Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/B01NAZQ80YA Sequel to DreamLand
Date this lecture was recorded: August 6, 1998
Today’s podcast features an August 6, 1998 talk about Salvia Divinorum given by Terence McKenna at the Esalen Institute. In addition to many interesting facts that Terence presents about Salvia, he tells how Daniel Siebert became the first person to identify the active ingredient of the plant, which eventually led to its widespread use today. In addition to discussing Salvia, Terence also touches on: Ibogaine, magic mushrooms, psychedelic plants, Australia’s psychoactive plants, DMT, Greek mystery religions, Datura, LSD, War on Drugs, and language.
“I’ve not done the pure [salvinorin A] compound. It’s somewhat scary. One thing that’s scary about it is it creates a profound break with reality. The person who is intoxicated totally loses touch with this world, and unlike people on DMT, or ketamine, or some other short-acting psychoactive or dissociative, they won’t stay still. People tend to move around and be active, which is a real pain for the sitter… . The protocol for dealing with this is the ‘tie ‘em to a tree’ protocol.” -Terence McKenna
U.S. State Laws regarding Salvia Divinorum
Legal status of Salvia Divinorum worldwide
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:23 ►
salon.
00:00:23 ►
And while this is actually the first program of my 13th year of podcasting from here in the salon,
00:00:30 ►
nonetheless, I’d like to thank Marcus A., Nicholas R., and Luke S.,
00:00:36 ►
who are actually the last three of our fellow saloners to make a donation during my year 12.
00:00:42 ►
And since this comes in the middle of March, I don’t really expect you to follow
00:00:46 ►
this train of thought. However, it does mean a lot to me as they bring the number of donors to
00:00:51 ►
the salon during the past year to just over 100 wonderful salonners. Without whose help,
00:00:58 ►
these podcasts certainly wouldn’t be possible. So Marcus, Nicholas, and Luke, along with everyone
00:01:04 ►
else who has made a
00:01:05 ►
contribution to the salon in the last 12 months, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
00:01:11 ►
Now for today’s program, I’m going to play the next tape in the series of Terrence McKenna talks
00:01:17 ►
that he gave in August of 1998 at the Esalen Institute. His main topic for this talk is
00:01:24 ►
Salvia Divinorum, which has been discussed
00:01:26 ►
at least 10 other times here in the salon. But since this talk was given near the end of Terence’s
00:01:32 ►
public speaking days, it may well be his final words on the topic of Salvia. So without any
00:01:38 ►
further interruptions by me, let’s join him and a few of his friends and hear what he thinks about this interesting plant.
00:01:46 ►
Well, one more interruption, I guess. I should let you know that about 45 minutes into this talk,
00:01:53 ►
there was a break in the tape and a few seconds of Terence’s words of wisdom were lost.
00:01:59 ►
But I don’t think that we missed anything really important. So let’s get on with the show.
00:02:04 ►
I don’t think that we missed anything really important, so let’s get on with the show.
00:02:08 ►
What concerns does anybody want to talk about?
00:02:09 ►
Is there an agenda? We can talk about psychedelics, media, philosophy, Monica, the forces that deconstructed the Renaissance, memory palaces.
00:02:24 ►
Yes, well, if you don’t have an agenda
00:02:26 ►
everything really does go because then you’re
00:02:28 ►
at my mercy
00:02:29 ►
is there anything
00:02:32 ►
anybody particularly
00:02:33 ►
oh well that’s a good
00:02:35 ►
practical thing to
00:02:38 ►
talk about
00:02:38 ►
well Salvia
00:02:40 ►
it’s an opportunity
00:02:43 ►
and a challenge to the community.
00:02:46 ►
For those of you who may not have heard of it,
00:02:48 ►
this is a plant that has been known to botanists for 50 years or so
00:02:55 ►
and was always carried.
00:02:57 ►
It’s a Central Mexican plant, an obscure mint
00:03:02 ►
that grows in the Sierra Mazateca of central Mexico.
00:03:08 ►
And since ethnobotanical work has been done in that area in the 30s,
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it was always carried on the books as a possible hallucinogen
00:03:19 ►
because the local people who were Mixtec, Mazatec, and Zapotec Indians
00:03:26 ►
claimed it was a hallucinogen.
00:03:30 ►
But the normal way of beginning the process of characterizing
00:03:38 ►
a psychoactive compound like that,
00:03:42 ►
99% of them, 95% of them are alkaloids and when
00:03:48 ►
they would do simple alkaloid positive tests on salvia divinorum it came up
00:03:54 ►
negative sure so there was the implication that if there was
00:04:01 ►
psychoactivity in salvia divinorum it it wasn’t based on an alkaloid.
00:04:06 ►
Alkaloids characterize all the common hallucinogens,
00:04:11 ►
psilocybin, DMT, harmine, tropanes,
00:04:16 ►
such as occur in detoura,
00:04:18 ►
and many other compounds.
00:04:21 ►
Well, about, I don’t know, now maybe eight or nine years it’s been a
00:04:25 ►
while it’s stretching out Brett Blosser an anthropologist who perhaps has been
00:04:32 ►
to Esalen I think he’s been here to conferences anyway a peer of all of us
00:04:36 ►
he was studying these people and they turned him on. He asked about it, and they showed him how they did it.
00:04:46 ►
And he became unambiguously intoxicated,
00:04:50 ►
in fact, spectacularly intoxicated.
00:04:52 ►
And so he told a few people about this.
00:04:59 ►
And the trick is no trick at all when you know it.
00:05:03 ►
What people had been doing is chewing and swallowing this plant
00:05:07 ►
and having very ambiguous results.
00:05:12 ►
What the Indians told him was to masticate it to a mush
00:05:17 ►
but to hold it in his mouth
00:05:20 ►
and that it was absorbed through the mucosa, mucous membranes of the mouth.
00:05:29 ►
It doesn’t seem like much of a shift in technique,
00:05:33 ►
but what had been previously elusive
00:05:36 ►
suddenly became accessible to large numbers of people.
00:05:41 ►
And it excited the interest of an amateur underground chemist named Daniel
00:05:48 ►
Siebert, who lives in Southern California. Some of you may even know Daniel. He also
00:05:54 ►
has been here. And he, one of the things that attended the plant, or was part of its mythology that was
00:06:05 ►
that if there was a psychoactive
00:06:08 ►
principle, it was somehow very
00:06:11 ►
chemically unstable, fragile. And
00:06:14 ►
it was said, you know, that you
00:06:16 ►
had to use the leaves within hours,
00:06:18 ►
no drying, no storing. And they do,
00:06:22 ►
the leaves do have a peculiar
00:06:24 ►
quality of blackening quickly.
00:06:26 ►
They are fragile. They go through chemical changes.
00:06:30 ►
But Daniel Siebert decided that he would just assume this was not true.
00:06:36 ►
He would just start with the assumption that the chemical constituent was robust, and so he started drying the leaves and extracting with petroleum ether to de-fat
00:06:51 ►
and then just, I don’t know, some other high molecular weight solvent to take it out.
00:06:58 ►
And he very quickly reached white powder, a crystalline white powder. And when he smoked a very small amount
00:07:08 ►
of this white powder, it was spectacularly active. So he then looked back through the
00:07:18 ►
literature of Salvia divinorum and found that some 20 years earlier, a crystalline compound had been extracted from it,
00:07:27 ►
but never tested on humans or animals,
00:07:30 ►
that had been named alpha-salvinorine.
00:07:35 ►
So he, you know, chemical companies sell very small amounts
00:07:41 ►
of unrestricted compounds as chromatography standards in other words you
00:07:47 ►
calibrate your chromatographic column with a small amount of a known compound so he ordered
00:07:56 ►
the chromatographic standard for alpha alpha salvinorin which was only through they only would send three milligrams well he took he
00:08:05 ►
got the three milligrams and he divided it in three and he smoked it and bingo
00:08:12 ►
he had exactly elicited exactly the same experience that he had elicited from the
00:08:19 ►
white crystalline powder he had isolated So then he knew that what the white powder was
00:08:25 ►
was alpha-salvinorine.
00:08:28 ►
The pharmacology of this is pretty astonishing.
00:08:33 ►
First of all, it’s a diterpene,
00:08:34 ►
a chemical family unknown to contain other psychoactive compounds.
00:08:41 ►
Second of all, it’s active at under one milligram this is phenomenal
00:08:48 ►
LSD is spectacularly active at 500 micrograms 500 micrograms is equivalent
00:08:58 ►
to one half milligram so but that LSD is of of course, a hybrid synthetic, quasi-synthetic compound made from the natural compound ergot.
00:09:11 ►
Alpha-salvinorin, as a natural byproduct of a plant, is the most powerful psychedelic nature is known to elaborate a milligram is way too much i mean this you know
00:09:31 ►
triggers the feeling of an overdose of some sort uh well so this compound very late in the in the
00:09:40 ►
history of the elaboration of psychedelic drugs from nature.
00:09:46 ►
In other words, it’s been a long, long time since a discovery like this was made.
00:09:53 ►
LSD was in the late 40s.
00:09:58 ►
Psilocybin and DMT both arrived around 1956, 57.
00:10:04 ►
And there were no major,
00:10:06 ►
well, DOM, Sasha elaborated that,
00:10:09 ►
that was a synthetic,
00:10:10 ►
that came in the early 60s.
00:10:12 ►
But since then, there’s been no
00:10:15 ►
mega-halocenogen in its own special family,
00:10:19 ►
elaborated.
