 ►

harming, that probably is harming, is harming.

01:10:22 ►

So I injected pure harming.

01:10:23 ►

There it was.

01:10:24 ►

Nice, nice, no problem. Then I said, let’s make sure the

01:10:27 ►

harmaline that I have over here is pure harmaline. It is harmaline.

01:10:31 ►

So I got my reference sample of harmaline and injected the sample and I got

01:10:35 ►

two peaks. Whoops.

01:10:39 ►

So I looked at my harmaline. Merck company, 1920 something

01:10:43 ►

or other, harmalin hydrochloride.

01:10:46 ►

The lot number was on there. Everything’s

01:10:48 ►

on there. It was about a third

01:10:50 ►

Harmelin. So what happened?

01:10:52 ►

It was dirty to start with.

01:10:54 ►

Harmelin goes to Harmelin with time.

01:10:56 ►

My machine is doing

01:10:57 ►

something weird. So I got a sample

01:10:59 ►

from Sigma Chemical Company of currently made

01:11:02 ►

Harmelin one peak.

01:11:04 ►

So I wrote to Merck. I said, dear Mr. Merck, please tell me, here’s a lot number, here’s a control number,

01:11:10 ►

here’s the date of its manufacture, it’s a label that was only used by you between 1924 and 1928 or something.

01:11:16 ►

Was your quality control to know there was no Harmaline in your Harmaline?

01:11:20 ►

Or how did you distinguish between them at that time?

01:11:24 ►

I’d like to know because I’m finding you’re harming at that time.

01:11:27 ►

Oh, we know.

01:11:28 ►

To be 30% harming.

01:11:30 ►

Got back this gorgeous letter which said,

01:11:32 ►

we have never offered that sample commercially.

01:11:35 ►

Okay.

01:11:38 ►

So that didn’t help, so I wrote to Boo Homestead.

01:11:40 ►

He said, well, he had gotten a sample of Banisteriopsis

01:11:43 ►

that was left on the shores of somewhere

01:11:46 ►

down there in the Rio Negro or the Orinoco

01:11:47 ►

or somewhere down there in 14

01:11:50 ►

1842 or something

01:11:51 ►

and stood for a while and got over to the Kew Gardens

01:11:53 ►

and Scholdy’s made it available

01:11:56 ►

to him and at that time it was banisteriopsis

01:11:58 ►

both alkaloids he asked that it was

01:11:59 ►

only harming so he deduced that

01:12:01 ►

harming went to harming with time

01:12:03 ►

and it was an age change thing.

01:12:05 ►

Well, I’m not going to wait 100 years and see if this gets worse.

01:12:08 ►

And how do you accelerate an age change?

01:12:10 ►

Is it light? Is it UV light?

01:12:11 ►

Is it air? Is it moisture? I don’t know.

01:12:14 ►

So still, to me, it’s an unanswered question.

01:12:15 ►

What bothers me a little bit is

01:12:17 ►

that all of the Harmelin, this was years and years

01:12:19 ►

and years ago, that was used by Claudio

01:12:21 ►

Naranjo in all of his studies that led

01:12:23 ►

to his marvelous book,

01:12:25 ►

one chapter of which was a use of and study of Harmelin in human subjects in psychotherapy,

01:12:29 ►

was from that bottle. So is it possible that a lot of the works reported for Harmelin is also

01:12:36 ►

Harmin or only Harmin or due to Harmin? You can’t prepare a thing like that. All you can do is say,

01:12:42 ►

when you find something in the literature and it sounds okay, as someone said just by Peter First last time,

01:12:48 ►

hang on, there’ll be something in about ten years that’ll make it not okay. You don’t

01:12:52 ►

know the final answer. You have to kind of roll with it as you go.

01:12:56 ►

So I made a number of different carbolines. I made carbolines that looked like

01:13:00 ►

things that came out of, oh, another, the beautiful chemist

01:13:04 ►

in this whole, in the area would love this.

01:13:06 ►

My first working with

01:13:07 ►

Harmelin many years ago,

01:13:10 ►

I just had access to a brand new

01:13:12 ►

state-of-the-art 60-megacycle NMR.

01:13:14 ►

So I dissolved the Harmelin in heavy water,

01:13:16 ►

I put it in NMR so I get all the

01:13:17 ►

methyl group down here, methoxy group

01:13:19 ►

out there, and all the hydrogens in the thing.

01:13:22 ►

There was no methyl group

01:13:23 ►

hanging down on the one position.

01:13:27 ►

And harmaline has a methyl group

01:13:28 ►

there. Was my harmaline wrong then?

