In his presentation, artist Alex Grey noted that Nobel-prize-winner Francis Crick, discoverer of the double helical structure of DNA, also told friends he received inspiration for his ideas from LSD, according to news reports.
The gathering included a discussion of how early computer pioneers used LSD for inspiration. Douglas Englebart, the inventor of the mouse, Myron Stolaroff, a former Ampex engineer and LSD researcher who was attending the symposium, and Apple-cofounder Steve Jobs were among them. In the 2005 book What the Dormouse Said, New York Times reporter John Markoff quotes Jobs describing his LSD experience as “one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life.”
Tagpsychedelics
The Village Voice:
Now that University of Miami neurologist Deborah Mash has the cash needed to resume clinical studies of ibogaine—the drug that could be the best anti-drug the CIA never told you about—there’s new hope for hard-core drug addicts and alcoholics. She got the go-ahead from the Food and Drug Administration 10 years ago, but after negative reviews by other scientists, the National Institute on Drug Abuse refused to fund her.
Full Story: Village Voice: The Drug to End All Drugs
(via LVX23)
Trip Magazine seems to have run its course in the print environment:
There are just a few more of issue 10 left, the VERY LAST issue of Trip Magazine! Order your signed collector’s copy today! Featuring Afro Celts, The Bad Shaman, Drug Geeks, Erik Davis, and more!
There have actually been some pretty enlightening articles posted on the web site, including a first person account of tryptamine hallucinations, so you might want to check it out.
Who’s Got the Acid? – These days, almost nobody. By Ryan Grim | Slate | MSN
Evidence of acid’s decline can be found practically everywhere you look: in the number of emergency room mentions of the drug; in an ongoing federal survey of drug use; in a huge drop in federal arrests; and in anecdotal reports from the field that the once ubiquitous psychedelic is exceedingly difficult to score. In major cities and college towns where LSD was once plentiful, it can’t be had at all.
…the decline in LSD use doesn’t look like a demand-side phenomena: The cultural hunger for a substance that lets you hold affordable conversations with God, watch walls melt, breathe colors, and explore your psyche remains unsated.
Abstracts of studies concerning DMT and other psychedelics present in urine. Most studies found that schizophrenic patients were no more likely than control to excrete DMT, but this one is interesting:
Studied the excretion of dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in 122 recently admitted psychiatric patients and 20 normal Ss. DMT was detected in the urine of 47% of those diagnosed by their psychiatrists as schizophrenic, 38% of those with other nonaffective psychoses, 13% of those with affective psychoses, 19% of those with neurotic and personality disorders, and 5% of the normal Ss. 99 of the patients were interviewed in a semistandardized fashion, and also categorized according to a variety of operational definitions of the psychoses. The operational definitions failed to reveal any group significantly more correlated with urinary DMT than did the hospital diagnosis of schizophrenia, but a discriminant function analysis of symptomatology could be used to define a group of 21 patients of whom 15 (71%) excreted detectable DMT. There was a general relationship between psychotic symptoms and urinary DMT, but specifically schizophrenic symptoms did not appear to be major determinants of DMT excretion.
Deoxy: Scientific Evidence of Psychedelic Body Fluids
(via TechnoShamanic)
Cannabis Culture explores the origins of the Santa Claus myth:
Santa also dresses like a mushroom gatherer. When it was time to go out and harvest the magical mushrooms, the ancient shamans would dress much like Santa, wearing red and white fur-trimmed coats and long black boots.
These peoples lived in dwellings made of birch and reindeer hide, called “yurts.” Somewhat similar to a teepee, the yurt’s central smokehole is often also used as an entrance. After gathering the mushrooms from under the sacred trees where they appeared, the shamans would fill their sacks and return home. Climbing down the chimney-entrances, they would share out the mushroom’s gifts with those within.
Cannabis Culture: The Psychedelic Secrets of Santa Claus
(via TechnoShamanic)
Trip Receptacle was “a series of three 3-hour shows consisting of all-psychedelic, all-entheogen radio.” It includes interviews and talks by Timothy Leary, Terrence McKenna, Sasha Shugin, etc.
According to researchers Jack Cowan (of the University of Chicago) and Paul Bressloff (of the University of Utah) visual hallucinations reflect “the pinwheel pattern of brain cells that process lines, curves and other geometric shapes, providing a remarkable view of the physical architecture of the visual cortex.”
“It’s almost like seeing your own brain through a mirror,” Cowan said. “You’re basically seeing patterns that your own brain is making.”
Dance Safe: Seeing More Than Meets the Eye
(via Barbelith).
Tonight I attended a lecture by TiHKAL and PiHKAL author Alexander Shulgin at the Evergreen State College today. He’s working on a new book called Quinolines I Have Known And Loved. Quinolines are non-mescaline chemicals found in certain psychoactive cacti. [Update: I think this may have ended up becoming the book The Simple Plant Isoquinolines]
He’s a pretty interesting guy, very excited by chemistry. He got really into the lecture and was constantly scribbling diagrams of molucules (“dirty little pictures” he called them). He said he tried DXM back in the 60s when it was available as Romilar pills and found it to be a “Spacey death like experience. I didn’t like it.”
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