00:10:21 ►
As for the, you know,
00:10:23 ►
pharmacopsychology of this thing I’ve not done the pure
00:10:34 ►
compound it’s somewhat scary one thing that’s scary about it is it creates a profound break with reality the person who is intoxicated does
00:10:49 ►
totally loses touch with this world and unlike people on DMT or ketamine or some other short
00:10:57 ►
acting psychoactive or or disassociative they won’t stay still.
00:11:06 ►
People tend to move around and be active,
00:11:10 ►
which is a real pain for the sitter and near and dear.
00:11:15 ►
The protocol for dealing with this is the old tie-em-to-the-tree protocol.
00:11:22 ►
You know, this stuff only lasts 3 to
00:11:25 ►
12 minutes so
00:11:27 ►
if you’re really concerned about keeping
00:11:29 ►
somebody still they should be tied
00:11:32 ►
to the mast as Ulysses
00:11:34 ►
was when he wanted
00:11:36 ►
to hear the siren song
00:11:38 ►
you know he had his crew
00:11:39 ►
lash him to the mast and then
00:11:42 ►
he stopped all their ears
00:11:44 ►
with cotton wool whatever cotton wool is
00:11:47 ►
and then he could hear the siren song but not succumb to it
00:11:53 ►
maybe some of you remember in gabrielle garcia marquez’s novel, Sin Años de Soledad, José Arcadia Buendía, ties himself to a tree to take de Tura.
00:12:11 ►
And so it does have a tradition, at least in Latin American fantastic realism, if nowhere else.
00:12:27 ►
When I took the leaf, it was very psychedelic.
00:12:32 ►
It was not considering the chemical difference.
00:12:38 ►
It was not as dramatically different from other psychedelics as I thought it would be.
00:12:48 ►
The hallucinations are very bright and seem strangely linked to the reflex of closed eyes.
00:12:53 ►
In other words, I was sitting in a darkened room flooded with moonlight,
00:12:57 ►
and with my eyes open, nothing was happening.
00:13:01 ►
With my eyes closed, instantaneously, there was a very bright, complicated, recessional landscape.
00:13:09 ►
You’ve done it a lot in bongs, right?
00:13:13 ►
Yes, smoking.
00:13:14 ►
In a bong. Some people seem to have trouble connecting with it.
00:13:19 ►
Like on the Internet, there’s a lot of complaining about how it doesn’t work
00:13:23 ►
or why doesn’t it work for me
00:13:25 ►
but if you keep at it it’s usually just a methodological thing and also there is something
00:13:32 ►
weird about the handshake between user and drug the very first time i remember when i was first
00:13:40 ►
exposed to cannabis i smoked it a number of times
00:13:45 ►
with no discernible result to me,
00:13:48 ►
although I noticed people liked to come and watch.
00:13:52 ►
And then finally one evening,
00:13:55 ►
my mentor in these matters said,
00:13:59 ►
we’re just going to keep smoking these things
00:14:01 ►
until you avow that you are loaded and it took about four joints
00:14:08 ►
of terrible swag weed and then it just like there came a moment where everything rearranged itself
00:14:18 ►
and yeah swag i heard that term recently to me it always meant stolen clothing in manhattan you know
00:14:30 ►
the mafia deals in swag but now it’s apparently come to me yeah swag means stolen stolen fashion
00:14:39 ►
what for the fashion for the stolen clothes What? The Yiddish version of swag. I thought it was swag.
00:14:46 ►
For the fashion?
00:14:47 ►
For the stolen clothes?
00:14:49 ►
No, just stolen goods.
00:14:50 ►
Oh, stolen goods.
00:14:50 ►
It was swag.
00:14:53 ►
Well, maybe I hung out with people so Yiddish that all S’s were S-H’s.
00:14:57 ►
Swag.
00:15:00 ►
What’s the magic of the bomb?
00:15:03 ►
It’s all about a lot of leaf delivered in one big hit, you know, as opposed to a pipe
00:15:09 ►
The joints don’t really seem to do it not enough at once
00:15:16 ►
Once you’ve actually sucked down big bong hit of it and held it in and gotten off then I think you’re much more sensitive to it
00:15:23 ►
like cannabis in that way.
00:15:25 ►
You kind of tune into it,
00:15:27 ►
and it doesn’t take as big of a long hit
00:15:30 ►
to put me over the edge of the ear.
00:15:33 ►
But the difficulty of connecting with it
00:15:35 ►
makes it sound subtle.
00:15:37 ►
But when you actually do connect with it,
00:15:39 ►
it’s not subtle at all.
00:15:41 ►
It absolutely knocks you off your pins.
00:15:50 ►
As a plant, it can be grown in a window box. It can be grown in any enriched garden bed. It’s very much like coleus. You
00:15:59 ►
know what coleuses are? These ornamental plants. You see them everywhere. They’re used in landscaping. They
00:16:06 ►
have very brightly veined leaves, red, purple, green, chartreuse, very dramatic colors. Well,
00:16:15 ►
this is like a coleus that is not dramatic. It’s just a green-leafed coleus, but it forms
00:16:22 ►
the same kind of flowers as coleus. And then, you know, in the
00:16:28 ►
interest of thoroughness, I suppose, there are a lot of mysteries about the ethnography of this
00:16:33 ►
plant. It’s only known from these Mexican Highland Indians, but they have no word for it in their own language they refer to it as Ohas de la Pastora
00:16:46 ►
leaves of the shepherdess well if they’ve been using this plant for
00:16:52 ►
hundreds of years it’s inconceivable that there would not be a vocabulary for
00:16:58 ►
it in their native language why would they use the language of the conqueror to describe the shamanic plant so people have
00:17:07 ►
wanted to say well maybe they maybe they maybe it was brought from somewhere else one candidate
00:17:16 ►
don’t ask me why was the Basque country of Spain not because there are is such a plant there but simply because it was inside the empire
00:17:26 ►
that conquered Mexico
00:17:29 ►
another possibility we don’t know
00:17:35 ►
is maybe it has been discovered recently
00:17:38 ►
one thing we don’t know about psychedelic plants
00:17:42 ►
but tend to assume
00:17:43 ►
is that whenever we discover
00:17:45 ►
a psychedelic plant
00:17:48 ►
in a ritual context
00:17:49 ►
that it’s ancient,
00:17:52 ►
ancient, ancient, ancient.
00:17:54 ►
But there are some examples
00:17:56 ►
which suggest this may not be true,
00:18:00 ►
that this is a kind of prejudice
00:18:03 ►
on our part.
00:18:04 ►
Two spectacular examples. The first is peyote.
00:18:08 ►
The general assumption about peyote is that it’s thousands and thousands of years old. In fact,
00:18:16 ►
there appears to have been very little peyote use before the ghost dance religion of 1888.
00:18:30 ►
use before the ghost dance religion of 1888. In the old graves of the Sonoran Mexico, the Tarahumara, and these people, the narcotic plant remains that you find are of Sephora secundifolia,
00:18:40 ►
a plant that contains cytosine, a compound we, with our cultural values,
00:18:46 ►
would not even consider psychedelic.
00:18:48 ►
We would consider it an ordeal poisoning.
00:18:52 ►
You know, if I were to give you cytosine,
00:18:54 ►
you’d wrap yourself around the jaw all night long
00:18:58 ►
and vomit and convulse,
00:18:59 ►
and it would definitely put you through psychological changes.
00:19:03 ►
But to embrace it as a path is not in our cultural toolkit.
00:19:12 ►
Another example is Ibogaine,
00:19:16 ►
Tabernacle Iboga use in the Congo and Zaire region of Africa.
00:19:22 ►
This is used by the Fang people they build elaborate rituals
00:19:27 ►
around it they have a myth of its origins we can’t find any record of
00:19:33 ►
using this plant before 1860 and yet the Portuguese were in there from the 1430s onward describing customs and cataloging the cultural toolkit.
00:19:51 ►
So it may be that a phenomenon which we associate with modernity,
00:19:59 ►
the discovery and application of new psychedelic plants,
00:20:04 ►
has been going on for a long time.
00:20:07 ►
You know, I can remember a time when the only known source of psychoactive mushrooms was central Mexico.
00:20:15 ►
And now, every nation on Earth, right up to the Paleo-Arctic zone,
00:20:22 ►
has its own well-established and well-described psychoactive mushroom flora.
00:20:29 ►
And that’s simply because people started paying attention.
00:20:33 ►
I asked Paul Stamets once why he thought it took people so long to notice,
00:20:40 ►
for instance, in southern Oregon, which is really one of the great mushroom ecosystems
00:20:46 ►
psychedelic mushroom ecosystems
00:20:48 ►
of the world
00:20:48 ►
why had it taken so long for people to
00:20:51 ►
wake up to
00:20:53 ►
what was going on there
00:20:55 ►
and he said it was because
00:20:57 ►
mycologists when they would go collecting
00:21:00 ►
they would always strive
00:21:02 ►
to go to the
00:21:03 ►
pure primary uncut, remote Pacific rainforest ecosystem.
00:21:11 ►
And he said all these psychedelic mushrooms, they’re found in highway medium strips, playgrounds,
00:21:19 ►
rhododendron dells, the lawns of courthouses, public buildings, city parks,
00:21:26 ►
they tend to associate themselves with human beings.
00:21:30 ►
And they were all very diminutive, too.
00:21:34 ►
In other words, there was a time in mycology when if it was smaller than a dime,
00:21:40 ►
you didn’t bother.
00:21:42 ►
Later, when all the good stuff had been mined out then people
00:21:47 ►
discovered the so-called micro flora and went back and catalogued it
00:21:54 ►
yeah suggest something maybe that’s um maybe all the you know ecological changes that have
00:22:03 ►
occurred all over the globe.