01:13:30 ►

Could Emil Fischer

01:13:31 ►

have been wrong and gotten the wrong structure for harmaline?

01:13:34 ►

Not likely. It’s been about

01:13:36 ►

50 years and everyone kind of agrees with him.

01:13:38 ►

So I began looking. It turns out

01:13:40 ►

pure fun of the chemistry

01:13:41 ►

of it, that those hydrogens on that

01:13:43 ►

methyl group exchange with heavy water and become deuteriums and becomes invisible.

01:13:47 ►

So one simple thing like dissolving a sample in a solvent and running a spectrum on it

01:13:52 ►

gave a totally wrong spectrum because I didn’t have the wit to think through the fact

01:13:56 ►

that one part of the molecule would be exchanging in water

01:14:00 ►

with something that could only be seen in an NMR.

01:14:04 ►

Fabulous. Every time you turn around, you think you have an answer, and you’re wrong.

01:14:08 ►

Anyway, the last of this group I want to talk about would be really the lystrogi.

01:14:14 ►

They were known at that time.

01:14:16 ►

This is the LSD.

01:14:17 ►

I think I had a big argument with someone early yesterday morning out in the lobby,

01:14:22 ►

or maybe noontime in the lobby, on LSD being a natural product.

01:14:26 ►

It’s not a natural product.

01:14:26 ►

It’s not.

01:14:27 ►

Some of that rumor and myth once and for all, LSD is not known in nature.

01:14:32 ►

It is not a plant component.

01:14:34 ►

It is a laboratory component.

01:14:35 ►

Lysergic acid, isosyl Lysergic acid, a whole host of beautiful polypeptide amides, different

01:14:40 ►

substitution patterns are known.

01:14:43 ►

Simple amides are known.

01:14:44 ►

But not Lysergic acid diethylamide itself.

01:14:47 ►

That’s a laboratory material.

01:14:48 ►

It’s natural if you consider Albert Hoffman natural, just like STP is natural if you consider me natural,

01:14:52 ►

but it’s not a plant product, and so it cannot be put into quite that category.

01:14:57 ►

Okay, at that time, a host of compounds had been made in imitation of LSD,

01:15:03 ►

and almost all of them at that time were ground out

01:15:05 ►

because they were assaying things in Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories.

01:15:09 ►

You put a dipropyl group on there.

01:15:10 ►

You put this group.

01:15:12 ►

It’s up here.

01:15:12 ►

The nitrogen’s up here now because we have an indole with a nitrogen.

01:15:17 ►

We have a phenethylamine with the same nitrogen.

01:15:20 ►

And that nitrogen up there happens to be in the all-by-self called the five position,

01:15:24 ►

and that has a methyl group on it.

01:15:26 ►

But everyone pays attention to the carboxyamide up here at the, what’s it, what, five, six, seven, eight, the eight carbon,

01:15:33 ►

the carboxy up there.

01:15:34 ►

And you make the diethylamide, the dimethylamide, the hydrogen, dihydrogenamide, the methylhydrogen,

01:15:40 ►

the ethylhydrogen, the methylethyl.

01:15:42 ►

They made probably 10, maybe 15 amides of

01:15:46 ►

it.

01:15:46 ►

Every one was less potent than LSD in human studies.

01:15:49 ►

Every one.

01:15:50 ►

And so people said, gee, LSD is the ultimate compound.

01:15:53 ►

That is it.

01:15:53 ►

It is the perfect answer to this area of psychotomimetic, at that time it was still called psychotomimetic,

01:16:00 ►

psychedelic drugs.

01:16:01 ►

And then a very interesting little study was made.

01:16:04 ►

Again, I’m not the only one doing this work. A lot of people are. And there’s a lot of study was made. Again, I’m not the only

01:16:05 ►

one doing this work. A lot of people are, and there’s a lot of work being published. You should

01:16:08 ►

be attentive to the literature. It’s all the time coming out there. A series of compounds in which

01:16:12 ►

that methyl group up there was changed. It was taken off by a very obscure method to form what’s

01:16:17 ►

called NOR-LSD, and then an ethyl group was put on. So really it is nor N-ethyl, nor LSD.

01:16:29 ►

All it is is LSD with a two-carbon instead of a one-carbon thing sticking out there.

01:16:31 ►

Damn thing’s twice as potent as LSD.

01:16:34 ►

Very hard to make, but it’s twice as potent.

01:16:38 ►

So all of a sudden, LSD is not the most active of the psychedelic compounds by any means.