00:22:06 ►
I don’t know what that part of Mexico is like, but from what I understand,
00:22:08 ►
it’s been through many changes of agrarian cultures
00:22:12 ►
and rainforests and things have changed.
00:22:15 ►
So maybe there’s a change in the ecosystem of the plant community
00:22:18 ►
that has brought some plants that have just been in the background
00:22:22 ►
out to a place where people notice them.
00:22:27 ►
You mean in the case of salvia?
00:22:29 ►
In the case of salvia or in the case of the mushrooms that are in golf courses and highway
00:22:36 ►
median strips, those are different ecologies that occurred in the rain.
00:22:41 ►
Right.
00:22:41 ►
So those things change.
00:22:43 ►
A lot of things love to stir in plants.
00:22:45 ►
Right.
00:22:46 ►
No, I think you’re probably right.
00:22:48 ►
I don’t know if it’s true for salvia,
00:22:51 ►
which tends, in spite of the fact
00:22:53 ►
that it’s never been observed
00:22:54 ►
to set seed,
00:22:56 ►
it seems to grow in fairly
00:22:59 ►
steep ravines,
00:23:02 ►
well-drained walls
00:23:03 ►
of steep ravines. I think that in the case of the mushroom,
00:23:08 ►
the practice of swidden agriculture, of so-called slash and burn of small tropical plots, that
00:23:17 ►
always creates a different ecological niche. And you often see, for any given area fairly exotic mushrooms and
00:23:28 ►
fungi in the wake of burns morels grow in the wake of
00:23:36 ►
only after
00:23:39 ►
fire
00:23:40 ►
frequent fire and it’s not
00:23:41 ►
a part of
00:23:41 ►
the normal
00:23:42 ►
program for
00:23:44 ►
an area where
00:23:44 ►
else it
00:23:45 ►
freezes in
00:23:46 ►
places.
00:23:47 ►
Right.
00:23:47 ►
It freezes
00:23:48 ►
often.
00:23:50 ►
One of the
00:23:51 ►
most spectacular
00:23:52 ►
psilocybin
00:23:53 ►
mushrooms in
00:23:54 ►
Mexico is
00:23:55 ►
actually called
00:23:55 ►
the landslide
00:23:56 ►
mushroom and
00:23:58 ►
is found in
00:23:59 ►
places where
00:24:00 ►
the earth is
00:24:00 ►
slid, so
00:24:01 ►
disturbed earth.
00:24:03 ►
Another one,
00:24:04 ►
the landslide mushroom is called
00:24:06 ►
the room base psilocybe uh aztecorum another one psilocybe carolescence even in that
00:24:17 ►
aboriginal context is only found in bagasse you all know what bagasse is
00:24:25 ►
it’s the waste from
00:24:27 ►
the operation of making sugar
00:24:30 ►
from sugar cane
00:24:31 ►
produces a high cellulose low sugar
00:24:34 ►
pulp and it’s
00:24:36 ►
an ideal medium for growing
00:24:38 ►
any kind of mushroom
00:24:39 ►
but psilocybe carolescens
00:24:41 ►
seems to have adapted to it
00:24:43 ►
as it’s preferred
00:24:44 ►
preferred ecosystem.
00:24:48 ►
David Aurora, a mushroom expert from Santa Cruz.
00:24:54 ►
He was a visiting teacher here last winter, I think.
00:25:00 ►
And he’s people all the time about psilocybin mushrooms.
00:25:03 ►
And they’re not common in this area,
00:25:05 ►
but he told us that he’s finding philosophy,
00:25:09 ►
psionessens, I think it was,
00:25:11 ►
which is fairly common, I guess, in the Northwest.
00:25:13 ►
But he’s been finding it around here now in wood chip mulch.
00:25:17 ►
So last time I just got a chip for a few years ago,
00:25:20 ►
so people are starting to look for a blue-staining small brown mushroom.
00:25:26 ►
Well, you know, one of the ironies of mushroom culture, no pun intended, is that in western
00:25:34 ►
Washington, there are areas where one of the major local businesses is the production of landscape mulch.
00:25:50 ►
And this stuff is shipped all over the country in plastic bags,
00:25:54 ►
and it’s just saturated with local mushroom spores.
00:26:01 ►
And so all the formerly Oregonian and Washingtonian mushroom spores have become generalized throughout the temperate zone,
00:26:06 ►
almost impossible to escape them.
00:26:11 ►
And the cycle of distribution is very rapid.
00:26:15 ►
For example, I think five or six years ago,
00:26:20 ►
Paul Stamets made the first collection of psilocybe azurescens, which is a very high psilocybin content, the highest ever measured is in this species.
00:26:33 ►
And he discovered the specimen growing in this completely unusual environment. He discovered it in a snag of driftwood right where the columbia river meets
00:26:46 ►
the pacific ocean so this super specialized ecosystem he comes upon this mushroom very
00:26:53 ►
high psilocybin content he takes it home he cultivates it he sells spores of it other people
00:26:59 ►
cultivate it and five years later there’s an area along a main highway in washington where there
00:27:07 ►
are several thousand acres where this stuff comes into fruit so it goes from being an undescribed
00:27:14 ►
species to you know as far as the eye can see in a very short amount of time it’s a weird thing
00:27:25 ►
how certain psychoactives associate
00:27:31 ►
themselves to human beings the mushroom
00:27:34 ►
we talked about but you know there’s
00:27:36 ►
also this theory that elusis the
00:27:41 ►
Eleusinian mysteries that were at the
00:27:44 ►
center of Greek mystery religions,
00:27:48 ►
was an ergotized beer.
00:27:50 ►
Well, ergot is a cereal.
00:27:54 ►
And ergot, I mean, ergot grows on rye, which is a human foodstuff,
00:28:01 ►
something which developed in the Middle East over several millennia.
00:28:06 ►
So it’s strange. And the grasses, which are very high and often in DMT and gramene and other compounds like that,
00:28:17 ►
the grasses are plants which evolved in the same environment as human beings.
00:28:23 ►
which evolved in the same environment as human beings.
00:28:29 ►
So it’s almost as though there’s a preference on the part of human beings and psychoactive plants either for each other or for certain kinds of ecosystems.
00:28:37 ►
I mean, that’s not true universally.
00:28:40 ►
There are psychoactive plants that are very rare, very wild, uncultivated.
00:28:52 ►
Anybody else on that? Anything else about that?
00:28:55 ►
You mentioned one time that there was about to be a book published having to do with the aboriginal culture of Australia.
00:29:09 ►
And there is an eject.
00:29:13 ►
Yeah, that’s right.
00:29:15 ►
Well, in the way of publishing, these things tend to move slowly.
00:29:22 ►
Actually, I should have brought, and I will bring to another meeting,
00:29:26 ►
a piece of propaganda for the Mexican psychoactive plant intensives
00:29:33 ►
that have been held every year for a while now at Palenque
00:29:37 ►
or somewhere else in Mexico,
00:29:39 ►
because next year it’ll be held at Palenque as well.
00:29:44 ►
And Michael Bach, who is one of the people who’s
00:29:49 ►
figured all this out in australia is going to come and talk about it yeah the old story was
00:29:57 ►
that for reasons which nobody could understand, but which generated some interesting speculation.
00:30:07 ►
Psychedelic plants seemed concentrated in the Amazon basin
00:30:11 ►
and in the New World.
00:30:13 ►
In other words, there was this so-called Central Mexican complex,
00:30:19 ►
which includes a dozen psychoactive mushrooms,
00:30:30 ►
includes a dozen psychoactive mushrooms, peyote, morning glories of several species,
00:30:36 ►
cannabis as an introduced thing, I think we can leave it out of the classical situation,
00:30:39 ►
but quite a complex of these psychoactive plants. Then in the Amazon, an even more intense complex, the banisteriopsis drinks, the ayahuascas,
00:30:49 ►
then out on the plains, snuff cults,
00:30:54 ►
the varrola cults, that’s DMT,
00:30:59 ►
but from the sap of a tree, all kinds of stuff.
00:31:03 ►
Now it appears that Australia which had been
00:31:09 ►
completely overlooked in all of this has an extremely rich psychedelic flora and
00:31:16 ►
the how could this be overlooked well apparently Aboriginal society is first of all one of the most paranoid
00:31:27 ►
societies in the world in the sense that they are very able to keep a secret it’s
00:31:33 ►
about secrets they’ve had practice it’s not a new thing secrets within secrets
00:31:40 ►
within secrets is how Aboriginal society works so they weren’t willing to cop to it
00:31:50 ►
until somebody came from the outside and basically said i’m going to tell you how it works all you
00:31:57 ►
have to do is blink your left eye when i’m done if what I say is true and then laid it out to
00:32:07 ►
these guys you know the national symbol of Australia is the wattle it’s on the
00:32:12 ►
flag or it’s on the state symbol or something well it’s an acacia acacia is
00:32:18 ►
one of the most suspect genera the entire super group of the leguminosi is very alkaloid rich,
00:32:27 ►
and the acacia group, which is right in the center of that,
00:32:34 ►
is very dense in tryptamines and other psychoactive alkaloids.
00:32:39 ►
So these Australian freaks, basically,
00:32:44 ►
began using pagamin harmless seed as an MAO inhibitor.
00:32:49 ►
That’s an Iranian plant that is quite an efficient MAO inhibitor.
00:32:55 ►
You just need a couple grams of the little hard, dark seeds,
00:32:59 ►
and it will inhibit all the MAO in your body,
00:33:02 ►
making your body then sensitive to oral doses of DMT.
00:33:08 ►
So they started using the Galvan Harmala
00:33:11 ►
and just working their way through these Australian acacias.
00:33:17 ►
And they discovered that Simplex, acacia Simplex,
00:33:23 ►
a New Caledonian species,
00:33:30 ►
Simplex, Acacia Simplex, a New Caledonian species, has more DMT in it than any other plant ever looked at.
00:33:38 ►
Acacia phlebophylla, a plant that grows on a mountain near Sydney, highly active.
00:33:41 ►
And then the more they looked, the more they found. And a few months ago, it sort of broke out into a controversy
00:33:47 ►
because the Minister of Drug Interdiction and Control saw fit to denounce all this and
00:33:55 ►
draw everyone’s attention to it. Did the Aborigines use DMT? Seems like they did they’re still not ready to just
00:34:06 ►
cough up all the
00:34:08 ►
secrets but
00:34:09 ►
if in fact
00:34:11 ►
I’ve always been puzzled
00:34:14 ►
by the aboriginal societies
00:34:16 ►
of Australia because I’m
00:34:18 ►
keen for
00:34:19 ►
atavistic social
00:34:22 ►
behavior and the idea of an
00:34:24 ►
archaic revival
00:34:25 ►
through psychedelics and all that.
00:34:27 ►
And it all worked for me,
00:34:28 ►
except it seemed to me like
00:34:30 ►
the Australian Aborigines should be psychedelic.
00:34:34 ►
And now I discover they are psychedelic.
00:34:39 ►
And, you know, the notion,
00:34:41 ►
if you know anything about the Australian Aborigines,
00:34:45 ►
you know that their main cultural value system is built around something called the Dream Time.
00:34:53 ►
Well, the Dream Time, DMT is very dream-like.
00:34:59 ►
The chemistry of dreaming and the chemistry of DMT, I would bet you,
00:35:04 ►
are, you know, Siamese twins of each
00:35:08 ►
other. DMT is incredibly dramatic in its effects, but when it leaves you, the entire construct
00:35:18 ►
of the alien reality departs in under 20 or 30 seconds exactly the way a complex dream leaves
00:35:27 ►
you when your alarm starts ringing in the middle of it and you stumble out of
00:35:32 ►
bed in clinical studies DMT concentrates in the human spinal fluid between 3 and 4 a.m. Well, that’s when the deep REM dreaming is going on.
00:35:49 ►
And if you’ve ever given DMT by the method of smoking to somebody,
00:35:55 ►
the way you can tell that they’ve really gotten off,
00:35:59 ►
you tell them, you know, take three hits, four hits, whatever,
00:36:02 ►
and lay down and shut up and close your eyes
00:36:05 ►
well then you look at them in this state if they’ve actually gotten off they will go into
00:36:12 ►
REM their eyes will move wildly underneath their closed eyelids they’re actually tracking the the
00:36:20 ►
hallucinatory objects in the mind space they’ve entered.
00:36:25 ►
So there’s a whole bunch of circumstantial evidence that suggests
00:36:28 ►
and one piece I didn’t mention, DMT occurs naturally in human metabolism
00:36:35 ►
produced in the pineal gland in conjunction with compounds
00:36:41 ►
that are very much like beta-carbolines,
00:36:46 ►
or in fact beta-carbolines.
00:36:51 ►
Adeneroglomerotropine, which is a pineal enzyme,
00:36:56 ►
when renamed according to the rules of organic chemistry,
00:36:59 ►
is 6-methoxy-tetrahydroharmalan.
00:37:02 ►
It’s some kind of relative of haramine,
00:37:10 ►
harmaline, tetrahydroharming. And that’s a light-mediated chemistry in the pineal gland,
00:37:12 ►
which seems suggestive to me.
00:37:14 ►
It may not have anything to do with it.
00:37:20 ►
So Australian Aboriginal shamanism,
00:37:25 ►
based on entering into some kind of waking dream, some kind of chemical intervention,
00:37:28 ►
a normal physiological functioning
00:37:30 ►
that produces a kind of waking dream state
00:37:33 ►
seems to me very plausible.
00:37:36 ►
You know, when you go to the Amazon,
00:37:40 ►
the mestizo cultures of the towns
00:37:44 ►
have a certain way of doing ayahuasca,
00:37:47 ►
curing sessions, Saturday night get-togethers, community sings, this and that.
00:37:52 ►
But when you go to the people where it’s life and death,
00:37:57 ►
tribal shamanism with high degree of paranoia and high reliance on actual hunting,
00:38:03 ►
in other words, the most unacculturated people,
00:38:09 ►
the style of ayahuasca taking of the shamans
00:38:12 ►
is solitary and virtually continuous.
00:38:17 ►
In other words, they’re living inside these states.
00:38:20 ►
They never come down.
00:38:21 ►
They are constantly dosing themselves and moving in a world hard for someone
00:38:29 ►
like ourselves to imagine even if you’ve had ayahuasca you can’t imagine what it would be
00:38:34 ►
like to just move in there and pitch your tent and remember what the point of all that was,
00:38:48 ►
but it seems like we’re talking about drugs here in some form.
00:38:51 ►
Oh, it was about the Australian Aborigines.
00:38:53 ►
Yeah, so if you’re interested in all this,
00:39:00 ►
there’s some websites, Aussie websites, that deal with this. There’s even a taxonomic key to the acacias of Australia and New Zealand online
00:39:07 ►
and then in the DMT lists all kinds of discussion
00:39:12 ►
a lot of talk about preparation
00:39:15 ►
a lot of people I think are sincere people
00:39:19 ►
wasting their time trying to extract DMT from plants that contain it but in
00:39:27 ►
vanishingly small amounts like I think we pretty much established at this point
00:39:33 ►
that unless you have a fully equipped chemical laboratory of reasonable
00:39:39 ►
capacity you should stay away from phalaris grasses and all that it’s just you need to process so much
00:39:47 ►
to get an active amount that it becomes counterproductive to proceed that way Arundo Donax, that one has always interested me because it has some suggestive aspects to its history.
00:40:12 ►
Arundo Donax is a big plant called the Old World Giant Reed in common parlance.
00:40:21 ►
You may have seen it because in California it’s a problem in the Central
00:40:27 ►
Valley in the irrigation systems yes they spend hundreds of thousands of
00:40:33 ►
dollars a year with big pieces of machinery scooping the stuff out of the
00:40:38 ►
canals and they just pile it to rot by the sides of the canal so you know if
00:40:43 ►
you wanted to do chemical work on
00:40:45 ►
a rhododontics, it would be no problem to get a pickup truck full of the root. To this
00:40:52 ►
day, that plant is the preferred source of reeds for woodwind instruments. I thought it was interesting because I’ve always, you know, in my own
00:41:08 ►
involvement with ancient Greek mystery religion and stuff like that, you encounter always mention
00:41:18 ►
of the Orphic cults. And the Orphic cults are as psychedelic as what went on at Eleusis or at Delphi
00:41:27 ►
or with the Dionysian cults, but there didn’t seem to be a psychedelic plant.
00:41:33 ►
But the story of Orpheus is the story of a magic flute player
00:41:38 ►
who goes into the underworld and loses his lover there or escapes with it, depending on the
00:41:48 ►
version of the myth.
00:41:50 ►
Well, with the Rundodonax, you suddenly have a source of reeds for flutes, and it’s a plant
00:41:58 ►
whose underworld, whose roots, contain DMT.
00:42:02 ►
So in the style of ancient myth-making it seems like a myth
00:42:07 ►
that is trying to say something about this plant in terms of is there any
00:42:15 ►
textual material out of the Greek corpus that would support this contention not
00:42:21 ►
that I’m aware of you would have to you know you’d have to make a tortured argument but there is
00:42:26 ►
DMT in the roots is it extractable is it
00:42:30 ►
extractable by methods accessible to
00:42:33 ►
Greeks of the time of the Orphic cult
00:42:36 ►
not known you know Hoffman and Wasson
00:42:42 ►
wanted to say that the cult at Eleusis, I mentioned this earlier, was based on ergotized grain.
00:42:48 ►
A lot of people criticized that theory because ergot, though hallucinogenic,
00:42:57 ►
is a pretty toxic material.
00:43:01 ►
I mean, it’s very easy to send yourself into convulsions with it if not
00:43:06 ►
actually kill yourself and what we’re asked to believe about a luces is that
00:43:12 ►
for more than 2,000 years every September anybody who offered
00:43:19 ►
themselves at the temple grounds would be initiated into this mystery. Not anyone.
00:43:25 ►
The rule was you had to be a man.
00:43:29 ►
You had to be a free man.
00:43:31 ►
And you had to have not done it before.
00:43:34 ►
Interesting, this third rule.
00:43:36 ►
It means you could only do it once in your life.
00:43:39 ►
And imagine what a confused impression you would have of psychedelic
00:43:44 ►
if you’d had one shot,
00:43:46 ►
one mega-dose shot, and then told, that’s it for you. I think, I don’t understand. I’ve
00:43:57 ►
talked to Albert Hoffman about this, and my objection was, surely if it was ergot, it would have obtained a reputation of danger.
00:44:09 ►
There would have been stories of miscarriages, or not miscarriages, but of convulsions and death even.