01:16:40 ►

It has a shorter action.

01:16:47 ►

It doesn’t have quite the magic, colorful sparkle of LSD, but it’s a very thorough psychedelic.

01:16:54 ►

So ethyl, allyl, butyl, benzyl, you know, once you find a spot where changes occur and they’re not all negative,

01:16:56 ►

you start peppering all kinds of things in there.

01:17:01 ►

And indeed, it turns out ethyl is the most active of them, but the propyl is active, the allyl is active,

01:17:05 ►

the propenyl is active, the propyl is active, the butyl has some activity that’s down, and that’s the limit of it.

01:17:08 ►

But there are another six or eight compounds up there,

01:17:10 ►

and it’s a dramatic, dramatic opening of an area to begin exploring again.

01:17:16 ►

Other things could be modified in the LSD molecule.

01:17:20 ►

LSD has a way of being this way and this way.

01:17:22 ►

If you make it this way or this way or this way, the other three isomers, the stereoisomers, they’re all inactive.

01:17:28 ►

So LSD itself is by itself has the only active configuration of what’s called stereoisomeric orientation.

01:17:35 ►

A very popular thing back approximately in the 60s became all of a sudden MGS.

01:17:42 ►

Everyone was talking about MGS.

01:17:43 ►

Herb Cain had a column dedicated totally to MGS, the latest something or other.

01:17:48 ►

Morning Glory Seeds. And someone had published, I think, one of the

01:17:52 ►

early psychedelic review papers, things about

01:17:55 ►

Oluyuki. At that time, everyone was learning the word of Ipamia

01:17:59 ►

with all kinds of marvelous common names and species.

01:18:04 ►

I remember I did some very early work with rivia, rivia corumbosa,

01:18:07 ►

a little black seed, the shape of a rice grain.

01:18:11 ►

It had gorgeous flowers and contained the ergot alkaloids.

01:18:16 ►

Then all of a sudden, someone discovered the baby Hawaiian wood rose,

01:18:20 ►

superb source of these ergot alkaloids.

01:18:23 ►

And they had activity.

01:18:25 ►

They were amides, but they were not LSD.

01:18:27 ►

I remember a very interesting situation

01:18:28 ►

where I was at a trial,

01:18:31 ►

asked to be an expert witness this time

01:18:33 ►

for the defense, a trial of Mendocino,

01:18:35 ►

in which there was a one-liter round-bottom flask

01:18:38 ►

that was half full of black goop,

01:18:39 ►

of black viscous goop.

01:18:41 ►

And the prosecution said,

01:18:44 ►

this is LSD, and this person is making LSD.

01:18:47 ►

And the defense lawyer said, there’s no LSD in there. It’s not LSD. I didn’t know what the guy

01:18:50 ►

was doing. But he’s certainly not making LSD. And so I was brought in as defense. This is a fellow

01:18:55 ►

by the name of, what was his name? Best was brought in as a prosecution witness. And they said to us

01:19:01 ►

very simply, very simple. The judge said to us in the presence of the jury, gentlemen, you’re both experts.

01:19:06 ►

One of you best leans largely toward the prosecution as your orientation.

01:19:12 ►

The other of you, me, leads largely toward the defense as your orientation.

01:19:16 ►

The question is, is there LSD in here?

01:19:18 ►

Why don’t we take this bottle and pour it into two halves?

01:19:21 ►

You take one.

01:19:22 ►

You take the other.

01:19:23 ►

Go away.

01:19:25 ►

And come back next Monday and tell us if there halves. You take one. You take the other. Go away. And come back next Monday

01:19:26 ►

and tell us if there’s LSE in there.

01:19:29 ►

Marvelous.

01:19:29 ►

That’s the way things should go.

01:19:31 ►

And I said,

01:19:32 ►

now, one precaution.

01:19:33 ►

He said,

01:19:33 ►

don’t talk to each other.

01:19:35 ►

No communication

01:19:36 ►

between the two of you.

01:19:37 ►

And you’ll come into court

01:19:38 ►

without knowing

01:19:39 ►

what the other one has said.

01:19:40 ►

Okay, sure.

01:19:42 ►

As far as I was concerned,

01:19:43 ►

if it was there,

01:19:44 ►

we’d both find it.

01:19:45 ►

If it wasn’t there, neither of us would find it.

01:19:46 ►

There’s no problem at all.

01:19:47 ►

So we went back.

01:19:48 ►

Boy, I don’t know about him, but I worked like fury on that thing.

01:19:52 ►

I had about one weekend plus a day to see if there was or was not LSD in there.