00:44:16 ►
Ergot poisoning, the outbreaks of it in the Middle Ages are more nightmarish than psychedelic. Entire villages go mad. Even
00:44:27 ►
as late as the summer of 1787, there was this thing called the Grand Puerh, which is carried
00:44:37 ►
in the history of France as a peasant revolt in the south of France anticipating the French Revolution. But Mary Alice Matosian,
00:44:47 ►
in a book called Poisons of the Past, went into the parish records and got the evidence
00:44:56 ►
together, and it’s pretty clear it looks like it was an outbreak of ergotism. What Hoffman said to me
00:45:06 ►
was that he felt that there were
00:45:09 ►
potentially strains of ergot
00:45:12 ►
that elaborated water-soluble
00:45:16 ►
psychedelic compounds
00:45:18 ►
and that there would be a way
00:45:19 ►
to make an ergot beer
00:45:21 ►
and fractionate it
00:45:22 ►
so that you produced
00:45:24 ►
a liquid fraction
00:45:26 ►
of non-toxic but psychoactive alkaloids.
00:45:31 ►
It’s strange.
00:45:32 ►
This is a wonderful area for amateurs to do research,
00:45:36 ►
and nobody’s ever done it.
00:45:39 ►
What we really want is for somebody to come forward
00:45:41 ►
with a beaker of stuff and say,
00:45:44 ►
you know, I made this for my God,
00:45:46 ►
I took it, it was great, here, try it.
00:45:51 ►
If it was not a psychedelic,
00:45:55 ►
then we really don’t understand what was going on at Eleusis.
00:46:00 ►
In the 19th century, they thought that
00:46:02 ►
the descriptions are somewhat scattered, In the 19th century, they thought that something,
00:46:06 ►
the descriptions are somewhat scattered,
00:46:09 ►
but it seems as though at a certain high point in the ceremony,
00:46:12 ►
something was displayed.
00:46:15 ►
Everybody crowded into this thing called the telestereon,
00:46:18 ►
a kind of temple.
00:46:19 ►
Then at a certain point, in a brilliant burst of light,
00:46:24 ►
something was shown.
00:46:26 ►
And the 19th century scholarship, probably owing something to its own Victorian hang-ups,
00:46:32 ►
had the idea that it was some kind of simulacrum of the female genitals,
00:46:38 ►
which might raise the hackles of a bunch of Victorian classicists, but I doubt could get a bunch of toged pagans
00:46:47 ►
so profoundly stirred.
00:46:52 ►
The other argument that it must have,
00:46:54 ►
the evidence that seems to suggest it must have been a drug,
00:46:58 ►
is there is this famous case, I guess you would call it,
00:47:04 ►
called the Scandal of Alcibiades, which was Alcibiades
00:47:09 ►
was a friend of Plato’s and a nobleman of that. Something you could carry around and
00:47:19 ►
something that you could give to your guests as an amusement after dinner parties. He was roundly run out of
00:47:27 ►
town for that stunt. And in the 2,000 year history of Eleusis, that was the only instance
00:47:33 ►
of anybody ever breaching it. The greats of Greek and Roman literature, Plutarch and Cicero
00:47:42 ►
and all these people went and had their moment and
00:47:45 ►
nobody ever gave away the real details of the mystery well no it occurs
00:47:55 ►
worldwide Nepal has a conspecific flora of detouras that matches California. For example, in
00:48:05 ►
California you have detoura metal.
00:48:08 ►
In Nepal you have detoura
00:48:10 ►
metalloides. There’s also a
00:48:14 ►
subgenus that’s very taxonomically
00:48:17 ►
well-defined called the
00:48:18 ►
arborescent detouras, the tree-like
00:48:21 ►
detouras. And that subset are called
00:48:25 ►
Brugmansius.
00:48:27 ►
Brugmansius, Suaviolens,
00:48:30 ►
Brugmansius,
00:48:32 ►
Candida,
00:48:33 ►
so forth and so on.
00:48:36 ►
That
00:48:36 ►
arborescent subset
00:48:39 ►
seems to have evolved in the Andes
00:48:41 ►
and then been
00:48:43 ►
spread throughout the world as an ornamental plant.
00:48:47 ►
It’s interesting.
00:48:48 ►
It’s never controlled,
00:48:49 ►
and you see it everywhere,
00:48:52 ►
and yet every single part of that plant
00:48:56 ►
is extraordinarily psychoactive.
00:48:59 ►
And I mean, you know,
00:49:00 ►
you roll up a leaf and eat it,
00:49:03 ►
and the next 24 hours of your life will be something to behold.
00:49:08 ►
I don’t like it because it’s a deliriant.
00:49:18 ►
It messes with core data processing and judgment algorithms that I kind of like to hang on to.
00:49:28 ►
This is an interesting thing about, you know, contrasting psychedelics. Probably the most
00:49:35 ►
extreme contrast would be between DMT and something like Datura or ketamine. DMT, this incredible transformation of reality takes place almost
00:49:49 ►
instantly when you smoke it. But if you pay close attention to what has happened, you discover that
00:49:57 ►
you have not been changed. You are not ecstatic. You are not unreasonably terrified. You are not ecstatic you are not unreasonably terrified
00:50:06 ►
you are not stimulated
00:50:07 ►
you are not depressed
00:50:09 ►
what’s happened is the world
00:50:12 ►
you expect to find yourself in
00:50:14 ►
has been dramatically replaced
00:50:16 ►
but your reaction
00:50:18 ►
to that is normal
00:50:20 ►
which is to say my god
00:50:22 ►
what the fuck is going on
00:50:23 ►
what does this mean
00:50:24 ►
how long will
00:50:25 ►
it last? Am I all right? When you take detour, the judging and discriminating function seems to erode
00:50:35 ►
quite quickly. And so you completely lose hold of reality. You don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are, you don’t
00:50:45 ►
know what has just happened, you have no notion. And for some reason, I don’t know why it is,
00:50:52 ►
people invariably remove all their clothes. And then usually the rest of their trip revolves
00:50:59 ►
around the social and political consequences of having done that in the mall or on Main Street or
00:51:09 ►
something like that. It’s used a lot for magic, and it’s sort of, you know, one of the earliest
00:51:17 ►
date rape drugs. I mean, this is a drug you give to somebody if you want to thoroughly befuddle and confound them. If
00:51:25 ►
you give them more than that dose, they will actually become comatose and lose consciousness
00:51:32 ►
completely and, you know, I don’t know, you could probably perform minor surgery on them
00:51:38 ►
and they would never object. It also has the side effect of, for days afterwards, dilating your eyes.
00:51:50 ►
And detour hallucinations are a strange mixture of the ordinary
00:51:58 ►
and a failure of discriminating intelligence on the part of the person taking the
00:52:05 ►
drug.
00:52:06 ►
In other
00:52:06 ►
words, a
00:52:07 ►
DMT
00:52:07 ►
hallucination
00:52:08 ►
is you see
00:52:09 ►
something,
00:52:09 ►
looks like it
00:52:10 ►
was made in
00:52:10 ►
another galaxy,
00:52:12 ►
bears no
00:52:13 ►
thumbprint of
00:52:14 ►
human reason
00:52:15 ►
on it,
00:52:16 ►
totally alien.
00:52:17 ►
A detour
00:52:17 ►
hallucination
00:52:18 ►
is a
00:52:20 ►
knock on
00:52:20 ►
the door
00:52:21 ►
and suddenly
00:52:22 ►
ten people
00:52:24 ►
you don’t
00:52:24 ►
really know
00:52:25 ►
but for some reason allow
00:52:27 ►
into your apartment
00:52:29 ►
come into your apartment and perch
00:52:32 ►
on the furniture and talk to you
00:52:34 ►
for hours and eat up all
00:52:36 ►
your food and mess the bed
00:52:37 ►
and throw the dog out the window
00:52:39 ►
and break stuff
00:52:41 ►
it’s strange
00:52:44 ►
it more fits with the medieval notion of bewitchment
00:52:50 ►
than the modern notion of probing neurological frontiers.
00:52:56 ►
And there’s a lot of these tropane-containing plants.
00:53:01 ►
The detour is the most spectacular,
00:53:04 ►
but Brudenfelsias, Brunmansia,
00:53:09 ►
and then there’s some obscure ones in South America,
00:53:14 ►
Latua Puba Flora, like that.
00:53:19 ►
Right.
00:53:21 ►
And the Catalina Indians and the Luiseno Indians,
00:53:25 ►
it seems to be a religion that was concentrated in Southern California.
00:53:29 ►
A lot of the rock painting out behind Santa Barbara and in places like that
00:53:37 ►
seems to be traced to these initiations.
00:53:40 ►
I don’t think that’s…
00:53:41 ►
You may be right, I’m not sure.
00:53:43 ►
But they do call it the to watch complex to watch being the Luis
00:53:50 ►
Sena word for detour well this is all pretty specific plant-based hallucinogen based information information. Is that what everybody bargained for? It’s probably salvia. There used to be
00:54:10 ►
one by these greenhouses down here, and I looked, not carefully, but from a distance
00:54:18 ►
of about 20 feet, I looked today, and I thought I could spot it, but it looked pretty gnarly.
00:54:22 ►
I don’t think…
00:54:23 ►
It got torn out a couple of years ago.
00:54:25 ►
It’s a pretty tenacious plant.
00:54:28 ►
It’s going wild on my place in Hawaii,
00:54:32 ►
although Hawaii is incredibly close to its ideal growing conditions.
00:54:38 ►
In other words, heavy rainfall, well-drained volcanic soil,
00:54:43 ►
tropical nighttime temperatures,
00:54:47 ►
and like that.
00:54:48 ►
There was dead enorms growing here.
00:54:51 ►
Yeah, and it may still be growing.
00:54:53 ►
I have two.