01:19:55 ►

And I have a feeling he was working like fury over at the DEA lab in San Francisco.

01:19:59 ►

We went back up there.

01:20:00 ►

We met in the parking lot.

01:20:01 ►

Didn’t say a word.

01:20:02 ►

We went back in.

01:20:03 ►

We brought our little bottles back with us.

01:20:06 ►

And the judge, I think I weighed in the hall.

01:20:07 ►

He went and gave his report.

01:20:09 ►

Then he came out in the hall and looked at me.

01:20:10 ►

No way did I get one hint of communication from that look he gave to me.

01:20:14 ►

No way at all.

01:20:15 ►

He’s playing it very straight.

01:20:17 ►

I went in and gave my thing.

01:20:18 ►

Neither of us found LSD.

01:20:20 ►

The guy, the judge, threw the whole thing out.

01:20:23 ►

The humorous part was the thing was loaded with lysergic acid.

01:20:28 ►

Interesting.

01:20:29 ►

But they never asked that question.

01:20:33 ►

They just said, was LSD in there?

01:20:34 ►

And the answer was no.

01:20:36 ►

It happened to be LSD and lysergic acid.

01:20:38 ►

It’s also schedule one drug or schedule three or something or other.

01:20:41 ►

They never asked the question.

01:20:42 ►

And there’s enough peptides in there.

01:20:44 ►

There was this hydrolyzed morning glory seed. There’s no question about it. Later on, Jimmy and

01:20:48 ►

I had a beer down at the place, a beer house down in Hopland Woods, a town down the road

01:20:56 ►

from Mendocino. And we were discussing what we had found, how we had done it. And we were

01:21:01 ►

trying to determine which morning glory seeds had been used. We both had found this. We

01:21:04 ►

found the evidence. We were discussing the whole thing. We were trying to determine which morning glory seeds had been used. We both have found this. We found the evidence.

01:21:05 ►

We were discussing

01:21:06 ►

another thing.

01:21:07 ►

We were very grateful

01:21:07 ►

the question was asked

01:21:08 ►

the way it was.

01:21:09 ►

We were good friends before.

01:21:10 ►

We’re still, he’s now dead,

01:21:11 ►

but we were good friends

01:21:11 ►

for many years after that.

01:21:13 ►

But yes, morning glory seeds

01:21:14 ►

not only contain ergot,

01:21:16 ►

some very interesting sorts,

01:21:17 ►

but they can be converted

01:21:18 ►

to a surgic acid,

01:21:19 ►

which in turn

01:21:20 ►

can be converted to LSD.

01:21:21 ►

And anyone who has a catalog

01:21:23 ►

from, what’s it called, that place up in Washington, Lumpanix,

01:21:28 ►

can do about 16 recipes that tells you how to do it.

01:21:31 ►

I wouldn’t trust them very much, but at least you can get the recipes.

01:21:34 ►

So that is kind of a hand-waving romp through the non-slide, non-blackboard area of phenethylamines and tryptamines.

01:21:43 ►

All I can say in sort of winding up is it’s been

01:21:46 ►

a fascinating 40 years and I sure hope

01:21:48 ►

I get another 40 years.

01:21:49 ►

Thank you.

01:21:50 ►

Thank you. You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:22:19 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:22:24 ►

Okay, so here’s my fantasy.

01:22:27 ►

Copies of this talk by Sasha Shulgin

01:22:29 ►

get somehow included as a standard feature

01:22:32 ►

of every chemistry set sold to children all over the world.

01:22:35 ►

And it’s also played during the first chemistry class

01:22:38 ►

each year in high school and university.

01:22:41 ►

And after hundreds of thousands of budding young chemists

01:22:44 ►

are inspired to explore

01:22:46 ►

psychedelic chemistry, well, maybe they’ll find a magic pill that simply makes people be nice.

01:22:53 ►

I happen to believe that there’s never been a human being who wasn’t nice at one point in their

01:22:59 ►

life. I’ve even been nice myself from time to time. But it would sure help me get through those grumpy times with a magical nice pill.

01:23:08 ►

Oh, wait, we do have something like that.

01:23:10 ►

It’s called cannabis.

01:23:13 ►

And I guess that this is kind of a rude way to make a comment

01:23:16 ►

after the wonderful talk by Sasha Shulgin that we just listened to.