00:54:55 ►
Well, how spontaneously and how new?
00:54:59 ►
Yeah, why put them hundreds of years?
00:55:01 ►
To produce a new species of plant?
00:55:05 ►
Well, hundreds of years is cutting it pretty thin,
00:55:09 ►
but I think the most recently evolved plant groups
00:55:14 ►
are the orchids and the grasses.
00:55:17 ►
And I think grasses speciate very quickly,
00:55:22 ►
maybe even in hundreds of years,
00:55:24 ►
certainly in a couple of millennia.
00:55:26 ►
Yeah, I mean they can’t spring de novo. It’s always about modification of pre-existing species.
00:55:36 ►
I mean, that’s my assumption. Something like mushrooms, it’s a little hard to talk about because the fossil record isn’t
00:55:46 ►
good. Mushrooms don’t fossilize at all well. I think the oldest authenticated mushroom fossil
00:55:54 ►
is 40 million years old. Well, that’s a thousandth the life of the earth. That’s not good news for our
00:56:04 ►
assumptions.
00:56:06 ►
On the other hand,
00:56:09 ►
well, pollinology is only effective
00:56:11 ►
in looking for plants that were
00:56:15 ►
major members of the ecosystem.
00:56:20 ►
In other words, pollinology can tell you
00:56:23 ►
25 million years ago this went from being an oak forest to a maple forest, but it can’t tell you the understory species and their distribution.
00:56:43 ►
it could. I mean, it’s a matter of pushing the techniques of pollinology harder. But at the moment, it just gives you very
00:56:47 ►
general statements, such as, around 16,000
00:56:51 ►
years ago, people began growing corn on the edge of this lake.
00:56:56 ►
They did that for 2,000 years, and then they
00:57:00 ►
stopped growing corn. But in terms of giving you a complete
00:57:03 ►
inventory…
00:57:06 ►
How about mushrooms?
00:57:07 ►
Mushroom spores are pretty durable,
00:57:10 ►
but they’re hellishly
00:57:12 ►
difficult to
00:57:14 ►
identify.
00:57:16 ►
They all basically look alike.
00:57:18 ►
I mean, that’s somewhat of an exaggeration.
00:57:21 ►
But once you
00:57:22 ►
add in distortion
00:57:24 ►
and stuff like that from fossilization, sorting
00:57:28 ►
out mushroom spores is pretty difficult. There is a belief among some paleontologists that
00:57:37 ►
very early in the history of life on Earth, there was a huge dieback based on overproduction of oxygen,
00:57:49 ►
and that fungi must have been necessary
00:57:56 ►
to redress the balance of all the dead material created by that.
00:58:03 ►
Fungi are ideally, or mushrooms,
00:58:05 ►
not fungi generally,
00:58:07 ►
but mushrooms are pretty ideally suited
00:58:09 ►
as cosmic organisms
00:58:12 ►
to survive the conditions of outer space.
00:58:17 ►
But the evolutionary history of them
00:58:20 ►
is probably one of the least understood
00:58:22 ►
of any of the major life groups on the earth
00:58:26 ►
because they’re so soft-bodied and not very sexy either everybody wants to go out and dig up
00:58:35 ►
dinosaurs the length of three city buses who wants to make their name in micro paleontology
00:58:43 ►
micro microaleontology, micromicopaleontology.
00:58:51 ►
Anybody else on all of this?
00:58:53 ►
Or anything else for that matter?
00:58:56 ►
One thing I might say about
00:58:57 ►
salvia just in passing,
00:59:00 ►
the most unique thing about it
00:59:03 ►
besides its chemistry is that it’s legal.
00:59:06 ►
It’s absolutely legal.
00:59:10 ►
You could contract with a chemical manufacturer to make a ton of this stuff.
00:59:15 ►
You could transport it across borders.
00:59:18 ►
You could place ads in newspapers to sell it.
00:59:21 ►
You could do therapy with it, advocate it, formulate
00:59:26 ►
chewing gum based on it.
00:59:28 ►
This was actually suggested on the
00:59:30 ►
internet.
00:59:33 ►
It’s
00:59:34 ►
interesting that
00:59:36 ►
the government has chosen
00:59:37 ►
not to go ballistic
00:59:40 ►
about this.
00:59:41 ►
And it may indicate a certain
00:59:43 ►
exhaustion with the whole notion of drug
00:59:46 ►
control because if you demonize salvia
00:59:50 ►
it’s perfectly set up to spread
00:59:55 ►
everywhere and become a social obsession
00:59:58 ►
anyone can grow salvia you know if you
01:00:00 ►
can grow carrots if you can grow lettuce
01:00:03 ►
you can grow sal, if you can grow lettuce, you can grow salvia.
01:00:06 ►
And it also looks very nondescript.
01:00:12 ►
And I’ve maintained, although some people say I’m naive and legalistic in my thinking,
01:00:19 ►
but I’ve maintained that because it’s a diterpene, not an alkaloid,
01:00:26 ►
the wording of the drug laws is that any compound can be made illegal
01:00:32 ►
at the pleasure of the Attorney General
01:00:35 ►
if it is an isomer, antisomer, stereoisomer,
01:00:42 ►
or cogener of an already known psychoactive substance.
01:00:49 ►
The problem is, salvia divinorum is alpha-salvinorin does not fit that description.
01:00:54 ►
It is not an isomer, stereoisomer, cogener, or structurally similar.
01:00:59 ►
So, if you really want to make it illegal,
01:01:03 ►
you would have to induce scientific evidence
01:01:06 ►
that there is some problem with it.
01:01:09 ►
First they would have to prove that it actually gets you high.
01:01:12 ►
First they would have to prove that it gets you high.
01:01:14 ►
Then they would have to prove that there was something wrong with that,
01:01:18 ►
either that it was physiologically dangerous,
01:01:21 ►
addicting, or caused violent behavior,
01:01:24 ►
or something like that. And I think that it
01:01:27 ►
would open up just a huge can of worms. You see, when all these substances were made illegal
01:01:36 ►
toward the close of the 60s, the cause of the panic was LSD.
01:01:46 ►
And why?
01:01:48 ►
Because out of millions of people who took it,
01:01:51 ►
a couple jumped out of their dorm windows
01:01:54 ►
and otherwise brought great negative publicity upon it.
01:01:59 ►
And so the state of California, where all this was happening,
01:02:04 ►
decided to make LSD illegal.
01:02:06 ►
Well, then the Republicans controlled the legislature.
01:02:12 ►
They decided then to make all hallucinogens illegal in the same bill.
01:02:19 ►
And they went into the scientific literature and they just made lists.
01:02:23 ►
And they went into the scientific literature and they just made lists.
01:02:29 ►
You know, mescaline, psilocybin, LSD, ibogaine, bufotinine,
01:02:32 ►
later found to be inactive in human beings,
01:02:37 ►
is to this day carried as a Schedule I drug in the law because that week somebody thought it might cause hallucinations.
01:02:42 ►
So they bundled all this stuff together
01:02:44 ►
and in the panic of the times, they passed this law.
01:02:49 ►
No scientific evidence was ever presented in any court
01:02:53 ►
that these things had detrimental properties.
01:02:59 ►
No science of any sort was ever filed with the court.
01:03:04 ►
And then, six months later, when the
01:03:08 ►
federal government became alarmed over the spread of the California drug-taking phenomenon,
01:03:15 ►
they decided that they needed a federal statute to deal with all these hallucinogenic drugs.
01:03:22 ►
They simply copied the California statute
01:03:26 ►
and it became federal law. So the whole thing was slid in in a very sly manner and bad law
01:03:35 ►
was the result because you have to make radical distinctions between things as different as DMT, psilocybin, bufotinine, and so forth
01:03:47 ►
and so on. Probably a leaf. You know, smoking it and chewing it is very inefficient. Probably
01:03:57 ►
if you could chemically extract it, you would discover that this makes sense as a drug.
01:04:05 ►
In other words, the numbers work
01:04:08 ►
from what you could grow in a window box
01:04:10 ►
if you could efficiently extract it.
01:04:12 ►
You could probably stone the entire population
01:04:17 ►
of the apartment house that window box is attached to.
01:04:21 ►
So it makes sense.
01:04:24 ►
It’s very interesting that it’s so active, you know,
01:04:29 ►
that one 500 micrograms, half a milligram, pulls most people to pieces.
01:04:37 ►
I think it’s worth saying that the reason I never…
01:04:41 ►
Yeah, part of the issue that revolves around it is nobody who’s gotten off disagrees that it’s a strong consciousness-altering thing.
01:04:51 ►
The question is, is it pleasant?
01:04:55 ►
It’s somewhat radical.
01:04:57 ►
Of course, people held this out against DMT,
01:05:00 ►
but I’ve always felt DMT, if you would let yourself go with it, was ecstatic, you know, that a hit that vast couldn’t not be.
01:05:10 ►
But the people who smoke the alpha-salvinorin, the pure compound, something about the quality of the hallucination seems to involve pretty radical distortions of body image.
01:05:29 ►
People are always half in or half out of something.
01:05:32 ►
They’re always trying to crawl out or crawl into something.
01:05:36 ►
And they can’t give a very good account of what’s going on afterwards.
01:05:44 ►
So it radically deconstructs reality. give a very good account of what’s going on afterwards so it’s you know radically
01:05:46 ►
deconstructs reality like DMT it puts you back to baseline in under 15 minutes
01:05:53 ►
usually and you know in terms of emergency room admissions to this point
01:06:02 ►
probably zero for the entire continental united states
01:06:07 ►
but that’s because it’s very fast acting
01:06:12 ►
well it’s just my observation first of all dmt which is completely horse of a different color, is active at about 50 to 70 milligrams.
01:06:27 ►
5-MeO DMT is active at about 5 to 15 milligrams.
01:06:32 ►
So pharmacognetically speaking, it’s more active.
01:06:40 ►
In my experience, I didn’t hallucinate enough,
01:06:46 ►
considering that I was having the full experience of a tryptamine,
01:06:51 ►
in other words, this strange, numbing feeling,
01:06:53 ►
and you have to get your courage up to do these things.
01:06:56 ►
So I’d gone through the whole thing of the courage and all that,
01:07:00 ►
and now you’ve smoked it,
01:07:01 ►
and now you have this weird feeling through your body.
01:07:04 ►
I kept reaching out for the DMT state and it never opened out into that.
01:07:11 ►
It seemed to me like a huge and difficult to describe emotion.
01:07:18 ►
You know, not rage, not love, not despair, not hope, but big like that. But no very little visual activity at all. Now,
01:07:31 ►
recently people have been telling me I just didn’t do enough, and that if you will but persist or
01:07:39 ►
double the dose, you know, Tim Leary used to say, when in doubt, double the dose. But I wasn’t in any doubt
01:07:47 ►
that I was having a psychedelic experience. It just wasn’t the one I wanted to have.
01:07:52 ►
On the other hand, the LD50 of these compounds is very high. So you’re not in physical danger,
01:08:00 ►
like doubling the dose. You’re not in physical danger danger but it’s not physical danger that you
01:08:07 ►
come to fear with these things you know it’s your mind that appears to be hung out to dry
01:08:14 ►
sometimes people complain of on tryptamines that their heart erased I think tryptamines have a slight tendency to race your heart, but it’s fear that really races your heart.
01:08:29 ►
And separating the fear from the drug is sometimes difficult, but if you can get a grip, the fear usually behaves like normal fear.
01:08:41 ►
In other words, if you can get a grip the fear recedes that’s normal fear pharmacologically
01:08:46 ►
induced fear there is no getting a grip it runs you straight over the edge the fear in dmt comes
01:08:56 ►
from just that the transition from this reality to that reality is so dramatic you’ve taken drugs
01:09:03 ►
all your life you You’ve practiced yoga.
01:09:06 ►
You’ve done this.
01:09:07 ►
You’ve done that.
01:09:08 ►
It’s always about, you know,
01:09:09 ►
all of a sudden here’s this thing
01:09:12 ►
which just, bing,
01:09:14 ►
turns the world upside down.
01:09:17 ►
And the sane reaction to that
01:09:20 ►
is a certain amount of caution
01:09:23 ►
and amazement and wondering if things are working
01:09:27 ►
all right because it’s the most dramatic transformation of your perception that you
01:09:35 ►
will probably ever experience this side of the yawning grave or it’s you know one of them one
01:09:42 ►
of the few now that alpha Salvinorian is on stage,
01:09:46 ►
you begin to wonder how many of these short acting,
01:09:52 ►
apparently very not consequential to the functioning of your physiology,
01:10:01 ►
how many of these things are there?
01:10:04 ►
There could be myriad one implies
01:10:11 ►
nothing to implies myriad and more and more you know the future inevitably is
01:10:19 ►
going to be about the elaboration of all kinds of drugs. I mean, if materialist pharmacology
01:10:26 ►
is actually able to deliver on its understanding of how the world works, then it ought to be
01:10:32 ►
possible to design a drug that causes you to whistle the first eight bars of Dixie and
01:10:38 ►
that’s it. You know, there is this school of neurophysiology that holds that every thought has a unique molecular foundation, which is a mind-boggling concept. It extends syntax into matter in a way that we could probably ranch around to get some fairly psychedelic effects out of that conclusion.
01:11:06 ►
I don’t know if I believe that.
01:11:08 ►
I find it hard to believe, on the other hand, I find it hard to formulate a counter-theory.
01:11:15 ►
If thought is not uniquely chemically defined, well then what does uniquely define it?
01:11:23 ►
In other words, the thought, I will go home,
01:11:27 ►
is different from the thought, I will go home to mother.
01:11:31 ►
But was there more chemistry involved in the second statement than the first?
01:11:36 ►
And in what way did these chemistries differ?
01:11:40 ►
And what kind of chemistry is this anyway?
01:11:44 ►
Is all physiological functioning,
01:11:47 ►
including the formation of ideas
01:11:49 ►
and their expression through speech,
01:11:52 ►
accompanied by chemical changes
01:11:54 ►
specific to each activity?
01:11:58 ►
How does it…
01:11:59 ►
It violates the principle of parsimony pretty dramatically.
01:12:07 ►
In other words, the idea that things should be as simple as possible.
01:12:11 ►
Would nature assign a unique chemical sequence to every possible linguistic utterance?
01:12:20 ►
I mean, maybe.
01:12:21 ►
Well, let’s look at the proposition no two human thoughts are exactly alike.
01:12:28 ►
If you believe Chomsky
01:12:30 ►
and theories of deep structure,
01:12:33 ►
what’s been said there is
01:12:35 ►
any thinkable thought
01:12:38 ►
is going to follow rules
01:12:42 ►
that can be defined.
01:12:44 ►
A statement that doesn’t follow these rules
01:12:47 ►
will not be perceived by language as language by any other person yeah i mean it’s it’s somewhat
01:12:56 ►
similar to the question you have when you don’t inject drugs into the picture and just ask the question, do syntactical rules allow for all possible thoughts
01:13:09 ►
to be expressed?
01:13:11 ►
Or are there literally unthinkable thoughts
01:13:16 ►
because they stand somehow outside of syntax?
01:13:19 ►
Well, I don’t know if it’s intuitively true,
01:13:21 ►
but I think it’s true.
01:13:23 ►
In other words, like Gödel showed,
01:13:26 ►
that leave alone something as complicated as spoken language,
01:13:31 ►
simple arithmetic breaks down.
01:13:35 ►
You know, Gödel’s so-called incommensurability theorem
01:13:38 ►
says that no formal system will generate
01:13:43 ►
all possible true formal statements possible within the system.
01:13:49 ►
And he showed that this was true for ordinary arithmetic.
01:13:53 ►
This is a pretty staggering thing to have secured.
01:13:56 ►
It shows there is no such thing as anchored thought.
01:14:00 ►
Mathematics itself begins to feel like a cultural activity,
01:14:06 ►
not the revelation of the face of deity,
01:14:10 ►
but just something as culture-bound as tattooing yourself
01:14:14 ►
or beating on a hollow drum.
01:14:16 ►
It’s a tough one to swallow for me and for any Platonist
01:14:21 ►
or anybody who has an atom of Platonic idealism in them,
01:14:26 ►
the idea that these systems of rules don’t produce all the potential truth possible in the system is maddening.
01:14:38 ►
And yet Gödel had this nailed to the barn door by 1948.
01:14:43 ►
It’s one of the most unassimilated understandings of the 20th century.
01:14:49 ►
I mean, everybody’s heard of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle
01:14:52 ►
and this, that, and the other,
01:14:54 ►
but realizing what Gödel showed about the limitations of formal thought
01:14:59 ►
has barely reached the physics department,
01:15:02 ►
let alone biology, psychology, and politics.
01:15:06 ►
They’re not ready to give ground on this yet at all.
01:15:11 ►
So that leads us somewhat far afield into the deeper water that surrounds these issues.
01:15:18 ►
The whole issue of, you know, what is language for, what is it adequate to,
01:15:24 ►
what does it mean when we have experiences that
01:15:27 ►
lie outside of language does do they really lie outside of language or do they lie outside of
01:15:34 ►
conventional metaphor and can we by pushing conventional metaphor somehow take in more, or are there, in fact, states of mind and perceptual states
01:15:48 ►
that simply fall through the mesh of linguistic intent?
01:15:57 ►
Art, the cutting edge of art, is in here somewhere.
01:16:02 ►
I remember, I haven’t been able to find it for years but somewhere
01:16:05 ►
in
01:16:06 ►
part way through cities of the plain
01:16:10 ►
in a la recherche de
01:16:11 ►
tempe du there’s this
01:16:14 ►
passage where
01:16:15 ►
these people are riding
01:16:17 ►
in this coach and
01:16:20 ►
this guy looks out into the
01:16:22 ►
passing forest landscape
01:16:24 ►
and has a thought which is reproduced on the page,
01:16:29 ►
which is a thought so complicated that until I read that page,
01:16:34 ►
I thought that I was the only person who had ever thought this thought.
01:16:38 ►
And I had never attempted to communicate it to anybody
01:16:41 ►
because it seemed so complicated and elusive. And here
01:16:47 ►
it is in translation, no less. So there is something about extending the realm of what
01:16:59 ►
can be said. You know, Wittgenstein talked about the unspeakable, and said, you know Wittgenstein talked about the unspeakable beyond the reach of philosophy
01:17:07 ►
he always made these spatial metaphors
01:17:11 ►
he said beyond the reach of philosophy
01:17:13 ►
beyond the present at hand
01:17:16 ►
again this lies the realm of the unspeakable
01:17:21 ►
but this is a vector
01:17:22 ►
toward which the history of philosophy
01:17:25 ►
is necessarily pointing.
01:17:31 ►
Psychedelics are good for, you know,
01:17:34 ►
it’s sometimes hard to imagine the unimaginable
01:17:38 ►
without a little kick in the tail
01:17:40 ►
from a plant ally or a chemical ally.