01:23:20 ►

After hearing Ken speak last week and then hearing Sasha today,

01:23:24 ►

well, it makes me feel good

01:23:26 ►

that with luck my grandchildren will also get to hear them one day as well. You know, I’ve met

01:23:32 ►

quite a few chemists in my life, but not one of them ever came close to his or her excitement

01:23:38 ►

about chemistry as did Sasha. Even in private, when he was talking about chemistry, he was

01:23:43 ►

every bit as animated as what he was when he gave the talk that we just listened to.

01:23:49 ►

And did you catch the fact that he began his inquiries into the properties of psychedelic molecules a good decade before the word psychedelic was even coined?

01:24:01 ►

What a wonderful man he was, as was Muhammad Ali.

01:24:04 ►

We have really been fortunate to have had them among us for as long as we did. What a wonderful man he was, as was Muhammad Ali.

01:24:09 ►

We have really been fortunate to have had them among us for as long as we did.

01:24:13 ►

Now it’s our turn to find ways in which we can honor their memories.

01:24:18 ►

But for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

00:00:00 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

506 - One Of Us

Program Notes §

Previous Episode §

Next Episode §

Similar Episodes §

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

00:00:19 ► §

00:00:23 ► §

00:00:30 ► §

00:00:35 ► §

00:00:40 ► §

00:00:45 ► §

00:00:50 ► §

00:00:55 ► §

00:00:58 ► §

00:01:03 ► §

00:01:05 ► §

00:01:11 ► §

00:01:18 ► §

00:01:23 ► §

00:01:33 ► §

00:01:38 ► §

00:01:46 ► §

00:01:52 ► §

00:01:58 ► §

00:02:03 ► §

00:02:10 ► §

00:02:15 ► §

00:02:23 ► §

00:02:26 ► §

00:02:30 ► §

00:02:34 ► §

00:02:38 ► §

00:02:40 ► §

00:02:45 ► §

00:02:52 ► §

00:03:00 ► §

00:03:05 ► §

00:03:08 ► §

00:03:16 ► §

00:03:23 ► §

00:03:27 ► §

00:03:30 ► §

00:03:32 ► §

00:03:37 ► §

00:03:41 ► §

00:03:47 ► §

00:03:53 ► §

00:03:56 ► §

00:04:02 ► §

00:04:08 ► §

00:04:14 ► §

00:04:20 ► §

00:04:26 ► §

00:04:31 ► §

00:04:37 ► §

00:04:43 ► §

00:04:47 ► §

00:04:51 ► §

00:04:55 ► §

00:04:59 ► §

00:05:03 ► §

00:05:07 ► §

00:05:11 ► §

00:05:19 ► §

00:05:27 ► §

00:05:37 ► §

00:05:43 ► §

00:05:48 ► §

00:05:51 ► §

00:05:56 ► §

00:06:02 ► §

00:06:08 ► §

00:06:12 ► §

00:06:16 ► §

00:06:20 ► §

00:06:24 ► §

Program Notes

Previous Episode

Next Episode

Similar Episodes

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

00:00:19 ►

00:00:23 ►

00:00:30 ►

00:00:35 ►

00:00:40 ►

00:00:45 ►

00:00:50 ►

00:00:55 ►

00:00:58 ►

00:01:03 ►

00:01:05 ►

00:01:11 ►

00:01:18 ►

00:01:23 ►

00:01:33 ►

00:01:38 ►

00:01:46 ►

00:01:52 ►

00:01:58 ►

00:02:03 ►

00:02:10 ►

00:02:15 ►

00:02:23 ►

00:02:26 ►

00:02:30 ►

00:02:34 ►

00:02:38 ►

00:02:40 ►

00:02:45 ►

00:02:52 ►

00:03:00 ►

00:03:05 ►

00:03:08 ►

00:03:16 ►

00:03:23 ►

00:03:27 ►

00:03:30 ►

00:03:32 ►

00:03:37 ►

00:03:41 ►

00:03:47 ►

00:03:53 ►

00:03:56 ►

00:04:02 ►

00:04:08 ►

00:04:14 ►

00:04:20 ►

00:04:26 ►

00:04:31 ►

00:04:37 ►

00:04:43 ►

00:04:47 ►

00:04:51 ►

00:04:55 ►

00:04:59 ►

00:05:03 ►

00:05:07 ►

00:05:11 ►

00:05:19 ►

00:05:27 ►

00:05:37 ►

00:05:43 ►

00:05:48 ►

00:05:51 ►

00:05:56 ►

00:06:02 ►

00:06:08 ►

00:06:12 ►

00:06:16 ►

00:06:20 ►

00:06:24 ►

00:06:31 ►

00:06:37 ►

00:06:44 ►