01:17:48 ►
Ordinary language seems to be almost a state of physiological equilibrium.
01:17:57 ►
Like people, the most interesting speech comes out of people
01:18:01 ►
when they’re highly agitated, either by love or revulsion or fear,
01:18:08 ►
then they say very interesting things.
01:18:10 ►
But most of the time what they say runs along
01:18:15 ►
run-dane-mun-als.
01:18:19 ►
Mundane run-als!
01:18:23 ►
One of the ideas that, I mean mean this is just following this thought about
01:18:28 ►
language but and maybe then we should end after this but one of the ideas that
01:18:33 ►
has really struck me recently and I’ll tell it to you it may seem trivial to
01:18:40 ►
you it’s it may be because it is trivial and I just never quite understood
01:18:46 ►
it before but I recently read George Dyson’s book Darwin among the machines
01:18:54 ►
which is a wonderful book if you haven’t read it it it’s basically a history of
01:19:02 ►
the idea of thinking machines.
01:19:05 ►
And it turns out there were people in the 19th century
01:19:08 ►
who saw the Internet with absolute clarity.
01:19:12 ►
They wrote about it.
01:19:14 ►
They were not talking about radio or TV or movies.
01:19:18 ►
They were talking about some kind of globally networked,
01:19:21 ►
distributed, interactive thing.
01:19:25 ►
And George Dyson, who’s the son of Freeman Dyson,
01:19:30 ►
the famous big thinker in nanotech and space engineering.
01:19:35 ►
Anyway, one of the things George Dyson says in there
01:19:38 ►
that struck me as very interesting was he said,
01:19:42 ►
when human beings make sense,
01:19:47 ►
in other words, when we actually say sensible things to each other,
01:19:52 ►
they can always be deconstructed
01:19:58 ►
into the language of symbolic logic,
01:20:02 ►
which is a branch of mathematics.
01:20:08 ►
And he said not only can meaningful human communication be deconstructed into symbolic logic, but symbolic logic is the natural
01:20:15 ►
machine, it’s the natural environment for machine intelligence. So in spite of the fact that we tend to feel
01:20:25 ►
this great gap between ourselves and our machines,
01:20:29 ►
there is a broad and shining bridge between us,
01:20:33 ►
which is we really speak the same language.
01:20:38 ►
They think as we do.
01:20:41 ►
We think as they do.
01:20:43 ►
There is no speed bump there. There is no ontological difference
01:20:49 ►
of categories. And this probably holds great implications for the extension of human language
01:20:56 ►
into machine prosthesis. The fact that the Boolean operators, and, if and but are in fact common parts of
01:21:07 ►
English speech perfectly understood by a child of four means there is an enormous
01:21:15 ►
commonality between ourselves and these thinking machines that we’ve created. Well, there’s a lot of talk about how alien they are and how
01:21:28 ►
incommensurable the human and machine world are, but it turns out they’re really not so different.
01:21:37 ►
You’re actually just Luddite talk.
01:21:39 ►
Luddite talk. You know, if the hardcore biological materialists are right, and the evidence isn’t
01:21:52 ►
in yet, we are machines of some sort. I mean, very complicated machines. And then, does
01:22:01 ►
this mean then that we are somehow, we lose our existential authenticity if we admit we’re machines?
01:22:08 ►
I don’t think so.
01:22:09 ►
I think what it means is that matter is far more interesting,
01:22:14 ►
magical, and creative stuff than we’ve been used to thinking of.
01:22:19 ►
It’s not like little Lego blocks.
01:22:22 ►
Matter has telos.
01:22:25 ►
Matter has energy, levels, intent, vectors toward completion.
01:22:33 ►
Fractals.
01:22:35 ►
Well, for example, you get in chemistry, even in simple chemistry,
01:22:42 ►
you get situations where you, well let’s take sulfur
01:22:45 ►
for example, you heat sulfur, it’s a yellow powder, you heat it, it becomes a black liquid.
01:22:54 ►
If you keep heating it, it suddenly becomes a black solid again. And if you keep heating
01:23:01 ►
it, it then goes into another liquid phase at a higher temperature.
01:23:10 ►
It has what are called two conformational geometries,
01:23:14 ►
depending on the local regime of temperature and pressure.
01:23:16 ►
Proteins are like this.
01:23:20 ►
You know, one of the great mysteries, one of the unsolved mysteries of biology that is really pulling a lot of computational mathematics
01:23:25 ►
into the discussion is the question of protein folding.
01:23:29 ►
I mean, here you have a 10,000 Dalton protein.
01:23:32 ►
It’s produced as a piece of linear spaghetti out of a ribosome,
01:23:37 ►
and within milliseconds after it leaves the ribosome,
01:23:49 ►
it folds into a three-dimensional shape
01:23:55 ►
Always the same shape even though there were hundreds of thought in fact thousands of
01:24:03 ►
conformational geometries and the and people you know in the first try at explaining this people said well it always
01:24:07 ►
assumes the lower dimensional energy configuration.
01:24:10 ►
In other words, it seeks the low energy state.
01:24:13 ►
But when you actually take a given protein and model all the possible conformational geometries,
01:24:18 ►
it turns out the one it prefers
01:24:21 ►
is not necessarily the lowest energy state.
01:24:25 ►
Well, they’re at sea.
01:24:27 ►
They have no idea.
01:24:28 ►
People like Sheldrake and woo-woo thinkers of that caliber
01:24:33 ►
have to step in in order to provide a metaphor
01:24:36 ►
for how this completely mechanistic linear thing
01:24:42 ►
seems to perform an extremely complex calculation
01:24:46 ►
and always perform it the same way and perform it instantly and without hesitation.
01:24:53 ►
And this is going on literally thousands of times a second inside every one of us
01:24:59 ►
as a precondition to existing at all.
01:25:02 ►
And there isn’t even the beginnings of a theory on
01:25:06 ►
this it’s one of the more challenging places in mathematical biology at the
01:25:11 ►
moment oh yeah there was this thing that lasted for seven hours that was on Dutch
01:25:19 ►
TV a year or so ago and Sheldrake took place took part
01:25:25 ►
in some of the other big honchos
01:25:28 ►
of edgy science
01:25:30 ►
and
01:25:31 ►
Dennett
01:25:33 ►
who wrote
01:25:34 ►
Consciousness Explained
01:25:37 ►
was his name Dennis Dennett
01:25:40 ►
or Michael Dennett
01:25:41 ►
anyway he was there
01:25:42 ►
Rupert said at one point his book should have been called
01:25:46 ►
Consciousness Explained Away.
01:25:49 ►
But as a biologist, he was making this speech to the camera saying,
01:25:53 ►
you know, as mechanists, it’s our duty to remove the magic from matter.
01:26:00 ►
There is no magic in matter.
01:26:02 ►
Well, then sitting next to him was this quantum physicist
01:26:05 ►
who said, listen, I hate to rain on your parade, but matter is our specialty, and I can assure you
01:26:14 ►
all the work we do is revealing the greater depths of magic within matter. So part of the
01:26:22 ►
problem here is that the house of science does not communicate
01:26:25 ►
well in its various sections. What the folks in the quantum physical basement know, the
01:26:32 ►
folks up in the social sciences and biology can’t even conceive of, they’re operating
01:26:38 ►
essentially on a 19th century Hamiltonian model of the atom. They actually believe in simple location. They’re
01:26:47 ►
victims of what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. They take the physical
01:26:54 ►
world at face value. They don’t understand, you know, that its wave mechanical and corpuscular
01:27:00 ►
nature is not mere theorizing.
01:27:05 ►
It’s actually part of it.
01:27:07 ►
It’s really there.
01:27:10 ►
Any other questions?
01:27:11 ►
Otherwise, we’ll knock off for tonight.
01:27:15 ►
I think it’s time to knock off.
01:27:18 ►
This was lots of fun.
01:27:19 ►
My pleasure.
01:27:21 ►
It’ll be different next time.
01:27:26 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:27:29 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:27:33 ►
Before you go, I want to be sure that you are aware of the fact that
01:27:37 ►
since this talk was given back in 1998,
01:27:41 ►
there have been some very significant changes in various state and federal laws
01:27:46 ►
in regards to salvia divinorum.
01:27:48 ►
So in today’s program notes, which you will find at psychedelicsalon.com, I’ve added links
01:27:54 ►
to a listing of U.S. state laws regarding salvia, and another link to the Wikipedia
01:27:59 ►
entry regarding the legal status of salvia worldwide.
01:28:04 ►
And both of those would be good places for you to start
01:28:07 ►
before you begin any kind of a personal exploration of this amazing plant.
01:28:12 ►
Also, as I’ve mentioned in previous podcasts that discuss salvia dibonorum,
01:28:18 ►
if you want to hear directly from Daniel Siebert,
01:28:20 ►
the person who Terrence just credited with being the person
01:28:24 ►
who first correctly identified
01:28:25 ►
the active ingredient in salvia, well then you can go back and re-listen to my podcast number 81,
01:28:32 ►
where Daniel and I talked about his work. Although that talk was recorded in February of 2007,
01:28:38 ►
I think that you’ll still find all of the information in it holds true yet today,
01:28:43 ►
other than the legal status, of course.
01:28:45 ►
That’s constantly changing.
01:28:49 ►
Well, as much as I would like to keep visiting with you right now,
01:28:53 ►
I’m going to cut this a little short today
01:28:55 ►
and get back to reading my friend Matt Palomary’s new novel,
01:28:59 ►
which just came out, and it’s titled No Thing.
01:29:05 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:29:09 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.